“The natural world of totems was never black,” she declared when we were students at the government school, “sometimes cloudy, never black,” but rather vibrant with the curative colors and hues of wild disguises. Yes, she used the same words to honor the actual natural disguises of birds, animals, and insects with poses of color and tricky masks. We rarely shared the notions of the protection, deception, and disguises of color with strangers. Margaret ordered us to wear blue ribbons on our infantry uniforms in the war, and would surely have rushed to brighten with color and ribbons the black and cloudy poses of people on the Lower East Side.
Plucky led our mattress mission on several market streets and we found eight thin and tattered square cushions apparently stuffed with horsehair. Two cushions on each of our bed planks, one for shoulders and the other for thighs, would make it possible to sleep most of the night. I started the negotiations with the pushcart owner, and declared that the price was even too much for new cushions, not the ragged, infested sacks for sale. The merchant was eager to part with the cushions, it seemed to me, and then in about fifteen minutes of avoidance the price was set at forty cents, or five cents for each cushion. We washed the cushions under the fire hydrant and beat them almost dry. No one complained that night about the moist scent of horsehair in the cushions.
Firecrackers were not permitted that Independence Day, and the police enforced the new declaration of quietus, a word we learned at the federal school on the reservation. The city was quieter with the Depression decree, and there were no accidents, fires, or deaths according to the hearsay over dinner in Hard Luck Town. The only noisy substitutes of celebration that day were the red snap crackers from Chinatown.
The rain glistened on the cobblestones, and some city events that afternoon were cancelled, but thousands of citizens gathered with their children at city parks for games and races in spite of the rain showers. Obviously we were envious of the potato races in the nearby squares because we would have run away with the vegetables for a communal shanty stew.
Star Boy was the platoon leader a few days later to the Alfred Stieglitz art and photography gallery, two blocks east of the Museum of Modern Art. Since the war my brother has avoided tunnels and ducked out of burrows and trenches, and his fear of narrow enclosures included the subway system, so we traveled that morning on the Third Avenue Elevated from Ninth Street to the gallery plainly named An American Place at 509 Madison Avenue.
Stieglitz was seated near a window at the side of the gallery, a portrait of a maestro of art with white hair and noble moustache, and with stacks of letters and a bloom of flowers on the desk. My brother paused only to admire a watercolor painting mounted nearby, Downtown New York by John Marin. The bloody sun, encircled with hues of blue and pale yellow, was a natural show between the abstract window frames and tracery of city columns and margins downtown.
The eminent photographer and impresario of modern art was either reserved or elusive when we entered, only a classy glance, and then he bowed his head without a word or slight gesture of directions. We slowly wandered around the gallery in silence, worried that even our hushed voices would be a distraction.
An American Place was a cozy sanctuary of art. The walls and ceiling were painted pure white, and the bright colors of the original paintings were heightened in the two chalky rooms, almost buoyant in the gallery. The larger room was painted completely gray, a shroud of overnight gray, cloudy ocean gray, memorable gray.
Blue Raven was enchanted with the sun bleached colors, the turn of wild blues, leathery greens, and abstract contours and natural shapes of the clouds and water by Arthur Dove. The modern spectacles of curves and color were named “a new realism” in the art talk of the city, the abstract scenes of nature, sun, clouds, and water. Dove had created abstract patterns and natural ornaments of motion and color.
My brother painted great irreducible blue ravens when he was a schoolboy, and the scenes were visual and totemic, not reductions or duplicates. Later he created more abstract and chancy blue ravens, scenes that deserted the customary contours of native totems, and showed the chancy traces of blue wings on a visionary landscape, the bright and broken claws over a city, or the heavy waves of blue ravens on the river Seine.
Blue Raven whispered as we turned a corner in the museum that new realism was inspired by the ancient pace of native art, on stone, bark, and paper, and the natural motion of cave art, “not the tidy search for cultural identity, no, new realism was a return to totemic visions of nature, the curves and color of the natural world.” Then my brother traced silently with his fingers the magical silhouettes, the show of color and giant flowers, and the waves of heavy blues and dusty rouge mesas by Georgia O’Keeffe.
“Totemic fauvism and new realism were never the outcome of the war or stony reason, not creased or cubist abstract art,” my brother continued to whisper as we moved once more through the chalky gallery. “The art of natural curves and colors is more than mere empathy, more than an apology for the ruins of nature, the rush of new realism has always been in the color, character, and totemic memory.”
Plucky was on the other side of art, as he collected the words that show the deceit of abstract art, and the tease and tow of names in art history. “Blue Raven is a master of blue ravens,” he boasted, and then teased the abstract scenes and colors with words. Plucky became a word painter when he named the hues of blues, and he invented new color names on the road, porter white, wizard blue, hunger brown, wheel rim blues, rusty blues, apron gray, cobblestone hues of gray, elevated gray, dog days rouge, and the natural sounds of blue memory. These new colors were in our memory, and his stories connected directly to the actual moments, and the abstract scenes were stories, “the words not the eye create the visual memory.” Plucky roamed through galleries and whispered the words that created the art in his memory.
“Dove should paint blue ravens,” said Star Boy.
“Chagall paints characters in blue flight, a rabbi under the wings of blue ravens,” said my brother. “Blue waves and ravens are visionary, the words describe the scenes but not the visions.”
Star Boy paused at the entrance and returned the classy glance with irony. Then one by one we nodded on our way out the door of An American Place. Plucky turned back and saluted but the gesture was not seen, and the exclusive gallery returned to the silence of Stieglitz. “Blue Raven might have painted ocean scenes, the abstract shiver and cut of nature in the city, and painted a raven wing bone at the very heart of a wild flower,” said Star Boy.
The Summer Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art presented selected works by French, American, and German painters, a survey of magnificent abstract art that included Paul Gauguin, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, Moïse Kisling, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, and many other painters and sculptors.
Blue Raven was elated with the entire exhibition and noticeably moved in the actual presence of The Praying Jew by Marc Chagall, Portrait of a Boy by Chaïm Soutine, and Head of a Woman by Pablo Picasso. As an expressionist artist, my brother was always impressed with brush bruises, his description for thick layers of paint, and waves of color, blues and rouges, and he carried the rapture of the artistic scenes in visual memory.
Yes, we were courted by and obsessed with the waves of color, the sensuous pose, puckered lips, and facial blues of Head of a Woman. The slightest rouge on the right bare shoulder was an extraordinary presence that afternoon in the Museum of Modern Art. Pablo Picasso painted blue women for only a few years and long before the First World War. My brother was aware of the style and moody hues of blue hair and melancholy faces, but he concentrated on the nature and flight of blue ravens, and advanced the abstract totems and painterly tease of blues in the heart and character of natives.
Plucky declared that my brother never abandoned the blues and was never sidetracked by the sway of cubism or surrealism. “He pitched the honest blues, new, abstract and disguised in the nature of totems.” Plucky carried on his care of my brother an
d the blues as we slowly moved to the portrait of an oval and enigmatic face with vacant eyes by Amedeo Modigliani.
“Aloysius Beaulieu and his modern blue ravens should be included in this exhibition,” asserted Star Boy. Several nearby viewers smiled and turned away. We raised our hands in praise, of course, and then teased my brother about his fascination with rouge cheeks, painterly blue puckers, and sensuous waves of color.
Four natives circled Girl with Blue Eyes and in a cluster that excluded other viewers. We commented on the futile pale blue eyes, not an abstract scene or character portrait but a distortion of an apathetic woman with a high forehead, blank oval face, and the steady elongated necks of other portraits painted by Modigliani.
Blue Raven was the only artist to stay with the blues, and never painted lonely women. His comments were more about the curves and culture of color and brush of character than the plain counter creases of portraiture. “Modigliani painted the ordinary color of a blush on a slanted face with no cheek bones,” said Blue Raven. “There, look at those bright red lips, probably a sexual pout, and the vacant eyes of torment, the haunted gaze of an absence.”
“Yes, the gaze of the dead,” said Plucky.
“No, the gaze of Modigliani,” said Star Boy.
Blue Raven was fascinated with the clumsy and distorted characters painted by Chaïm Soutine. I told our cousins as we sauntered to the next room that Nathan Crémieux, the gallery owner in Paris, told us many stories about La Ruche in Montparnasse, the dirt cheap hive of wild and marvelous painters, sculptors, and poets, Marc Chagall, Moïse Kisling, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others.
Later we viewed the Modigliani portrait of Soutine. The elongated features were slightly jowly, bloated nose, blushed, and with droopy eyes. Soutine, we were told, was distant and elusive. Luckily we attended an exhibition of his early paintings at the Galerie Bing in Paris about five years earlier, a few months before we returned to the reservation for the second time.
The Museum of Modern Art exhibition had opened a month earlier and was very popular. We moved slowly with the crowds to the display of Portrait of a Boy, with the skewed eyes, mighty ears out of balance, and great blunt hands, a perfect disharmony. Soutine painted ordinary characters with natural distortions that touched the very heart of creation and irony. The expressionistic boy was caught in the comedy of culture, and appeared rather cocky in a red vest. The brush traces and texture of paint created a sense of motion. Soutine painted a boy in blue, an altar boy, choirboy, room service boy, pageboy, boy with cap, and many boys in blue.
The great rave came much later with hand gestures, when my brother simulated the uneven touch of rouge on the face of the boy, and the heavy red vest painted by Soutine. The contrasts of blue in the background of the scene were either the shadows of stormy waves or blotchy hues of mountains and created a boy afloat in space.
“The background is planetary blue,” said Plucky.
The Marc Chagall painting, The Praying Jew, sometimes named The Rabbi, was mounted in a position that seemed to dominate the entire space, and viewers were hushed by the image of Judaism. The painting was about three feet wide and four feet high. The Jew wore prayer clothes, shawl, and leather phylacteries, and was painted mostly in black and white, with only slight fleshy rouge on the angular face and hands. The lower lip was brighter, and the weary eyes were distant, an ancient gaze that reached past the viewers and outside the museum. Chagall, we learned later, had painted an old man, a beggar, dressed in the prayer clothes of his father. The artist had bright and spirited eyes, but the old beggar was a captive of destiny, and yet the artist created a gaze of visionary liberty.
Blue Raven told stories about our visit with Chagall and his wife Bella at a studio in Paris shortly after they had returned from Russia. Some of his paintings were stacked against the wall, and we saw the originals of The Birthday, Blue Horses, I and the Village, and many more.
“Chagall was invited to the exhibition of my abstract blue ravens and wounded veteran series, Corbeaux Bleus, Les Mutilés de Guerre, Nouvelles Peintures par Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu, at the Galerie Crémieux in Paris,” my brother said as we started our return walk down Fifth Avenue. Plucky repeated the names several times to practice his French.
The temperature reached the nineties that week, and the floating bathhouse was crowded with children, so we built a rough and ready cover and watched the boats on the East River. Blue Raven outlined three new puppet heads, and that afternoon on the river he started to carve the first caricatures of Léon Blum and General Philippe Pétain, the Lion of Verdun. He carved with the same knife that he had used in combat. Odysseus, the great reservation trader, gave each of us a Hammer Brand Elephant Toe Pocket Knife when we enlisted as infantry soldiers fourteen years ago. My brother had carved so many wooden pendants the pick bone amber was worn smooth.
Plucky teased my brother, “General Pétain would not like his head hollowed out by a native veteran with nothing more than a pocketknife.”
“Marshal Pétain the hand puppet,” said Star Boy.
“The war is over,” said Blue Raven.
“Pétain would agree that a hollow wooden head is much better than the fate of a rusty condensed milk can named Herbert Tombstone,” said Plucky.
“Hoover is a waste of wood,” said Blue Raven.
Star Boy promised the mayor of Hard Luck Town a copy of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, so a few days later on a cool morning we returned to Biblo and Tannen Booksellers. “I knew you boys could not stay away,” said Biblo. “Where did you land that first night, at Camp Thomas Paine?”
“No, too far away,” said Plucky. “Mayor Smith invited us to build a shanty at Hard Luck Town on the East River. Patriotic place, reveille, retreat, camp meal plan, and mostly veterans who keep the place clean.”
He touched our shoulders, one by one, and then waved us to the back room of the store where he handed me a copy of Dawn Boy: Blackfoot and Navajo Songs by Eda Lou Walton. I opened the small limited edition book with care and read out loud one of the songs, “The Lights.”
the sun is a luminous shield
borne up the blue path
by a god
the moon is the torch
of an old man
who stumbles over stars
Biblo was enchanted with the beauty of the concise poetic images, and yet he wondered how the editor had favored the songs in poetic translation, and “who were the original singers, and how were the songs recorded and transcribed?” Serious questions, of course, that he did not hesitate to answer that afternoon, “Truly, what does it matter, the songs touch the heart from the desert to my bookstore, and who dares to write about the poetry by Indians?”
E. P. Dutton and Company published Dawn Boy six years earlier, and only seven hundred and fifty copies. Biblo said he bought the copy from an older man “who told me that Eda Lou Walton, the editor, teaches literature at New York University.”
“We were there last week, at Washington Square Park looking for old Gray Face,” said Plucky. “Maybe Eda Lou knows where to find the natives in New York.”
“Gray Face, a relative?” asked Biblo.
I changed the subject and returned to the lovely book of native songs. Biblo told me the book was a rare edition and cost only a dollar. He pointed out the clean pages and tight binding, and he knew, of course, that the actual price once we teased and dickered would be mine, fifty cents.
Thomas Wolfe was on my mind that morning, but we could not get past the serious talk about native poetry. The metaphors were cultural and close to nature, and that raised the expectation that natives would have a better ear for and greater sensitivity to the images, and we were moved, of course, but Blackfoot and Navajo poetry in translation was not Ojibwe or Anishinaabe.
“Japanese songs are not French,” said Blue Raven.
Plucky intruded on cue and declared that the author should publish a collection of Anishinaabe dream songs, �
��and here is the title, The Sky Loves to Hear Me Sing.”
“Go ask her yourself,” said Biblo. He seemed irritated and insisted that we should contact her directly. “Why not, and ask her to sign the book, no better reason than that to call on an author, and especially a professor.”
Plucky was the natural platoon leader and we marched back to Washington Square Park in search of the romantic editor of the mesa dawn boys, and actually found her name listed in the directory of the College of Arts and Science.
The office door was open, and a breeze through the open window carried the scent of perfume into the hallway. Professor Walton was reading a manuscript at her desk, and did not notice four natives at the door. I tapped the glass with my finger, and without looking up she told me to enter. There, we observed her at work, and without the hesitation of eye contact. She was a small woman, and wore heavy gold jewelry on her neck and wrists. Maybe she painted too much rouge on her face that morning, and for a moment she became a portrait by Modigliani.
Professor Walton raised her head and with a strong voice said, “You are not my students, so why are you here without an appointment?”
I handed over Dawn Boy and asked her to autograph the book. “Jack Biblo the bookseller secured the book for me, and told us you were a professor.”
She firmly told us to sit down, but there were only two chairs and a second desk. Plucky and Blue Raven sat on the wooden desk near the door, and then she surprised us with the question, “Where in the world are you going?”
“Paris, and the world of art,” said Plucky.
“American Indians?”
“Yes, and we are war veterans from the White Earth Reservation and soldiers in the Expeditionary Bonus Force,” said Star Boy. He was very formal, and in turn asked, “And where in the world are you going?”
Professor Walton burst into laughter, and her voice was loud for a small woman. Ordinary hand gestures rattled the jewelry on her wrists. She smiled and said she appreciated the retort. “You know, of course, that literature is a journey, and today this is my journey with an immigrant, a Jewish boy on the Lower East Side in Call it Sleep, an unpublished novel by Henry Roth.”
Native Tributes Page 10