T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

Thank you for considering my humble application.

I read on the YouTube advice link connected to the application page that we’re not supposed to end with a quote, especially from a book called “The Road Less Traveled.” Well, I guess I just did that anyway, but only to remind you that to get to some of my relatives we drive partway and walk the rest because they don’t have roads leading to where they live. (I hope you liked that.)

I gave up hunting and I’m a vegetarian and I think I’m ready to be released into society.

On another note, YouTube also said to be honest, so I must admit that the other reason I like UC Berkeley is because the only way I could get farther from home is to learn how to swim.

Sincerely,

Hopefully,

Daron Little May Davenport

Class of??!!

Daron stumbled across those letters shortly before Operation Confederation, as the 4 Little Indians had begun to call it. Rereading them he prickled with guilt.

I gave up hunting? I’m a vegetarian? I’m ready to be released into society? What was he thinking? Community? He’d never used that word so much in his life. Dear parole board! It was as though he had begged to be released from a cage of savage animals. What was wrong with hunting or eating meat? Nothing. Had he felt differently back then, or had he written what he thought they’d want to hear? He feared the worst. Even if it had felt honest at the time, he now recognized a shameful pleading, a palpable desperation, the stench of superiority.

Anxiety redoubled as self-reproach. Spring break was fast approaching, and he had better warn his mother. On the phone he asked her to request that Uncle Roy not use the N-word. His mother paused.

An word? she mused. Oh, in-words? Is that slang?

You know. Nigger.

Oh. Then louder, Oh! So you mean you are bringing friends. Okay, dear. I’ll make all the preparations.

And, ask, no, tell Quint not to make that Chinese joke.

What Chinese joke?

That thing he says that isn’t even funny. When Quint disagrees with something or someone, he says, Hell naw! Start that shit and next thing you know you’re Chinese. Not to mention — most definitely not to his mom — that to Quint, getting Chinese means getting high, and ordering Chinese means ordering dope.

Oh! You’re bringing home company. Don’t fret, D-dear.

Thanks, Mom. I owe you.

No charge, son, no charge. The full cost is no charge. She hummed for a moment her favorite Melba Montgomery song, No Charge . Don’t fret, dear, everyone will be on their best behavior.

And they would be. No one messed with his mother, who could stare a stone into sand. Could you also ask Dad to… well…

Yes, dear. We’ll move The Charlies.

The Charlies were what his father and grandfather called their black lawn jockeys, those two statues flanking the driveway, Serving with a smile. When referring to only one statue, they called it Tom, but together, and collectively, they were The Charlies. As in: Damned tractor went off the shoulder and took out my favorite Tom, they don’t make that size no more so I got to buy two new Charlies. As in: When are we lighting up The Charlies this year, Black Friday or December first? As in: Two Wongs don’t make a wang between ’em, but two Toms make The Charlies. He’d read both the Wikipedia and Uncyclopedia entries on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and found no connection. He knew it was supposed to be funny, but he never understood the joke, and didn’t think he wanted Candice or Louis or — good Lord, goodness, no — Charlie asking for an explanation about The Charlies. Charlie would take it in stride and Louis would say something funny, but Candice would go astral as she had after learning that Ishi meant man, that it was against Yahi custom to tell outsiders your name, that Ishi had no formal Yahi name because there were no surviving members of Ishi’s tribe to name Ishi, that Ishi therefore meant Ishi. She had, as Quint would say, gotten a red-eyed bull up her ass about Ishi, and Ishi wasn’t even alive.

¿Por qué? ¿Por qué no?

Porque, as she explained it, Ishi is Yahi for man, Ishi is Yahi for Ishi.

Porque, as she explained it, there was a difference between apologizing and anthropologizing, and neither excuse the desecration of a body.

Porque, as she explained it, they were Ishi’s remains. They are Ishi’s remains. If a picture was a captured soul, what the fuck was a book of them, what the fuck was a history of one people written by another, except an imaginary menagerie, a colonial shadowbox, a little foot warmer for those cold-existential evenings, an amulet against those starless, soulless nights?

You understood none of it, except the part about the foot warmer, which you knew was a myth of Northern aggression, though you daren’t interrupt when the spirit combed her tongue.

Mengapa? Mengapa tidak?

Is that Malay? Uh, you know I don’t actually speak Malay, except for curse words, right?

Mengapa? Mengapa tidak?

Kerana, as she explained it, if everything’s symbolic, then everything’s real. Then when we spread these ashes in Vallejo, people will know. They will know that UC Berkeley, supposedly the best public university in the world, took a man and made him live in a museum like an Epcot Center attraction, that we’re all in prison. That this is what public schools are. People will ask questions. People will demand answers. They will find there are none, and that will be the beginning of a reckoning… (A nod at you.)

What you talking ’bout, Willis?

What I’m talking ’bout, Willis, she explained, is how could any decent human force the last living member of a tribe to live in a museum? Ishi, how Ishi must have dreamed at night, how Ishi must have dreamed. How Ishi must dream even now. Though the museum and Kroeber both promised that Ishi’s body would not be desecrated, Ishi was autopsied in defiance of Native custom, Ishi’s body cremated, and Ishi’s brain wrapped in deerskin and shipped by mechanical conveyance to the Smithsonian. Ishi! How Ishi must dream.

Candice was not reassured to learn that the Smithsonian repatriated the body. Would we commend a stock market swindler for repaying stolen funds? Plan A: We’re taking Ishi to Six Flags and we’re riding Medusa and we’re releasing Ishi at the summit, and…

¿Cómo? Bagaimana? How? A padded bra! With three pounds of ashes double-packed in eight lucky-ass Ziploc bags, duct-taped like Styrofoam padding lining a bike helmet inside a Victoria’s Secret triple-D underwire, she’d put the pied piper out of a job, or at least off of it: the Six Flags guard checking her bag didn’t see anything in that shadow, not the collapsed box that would be the urn, not the clutch of feathers, not the half pint of Old Grand-Dad, none of it. She had borrowed Charlie’s rugby jersey, and damned if a spontaneous folk etymology didn’t cleave your brain as scrum took on a whole new meaning.

(Is it that… could you be… are you… might you be predisposed to objectify women, to remain stunted in what one prof called abject masculinity? Are you unfit for the university, the universe where no one has a body? A shame you cannot name scores you. For one class last fall, you read Andrea Dworkin, Akasha Gloria Hull, Martha Nussbaum, and at least a dozen other feminist authors, including Naomi Wolf and John Stoltenberg, both of whom argue that even the idea of physical attraction is socially constructed, argue that no one is innately beautiful, argue that society just told you so — about certain people. You found, though, that the more you tried looking at Candice and not thinking about her as a body, but as a person, the more you thought about her body. And now this!)