The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  It’s easy to assign a psychosomatic label to Teresa. The caveat is that her symptoms caused her spirit to rejoice. She exceeded Shonnie in equanimity to pain. She not only worked her discomforts into her normal plan of bodily mortification, but also applied them to her unscheduled spiritual transports, the helpless paralysis and pricks delivered by God. What made her miserable was the soul’s torment, its moments of what she called dryness or doubt, and not her body’s torments. Death was her desire. During her raptures Teresa felt her body deliciously close to death. When, exhausted and bleeding internally, she truly came to the end, she lingered by the exit and orchestrated her departure with flourishes. “Let me suffer or let me die” remains her most famous saying.

  The Spanish Catholic disgust or disillusionment with the human body can be traced to Saint Paul, who urged Christians to dispense with the deeds of the flesh and to mortify the flesh in order to live. But such is the hold of superstition, down in the trenches of belief, that after Teresa’s passing, parts of her body were chopped into holy relics and distributed to the rich and powerful. Physical pieces of Teresa held sway in Spain centuries after her soul had left.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses believe they will retain their bodies forever. The body is the dominant entity when they contemplate the afterlife. Although from birth the body is beset with flaws and disease, the believer will get it back shiny and restored in the Earthly Paradise to come. More than other Christians, the Witnesses insist on a physical resurrection. The body’s resurrection—theirs but probably not yours—will take place after the Apocalypse. It’s all laid out in the Bible, if you can read the Bible properly.

  Shonnie did not yearn to die. Shot through the breast, her treatments come to naught, she was scared as she neared the end. But all her visitors attest to her composure when they would find her sitting up in bed, her long hair brushed and her nail polish without a chip. She went out in style and was never tempted, as Job was by his wife, to curse God and die.

  We are imperfect, said her sister, Iona. It’s not normal to be sick and to die. At times she was freaking out, but she never was completely lost. She made the best of it. We talked about it a lot. It’s human imperfection, her fear. Her attitude was, I am afraid but Jehovah is going to fix it. We grew up living the way Jehovah wants us to. She was not helpless.

  Sepharad—what became of it? O the lamentation as the Sephardim were banished and drifted away from Iberia. Some went north to Amsterdam, some west to Mexico, some even into Muslim Palestine. It was in Palestine that a rabbi named Isaac Luria, a contemporary of Teresa’s, helped to shape the Kabbalistic school of Judaism. According to the mystical Kabbalah, the Jewish soul has all sorts of options independent of the body.

  In the Kabbalah there is a concept called ibbur, which describes one righteous soul possessing another. Ibbur means impregnation or incubation. It is a positive thing, not like being taken over by Satan. For a while, two linked souls might dwell in a single body, Teresa tending to Shonnie.

  Not steeling the young woman for death, necessarily, but entering her interior castle long before then and comforting her after the little girl was sexually molested by an uncle. The chink in her castle that Shonnie never talked about until she married.

  Lucubration, look the night is breaking. . . . The coyotes that were crying have stopped their crying. It’s dawn in San Luis, the hub of Culebra.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  THE LOST TRIBE

  Marianne Medina seemed to grow closer to Earth as she aged. Phlegmatic where she once had been fiery, she moved through rooms with barely a rustle. The sense of quiet and moderation about Marianne was distinct from the occasional heaviness or sadness she felt over the people she had lost. The oval line about her face rounded, and she went gray at the temples. Marianne Medina was a strong woman, a strong woman affected by gravity.

  In early 2007, she and her husband, Joseph, were getting ready to turn over their house in Culebra to Iona, their remaining daughter. Iona and her husband would move in, and Joseph and Marianne, generous parents, would live in a new building that Joseph was constructing behind the restaurant. The move wasn’t far, just down the road. Although Marianne had set no firm date for leaving, she was filling boxes in her living room and taking pictures down from the walls. She apologized for the mild disarray of the house.

  Shonnie’s old room, at the top of the stairs, hadn’t been touched. The room had not changed since Shonnie had vacated it fifteen years earlier, following her wedding. (Shonnie did come home several times in 1998 when she was ill.) Thanks to a skylight, the ambience in the small room was cheerful. There was a twin bed with a quilt; a bureau; a tidy closet. Prints with Indian themes hung on the wall. Marianne’s gaze moved about the room palpating for memories, which then issued as stories. How Shonnie helped to make the wedding dress. How she liked to ride Hot Smoke in the pasture and up onto la sierra. Her modeling. How she earned Pioneer status going door-to-door.

  Her full name was Shonnie Christine Medina, Marianne said. The spelling was supposed to be Shon-i, that was the Indian spelling we wanted, but it came out Shonnie on the birth certificate. Marianne shrugged slightly, as if to indicate that this sort of thing commonly happened to native people and also that her daughter didn’t care. There was no special reason for Christine, she added. It just kind of goes with Shonnie.

  Opening a bureau drawer, Marianne took out a high school yearbook, some newspaper clippings, and a packet of old photos and spread them on the bed. By now she was smiling and tickled in spite of herself, the sparkle of her scintillating daughter having rubbed off on her, the way that someone else’s sequins can’t help but make you smile. That Shonnie—she was so vain, Marianne said. She wouldn’t walk out the door if she had one pimple on her face. She thought she had an acne problem—she didn’t. Her daughters’ remedy for pimples was to dry them out with dabs of toothpaste, though no one except Marianne and Iona ever saw Shonnie Medina with toothpaste on her face. Not the pizza delivery boys in Alamosa, who would notice when an order was phoned in from her house. Some of them would drive out of their way, into another guy’s territory, just to get a look at Shonnie when she opened the door.

  Shonnie was always emotional, Marianne went on rapidly. She’d be happy—too happy—but then a down day would follow. Marianne blamed Shonnie’s mood swings on her childhood secret of having been molested. The story eventually came out. A teenage uncle, one of Joseph’s brothers, had been an occasional babysitter. It didn’t involve penetration, Marianne said, but it was contact and it happened more than once. Marianne was surprised because, as she put it, My family is harsh that way but Joe’s is not. Shy and sly, Marianne said of her brother-in-law, a bitter edge to her voice. He traumatized her. Shonnie was sensitive and holding all this stuff in.

  It could explain her presentiment about death, her mother thought. If you get too happy, Shonnie had warned, things will happen to you. That was her attitude, Marianne said. When I told her once that she looked like her grandmother, Shonnie said, That means I’ll die young.

  Your mother?

  My mother. You know how they are—she ignored a uterine problem. She died of uterine cancer when she was fifty-three. She treated herself with herbs. Yet Marianne Medina practiced natural medicine too. When her kids had coughs or ear infections, she would take them to a médica, a female folk healer, in Taos rather than to a doctor for antibiotics. Marianne was even tougher about her own care, on one occasion yanking out a bad tooth with a pair of pliers.

  The photographs that Marianne kept in Shonnie’s drawer were taken in the summer of 1997. George Casias, a professional photographer and family friend, had known Shonnie since she was a girl. He had photographed her wedding. When he would ask her to pose, she would always be willing. This time George wanted to try out a new brand of Kodak film. With her anniversary coming up, Shonnie hoped to surprise Michael with some nice shots. She
must also have welcomed the distraction from the tumor in her breast, which had been diagnosed about that time.

  Shonnie dressed up as an Apache Indian. She wrapped herself in a serape, a full-body garment, striped and colorful. She pinned a plumed ornament, called a scalp tie, to her long, black hair, and brushed her hair over to one side of her face. For jewelry she wore a heavy white necklace, triple-stranded and clasped with a medallion of beaten silver. In the pictures Shonnie is kneeling, her arms and legs folded inside the serape, while her back rests against the furrowed bark of a large cottonwood tree. Two gray-and-white puppies, which look to be huskies, nestle by the trunk. Having these dogs in the photos added a fine native touch, because until the Apaches obtained horses from the Spaniards, they would use dogs to move their possessions over the prairie. The Indian travois, a simple rig of lashed-together poles, was dragged by dogs. The people walked; only if she were very sick would a person go by travois. The vertical stripes of the serape, the deep grooves of the cottonwood tree, the pricked-up ears of the puppies are in sharp focus, but for some reason, maybe because loose strands of hair are blowing in front of her eyes, Shonnie’s features seem soft, and her expression seems distant, as if she were looking through the lens at a point far away.

  Still, it was dressing up; Shonnie didn’t have any investment in being an Indian except at this moment. She was a young woman having her picture taken, one who almost always liked having her picture taken. Marianne Medina definitely did not like to be photographed, as the family’s video and photo albums make clear. It is comical to watch Marianne slide out of the frame or scurry behind her daughters when the camera attempts to catch her. I just don’t like how I look, she said, in spite of having worked for a time as a department-store model in Denver. But more than that, she evinced the deep-seated unease that native people have about photography, the intuition that each shutter-snap steals a portion of their selves. It takes away your spirit, she recalled her father saying.

  Marianne’s go-to identity, herself in her heart, was Native American. Her mother, Rose, was a Pueblo Indian. Rose’s family came from Picuris Pueblo, Marianne said, Picuris and Taos representing the northernmost villages of New Mexico’s Pueblo tribes. Juan Quintana, Marianne’s father, was Jicarilla [hic-a-REH-a] Apache. But both of her parents also had Spanish blood. Since most of the Indians of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado had Hispano names and ancestry, it was up to them to decide which part of their heritage to emphasize. Juan Quintana thought of himself as an American Indian, she said. His parents and grandparents had lived on the Jicarilla reservation, west of the Valley. He had prominent gray eyes. He was a well-built Jicarilla Apache, Marianne remembered. He was genízaro—do you know what that means? It means we used to be slaves.

  Marianne Quintana grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Alamosa, then and now the Anglo center of the San Luis Valley. Alamosa is about fifty miles from Culebra, on the Rio Grande River, west of Mount Blanca. When she was a schoolgirl, her ill-defined race was used against her. They called me Mexican . . . or Chinese, she said. The teachers, who were white, made kids like me wear gloves when it was our turn to give out snacks to the class. Get your greasy hair off the desk, they said. We had to sit in the back of the classroom. We even had separate chalkboards and erasers.

  In her teens Marianne rebelled. I called a teacher white trash once after she called me Mexican, and she slapped me. In high school I was in AIM [the American Indian Movement] and I was also in the Chicano movement. I wore combat boots and fatigues all the time. I was violent and aggressive. I broke a girl’s eye once, and another time I hung a girl on a telephone pole. You know the rungs they use to climb telephone poles? I pushed her up against the telephone pole and her coat got hooked up on the rung. All that anger came from what happened to my dad. Because they stripped him of his culture.

  What would have become of Marianne, a great-looking package of trouble, if she hadn’t met Joseph Medina? He was a scrapper too, but he was secure in his Hispano identity, a proud son of Culebra. More important, race never was an issue with him. One night, while playing with his band at a high school dance in Alamosa, he looked down from the stage and saw her. So Joseph married Marianne when she was seventeen and treated her soothingly, like a high-strung pony. For years she did not get over her hostility to whites and her defensiveness about being an Indian. Indita, her father-in-law would hiss at her when he got annoyed. Becoming a Jehovah’s Witness helped, but even after becoming a Witness she would get in your face if you crossed her. Her calming had mainly to do with time and inertia. As the cares of her life pulled her closer to Earth, the earth pruned away feelings that were unnecessary.

  Her oldest daughter, fiery in her own way, could put on an Indian identity much more easily than Marianne was able to let go of hers. Shonnie mixed-and-matched—she had the plasticity of a sunflower. She was the Hispano once-removed. She was the middle-class spouse skiing with her Anglo husband, the ardent and prim Jehovah’s Witness, the beauty queen and photo model, the cowgirl on her horse, the breast-cancer patient bucking the medical system. For fun, Shonnie was an Apache. But Marianne, even in her lightest moments, did not stray far from her centripetal self.

  One last thing, Marianne Medina loved to dance. Pivoting from her solid center, she would spin her grinning husband around the floor. You could take a picture of Marianne when she was dancing and she wouldn’t mind. She danced with Shonnie and Iona when the girls were growing up; she organized a dance troupe consisting of her children and four of their friends. Brightly turned out in hand-sewn dresses, the group performed at weddings, doing the flamenco, mariposa, and other folklorico steps, six little ladies in a nervous line on the shiny floor. Marianne had them change their dresses and ruffled petticoats in the middle of the set. The last time you see Shonnie on videotape, the young wife and her mother are dancing the cumbia together, their hands not touching and their steps synchronized. They’re as dreamy-eyed as two lovers, while Michael slouches against a wall.

  Joy in dancing might spring from the Spanish part of their legacy, overriding the stolid Native American component. No, that’s lazy thinking. Stolid is a racial stereotype, so too the portrait of the poker-faced Indian, as if their DNA contained a gene for impassiveness. Indians were said by white people to be fatalistic. This quality of theirs was a defense mechanism, a cultural artifact, and technically not even a Native American artifact. It was a trait that Europeans had induced in the other race and mistook for biology.

  Indians lived by what might be called the rule of natural contingency. What was going to happen? It depends. See that rock on the horizon? It could embody a benevolent ancestor, or a witch, or it could conceal an all-too-real enemy who had a knife. The native constantly had to adapt himself to changes in his circumstances. To the Indian, augury was everywhere and the environment was all. Having little control over things, he floated on the swift currents of the world, constantly adjusting his course lest he be dashed and broken on the rocks. Does that make for “passivity” or “fatalism”? No outcome was absolute or essential. No authority could overcome the influence of the landscape or the sway of Earth. In order to survive, every village, every encampment, every campfire installed its own theocracy.

  Their fatalism, by which is meant the cliché of the fatalistic Indian, is analogous to the mendelian view of genetics. The mendelian model (from Mendel) oversimplifies genetics by overemphasizing the power of the single gene. The contingent, shape-shifting universe of the Indian was truer to the world of modern genomics, where each person’s DNA and environment interacted to form traits unique to that person. In that sense Shonnie was a more natural, more resilient Indian than Marianne because Shonnie wasn’t hung up on her identity. Shonnie adapted. At the same time she carried a big-time mendelian gene.

  I’m light-skinned, Marianne was saying. I am not a Ute [Ute Indians were another important people of San Luis Valley] because Ute means dark. But she
allowed that her pale, almost porcelain coloring might stem from a rival source, a Chinese cook who had worked with her mother. The Indian man Marianne regarded as her father, Juan Quintana, who helped to raise her and provided her name, had never married her mother. Was my biological father Chinese? she wondered, becoming animated again. Yes, maybe. His name was Pee Wee Wong. I remember he gave me a Chinese doll. Of her mother’s dozen children, Marianne was the only one whose paternity was in doubt.

  Was she aware that DNA analysis could answer her question? Harry Ostrer happened to have a contact at 23andMe, a gene-testing company, and he arranged for Marianne to get a free test kit. If she would swab cells from the inside of her cheek and send in the sample, the company would tell her if her DNA contained the genetic markers of Asians (i.e., Pee Wee Wong). But as of this writing Marianne hasn’t wanted to know more about her biological father. Apparently she wants to maintain the identity she has now.

  After you have approached the San Luis Valley a few times, whether through the snowy ranges on the north, east, or west, or from the broad Taos Plateau to the south, you appreciate the centrality of Mount Blanca. The mountain is a psychological force in the Valley even more than a physical anchor. Nothing happens in Culebra that Blanca doesn’t supervise.

  What the Navajo Indians called White Shell Mountain marked the eastern edge of their homeland. As long as they could see Blanca, they felt secure. The Navajo and other roaming Indian people believed that the mountain stood at the doorway to the subterranean spirit world. As noted, Blanca served as the midwife for the emergence of the first human beings.

  Geologists, who are a recent tribe of human beings, say that the earth cracked and pulled apart here, and that the mountain and the rest of the Sangre de Cristos heaved up along the faults. A long fissure or rift running south from Blanca became the birth canal of New Mexico because it housed the Rio Grande River, against whose flow Europeans forged their way north, bearing their DNA to the Indians.