Superman and Me
Sherman Alexie
I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I
cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which
villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I
obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane
Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern
Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually
managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by
reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of
irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food.
My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose,
was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics,
basketball player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by
the pound at Dutch's Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he
had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and
hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in
the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative
energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random
assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and
the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I
loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.
I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read. The words
themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first
understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the
vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held
words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had
some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I
began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small
paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the
other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal
School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate
paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this