The Truth About Love and Lightning by Susan McBride

When his grandpa had performed his brand of “magic,” Hank had believed as much as anyone else.
    “I’m no shaman,” Hank told his folks, because he didn’t feel anointed by any gift save for his physical ones: the chiseled jaw; the strong, straight nose; the width of his shoulders; and his formidable height. If there was anything especially spiritual about him, he figured he hadn’t grown into it yet. “I have to go,” he’d insisted. “I don’t feel like I belong here. I have to find my own way.”
    Sad as they were to see him leave, his parents did not stop him.
    Hank didn’t fancy living his life the Otoe-Missouria way any more than he wished to live the white man’s way. He just wanted to do things his way.
    So that was precisely what he did.
    Since opportunities in the theater for men like him—meaning, with colored skin—were virtually nonexistent, he made a conscious decision to get his foot in the door any way that he could. After fruitlessly following leads in local newspapers and countless auditions with often cruel rejections, he met a man in St. Louis who managed a vaudeville troupe that traveled from the upper Midwest down to Texas, performing “Incredibly Entertaining Feats of Daring, Comedy, and Burlesque.” Wilbur Coonts’s Caravan of Wonders, it was called, hardly lacking in hyperbole.
    Coonts had advertised for a thespian whose skills extended to wearing greasepaint and a headdress, portraying an Indian chief with a daughter who dances her way into the heart of a lonesome cowboy. Yes, the plot was trite, demeaning even. But Hank would have done just about anything at that point to get a toe in the door.
    He showed up in ceremonial buckskin and turquoise beads for the audition, his dark hair braided and embellished with a single eagle feather, although his attire paled in comparison to the costumes worn by dozens of others, all Caucasians in “war paint,” black wigs, and enormous headdresses. Hank watched from the wings as each actor took his place center stage, more than willing to spit out the “you, cowboy, me, Indian,” routine. When it was Hank’s turn, he realized he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t utter the offensive dialogue without getting sick to his stomach. So he shucked the script, instead telling a vivid tale of his shaman grandfather who could make it rain and heal the ill. Then he proceeded to dance in a small circle, chanting words he’d memorized from childhood, doing an abbreviated and exaggerated version of the tribal rain dance.
    When he was done, his face dripping sweat, Coonts was on his feet. His face beet red, he dismissed the others and waved Hank down from the stage. Hank braced himself, certain he was about to be browbeaten for refusing to play the part as written or, worse, for the color of his skin.
    Instead, Coonts tucked his thumbs into his suspenders, rocking back on his spats.
    “That was the bee’s knees, kid,” the stout, balding fellow told him and clapped him on the shoulder, grinning. “Better than anything I could have written.”
    “So am I hired?” Hank asked, hardly willing to believe it.
    “Something like that, yes.”
    Coonts agreed to take him on for two months—at half pay—to see how things went. “As long as I’m happy, you’ll stay,” his new boss told him, and they sealed the deal with a handshake. Hank got his own act, aptly labeled “Chief Littlefoot’s Authentic Rain-Making Ceremony,” portraying an Indian shaman in the vaudeville show.
    Of course, the main thrust of Hank’s performance was making it rain in the theater, a bit that was full of pageantry and intensity, as well as smoke and mirrors. While stagehands worked the lights and sound to simulate the crackle of lightning and pounding of thunder, Hank shuffled in a circle on the stage, wearing buckskin and a full headdress—Coonts insisted on the latter—chanting the words he’d memorized from hearing his grandfather utter them time and again during