I was rereading one of my favorite novels, News of the World by Paulette Jiles, when I learned that she had just died. Her death is a great loss not only to me, but to all of her readers, and as the celebration of her life is underway today, July 20, in a church in the town of Utopia, Texas, where she sang in the choir, I am there in spirit. I love this novel for its generous belief in the possibility of an old man and a child, two warring individuals, to care for one another.
I first wrote about News of the World in my blog in 2021. I talked about how the author's use of images made the characters come alive. You can find that original post here. The novel is so rich in visuals that when the movie came out, I had no interest in seeing it because I already knew what the ten-year-old barefoot warrior the Captain calls Johanna looked like in her torn and filthy dress, her long blond braids coming undone. I could see her protector, the war-weary Captain Kidd, who at seventy-two was still impressively tall with white hair and silver rimmed glasses.
The novel is about their journey in 1870 from North Texas to San Antonio, where Captain Kidd will hand the girl over to her German relatives after she spent four years with the Kiowa Indians who had captured her when they killed her parents. Now that the tribe has sold her for cash, the Captain is tasked with the job of reuniting her with her aunt and uncle. It's a difficult assignment because during those four years with the tribe, she had become a Kiowa, replacing her German American upbringing so entirely that Kiowa is her only language and her only desire, when turned over to the Captain, is to return to her Indian family.
On this read, I noticed the way Jiles begins the preparation for the central battle scene many pages in advance. That scene is a turning point because it brings about three changes, two within the Captain and one within Johanna. The Captain will begin to treat his charge with a new respect and his dedication to her will deepen so that between the two of them, human beings who were so utterly at odds with one another, a bond is formed. Both have lost whole worlds: the girl has lost her Kiowa mother and the Kiowa way of life and the Captain has lost his beloved Latina wife. The Captain has a peripatetic nature and after she died, he left his San Antonio home and became a news reader, travelling from town to town in North Texas, reading articles from a variety of newspapers to rapt and mostly grateful audiences who have paid a dime to attend. It is both entertainment and education because the Captain is a good reader and he presents a varied and balanced range of local and world news. And though it’s a subsistence lifestyle, it suits the Captain, a veteran of several wars, and it suits Johanna, as they make their way south in a small horse-drawn wagon, travelling through rough, lawless territory with outlaws pursuing them who want to kidnap the girl and use her for child prostitution.
The author must convince her readers that a grieving and angry ten-year old girl is capable of doing the things she will do in the battle scene. This is a monumental task, so the preparation begins early. The reader is told that the Kiowa pride themselves on their resourcefulness, eschewing possessions, making do with what they have at hand, and we will see that Johanna has learned this trait. She knows how to handle guns, ride horses, and shoulder responsibility. We see that she practices the Kiowa rituals and sings to the animated and sacred things around her. In addition, we see how the Captain makes use of her capabilities, first by showing her how his mobile cookstove works so she can cook their meals, and then by showing her that the bullets are stored in the flour jar and how to load his gun. We see that she learns quickly and is comfortable, again because of her Kiowa childhood, with adult-size tasks.
Early in the fight we witness the way her fierceness, originally employed against the Captain when she was transferred into his care, now resurfaces as she commandeers a rock to stop the pursuers:
"Johanna was still levering at the base of a slab of stone with the lifter. To his amazement, she tipped it up, and then over, and it rolled end over end like a flat plate on edge, leaping downhill, smashed in half on an outthrust boulder and then shattered and fell in pieces upon somebody. There was a deep shout, almost a grunt, and a man fell forward out of concealment and rolled" (107-8).
The stone missile prepares us to believe that the child warrior understands that the outlaws must be stopped by any means possible, and seeing the captain's dependence on more traditional methods of battle, she uses her native ingenuity to first, turn a boulder into a weapon, and then, when the Captain runs out of bullets, and their pursuers are gaining on them, she invents an utterly new and original ammunition for his gun.
What that is exactly I won't give away, but my point is that I had already seen her desire to help the Captain as well as her resourcefulness, so I never doubted that she could play such an outsized and positive role.
When the Captain sees that the outlaws are gaining on them, he realizes that Johanna might have a chance to escape if she rides away immediately; he even offers his horse, and although she is used to travelling alone on horseback, this wild child who had tried to escape at every opportunity when she was first in his care, now refuses to leave. This is when her relationship to the captain pivots from antagonism to comradery.
Because I have witnessed these changes, I care deeply about these odd, ill-matched people. The battle scene, where their choices are so beautifully choreographed, occurs at the halfway point in the story and marks that pivot. And though the narrative on both sides is equally compelling, the tone is dramatically different. Compare "Sit. Stay" (70)[,] his one-word commands before the battle, uttered as though speaking to a dog, to his gushing admiration afterwards: "Good girl, Johanna, good girl. My dear little warrior" (114). For me, as a reader, watching this shift in attitude, seeing how it comes about, is pure excitement.
Reading Naomi Shihab Nye's remembrance about her friend, Paulette Jiles, I discovered new things about this woman I had once written a fan letter to and amazingly, received an answer in return. I only knew her through her novels, but I will miss imagining her out in the Texas hill country around San Antonio, hard at work in her writing studio.
Jiles, Paulette. News of the World. New York: Harper Collins, 2016.
Filed under: Advance Preparation