“On her left:
This is to certify that:
Samuel Joseph Scott
born 2/17/21 is 1/8th degree Indian blood.
On her right:
This is certify that:
Grayson Joshua Blackburn
born 12/28/21 is 5/16th degree Indian blood”
The stories in this collection of dark tales all deal one way or another with indigenous people. “Quantum” is one of the stories that places this unifying aspect front and center. The story is about racial purity, which is a topic more often seen in stories about non-indigenous people. Many such readers may be surprised to discover that genetic purity even exists as an issue but as this quote demonstrates, when it comes to genetic maps of indigenous people, the issue may not actually be genetic purity so much as genetic plurality. The difference between the genetic makeup of Samuel and Grayson is so slight as to seem hardly worth mentioning much less inducing anxiety. The problem is that the degree in Samuel’s case is small enough to prevent him from being officially recognized as a member of the tribe. The reaction by the mother to this revelation becomes the source of horror which makes the story suitable for such a collection.
“Then the pain hits.
It’s like a blade is corkscrewing into my gums. I hold back a squeal, a hot tear melting its way down my frosty cheek. My curious tongue searches my mouth while the frigid air eats at my chattering teeth. It snakes its way between my top-left molar and the gum it’s hanging onto by a thread. It comes loose with a weak snap, and my eyes go wide. I spit the tooth into my hand, and my tongue checks the others. My opposite molar on the top right is wobbly, too. After a few seconds, I’m holding two blood-caked teeth. My tongue can’t help but play with the two new holes in my gums.”
This is a collection of dark tales, after all, so it is natural to expect some scenes of outright horror. What the young boy narrator is describing here is unknown. He and his dad on are a hunting trip and things go seriously wrong. Something besides a wild animal is in the woods with them and though they caught sight of it briefly they have no explanation for what it might be. This excerpt is somewhat typical of the horror element of the stories in general. Vivid descriptions of weird and inexplicable things happening are the norm. In this case, even though the scene takes place a good bit into the story, not enough information has been supplied to the first-person narrator to allow the reader to understand what is happening. This is an effective technique in this story especially because the key element of terror is the unknown. Like the narrator, the reader only knows what is happening but not why or who or what or how. The story maintains this technique to sustain tension throughout.
“You don’t have to love him, just make his baby.” Mama said, hanging the fleshy swath of salmon to dry. “It might have colored eyes, you know, maybe blue eyes. He’ll pay you to keep quiet about it.”
Mama had always been Machiavellian, but this was next level.
This is the opening line of the very first story in the collection and it resonates with the collective nightmarish horror of indigenous people whose land and culture has been lost to oppression or assimilation. Mama is offering advice on the situation at hand: a white man wants the narrator to carry his child. The reference to the potential for the baby to have blues eyes is a subtle recognition of the cost of forced assimilation. The reference to salmon is a detail that is so familiarly associated with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest as to perhaps be a consciously ironic stereotype. Everything in this excerpt is directed specifically toward the situation at hand but also acts forcefully as a larger metaphor for the entire history of European colonization of foreign lands. For one thing, English is being spoken. The description of Mama which engages the winning-is-everything philosophy of a fifteenth century Italian writer speaks volumes about the depth of cultural interaction. The Machiavelli reference is also ironic in that it is the indigenous woman who is being called this in the face of a long history of European settlers initiating a win-at-all-cost philosophy toward dominating the native peoples across the entire continent. These opening lines commence the personal story while succinctly encapsulating the entire history of relations between natives of and immigrants coming to North America.
