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universe, and the Great Spirit they believed in struck you as a warm and welcoming deity, unlike the vengeful God of your imagination, who ruled through terror and agonizing punishments. Later on, when you were cast in the role of Governor William Bradford for a play mounted by your second- or third-grade class, you presided over a reenactment of the first Thanksgiving with the munificent Squanto and Massasoit, knowing that the Indians were a good and kind people, and without their generosity and constant help, without their bountiful gifts of food and learned instruction about the ways of the land, the early Pilgrim settlers would not have survived their first winter in the New World. Such was the conflicting evidence: devils and angels both, violent primitives and noble savages, two irreconcilable visions of the same reality, and yet somewhere in this confusion there was a third term, a phrase that had fed the most secret part of your inner world for as long as you could remember: wild Indian. Those were the words your mother used whenever you misbehaved, when your normally subdued conduct turned to rambunctiousness and anarchy, for the truth was that there was a place in you that wanted to be wild, and that urge was expressed by imagining yourself to be an Indian, a boy who could run half-naked through gigantic pine forests with his bow and arrow, spend whole days galloping across the plains on his palomino stallion, and hunt buffalo with the warriors of his tribe. Wild Indian represented everything that was sensual, liberating, and unfettered, it was the id giving vent to its libidinous desires as opposed to the superego of cowboy heroes in white hats, the oppressive world of uncomfortable shoes and alarm clocks and airless, overheated classrooms. You had never met an Indian, of course, had never seen one except in films and photographs, but Kafka never set eyes on an Indian either, which did not stop him from composing a one-paragraph story entitled “The Wish to Be a Red Indian”: “If only one were an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind…,” a single run-on sentence that fully captures the desire to throw off restraints, to let go, to flee the stultifying conventions of Western culture. By the time you were in the third or fourth grade, this is what you had absorbed: the whites who came here in the 1620s were so few in number that they had no choice but to make peace with the surrounding tribes, but once their numbers swelled, once the invasion of English immigrants began to grow, and then continued to grow, the situation was reversed, and bit by bit the Indians were pushed out, dispossessed, slaughtered. The word genocide was unknown to you, but when you saw the Indians and whites going at each other in the old Westerns on TV, you knew there was more to the story than those stories ever told. The only Indian treated with any respect was Tonto, the faithful sidekick of the Lone Ranger, played by the actor Jay Silverheels, whom you admired for his courage, intelligence, and long, thoughtful silences. By the time you were in the fifth grade, that is, when you were ten and eleven years old, you had become an enthusiastic reader of Mad magazine, and in the now-famous parody of The Lone Ranger that appeared in one of its issues, the masked avenger of wrongs and his loyal comrade find themselves confronted by a band of hostile Indian warriors. The Lone Ranger turns to his friend and says: “Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.” To which the Indian replies: “What do you mean we ?” You got the joke, which was a superb and deeply funny joke, you felt, for the precise reason that in the end it wasn’t a joke at all.
    The Diary of Anne Frank. India becomes an independent country. Henry Ford dies. Thor Heyerdahl sails on a raft from Peru to Polynesia in 101 days. All My Sons, by Arthur Miller. A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. The Dead Sea scrolls are