Читать книгу Blue Ravens - Gerald Vizenor - Страница 9

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GATEWAY PARK

— — — — — — — 1909 — — — — — — —

The Soo Line train arrived on schedule that afternoon and we boarded as passengers on our first adventure south to the great city of Minneapolis. Augustus bought our tickets as he had promised a year earlier. We were dedicated to the promotion of the newspaper during the year and that pleased him more than our hurried mission as painters. The white paint had already started to blister and crack on the sunny side of the newspaper building.

Augustus emerged from the steam of the engine, a great man on our reservation, and gave me a brown envelope with money for the hotel and other expenses on the journey. Aloysius was given a new book of art paper. He touched the smooth white paper, and then we both hugged our uncle on the steamy platform. We were about to leave the reservation for the first time and without permission of the federal agency regime.

Honoré, our father, had not been home for more than three weeks. He was cutting timber near Bad Medicine Lake. Our uncle told us not to worry, because no agent would dare to confront him or anyone in our family about government permission to leave the reservation. He had shunned the authority of the federal agent and every agent since the federal court had decided in favor of the constitutional right to publish the Progress. Augustus would never solicit favors or permission from any agent of the government to leave the reservation.

Margaret, our mother, our uncle, Patch Zhimaaganish, the eager soldier and conductor, and the station agent and his wife were there to wave as the engine slowly pulled away from the station. My heart beat faster with the mighty thrust of the engine. Aloysius convinced our mother that we must present the original totemic paintings of blue ravens to curators at art museums and galleries in Minneapolis.

Patch saluted and then he removed his gray gloves and waved until his hand vanished in the distance. Suddenly we realized that our friend, the good soldier, should have joined us on the train to the city. That would not happen, however, for another nine years, when we were drafted at the same time to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces in France.

We packed thirty folded copies of the Tomahawk to hawk at stations on the way, but the tout and trade was reversed. The sound of the engine and the whistle was the same but every station was an adventure. We left the train for a few minutes at each station rather than board the passenger car to promote the newspaper and the Hotel Leecy on the White Earth Reservation.

I sold only five copies in one direction and twelve copies on our return to the Ogema Station. Aloysius painted blue ravens in scenes at every station, blue ravens with beaks under wing, and with great feathers that shrouded the passengers.

The Soo Line Railroad stopped at stations in Callaway, Detroit Lakes, Vergas, Ottertail, Henning, Parkers Prairie, Alexandria, Glenwood, Eden Valley, Kimball, Annandale, Maple Lake, Buffalo, and other towns without stations. We remembered every town on the railroad line, and we announced the street names and counted every house and building as the train approached the Milwaukee Road Depot in Minneapolis.

Eden Valley and other country towns moved slowly through the windows of the passenger car, one by one, surrounded by farms. The towns were built by migrants and fugitives from other worlds of stone and monarchies.

Chicago, our uncle said, was built twice with white pine trees cut down from our reservation, and we wondered at the time about the timber that built the houses in Minneapolis. We were native migrants in the same new world that had created the timber ruins of the White Earth Reservation.

The slow and steady motion of the train created our private window scenes, woody, churchy, junky, curious domains, and yet the steady rows of the newcomer towns were treacherous. Aloysius painted giant blue ravens perched on white pine stumps, beaks agape, and tiny houses decorated with bright blue leaves afloat in the pale sky. We were eager captives in the motion and excitement of railroad time. We sat first in window seats that faced the motion of the train through the late summer woodland

and towns. Later we moved to the opposite seats and watched the new world pass slowly with the steam and smoke behind the train. We decided then that we would rather be in the motion of adventure, chance, and the future.

The Mississippi River rushed with great energy and memory over Saint Anthony Falls and created a spectacular spirit world of mist and light around the many flour and lumber mills near the Milwaukee Road Depot. The waterfall spirits had started out as a cold trickle at the source of the Great River and months later became a misty light in the city.

The riverfront was overrun with railroad tracks, engines, and boxcars. We had never seen so many railroad tracks and engines in one place. The engine smoke and coal power of the mills poisoned the air and the river. The gichiziibi, the great native river at the headwaters in Lake Itasca, became a hazy and murky shame of greedy commerce in the cities.

Blue ravens were hard to imagine in the heat, smoke, and commotion. Only my words could describe our adventures, the roar of machines and deadly scenes on the riverfront, a spectacle no native totem, animal, fish, or bird could easily survive. I wrote about our first experiences on the river, and my report was published a few months later in the Tomahawk.

Aloysius was inspired, however, by the majestic curves of the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River below Saint Anthony Falls. He painted a row of three blue ravens perched on the bridge with enormous wings raised to wave away the poison coal-fire smoke and hush the strange whine, clack, and other machine sounds along the river.

The Milwaukee Road Depot was enormous, a great mysterious cavern of massive railroad engines. The building was granite with a great tower. We were already transformed by the city, only thirty minutes after the train moved slowly through the alphabetical street names, and then into the sooty, smoky rows of warehouses and railroad tracks.

Indians, are you Indians?

The station agent asked about our reservation when we only wanted to check our bundle of newspapers. He was in uniform, pressed his hands on the counter, and examined our clothes. Our mother made new white shirts and dark trousers for our journey. My brother stared back at the man but refused to answer his question. Not a glare, but a stony stare, and the appropriate response to his inquiry. My brother waited for the agent to continue, and then turned away. We were natives on the road, traveling without permission of the federal government, and we had good reasons to worry that the station agent might notify the federal agents.

Augustus was our champion only on the reservation. He had visited the city many times, and he arranged for us to stay at a hotel managed by one of his close friends, but he could not protect us once we left the reservation.

The station agent leaned closer, over the counter.

No, we are artists on our way to the museum.

What museum?

The Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, said Aloysius. He had read about a collection of art in the new library. My brother showed the station agent several paintings of blue ravens perched at several stations between Ogema and the Milwaukee Road Depot.

Where is that?

North of Detroit Lakes.

No, the museum?

The Minneapolis Public Library, said Aloysius. The station agent tested our knowledge about the public collection of fine art that was located at the time in the city library.

Artsy books?

No, original art at the library. The station agent was wary, we were not old enough to be artists, and he had no conception of creative art. So, we told stories about the train stations and recent news reports in the Tomahawk.

What are these newspapers?

Our family newspaper, said Aloysius. The Tomahawk is owned by our uncle, Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, and we are hawking the newspaper to people in small towns, people who have never heard of international news.

No, not on a reservation, said the station agent. He turned away and refused to believe that natives could publish newspapers on reservations. Luckily there was no way to overcome his mistrust, so we told him that the newspaper was an experiment in the distribution of national news stories, an unusual investment by the bishops of the Episcopal Church in the newsy prospect of education, assimilation, and civilization. The choice was strategic, but even so the testy station agent might have been a Roman

Catholic.

Gateway Park near the train depot became the second scene of blue ravens in Minneapolis. That afternoon the sun shimmered in the perfect rows of pruned trees. Aloysius painted several abstract ravens over the pavilion, one enormous blue beak above the arcade and classical colonnades on each side of the entrance. We had never seen so many warehouses, so many motor cars, electric streetcars, horses, carriages, and so many great stone and brick buildings.

The Minneapolis Police arrived on patrol wagons drawn by horses. Two were parked near the construction site of the new Radisson Hotel. Every major street was obstructed with carriages and motor cars. The Model T Ford was the most common, of course, but there were cars that we had never seen on the reservation, such as the Pierce Arrow, Stanley, Hudson, and the practical Mason Delivery Wagon.

Commission Row, the center of wholesale groceries, vegetables, fruits, and perishables, was one of the few quiet places in the city that afternoon. The white and brown horses were harnessed to empty wagons. The deliveries were done and the horses were waiting to return to the stable.

Nicollet House, an old hotel with four stories, was across the street directly behind the park pavilion on Washington and Nicollet avenues. The entrance was spacious and shabby, and it was the first time we had ever been in a grand hotel lobby. Many dignitaries had stayed there over the years, and we sat in the very same leather chairs as the ordinary and grandees. Oscar Wilde, the poet and playwright, who we later learned more about from a trader on the reservation, was pictured alone in the lobby. He posed for the photograph with long hair, and he wore a heavy fur-trimmed coat.

Oscar Wilde had lectured about decorative art at the Academy of Music near Nicollet House. The Tribune newspaper review of his lecture was framed and mounted near his photograph. “Ass-Thete” was the headline of the review dated March 16, 1882, thirteen years before we were born. The reviewer noted that Wilde was “flat and insipid,” and from “the time the speaker commenced to his closing sentence, he kept up the same unvarying endless drawl, without modulating his voice or making a single gesture, giving one the impression that he was a prize monkey wound up, and warranted to talk for an hour and a half without stopping.”

Actually, as we read, we thought his lecture was learned, more than a jerky vaudeville lecture. We could not understand at the time his traces of irony. Wilde lectured, for instance, “The truths of art cannot be taught. They are revealed only—revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by the study of and the worship of all beautiful things.” Reading the story for the first time at the hotel we understood only the first part of his lecture, “art cannot be taught.” Rather, and we agreed, art can be “revealed,” and that was an obvious description of the inspired blue ravens painted by my brother. Aloysius wanted to meet the great Oscar Wilde but he died when we were five years old.

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Minneapolis was a commercial center of great lumber and flour mills built on the shores of the river. Most of the lumber came directly from the reservations, White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake, and the grain was delivered by railroad from the plains. Our father was a lumberjack, a timber cutter for the agency mill on the reservation. Honoré continued to cut timber with older men because he could not survive in the new reservation communities. He was a calm and quiet man. The white pine was his natural destiny, not his investment or enterprise.

Aloysius created a blue raven totem in the timber ruins of the reservation. We were cosmopolitan natives by words, by preprinted stories in the Tomahawk. The city was our new world, but we were not worldly by experience. Yet we pretended to be cosmopolitan natives overnight on Hennepin Avenue.

Minneapolis, we learned later, had grown by more than a hundred thousand people in the past decade, a wealthy city of immigrants and newcomers. We were fourteen years old at the time and knew just about everyone in our reservation community. Our uncle was absolutely right that the mind and heart must change to live with so many people. The city was abstract but not aesthetic, rather a strange and exciting creature of fortune and politics. That summer the river city was an unwashed window after a storm, and a noisy scene in constant and unnatural motion.

Aloysius created the aesthetic scenes with blue ravens, the natural presence of great abstract totems. The city was no sanctuary or state of creation for traditional native totems, no natural site or marvelous estate for bears, wolves, plovers, migratory sandhill cranes, kingfishers, or even the stories of the ice woman.

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Hennepin Avenue was already famous for the great theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Every building, every hotel was impressive as we walked up Hennepin Avenue from Gateway Park past the Bijou Theater and the Pence Opera House that had been converted to a rooming house. We might have stayed there, but our uncle insisted that we stay at the more secure Waverly Hotel on Harmon Place near the Minneapolis Public Library.

Napa Valley Wine Company, located in the next block, had sold wine “continuously for the last twenty years.” We were too young to enter the establishment, so we read the advertisements in the window and pretended to be wine enthusiasts. “Our house is the only one in the wine and liquor line in the city catering to the family trade, which has no bar.”

Father Aloysius used sacramental wine at services in Saint Benedict’s Mission Church. Luckily one of our older cousins was an altar boy. He was obliged to share the taste of red church wine from the Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa Valley, California. We were rather conceited about the sacramental wine that was bottled in our family name. Naturally we used that coincidence, the relations of a surname wine, to our advantage when we first arrived as infantry soldiers in France.

Napa Valley Wine could be ordered by telephone, and that was very modern at the time. We knew about telephones because our relatives had established the first system in Callaway on the White Earth Reservation. Telephones were cosmopolitan at the time, but not the party line conversations. Simon Michelet, the contentious federal agent, ordered reservation telephone lines to the government schools in Mahnomen, Beaulieu, and Porterville. The Napa Valley Wine advertisement explained, “Ladies can visit our establishment as unconcernedly as any dry goods store.”

Early the next morning we visited the three great dry goods stores on nearby Nicollet Avenue. Aloysius was inspired by the fortune and display of clothing in the stores, the great bay windows, and naturally he painted blue ravens in every display window of Dayton’s Dry Goods Company, Donaldson’s Glass Block, and down a few blocks at Powers Mercantile Company. We did not have enough money to buy anything, not even a paper napkin or a handkerchief, but we tried on shirts, coats, hats, and my brother painted me as a grandee in an enormous raincoat. The black sleeves became great blue wings that reached over the counters. The blonde clerk waved her hands and told us to leave, but when she saw the painting by my brother she was much more friendly. Aloysius painted the woman in a fedora and a brim of blue raven feathers over a train of light blue hair.

Aloysius paused at his reflection in every window.

The West Hotel was a great cruise liner afloat on a sea of shiny cobblestones, and surrounded by new theater buildings on Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street. The Masonic Temple, a secret mountain of sandstone with decorative carved emblems, was only a block away. As the streetcars turned the corner in front of the hotel the trolley wheels sparked, a magical ritual at the foyer of the hotel.

The doorman was courteous, raised his hand and inquired about our business in the hotel. We were young, native, and not properly dressed for the entrance, but we were not skanky. Aloysius told the doorman that our uncle was the publisher of a newspaper, and then announced that we were there to paint blue ravens.

What is the name of the newspaper?

The Tomahawk.

Surely not a newspaper?

Yes, and with international news.

How the world changes.

We only want to see the hotel lobby.

The West Hotel lobby was luxurious and lighted by an atrium. The blue settees inspired my brother to paint blue ravens in every cushy seat, claws crossed as moneyed gentlemen, and disheveled wing feathers spread wide over the padded backs and arms, and across the marble floor of the huge lobby.

Rich ravens in shiny blue shoes.

Mark Twain, the great writer, had stayed at the West Hotel on July 23, 1895, in the same year that we were born on the White Earth Reservation. In a leather-bound book near the registration counter we discovered photographs and news stories about his visit to Saint Paul, Duluth, and Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis Journal reported that he suffered from a carbuncle on his leg, and had declined the invitations of admirers to visit the Minneapolis Public Library and Minnehaha Falls. “To the casual observer, as he lay there, running his fingers through his long, curly locks, now almost gray, he was anything but a humorist. On the contrary, he appeared to be a gentleman of great gravity, a statesman or a man of vast business interests. The dark blue eyes are as clear as crystal and the keenest glances shoot from them whenever he speaks.” Twain entertained an enthusiastic audience for ninety minutes that night at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Mark Twain left traces of his marvelous irony in the grand lobby of the West Hotel, and surely he would have told memorable stories about native totems and blue ravens from the White Earth Reservation.

Aloysius painted blue ravens on streetcars, a conductor with blue wings, blue ravens in dance moves on the cobblestones in a rainstorm, and dark blue eyes reflected in the bay windows of the West Hotel.

Hennepin Avenue was crowded with streetcars, motor cars, and horse-drawn wagons and carriages. The sounds were strange, unnatural, strained machines, and engines so loud we could barely hear the most familiar sound of the steady clop clop clop of horses on the cobblestones. We walked past great stone buildings, theaters, and restaurants, on our way to the Waverly Hotel.

The Orpheum Theatre was a majestic dominion of murmurs, theatrical recitations, ironic pronouncements, acrobatics, the lively tease of vaudeville, and the memorable voices of great lectures and plays. The theater that late afternoon was empty but not lonely. No one was at the ticket window so we entered the great auditorium without a ticket or a story. Everywhere we could hear the rich and evocative voices of actors in the balconies, the secrets, shouts and moans in the cluttered dressing rooms backstage.

Aloysius declared the theater his second home of visions and fantasy. He selected a seat in the front row of a side balcony and painted blue ravens in a stage play. The ravens of the theater turned a wing and raised their beaks to the audience. The only real play we had ever seen was the shortened government-school production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

The Waverly Hotel rented rooms by the week, but the manager was a friend of our uncle so we paid only five dollars for two nights. “Electric lights, bath, and telephone” were advertised in theater programs and newspapers. The hotel was located near the public library.

We walked past several restaurants on the way to the hotel and later read the advertisements, “Superb Cuisine at Café Brunswick,” and “Schiek’s Café Restaurant,” but the menus were too expensive and ritzy. So, we ate meat, potatoes, and corn at a nearby cafeteria for students. That first night we lingered in the tiny lobby of the hotel and found a program of events scheduled earlier in the summer at the Orpheum Theatre. Aloysius imagined the grand performances from our special seats in a side balcony. The program listed matinee admission to the gallery for fifteen cents. We were two months too late for the performances.

“Scotch Thistle,” a musical program directed by Theodore Martin, was advertised in the May 1909 program of the Orpheum Circuit of Theatres. Miss Charlotte Parry and Company presented “The Comstock Mystery” that same month.

“Master Laddie Cliff,” featured in another program, was “England’s famous little Comedian and Grotesque Dancer.” Another program announced the “First American Tour of Three Sisters Athletas, Direct from New York Hippodrome.” The sisters were “Extraordinary Lady Gymnasts.” “The Kinodrome New and Interesting Motion Pictures” reported that the pictures were about a “Ring Leader” and a “Jealous Hubby.”

Naturally, we were excited to read the programs and would have attended every matinee performance. We were more interested in the Lady Gymnasts than the Kinodrome. The movies we saw on the reservation were trivial and flimsy. The stories in the movies were monotonous, more about agents than the ice women or the dance of the plovers.