Hemingway, Race, and Art: Bloodlines and the Color Line

Chapter Two: Beyond the Camp, Behind the Myth: Native American Dissolution and Reconstituted Whiteness in “Ten Indians,” “Fathers and Sons,” and “The Indians Went Away”

| 51 We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of our­ selves. . . . The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. —N. Scott Momaday Since the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere neither called them­ selves by a single term nor understood themselves as a collectivity, the idea and the image of the Indian must be a White conception. —Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian So far, we have seen Hemingway explore and dispel the myth of racial primacy by delving into the depths of the gray spaces between red and white. Woods, water, and gate worked well as spatial separators between civilized and savage. If the camp stories exploit difference along general primitive lines, then several of Hemingway’s remaining Native tales complicate the formula considerably. In them, the author explores and exploits interstitial race spaces through the lens of degeneracy and moral corruption. In each instance, per our established paradigm, that degeneracy, that corruption, begins as a seemingly Native phenomenon and end as a shared experience with whiteness a bit worse for the wear. Hemingway’s predominant devolutionary tropes of choice in these particular Indian stories are drink and sex. Critic Bonnie Duran suggests in her “Indigenous versus Colonial Discourse: Alcohol and American Indian Identity” that “the imagery of the stereotypical Drunken Indian—violent, lawless, impetuous —emerges clearly in this analysis as one of the instruments that attuned chapter two Beyond the Camp, Behind the Myth Native American Dissolution and Reconstituted Whiteness in “Ten Indians,” “Fathers and Sons,” and “The Indians Went Away” 52 | hemingway, race, and art Western collective consciousness to the notion of a North America awaiting the civilizing and rationalizing mission of European settlement.” (113). Clearly, Hemingway did not invent the type, but he did recognize early on its inherent power, and he exploited it accordingly. The inebriated Native, whom I will examine later, litters Hemingway’s literary landscape. However, in “Ten Indians,” he explores a singularly different aspect of man’s “otherly” nature—sexuality— in an attempt to draw clear lines of racial division between red and white. Once again, though, our emphasis should be not so much on the end result as on the means to that end—that is, Hemingway’s initial narrative strategies employed to both forge this degenerative picture and wrest agency from alien clutches, only to subvert the totem again and question white inheritance in the end. “Ten Indians,” like “Indian Camp” before it, is very much an initiation tale. In it, a young Nick Adams learns about love, heartache, and rejection. Nick, still a preadolescent at this stage, is teased by neighborhood children about the wandering eyes (and other parts) of his crush-of-the-moment: a Native American girl named Prudence Mitchell.1 Importantly, his father confirms the rumor after stumbling upon young Prudence mid-dalliance with another neighborhood child, Frank Washburn. While he never expressly tells Nickie what the young couple was doing when he came upon them, Dr. Adams’s circumlocution leads us to believe she and the boy were engaged in some kind of sexual play. Most scholarship emphasizes the beginnings of a sexual awakening for a boy being initiated into the world or else sees it as a young boy’s first dealings with the harsh realities of love and matters of the heart.2 But I would venture to say that something more than heartache deserves our attention here—focus should also be on what precipitates that disappointment. “Ten Indians” is very much a story about corrupted virginity. Further, Hemingway racializes sex as he examines that sullied space; he explores and ultimately aligns sexuality—more specifically, promiscuity—with stereotypical savagery. “Ten Indians” becomes a formal testament to the marginalized figure’s moral decadence (with Nick Adams and the reader as principal witnesses to his decline). And with an added emphasis on miscegenation’s threat (miscegenation here being actual, real), on the surface, this story serves as Hemingway’s reminder of its perceived dangers. Hemingway seems to venture that such a reading of the Indian’s apparent degradation begs some questions: Is depravity essential? Is decadence corruptive? And is the white immune to such corruption? To be sure, the sexual act is a union, a merging of disparate bodies; momentarily, two become one, each potentially indistinguishable from the other. Thus, to the fearful and squeamish, the physical divide here native american dissolution...