Wooden Indian

The Wooden Indian is a cigar-store figure that stands on the sidewalk in front of a cigar store, halfway between Washington Street and Harrison Avenue in Boston's South End. It holds a package of wooden cigars in its hand, a standard advertisement for the tobacco shop it guards. For Mary Antin, newly arrived from Polotzk and still adjusting to the rhythms of American city life, this painted figure becomes the accidental instrument of a small but memorable catastrophe, and then an unexpected emblem of fortune.

The Accident and Its Aftermath

One day, after a hard rain, Mary walks to the drug store to have her prescription renewed. The broken pavements are full of pools reflecting the blue sky, with white clouds moving across them, and she is so delighted by the sight that she keeps her head down all the way to the store. On the return trip, carrying the new bottle of medicine, she repeats the same distracted posture. In front of the cigar store, with her eyes fixed on the shining rain pools, she walks plump into the Wooden Indian. The bottle is knocked out of her hand and breaks with a crash on the pavement.

The catastrophe is immediate and severe. The medicine costs fifty cents, and her mother has given her the last money in the house. The dispensary doctor has been emphatic that she must not go without the medicine, and she dreads the prospect of falling sick and having to stay out of school. With no money at home and no way to replace the bottle, she faces a genuine crisis that threatens both her health and her education.

The Appeal to Mr. Pastor

Within less than five minutes, Mary makes up her mind. She returns to the drug store and asks for Mr. Pastor himself. He knows her well, having often sold her postage stamps, joked about her large correspondence, and heard a good deal about her friends. He comes out from his little office in the back of the store, and she tells him about the accident, explains that there is no more money at home, and asks him to give her another bottle to be paid for as soon as possible. She mentions that her father has a job as a night watchman in a store, implying that payment will come soon.

Mr. Pastor responds with immediate generosity. "Certainly, my dear, certainly," he says, "very glad to oblige you. It's doing you good, isn't it?—That's right. You're such a studious young lady, with all those books, and so many letters to write—you need something to build you up. There you are.—Oh, don't mention it! Any time at all. And lookout for wild Indians!" His cheerful joke about the wooden figure turns the accident into a shared amusement, and his willingness to extend credit without hesitation transforms a moment of despair into one of relief and gratitude.

The Indian as a Symbol of Good Luck

After this incident, Mary and Mr. Pastor become great friends, and she reflects that this is the way her troubles often ended on Dover Street. To bump into a wooden Indian, she concludes, is to bump into good luck, a hundred times a week. The figure, which had been the cause of her mishap, becomes instead a recurring marker of fortune in her daily rounds. The accident reveals the precariousness of her family's finances, where fifty cents represents the last money in the house, but it also reveals the network of small kindnesses that sustain them. Mr. Pastor's willingness to trust her on credit echoes the broader pattern of credit and generosity that runs through her family's life in America, from the grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplies their table on a perilous credit system to the friends who help her father find work.

The Wooden Indian thus stands at the intersection of several of the memoir's central concerns. It is a fixture of the urban landscape, a commercial object that becomes entangled in a personal drama. It is a reminder of the constant threat of poverty, where a broken bottle can feel like a disaster. And it is a testament to the human connections that make survival possible, the small acts of trust and kindness that turn a stranger into a friend. The Indian itself never moves, never changes, but its meaning shifts dramatically in the course of a single afternoon, from an obstacle to an omen, from a cause of loss to a source of luck.