Read Online The Cannibal Spirit by Harry Whitehead - Free Book Online Page B

fish, foul sweat, mouldering cloth.
    Now the old chieftains on the dais placed their masks upon their heads, all except the leading chief of the Fort Rupert people, Owadi, bone-thin and tall, who wore a hat made of bear’s fur. Owadi spoke out in the high Kwakwala of which Harry knew nothing at all. The words came cantillating from the old man’s throat, the “lah” with which each phrase was always finished—that much Harry knew, at least—beating its own rhythms against the rain. The men on the dais who were wearing masks turned slowly with the words. They made small steps forward and back, their masks’ fur or feathers swaying with their movement, and one long raven-like beak on its hidden cords snapping open and shut.
    The minutes passed, and still the old chieftain intoned and the fire crackled and the rain still thundered on the roof. There was only lifeless desecration on George’s face. Yet, with time, there came a different emotion in his father-in-law. And more than one. It seemed some conflict seethed in him. As Owadi droned, George’s eyes moved around the gathering and up across the roof, and then into the fire, where they stopped and stared, as if in trance to the revel of the blaze. His eyes squinted, the left drooping in its paralysis. His lips were thin beneath his moustache. The hand that did not hold the staff clasped and opened and clasped again.
    Harry had worked the merchant marine all over the world. He’d spoken, drunk, fought, fucked among so many, that surely the world had lent him skills for reading men. Yet he could not read his father-in-law at this time, except to believe some torment or, perhaps, some terrible notion was rising to the surface. What was passing through the old man’s mind with such intensity? Not simply grief, nor yet the flickerings of his lunatic rage. Harry knew him enough to understand that his emotions, powerful as they often were, followed paths direct and open, so that few who looked upon his face could doubt what he might be feeling in that moment.
    Owadi intoned his final words. There was a silence, just the crackle of the fire and the odd rustle, cough, or grunt. Then George stepped forward a pace to speak.

“HERE IS MY SON,” I told them as they stood about me on the Isle of Graves. “My son what is named David Hunt by the whites, and Hameselal from his mother’s father, Nemogwis in the Winter Dances, Chief of the Senlem Clan of the Walas Kwagiulth, great chief of the cannibal dancers, descendant of chieftains of the northern tribes, bearer of their crests, father to children what will take those crests and carry them in all eternity. A great man he was. A Kwagiulth he was, and now he is dead.”
    And that was all the words I was going to speak, making my point to those present—and I suppose to myself—that my family was of the people, and would stay Kwagiulth forever. But then there was more; and perhaps I knew there would be, listening on old Owadi rattling on about how the world was fearful, all the youngsters dying, and everyone else, and speaking the proper words of the funeral as he did as well.
    Bitterness welled up, wrapped about with grief, and fermented with rage at all those ranged against me, as I saw it. It seemed like it was the whole world. So I spoke on, and angry words they was. Words against the white men first. How they brung their diseases and their controlling ways, their Christianity. I know that made some nervous what was regular churchgoing folk. I done it deliberate, though, stoking them up, provoking, prodding and poking till I knew they’d be resenting me.
    Then came words against the Indians. And there are Indians indeed who want rid of me still: for working with the scientists, for writing the secret ways of the people into the books, where there weren’t no written words before, just the memories of men, for trying to hold on to the ways of the people against