What is inside

The kid was "a youth of peculiar appearance and manner," or so says Francis LaFlesche in The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, a memoir of his days at the Presbyterian boarding school on the Omaha reservation just a few short years after the Civil War. "He was tall and muscular with a prominent nose and cheekbones," LaFlesche says, but it wasn't the big kid's stoicism that set him apart.

Aleck excelled in sports, even invented games some the boys played; but what Francis LaFlesche remembers best about him, he says, is a steely reserve that didn't shush him, but served to make him operate almost emotionlessly: "we never knew him to change the expression of his face, either in pain, anger, or mirth."

Aleck's unyielding personality must have been remarkable, because LaFlesche claims he and his buddies used to talk about it and him. Everyone noticed Aleck never laughed; his thin face never changed, not a whit. They assumed the active register of his emotions was somewhere not seen, or so their leader, a boy named Brush, asserted. Aleck was "turned outside in," Brush told them all, so that "all his laughter, anger and sorrow were inside and couldn't be seen."

Brush had the kid figured out, but his thoughtful understanding seemed, to me at least, a wise and surprising revelation. Francis LaFlesche is remembering a bunch of schoolboys whose English is barely understandable and whose arithmetic isn't much better, a bunch of boys, children, whose adolescence was just then only dawning.

One of the little ones, Edwin the story-teller, claims the reason for Aleck's striking fortitude was that in the days following his father's death in battle with the hated Sioux, Aleck had simply determined not to smile again. "He was reserving his laugh," Edwin told the boys, "for the time when he would take revenge."

The man who's remembering all of this, Francis LaFlesche, went on to become a celebrated anthropologist who did much to preserve the disappearing culture of his Omaha people, as well as their neighbors, the Osage. Maybe Francis wasn't just an ordinary Omaha kid.

Still, it's a remarkable story amid all the boyhood shenanigans chronicled in The Middle Five, remarkable because it distinguishes the boys, despite their years, as quite astounding analysts of human character, as thoughtful as they are youthful.

I dog-eared the page because I honestly wouldn't have thought PTSD to be a problem in 1870 on the Omaha reservation, where death was a frequent visitor and, in a way, violence was institutional. Amazing--here's a bunch of boys, on their own in a three-story Presbyterian boarding school, a brick monster, a bullwork above the wide Missouri, a bunch of children putting their heads together to try to understand a wounded soul, a bunch of Indian kids long before the 20th century learning, on their own, how to become more blessedly human.

That's it, I suppose. That's why I dog-eared this incidental little story of a kid his teachers named Aleck and the legacy of war that left him fatherless--and, the boys who admired him and tried hard to understand the steely reserve forever registered on his face. It's a moment as sad as it is blessed--Aleck, or so the boys reason, is waiting for the moment he can bloody his own profound grief, or so the boys reason. 

I just wouldn't expect those Omaha boys to be so caring, so thoughtful, so human.

Francis LaFlesche

Years ago, Desmund Tutu told Krista Tippett that he once waited at the gate of an airport in South Africa and watched the crew come up the stairs and go into the plane. He couldn't help but feel a certain kind of fear, he said, when he saw the pilot was Black. That's Desmund Tutu, the South African anti-apartheid and civil rights champion making the point that racism has a place in the heart of just about everyone.

Me too. I loved the story of Aleck because I just couldn't believe those Indian kids could be that sweet and that smart. 

That too is racism.