Reservation Blues: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Song lyrics precede each chapter, and this first one is a song about poverty and lack of choice. The action begins when a black stranger arrives in Wellpinit, Washington on the Spokane Indian Reservation, waiting with his guitar at the town’s crossroads. Word of his arrival spreads rapidly, but no one has the courage to speak to him until Thomas Builds-the-Fire, a lonely, dark-skinned Indian man with the physique of an old-time salmon fisherman, introduces himself. The stranger refuses to shakes Thomas’s hand, saying that he’s afraid that “the Gentleman” might hear. Thomas is curious, but according to unwritten Spokane tradition, he doesn’t ask questions.

The man introduces himself as Robert Johnson, and reveals that he has come in search of an old woman from his dreams who might be able to help him escape the Gentleman. Thomas sees the sickness and fatigue in Johnson, and recognizes the weight that he himself feels as a storyteller, enslaved in some ways by his art. He invites Johnson home to play some songs. Johnson, who has been on the run since he first faked his death to escape his deal with the Gentleman in 1938, shows him his scarred hands, and tells Thomas that he can never play again.

Thomas tells Johnson that Big Mom, who lives on top of the beautiful and mystical Wellpinit Mountain, may be the healing woman he is looking for. Johnson admires the reservation’s beauty, but Thomas thinks of all the painful history buried just under the surface. He drives Johnson to the base of the mountain, but his van won’t make the whole journey to Big Mom, so Johnson sets out alone, leaving his guitar behind.

In the memory of Big Mom, 134 years earlier, the Indian horses scream. She thinks at first that they are singing, but knows this is unlike any song she has taught them. She memorizes the song, and then walks to the clearing, where she sees the horses shot and killed by soldiers in blue uniforms. An officer whispers in the last colt’s ear, then shoots it between the eyes, and it falls to the grass, “to the sidewalk outside a reservation tavern…” Big Mom weeps, and makes a flute from the bones of the most beautiful horse. Now she waits on the mountain, and greets different “horses” who come to her in need: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and many others. Now she watches as Robert Johnson makes his way to her.

Thomas talks to the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota, a man who spends all day outside the reservation’s Trading Post. The man tells Thomas that the end of the world is near, and to be careful with music, which is dangerous. Thomas smiles. He steps past the new tribal slot machines and buys a microwave burrito at the Trading Post. Then Victor Joseph, who is tattered and angry, and Junior Polatkin, a “tall, good-looking buck with hair like Indians in the movies,” interrupts his curbside meal to ask about the guitar. They are bullies—Victor is an “asshole,” and Junior can be too, because “Victor [is] extremely contagious.” Thomas tells them he is going to change the world with this guitar.

Thomas tells them the guitar has a secret name, and Victor pulls him into a sudden headlock to make him reveal it. These tussles are common on the reservation, full of frustrated, macho warriors who are treated like animals by the rest of world. Thomas does not struggle, but he will not speak. He and Victor make a deal: if Thomas can play a Patsy Cline song, he can go free—if not, Victor will beat him up and take the guitar. Junior remarks that the song can’t be worse than Thomas’s stories, which creep about and get into everything on the reservation, even dreams. Victor and Junior often try to shut Thomas up, but he never stops telling his stories.

Suddenly, Victor smashes the guitar against the sidewalk, and then gives it to Thomas to play. Thomas, knowing that Junior and Victor are “fragile as eggs, despite their warrior disguises,” carefully plays the song about falling to pieces. It is good, silencing the two bullies, and the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota interrupts to tell them that the end of the world is near. By now, Junior has to go to work delivering water, and the unemployed Victor tags along—so Thomas escapes the beating. He starts to cry, and the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota tells him that things will be better in the morning. Thomas notices his hands have small razor cuts on them, where he played guitar, and he drives home with the broken guitar.

Junior is driving the water truck to the West End, avoiding potholes, with Victor asleep beside him, twisting and turning from a nightmare. Junior remembers the Psych 101 course he took at college, and how Freud and Jung said dreams decide everything. Junior knew that this was true for Indians, especially, since all the Indians on television had visions that told them exactly what to do. Junior knows this fact (and how to drive) and little else, except for the “wanting”—the need for something more. Victor only seems to want money. Junior reaches out to calm Victor in his sleep.

The two arrive at Simon’s house and pump some water into the well, looking at the dusty lawn. Simon, whom Victor calls the “crazy backwards driving old man,” offers them a drink, but all he has is Pepsi and coffee, and Victor wants a beer. Junior says he has to finish his work first, and shrugs his shoulders in response to Simon’s question about the black stranger. Simon shrugs back in agreement. The two leave, and Junior insists that they finish the five houses remaining. He promises to buy Victor’s drinks at the tavern.

Thomas plans to burn the broken guitar to smoke some salmon, but the instrument repairs itself overnight, and speaks to him in the morning, laughing at his plan to burn it. He tells Thomas that “the blues always make us remember,” and Thomas thinks of his mother’s singing when he was a child. The guitar plays him a sad song, the same song for hours, and Victor and Junior hear it too, passed out drunk in the water truck. The guitar tells Thomas the other two will be coming soon, and that the three of them are meant to play songs for their people, who “need the music.” The reservation “drank deep” from the music of the guitar because it “tasted so familiar.”

Junior and Victor are passed out in the water truck. Junior dreams of his two brothers, his two sisters, and his parents waiting at a bus stop in Spokane, during one of the short vacations his father was able to pay for every harvest season, when they would sit in the hotel and watch bad karate movies. Then he dreams of his parents’ death. None of his siblings, by now scattered and poor, could afford to return for their funeral. Victor dreams of his white stepfather, a short man in a cowboy hat, and his real father, who died during a heat wave in Phoenix and rotted on the couch for a week before anyone discovered him.

The sound of the guitar’s song washes over the reservation like rain, waking Victor and Junior, who, angry and hung over, drive toward Thomas to stop the music. The guitar tells Thomas they are coming, so he prepares peanut butter and saltine crackers to welcome them. While he waits, Thomas tells the guitar a story about Benjamin Pond and Turtle Lake—Jesus sipped from one lake, and Genghis Khan was attacked by turtles from the other. Legend has it that a tunnel connects the lakes, and that a woman can be heard crying there. Victor, Junior, and Thomas once saw Big Mom walk across the water, singing all the way, but Victor and Junior pretend they didn’t see it. Thomas watched Victor learn to swim in Turtle Lake, when his stepfather threw him in as a child and listened to him scream. Junior’s older brother fractured his skull on the dock at Benjamin Pond.

Victor and Junior arrive, and Thomas invites them to join a band, offering Victor the guitar, which burns him slightly. Victor protests, but the guitar has him seduced already—Thomas sees it snuggle close to his body. Victor, who has never played guitar before, strums a chord, and smiles. Thomas claims the bass, and says that he will be the lead singer.