Interesting Women Andrea Lee (e books free to read .TXT) 📖

White fellow who ran the lodge where we stayed in the Bighorn Mountains, a Pacific Theater vet, kept going on and on about the Indians when I went to pay the bill, about how they were shiftless and drank and so on. I think the son of a bitch thought I was going to laugh and chime in. Out here, Indians are niggers. Once my brother Ray, the minister who’s the straightest-haired one in the family, was traveling across Oklahoma with some kind of fool Baptist tour group, and in a little two-bit café, they refused to serve him. But then the owner kind of slid up to him and asked if it was true that he was an American Indian. “No,” says Ray, figuring he’s not going to eat anyway. “I’m an American Negro.” Damn if the cracker didn’t shut up, smile, and bring him his apple pie.

RICHIE: At Yellowstone, the best thing wasn’t Old Faithful, which you could hardly see because there were so many people around, or the bubbling pink sulfur mud that would probably parboil your foot if you wanted to make the experiment, it was two girls that Walker and I met at the campground canteen. They were a pair of not very pretty white girls with hair the color of grass when the green is burnt out of it at the end of the summer, one of them with pimples and one with a bow clipped on over her bangs. They started talking to Walker, who was very cool and said he was in college and that impressed them into wild giggles and “Oh,” they said to me, “you look older than fourteen, you look at least twenty.” They went crazy over the Golden Chariot, and I showed them how the front seats flipped all the way back. We would have taken them for a ride except Mom was waiting for the hot dogs. “They were ready, little brother,” said Walker, who the whole time had had this sort of constipated look on his face, that he gets when he tries to act suave. “It’s a new age, the great and glorious West, gateway to the future. Be cool and the white chicks will flock like pigeons, they think we’ve got the Space Needle between our legs.”

GRACE: When we got to Cody, Wyoming, we stopped in a big general store that had traps and skins hanging from the ceiling and dusty old pickup trucks in the parking lot and we went in and all three of the kids bought blue jeans. No one we know wears blue jeans, except for white teenagers on television. The kids walk differently now: they amble like cowboys; they look, even little Maud, as if they all of a sudden know about distances, as if they’re about to gallop away from me into a Technicolor sunset.

THE FAMILY: In the Black Hills of South Dakota, we, the Harmon family and our new car, were present at an historic event: the first intercontinental television broadcast using the Telstar satellite. At the base of Mount Rushmore we stood in a crowd looking on as the huge indifferent sand-colored faces of the Founding Fathers traveled magically across outer space to Paris. The Harmons, latest issue of the combination of a few Mid-Atlantic coastal Indians with certain unwilling West Africans shipped abroad for profit by their own warlords, which combination lightly mixed with the largely undistinguished blood of English debtors and Irish bond servants, stood and cheered with the rest of the crowd watching itself on an outdoor screen. Though we still can’t vote or eat or pee with white men in many states, we love our country. Didn’t we learn patriotism at school? We feel enlarged by a sense of history and destiny, even though inside each of us, in the dark space at the very center, is a secret question mark.

MAUD: The USA is like a big board game, Monopoly or Clue. We’ve been following signs for days along the highway: Burma-Shave; Little Stinker; and ads for the Corn Palace, in Mitchell, South Dakota. There it is, smack in the middle of the country, a royal palace really built out of corn. Cars all around it from every state. And if you look up in the sky, clouds of crows just gobbling it up.

RICHIE: I’ve grown three inches since I turned fourteen, and I have the biggest appetite in the family. I’ve been eating my way across America, and I say that the best root beer floats on the road are at A & W and the best barbecue is the Piggly Wiggly chain. I won a bet with my sister by drinking four bottles of Coke in less than five minutes in the backseat, when we were driving through the Badlands. And, out of intellectual curiosity, I ordered shrimp in Iowa, a thousand miles from either ocean. In Chicago, we went out to a restaurant run by Jewish people, and it was the best place I ever ate in my life. Papa Stein’s. When they brought the meat, it looked like a rib out of an elephant, and they even served pickles that were made from whole tomatoes. The real Papa Stein himself, a cool old white-haired guy with a Mad Professor accent, came over to our table to say hello. Like we were celebrities or something.

WALKER: In Chicago, I didn’t go out to dinner with everybody else. I stayed in the hotel, which for once was a deluxe one, a Holiday Inn—AAA of course. I had to get away from them all, to breathe. I wanted to think about how I could start living my own life. After a while I opened the curtains, and you could see the big city just lighting up in purple dusk, and I turned on the radio, and a wild tune stole out of that radio that was like the breath of the city. Jazz like I’ve never heard before. Spilling out of some