(The beginning of some notes on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as promised here. )
This one takes a little patience, but one of the most fruitful ways to track the judge’s representation of Indians is tease out the historical representations of Indians that lead to Blood Meridian. To do that, however, we have to start with one assumption. That is: judge Holden is the book, Blood Meridian. Meaning, the representation of Indians in Blood Meridian is the judge’s representation. They are inseparable, and the judge’s Indians, Blood Meridian‘s Indians, are the squalid, bloodstained, warlike savages of nineteenth-century pulp fiction, wandering the fringes of civilization, barely eking a living out of a tortured and hostile landscape. I’ll have more on exactly why I argue that the judge is the book in a later post.
So, who was John Smith? And what does he have to do with the judge? Well, to most people, he was Pocahontas’ love-smitten beau in any number of fictionalizations of his life, from Disney’s Pocahontas to Terrence Malick’s thematically identical The New World. In reality, he was a mercenary. The first English colony in the New World was a get-rich-quick scheme, established in Jamestowne, Virginia in 1607, to procure gold and gems for the colony’s backers. As such, at least half of the colonists were English aristocrats who disdained common labor. They weren’t a very hardy folk, to put it mildly, and they weren’t very good at most of the things colonists typically should be, if they are to survive: i.e., growing food, foraging, building shelter, hunting, fishing, etc. And so, they died like flies of starvation.
The Indians they met, however, were exceedingly good at surviving. They were agricultural peoples, and decidedly better at agriculture than the English. Which leads us to John Smith’s contribution to the colony. More than likely all of the Virginia colonists would have starved had it not been for Smith, who took on the roll of strongarm artist, extorting and plundering food from the Indians. His tactics were simple: intimidation, boastful threat, and, when necessary, sudden and overwhelming violence. For instance, when one village of Indians refused to open their granaries, Smith’s men raked them with shot and burnt their lodges down. When another refused, Smith took their leader, put a gun to his chest, and promised to kill him if he didn’t come up with twenty tons of corn.
Needless to say, much of the food he took from the local Indians was sorely missed. Often it was food meant to be stored for the winter. As such, Indians started dying like flies of starvation.
These tactics continued with and without John Smith right up until 1622, when the Virginia colonists finally managed to provoke the Indians into open warfare, which made the colonists ecstatic. See, the Virginians were still unable and unwilling to eke a living from the land, and warfare with the Indians meant the plundering of their cultivated land and crops. As Virginia colonist Edward Waterhouse wrote:
[W]e, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground than their waste, and our purchase at valuable consideration to their owne contentment, gained; may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade their Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby wee shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious Mattocke into the victorious Sword (wherein there is more both ease, benefit, and glory) and possessing the fruits of others labours. Now the cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situate in in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us, whereas heretofore the grubbing of woods was the greatest labour.
It also meant another boon to the colony. It meant slaves.
Because the Indians, who before were used as friends, may now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply the room of men that labour, whereby even the meanest of the Plantation may imploy themselves more entirely in their arts and Occupations, which are more generous, whilest Savages performe their inferiour workes of digging in mynes, and the like . . .
Furthermore, it would be a war like nothing the Indians had ever known. Total war, open extermination. As Waterhouse continues:
Because the way of conquering them is much more easie then of civilizing them by faire meanes, for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people, scattered in small companies, which are helps to Victorie, but hinderances to Civilitie: Besides that, a conquest may be of many, and at once; but civility is in particular, and slow, the effect of long time, and great industry. Moreover, victorie of them may bee gained many waies; by force, by surprize, by famine in burning their Corne, by destroying and burning their Corne, by destroying and burning their Boats, Canoes, and Houses, by breaking their fishing Weares, by assailing them in their huntings, whereby they get the greatest part of their sustenance in Winter, by pursuing and chasing them with out horses, and blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to teare them, which take this naked, tanned, deformed Savages, for no other then wild beasts, and are so fierce and fell upon them, that they feare them worse then their old Devill which they worship, supposing them to be a new and worse kinde of Devils then their owne. By these and sundry other wayes, as by driving them (when they flye) upon their enemies, who are round about them, and by animating and abetting their enemies against them, may their ruin or subjection be soone effected.
You’ll note the irony here. Waterhouse wants to exterminate the Indians because they have cultivated land and crops; however, his justification for exterminating them is that they are “no other then wild beasts” and “naked, tanned, deformed Savages.” This is a tension that continues throughout the colonization of America, for the simple reason that neither the aforementioned “right of Warre” nor the “law of Nations” specifically did not allow liquidating an Indian population to gain any plot of land a European happened to desire.
In fact, there had already been a series of debates about whether Indians had the right to their own land, probably the most famous of which being those between Bartolome de Las Casas, who wrote A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Juan Gines de Sepulveda. And those lead to the sixteenth-century Spanish jurist Franciscus de Vitoria, known as the father of international law, writing several articles detailing the limits of papal and Spanish authority over Indians and their territories. Vitoria concluded that Christians had no right to wage war on Indians simply for being non-Christians, that there were no rights of conquest, and that Indians who owned land were sovereign nations with the right to make treaties, and could not be divested of that land by individual hucksters. Moreover, Pope Paul III had issued Papal Bull Sublimis Deus in 1537, instructing that Indians are to be treated as true humans, and not to be arbitrarily deprived of their property:
In the desire to remedy the evil which has been caused, We hereby decide and declare that the said Indians, as well as any other peoples which Christianity will come to know in the future, must not be deprived of their freedom and their possessions- — regardless of contrary allegations — even if they are not Christians and that, on the contrary, they must be left to enjoy their freedom and their possessions.
Far from our contemporary assumption that Europeans thought they had the right to do whatever they wanted with Indian lives and land, nothing could be further from the truth. There were all kinds of people arguing otherwise, and the opposition to flat-out butchery and land-grabbing was fierce. As such, every one of these liquidations and land grabs had to be justified, usually in retrospect, back to the homeland. Hence, in reports to Europe, Indian peoples who were inarguably superior at most of the things colonists liked to consider as the hallmarks of civilization — agriculture, the development of land, etc. — were described as the exact opposite of what it was about them that made their land so desirable. Suddenly, they were without agriculture, without the capacity to develop their land, and were instead rewritten as nomadic wild beasts in a howling wilderness, as inherently warlike, and impossible to live near with being drawn into wars of extermination.
Which ought to sound familiar to those who’ve read Blood Meridian. These are the judge’s Indians.
I’ll elaborate more on the process of creating this kind of nomadic wild beast next time around with the Puritans, but it’s worth bearing in mind that none of this is new. There was an explosion of books pointing most of it out in the 1960s and 1970s, and many of them dealt directly with Herman Melville’s (McCarthy’s favorite author, according to at least one interview) depiction of Indians as a counter-example to the main. Savagism and Civilization comes to mind, as does The White Man’s Indian, and Regeneration through Violence, which I’ve already mentioned in connection with McCarthy. None of these books are usually read outside of American Indian Studies classes these days, but if McCarthy was interested in representations of American Indians they would have been impossible to miss.
Aside: It’s worth remembering that John Smith is most famous now for one of the more successful confidence games in the history of North America. That would be his story of being saved by Pocahontas when his life was threatened by her father, Powhatan — the story which lead to all the Disney-like mythologies of romance revolving around empty fertile land and, of course, nubile fertile Indian maidens. As Smith describes the incident in his The Generall Historie of Virginia:
Being ready with their clubs, to beate out his brains, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevaile, got his head in her arms, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: Whereat the Emperour was contented that he should live.
Interestingly, this is all Smith wrote of being saved by Pocahontas in The Generall Historie of Virginia, and, though he wrote other accounts of his captivity by Powhatan in 1608 and 1612, neither of these mentions anything about Pocahontas saving his life. Indeed, they describe Powhatan favorably. It was not until 1622, when both Powhatan and Pocahontas were dead, that John Smith published the tale of Powhatan’s attempt on his life and his salvation by Pocahontas.
There’s very little about the Pocahontas legend as spun by Euro-Americans that can’t be met with suspicion. Pocahontas was not even her name. She had two names: one formal, Matoaka, and one informal, Amonute. Pocahontas was a nickname given her by her father, which the English vastly preferred because William Bradford liked to translate it as “little wanton,” suggesting in itself the cultural work the legend performs for Euro-Americans. It’s a legend that signifies one culture supplicating itself before the other, that signifies an Indian woman betraying her own people and opening herself to European colonizers as a recognition of them as a superior race. Which is exactly why it’s a story that Euro-Americans still can’t stop telling.
There are two American Indian women, and only two American Indian women, whom every white schoolchild knows: Pocahontas and Sacagawea. Their names are known because they tell the same story.
This narrative of supplication doesn’t begin with Pocahontas, by the way. Christopher Columbus traded in women, as well as slaves and gold. The following comes from the diary of an Italian nobleman who sailed with him:
I captured a very beautiful Carib women, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me and with whom…I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, I took a rope and thrashed her well…. Finally we came to an agreement.
The “Lord Admiral” is Columbus.
Five hundred years later, Harvard Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of the same voyage:
In the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola they found young beautiful women, who everywhere were naked, in most places accessible, and presumably complaisant. . . Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.
Nor does this narrative exclusively target Indian women. Black women share in it as well. As literary critic and historian H. Bruce Franklin writes:
The sexual problems characteristic of each stage of our history have been analyzed most keenly in literature by Afro-American “criminals.” There is an unbroken line of development from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent, whose crime was refusing to submit to the perverted sexuality of her master, through that turn-of-the-century Georgia peon whose wife was taken away to service the sexual needs of his masters, through Malcolm X, who worked as a pimp in Harlem, guiding wealthy old white men to ogle and participate in their most diseased sado-masochistic fantasies with Black women and men, to Eldridge Cleaver’s own sexual aberrations, which led, in Soul On Ice, to his incisive exploration of the psychopathology inherent in the stereotyped sexual roles imposed by American culture on the Black man, the white woman, the white man, and the Black woman.
The aforementioned Herman Melville was very well aware of the work done by this narrative, by the way. His satirical masterpiece,The Confidence Man, which could have been dedicated in part to John Smith, includes the sublime line: “When I think of Pocahontas, I am ready to love Indians.”
It’s worth remembering that John Smith is most famous now for one of the more successful confidence games in the history of North American. That would be his story of being saved by Pocahontas when his life was threatened by her father, Powhatan, which lead to all the Disney-like mythologies of romance revolving around empty fertile land and, of course, virginal, nubile Indian maidens. As Smith describes the incident in his The Generall Historie of Virginia:
Being ready with their clubs, to beate out his brains, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevaile, got his head in her arms, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: Whereat the Emperour was contented that he should live.
Interestingly, this is all Smith wrote of being saved by Pocahontas in The Generall Historie of Virginia, and, though he wrote other accounts of his captivity by Powhatan in 1608 and 1612, neither of these mentions anything about Pocahontas saving his life, and, in fact, describe Powhatan favorably. It was not until 1622, when both Powhatan and Pocahontas were dead, that John Smith published the tale of Powhatan’s attempt on his life and his salvation by Pocahontas.
There’s very little about the Pocahontas legend as spun by Euro-Americans that can’t be met with suspicion. Pocahontas was not even her name. She had two names. One formal, Matoaka, and one informal, Amonute. Pocahontas was a nickname given her by her father, which the English vastly preferred as William Bradford liked to translate it into “little wanton,” which suggests the cultural work the legend performs for Euro-Americans. It’s a legend that signifies one culture supplicating itself before the other. An Indian woman being willing to open her body and betray her people in the face of a superior race, which is exactly why it’s a story that Euro-Americans still can’t stop telling.
There are two American Indian women, and only two American Indian women, whom every white schoolchild knows: Pocahontas and Sacagawea.
Their names are known because they tell the same story.
This narrative of supplication doesn’t begin with Pocahontas, by the way. Christopher Columbus traded in women, as well as slaves and gold. The following comes from the diary of an Italian nobleman who sailed with Columbus:
I captured a very beautiful Carib women, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me and with whom…I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, I took a rope and thrashed her well…. Finally we came to an agreement.
The “Lord Admiral” is Columbus.
Five hundred years later, Harvard Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of the same voyage:
In the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola they found young beautiful women, who everywhere were naked, in most places accessible, and presumably complaisant. . . Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.
Nor does this narrative exclusively target Indian women. Black women share in it as well. As literary critic and historian H. Bruce Franklin writes:
The sexual problems characteristic of each stage of our history have been analyzed most keenly in literature by Afro-American “criminals.” There is an unbroken line of development from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent, whose crime was refusing to submit to the perverted sexuality of her master, through that turn-of-the-century Georgia peon whose wife was taken away to service the sexual needs of his masters, through Malcolm X, who worked as a pimp in Harlem, guiding wealthy old white men to ogle and participate in their most diseased sado-masochistic fantasies with Black women and men, to Eldridge Cleaver’s own sexual aberrations, which led, in Soul On Ice, to his incisive exploration of the psychopathology inherent in the stereotyped sexual roles imposed by American culture on the Black man, the white woman, the white man, and the Black woman.
The aforementioned Herman Melville was very well aware of the work done by this narrative. His satirical masterpiece, The Confidence Man, which could have been dedicated in part to John Smith, includes the sublime line: “When I think of Pocahontas, I am ready to love Indians.”
