Release. I must release.
So when the priest’s hand clamps my skull and his fingers squeeze my temples: I do.
NOTES
1. Milagros, or miracles, are tiny votive charms made of silver or tin that represent parts of the body—hands, legs, eyes, lungs, hearts. Next time you or a loved one falls ill, buy a milagro, string it with red ribbon, and proffer it to your favorite saint with a prayer and a kiss. Practiced throughout the Americas, this custom is believed to have originated with the ancient Iberians along the coast of Spain.
2. This crucial matter of skin tone is what prompted the Mexican writer Carlos Monsivais to say of La Virgen, “She is, on the one hand, the pacific moment in the Christianization of the Indian peoples and, on the other, the Mexicanization of faith.”
3. While living in Mexico, I often heard this saying: “English is the language of business, German is the language of war, and Italian is the language of love, but Spanish is the language of God.” Some trace it back to Charles V, who supposedly declared in the sixteenth century, “To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse—German.”
4. The monstrance is the vessel that holds the large circular wafer that—during Communion—transubstantiates into the body of Christ. As such, they tend toward the extravagant, plated in precious metals, embedded with jewels, and weighing many pounds. Monstrances are also used to hold the relics of saints.
5. For those too young to remember or who have tried to forget: Jim Jones was the leader of the religious cult Peoples Temple who convinced more than 900 followers to swallow a cyanide-laced drink in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head, in an apparent suicide, soon after. Until 9/11, it was the greatest single loss of U.S. civilian life from a deliberate act.
6. An ancient Mesoamerican sweat lodge, temazcales are womb-shaped constructions of mud or adobe heated by a pit of volcanic stones and firewood. Tradition dictates temazcales burn for four hours prior to use, symbolizing the four cardinal directions and the four earthly elements. Indigenous people throughout Mexico gather inside these chambers for curative ceremonies.
PART II
The New York–Canada Borderlands
Welcome to Akwesasne! While a visitor to our community you will be under the jurisdiction of the following: Canada, the United States, Mohawk Nation, St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, New York, Ontario, Quebec, Huntington County, Franklin County, St. Lawrence County, New York State Police, Mohawk Police, Quebec Police Force, Ontario Provincial Police, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Border Patrol, Canadian Customs, US Customs and soon—the National Guard! Drive Carefully and Have a Nice Day!
AKWESASNE NOTES, FALL 1989
11
The Sort of Homecoming
ONE OF THE TRUEST DECLARATIONS IN GLORIA ANZALDÚA’S OPUS, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, is this: “I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy. At times I am nothing, no one. But even when I am not, I am.” Throughout my South Texas sojourn, I wonder if this psychic wound festers in all border communities or just in my own. How have others internalized their ancestral division? Is nepantla a universal condition? An opportunity to find out arises in the summer of 2012, when I land a job near the other U.S. border, the one we rarely hear about.
Mom helps with the move. Flying out from opposite ends of the country, we meet at midnight in Syracuse, New York, and catch a red-eye bus toward Canada the next morning. As we hand our tickets to the driver, a husky woman with tobacco-stained teeth, she informs us that cell phones are not permitted on board. We climb inside to find the male passengers sporting ZZ Top beards and the female passengers wearing bonnets. I look back at Mom. Is this the right bus?
“Let’s go,” the driver snaps.
We do. Maneuvering through the aisle, it seems that everyone is in excellent spirits, twisting around in their seats, passing babies back and forth, doffing their straw hats, and chattering away in a guttural language that sounds vaguely German.
“Are they Amish?” Mom asks, as if they cannot hear us.
“Parece,” I whisper back in Spanish. Appears so.1
U.S.-CANADIAN BORDER
AKWESASNE, AT THE U.S-CANADIAN BORDER
Whoever they are, they occupy the bulk of the bus. The only other passengers are a boozy-looking white couple and a young African American, seated in the very back. We sit behind an elderly Amish man snoozing over a vintage hard-shell suitcase that’s a polar shade of blue.
Heading north from Syracuse, we pass only trees for more than an hour—pine and maple, beech and birch—until we exit the interstate near Watertown. U.S. 11 leads us into the countryside, rolling and green. Farms with centuries-old houses dot the landscape. Roadside stands offer pints of blueberries and pyramids of tomatoes; fresh-baked pies and jellies with handwritten labels; quilts and baskets. Bonneted women in long dark dresses pull wagons laden with children. There is a remarkable range of roadkill—squirrels, porcupines, raccoons, deer, foxes—and obscene amounts of horseshit. I understand the latter when the bus pulls into a gas station where five horse-drawn buggies line up in a row. A young couple yanks out their suitcase from the overhead bin and ducks out the door, where a bearded-and-bonneted family receives them. Soon, the other passengers prepare for departure. The women remove their bonnets, shake them out, secure them back with bobby pins, and carefully retie their bows. The men run combs through their finely oiled and curled hair.
Two hours into our journey, we slow to a stop in the middle of the road. Peering out the window, I see something I thought we’d left behind 2,000 miles ago: the U.S. Border Patrol. Half a dozen agents block the road with cones. One climbs aboard the bus. Unlike our agents back in Texas—brown and compact in jalapeño greens—this one is white and tall and clad in khakis. He stands in front of us, hands on hips, sunglasses shielding his gaze.
I glance around at our fellow passengers. The Amish are still gossiping away in what might be German. The African American is listening to his headphones. The couple is battling their hangover. Only Mom and I seem to have noticed this obstruction in our journey.
The agent scans us over for approximately 2.5 seconds, then gives a little wave. “You have a good morning, now.”
Apparently, this is a corner of the United States where nothing says “citizen” like a German speaker wearing a bonnet. As we roll away, I crane my neck to gawk at the roadblock. Who or what are they looking for?
FOR THE NEXT YEAR, I’ll be living in Canton, a town of 6,000 in the poorest, remotest, and coldest region of New York State. You could call this “upstate,” but to some people (including myself, before I got here) that implies anywhere north of the Bronx. No. This is north of the Hudson, north of the Catskills, north of the Adirondacks, even. Locals call this the North Country because the only thing it’s south of is Ottawa. I got a taste of its seclusion when I was flown in for a job interview and the ticket cost $1,100 and culminated with a ride on a nine-seat Cessna flown by a pilot questionably old enough to shave. I didn’t realize how far I’d be from urbanity, though, until I saw horses pulling buggies down the street.
My title here at St. Lawrence University is “Visiting Professor.” To me, this conjures an image of one foot planted in academia while the other kicks freely about. That nicely sums my sentiment: I want a secure income and a fixed residence as badly as I fear that those things will crush the itinerant writer I have worked so hard to be. “Visiting” is not just a title, then, but a metaphor for who I am right now. Half here, half not. Half committed, half not. Just as likely to bolt as to invest in curtains and nest.
And that’s not the only border I’ll be straddling here. When my students stroll into class on the first day laughing about the “nineties party” they had attend
ed that weekend where they dressed up in Doc Martens and moshed around to Pearl Jam, I see with sobering clarity that I have crossed into the realm of the middle-aged as well. This feels slightly unfair, given that I still have no partner, no child, no pet, no plant; no stocks nor bonds nor 401K; no furniture that didn’t have half a dozen owners before me. No matter. My Doc-wearing, Pearl Jam–moshing undergrad days have been rendered into retro kitsch. I am thirty-eight years old now, which for a single woman is a nepantla all its own. Last chance for childbirth. Last chance to find a partner who hasn’t already got an ex-wife and three screaming kids. Last chance to attribute your nomadic lifestyle to Bohemianism without seeming like a total flake.
Before arriving here, I didn’t think the northern borderland could differ more starkly from the one where I grew up. Temperatures, for starters, tend to be sixty degrees apart. South Texas feels like a large wet dog is sitting on your face. The heat and humidity are that oppressive. The North Country is more like a cat hissing and scratching you. It is that visceral, that persistent, that extreme. And yet the hot-boil of the sun and the raw-freeze of the snow affect me the same way: both make me retreat inward.
And when I step into the car and in twenty minutes reach a bridge that requires a passport to cross and descends into a shockingly different economic strata, I realize I have been here once before.
And when I learn that a nearby community is rallying to deify an ancestor as a saint, and those very same people are also battling poverty, obesity, and industrial waste, I realize I will once again be caught in the suspension of disbelief.
And when I read about people getting arrested for smuggling “aliens” by speedboat and drugs by snowmobile, I realize that I am yet again living on an edge.
And when I finish teaching at 4 P.M. on Thursday and it occurs to me that—unless I stage an intervention—I will not see another human being until 10 A.M. the following Tuesday, I realize I am alone.
In other words, when I stare around this remote new world, I realize that I am home.
NOTES
1. With more than 16,000 members, New York has the fastest growing Amish population in the nation. In the North Country, many belong to the ultraconservative Swartzentruber community, which permits battery-operated flashlights but few other technologies. Though their buggies’ lack of mirrors, lights, and warning triangles occasionally causes disgruntlement, they otherwise enjoy a harmonious relationship with their “English” neighbors, exchanging services like hoof-trimming and carpentry for emergency car rides and telephone calls. In 2014, North Country Amish made international headlines when two sisters got abducted from a roadside vegetable stand. Worlds collided when police asked their family for photos to issue an alert. They had none to offer, due to their religious beliefs, but consented to allow a sketch artist to make an illustration of their twelve-year-old (albeit, not their seven-year-old). The sisters resurfaced a day later, and the suspects were arrested and charged with kidnapping.
12
The Trade
AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES OF CRASHING ON OTHER PEOPLE’S futons, I finally have a place suitable for hosting. My new job comes with a free and fully furnished Victorian house built in the 1850s. Before the moving van has even arrived, I welcome my first visitors: Uncle John and Tía Marie. They met while he was stationed at a naval base in South Texas fifty years ago and then absconded to the Bronx, where they made a mint in the auto springs business. They maintained their Tejano ties by flying back to Corpus Christi every Easter wearing cowboy boots beneath their New York Yankees jerseys and taking home a year’s supply of tortillas from H-E-B. When I ask around for entertainment options in the North Country, someone mentions a casino at the nearby Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne.1
My only reference for this community is the 2008 Oscar-nominated film it supposedly inspired, Frozen River. The story revolves around a white woman (Melissa Leo) struggling to raise two sons on her Dollar Store salary after her husband takes off with the money they’d been saving for a double-wide. Increasingly desperate, she partners with a Mohawk woman (Misty Upham2) who claims “There is no border here” as they shuttle undocumented immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States in the trunk of a car. A disaster strikes that has haunted me ever since.
Contrary to its bleak portrayal in the film,3 Akwesasne feels upbeat as we drive through it. The highway is dotted not with campers and trailers but with standard HUD models and a few stately colonials. Everywhere we look is another tax-free, full-service gas station or smoke shop, and shuffled in between are a library, a museum, a bookstore, tribal government offices, a Chinese Canadian restaurant, a sushi cafe, a Brass Horse Pizzeria, a Subway, a Papa John’s, a Jrecks Subs, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and its Canadian cousin, Tim Hortons. The casino is located on the far eastern side of the nation, marked by a water fountain and sculptures representing the Mohawks’ major clans: bears, turtles, wolves, and snipes. One traffic lane spills into an RV park; the second into a massive lot with cars bearing license plates from Quebec and Ontario; the third to valet. A Comfort Inn hovers above the premises as well as the skeleton of a luxury resort set to open next spring.
A Mohawk built like a linebacker ushers us inside the casino doors. The sensory assault is immediate: an arctic blast of air-conditioning followed by a sound wave of 1,800 ringing, pinging machines. Suddenly, it is nighttime. Suddenly, there is excitement—or at least a manufactured glee. As we moth toward the blinking lights, a herd of ladies amble by with walkers and canes. Their nails are polished, their hair is permed, their blouses are silky or sparkly. Husbands wearing hearing aids trail behind. Canadians, most likely. The North Country crowd is younger and clad in ragged jeans. They grip their beers and furrow their brows as they stake out their spots. Hardly any of the gamblers appear to be Mohawk, but at least half of the employees do, along with the bulk of the security guards. They wear black suit jackets and stern expressions—until they recognize someone in the crowd, whereupon they crack jokes like, “Does your sister know you’re here?” The Elvis impersonator seems to be Mohawk, too. Decked in a white pantsuit festooned with sequins, beads, and feathers, he croons love songs against a backdrop of ham sandwiches in the food court.
The last time I gambled, slot machines had manual levers and spat out coins with a satisfying clunk into a bucket. Here, financial transactions run through plastic cards that the gamblers fasten to lanyards worn around their wrists. When they stick their card into a slot, the machine takes on the appearance of a life support system, flashing colored light onto the gamblers’ faces as it drains them of their money via the lanyard on their wrist. The aesthetic is so unsettling, I follow Uncle John around instead. With his thick Bronx brogue and sailor tattoos, he commands people’s respect—especially in joints like this.
After exchanging a bundle of bills for a pile of chips, Uncle John swaggers over to a blackjack table where bets start at twenty-five dollars. The dealer is a white man with fast hands. Seated at first base is a blonde in a zebra-print blouse who signals for hits by scraping a card against the green felt table. Next up is a fiftyish man whose bleary eyes and rumpled clothing suggest a weeklong binge, and a younger man with well-gelled hair who bets obscene numbers of chips. Uncle John waits until the dealer’s shoe has emptied before stepping in. As the dealer prepares a new round, a Mohawk woman walks up and taps his shoulder. He bids us well with a nod of the head, and she takes his place as dealer.
“Oh no,” says the bleary-eyed man, rising from the table. “I’m not playing with her. No, no, I’m outta here.” He grabs his chips and splits.
What this means, I cannot say. If the dealer knows, she does not reveal it. No one reacts to his departure, for the game is under way. After tossing each player a card with a flick of the wrist, the dealer looks at me. Her eyes are startlingly green. Shaking my head, I back away from the table and watch as she deals herself an eight and a queen. Then a jack and a king. Then nine, six, and five. Within minutes, everyo
ne’s chips have shrunk considerably. After twenty, Uncle John’s are gone.
I feel bad for him, of course, and for the rest of the table, too. I feel bad for everyone here, blowing money they shouldn’t. Yet hours later, when we wend through the maze of slot machines toward the exit, past all the other white folks being intravenously bled of their resources, I can also see the perverse appeal of this spectacle, given the disastrous history of Native/white relations in this country. Once I learn how bitterly gambling has divided some Indian communities (particularly this one), this impression will change. This first glimpse, however, feels like witnessing karmic payback, which is inherently gratifying—even when it’s vicarious, even when it’s ancestral, even when it’s mean. Stepping through the cold-fog doors into the blinding sun, I flip through my mental calendar to figure out how fast I can return.
All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition Page 21