Two Roads

Oklahoma Track Team (1910), Chilocco Indian School

Two Roads by Joseph Bruchac

Cal thinks he knows who he is: a “knight of the road” riding the rails across the U.S. as a hobo with his father, Will, the two of them honoring the hobo code, doing an honest day’s work whenever they can find it, and sleeping under the stars. He and his father have both been through hard times, striking out on the road after Cal’s mother died and the family lost their farm in the economic crisis of the Great Depression, and Cal knows his father still remembers the horrors he saw as a soldier in World War I. But because the two of them are together, Cal feels secure and even happy most of the time. All of this is before Will reveals to Cal that he’s not of Italian heritage, as he’d always said: he’s Creek.

Will tells Cal about his heritage so that he can go to Challagi Indian School, an Indian boarding school in Kansas, while Will goes Washington D.C. to join the mass protest of veterans congregating there to demand pay from the federal government. With this revelation occurring almost a third of the way in to the novel, the reader has plenty of time to both enjoy, learn about, and grow attached to Cal’s hobo life with his dad. Though Will promises things are better now, after the publication of the Meriam Report., it’s still gut-wrenching to think of the father and son being separated, especially after Will starts sharing some of his harrowing memories from his own time at Challagi. Nevertheless, Cal wants to make his father happy and their two roads separate after Will drops Cal off at Challagi.

Bruchac continues his excellent job of infusing an interesting narrative with historical fact in the novel’s second section. Cal makes friends shortly after reaching Challagi, and this crew not only shows him the ropes at the strict—albeit no longer stridently abusive—school, they also show him what it means to be Creek. Cal learns Creek words, how to stomp dance, and that the prophetic visions he sometimes experiences are better honored than suppressed. Again demonstrating an unusual, but not ineffective, sense of narrative timing, Bruchac holds off on delivering the novel’s climax till the very last pages, gathering together the novel’s many roads and empowering Cal to traverse them on his own, making his own decisions, ultimately saving his father’s life and beginning to define his own for himself.

An author’s note at the end of the book describes how Bruchac researched the novel, provides a few more contextualizing historical facts, and mentions books that an interested reader could turn to for further information. Two Roads does a good job of walking the line between honestly describing the abusiveness and discrimination with which Indigenous peoples, black people, and the poor were treated by the U.S. government and many of its white citizens, and keeping the novel appropriate and empowering for young readers. Similarly, while this novel could be oversimplified as a “boy’s book,” featuring almost no female characters and reveling in Cal’s bond with his dad and his all-male crew of friends at school, the masculinity that is extolled here is a sensitive, responsible, and kind one, as rich with love and solidarity as it is with humor and adventure. Two Roads is an engaging and educational book that brings to life a mostly forgotten time from the perspective of a character and community not yet seen often enough in literature.

Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to: discrimination and racism, child abuse (not vividly described), forced relocation of Indigenous nations by the U.S. government.