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Some Indian Silliness . . .

10/15/2018

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​I came across the following during the runup to the 2018 mid-term elections.  Normally, I would express great disdain and disbelief at such an attitude.  I would file it away as an example of outdated and shopworn racist attitudes toward Native peoples.
First, the example:
In a head-scratching interview, a New Mexico nominee to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District suggested her Native American opponent isn’t Native American ― because she didn’t grow up on a reservation.
“Your opponent would be the first Native American woman in Congress,” a Fox News host noted.
The nominee replied, “That’s what they say . . . but she’s a military brat, just like I am, and so, you know, it evokes images that she was raised on a reservation.”
Deb Haaland responded that calling the assertion she’s not Native American because she grew up on military bases “racist, an assault on military families, and wrong.  For generations, Native Americans have been subjected to genocide, forced assimilation, and government-backed family separation,” she said. “Even today, Native American Tribes suffer through attacks on tribal sovereignty. Despite all of that, Native Americans are still here, we are proud, and we matter. I am proud to be a citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna.”
In a weird coincidence, this troublesome example occurred the very same day that I experienced a spookily similar circumstance. 
A little background:  Some weeks before the above appeared I had joined an online group devoted to “Oklahoma Choctaws”—Face Book group.
If you’ve attended thus far, you know that I come from Oklahoma—that I spent a good deal of my early life in that state and that I am an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.  My late maternal grandmother was an original enrollee on the 1887-1907 Dawes Commission Rolls of American Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes living in Indian Territory at the time.  More than 250,000 people applied for admission and the Dawes Commission enrolled just over 100,000.  My mother’s mother, Ruth Adella Foster, was #15,137 on the Dawes Rolls as of March 26, 1904.
The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma determines membership by lineal descent. The tribe does not have a minimum blood quantum requirement; however, this does not mean anyone with any amount of Indian blood can enroll. Members must be direct descendants of original enrollees.
The Oklahoma Choctaw Group I had joined stated very clearly on its Face Book page that it was a group “for Choctaws and friends of Choctaws to talk about Choctaw things.”  At the time there were nearly 4,700 members of the group.  And there were six administrators.
Things went along smoothly for a number of weeks.  Then a single member seemingly objected to something I had posted on the site and stepped beyond the norms of civility that such groups strive for and began to harass and insult me.  It reached the point where I exercised the Face Book option of “blocking” that individual so that he could no longer see my posts and, more importantly to me, I would no longer have to see his.
Within a day or so, I was removed from the group.  I contacted two of the administrators to inquire about my removal.  One replied that she had not removed me and had no idea but would check on the matter.  The other administrator responded similarly.
Turns out, the individual who was harassing me claimed to be himself an administrator, and had removed me by fiat.  Another administrator told me that a “new” rule had suddenly appeared on the site that stated there could be no “blocking of administrators”—a curious coincidence, I thought.
A day or so later, I was informed that I had been removed because I wasn’t raised in southeastern Oklahoma, on the eleven and one-half counties designated as the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.  Understand, I was raised in central Oklahoma—shuffled between a home in Oklahoma City and my grandmother’s home on her allotted land near Newcastle, an hour or so south of Oklahoma City.
I was told that Choctaws from the rural communities of Panki Bok and Broken Arrow were very different from those in Oklahoma City and, I assume, different from those residing in rural farming areas like Newcastle in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Good Choctaw people surrendered their homelands in Mississippi and were subject to forced relocation to Indian Territory in the 1830s and ‘40s, where they were and still are, in essence, restricted by artificial boundaries to what is now southeastern Oklahoma.
The nominee that questioned Deb Haaland’s claim to be Native because she wasn’t raised on a reservation is as patently ridiculous as those leveled at me because the government, in a document I have that is signed by Choctaw Chief Green McCurtain, allotted my family their lands on the Choctaw and Chickasaw lands in central Oklahoma.
I doubt the single rule-making decider I had blocked would have been satisfied had my grandmother been able, somehow, to intuit that just a couple of generations later her family members would be refused participation on social media, and so to avoid that absurd refusal had simply abandoned her two-hundred and ten allotted acres with its oil and gas reserves and returned to southeastern Oklahoma.
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Those were the days . . .

7/11/2014

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Thinking still about what was arguably one of the most important times in my life.  Fresh out of the Marine Corps, enrolled at San Francisco State where I was reading as many books as fast as I possibly could, surrounded by bright and beautiful people with ideas and concerns and energy.  It was a wonderful time . . . .

“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . .   There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .”

Hunter S. Thompson
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas


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R.I.P. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) 1934-2014

1/10/2014

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“You got to sing . . . don’t be no ghost”

In the mid-1960s I was living in San Francisco.  Divorced and going to college I worked at a hospital as an orderly.  My life experiences to that point pretty much consisted of high school in Oklahoma, and three years in the Marine Corps.  In San Francisco it was the time of the Haight-Ashbury, anti-Vietnam protests, Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements.  I was caught up in it all.  And I loved it all.

A friend at the hospital—he was Black and he was a lab technician—invited me to go along with him to see two one-act plays that were getting rave reviews.  The plays were The Dutchman and The Toilet by LeRoi Jones, and I was blown away by the power and the relevance of the pieces.  Other than my high school’s production of  Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, I’d never before seen live theater.

In my junior year in college I moved back to Oklahoma to be closer to my mother, who was having some difficulties.  I worked at a hospital there and resumed my college studies.  While it will come as no surprise that Oklahoma was/is a hotbed of right-wing conservatism compared to San Francisco and most other places, there were offered in the state school where I was enrolled some surprisingly fine courses in Black Literature, which I took.  At the same time, there was an active NAACP group in Oklahoma City, which supported a garbage workers’ protest—a protest that I took up by writing letters to the editor at the Daily Oklahoman wherein I described how I was withholding the portion of my City Utility Bill that was earmarked for garbage service and sending that amount to Miss Clara Luper, who was then president of the OKC NAACP to use as she saw fit.

I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from what was then called Central State College and relocated to New Mexico to pursue a Master’s Degree.  There were very few Black students at New Mexico Highlands University in 1969.  Those who were there were mostly athletes.  When I told the English Department Chairman that I wanted to write a Master’s Thesis on the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, I believe he took to his bed for several days.  The school’s library had very little relating to contemporary Black writers, and there were no courses offered that remotely related to what I wanted to pursue.  However, I think that I was a little scary in those days—my hair was long and I had a beard and called the Chairman “sir,” which I learned later he thought was said sarcastically (it really wasn’t).  In any event, I was given the go-ahead.

The thesis--Transition into Blackness: The Audience and the Speaker in the Poetry & Plays of LeRoi Jones—caused a stir in that it contained the word “fuck.”  (In my defense, the word was in a long quote of Jones’ important poem, Black Art!)  The stir came about because I was (and remain to this day) a two-finger typist, and had arranged for the Department secretary to type the manuscript—no word processors or personal computers in 1969.  The Chairman called me into his office and closed the door.  He stuttered that Mrs. Smith (not her real name) was not an “academic,” and so shouldn’t be subjected to such “dirty” words.  He wanted me to type the offending page myself.  Long story short: When I was unable to find a typewriter with a perfectly-matched font, I asked Mrs. Smith if I could use her machine for, maybe 20 minutes.  She asked why.  I told her.  She laughed and typed the “dirty” words herself.

The link below will take you to a 6-minute recording of Jones reading “Black Art!”  Click on it if you dare:


Black Art!
Epilogue

A Ph.D. and a number of years later I was working at writing and doing non-academic things on a horse ranch in Northern New Mexico.  My brother—at the time a doctoral candidate at the University of Oklahoma—telephoned to say that the English Department at OU had come into some oil money and was fixing to hire a dozen-or-so Ph.D.s to teach lower division courses.  He suggested that I might want to send a curriculum vitae and a cover letter.  I did.  I never heard a word back.

A couple of months later, my brother telephoned again to say that he’d seen the new schedule for the Fall term and noticed that an “R. Querry” would be teaching a survey course in Black Literature.  Turns out the folks in the English Department had alertly noticed my Master’s Thesis and, not having a person of color available to teach the course, had assigned it to me, along with a couple of writing courses.



Below, one of my favorite images--Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou

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Rodeo Clown Redux

12/7/2013

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Some months ago I posted here a piece—“From Rodeo Clown to Lawyer”—about my Texas lawyer friend Kirk Purcell.  I said at that time that we’d lost touch with one another, but that I hoped he was well and happy.

Just last evening I received word that Kirk had died . . . in Archer City, Texas . . . on October 1, 2005.

Kirk Purcell was fifty-five years old.



My friend Steve Davis pointed out that a lot of folks walked a little taller because they knew Kirk.

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William Eastlake

11/30/2013

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Once during one of the periods when we were traveling Elaine and I visited the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, an hour and three-quarters east of Tucson.  It seemed like the sort of place we might enjoy for a while.  We found a desert trailer park a few miles outside Bisbee and paid for a month.

There were odd folks staying there . . . besides us, I mean.  There was a woman and her dog who lived in her pickup truck with a cab-over camper.  She ran a quick-lube kind of place in Bisbee.  She said she was an Indian Princess.  We didn’t question her on that—people who live out in the desert are generally tough folks and not particularly open to one’s questioning their veracity.  People in that part of the state, we’d noticed, carried guns openly and favored camp trailers over doublewides for permanent residences.

We took long walks and read and slept away some afternoons.  We often went into Bisbee and walked its hilly and odd little streets.  We took our mail by General Delivery at the town post office and we enjoyed the town library and a quirky used bookshop.

I remembered that the writer William Eastlake—whose work I admired greatly and whom I’d included in my anthology, Growing Old—when I’d written him via his publisher for permission to include a chapter from one of his novels, had responded with a letter postmarked and with a return address in Bisbee.  I recalled, too, how he’d kindly noted my plea of poverty by saying that, sure, I could use the piece, and send him “fifty bucks.”  Or, he added, if I didn’t have the money that was okay, too.

I had entered his address into a notebook I had with me on the trip and I wrote him a short note telling him who I was and where we were and that I’d sure enough like to meet him if he was so inclined.  In a couple of days I had a postcard with a phone number, asking me to call.  When I did so, we made plans to meet for lunch at The Iron Man Restaurant in Bisbee.  He said that Marilyn would be with him.  I assumed this to be his wife, and referred to her as Marilyn Eastlake until she informed me some time later that she was not his wife, but rather his companion.  And she was his devoted companion, to be sure, and came to be a good friend to Elaine and me over the next few years.

People who know Eastlake’s work are apt to call him “a writer’s writer.”  I have been an admirer of the work since the spring of 1980 when I was preparing to teach a course on the Western Novel at the University of Oklahoma.  A friend at the University of Alabama at Birmingham—himself a writer—urged me to consider one of Eastlake’s novels for the course.  He recommended The Bronc People.

That summer I read and reread the early novels--Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of an Artist With Twenty-Six Horses—and a later fictional return to Indian Country, Dancers in the Scalp House.  I recall being struck by the skill with which Eastlake made his wonderful Indian characters.  These were not the Indians I was used to in fiction.  These Indians spoke with remarkable voices—not the stereotypically syrupy, sentimental, noble-savage voices to which I was accustomed, but rather they uttered their truths in hard-biting, funny, and ironic twists the likes of which I had not before come across.

Those four novels—the Indian Country novels—remain my favorites among the Eastlake canon (Go in Beauty, the first published, remains my favorite).  As I said, in a collection of what I considered then to be some of the best Southwestern writing, I included a chapter from Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses.

To say that Eastlake has had an influence on my own writing—indeed, on my way of looking at the world—does not suggest the extent of that influence. I have described elsewhere how the original publisher of my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, wanted me to revise dialogue because—as he put it—“an Indian wouldn’t talk that way.”  How I dismissed his oddly disparaging and clearly inappropriate remark immediately as the stereotype-reinforcing foolishness it was chiefly because William Eastlake had exploded that particular myth once and for all in his writing: Indians, Eastlake had shown us, can talk any way anyone else can.

And so we met at The Iron Man Restaurant in Bisbee.  We sat on the shady patio-porch and drank beer and gin and ate hamburgers and talked for two hours.

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I can tell you that I liked Bill Eastlake immediately.  Some writers I know to be shy and uncomfortable—not given to brilliant conversation—struck nearly dumb, in fact, in social settings. Bill delivered strong opinions spontaneously with studied eloquence and shared anecdotes and reminiscences without prodding.  And I mean for you to know that they were wonderful stories that Bill told: Stories about William Faulkner, about his friends Ed Abbey and Jim Harrison, about raising cattle in northern New Mexico and about the wars he’d seen and written about, stories about writers and writing and sports and science and politics . . . .

After that first lunch, we had many, many more—at motel restaurants, oddly enough, as well as at his home and, later, at mine in Bisbee, and later, in Tucson and in Taos.  I have an especially fine memory of watching my friend Bill Eastlake dance among traditionally dressed Indian people at a Buffalo Pasture powwow at Taos Pueblo.  And while we had specific disagreements, Eastlake and I, we never pursued them, and I like to think that improved our relationship.  You see, always we drank gin and beer, and always we talked and we laughed, and always we told tales—some of them taller than others.

William Eastlake is gone now, he died in June, 1997 at the age of 79.  But for the years I knew him I knew for a fact that there was at least one good outlaw living in southern Arizona, near the Mexican border.


Eastlake Interview
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Dallas 1963

10/15/2013

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I’ve just finished reading one of what I understand will be a plethora of books aimed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963.  

In 1963 I was in the United States Marine Corps, stationed aboard the U.S.S. Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier.  I was the Commanding Officer’s orderly, and the ship was returning to our home port of Naval Air Station Alameda on San Francisco Bay after a nine-month deployment.  We were scheduled to pass beneath the Golden Gate Bridge on the afternoon of November 22nd.

My only daughter had been born on October 18th in San Francisco.  This was before internet and digital photographs and such technical gadgets.  I had received a telegram telling me of Isabel’s birth—I hadn’t spoken to her mother or seen a photograph of my daughter.  November 22nd was to be the day I first met her.

We had not yet come within view of the bridge when the ship was abruptly directed to come about and await further orders.  The ship’s radio, or intercom system, announced to the crew that shots had been fired at the President in Dallas, Texas.  We were placed on high alert.  We sailed around for three days while the government caught its breath.  I met my daughter on November 25th.  Together we watched President Kennedy's funeral on a black-and-white television in San Francisco.

All of this is to make the point that I was an adult when the assassination of the President occurred.  That same year I was released from active duty and began college.  Although not politically active except in the area of Civil Rights, I was acutely aware of politics and believed that I was more informed than most and certainly well attuned to contemporary issues.  Up until a couple of weeks ago, had you asked me about Kennedy’s assassination, I would’ve felt confident that I was relatively well informed about it.

But, like I said, I’ve just read DALLAS 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis.  And I am, frankly, humbled to see that I had no clear idea about the lead-up to that terrible day.

I really never understood how much hatred for the government and JFK there was in Dallas in the early 1960s.  I didn’t realize how much warning—in retrospect, at least—there had been about the President’s safety during his visit to Dallas in November 1963.

This book is a gripping account of an unhinged element spurred on by unhinged individuals; among them Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey, General Edwin Walker, Texas Congressman Bruce Alger, Baptist Reverend W.A. Criswell, and Dallas billionaire H.L. Hunt.  Above all, the account is frightening in its awful similarity to the ugly attitudes and vitriolic speech (and worse) we see directed toward “them”—immigrants, Muslims, etc.—today. 

Anyone who, like me, can recall where they were on November 22, 1963, will, I suspect, be shaken by Minutaglio’s and Davis’ fascinating and eye-opening chronicle.  At the same time, younger readers may, sadly, view the vitriol of 1963 without surprise.  After all, it’s become more and more difficult to shut out the hateful noise and the hurtful images with which we are bombarded from every direction.

Full Disclosure: one of the authors is a close friend whom I admire very much. 
Spoiler Alert: This is NOT a “Conspiracy Theory” book, though I am confident some of those will appear for readers with a taste for such things.


Dallas 1963
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The Death of Bernadette Lefthand

9/14/2013

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I am pleased to say that my novel is finally available as an eBook from Amazon.com in the Kindle Store, it can be accessed from the Books page on this site.

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At long last . . . Bernadette

8/28/2013

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After a very long and sometimes unhappy struggle, I have recently had all of my rights to my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, returned to me.  I am just now in the process of preparing the manuscript for publication as a Kindle eBook which I intend to offer at a reasonable (read cheap) price on Amazon.  Herewith, a bit about the inspiration and writing of that novel.

We were living in Taos at the time.  Elaine was working as the chief photographer at The Taos News—I was struggling to focus on a writing project and feeling relatively useless.

Listening to the radio one morning, I learned that Larry McMurtry and Leslie Marmon Silko were going to give talks at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, in a couple of days.  I knew and admired both Larry and Leslie, hadn’t seen either since my days at OU, and thought that being in touch with them and hearing their talks might give me a boost.  Durango was just a couple of hundred miles from Taos, and it was Fall and the drive alone promised to be beautiful.

We drove up to Durango arriving about noon and got a motel.  The talks were scheduled for that evening and so we went out to explore the town.  I am, by nature, unable to pass a bookshop without going in.  At least I am unable to pass a small, independent bookshop—the kind of place that, sadly, has grown rare.

I don’t recall much about the little, used bookshop itself, but I came upon a book by a writer/photographer friend of ours in Taos—Nancy Wood—that I didn’t know about and had never before seen.  Out of print, the book, When Buffalo Free the Mountains, is a non-fiction account of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Indians in southern Colorado, and is illustrated with Nancy’s photographs throughout.  The book was a fine first edition hardcover with a dust jacket and cost, as I recall, something less than twenty dollars.  Later, we returned to the motel to prepare for the talks on campus and I laid the book on the bedside table.


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McMurtry and Silko, Durango, Colorado


The talks that evening were well attended and well received.  We visited with Larry and Leslie both before and after their presentations and agreed to meet the next morning for breakfast at their hotel.  I remember we had a fine visit in the course of which I mentioned that Scott Momaday was just then doing a residency in Taos at the Wurlitzer Foundation and that he had told me he was working at finishing up a Billy the Kid novel. (The Ancient Child, 1989)  McMurtry was very interested in this, saying he was doing a Billy the Kid novel, as well.  Anything for Billy appeared in 1988.

Anyway, after the talks that evening, we went to our motel.  I was thumbing through Nancy Wood’s book, looking at the images, two of which struck me in particular and became the inspiration for my first novel—my first attempt at fiction of any kind.

The first photograph showed a young Indian woman sitting in a lawn chair holding an infant on her lap.  The woman is dressed in a beaded dress and her hair is done in braids.  She is, it appears, at some sort of  powwow or other doin’s.  The caption on the photo states that the woman is Regina Box and her infant son and that the picture was taken five months before her death.

A few pages later there is a photo of a young Indian man singing and beating on a drum.  He wears jeans and a down vest and his hair is in braids.  The caption says he is Jim Box and that he is shown at a Bear Dance shortly before he killed his wife.

To this day I have never read When Buffalo Freed the Mountains.  But The Death of Bernadette Lefthand began with those two photographs.

Some years later—I believe it was when Bad Medicine came out and I was signing in Taos—I saw Nancy and told her about how her photographs had been the touchstones for my earlier novel.  She said she should get some money, then.  I think she was kidding.  Maybe not.  In any case, I did not offer her any money.  I’m sad to say that Nancy died in March of this year.

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Nancy Wood at Taos Pueblo

Within a couple of days after we returned to Taos from Durango, I began writing Bernadette.  I didn’t have any kind of outline or plan—as I said, I’d never written fiction before—I just started writing.

At the time, we were living in a small, dreary, poorly-constructed 1960s vintage two-bedroom, single-wide mobile home that we rented from a nice woman named Margaret because the rent was inexpensive by Taos standards.  We were starting into the winter season and the nights were turning colder.  I’d begin work at my old dual floppy-disc computer as soon as Elaine left for her job.  In the evening when she returned I’d usually read her what I’d written that day.  I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I am taken with language—that the sounds of words are important to me.  Reading aloud—to myself, or to Elaine—was and is important to me, it is, I think, essential to my writing process.  I have to hear the narrative—especially the dialogue.  It’s got to sound (to me, anyway) like people really speak or it’s not real.


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1984. My first computer—dual floppy disc.

Elaine rarely, if ever, criticized my efforts.  On the other hand, I am extremely self-critical and I suppose she knew that I was hard enough on myself.  Sometimes tears would well up in her eyes as I read and I knew I was getting it right.

The Taos News was (and is still) a fine weekly newspaper.  This means that Elaine had time off pretty much whenever we needed to travel.  And we traveled a good deal that winter.  We spent a good deal of time driving across the vast Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona.  We especially liked visiting Hopi, which is located in the middle of Navajo-land.  We attended dances and rodeos and fairs and ate in small cafes and at trading posts.  We shopped in trading post food stores and essentially spent time hanging out where Navajo people were.  As much as anything, I think, I was eavesdropping—listening to Navajo people talking.  I remember how in Gallup we would frequently eat at Furr’s Cafeteria and sit near Indian families.  There are phrases and even whole sentences, I think, in Bernadette that I overheard while eating in Furr’s.

We once spent a night at the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa and were told by a young woman selling jewelry the next morning that we should go to her Second Mesa village of Shongopovi because, as she said, “there are some doin’s there today.”  I asked her if we would be welcome there and she assured me we would.  And so it was that we chanced to see first-hand the wonder of ninety-nine Tasapkachinas dancing on the dusty little plaza at old Shongopovi—to watch from atop the roof of a small gray house built of undressed stone and mud the dance Bernadette and Gracie Lefthand and Tom and Anderson George watched later in Bernadette.  We had spent a wonderful afternoon watching a dance that I described in detail—exactly as I recalled it happening—in my novel.  I named the character of the young girl at Hopi after the young woman who directed us to the dance—she had given us her card.  Another day we were lucky enough to see forty-one Tasap Yeibichai Kwa-um dancers at Mishongnovi.  I will add that taking photographs at Hopi has been regulated and prohibited, to an increasingly greater extent, since 1902 (signs today caution “Don’t Even Ask!”)  I understand, too, that the dances at the village of Shongopovi have now been closed to visitors. 

We spent time at Canyon de Chelly and at Chaco National Monument.  We often visited Gallup and it was our habit to take a room in the El Rancho Hotel there.  The rooms are named after 1940s and 50s movie stars who allegedly stayed there while making movies.  The El Rancho is the place where Bernadette and Gracie and Tom stay in my novel.

Some of the most beautiful country in northern New Mexico is to be found around Chama and the Jicarilla Apache Reservation where we would visit the “shopping center” at Dulce and eat lunch at the Jicarilla Inn and—if it happened to be open—admire the beadwork and baskets in the Tribal Museum.

We crisscrossed Navajo Country in our pickup, and always we favored the back roads—even in those rare instances when there was a choice—the narrow blacktop ribbons between Shiprock and Chinle and Piñon . . . between Gallup and Window Rock and Keams Canyon.  And when we traveled we listened to the powerful radio stations for the Navajo Nation—the Navajo call radio “Wind That Speaks”—listened to the voices of Selena Manychildren and Harrison Dehyah speaking in Navajo and in English.

We would often visit Canyon de Chelly—hiking or riding horseback into Canyon del Muerto, where, if we tried hard enough, we could hear the sounds of gunfire from Captain Albert Pfeiffer’s troops in 1864.

When I was writing Bernadette I assumed that my reader would not likely be Indian—certainly not Navajo (I was writing, after all, about Navajo witches).  At the same time, I assumed that my reader would not be a student of the scholarly works extant on Indian—and specifically Navajo and Jicarilla Apache—cultures.  Rather, I had in mind that there are aspects of the cultures that even the most casual, non-Indian would find fascinating and so felt compelled to tell about them.

I do not think that I have a great deal of imagination.  That is, I don’t seem to have a knack for making up things out of whole cloth.  Rather I think that I see individuals and places and events and that I like to imagine these individuals’ lives in those places and at those events.  I look at pictures, for example, and imagine what’s happening or happened.  Or, because when we would make these trips both Elaine and I would be doing our respective “jobs”—she making photographs where allowed and I making notes—I very often had Elaine’s photographs as reminders . . . as visual notes, if you will.

When I become interested—preoccupied may be a more accurate term, here—in a specific subject I tend to focus all my energy on that subject.  When I began to think about Navajo tradition—and I am thinking here of witches in particular—I read everything I could find.  Not fiction, mind you, but everything in the ethnological and anthropological literature—dry, scholarly tomes and monographs, treatises and first-hand accounts.  Just everything.  And I was surprised at what I found and was able to work much of what I learned into Bernadette’s story.

Indeed, I learned a great deal while writing my novel . . . a great deal about Navajo and Apache cultures—about lifeways and customs and, yes, about witches.  It is curious to me to find that now, having written about the things I learned, that they are, in the main, gone from my memory.  It is as though all those things that I absorbed in the months of reading and study are a part of the novel.  I read the treatises on Navajo witchcraft, to be sure, and thinking about those scholarly works I tried to write a novel that was/is accessible, interesting, and above all, true.  The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is a novel, but it is, at the same time, true.

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Dogs in Mexico

7/21/2013

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At the end of the last century, we lived for three years in central Mexico, in a fine house that we rented located in the Colonia Estacion on the outskirts of San Miguel de Allende, in the state of Guanajuato.
PictureOur House on Callejon del Perro
The single-lane dirt road—and it was no more than a path, really—that dead-ended between our house and the tracks was called Callejón del Perro—Alley of the Dog.  At least this was what some people called it—it appeared on no street map that we ever saw, and local people seemed always to laugh when we told them our address.  (Once, when an official from Hacienda—that’s the sort of Mexican equivalent of the IRS—came by to verify that Elaine lived at this house when she had applied for permission to sell her artwork in the country, the official told us that she had asked several people in the neighborhood where she might find Callejón del Perro and that no one seemed to have heard of it.  She did add, however, that when she tried a different tactic and asked if they knew where the extranjeros [foreigners] lived, our house was immediately pointed out—like I said, we were pretty obvious around here.)

And you may be certain that there were dogs on Callejón del Perro--you probably already know that in Spanish, the very term for a stray dog is “perro callejero.”

One can’t help but notice the dogs in Mexico.  Malcolm Lowry, in his classic and powerful novel, Under the Volcano—considered by me and many others to be the most accurate novel about Mexico yet written by a foreigner—makes much of what he terms the “pariah dogs” of Mexico.  (Pariah being the term for the lowest castes of society or any outcast—although curiously, Lowry chose not to use the Spanish spelling of the word: paria.)  In fact, the pariah dogs may be said to occupy a symbolic position equally as important to that fine novel as does the volcano of its title.  Early in the book, the drunken Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, is shadowed by these unfortunate and horrid beasts—the last sentence of Chapter 2, when Geoffrey and Yvonne return to their house on Calle Nicaragua, reads: “A hideous pariah dog followed them in”—and then, when the Consul has been finally murdered and thrown into the deep barranca, Lowry punctuates his dark novel with this last sentence:

“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”

And it wasn’t just Malcolm Lowry, either.  I can recall many years ago reading D. H. Lawrence’s disturbing (to me) account of being in the public market in Oaxaca and seeing a dead dog lying in the aisle and describing how the people simply stepped over the carcass as they went on about their business.  That image made a powerful impression on me and it has stayed with me for all these years.  And while I have never yet seen such a thing in a public market, I have seen a dead dog on a cobblestone sidewalk in San Miguel and watched as passersby stepped over or around the fly-blown creature.

The dogs in Mexico interest me a great deal.  I cannot count the times I have sat on a park bench in some Mexican zócalo and watched as these canine beggars and thieves and con-artists went about their daily struggle to survive in a country where it’s tough going for a good many of the people, never mind the dogs.  I’ve watched while two or three mutts sat quietly and patiently begging as an old peasant man squatted on the curb and ate his noonday tortillas and tiny bits of meat—watched fascinated as the old man, no doubt feeling the hunger that those dogs felt more sharply than I ever could, tossed the tiniest of morsels to the animals, each of whom took his share and then—as if he knew this was to be his share and there would be no more—walked away in search of some other benefactor.

And I’ve seen bitches with teats nearly dragging the ground—dragging not because they were swollen with milk, you understand, but rather because they were so flaccid and empty—bitches that were so emaciated I couldn’t imagine how it was they were able even to look for food for themselves much less to muster the will to try and care for puppies.

And dogs with sores and mange and abscesses cowering around street vendors’ stands snatching whatever might fall to the ground.  And miserable animals in packs of upwards of fifteen or twenty because a lone female is in heat and the urge to mate has overcome even that to eat . . . the normally timid males snarling savagely at one another, the exhausted bitch panting and glassy-eyed, searching frantically I imagine for some escape from this dusty mob of suitors.

And dog shit.  In only one town in the United States—Bisbee, Arizona—and in one city in Europe—Paris—have I ever observed there to be so much dog shit on the sidewalks as there is in San Miguel de Allende.  (I had a Parisian acquaintance once—he was associated in some way that I never understood with the French publisher that had translated my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, and claimed, with all the authority at which the French are so practiced, to have been legally adopted into the White Mountain Apache tribe in central Arizona and in fact to be the only French medicine man in that particular tribe—who assured me that it’s good luck if you step in “zee dog doo-doo” [his phrase, by the way] with your right foot . . . bad luck if it’s with your left.  I don’t know, I personally prefer avoiding the stuff altogether, but then maybe I’m just overly fastidious, or else a poor sport.)

Not all of the dogs in Mexico are of this pathetic pariah class, of course.  There are in Mexico, it seems to me, mainly two classes of people—the relatively well-off and the miserably poor.  And so it is with their dogs.  There are those dogs who roam the streets and alleys in search of a handout and then there are those who live in and on the homes of the more well-to-do.  These latter are working animals, if you will, whose duty it is to keep the poorer classes away from the properties of the more privileged.  Like the shards of broken glass embedded in cement along the tops of walls as a jagged barrier to any who might think to climb over, there are in Mexico watchdogs who live out their lives on the verandahs and flat rooftops of homes and businesses.  Better to risk a nasty cut on a broken beer bottle than to brave a climb only to be greeted by some snarling Doberman or Rottweiler.

On Callejón del Perro there were always two or three dogs—at the very least.  Medium-sized, yellow or mottled brown, mostly. (I’m reminded that Jim Harrison, in his stunningly fine novel, The Road Home, puts forth the proposition that, left to their own devices, all dogs would eventually be brown and medium-sized.)  And they were nearly always mangy and dusty, these dogs on Callejón del Perro, oftentimes with patches of black grease from where they had crawled up under the rail cars parked on the sidings to escape the burning sun, there to sleep or to lick themselves and snap at the persistently buzzing flies.

I do not mean for you to suppose that the dogs around our house were in any way common, however.  We have known several remarkable dogs on Callejón del Perro.  When we first moved there we soon noticed that there are two older males who lived across from us—Elaine called them Vagabundo Uno and Vagabundo Dos, I did not know which was which.  They were stand-offish but seemed well-fed and happy.  Their principal duty, it seemed to me—one which they carried out with great enthusiasm—was to keep strays away from the seven identical doors of the railroad workers’ quarters directly across the tracks.

Far from stand-offish was the comically short-legged, wiry-haired little female who usually wore a brown leather collar.  She seemed to live (or at least hang out) at the place next door.  She barked at us the first few times we drove or walked past her doorway, but soon came to see that we were neighbors and would always come wagging over for a few pats whenever she saw us.  She had an old scar on her side from what had clearly been a nasty wound, but because she didn’t seem like a young dog or an adult who’d had pups, we just assumed that she was the pet of the women who occupied the small house nearest our own (they fed her regularly, after all) and that she had most likely been spayed.  The young girls next door told us that her name was Muñeca—“doll.”

Another special dog was an inevitably dusty, medium-sized female who was very simply as sweet as a dog could be said to be.  She always walked with her head cocked to one side as though she had a stiff neck.  She often slept under our truck and would come over to greet us whenever we would open our front door.  Elaine took to calling her “Blondie” and was understandably surprised when later she asked the old woman at the tienda what the sore-necked dog was called and was told that her name was “Blondie.”

Several months after we moved there, we noticed that Muñeca was getting rounder.  Sure enough, she whelped a litter of pups soon after that.  And then, within a matter of days, Muñeca and Blondie and all the new pups were gone—disappeared.  Gone to the perrera, the girls next door told us—Mexico’s version of the dog pound.  For Elaine and me it was terribly sad.  While we felt we could not adopt yet another dog—our two were more than we could reasonably manage—we certainly would have paid for Muñeca and Blondie to be spayed.  In fact, we had spoken of approaching the neighbors about doing exactly that when Muñeca had her pups.

We were too late.  But after that we knew and loved funny little MonoCola (Monkey Tail), and handsome young Ojitos (Sweet Eyes), and three-legged Milagrosa (Miraculous).  When we didn’t see MonoCola for several days, María asked at the vivero nearby where we’d often seen him playing with the workers—they said that he had died.  It was a hard life there, but we have no doubt there’ll always be dogs on Callejón del Perro.



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From Rodeo Clown to Lawyer

7/11/2013

3 Comments

 
Those who have attended closely so far have no doubt figured out that my friend the Texas lawyer Kirk Purcell had—maybe he’s matured with the passage of time—a wicked sense of humor.  (I mean, the fact that he was once a Rodeo Clown tells you something about the man.)  A sense of humor that I found appealing.  For example, Kirk would write long letters to celebrities in which he would, as the saying goes, piss on their shoes while he told them it was raining.  The thing is, these folks would, apparently, think he was on the up and up and write him back (or else at least have their minions fulfill his usual request for an autographed photograph).  Understand, this was before celebrity stalking had become so common, so I guess it just was a more trusting time.  I have personally seen letters to and from Norman Mailer (Purcell offered to stage a grudge no-holds-barred wrestling match between Mailer and Gore Vidal), Alabama Governor George Wallace (Purcell asked if it was okay to name his son after the Governor), Gerald Ford, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and Anita Bryant.  I remember seeing correspondence between Purcell and Pat Boone.  Boone was the white buck wearing singer/movie star who was wholesome almost to a fault.  Purcell wrote him fan letters that were, to my mind, transparently tongue-in-cheek, and Boone responded.  There were letters sent to Richard Nixon—“the only president I’ll ever have.”

Picture
The Lawyer Kirk Purcell
Purcell’s stage and letter-writing persona was that of the Reverend Billy Joe Bob $weeney, spiritual leader of the “Anti-UnAmericanism Crusade” whose motto was “Always Grab a Republican by the Neck.”  He once wrote to Ugandan President (and despot) Idi Amin telling him that the Anti-UnAmericanism Crusade had named him “The Crusade’s Honorary American of 1978” and had named a grocery store after him “in recognition of your many accomplishments as a military leader, statesman, and race car driver.”

And I once read a short biographical blurb on Purcell which described him as leaning “to the left politically, and to the right when he dances.”

I haven't been in touch with him in years.  I hope Kirk’s well and happy and prosperous and that he’s allowed to move about unsupervised.

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