Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

His hands—or rather, the one hand I can see, his
left hand, is huge. Like my father’s. Big square palms
with thick strong brown fingers, callused knuckles.
He’s worked all his life, from the moment he could
hold a basket or hammer or grab hold of a stick.
These are not the slender graceful hands that some
Esselen ancestor left on the cave walls, hands
immortalized by Robinson Jeffers, the poet laureate
of Big Sur. These hands are not the hands of a
peaceful or content soul.
These hands are hungry. These hands have had
too many things slip out of their grasp. These hands
can’t be gentle; gentle means dead. And while these