The Colony

The man from the agency came to the Colony on a Thursday in May with a leather folder under his arm and parked his government car at the end of the lane where the Washoe houses were, on the south side, and Lena watched him from her doorway, drying her hands on her apron, while her son Raymond ran past her into the yard the way boys do, not seeing the car at all.

She was twenty-eight. She had been born on this ground, on the twenty-eight acres the government had bought along the river east of downtown so the Indians who had drifted into Reno for work would have somewhere to be that was theirs, and she had grown up here among the three peoples who shared it, the Paiute families on the north side and the Washoe on the south and the few Shoshone between, and she knew without being told that the man with the folder had come about the program. They had all heard about the program by now. A man came, and he had forms, and he told you about the cities.

Her father Joseph came out and stood beside her. He was older now, gray at the temple, the man who as a young one had stood on Virginia Street the year they made the gambling legal and watched the town decide what it was going to be. He looked at the car a long moment.

“Give him coffee,” Joseph said. “Hear him. Sign nothing.”

The man’s name was on a card he gave her. He was polite. He sat at her table and drank the coffee and opened the leather folder and spread it out, and he talked, and he was good at the talking, because it was his work. He told her about the relocation program. He told her the government would pay the train fare for the whole family, one way, to Los Angeles or to San Francisco or to Denver, wherever there was a placement office, and that at the office there would be a man to meet them and help find an apartment and a job, factory work or shop work, real wages, more than a man made hauling hay or a woman made cleaning rooms in the Reno hotels. He told her there was schooling for the children, city schools, and that a boy like the one in the yard could become anything in a city, an electrician, a mechanic, a man with a trade and a paycheck and a future that was not this.

He said the word future several times. He did not say the other words. He did not say that the law of the country had decided three years back that it wanted to be done with the agencies and the trust land and the whole business of Indians, that there were men in Washington who wanted the colonies and the reservations closed and the people scattered into the cities until there was nothing left to administer. He did not say that. He said future, and he said opportunity, and he tapped the form where the line was for her name.

“You don’t have to decide today,” he said. “Talk it over with your husband.”

“My husband’s on a ranch in Smith Valley till the haying’s done,” Lena said. “He decides things with me, not before.”

The man smiled and said of course, and left the form, and the card, and shook her father’s hand, and Joseph did not say anything to him at all, and the government car went back down the lane and away over the bridge toward town.

Lena put the form on the table and looked at it.

She was not a fool. She knew what the cleaning work was. She had been doing it since she was fifteen, the hotels and the houses on the better streets, on her knees on other people’s floors, and she knew there was no trade in it and no future in it, and she knew the man was right about that part, that a city might give Raymond a thing Reno would never give him. She had been to Stewart, the school down by Carson, where they had cut her hair the first day and told her not to speak the language and washed her mouth with soap the time she did, and she had come out of it able to read and write and type and hate a certain kind of room, and she did not want Stewart for Raymond, and the city school the man talked about was not Stewart.

But she knew the other thing too.

She had an aunt who had gone, two years ago, to Los Angeles on the program, with a husband and three children, and the letters had come back fewer and fewer and then stopped, and the word that drifted back was that the husband had not found the steady work the office promised, and that the apartment was a bad one, and that the children cried for home, and that there was no one out there, no aunt, no grandmother, no church, no one who knew your name or your people, only the long flat city and the bus and the rent. The program paid your fare one way. It did not pay it back.

She went to the doorway. Raymond was at the far end of the yard, by the willows along the river, doing something with a stick and the mud, nine years old and brown from the sun and entirely here, entirely of this place, the river and the sage and the line of the Sierra behind the town. In the city there would be no river you could get to. In the city there would be money, maybe, and a school, and no one who could tell him whose grandson he was.

Her grandmother Willa had made baskets. There was one still in the house, a small coiled one, tight and round, the old kind, the degikup, the shape the great weaver down in Carson had made famous before Lena was born, the one the white people paid hundreds of dollars for and put in glass cases. Willa had not sold hers. She had given it to Lena’s mother and her mother had given it to Lena and it sat on the shelf by the window holding nothing, holding only itself, a thing made by a pair of hands that had learned the making from hands that had learned it from hands, back and back, on this ground, by this river, before the town, before the railroad, before any of it.

You could not take that to Los Angeles. You could take the basket. You could not take the thing that made the basket.

She came back to the table and sat down in front of the form. The lines on it were clean and ruled and waiting. Fare paid one way. Placement assistance. A boy could become anything in a city. Out the window the light moved on the river and her son crouched at the edge of it, and Lena sat with the pen in her hand and the form in front of her and did not yet know, truly did not know, what she was going to tell her husband when the haying was done.

---