The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  I remember my great grandma Helen vividly; she always wore a long black cardigan over her dress, and she rolled her own cigarettes from a bag of tobacco as she gossiped in Spanish with my grandma and her sisters Lorena and Marie. I don’t remember her greeting us or hugging us; she hardly seemed to notice us great grandchildren. She was so different from our beloved great grandma A’mooh that we children were a little afraid of her.

  Great Grandma Helen was born to Josephine Romero whose mother was a Luna, one of the founding families of Los Lunas, New Mexico. The Romeros were another founding family. Josephine Romero had married a Whittington, the son of an English merchant who married a daughter of the Chavez family.

  Grandma Lillie always called her grandmother Josephine Romero “Grandma Whip” because she wore a black braided leather belt around her waist which she could remove quickly to use as a whip for naughty children. My father remembers Grandma Whip too. He said they called her Grandma Whip because as children, whenever they visited her, the first thing she did when they came into the house was to warn them not to touch anything in her house by saying “Grandma whip! Grandma whip if you touch!”

  The whippings that were part of child-rearing in Grandma Lillie’s family included my father, and finally my sisters and me. The whippings were a legacy from Grandma Whip and her family.

  In 2006, I was asked to write a foreword to a book about a corrido or ballad that was composed in 1882 in the Mexican community of Cubero, near Laguna. The corrido is about a Mexican woman, Placida Romero, whose husband was killed and she and her baby kidnapped by a band of Apache raiders.

  It is likely the Apaches chose the Cubero area deliberately because Cubero had long been the site of slave markets. Placida Romero was taken back to Chihuahua by the Apache warriors where she was held for forty-nine days and so badly mistreated that the Apache women felt sorry for the Mexican woman and gave her clothing, food and even a burro to aid her escape.

  Of course the ballad written afterward made no mention of the compassion and considerable bravery of the Apache women who helped Placida escape. That angered me because at the time they helped her escape, Apache women and children were being murdered by Mexicans and Americans alike for the bounty on their scalps. Yet the Apache women who helped Placida escape did not let the genocide destroy their human decency.

  I wanted to put the incident into historical perspective: Placida Romero was a captive for forty-nine days and then she got to go home. Juana was a captive for almost a hundred years, and she never got to go home.

  To prepare to write about the captives, I reread L. R. Bailey’s scholarly work Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest, first published in 1964. Though I’d read it before, I’d conveniently forgotten some of the more horrendous details. The Spanish governors of New Mexico encouraged and participated in the Indian slave trade; it was their way of keeping the Pueblos, Navajos and Apaches at war with one another so they would not unite against the Spaniards as they had in 1680.

  After the fur trade collapsed, the rendezvous held at river crossings from Taos to Tucson became slave markets where Indian captives were traded for whiskey and gunpowder. The captives were mostly young children, primarily young girls because they were less likely to try to escape. At the slave markets, in drunken exhibitions, the slave traders raped the young Indian girls.

  The Catholic Church participated in the slave trade by possessing young Indian “servants” for labor, and by baptizing the captives. Baptismal records show that from 1700 to 1780, eight hundred Apache children were baptized as “servants” to the households of Spaniards in New Mexico. At the Catholic Church at Laguna Pueblo baptismal records revealed that the Spanish rewarded the Pueblos who accompanied them on military actions against the Navajos with young captives.

  More money could be made from one slave hunting expedition of two or three weeks than could be made in one year of subsistence farming or ranching in New Mexico. When the U.S. authorities took the New Mexico Territory from Mexico in 1846, the U.S. officials made attempts to stop the Indian slave trade, but the wealthy Mexican families resisted, and even the U.S. authorities kept Indian “servants.”

  When I reread Bailey’s book I came across the account of a young Navajo woman released by U.S. soldiers from her captivity with a Mexican family in 1852. The young Navajo woman complained to the U.S. military officer that the Mexican family stripped her naked and whipped her every day. Whipping slaves, it seems, was a common perversion with the founding families of New Mexico.

  I happened to mention to my father that I wanted to write about Juana but I wasn’t really sure when or how she came to work for Grandma Lillie’s family. That was when my father told me what Grandma Lillie never told me. My father told me so offhandedly it angered me; I could tell he was ashamed and the off-handed manner was his way to cover up his shame.

  Four young Navajo sisters were captured by the Spanish slave hunters during the Spanish governor’s 1823 military campaign against the Navajos in New Mexico. Juana, who was four or five, was the youngest. The four captives came into the possession of Grandma Whip’s brother.

  Did he buy the young sisters from a slave trader or were they loot he got for volunteering to accompany the Spanish troops on the assault? Did someone owe him a gambling debt and give him the little girls in payment or were they a bribe to curry his favor?

  If Grandma Whip was quick to take off the leather belt to whip her small grandchildren, imagine what Grandma Whip’s brother was like: he must have been the Devil himself with the whip on the little Navajo girls. After he whipped the young Navajo girls, what other perversions? Was he one of those slave dealers who participated in the drunken public rapes of young Indian girls at the slave markets? His abuse was unbearable, so the three older girls poisoned their torturer.

  With the son of two prominent Los Lunas families dead at the hands of Indian “servants,” the local authorities could not afford delay. Copycats had to be discouraged immediately. The three young Navajo girls were hanged at once; only the youngest, Juana, was spared. Did other wealthy families of Los Lunas send their Indian “servants” to watch the hangings that day as a precaution? Did they make little Juana watch her sisters die? Did Juana understand then her last links to her family and people died with her sisters and there would be no reunion for her?

  From her poisoned brother, Grandma Whip inherited the only remaining Navajo child to be her “servant.” Poor Juana came to be part of the strange cruel family of Grandma Whip and her husband the Mexican with the English surname.

  Both my father and Grandma Lillie told me about the huge ring of keys Grandma Whip wore on the belt around her waist. Every door, every closet, every cabinet, cupboard and drawer in Grandma Whip’s house was locked at all times. When they visited and needed sugar for their coffee, Grandma Whip had to search among dozens of keys before she unlocked the cupboard with the sugar bowl. Grandma Lillie said all the locks and keys were because Grandma Whip didn’t want the servants to steal things, but maybe Grandma Whip wanted to make sure the rat poison stayed out of the sugar bowl.

  CHAPTER 7

  My mother’s ancestors weren’t as well known to her as my father’s ancestors were to him. My mother’s maternal great grandfather, Grandpa Wood, was born in what is now Kentucky during one of the violent removals of the Cherokees from their homelands in North Carolina and Georgia. It was his daughter, my mother’s grandma Goddard, who taught my mother that the black snake in the cellar was their friend. The Cherokees revered snakes before Christianity arrived. So my mother taught me to respect but not to fear snakes.

  In my second year at the University of New Mexico, money was scarce. My elder son Robert was a baby then, and my husband Dick Chapman was in graduate school. I had good grades but in those days all the scholarship money there went to male athletes. The only scholastic scholarship available was one offered by the Daughters of the Confederacy. The financial aid counselor suggested I find out if I had any relatives who fought for the
Confederacy. I asked my mother and she told me the Leslies, her ancestors, fought for the Confederacy. I got the scholarship for my high grade point average; it was two hundred dollars split between two semesters.

  The Leslie name goes back to Scotland and the Leslie clan. My mother said that her father, Grandpa Dan, had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan during the years he and Grandma Jessie lived in Georgia. My mother was very close to her father; they both wept easily and loved to drink. I remember Grandpa Dan with happiness until I got old enough to want to watch Hopalong Cassidy when Grandpa wanted to watch the Friday night boxing matches. The anger he directed at me that night so frightened me I did not feel the same about him ever again. Some years later when he died, I felt sorry for my mother’s loss and her sadness, but I didn’t feel sad; I was about six years old then.

  Later on when I was in high school in the 1960s, I tried to track down Grandpa Wood, and our Cherokee relatives; not all the Cherokees went to Oklahoma—some of the Wood family hid out in the mountains near Asheville. But in those days the Cherokees were poor with no casino money, and few records were kept of those who had been born or who died during the removals.

  Years before, when I was in grade school, our cousin Charlie Wood from western North Carolina worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a community health worker at Laguna. He stayed at Laguna for a few years before he went back to North Carolina. We didn’t really get to know him. I’m not sure why. I remember he came to our house for supper a few times, but mostly we saw him when he came into the store to pick up the mail.

  Maybe it was the liquor around our house that kept our cousin Charlie away. Alcoholic drinks were and still are illegal at Laguna. As a BIA public health worker it would have been awkward for Charlie Wood because he was very conscientious. He might have lost his job.

  Now I realize how the alcohol in our house determined who might or might not be invited in spontaneously. People who possessed alcohol might be reported to the village officers who had the power to punish those breaking the law. In those days there were no tribal police or tribal jail; the elected village officers took care of keeping the peace in their village.

  My mother was a bright well-educated woman, and a great teacher, but she was also an alcoholic. She came from a small Montana coal mining village. She told me she started drinking in the seventh grade when she and some school chums stole the wine her father and the other coal miners planned to drink after the union meeting.

  I never thought of my mother as an alcoholic because she seldom got drunk or impaired by drinking, except at picnics and parties, and Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. I was used to seeing the dramatic, extreme alcoholism of the World War Two and Korean War veterans who were my cousins, so it was easier to fool myself about my mother’s drinking. She didn’t drink on the job and she never missed work, but after work and on weekends, my mother kept a coffee cup full of whiskey nearby.

  Except for Grandma Jessie and her sisters, Aunt Sarah and Aunt Lucy, and my mother’s brother, Uncle Jack, my mother’s relatives were not only distant, they didn’t seem as interesting as my father’s relatives who were active presences in my life. Except for Aunt Lucy and her love for Cherokee Grandpa Wood, my mother’s relatives weren’t storytellers; and except for my mother’s brother, Uncle Jack, they weren’t colorful either.

  Uncle Jack flew for the Navy in the Pacific in World War Two. Afterwards he was a crop duster in Fresno with great stories to tell about close calls and the crashes he walked away from. His children, my cousins John Leslie and Lana Leslie, were like brother and sister to my sisters and me while we grew up.

  Every summer John and Lana spent eight weeks with us at Laguna. They always knew the latest music, dances and fashion because they were from California and were popular and cool—far ahead of the rest of the country. Their town had a big municipal swimming pool which was the focal point of their summer. So I was impressed that they preferred to spend their summers with us in New Mexico without a swimming pool, hiking in the hills, riding horses and helping my father sell fireworks for the Fourth of July.

  We never got to go stay with John and Lana in California because the summer growing season was Uncle Jack’s busiest time to crop dust, and much of it had to be done at night when the fields were deserted. He needed quiet during the day so he could sleep. After high school we no longer saw as much of our cousins because they went off to college while we got pregnant and got married in college which wasn’t cool.

  CHAPTER 8

  In the keynote address I gave to the American Indian Language Development Convention in Tucson in mid-June of 2007 I decided to look into the future to see what languages people here will speak five hundred years from now, and I realized everyone in the Southwest will speak Nahuatl, not Chinese, although Chinese will be the dominant language of finance and commerce world-wide, and everyone’s second language. I won’t go into the details of the decline of the English language here for lack of space.

  The resurgence of Nahuatl will arise out of the sheer numbers of speakers especially in Mexico City, with the largest population of Nahua speakers in the world. Of course a great many of the indigenous tribal languages of the Americas are related to Nahuatl so I include them as well.

  But before I could write about five hundred years in the future, I had to go back to the past, my own past. Writing about why I don’t speak the Laguna language was much more complicated than I imagined. My parents sent me to kindergarten at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school near our house. The first day of kindergarten I learned about invisible lines: the old cattle guard full of sand at the entrance to the day school property had an invisible line down the middle. We children were warned: once we crossed this invisible line onto the school grounds talking Indian was forbidden. If we disobeyed we’d be sent to the principal’s office for punishment. That was the first thing the teachers taught us children on the first day of kindergarten.

  I paid close attention to the rules because my father was very strict about the behavior of my sisters and me. I was afraid to get sent to the principal’s office for any reason because I feared my father’s temper.

  Mr. Trujillo was our principal and his wife was my kindergarten and first grade teacher. They both were Pueblo people: she was from Isleta Pueblo and he was from Laguna. They spoke the Pueblo languages, but they had attended BIA schools when they were children. They were taught to believe in the goal of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1950s which was to break us children from talking Indian so we’d learn English and one day relocate off the reservation.

  In kindergarten class, Mrs. Trujillo taught the five year olds to speak English. I was happy to be with children of my age but after a week she sent me to the first grade because I already spoke English. I felt uncomfortable because all the other children knew I was treated differently because I spoke English. Afterward some of my classmates teased me with Laguna words about being a show-off so I ran to the teacher to get them in trouble. My mother cautioned me not to be a tattle-tale and I stopped.

  I learned how to get along. I picked up the Laguna expressions and phrases my classmates used: my grandpa Hank taught me to count to ten and passed on handy phrases to use at the store like how to say “there’s no more”: “zah-zee hadti.” I might have learned more Laguna from my grandpa Hank if he had lived longer and if I hadn’t been such a tomboy always outdoors exploring at the river or off in the hills on my horse.

  Grandpa Hank worked in the store twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week. He was a quiet man. After work around seven, he and Grandma Lillie ate supper and then he rested in his armchair. Grandma told us kids not to bother him because he was tired. He read science and car magazines, and later when TV came he watched until he fell asleep in the chair.

  But when Grandma Lillie went on vacation to see her sister in California, I used to cook for Grandpa Hank. He talked more then, and told me stories he’d heard as a child. This is the one Grandpa told me one day at lunchtime: there wa
s a young Laguna hunter who always brought back game because he could travel farther. The young hunter’s secret was that he carried with him a magical lunch in a small cloth sack. No matter how much the young hunter ate there was always more food in the sack.

  My great grandma A’mooh and my grandpa Hank and all our extended family around us spoke Laguna. At the store, most of the people who shopped there spoke Laguna. Only my father could not speak Laguna. I was aware of this oddity before I went to school, and I asked more than once why he didn’t know how to talk Indian. He said it was because the other children made fun of his accent when he spoke Laguna so he refused to learn to talk Indian; he only spoke a little as a courtesy to the old folks who spoke no English.

  Now I wonder if it was more than just his schoolmates who gave him a bad time about speaking Laguna. I have the sense there was an adult family member, maybe one of Grandma Lillie’s brothers, one of my father’s uncles, who teased him about talking Indian. Somebody filled my father’s head with a strange idea: if we learned to speak Laguna, we would speak English with a Laguna accent. Of course that notion was completely ridiculous.

  My great grandfather Robert Gunn Marmon and his brother, Walter Gunn Marmon, came to Laguna from Kenton, Ohio to work as Government school teachers and surveyors. Walter arrived in 1868 and Robert followed in 1875. They both learned to speak the Laguna language and married Laguna women.

  My grandpa Hank was fluent in Laguna and knew the older dialect that was disappearing. He also spoke some Hopi, some Zuni, and some of the Dine language as well as Spanish. At that time among the tribes of the Southwest, people routinely spoke three or four languages.

  My great grandma A’mooh and my great aunts Alice Marmon Little and Susie Reyes Marmon grew up speaking the Laguna language, and all learned to speak English with that unmistakable “proper” accent which was taught at the Carlisle Indian School in the latter nineteenth century. Years later in Alaska I met a Haida elder who had attended Carlisle as a child and she spoke English with the same Carlisle accent—maybe it was more of a cadence—it’s difficult to describe—it was an American accent but with a hint of Scotland, not England.