A Haunting

When I was little, maybe ten, my family went out West-
my parents up front, my three brothers and I in back.
Probably it was about 1958, or so. I forget. But one thing
I recollect from that horrible cross-country all-American
"are-we-having-fun-yet?" experience was seeing Indians,
"real live Indians" somewhere in the Southwest.

They weren't dressed up in beads and feathers, or riding
ponies, or posing for photos. Quite the opposite, in fact.
They were sitting quietly on some sandy patch of desert-
inside a ratty screened-in lean-to, just staring out at space.

As a child from an affluent all-white Philadelphia suburb
I didn't understand much. But I knew they were unhappy.
And poor. And that they weren't paying attention to me,
or to my overfed aggressive family in our stationwagon.

We didn't stop to talk. Actually, we never made friends
on any of our trips. God knows, why we went anywhere
anyway. We just hurtled by and forgot about them. But
from time to time, as I've gotten older- and now it's over
fifty years ago that I saw those people- I recall how they
were sitting there, just looking at the desolate landscape.

I've had a lot of time to think about America's deformed-
and deforming- history with its dispossessed minorities.
In some small ways, I've done my part to try and make
things better for others. But these people haunt my memory.
I don't know why. Maybe it's because the land was theirs,
originally, and I knew that even then? Maybe it's because
there was such a helpless futility about them-- but nothing
urban, nothing familiar to me... just an intractable despair
which came across the sandy terrain, though they didn't say
anything, or even look at us, or complain, or ask for money.

My brothers and I were so used to being warned that people
would ask us for money- try to exploit us- yet these people
didn't even try; they weren't interested in us. Everything had
already been taken except a screened-in lean-to on a sandy
plot of nothing... and their pride, and their dignity. And now,
as ever, I look back and I feel ashamed to think of how
they must have seen us.