Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [30]
The Missionary and his sister shook hands with us and asked us to tea the next day. Louisa could not go, but I went.
The Missionary said, “It is good for the Indians to have a white person stay in their homes; we are at a very difficult stage with them—this passing from old ways into new. I tell you savages were easier to handle than these half-civilized people … in fact it is impossible … I have sent my wife and children south …”
“Is the school here not good?”
“I can’t have my children mix with the Indians.”
A long pause, then, “I want to ask you to try to use your influence with Louisa and her husband to send their boys to the Industrial boarding-school for Indians. Will you do so?” asked the Parson.
“No.”
The Missionary’s eyes and his sister’s glared at me through their spectacles like fish eyes.
“Why will you not?”
“In Louisa’s house now there is an adopted child, a lazy, detestable boy, the product of an Indian Industrial School, ashamed of his Indian heritage. All Louisa’s large family of children are dead, all but these two boys, and they are not robust. Louisa knows how to look after them—there is a school in the village. She can send them there and own and mother them during their short lives. Why should she give up her boys?”
“But the advantages?”
“And the disadvantages!”
LOUISA AND I sat by the kitchen stove. Joe, her younger son, had thrown himself across her lap to lull a toothache; his cheeks were thin and too pink. Louisa said, “The Missionary wants us to send our boys away to school.”
“Are you going to?”
“—Maybe Jimmy by and by—he is strong and very bright, not this one—.”
“I never saw brighter eyes than your Joe has.”
Louisa clutched the boy tight. “Don’t tell me that. They say shiny eyes and pink cheeks mean— … If he was your boy, Em’ly, would you send him away to school?”
“NO.”
MARTHA’S JOEY
One day our father and his three little girls were going over James Bay Bridge in Victoria. We met a jolly-faced old Indian woman with a little fair-haired white boy about as old as I was.
Father said, “Hello Joey!,” and to the woman he said: “How are you getting on, Martha?”
Father had given each of us a big flat chocolate in silver paper done up like a dollar piece. We were saving them to eat when we got home.
Father said, “Who will give her chocolate to Joey?”
We were all willing. Father took mine because I was the smallest and the greediest of his little girls.
The boy took it from my hand shyly, but Martha beamed so wide all over me that I felt very generous.
After we had passed on I said, “Father, who is Joey?”
“Joey,” said my father, “was left when he was a tiny baby at Indian Martha’s house. One very dark stormy night a man and woman knocked at her door. They asked if she would take the child in out of the wet, while they went on an errand. They would soon be back, they said, but they never came again, though Martha went on expecting them and caring for the child. She washed the fine clothes he had been dressed in and took them to the priest; but nobody could find out anything about the couple who had forsaken the baby.
“Martha had no children and she got to love the boy very much. She dressed him in Indian clothes and took him for her own. She called him Joey.”
I OFTEN THOUGHT about what Father had told us about Joey.
One day Mother said I could go with her, and we went to a little hut in a green field where somebody’s cows grazed. That was where Martha lived.
We knocked at the door but there was no answer. As we stood there we could hear some one inside the house crying and crying. Mother opened the door and we went in.
Martha was sitting on the floor. Her hair was sticking out wildly, and her face was all swollen with crying. Things were thrown about the floor as if she did not care about anything any more. She could only sit swaying back and forth crying out, “Joey—my Joey—my Joey—.”
Mother put some nice things on the floor beside her, but she did not look at them. She just went on crying and moaning.
Mother bent