Little Big Man Read Free

times I felt: this is the way things are and should be. I had medicine then, that’s the only word for it. I knew where the center of the world was ” ( this page ).
    Once, but not for all. The key phrase in Jack’s reverie is “insofar as that was possible by the actions of the body,” and what he fails to achieve is liberation through the actions of the mind. Custer’s attack shatters his peace, destroys the world whose center he had just found, and throws him back into the clutches of white standards and expectations. Appropriately enough, the only real and lasting triumph in Jack’s life must be created and measured in accordance with those white standards. That triumph is his “uncorrupting” of the young whore Amelia, the one hoax in his life that really succeeds, based as it is almost entirely in the abstract ideals of white society, and carried off almost entirely through the medium of language.
    In fabricating the new Amelia, Jack most closely approaches the ideal of white society symbolized for him by Mrs. Pendrake. In this one area Jack manages to free himself from culturally imposed definitions and to act not as some standard of conduct dictated, but as he chose. His explanation reveals a momentary insight into his own ever-losing struggle with absolute definitions. Acknowledging the suspect nature of Amelia’s claim to be his niece, Jack defiantly states that since all of his “real” families had been torn from him by disaster, he had earned the right “to say who was or wasn’t my kin” ( this page ). For once Jack manages to define a situation. But when Jack records his satisfaction at Amelia’s success, he measures his pride in cultural rather than personal terms, judging his success at arranging her respectability “about as high as a white man can aspire.”
    Jack’s achievements are Cheyenne, his aspirations are white, and therein lies a kind of captivity against which his shiftiness has no power. What may be the most significant of the many levels of meaning in Little Big Man is not that Jack survives but that he suffers—ever victimized by his own hypostatization of “white ideals. Jack displays many of the afflictions of Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment , fighting and scheming for physical freedom but always hobbled by his own sense of impossible obligations. The moment of his greatest victory also reminds us of his ultimate submission to the tyranny of self-imposed definitions, just as the Indian victory at the Little Bighorn marked the end of the Plains Indian way of life.
    B ROOKS L ANDON
University of Iowa      

Foreword by a Man of Letters
    IT WAS MY PRIVILEGE to know the late Jack Crabb—frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne—in his final days upon this earth. An account of my association with this remarkable individual may not be out of order here, for there is good reason to believe that without my so to speak catalytic function these extraordinary memoirs would never have seen the light of day. This apparently immodest statement will, I trust, be justified by the ensuing paragraphs.
    In the autumn of 1952, following an operation to correct a deviated right septum of the nose, I convalesced in my home under the care of a middle-aged practical nurse named Mrs. Winifred Burr. Mrs. Burr was a widow, and since she has by now herself passed away (as a result of an unfortunate accident involving her Plymouth and a beer truck), she will not be hurt by my description of her as stout, over-curious, and spiteful. She was also incredibly strong and, though I am a man of some bulk, when washing me tumbled me about as if I were an infant.
    I might add here, in acknowledgment of the current fashion in literary confession, that from this treatment I derived no sexual excitement whatever. I dreaded those ablutions and used every feasible device to gain my freedom from them. Alas! To no avail. I believe she was trying to provoke me to discharge