In
the following scene from Chapter 4 (Pages 35 and 36) of the novel, Cut Hand and Billy Strobaw
have left Billy’s two companions, Splitlip Rumquiller and Wild Red Greavy, on
their way to the warrior’s village. They intend to build a life together among Cut Hand's people where their way of life would be more accepted than among the
Americans. At the moment, they are discussing Billy’s difficulty reconciling a “win-tay” lifestyle with his upbringing. Let’s watch and listen.
###
We
dawdled away most of the phase of a moon gaining fluency in one another’s
languages. I shuddered to think I had been bound for the Santa Fe Trail where I
would have missed him. But, even the joy of Cut’s presence could not purge the
occasional guilt I experienced in private over my libertine practices.
“Don’t
you understand, Cut?” I snapped once when he challenged my mood. “I love you,
but my God says that is wrong. Men don’t lie with men!”
“This
God of yours must be the same Great Mystery who made me. My creator gave me a
hunger in the loins, so I can make children, but he never said there was only
one way to enjoy the act. Why would he make it pleasurable if it was not to be
used?”
“Even
you said it was wrong for two men to lie together.”
“Yes.
And it is wrong for two women to lie together, and two Win-tays to lie
together. That is against nature.”
“But I
am a man,” I cried in anguish. “I have a yard and stones like you! We are two
men lying together, Cut!”
He went
so quiet that I grew deathly afraid. “If that is true, I will leave you here
and hang my head in shame. But a pipe and stones do not make a man, Billy. You
are not a man because you were born with a penis. You are not a man because you
are brave and strong and killed two warriors.” He tapped his heart. “Your
spirit determines what you are, not your genitals.”
“That
can’t be right!” I protested. “God makes you a man or a woman. There isn’t
anything else!”
Then I
learned one of the great differences between the Red and the White worlds. To
the European, life begins, progresses, and ends along a linear. A man is a man
and behaves as such or suffers for it; a woman travels an even narrower
pathway. They are opposite sexes. The Indian perceives life as a Sacred Circle.
There is no “only-man” or “only-woman,” no opposite genders, merely
complementary ones.
Cut
drew a hoop in the earth. Humans, according to his notion, might fit anywhere
within the circle. A man was a man according to his spirit; a woman was a woman
because of hers. A man became a man by accepting a man’s responsibilities. His
sexual appetite had less to do with his orientation than his choice of
responsibilities.
If a
boy child selected a bow as his toy, he was allowed to grow into what he would
become, a man. If the boy chose a woman’s tool, he was allowed to grow into
what he would become, a Win-tay, a not-woman, a double-face, a human being with
male genitals who accepts the responsibilities of a woman.
One
male may appear more manly than another, or less so, but his spirit determined
his lifestyle. So men or two-spirits or women fit at various places on that
great circle according to choices made before the Soul Journey ever commenced.
The point was that humans belonged wherever they felt natural, and one man’s “natural”
was not necessarily another’s. It was a powerful philosophy allowing a person
to live where he fit, rather than fit where he lived – a staggering concept
that brought me some ease of mind.
###
Too
bad that philosophy did not become the prevailing one. It would have alleviated
a great deal of suffering in this world of ours.
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