The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (23 page)

"Let's go," I said.

We walked over to the courts behind the high school.

Two old hoops with chain nets.

We just shot lazy jumpers for a few minutes. We didn't talk. Didn't need to talk. We were basketball twins.

Of course, Rowdy got hot, hit fifteen or twenty in a row, and I rebounded and kept

passing the ball to him.

Then I got hot, hit twenty-one in a row, and Rowdy rebounded for me.

"You want to go one-on-one?" Rowdy asked.

"Yeah."

"You've never beaten me one-on-one," he said. "You pussy."

"Yeah, that's going to change."

"Not today," he said.

"Maybe not today," I said. "But someday."

"Your ball," he said and passed it to me.

I spun the rock in my hands.

"Where you going to school next year?" I asked.

"Where do you think, dumb-ass? Right here, where I've always been."

"You could come to Reardan with me."

"You already asked me that once."

"Yeah, but I asked you a long time ago. Before everything happened. Before we knew stuff. So I'm asking you again. Come to Reardan with me."

Rowdy breathed deeply. For a second, I thought he was going to cry. Really. I expected

him to cry. But he didn't.

"You know, I was reading this book," he said.

"Wow, you were reading a book!" I said, mock-surprised.

"Eat me," he said.

We laughed.

"So, anyway," he said. "I was reading this book about old-time Indians, about how we used to be nomadic."

"Yeah," I said.

"So I looked up nomadic in the dictionary, and it means people who move around, who keep moving, in search of food and water and grazing land."

"That sounds about right."

"Well, the thing is, I don't think Indians are nomadic anymore. Most Indians, anyway."

"No, we're not," I said.

"I'm not nomadic," Rowdy said. "Hardly anybody on this rez is nomadic. Except for you.

You're the nomadic one."

"Whatever."

"No, I'm serious. I always knew you were going to leave. I always knew you were going to leave us behind and travel the world. I had this dream about you a few months ago. You were standing on the Great Wall of China. You looked happy. And I was happy for you."

Rowdy didn't cry. But I did.

"You're an old-time nomad," Rowdy said. "You're going to keep moving all over the world in search of food and water and grazing land. That's pretty cool."

I could barely talk.

"Thank you," I said.

"Yeah," Rowdy said. "Just make sure you send me post cards, you asshole."

"From everywhere," I said.

I would always love Rowdy. And I would always miss him, too. Just as I would always

love and miss my grandmother, my big sister, and Eugene.

Just as I would always love and miss my reservation and my tribe.

I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them.

I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them.

"Ah, man," Rowdy said. "Stop crying."

"Will we still know each other when we're old men?" I asked.

"Who knows anything?" Rowdy asked.

Then he threw me the ball.

"Now quit your blubbering," he said. "And play ball."

I wiped my tears away, dribbled once, twice, and pulled up for a jumper.

Rowdy and I played one-on-one for hours. We played until dark. We played until the

streetlights lit up the court. We played until the bats swooped down at our heads. We played until the moon was huge and golden and perfect in the dark sky.

We didn't keep score.

1.
Consider the adjectives "absolutely true" and "part-time." What concepts appear to be emphasized by the images and the title? Does the cover make a reference to Junior's internal struggle, or a struggle between Junior and the white power structure, or both, or neither?

2.
By drawing cartoons, Junior feels safe. He draws "because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me." How do Junior's cartoons (for example, "Who my parents would have been if somebody had paid attention to their dreams" and "white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white" and "white/Indian") show his understanding of the ways that racism has deeply impacted his and his family's lives?

3.
When Junior is in Reardan (the little white town) he is "half Indian," and when he is in Wellpinit (his home reservation) he is "half white." "It was like being Indian was my job," he says, "but it was only a part-time job. And it didn't pay well at all." At Reardan High, why does Junior pretend to have more money than he does, even though he knows that "lies have short shelf lives"?

4.
Junior describes his home reservation as "located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy." Yet when he and Rowdy look down from almost the top of an immense pine, he says, "We could see our entire world. And our entire world, at that moment, was green and golden and perfect." What forces drive the dichotomy of Junior's perceptions of his world and allow him to see the land in apparently disparate ways?

5.
Cultural outsiders who write young adult fiction tend to romanticize the impoverishment of Indians. Junior is having none of this: "It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing that you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and
there's nothing you can
do about it
. Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor." How does Junior's direct language address this stereotypical portrayal of Indians? What about his language draws the teen reader into the realities of his life?

6.
Junior's parents, Rowdy's father, and others in their community are addicted to alcohol, and Junior's white "friend with potential," Penelope, has bulimia. "There are all kinds of addicts, I guess," he says. "We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away."

Compared to the characters in Jon Hassler's young adult novel,
Jemmy
(Atheneum, 1980), how does Junior's understanding of addiction transcend ethnicity and class?

7.
Junior refers to his home reservation as "the rez," a familiar name for the place in which he was born, the place in which his friends and relatives for many generations back were born and are buried, and the land to which he is tied that, no matter how bad things get, will now and forever be called "home." What would Junior think of a cultural outsider, such as Ian Frazier, who visits a reservation to gather material for a book and then calls his book
On the Rez
?

8.
At Junior's grandmother's funeral, held on the football field to accommodate all the people who loved her, Junior's mother publicly gives a white billionaire his comeuppance to the delight of the whole community. "And then my mother started laughing," Junior says. "And that set us all off. It was the most glorious noise I'd ever heard. And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean but, dang, we knew how to laugh. When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said goodbye to all of them. Each funeral was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together." How does this story reflect a cultural insider's perspective and how does it disrupt stereotypes about stoic Indians?

9.
"I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two funerals," Junior says. "That's really the biggest difference between Indians and white people." In the community if Wellpinit, everyone is related, everyone is valued, everyone lives a hardscrabble life, everyone is at risk for early death, and the loss of one person is a loss to the community. Compare Wellpinit to Reardan, whose residents have greater access to social services, health care, and wealth, and people are socially distanced from each other. How does Junior use this blunt, matter-of-fact statement to describe this vast gulf between an impoverished Indian community and a middle-class white town just a few miles away?

10.
In many ways, Junior is engulfed by the emotional realities of his life and his community.

Yet his spare, matter-of-fact language and his keen sense of irony help him to confront and negotiate the hurt, the rage, and the senselessness of Wellpinit's everyday realities. How does Junior use language to lead readers, whose lives may be very different from his own, to the kind of understanding that they will not necessarily get from other young adult fiction, whose writers do not have this same kind of lived experience?

11.
Cultural markers can be defined as the behaviors, speech patterns, ways of seeing the world, ethics, and principles that identify a person as belonging to a particular culture. When Rowdy and Junior play one-on-one at the end of the book—and they don't keep score—how is their friendship solidified by their deep knowing of who they are and what they come from?

How long have you been drawing comics?

I've drawn pictures from as far back as I can remember, but I didn't start drawing narrative comics until I was in high school. I drew a full-page comic for a friend who had quit her job at the ice cream parlor where we both worked—the piece was called "The Trials and Tribulations of Tina-Beena," and included a bunch of little stories about the way South Philly girls pronounced "Oreos" and the time she argued with a customer—stuff like that. She loved it and hung it up in her kitchen under a piece of plastic wrap

How did you and Sherman work together?

Sherman would give me a few chapters of his manuscript and ideas for what I might draw, and I'd do thumbnail sketches using his list as a bouncing-off point. Later, we'd go over what I'd come up with. About a third of the graphics were Sherman's ideas, a third were real

collaborations, and a third were my ideas that struck me as I read the text.

How was it getting into the head of Arnold Spirit?

Intense. Sherman describes Arnold so well in the text that I felt I had a good grip on who Arnold was. But to draw like him, to think of jokes that he might tell, I had to really immerse myself in being him, and it wasn't an easy place to be.

For instance, while drawing my last round of thumbnail sketches, I was working in a café, with manuscripts and sketches spread out all over the table. I'd worked for hours, hadn't eaten in a long time, and I drank too much coffee. I was deep in Arnold's head and felt like I had to keep going. So much heavy stuff was happening in the story, that's when I came up with some of Arnold's darkest humor, like the comic about the last sip of wine and the
Burning Love
book cover cartoon when Arnold's sister died.

Then when I got to the end of the manuscript, where Arnold and Rowdy play basketball, and as it was getting dark outside, I felt a tightening in my chest and I realized I was about to bawl. It felt like I was playing a bittersweet basketball game with Rowdy. I had a split second to decide whether or not I would cry in the cafe, and I put my head in my hands, sobbed once, and thought about something else. I had read that section so many times, but until then I hadn't been so deep in Arnolds mind.

What was your biggest concern/objective when creating the art for the book?

My absolute biggest concern was to make Arnold's comics look authentic. I was afraid my work would look too polished and professional, or maybe too goofy, but I also didn't want to dumb it down or stiffen it up. I briefly tried to draw like some of my teenage boy students, but that didn't work at all—you could tell I was trying too hard and it was obvious that it wasn't my style. So I talked about it with Sherman, and he thought it'd be fine if I just drew like me.

What's the most difficult part of the process: sketching the artwork or inking?

My process for this book was different from usual. In most of my work, doing the thumbnails is hard (writing and drawing my brainstorming ideas), sketching is easier (penciling and polishing up what I've laid out in the thumbnails), and inking is easiest (I use a brush and india ink).

For this book, the thumbnails were hard because I had to stay in Arnold's mindset, and I was interpreting someone else's work. Sketching was weird because I had to remember to keep the looseness of the thumbnails, and inking was REALLY HARD! The drawings needed to look like Arnold just sat down and drew them, boom. This may sound counterintuitive, but it takes way more concentration and confidence to make fast lines and swoops than my usual slow and

deliberate inking. Also, Arnold wouldn't use a brush in his sketchbook, so I used a felt-tip pen.

So not only was I using an unfamiliar tool, I was trying to make labored drawings look