When This World Is All on Fire by William Sanders - Essay Example

Set in the North Carolina Reservation, the novelette ‘When this World is all on Fire’, revolvesaround Sergeant Davis Blackbear, of the Native American Tribal Police, and his encounter with a young white girl whose song and voice left him entranced amidst the hatred and resentment around him. William Sanders has portrayed a catastrophe struck America, a generation bearing the burdens of their forefathers’ liberality with the usage of resources, disregard of the natural environment and aspirations of the modern technology. As a result of all this, the world is in a state of utter desperation. Cities, rather, entire states have been drowned with floods, while others have been robbed of their lush green farmlands, with the ever increasing heat drying up water beds. The upturned ecology is leading to all kinds of natural calamities including earthquakes, storms and tornadoes turning cities upside down. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, the dry heat causing entire forests to burn down, further dehumidifying the environment. Sergeant Davis seems to be going through the state of things with a sense of bewilderment at the extent of disaster possible, something that he probably never dreamed of, and hardly wants to think about. “…and he didn’t even want to think about what it must be like in places like Arizona. And Africa, oh, Jesus. Nobody in the world wanted to think about Africa.” (Sanders 2) Natural calamities led to effects on the economy with homeless, foodless people, obnoxiously inflating prices, fuel shortage, and the most difficult to overcome was the shortage of land leading to a rise in past resentments. Although the rich had been successful in securing places for themselves, the desperate poor were kicked around. As is the case with any epidemic, desperation and helplessness leads to social breakdown. It seems as if the United States are falling apart with both natural and socio economic plight. North Carolina, being Reserved land for the Native Americans, was out of bounds for the homeless white population. And since there wasn’t much “good land” left anywhere else, the Indians had to try hard to resist the ceding of whatever little of the land they had been authorized to, after the Europeans took over most of their country. However, since the country is “…running out of places for people to be” (2), squatters keep turning up now and again in the woods within the area in the jurisdiction of Sergeant Davis and he was often given the duty to evict them. His mixed origins i.e. being a “quarter-blood Indian” probably had a hand in this, even though he himself didn’t think so. He did display, however, a sort of rationality when addressing the issue of the squatters which seemed to reflect a glimpse of sympathy and understanding for the displaced population which the other Indians lacked. “Would you? Give up, I mean, if you were in their shoes?” (Sanders 1) Being polite and unaggressive by nature, he carefully avoids conflict, and isn’t offended by the abusive language of the white people he is persuading to leave the place they have chosen for settling without forcing him to make them, the cops, do it forcefully. His sympathies however did not interfere in his duties, and his feelings about the Indians’ right to the land. For him and his fellow natives, this was an attempt to repeat what had happened before, the intruding settlers, the forced dislocation from their ancestral lands and then the imbalanced deal of land authorization. As Jimmy, one of Davis’s juniors exclaims: “Twenty-first century, better than five hundred years after Columbus, and here we are again with white people trying to settle on our land. What little bit we’ve got left,” (1-2) Like other Natives, Davis also felt every right to kick out any squatters in their Reservation. “Sure I did. It’s our land, All we’ve got left.” (11) The little they had left after they relented to sharing with the white settlers, who, uprooted them from their homelands and shifted them to a new place, so they could take over, with hardly enough land for all the Indian tribes that originally owned it all. “We tried that, lady, and look where it got us.” (5) Sergeant Davis, who is otherwise a calm and composed man, of the ‘older breed’ as his friend calls him, is captivated by the clear and strong voice of a very young girl, Eva May, who was one of a family of squatters trying to settle into a clearing in the woods. “Nothing mattered but that voice. It soared through the still mountain air like a whippoorwill calling beside a running stream.” (Sanders 4) In this moment of bitterness, disasters and hunger and the oppressive weather, the melody of the song, the beauty of the voice enchants Davis, leaving him disheveled for the next few weeks. “..but the sound alone was enough to make the hair stand up on his arms and neck, and the air suddenly felt cooler under the trees.” (3) He isn’t physically attracted to the girl, in fact he fails to take into account her brilliant red hair and beautiful calm face. However, he is so drawn to her voice and the song she was singing on their first encounter, that he goes out of his way to save her from being arrested, buys her the pendant she was trying to steal as well as a new pair of shoes and all, just to hear her singing once again. “It had been an amazing experience, almost religious, driving along with that voice filling the dusty interior of the old cruiser; he felt light and loose, as if coming off a marijuana high. He found himself smiling.” (13) The utter misery of the state of things in the scenario Sanders has portrayed, is heightened by the incident of fire in the woods, seeming to have been started deliberately, signifying the lyrics of the song Davis loved to listen to, in the context of the disunity over a patch of land. “Oh, when this world is all on fire Where you gonna go?” (14) BIBLIOGRAPHY Masri, Heather. Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. Print Read More