Mirrors

Some of the parallels in Stones from the Creek were initially unconscious.  Only after re-reading two stories did I realize the ways in which I repeated myself.  Some of the devil references are like that.  Once I realized, I was comfortable adding more.  But some were calculated from the beginning.  I was very interested in the garífunas insistence on being Indians in the early twentieth century and Africans in the early twenty-first.  It was a way of shedding more light on the Creek Indians steady process of rejecting their Black members, and of some Black Creeks' insistence that they weren't African American.

The character of José Bishara in the story "If It is God's Will" was a decision, not an accident.  I had already written "All These Blue Things" with the once-famous US Marine, Smedley Darlington Butler, and I needed to come back at that story from a different point of view, that of Arünei Jack.  I had also already written "One Voice, One Heart."  It occurred to me that just as the Apache chief Alchesay of "The Giant Believed Her" could have a Jewish godson-in-law, so Arünei Jack could have a Palestinian brother-in-law.  The Jewish merchants of Arizona Territory had their close parallel in the Palestinian Christian merchants of coastal Honduras.  

And so I described José Bishara's progress from itinerant pedlar in many of the same words as I had described Lazar Sussman's.  I even carefully gave them the same inventory of merchandise.  I gave them similar approaches to business.  I gave Arünei Jack similar reasons for liking José as I gave Alchesay for liking Lazar: some personal, having to do with their character and the way the couples loved each other; some political, having to do with the advantage of having somebody familiar with the outside society marry into the group.  In both cases, that outsider is also an outsider in the opposing society, a Jew and a Palestinian.  In both cases they are escaping from danger in their homelands:  Lazar from the pogroms in neighboring Russia, José from the Ottoman rulers in Palestine.

So much of Stones from the Creek mirrors our world today.  I wrote "Who Could Have Foreseen It" in the early months of the 2008 recession when I could not escape its similarity to the Panic of 1907 and I was writing stories that took place in 1906 anyway.  "Turning Water Into Gold" was shaped in large part by the efforts of multinational corporations today to privatize water.  And so the twin merchants -- one Jewish and one Palestinian -- are also a way of calling the reader's attention to the similarities between Palestinian and Jewish peoples.  

As a Jew, I hear altogether too much truly vile language about Palestinians.  And I know from Palestinian friends what they hear privately about Jews.  I hope the rest of you are shielded from the worst of this.  I wasn't going to write about the entire Middle East conflict in a book about the US a century ago.  But I could write in these parallel characters.  It is more than saying we are all human.  It is an effort to point to some distinctive ways in which the two peoples reflect each other.