Green Grass, Running Water

Alberta Frank is one of the other protagonists. She is an intelligent, independent college professor; most of all, she wants to have a child but not a husband. In her experience, men want a wife, not a woman, and she does not fit this stereotype. This is emblematized most clearly by her ex-husband, Bob, whom she married young and who very quickly expected her to drop out of school and abandon her own ambitions to help him pay his way through school.

To combat this, she maintains relationships with both Lionel and Charlie, keeping them both at a comfortable distance so that they can’t try to progress things toward marriage. This small act of empowerment doesn’t change the fact she feels trapped by societal gender expectations, nor does it remove the barriers preventing her from having a child by herself. When she looks into artificial insemination, she is forced to jump through hoops and wait extended periods of time, only to be told she needs a husband to proceed further.

Alberta eventually becomes pregnant, though she initially denies it because she isn’t sure how it could have happened. Coyote reveals that he is responsible and implies that he was responsible for Mary’s immaculate conception as well. In this way, Alberta is used to further connect the realist plot line with Christian creation stories and further erode the distinction between reality and fantasy.

Eli Stands Alone is a retired professor of literature who, like Lionel, struggles with his Indigenous identity and has spent most of his time avoiding coming home to the reserve. While away at university, he meets and eventually marries a wealthy white woman named Karen. Karen is loving, supportive, and well-meaning, but like all the white characters in the text, she harbors racist biases and assumptions.

For Eli, Karen is a symbol of the distance he has put between himself and Indigenous identity, as well as a means of accessing the wealth and social mobility that come with being closer to whiteness. Eli builds a life and home with Karen, but when she is killed in a car crash, that world crumbles. Eli’s name has a dual meaning within the context of the story: On the one hand, he stands alone because of the distance he has put between himself and his cultural traditions, but on the other, he stands alone against the construction of the dam.

Charlie Looking Bear is Lionel’s cousin and competes with him for Alberta’s affection. He and Alberta often fight over the fact that he works for Duplessis, the law firm that represents the construction of the dam. Charlie has fully bought into the capitalistic aspects of Western culture, signified by his materialistic interests (expensive cars, an apartment in the mall) and his embrace of capitalism; he doesn’t see the issue with working for Duplessis because he gets paid well, and if it wasn’t him, someone else would do the job.

Like Lionel, Charlie became detached from his cultural roots after seeing his father struggle to get jobs in Hollywood because he does not conform to racist and stereotypical expectations. However, things change for Charlie after he recognizes his father in the Western film the escaped elders fix. At the end of the text, he indicates that he has gotten back in touch with his father and is going to visit him in Los Angeles, symbolizing a desire to reconnect with his cultural roots.

The four escaped elders, also referred to as the “old Indians” throughout out the novel, are the Lone Ranger, Hawkeye, Robinson Crusoe, and Ishmael. Each one gets their name from a figure from Western literary history. All these figures are white male characters who have an Indigenous/non-white sidekick that perpetuates racial hierarchies and stereotypes. While most of the other characters in the novel perceive the elders as men, Babo Jones suggests that they are in fact women—an idea that is reinforced by their connection to First Woman, Old Woman, Changing Woman, and Thought Woman, respectively, of the various creation stories. This malleability of their identities is a rejection of the labels and boundaries placed on them by colonial oppression.

Structurally, the escaped elders connect the various plot lines of the text: They are implied to be 400-500 years old, and given that the hospital from which they escape is in Florida, the same location as Fort Marion, they are connected to the historical narrative outlined by Alberta in her history lecture. Likewise, they are connected to the series of creation stories, as all take on one of the names of the characters they encounter in the Western narratives. Finally, they cross paths with most of the characters in the realist plot lines concerning the dam and fix the Western, which has important implications for many of the other characters.

Coyote is based on the traditional Indigenous trickster god who appears in many traditional tales and creation stories. He serves two primary functions in the text: First, he breaks the fourth wall and serves as a proxy for the reader, often voicing concerns or questions about the novel’s complex structure and layered meanings; and second, he is constantly blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, because when he is around, anything can happen. He jumps between the different plotlines effortlessly and, like the escaped elders, draws connections between the different stories.

King also uses Coyote to upend the monolithic nature of Christianity’s stories. By having God spring from Coyote’s dreams, and by including the idea that Coyote was responsible for the Virgin Mary becoming pregnant, King makes Christianity a subplot in a different creation story.

Dr. Joe Hovaugh is the director of the psychiatric institution in Florida from which the elders escape. His name is a play on the name “Jehovah,” but the character is also based on Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Frye’s structuralist approach to literary interpretation defines texts as closed systems. In this view, meaning arises strictly from the relationships and oppositions between elements in that closed system and has little to do with the “real” world outside the text.

This explains why Hovaugh is obsessed with trying to find order and patterns in the dates the elders have escaped, and why, despite being able to locate them at the end of the text, he is no closer to understanding who or what they really are. Dr. Hovaugh is more interested in his own garden and is deeply confused by the wildness of Canada. This aligns him with King’s version of the Garden of Eden, and he serves as a god-like figure at the ward.

Babo’s name is a reference to a character in Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno.” In that story, Babo, who is a black slave and barber (like Babo Jones’s grandfather), leads a slave revolt aboard the San Domminick. Throughout the story, he convinces the captain that things are operating as usual, despite the fact he has taken control of the ship and is sailing to Africa for freedom.

Babo Jones occupies a similar role in Green Grass, Running Water. First, when being interrogated by Sergeant Cereno, she refuses to play by his rules, dragging out the interview by avoiding his questions or turning them back on him. At first, this makes her appear erratic, but it soon becomes clear it is her way of resisting his authority and gaining control of the situation. She also takes advantage of Dr. Hovaugh when she agrees to help him look for the escaped elders because she wants to get a vacation to Canada out of it. As the text unfolds, it becomes clear she is the only character that sees the escaped elders for who and what they truly are: female rather than male and ancient as opposed to merely elderly.

The name references Holm O. Bursum (1867-1953), a senator from New Mexico who proposed the Bursum Bill of 1921, which aimed to steal large portions of land from Pueblos to give to European settlers. The Bursum of the novel owns Bill Bursum’s Home Entertainment Barn—where he employs Lionel (and previously, Charlie). Like his namesake, he plans to profit off stolen land: He buys what he believes will be the most valuable piece of property on the newly made Parliament Lake before construction has even started.

Bursum epitomizes the capitalist mindset and seeks to extract value from everything he touches, seeing his acts of exploitation as magnanimous. Bursum has fully bought into the racist and hierarchical ideology of the Westerns with which he is obsessed and believes “[p]ower and control” are “outside the range of the Indian imagination” (129). Despite this—or because of it, considering King’s depiction of Robinson Crusoe—he sees himself as a kind of benefactor to the Indigenous community. In reality, all his “goodwill” is self-serving and about expanding his consumer base to include the reserve.