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Hennepin Avenue was already famous for the great theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Every building, every hotel was impressive as we walked up Hennepin Avenue from Gateway Park past the Bijou Theater and the Pence Opera House that had been converted to a rooming house. We might have stayed there, but our uncle insisted that we stay at the more secure Waverly Hotel on Harmon Place near the Minneapolis Public Library.
Napa Valley Wine Company, located in the next block, had sold wine “continuously for the last twenty years.” We were too young to enter the establishment, so we read the advertisements in the window and pretended to be wine enthusiasts. “Our house is the only one in the wine and liquor line in the city catering to the family trade, which has no bar.”
Father Aloysius used sacramental wine at services in Saint Benedict’s Mission Church. Luckily one of our older cousins was an altar boy. He was obliged to share the taste of red church wine from the Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa Valley, California. We were rather conceited about the sacramental wine that was bottled in our family name. Naturally we used that coincidence, the relations of a surname wine, to our advantage when we first arrived as infantry soldiers in France.
Napa Valley Wine could be ordered by telephone, and that was very modern at the time. We knew about telephones because our relatives had established the first system in Callaway on the White Earth Reservation. Telephones were cosmopolitan at the time, but not the party line conversations. Simon Michelet, the contentious federal agent, ordered reservation telephone lines to the government schools in Mahnomen, Beaulieu, and Porterville. The Napa Valley Wine advertisement explained, “Ladies can visit our establishment as unconcernedly as any dry goods store.”
Early the next morning we visited the three great dry goods stores on nearby Nicollet Avenue. Aloysius was inspired by the fortune and display of clothing in the stores, the great bay windows, and naturally he painted blue ravens in every display window of Dayton’s Dry Goods Company, Donaldson’s Glass Block, and down a few blocks at Powers Mercantile Company. We did not have enough money to buy anything, not even a paper napkin or a handkerchief, but we tried on shirts, coats, hats, and my brother painted me as a grandee in an enormous raincoat. The black sleeves became great blue wings that reached over the counters. The blonde clerk waved her hands and told us to leave, but when she saw the painting by my brother she was much more friendly. Aloysius painted the woman in a fedora and a brim of blue raven feathers over a train of light blue hair.
Aloysius paused at his reflection in every window.
The West Hotel was a great cruise liner afloat on a sea of shiny cobblestones, and surrounded by new theater buildings on Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street. The Masonic Temple, a secret mountain of sandstone with decorative carved emblems, was only a block away. As the streetcars turned the corner in front of the hotel the trolley wheels sparked, a magical ritual at the foyer of the hotel.
The doorman was courteous, raised his hand and inquired about our business in the hotel. We were young, native, and not properly dressed for the entrance, but we were not skanky. Aloysius told the doorman that our uncle was the publisher of a newspaper, and then announced that we were there to paint blue ravens.
What is the name of the newspaper?
The Tomahawk.
Surely not a newspaper?
Yes, and with international news.
How the world changes.
We only want to see the hotel lobby.
The West Hotel lobby was luxurious and lighted by an atrium. The blue settees inspired my brother to paint blue ravens in every cushy seat, claws crossed as moneyed gentlemen, and disheveled wing feathers spread wide over the padded backs and arms, and across the marble floor of the huge lobby.
Rich ravens in shiny blue shoes.
Mark Twain, the great writer, had stayed at the West Hotel on July 23, 1895, in the same year that we were born on the White Earth Reservation. In a leather-bound book near the registration counter we discovered photographs and news stories about his visit to Saint Paul, Duluth, and Minneapolis.
The Minneapolis Journal reported that he suffered from a carbuncle on his leg, and had declined the invitations of admirers to visit the Minneapolis Public Library and Minnehaha Falls. “To the casual observer, as he lay there, running his fingers through his long, curly locks, now almost gray, he was anything but a humorist. On the contrary, he appeared to be a gentleman of great gravity, a statesman or a man of vast business interests. The dark blue eyes are as clear as crystal and the keenest glances shoot from them whenever he speaks.” Twain entertained an enthusiastic audience for ninety minutes that night at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Mark Twain left traces of his marvelous irony in the grand lobby of the West Hotel, and surely he would have told memorable stories about native totems and blue ravens from the White Earth Reservation.
Aloysius painted blue ravens on streetcars, a conductor with blue wings, blue ravens in dance moves on the cobblestones in a rainstorm, and dark blue eyes reflected in the bay windows of the West Hotel.
Hennepin Avenue was crowded with streetcars, motor cars, and horse-drawn wagons and carriages. The sounds were strange, unnatural, strained machines, and engines so loud we could barely hear the most familiar sound of the steady clop clop clop of horses on the cobblestones. We walked past great stone buildings, theaters, and restaurants, on our way to the Waverly Hotel.
The Orpheum Theatre was a majestic dominion of murmurs, theatrical recitations, ironic pronouncements, acrobatics, the lively tease of vaudeville, and the memorable voices of great lectures and plays. The theater that late afternoon was empty but not lonely. No one was at the ticket window so we entered the great auditorium without a ticket or a story. Everywhere we could hear the rich and evocative voices of actors in the balconies, the secrets, shouts and moans in the cluttered dressing rooms backstage.
Aloysius declared the theater his second home of visions and fantasy. He selected a seat in the front row of a side balcony and painted blue ravens in a stage play. The ravens of the theater turned a wing and raised their beaks to the audience. The only real play we had ever seen was the shortened government-school production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
The Waverly Hotel rented rooms by the week, but the manager was a friend of our uncle so we paid only five dollars for two nights. “Electric lights, bath, and telephone” were advertised in theater programs and newspapers. The hotel was located near the public library.
We walked past several restaurants on the way to the hotel and later read the advertisements, “Superb Cuisine at Café Brunswick,” and “Schiek’s Café Restaurant,” but the menus were too expensive and ritzy. So, we ate meat, potatoes, and corn at a nearby cafeteria for students. That first night we lingered in the tiny lobby of the hotel and found a program of events scheduled earlier in the summer at the Orpheum Theatre. Aloysius imagined the grand performances from our special seats in a side balcony. The program listed matinee admission to the gallery for fifteen cents. We were two months too late for the performances.
“Scotch Thistle,” a musical program directed by Theodore Martin, was advertised in the May 1909 program of the Orpheum Circuit of Theatres. Miss Charlotte Parry and Company presented “The Comstock Mystery” that same month.
“Master Laddie Cliff,” featured in another program, was “England’s famous little Comedian and Grotesque Dancer.” Another program announced the “First American Tour of Three Sisters Athletas, Direct from New York Hippodrome.” The sisters were “Extraordinary Lady Gymnasts.” “The Kinodrome New and Interesting Motion Pictures” reported that the pictures were about a “Ring Leader” and a “Jealous Hubby.”
Naturally, we were excited to read the programs and would have attended every matinee performance. We were more interested in the Lady Gymnasts than the Kinodrome. The movies we saw on the reservation were trivial and flimsy. The stories in the movies were monotonous, more about agents than the ice women or
the dance of the plovers.
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CARNEGIE TOTEMS
— — — — — — — 1909 — — — — — — —
The Minneapolis Public Library was only ten years old that summer of our migration, a massive stone building with magnificent curved bay windows. The turrets on two corners resembled a baronial river castle, but the books inside were never the reserved property of the nobility.
Andrew Carnegie, the wealthy industrialist and passionate philanthropist, donated more than sixty million dollars to build public libraries, and more to establish schools and universities around the country. A slight portion of his great treasure acquired from the steel industry and other investments was used to construct the Minneapolis Public Library.
Carnegie was a master of steel, stone, railroads, and the great bloom of libraries. More than two thousand libraries were built in his name, but he would not give a dime to build even a bookrack on the White Earth Reservation, our uncle explained, because the federal agents were not reliable and the government would not promise to support the future of books for natives.
Carnegie was a new totem of literacy and sovereignty. The libraries he created were the heart and haven of our native liberty. No federal agents established libraries on reservations, and not many robber barons constructed libraries and universities.
Aloysius painted a huge blue raven, our great new totem of honor and adventure, in one of the turret bay windows of the library. The beak of the raven almost touched the sidewalk and stairs near the entrance. My brother never painted humans, but some of his great ravens traced a sense of character, a cue of human memory. Carnegie was portrayed as a stately blue raven with a bushy mane and great beak in the turret windows.
We could not believe that the books were stacked on open shelves and available to anyone. We walked slowly down the aisles of high cases and touched the books by colors, first the blues, of course, and then the red
and black books. In that curious hush and silence of the library the books were a native sense of presence, our presence, and the spirits of the books were revived by our casual touch. Every book waited in silence to become a totem, a voice, and a new story.
The books waited in silence, waited for readers, and waited for a chance to be carried out of the library. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper was tilted to the side. The novel was illustrated by Frank T. Merrill, and in one picture a couple with fair skin watched a native wrestle with a bear. The couple was dressed for a dance, and the native wore leather, fringed at the seams, and three feathers on his head. The book waited to be recovered by a reader, but not by me or by my brother. That novel was introduced by our teachers at the government school, along with that nasty poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but we were never obliged to remember the loopy cultural fantasies of literary explorers. The elaborate frontier of The Last of the Mohicans was a snake oil story.
Augustus teased the reservation native police with the name Chingachgook, and he sometimes used the name Natty Bumppo, both characters in The Last of the Mohicans, in stories about the missionaries and federal agents. So, we had a tricky sense of the characters in the novel by the time our teachers wrote the names on the chalkboard.
Aloysius touched The Call of the Wild by Jack London.
Augustus celebrated our thirteenth birthday with two new books. Our uncle always celebrated our birthdays with books, first picture stories and then literature. The new books were wrapped in the current edition of the Tomahawk. He gave me a copy of The Call of the Wild, and Aloysius received a copy of White Fang. Augustus knew we were inspired by native totems and animal stories, and he knew we would talk about these scenes in the novels. My uncle was a teaser, and he teased and coaxed me to become a creative writer, to create stories of native liberty, and a few years later gave me a copy of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.
Jack London was a great writer but he was mistaken about dogs and natives. Buck was a natural healer and would never return to the wolves, never in a native story. London was not aware that wolves were native totems, and not the wild enemy.
London made White Fang more human and never understood the native stories of animal healers. The real world of nature that we experienced was always chancy, and sometimes even dangerous, of course, the weather can be dangerous, but not evil and not as violent as the human world. London worried about the animals he had created in an unnatural way, and he might have sent them to some church. The notion of redemption was monotheistic, and that was not natural or native. London was a political adventurist in fiction and never understood native stories, animal totems, or the dream songs of native liberty.
Jack London would not survive on the reservation.
The card catalogue listed every book in the library. Aloysius looked through the cards in the drawer for his name and found a book about Aloysius Bertrand, a French symbolist poet, and Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. Beaulieu was listed many times, a winery in California, and as a reference to a place in France, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a commune near Nice and Monaco.
The Manabozho Curiosa, that ancient Benedictine manuscript about monks, sex, and animals was not listed in the card catalogue. Naturally, we avoided the word “sex” when we asked the librarian about the Manabozho Curiosa. She had never heard of the manuscript but thought a copy might be found in the Rare Book collection at the University of Minnesota Library.
Aloysius opened several art books on a huge oak reference table and together we brushed the images with our fingers, touched the painted bodies of soldiers, women poised near windows in soft natural light, darker scenes of animals and hunters, and distorted images of humans and houses. Most of the old images portrayed a civilization of pathetic poses and contrition, and the great shadows and slants of divine light by master painters.
The ancient blues were muted.
Yes, the bright flowers, pristine fruit on a table, and exotic birds, seemed at the time to be more authentic than our actual memories and experience of the natural world. The reds, yellows, and greens were bright, the blues faint. The images of exotic birds were realistic studies, an obsession of godly perfection in bright plumage. The painted birds were steady pictures, similar to the portraits of warriors and politicians.
The best of nature, and our sense of nature, was forever in motion by the favor of the seasons. The overnight bruises, creases, crucial flaws caused by the weather, and every wave, ruffle, gesture, and flight were wholesome. The ordinary teases, blush, and blemish of character, were a natural presence, and yet the birds, painted flowers, and fruit that we touched in the giant art books were bright, perfect, ironic, and unsavory.
Ravens would never peck at a pastel peach.
Aloysius slowly backed away from the reference table, looked around the library, and then he painted three blue ravens with massive claws over the modern art images in the books. The wings of the ravens were painted wide and shrouded the table and chairs with feathers.
A young librarian waved a finger and cautioned us not to touch the books. She praised the blue ravens that my brother had painted, and then explained that painting was not permitted in the library. Yes, we pretended to understand the unstated caution, that only the bookable and bankable arts were favored and secured, not the original blue ravens and native totems.
Aloysius painted with two soft brushes and a thick, blunt cedar stick that was roughened on the end. One brush was round, soft, and pointed. The other was a wide watercolor shadow brush. His saliva, and sometimes mine, was used to moisten the blue paste.
Aloysius had made his own paintbrushes. He carved the wooden handles from birch, molded the ferrule sleeve from copper, and the tufts were bundles of squirrel hair for several of his brushes. He used sable hair for the brushes with a fine point.
The new images were much richer and the hues of blue more evocative on the professional art paper. The blue ravens on the newsprint were strong, abstract, and the lines and shadows were in natural motion, neve
r distinct as portraiture, but the ravens were enlivened on the new paper. My brother had created a book of paintings on our first visit to the city.
My first creative impressions were short descriptive scenes, only a few words, more precise than abstract. Every spontaneous scene was more obvious in my memory than in my written words. My original scenes were composed in short distinct sentences, only single images or glimpses of the many scenes in my memory. My words seemed to contain a natural vision of motion, but the actual practices of a writer were not the same as a painter.
My heart is a red raven and rises on the wind.
The eyes of nature are in my stories.
Cars move with great explosions.
Curved windows bend our smiles.
Winter is an abstract scene in the autumn.
The ice woman is natural reason.
City men strut in black coats and tight shoes.
Horses wait for motor cars to pass.
Books are silent stories.
White pine lives in memory.
History is overgrown and chokes the trees.
The sound of a pencil on paper is similar to the sound of a watercolor brush but the words create scenes in the head not the native eye. My written words came together with painted blue ravens in the heart, the intuitive eye, and memory.
Aloysius continued to paint blue ravens in the library reference room. My brother spit in the blue paste and painted grotesque beaks that carried away the pastel fruit, the shadows of librarians at the window, blue soldiers, and the art books.
Gratia Alta Countryman, Head of the Minneapolis Public Library, was summoned to the reference room because my brother would not stop painting. She watched him move the thick brush over the paper, and then she leaned closer as he brushed the blue raven beaks with the softened cedar stick.
Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Page 5