“There isn’t a Mr. Heavyman”: Will’s Negatives in Medicine River

The narrator-protagonist of Thomas King’s Medicine River is, of course, a photographer, and a photographer works with negatives (“I’ll shoot a negative” [197]), developing them into pictures or “positives” (“the pictures turned out good” [215]). Although a number of readers have commented on Will’s role as photographer in Medicine River, it has not been remarked upon that Will is also very strongly given to think and express himself in negative statements, especially in his conversations with his friend and mentor Harlen, who unlike Will is always positive and “ever the optimist” (138).¹ Will’s work with photographic negatives can be seen as a controlling metaphor in Medicine River, a figure for his dealing with the world by means of the large number of negative statements he makes, both as asides to himself and in dialogue with others. His proclivity to think and speak in negatives raises a number of important questions about Will’s relations with the Blackfoot community—questions that can be phrased as wordplay on his resonant first name and on his profession as photographer. To what extent is he “will”-ing and able to move from behind the camera to join the community? Are his many verbal “negatives” merely negations, or can and “will” he use them as a photographer uses filmic negatives, as a stage in the process of developing a positive, if not perfect (as even a photographic “positive” still reverses what it represents), relation to the people among whom finds himself after accepting Harlen’s invitation to return to Medicine River?

In my reading of Medicine River, Will makes a real movement toward a closer, fuller interaction with the Blackfoot people among whom he lives, symbolized by his “smiling” (216), if initially reluctant, presence in the photograph that he makes of the Bluehorn family, a notable exception to the rule that the photographer is usually behind the camera.² But he makes this rapprochement precisely by constantly testing his interactions with his many negative utterances. It is only on the basis of negatives that the photographer can make pictures, even the one in which Will is himself present and smiling, and Will’s many negative statements and responses are just as necessary to him as a person as photographic negatives are in his chosen profession. It seems that only by constantly repeated acts of careful limitation and definition can he remain true to himself while creating a workable, positive interaction with the community in which he lives.

This moving toward engagement by means of negative statements and gestures might not seem so surprising if we consider Will’s dual heritage. When Ray Little Buffalo says that Will “ain’t no Clyde Whiteman” (78), this double negative manages to insinuate, grammatically at least, that Will is a “Whiteman.”³ He is in fact half White, and it is his White father’s face that is obscured in the photograph Will remembers when Harlen gives him his father’s letters: “His hand lay on her shoulder lightly, the fingers in sunlight, his eyes in shadows” (10). In another photograph, given to Will by his mother on his twenty-seventh birthday, his father “had on . . . a hat that was pulled down over much of his face” (86). Will’s father is doubly a negative for Will in Medicine River, since he is not only not Blackfoot, and therefore responsible for making Will himself less than fully Blackfoot, but he is also not present in Will’s life as a positive “Whiteman.” As a result of this personal history, the biggest questions that lurk for Will, and indeed for the reader of King’s novel, are the ones raised early on by Harlen’s humorous but entirely pertinent remarks on the actor Will Sampson: what is a “real Indian” (10) and, especially, does Will qualify? With a playful irony that shows he is not the naive innocent he might sometimes appear to be, Harlen remarks that Will Sampson, playing a sheriff in a movie, constantly says “Hey-uh” and yet “He’s...