Diana Palmer - The Savage Heart

He laughed shortly and let her go. “How can I miss something so primitive? Can you really see me in buckskins speaking pidgin English?”

She shook her head. “No, not you,” she said. “You’d be in a warbonnet, painted, on horseback, a bow in hand.”

He averted his head. “I’ll be late. I have to go.”

“Matt, for heaven’s sake, you aren’t ashamed of your heritage?”

“Good night, Tess. Don’t go out alone. It’s dangerous.”

He strode away without a single look over his shoulder. Tess stood and watched him for a moment, shivering in the cold wind. He was ashamed of being Sioux. She hadn’t realized the depth of it until tonight. Perhaps that explained why he rarely went home to South Dakota, why he didn’t speak of his cousins there, why he dressed so deliberately as a rich white man. He hadn’t cut his hair, though, so he might retain a vestige of pride in his background, even if he kept it hidden. She shook her head. So many of his people had been unable to do what he had, to resign themselves to living like whites, and the policies forbidding them their most sacred ceremonies and the comfort of their shamans were slowly killing their souls. It must have been easier for Matt to live in Chicago and fan the fires of gossip about his true background, than to go to the reservation and deal with it.

She recalled the way soldiers and other white men had spoken to him when he lived with her and her father, and she bristled now as she had then at the blows to his enormous pride. Prejudice ran rampant these days. Nativism, they called it. Nobody wanted “foreigners” in this country, to hear white people talk. Tess’s lip curled. The very thought of calling a native American a foreigner made her furious. Out west, one still could hear discussion about eradicating the small remnant of the Indian people by taking away all their remaining lands and forcefully absorbing them into white society, absorbing them and wiping out their own culture in the process.

Did no one realize that it was one hairbreadth from genocide? It turned Tess’s stomach. She’d always felt that the government’s approach to assimilating the Indians was responsible for the high rates of alcoholism, suicide and infant mortality on the reservations.

She turned away from the cold wind and went inside the boardinghouse, her mind ablaze with indignation for Indians and women. Both were downtrodden by white men, both forbidden the vote.

The two old ladies who lived upstairs, Miss Barkley and Miss Dean, gave her a cold stare as she tried to pass quickly by the open door to the parlor where they sat.

“Decent young ladies should not stand in the street with men,” Miss Dean said icily. “Nor should they attend radical meetings or work in hospitals.”

“Someone must tend the sick,” Tess said. “I daresay it might do you both good to come to one of our meetings and hear what your sisters in life are bearing because society refuses to accept women as equals!”

Miss Barkley went pale. “Miss…Meredith,” she gasped, a hand at her throat, “I do not consider myself the equal of a man, nor should I want to!”

“Filthy, sweating brutes,” Miss Dean agreed. “They should all be shot.”

Tess grinned. “There, you see, Miss Dean, you and I have much in common! You simply must come to a meeting with me.”

“Among those radicals?” asked Miss Dean, scandalized.

“They aren’t,” Tess returned. “They’re honest, hardworking girls who want to live life as full citizens of this country. We are a new type of woman. We will never settle back and accept second-class citizenship.”

Miss Barkley was red in the face. “Well, I never!”

Miss Dean held up a hand. “A moment, Clara,” she told her companion. “Miss Meredith presents some interesting arguments. These meetings are open to anyone?”

“Certainly,” Tess said. “You may go with me next Tuesday, if you like, and see what they are about.”

“Ida, don’t you dare!” Miss Barkley fumed.

“I should have gone, were I twenty years younger,” came the reply, and a smile. “But I am too old and set in my ways, Miss Meredith.”

“Tess,” she corrected.

The older woman’s eyes twinkled. “Tess, then. I hope you achieve your goals. My generation will not live to see it, but perhaps yours will eventually gain the vote.”

Tess went to her own room, happily having diverted them from any discussion of her surprising interaction with Matt. It wouldn’t do to have people in the boardinghouse speculate about the two of them. She refused to do any speculating on her own, either. She buried Matt’s odd behavior in the back of her mind and got ready for bed.

Outside the wind was blowing fiercely; snowflakes struck the windowpane. She closed her eyes, hoping for a heavy snowfall. She always felt curiously happy, often content, too, on snowy days.

Chapter Three

Saturday’s march was lively. It was held after dark with torches to light the path of the marchers. More than four hundred women showed up, carrying placards. Tess marched between two women she knew vaguely, but she missed the company of her friend Nan.

“Isn’t this exciting?” the girl beside her asked. “We’re bound to win with such large numbers of us demanding the vote now.”

Tess agreed, but less wholeheartedly. She’d learned one terrible truth in her young life, and that was the bullheadedness of government in the face of demands for change. Regardless of how just the cause, the people in power in Washington were avid in supporting the status quo. Roosevelt was keen on creating a safe place for wildlife and showing pride in the American spirit. But he was also a believer in Manifest Destiny, and a manly man. Tess wondered if he shared the same attitude toward women that most men of his generation harbored—that women were created only to keep house and bear children and look after men.

Demonstrations inevitably attracted spectators; Tess glanced around at them. A man waving a flag that read Up With Labor stepped from the street into the ranks of the women, bringing a small body of cohorts with him.

“This is not your group!” one woman yelled at him.

“This struggle is also the workers’ struggle!” the man yelled back, and kept marching. “We support your cause! Down with oppression of all kinds!”

“You see?” one of Tess’s companions grumbled. “We cannot even hold a rally without having a man step in and try to lead it. Well, I’ll just show him a thing or two!”

The small, matronly woman turned in the throng with her placard held like a club and beaned the advocate for laborers with it right on his bald spot.

He yelped and dropped the banner, and the few men and women who were in his group started attacking the women’s rights marchers.

Tess stood very still and gave a long sigh as she heard the first of many police whistles start to sound. The authorities had looked for a way to break up this march, and the communist had given it to them. The small scuffle became a melee.

As she tried to move back from the combatants, Tess was aware of a newcomer who didn’t seem to be part of either group. He was tall and young, expensively dressed, and he carried a cane. He seemed to be looking straight at her. While she was wondering about the odd incident, she was suddenly knocked down and all but trampled as the fighting accelerated.

She never lost consciousness, but she heard a metallic sound through the commotion of loud voices. She rolled to avoid being stepped on, and as she did, her arm was hit a mighty blow. It throbbed, and even though the light was dim, she could see that the sleeve of her jacket and blouse seemed to be ripped through.

Two policemen were on either side of her when she looked up again. One of them, kindly and older, assisted her to the sidewalk. Muttering about people who couldn’t live and let live, he left her on the stoop of an apartment house. Two small boys played with a hoop and gave her curious stares.