Saturday, June 18, 1932, we were depressed by the death of Congressman Eslick and angry about the defeat of the bonus legislation in the Senate. Most of the senators were rich cowards, men of money on the run, and they escaped through the back door to avoid the veterans on Capitol Hill.
Plucky marched our platoon in silence from the marble steps to Union Station. We cashed in our luxury return train tickets and bought cheaper seats on the first train to depart for New York City.
By Now declared that she would never leave the city without Treaty, and she would never ride alone along the railroad tracks and through the ruins of factories to be with her cousins. Yes, her reasons were absolutely the truth, and who would dare torture a gentle horse through the debris of dead factories. By Now was in love and would stay forever with William Hushka at the Federal Triangle, and in time he might decide to ride back with her to the White Earth Reservation.
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LOOK HOMEWARD
Aloysius outlined blue ravens at the march of the Bonus Army, and on the train that afternoon he turned the pages of the ledger book and told stories about the scenes. Blue ravens were sentinels on the drawbridge over the Anacostia River. Four ravens cast enormous shadows and feathery traces over the encampment on the National Mall, and hundreds of abstract blue ravens, the silhouettes curved and intertwined, were perched on the White House.
John Dos Passos carried a mishmash of blue ravens in an ambulance, beaks and wing feathers stretched out of the windows, and his name was painted on the hood. Blue ravens carried a streamer with the words “liberty trace” over the Federal Triangle. Plucky slowly turned the pages and laughed at the scene of the grotesque pear faced president, and blue ravens perched on the balcony over the veterans at the Gayety Burlesque Theater.
The Columbian eased out of Union Station in the early afternoon, swayed past rows of empty warehouses, and stopped at Baltimore and Philadelphia, and arrived four hours later in Jersey City, New Jersey. There were no porters in white coats, no tease or salutes on the gray platform, only the mingle and flow of passengers to the buses bound for Grand Central Station in New York City.
Aloysius used his finger to outline great raven wings on the dirty windows of the bus and then closed his eyes to avoid the fear of enclosure, and imagined the scent of a cedar grove as we entered the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River and emerged on Canal Street. The bus slowly lurched along Park Avenue and parked at the terminal on Forty-Second Street. We marched with the other passengers to the enormous main concourse of Grand Central Station.
New York City was a heavy shadow.
The Roman gods, Mercury, Minerva, and Hercules, posed in mythic fashion over the outside clock and great windows of the terminal, and the scenes of dressy travelers, men in summer suits and women in slinky silhouettes, were mostly the descendants of chancy commerce. We were distracted by the poses of fancy people, the four faces of the inside clocks, the echo of announcements, and the whispers and chase of trains, and the incredible constellations painted on the curved ceiling were spectacular.
The great cavern was decorated with curved windows and ornate sculpture. The tone of echoes was distinctive, a signature of poise and plenty, the grace of time, and surely the soughs and promises of certain estates. The scarce sound of laughter came from a lounge of decadence. There were no traces of hungry children, or even the slight shuffles and murmurs of poverty. The economic depression, the stock and big money swaps, started downtown, and the casualties were always convened at a distance, two, three, five blocks, and hundreds or thousands of miles away. The ordinary cost of train travel was a luxury of time unimagined on the dusty plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, or in the ruins of white pine on the White Earth Reservation.
Dummy Trout would create a fancy hand puppet for the concourse event, a money maid dressed in high heels with fishy eyes and a fur trade collar, and with a tease of mercy and jerky moves she would direct the diva mongrels to bay the song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” The tease of a puppet maid came to mind the entire time we were in the city.
Four native veterans of the war and the Bonus March were marooned in a cavern of wealth and travel covenants, and yet we were at ease in the splendor of the moment, and the natural slant of light that early evening. The scent of concocted perfume was a chancy cue that we had landed in a strange dream song, and the clouds waited to hear our voices in New York City.
Grand Central Station was encircled with skyscrapers, the most recent erection higher than the others, and lighted at the pricey point to warn pilots, and maybe a just marker for the migration of geese. The art deco Chrysler Building was a block away on Lexington Avenue. The heavy marble monument, decorated with gargoyle hood ornaments, was a prominent tease of civilization and poverty, a precious stone statue built with the excess of money from the sale of costly cars. My brother touched the curves and colors at the entrance, and he was tempted to cut a native totem, sandhill cranes, or the figure of a trickster, in the polished marble.
Plucky was our platoon leader that night in search of cheap food and a place to stay. We marched to nearby Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. There were hundreds of downcast citizens, and surely many veterans, in a breadline that circled the park and continued along the elevated train tracks. We had money to eat, and would not wait in line for a meal that others deserved more. There were no overnight campers, so we continued north on Fifth Avenue to Central Park. Seventeen tiny rickety shacks were erected in what we learned later was named Depression Street in Hoover Valley. The area, once the park reservoir, had been drained and was muddy. We met only three residents at the encampment, and they were worried about the police. Naturally, one of the shacks displayed a large Stars and Stripes. Nearby there was a small grocery store so we decided to make a supper with bread, cheese, and apples and return to Bryant Park.
The temperature was in the eighties, much too muggy to search for a place to stay so we slouched overnight on the wooden benches in Grand Central Station. Later that night we heard the sounds of resident animals, rats and mice, the heavy breath of the Depression, and late night travelers. Blue Raven twice explained to police officers that we were combat veterans of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.
Star Boy was our platoon leader that early morning to face the first glance of sunlight, to ease the enemy way of the Depression, and when we returned to the main concourse there were five spectacular streams of sunlight through the high curved windows. Plucky danced from one great stream of natural light to the other, a great show of bright faces in a cavern decorated with elaborate stone curves, sculpted oak leaves, and shadows of acorns out of reach.
Star Boy stayed in the streams of sunlight, then turned slowly and counted the constellations painted on the curved ceiling. “The stars are reversed,” he shouted and pointed to the scene of Biboon Ogichidaa, the winter warrior in a native totemic constellation that was otherwise named Orion the Hunter. “The warrior and three bright stars were painted in the position of Cancer.” We turned slowly under the ceiling, counted out the constellations, and could not correct the star trace turnaround. The artist was obviously mistaken about the scene, or he painted the godly zodiac of winter in the summer. Blue Raven turned in circles and together we shouted out our praise of the artist for the tricky zodiac dream song, a concourse winter in the summer.
I was the platoon leader that morning in search of a campsite. We set out for Washington Square Park to find other bonus veterans, and we were told that natives had once camped near New York University. Park Avenue was an easy walk to Union Square, but we turned by mistake with the stream of people down Fourth Avenue toward Cooper Union. We should have walked down Broadway.
Fourth Avenue turned out to be a more relevant turn than the rumors of overnight natives because we walked directly into a corner store of chance stories. The Biblo and Tannen Booksellers, located on the corner of Ninth Street, became our source of information about native authors, art galleries, and overnight camp
sites in the city. Magazines and books were for sale on counters outside for ten cents. Plucky searched for military and adventure stories, and found a ratty copy of Tarzan and the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For several years since the series started he had turned the pages of discarded newspapers to read the comic strips of Tarzan.
I searched the shelves and random stacks inside the store for books by natives and any familiar authors, Herman Melville, Jack London, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and found a copy of Moby-Dick and, of course, several copies of Three Soldiers. The books were stacked in the narrow aisles, and the scent of sweet tobacco and traces of mold wafted in the store, the pleasant signatures of a used bookstore.
Jack Biblo, one of the owners, surprised me with the declaration that, two years earlier, the novelist Sinclair Lewis had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Obviously he noticed the copy of Main Street in my hand, along with an early edition of Moby-Dick. I avoided the duty prize talk, and instead mocked the author because he had dismissed natives on the very first pages. Chippewas, Lewis wrote, once camped nearby, but they vanished with the flourmills and skyscrapers of Minneapolis. Carol Kennicott is the only one who vanished in the wearisome future of Gopher Prairie, not the Chippewas. There was no reason to open any novel with a dopey and romantic denigration of Chippewas.
The Nobel prizer probably did not know that native families were actually removed by the federal government to reservations. Chippewas were once translated and named in short histories, and ready to vanish in the second edition. “My native stories and dream songs are Anishinaabe, not Chippewa. So, you see we never vanished for any reason, and certainly never to please a leisure cruise novelist, rightly prized or not.” I waved my arms and declared, “Listen, four native veterans of the war just invaded your bookstore.”
“Where?” shouted Jack Biblo.
Plucky was outside and waved to the owner with a copy of Tarzan and the Apes. Star Boy, who was in the back of the store, shouted out his presence, came forward and saluted twice. He carried an original copy of The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-gah-bowh by George Copway, one of the first Anishinaabe authors published by Weed and Parsons in 1847. Aloysius walked into the scene and greeted the owner with a notice of an art show at An American Place, a gallery located at 509 Madison Avenue.
“Nothing much surprises me in the book business, but the four of you in one morning, now that is not believable,” he exclaimed. Biblo smiled, reached out to shake hands, and then teased, “So, are you buying books, camping in our store, or taking back Manhattan?” The tease was a perfect native moment, and naturally we returned the gesture with more teases.
“Yes, we want the store,” said Star Boy.
“But, wait,” declared Plucky, “you pay the rent every month and for that you can stay in the back and give me everything you have on Tarzan”
“We already live in the back,” said Biblo.
“Why, trouble with immigration?” teased Plucky.
“Indians don’t buy books, so we live here.”
“Tarzan then, that’s fair.”
“One dollar for Tarzan and the Apes,” declared Biblo.
“The sign said ten cents.”
“The price has changed,” teased Biblo.
“You can have the store back,” said Plucky.
“Right, then the apes are free.”
“So, what do we name our city?” asked Star Boy.
“Gopher Prairie,” said Biblo.
“White Earth on the Hudson,” said Blue Raven.
A few minutes later Biblo’s partner came out of the back room with a cup of coffee. “Jack Tannen,” he said, and that started a cascade of teases about the two Jacks. One Jack is never enough to run a bookstore.
“We both live in the back room,” said Jack Tannen. “So, who wants a cup of coffee?” Four hands were raised, and we were directed to the back room secrets. There were two wooden chairs, one stool, and three unused cups, so my brother shared his coffee. The Jacks in turn asked us about the Depression on the reservation, the heartless vote of the Senate against the cash bonus for war veterans, and we told them about modern art and our move to Paris.
“Why Paris?” asked Biblo.
“Art, and memories of the war,” said Blue Raven.
“New York is loaded with stories about the war, too much war chatter, and there are great modern artists, not Picasso or Matisse, but great painters, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe,” said Jack Tannen.
Jack Biblo mentioned that An American Place was a gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and advocate of art, and his exhibitions included great modern paintings by Dove and O’Keeffe. “Listen to me, you should visit the gallery, and see for yourself the new abstract art, and more, Stieglitz is a brilliant photographer.”
I told several stories about our service in the infantry, the death in combat of our cousin Ignatius Vizenor, and the great painters we met, Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Marie Vassilieff, and Moïse Kisling. The Jacks held back a natural tease of my casual boasts, so it was easy to continue with more about breakthrough authors, the great and subversive James Joyce, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Gide, Samuel Beckett, and Ezra Pound. Hard to believe that we met so many original artists and authors at Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore owned by Sylvia Beach in Paris. My brother became a distinctive artist there and his abstract blue ravens were exhibited in the Galerie Crémieux in Paris, and the same gallery published Le Retour à la France: Histoires de Guerre, my first collection of war stories.
“You didn’t mention Marcel Proust,” said Tannen.
“We never met him,” said Blue Raven.
“Good thing, because he’s dead, but not forgotten,” said Tannen. “You should read Swann’s Way, the first part of his huge Remembrance of Things Past.”
“Why, what’s the story?” said Blue Raven.
I was silent and not obliged to reveal my ignorance of Marcel Proust. Tannen handed me a copy of Swann’s Way and told me the translation was very good, but to ignore the subtitle because some readers were not pleased with the weight only on the past. I searched the first chapter of the novel, a translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, for one or more memorable quotations.
“Great Paris gossip, gossip theory, really, the rich and creamy stories on the way to the First World War, and not a word about the noble Chippewas,” said Tannen.
Biblo gestured for more stories, but then he turned away when a customer entered the store. He watched the customer for a minute, and then demanded more gossip theory about Paris.
“Do you want me to watch the desk?” asked Plucky.
“No need, there are more book lookers than book buyers, and there is a certain gesture and casual manner that reveals the browsers.”
I read out loud a paragraph from Swann’s Way about the circle of time, the remembrance of time. “When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequences of the years, the order of the heavenly host.”
“Should have written about natives,” said Plucky.
Tannen was so touched by my selection of the novel and the literary trace of connections in his own experiences, the hours and years in the bookstore, that he gave me the copy of Swann’s Way.
We talked more about the gossip theory of Proust, and his association with so many notable writers and painters, but Biblo turned the conversation back to the modern art in New York City.
Arthur Dove was one of the great modern painters in the world, we were told that morning in the back room. “Go see his abstracts, the shapes and nature of colors, and you’ll want to become a painter,” said Jack Biblo.
Blue Raven did not directly respond to the painterly tease, but instead reached into his shoulder pouch and pulled out the Niinag Trickster to meet the two book Jacks.
“I am the brother of an artist, an erect abstract painter,” said the hand puppet. The puppet head jerked from side to side, and then he stared, one b
y one, at the two booksellers. Biblo raised both hands and surrendered to the stares and teases. At that moment, the trickster puppet wagged his wooden penis three times. Everyone laughed, but the big laugh, the roar, was by Jack Biblo. “Manhattan is yours, take over the store, and give me a one way ticket to a reservation with puppets.”
Biblo waited on a customer, but she wanted to sell not buy books. He lowered his head in silence, and bought two recently published books, The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, for twenty cents. We frowned, and he exclaimed, “What, great books are turned over every day in the Great Depression.”
Biblo was distracted with the woman who sold the new books because, he explained, she comes in every other week with two or more books. She either buys new books to read or she steals them from other bookstores. “She wears very smart clothes, hard to know by clothes because sometimes even poor people dress for better weather.”
Biblo handed me a copy of Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, a new book he bought from the same woman a few weeks earlier, and told me that Sinclair Lewis praised the novel. “Read this novel, much more weighty and better written than Main Street, especially if you like big rumors and the regrets of a southern family.”
I read out loud the first sentence from the epigraph of Look Homeward, Angel, “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And all the forgotten faces,” and continued with the end of the first sentence of the novel, “over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.”
“My brother must have that novel,” said Aloysius.
“No, not for fifty cents?”
“Five times that new,” said Biblo.
Native Tributes Page 8