The Turquoise Ledge

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Over time I realized the politics of the Marmons in the pueblo was part of this, but there was more. Another part of the unease I felt as a child may have come from what happened before I was conceived. I found this out when I was in my early twenties from my grandma Jessie, my mother’s mother.

  Grandma Jessie said my mother gave away a baby and immediately conceived me, perhaps as a way to try to forget the baby boy she couldn’t keep. Of course she never forgot the baby boy and grieved all her life. She’d already arranged the adoption before she met my father. My father wanted to raise the child as his, but my mother believed in the prevailing notion of the time—that in such situations, adoption was best. For my mother adoption was the worst, and the pain helped keep her drinking all her life.

  My mother never talked about it until she was in her sixties, and her old flame, the father of the baby boy, located her in Gallup. They tried to contact their son through a national organization for adoptees. She told me they filed their names and information with the organization but no one ever replied. The old flame rekindled for a while then sputtered out. My mother never again mentioned the old flame or the boy she gave up for adoption.

  Sometimes I think about him, the boy, my lost half brother. He haunted my mother, and by extension, he haunted my sisters and me. Somewhere I have notes from when I tried to calculate the approximate time of his birth. First I count back from my birthday, March 5, 1948. (March 5th was my mother’s birthday too.) Then I count back nine months more; she and my father went to Denver for the birth. I think about the Viet Nam War and all the young men who died there. Maybe that’s what happened to my brother I never knew; maybe that’s why he never made contact with my mother or his father.

  My sister Wendy liked to dress dolls and play with little dishes. I wanted to have four legs and be able to run free in the hills as a deer or as a horse. For a long time I wished I wasn’t a human being. Whenever I ran, I pretended I was a deer or a wild horse.

  I talked to myself, and made up stories about myself and imaginary animals and people. I did the talking for each character. I was always “myself” as I made up the story, but I felt different from the little girl I became around the adults or other children. I preferred to play by myself. I was annoyed when other children or adults interrupted my imaginary worlds.

  I seldom played with dolls or toy dishes because I was interested in the world outside the house. During my first four years, my playmates were two large dogs, a yellow dog, Bozo, and Blackie. My mother told me Blackie was the only one with me when I was about four months old and lightning struck the house during a summer storm. My parents and grandparents were working in my grandfather’s store a short distance away.

  I remember following the two dogs around the yard while they ignored me and carried on with their dog business—which was to attend and sometimes to eat from their large collection of buried bones. They made visits to the places the bones were buried to make sure none were stolen or exposed. When the bones were ready to eat, I used to watch the dogs dig enthusiastically, their noses smudged with dirt, and how they savored the rotting morsels they recovered from the ground. The dogs and I could not leave the yard, but it was a large enclosure about a quarter of an acre in size and included shade trees, outbuildings and storage areas for old lumber.

  I was happy to play by myself. As I got a little older I liked to venture out of the yard. At first I went a short distance to some stacks of sandstone that were salvaged from a collapsed structure and intended for a house that was never built. A stray mother cat had hidden her kittens there in the crevices between the stones. I used to sit patiently on the sandy ground by the stacks of stone, to wait for the cat. She was yellow-striped, her yellow a little darker than the sandstone. I called her “Coonie.” She was skittish but sometimes allowed me to pet her. When her kittens were old enough to begin to emerge, I was disappointed at how shy and wild they were. I had to wait a very long time and sit very still before the kittens would peek out from the rocks. When I was finally able to grab hold of one it hissed and scratched me until I let it go and it fled to the safety of the rocks. I never tried to catch one again.

  Before my sister Wendy was born my parents moved out of my grandparents’ place to the old house across the road where my father was born. I saw an old photograph of Old Laguna from the 1870s, and the only building below the village was that old house we grew up in. The mud and stone structure was older than my great grandfather’s adobe house or the old train depot building of frame stucco across the road where Grandpa Hank and Grandma Lillie had turned the old train lobby into a living room and bedroom.

  Until I started kindergarten when I was five, I spent most of my time trying to escape the yard to get to the village where the older kids were, the kids who stopped to talk to me at the fence on their way home after school. They told me about all sorts of wonderful things I could not see because the Marmons kept their little children in yards, corralled like goats.

  I was the goat that climbed over the fence and took off. Marcelina Thompson, our neighbor, found me walking by her house and knew my parents didn’t want me loose. So Marcelina took me home; I cried and fought her all the way. I still remember what compelled me to climb over the fence: the kids told me there were dancers who ate wood as part of their dance, and I wanted to see this. I was three.

  One Christmas when I was in the second grade, my classmate Evangeline drew my name at school, and she gave me a lovely silver bracelet and ring with a honey brown stone. It seemed like such a generous gift at the time. Years later my mother told me that before Grandpa Hank met Grandma Lillie, Grandpa Hank had been married in the traditional way to a beautiful young Laguna woman who was related to Evangeline, but she died with Grandpa Hank’s child during the birth.

  Sometimes I felt Grandma Lillie was overshadowed by something. Was it the dead woman and child?

  When adults talked, I listened while the other children went off to play. I realize now I was moved by the undercurrents of tension I sensed between the Pueblo and non-Pueblo members of my extended family. From a young age I was fascinated with how the different sides of the family talked about the other. I always felt such anguish when one side of the family said something mean about the other branches of the family. I understood all of them in their ways, and I loved all of them and felt they loved me in their ways. For a long time I wondered why they did not see themselves as I did and love each other. Of course I was a young child then and did not yet understand the injustice that fueled the undercurrents between the Marmons, the other family branches, and the rest of the Pueblo.

  By the fifth grade I began to understand how the inequalities and injustice generated an impersonal anger, which sometimes got aimed at me because my paternal great grandfather was a white man. But I also knew that to other white men my great grandfather was a “squaw man” who set himself apart from other white men when he married my great grandmother.

  During the time my father served as Laguna Tribal Treasurer in the middle 1950s the Pueblo of Laguna Tribe filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. I remember when they took depositions for the case at the Federal Court in Albuquerque. My father carried piles of manila folders with him to the hearing. Millions of acres of Laguna Pueblo land had been taken by the Federal Government in the early 1900s for national forest and public land.

  The Pueblo hired archeologists and anthropologists to testify to Laguna’s ancient, continuous occupancy and use of the land at issue. After all the intrusions, theft and trouble that anthropologists had previously caused at Laguna, finally the people got some satisfaction out of anthropology.

  The stories and accounts of the old folks were important evidence in the lawsuit. The elderly Laguna people traveled one hundred miles round trip day after day to testify in the Laguna language in Federal Court. Some of them used to come to our house to ride with my father to Albuquerque; they were apprehensive about testifying in Federal Court but they were also brave because t
hey wanted the land back.

  Years later a decision came down from the Court of Federal Claims. Laguna Pueblo got back none of their precious land; instead the tribe was paid twenty-five cents per acre although the fair market value of the land in 1967 was hundreds of dollars per acre.

  What had lasting impact on me was that the old folks told their stories in their own words, in the Laguna language, and that together they stood the test in a high court of an alien culture. Maybe this is where I got the notion that if I could tell the story clearly enough then all that was taken, including the land, might be returned.

  When I was a child, the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school at Laguna only had kindergarten through the fourth grade. For the fifth grade, we Laguna children had to leave our families to attend Indian boarding schools, or start riding the bus to school for hours every day.

  I started writing when I was in the fifth grade because the transfer to Manzano Day School in Albuquerque was so difficult. The Bureau of Indian Affairs teachers had not bothered to teach us the times tables. I was mortified at how far behind I was at my new school.

  The fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Cooper who came from England as a war bride. She was very patient and understanding about my deficiencies in arithmetic. Soon after school began, she assigned our class to take the week’s spelling list and use each of the words on the list at least once in a story we had to make up. I can still remember how delighted I was with the assignment. I loved to make up stories to tell my younger sisters and cousins.

  The story came to me effortlessly, and in no time I was finished. But when I glanced around the classroom I saw the other students had difficulty making up a story. Here was something I could do that the others could not do so easily.

  All my life at Laguna I was surrounded by people who loved to tell stories because it was through the spoken word and human memory that for thousands of years the Pueblo people had recorded and maintained their entire culture. The stories I loved to hear were part of my early training; from these early years of listening my imagination raced off to make up my own stories. Making up stories was second nature to me.

  I made an important discovery too: while I was writing the story, I was no longer in the classroom, I was no longer the girl in fifth grade who hadn’t heard of the times tables. I was transported to the place the story was located; I wasn’t a character in the story, but I knew the direction the story was headed and I followed along and wrote down what I saw happening. I loved it and I still love it, even as I type this sentence. At Laguna the notion of “a story” covers the widest possible range: historical accounts, village gossip, sacred migration stories, hummah-hah stories that included Coyote and the other animals and supernatural beings, deer hunting stories, even car wreck stories, were all included in the oral narrative tradition. Stories are valuable repositories for details and information of use to future generations; details and information are easier to remember when there is a story associated with them. Stories even served as maps because a person who was lost in the mountains in a snowstorm might see an odd rock formation and remember a story that described the strange rock formation in detail including its location.

  My great grandma A’mooh, Aunt Susie and Aunt Alice, the women who spent the most time answering my questions and telling me stories, were also women who pored over books on their kitchen tables after their families were fed. They were proud to be women of the book as well as women of the spoken word because they had obtained their book knowledge the hardest, loneliest way: in long years of exile under overcast skies at the Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

  To these women, books were precious, and because of their love of books I grew up surrounded by books. They placed the highest possible value on education because the Pueblo people have always believed that knowledge from all sources, including books, is necessary for survival.

  From these women, my father learned to love books. He belonged to book clubs and I remember the big deal over the publication of the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, both of which he got.

  He was always telling me that I should be a writer because writers can live anywhere they want and do their work. He had a vivid childlike imagination. He must have talked to me a great deal about writing in the years before I went to school. My father’s passion and true calling was photography but he was a fine storyteller and writer himself, and always had a story to go with each photograph he made.

  I will always remember the day two white tourists visited our school and asked each of us children what we wanted to be when we grew up. My turn came and I told them I wanted to be a “playwright.” I was in the second grade. I never forgot this because the tourists reacted with such disbelief, but I knew a playwright made up stories.

  Because I was of mixed ancestry, the older people in the community looked out for me; they tried to teach me things I might not learn at home so I wouldn’t blunder into sacred areas in and around Laguna village. Rarely, it was with a scolding, but most often I was taught with kindness.

  Back then everyone watched out for other people’s children, and adults were expected to mind other people’s children and send them home if they saw them in danger.

  CHAPTER 6

  Grandma Lillie, my father’s mother, was born in Los Lunas, south of Albuquerque; she was a mix of Mexican, German and English and one quarter Texas Indian—she wasn’t sure which tribe. Great Grandpa Zachary Stagner, Grandma Lillie’s father, ran away from his Texas family when he was fourteen, and had no contact with them again. Our cousin Joanne after much research learned that Great Grandpa Stagner’s mother was a Texas Indian named Rhoda Touchstone who died in Sweetwater, Texas.

  I used to wonder why he ran away from home at fourteen. Was it because his father, Stagner the German, administered terrible whippings? Someone on Grandma Lillie’s side of the family had begun the practice of whipping young children. The Laguna Pueblo people, who never hit their children, were horrified at the terrible whippings my father gave my sisters and me when we were small.

  Grandma Lillie was a beautiful young woman, but she must not have felt or realized her beauty. I remember all the black and white Kodak snapshots in the Hopi basket with the grasshopper man pattern. Many of the photographs showed Grandma Lillie, when she was young, with Grandpa Hank but also with her younger sisters. There were snapshots of Grandpa Hank often posed beside fast cars. He wore stylish suits and was very handsome.

  Sometime in the late 1950s (was it one of the times she thought Grandpa Hank was having an affair?) Grandma Lillie took the Hopi basket full of snapshots and a pair of sharp scissors and carefully cut out her face from every photograph. If she appeared in snapshots with other people, the faces of the others were intact; only her face was neatly excised. The faceless images were very strange; without the face, the upright figure with the remaining top of the head and hair looked like a corpse.

  Recently I learned something more about Grandma Lillie’s mother’s people, our Los Lunas relatives and their connection with the whipping of young children. All these years I thought I knew the whole story but I was wrong.

  Long before I knew anything about the Indian slave trade in New Mexico, I’d heard Grandma Lillie’s stories about old Juana, the Navajo captive who lived with them and cared for them when they were children. One Memorial Day when I was twelve or thirteen, Grandma Lillie asked me to go with her to take flowers to old Juana’s grave. She told me Juana died around 1920 when she was more than one hundred years old. We filled clean coffee cans with water; then we cut some roses and lilacs from Grandma A’mooh’s yard because those were the only fresh flowers to be found.

  Grandma Lillie drove us to the south side of Laguna village and then down the old dirt road near the old bridge across the river. A low wall of black lava rock was partially buried in the pale gray river sand that covered an ancient floodplain; in the corners of the wall, dry weeds, scraps of paper and debris formed drifts. The
graves were from the time when the Laguna people didn’t use carved gravestones but flat pieces of sandstone or slate or black lava stones. I seem to remember the remains of a few wooden crosses scattered about.

  She hadn’t brought flowers to Juana in a while, but then that year, for some reason, she decided to do it. Grandma Lillie took a little while to get her bearings among the piles of stones and small dunes of sand that shifted in the graveyard with every wind. Then she located the five dark lava stones the size of cantaloupes that marked Juana’s grave. I helped Grandma Lillie clear away the tumbleweeds tangled with other debris, and she talked about old Juana while we worked.

  Juana had been captured by Mexican slave-catchers when she was just a little girl. Years later when Lincoln freed the slaves, it was already too late for poor Juana—thirty years or more had passed and she no longer spoke the Navajo language, and she did not know where she had been stolen from. Grandma Lillie gave me the impression Juana came to work for their family when she was an adult after Lincoln’s proclamation because she had no place to go.

  Grandma Lillie said Juana was the one who really mothered them, not Great Grandma Helen. In her eighties, old Juana raised my grandma Lillie and all her sisters and brothers because Great Grandma Helen followed the practices of the wealthy Mexican women at the time, which meant she took to her bedroom as soon as she was pregnant, and did not leave her bedroom again until two months after the birth. Grandma Lillie had eleven sisters and brothers and two who did not survive—so Great Grandma Helen seldom left her bedroom. It was Juana who cared for them while their mother awaited another birth. Juana bathed them and fed them, Juana rocked them and held them when they were sick or scared, not their mother. Juana was in her eighties by the time Grandma Lillie was born.

  I remember my great grandma Helen vividly; she always wore a long black cardigan over her dress, and she rolled her own cigarettes from a bag of tobacco as she gossiped in Spanish with my grandma and her sisters Lorena and Marie. I don’t remember her greeting us or hugging us; she hardly seemed to notice us great grandchildren. She was so different from our beloved great grandma A’mooh that we children were a little afraid of her.