The Stories I Never Heard
by F.R.R. Mallory
February 9, 2006

By definition a story is both fact and fiction, truth and lie, a rumor, legend or news article. I've got a story and it's important too because my story is the foundation of everything I believe to be true and it is upon that foundation that I have built my understanding of self and life. I want to tell you that I shaped my story. I crafted it with care and examined every detail. I want to tell you that but it isn't true. My story is mostly hand-me-down. Everyone I know tries to pass bits and pieces of story onto me, as if I can attach new pieces to my story in some madcap expression of hastily glued on mosaic-like shards. I'm lumpy. My story, well, you see, my story is less like a solid foundation upon which to display my personal essence and much more like an out-of-control cancerous growth: shapeless and obscene, leaking unknown fluids, sour odors and life-alienating thoughts.

Perhaps it's nature, part of our primal urge to survive, this feature we possess that harvests from all of our life's experiences those that are the most difficult, those couched in our deepest pain and passes these vignettes through us into our children, our common discourse, our future. We inherit our trail of tears in magnified warnings that litter our very basis of self. But none of these are really our stories, these are vapor trails of pain, anguish and suffering whose origin is long lost in a past whose context has emptied into a future spun and re-spun in so many different shapes and spirals that there is no true position for story to exist.

Sherman Alexie in his prose poem "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" spears my attention by his second and third word "...white woman" (677). There I am, categorized, labeled and in some inescapable way I feel judged, not by this author, not exactly. I am being judged by the weight of the adopted pain he has collected around his words from every unforgotten wound his ancestor's experienced under the label, white. Story becomes filter. My story sensitizes me to "white" and "woman" because in these subjectively crafted categories I cannot escape and my adopted story has informed me that race and gender must be honored truths. I am both white and woman. These are our shared story, this author and mine, this silent agreement that white and woman will connect to meaning. After all, I could release my story of being a white woman and be simply myself, a human being, absent of these two conclusions.

Alexie continues "...look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, as she points out the window...into what she has been taught" (677). Her story. More accurately, he describes his perspective on the white woman's probable story. (677). "I have learned little more about American history ... than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than ... the house..." (677). As he drags me through these words I hear two voices, the man distant from "American" as "white", and the man demanding closeness with "we should", becoming ... insisting on inclusion. "Should" judges. It tells me I (as the reader) am included in this failure to "know" of the stories critical to his personal story. The comparative years are held aloft in his words - 200 and 15,000. Yet we all ended up on this train today, in the present of our lives, accompanied by our stories and their incessant value judgments.

Someone who once lived on that hill told good stories. I don't remember their stories but I remember being told they were good stories. What lingers, as the train streams past this assemblage of boards and nails perched precariously on the hill? Alexie tells me through internal dialogue of his feelings about Walden Pond, about the Indians "...living stories around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born and before his grandparents' grandparents were born" (677). Yet we all ended up on this train today. He tells me saving the pond was redundant "...if" (677). There it is, the lead word in our best-created fictions - if. If is how the pain gets out, how it escapes into our children. We give them - if. "...nothing would need to be saved" (677). Is he saying he wouldn't feel this pain if white women didn't exist? Does his pain belong to me?

Alexie tells me "I respect elders of every color" (677). I read his words and try hard to hear the respect he speaks of. What I hear him say is that he rode the train with me, with her, with a tasteless sandwich and a Diet Pepsi and he "...as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own" (678). His story inserts me as his enemy, because he was born able to differentiate color of skin and because his story informed him that the enemy is within, the enemy is human and we begin by devouring ourselves first, we the species traitors.

As I step off the train of this prose poem's ride I discover I am still listening for a single word from 15,000 years of tribal stories - all I hear is pain.

Sherman Alexie
1966-
(Photo by Susan Sheridan)

I wanted more and that desire was the exact spot where failure occurred in my experience of Alexie's poem. I know that I create the expectations of my experiences and that none of this has anything to do with the poet or the other person. Still, I found this left me with a heavy feeling, as if a shroud clung invisibly to my shoulders, present in its invisible constancy and I regret that.

Merriam Webster describes proselytizing as the attempt to recruit or convert someone to join ones institution, faith or cause. For me, the contemporary participation in veiled politically corrected speech is often the opportunity to proselytize, often through acts of parallel oppression or the use of guilt or historical fear - to manifest violence under the guise of its opposite. It is as if to say, "I am against racism which is why I demand you accept the historical and contemporary grievances of my and my ancestors' experiences of racial violence perpetuated against me/us."

What are you without this story? How might you relate to me absent of this informed filter?

If I feel violated by the means your advocacy uses in its expression - does this sameness cancel perceptible validity. Can you be against racism by behaving racistly?

What is your cause?

At the time I wrote this essay I felt moved enough to send a copy of the essay to Alexie. He never responded.

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