Laughing Boy: Summary
Laughing Boy. Oliver LaFarge. 1930 winner. The Pulitzer committee brings us back-to-back anthropological-ish studies of groups of marginalized Americans, in this case, the Navajo. Where Scarlet Sister Mary is lush, Laughing Boy is clean and spare, but both are far more modernist in style than preceding winners.
The plot of Laughing Boy is extremely straightforward: boy sees girl from afar, wants to marry her, his family objects, they get married anyway, they live together, conflicts ensue, she cheats, she dies, he moves on. All of this plays out across the cultural conflict of Navajo that live largely apart from white men and Navajo that were forced to assimilate in white schools and towns. We see inside Navajo horse races, dances, hogahns, and the hybrid home that Laughing Boy and Slim Girl make together that is truly part of neither world.
The book starts with a dance and the constellation of social activities that surrounds it: trading, visiting relatives, horse racing. Laughing Horse is a young silversmith and keeper of horses who becomes intrigued with Slim Girl, a slightly older woman who seems at the fringe of the gathering. He finds her more forward than other Navajo women of his experience and they agree to marry without the permission of their families and despite his uncle’s open misgivings about her virtue. They travel to the outskirts of Los Palos, a white settlement, where Slim Girl visits her white lover and makes arrangements to see him, setting up the double life that entangles her for the rest of the book. She introduces Laughing Boy to liquor and persuades him to build up wealth with her before they think of rejoining his family at T’o Tlakai. Meanwhile, she struggles with the traditional roles of a Navajo wife, most notably learning how to weave.
The couple takes a trip to a Night Chant in the middle of the book, giving Laughing Boy an opportunity to defend the “Indian-ness” of his wife and their way of life to his family. While she is heartened by this, upon their return home Laughing Boy’s doubts fester, sending him away from the home more often and questioning her decision to delay having children until they are wealthier. This balance is lost when he discovers Slim Girl with her love by chance and shoots them both with arrows, wounding his wife in the arm. Chastened, Slim Girl finally reveals her full history to her husband: her pregnancy, abortion, and subsequent life of prostitution before she met the man who brought her to Chiziai. They feel cleansed by this revelation, and Slim Girl finally agrees to join him at T’o Tlakai and live fully as a Navajo wife. This is tragically interrupted when an old rival for Slim Girl comes upon them in their travels and kills her in a fit of jealousy. Laughing Boy conducts a modified version of traditional funeral rites for her, keeping a four-day vigil over her body alone and then rejoining his people.
This story’s told through a lot of interior narration from Laughing Boy and Slim Girl and asides about white/Navajo interactions and the tension between the Navajo and other tribes. We get to learn a bunch about silversmithing and horse-trading and weaving and traditional dances and funeral customs and drinking and scamming white guys out of money and canned goods. It’s a little odd that all of a sudden the Pulitzer committee realized that there are non-white people out there in America and gave us Scarlet Sister Mary and Laughing Boy back to back, but I’m grateful for even this small stretch towards diversity. Too bad we’re going to have to wait a good long while for a book that’s actually by someone who’s not white… 1969, I think? N.
