Madison Bell's Ten Indians: Inner-City Despair and Moral Conflict

Introduction

Ten Indians, by Madison Smartt Bell, is set in Baltimore and tells the story of Mike Devlin, a psychiatrist whose personal conflicts create turmoil within himself and within his practice. Bell presents Devlin as a man who is isolated even in a crowd, unable to reconcile his inner and outer realities. His perceptions of events at times deceive him, and the consequences are tragic.

Within contemporary society, the presence of drugs, violence, and despair seems so deeply ingrained in certain communities that there appears to be no clear path toward improvement. A lack of jobs and a welfare system that keeps people alive but offers little hope further inhibits social change, raising the question: can anything truly be changed? Or are the problems so intractable that keeping people alive is the best that can be done?

Bell's Ten Indians engages precisely these questions in a manner that is both personal and objective, drawing the reader into the inner city and presenting the burden one man feels to improve conditions there. Bell's characters cannot arrive at any single simple answer, and the costs of genuine change seem so high that most people are unwilling to pay them.

Analysis: Mike Devlin and the Inner-City Ghetto

Mike Devlin is a white man struggling to make a difference in young people's lives in the inner-city ghettoes of Baltimore. Those neighborhoods are home to black youth whose poverty and desperation funnel them toward crime and a morally debilitating existence. As a child psychologist with clients ranging from a troubled but ordinary teenager to a potential predator, Devlin is burned out by his practice and vaguely estranged from his family. He has heard so many horrifying stories that it has become difficult to reconcile his professional world with his personal life. Discovering that an eight-year-old client has cigarette burns on his body was nothing new: "Devlin realized with a dreary fatigue," Bell writes, "that he would be obliged to discover the reason for this detail." He cannot understand why people behave in such harmful ways, and that inability drives him on a moral and, ultimately, life-altering quest.

Unable to resolve the tensions in his practice, Devlin attempts to make a difference elsewhere. The turning point comes when he is struck by a car and decides not to tell his wife. That silence inaugurates a kind of secret life. He becomes deeply involved in a Tae Kwon Do school he establishes in a rundown section of Baltimore. As a white man opening a school in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, the venture appears to many as a folly. Poverty is so deeply entrenched in that area that young black men are already spiraling toward crime at an early age, and outside interference — especially from whites — is unwelcome.

Bell does not hammer these racial and class differences explicitly; instead, he renders in an objective tone the nuances that define ghetto life and reveals their inner dynamics. He draws a sharp contrast between the reality of inner-city existence and the perception most outsiders hold. It is easy to stand on a moral pedestal and assert that small interventions will make a difference, but in communities where crime, murder, drugs, and incarceration have become cultural facts, residents struggle to recognize intervention for what it is. Devlin's belief that a hobby could transform young lives was, at best, simplistic, and it exposed how little he truly understood about the world his students inhabited.

Conclusion

While on a surface level Ten Indians is about the paradoxes that inhabit social problems in contemporary society, at a deeper level it also explores the personal difficulties in Devlin's own relationships. He cannot communicate openly with his wife or share what he feels. He is emotionally distant from his daughter Michelle, and only begins to reach an understanding with her when she joins him in teaching. Yet, in his inner conflict, he fails to reconcile actual facts with his illusions of reality. He does not recognize that his wife, his daughter, and his students each have a life and a personality beyond what he is able to perceive. His need to act blinds him to truth, and he pursues what he believes rather than what is.

What Bell ultimately presents in this novel is a clear-eyed, objective account of the values people hold and the reasons so many well-meaning policies fail. We tend to view inner-city ghettoes through a social lens — as problems to be managed — while in reality they have become cultural facts that must be addressed as such. The youth who grow up there are born into crime and know no other life. A hobby, or an individual act of intervention, will make little lasting difference until the whole culture is overhauled. Yet Bell, through Devlin and Michelle, insists that the effort toward change must still be made — and that insistence is, perhaps, the novel's most honest and most troubling argument. For further context on the broader debate around urban poverty in the United States, readers may find that background illuminating.

Bibliography

Skow, John. "Street Games: A Winning Novel Set in the Inner City." Time, 28 Oct. 1996, p. 110.

Cryer, Dan. "Talking with Madison Smartt Bell: Life and Tae Kwon Do." Newsday, 15 Dec. 1996, p. C37.