59 POETS & WRITERS^Q&A TÉA OBREHTabout 1883 and 1893. Then one day
a guy who had seen a little bit of the
world looked out the window and saw
this “horse,” and it turned out it was a
camel. The newspapers were t r y ing to
figure out where this camel had come
from and then realized it must have
come over in 1857 when the Camel
Corps had formed. I remember listen-
ing to this story and thinking, “How
do I not know about this? How is the
Camel Corps not a huge part of West-
ern myth? Who were these women,
what was going on in that house?” I
knew everything would always have to
be about that night.
Why isn’t the Camel Corps in our history
books?
There’s not a lot out there about it
partly because it was considered a
failure. There were two boats of camels
that came over from the Middle East,
one in 1856 and one in 1857. Camels
were ideal for carrying heavy loads
through the deserts of the Southwest,
which before that had been almost
impossible to navigate, and they made
communication between Army posts
out there much easier. But the whole
thing was bankrolled by Jefferson
Davis, who at the time was secretary of
war but shortly after became the presi-
dent of the Confederacy. So, anything
associated with him was thrown out by
the government.
The larger problem, though, was
that while the camel drivers who came
over from the Ottoman Empire were
deft with them, the local, white sol-
diers were baffled by them and didn’t
know how to handle them. They triedto combine the camels with other pack
animals like mules, and the camels
didn’t like that. They would bite the
mules, get aggressive. So around the
start of the Civil War the camels were
just loosed into the desert, and occa-
sionally people would see them. There
are several Native tribes that have
narratives about catching and eating
camels at the turn of the century.The book really demonstrates how much
was happening during the last half of the
nineteenth century, particularly in regards
to technology, to radically change the way
people related to one another.
I thought it was a fitting time because
the continent had been bridged over by
the train and telegraph, and the tele-
phone was slowly beginning to come
into use, so I think it was the last time
when a certain kind of superstition,
like the red horse, was still possible.
When I started researching and
reading people’s diaries and letters,
the thing that came up a lot was, “He
or she went out West for a spell,” and
you get the feeling that it’s like, maybe
I’ll see him or her again, and maybe
I won’t. And to live that way, there’s
such an open uncertainty to that, and
I wanted to dwell on that for the book,
where anything could be out there and
anything could happen.
And at the same time people were
experiencing this kind of vast open-
ness, there was a tremendous number
of battles going on. There was the
Civil War, various components of the
Indian wars, the war with Mexico. It
was just constant, and the interest in
battles and wartime paraphernalia was
profound. People would keep bones,
they would keep scalps, they would
display these grotesque curios as a way
of demonstrating that they’d seen the
world. It was just a deeply disturbing
and eerie time.The grotesque obsession with war feels
so current, too.
As I was researching, things definitely
started to feel very cyclical. There
were many examples, in those days, ofInland
I never met a man so deep-sleeping as my father. Dockwork will do that, I reckon.
Every day would find him straining under some crate or hump of rope that made
him look an ant. Afterwards, he’d take my hand and let the river of disembarking
bodies carry us away from the quays, up the thoroughfare to where the steel
scaffolds were rising. They were a marvel to him, curious as he was about the
world’s workings. He had a long memory, a constant toothache, and an abiding
hatred of Turks that tended to flare up when he took tea with likeminded men.
But a funny thing would happen if ever some Serb or Magyar started in about
the iron fist of Stambul: my father, so fixed in his enmity, would grow suddenly
tearful. Wel l , e fe n di , he’d say. Are you better off now? Better off here? Ali-Pasha
Rizvanbegovic was a tyrant—but far from the worst! At least our land was beautiful.
At least our homes were our own. Then would follow wistful reminiscences of his
boyhood village: a tumble of stone houses split by a river so green he had no
word for it in his new tongue, and had to say it in the old one, thus trapping it
forever as a secret between the two of us. What I’d give to remember that word.
I could not think why he would leave such a town for this reeking harbor, which
turned out to be the kind of place where praying palms-up and a name like
Hadzios man Djuric got him mistaken for a Turk so often he disowned both.
I believe he called himself Hodgeman Drury for a while—but he was bur ied
“Hodge Lurie” thanks to our landlady’s best guess at the crowded consonants
of his name when the hearse came to take his body away.
Our mattress, I remember, was stained. I stood on the stairs to watch the
C oach m a n load my f at her i nto h is wagon. When t he y d rove of f t he La nd lady put
her hand on my head and let me linger. The evening down pour had withdrawn,
so a sunset reddened the street. The horses looked ablaze. After that, my father
never came to me again, not in the waters, not even in dreams.
From Inland by Téa Obreht. Copyright © 2019 by Téa Obreht. Excerpted by permission of
Random House. All rights reserved.
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