Читать книгу Native Tributes - Gerald Vizenor - Страница 8

‹| 2 |›

DIVA MONGRELS

Dummy carried two puppets with perfectly carved birch faces in the wide sleeve pockets of her smock that afternoon at the Ogema Train Station. The names of the diva puppets, Geraldine Farrar and Alma Gluck, were world famous sopranos of the New York Metropolitan Opera. The great mouths of the sopranos were painted bright red, and each puppet wore a dark blue turban. The Farrar puppet was fashioned with embroidered crimson images of the cross and crown on the border of a stained altar cloth. Gluck wore a silk chiffon gown with a gold metallic floral weave that was tailored from a remnant of exotic cloth delivered some twenty years earlier by the old trader, Odysseus.

Odysseus traded fabrics, absinthe, and peyote.

Dummy raised Alma Gluck to her breasts and with hand motions and silent facial gestures directed Miinan, the great blue mongrel singer, to moan, groan, and bay a worthy version of “Old Black Joe,” the popular parlor song written by Stephen Foster.

Salo, in spite of his resistance to puppets, returned to the circle to watch the silent hand gestures and hear the marvelous mongrel bel canto arias and recitals. Miinan raised her blue furry head, turned to the side, and wailed the detectable sounds of two words, “heart” and “gone,” and the other words of the spiritual were so familiar to the audience that the blue mongrel actually seemed to chant the first four lines of the woeful song.

Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,

Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,

Gone from the earth to a better land I know,

I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”

Salo, By Now Beaulieu, the priest, the federal agent, the medical doctor, my brother, and more than twenty natives and others at the Blue Ravens Exhibition that afternoon joined the mongrels and sang the chorus with reverence, I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low: I hear those gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” The station singers were melancholy at the end of the song, and praised the passion of the blue mongrel and the puppet named Alma Gluck.

Dummy puckered her eyebrow, as usual, and then bowed twice with the gorgeous hand puppet. The golden flowers on the chiffon gown shimmered in the sunlight. Miinan wagged her blue bushy tail, raised one paw, and bayed. The Ice Woman was outshined by the spiritual song and turned away. The Niinag Trickster never missed a chance to posture, and saluted the soprano three times with his giant wooden penis.

Salo turned his back on the trickster.

Queena, the second diva mongrel, a basset hound and golden retriever mongrel, circled the station agent with heavy ears and a steady slaver, and then she waited with absolute composure for the hand puppet gestures to start the second concert that afternoon at the train station. Geraldine Farrar, always the prima donna in the tease and grace of an embroidered altar cloth, emerged from a wide pocket on cue with a slight whisper, and then the station audience heard a steady mongrel croon of the nostalgic song “Long, Long Ago” written almost a century earlier by Thomas Haynes Bayly.

Tell me the tales that to me were so dear

Long, long ago, long, long ago

Sing me the songs I delighted to hear

Long, long ago, long ago.

Queena waved her ears and puckered to moan the refrain “long, long,” and then muted a melodic bark of the single word “ago” in the song. Her spirit and voice were gentle, sentimental, an operatic mood that was characteristic of some reservation mongrels. The tones were cozy, and with heavy whispers, a natural repose of the basset hounds. Queena was the great diva voice of the hand puppets, and once or twice a week she rehearsed the repertoire of puppet shows and songs on the shores of Spirit Lake.

Queena was a direct descendant of a celebrated mission hound at Saint Columba’s Episcopal Church on the White Earth Reservation. The Episcopal vicar erected a cattle fence but could not contain with wire or any churchy favors the spirited basset hound, and the consequences a decade later were houndy mongrels, the natural union of untold golden retrievers, spaniels, terriers, pointers, beagles, bulldogs, and showy empire chow chows. That communion of particular brands, breeds, and native couriers created a truly marvelous natural selection of clever mongrels, and most majestic was the hand puppet singer. The godly missions were obviously more memorable and enlightened with the reservation match and breed of hounds and mongrels than with overnight conversions, salvation, and the stale bait of monotheism and bloodline assimilation of natives.

Dummy listened to recorded opera and popular music on a Silvertone hand crank record player that she ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Company. She was the only native on the reservation who recognized the names of great operas and distinctive sopranos. Every day she cranked the old phonograph to hear recorded music. Hand cranked because electricity was never connected to the Manidoo Mansion on the southwest shore of Spirit Lake. She heated the shack with wood fires, cooked on a cast iron stove, lighted a corner with kerosene, and listened to great sopranos in the steady glow of a single flat wick Aladdin Mantel Lamp.

Miinan and Queena, the diva mongrels, watched and remembered the hand gestures of the puppets and the puffy cheeks of the maestro, and practiced the sounds of the songs in front of the phonograph. Alma Gluck and Geraldine Farrar recorded hundreds of arias and popular songs on Victrola records by the Victor Talking Machine Company. The mongrels were captivated several times a week with the voices of great recorded operas, but the complexities of the music, coloratura sopranos, lyrical timbre, trills, tease and pitch, were beyond the range of the mongrels and the two divas of puppetry, such as the heady sopranos in Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini, Carmen by Georges Bizet, La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, and, of course, The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Snatch nosed the soprano voices in the air but never whimpered or sang for meals. The divas were teased with treats, the same tasty deer joints and knuckles that the other mongrels were given after a special service. Native hunters once teased the retriever mongrels with treats, the very same practices of tricksters, truth storiers, and shamans.

The five mongrels heard the voices of Gluck, Farrar, Ninon Vallin, Mary Lewis, Lucrezia Bori, and Marion Talley, and at least once a night the unwound phonograph slowed the sound of the opera music and the mongrels mocked the weary and dreary recorded soprano voices with moans and poky bays.

Dummy was a shaman of the puppets.

Silvertone radios soon replaced the old phonographs, and the new machines cost about thirty dollars at the time from Sears, Roebuck and Company. Spirit Lake remained a hand crank culture without electrical power, and the radio broadcast of the long count fight of Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney at Soldier Field in Chicago, and the coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s flight from Long Island to France in the Spirit of Saint Louis were never heard by the silent puppeteer and five mongrels in the ruins of the white pine. The once recorded operas were soon broadcast on weekends across the country, but the magic of radios would never overcome the marvelously direct sound of music on the trusty hand crank phonographs.

The Metropolitan Opera broadcast the first radio opera, Hänsel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck, on Christmas Day 1931. The opera could be heard on shortwave transmission, the Red and Blue Networks of the National Broadcasting Company, and on radio stations around the country. That first broadcast became a series of matinee operas on radio every Saturday.

Dummy was determined to hear the matinee opera on radio and persuaded John Leecy, with diva puppet hand gestures, to sponsor the first radio opera broadcast in the dining room of the Leecy Hotel. He owned one of the best radios, and the deserted hotel was the perfect place on the reservation to stage the first broadcast of the grand opera.

Messy Fairbanks, once the chef de cuisine at the hotel, was summoned from her home at Pine Point to prepare and serve dinner at the end of the radio opera. She had retired when the hotel closed but returned to prepare a sumptuous dinner, lapin aux pruneaux en cocotte, or rabbit stew with a marinade of fruity red wine, carrots, and onions, baked in casseroles with prunes, chicken broth, crushed cloves, and decorated with parsley.

The Jesuit missioner discreetly provided the red altar wine for the marinade, and the tasty, tender rabbit was served in carved wooden bowls. Dark beer, a secret home brew from a disguised brewery in the abandoned Motion Picture Theater, was served despite the obvious double prohibitions of the Eighteenth Amendment and the White Earth Reservation.

John Leecy and Messy had honored the native veterans of the First World War with the Banquet Français. The Leecy Hotel was fully booked at the end of the war, and the French cookery was known by hundreds of visitors who had arrived by train, many staying overnight for the delicious meals prepared by Messy. The stories of that great dinner at the end of the war, more than a decade ago, have become more spirited with recounting, and on that occasion we were two worried veterans, tormented with night terrors of combat, and at the same time we were teased and put right by the best healers on the reservation.

Odysseus, the trader, Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, publisher of the Tomahawk, Catherine Heady, the precise government schoolteacher, Damon Mendor, the only medical doctor at the White Earth Hospital, and the Benedictine mission priest, Aloysius Hermanutz, kindly diverted my brother, my cousin Lawrence, our close friend Patch Zhimaaganish, and me with praise and glory stories.

Misaabe and his tender mongrel healers Mona Lisa, Nosey, and Ghost Moth, transmuted the night terrors into the natural motion of dreams and visual memories, and restored the natural rift and fault of sounds. Memories of the Banquet Français, French wine, absinthe, and stories of war, literature, blue ravens, and the mighty mongrel healers, were resumed with the radio broadcast of Hänsel und Gretel that afternoon at the Leecy Hotel.

The Niinag Trickster was an erotic healer.

The matinee radio event was held in the hotel dining room with chairs placed in two curved rows. Some visitors had arrived from Pine Point, Callaway, and Naytahwaush, and the local guests gathered around the Silvertone radio console with the government teachers, the federal agent, the priest, and a vicar. John Leecy turned the gold dial, and tuned the green eye to the station.

Milton Cross introduced the story of the opera in a clear and evocative tone of voice. He praised the sopranos, and then actually escorted the radio audience, and our good company at the hotel, into the theater, describing the hush as the lights were dimmed, and the slow rise of the great gold curtains. We heard the soprano Queena Mario as Gretel and Editha Fleischer as Hänsel in the glorious matinee broadcast of the opera. Dorothea Flexer sang the fairy tale scenes of the Sandman, and the gorgeous soprano Pearl Besuner was the Dew Fairy.

The radio sound was clear but not as vital or perfectly pitched as the phonograph records of the opera sopranos. The transmission waves distorted the sounds, the sopranos wavered, but the static on records was steady. Miinan and Queena, the diva mongrels, were allowed to sit at the side of the dining room during the broadcast, and only once Queena raised her golden head and softly bayed in harmony with the well known opera scenes. The audience responded with easy laughter and then applauded the lovely mongrel rendition. The Metropolitan Opera was truly honored that night with the great cuisine at the Leecy Hotel.

The Niinag Trickster was reserved at the opera.

Dummy and the five mongrels were rescued from poverty and boredom by the hand puppets, and only the backward priests and adverse federal agents resisted the obvious spectacle and tricky parodies the puppets delivered to natives. She created puppets that had a greater sense of presence and character than the agents of the church and state. Only once the nuns invited the mongrels and puppets to stage a show at the mission school. The students were dazzled with the bouncy motion of the puppets and moved closer to imitate their gestures, and to mimic the chants, light moans, and sweet bays of the mongrels.

The mission students bounced with the puppets.

Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu, my brother, painted his first distinctive blue ravens on newsprint more than thirty years ago at the Ogema Train Station. That summer we waited for the passengers to arrive on two daily trains, and sold copies of the Tomahawk, the first independent weekly newspaper on the White Earth Reservation. I wrote my first stories that summer, the creative imitations of national and international news reports, and my brother created incredible scenes of enormous blue ravens perched on the trains, huge shadows of wings over the state bank, over the hospital, mission, and over the livery at the Leecy Hotel. Our uncle was the publisher of the newspaper, and we were paid for the sale of each copy.

The Ogema Station was always a place of quirky stories, imagination, adventure and irony. We pretended many times to board the trains to destinations outside the reservation, Winnipeg, Chicago, and once our uncle bought tickets for us to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art. We were fourteen years old that summer, and named the tiny farm towns down to the enormous train terminal on the great Mississippi River. Eight years later we were mustered with our cousins and more than forty other natives to serve as combat infantry soldiers in the bloody First World War in France. The station had become a touchstone of original art by my brother, and my first written stories, and no one ever forgot that last poignant ceremony on the platform when native soldiers returned from the war with no certainty of citizenship. Nurse By Now returned from the Hindenburg Line with stories of wounded farm boys and her steady mount named Black Jack. The French truly honored us more than the government of the United States, and for that reason we enlisted in the Bonus Expeditionary Force and marched with thousands of other combat veterans at the Capitol in Washington.

Aloysius, my brother, became a distinguished native painter and his abstract blue ravens have been exhibited in Paris, Berlin, and Ogema. His original totemic fauvism, or abstract expressionism of watercolors and broken features of humans and ravens, started at the end of the war. The distortions, visual tone, and crash of colors were inspired mostly by the paintings of Marc Chagall and the elusive Chaïm Soutine. We had met these great artists in Paris.

My best stories started with our experience as combat soldiers, and later revealed the wonder, excitement, and uncertainty of expressionistic art and surreal literature in Paris after the bloody ruins of empire war, the low roads of enlightenment, and the deceits and swindles of civilization. My stories were published first in weekly issues of the Tomahawk and later as an edited collection in a newspaper magazine, The Paris Fur Trade by Basile Hudon Beaulieu. My brother and the other veterans on the reservation first nicknamed me the Furrier and later the Teaser. Furrier described the trade of words in my stories, and Teaser the play of scenes and characters.

Dummy and the two puppets, and many other natives, were at the station that spring to stand with veterans and to honor the memory of native casualties in the First World War. My brother painted bold abstract blue ravens in brutal war scenes for every native soldier and nurse who had served in the war. The totemic fauvist portrayals at the exhibition first appeared chaotic, fractured images of once familiar shapes and faces, frowns and smiles, and my brother refused, as usual, to explain the extreme forms and features compared to his earlier portrayals of blue ravens, those spectacular waves of blue ravens in various states of necessary rage, and with mighty claws and bold shadows over scenes of war and the reservation. Totemic Fauvism: Faces of Blue Raven Veterans was the first exhibition of art at the train station, and the original watercolors were only for sale to support native veterans on the reservation.

My brother had become a well known artist, but the market on the reservation for abstract expressionism and mainly his style of totemic fauvism was imaginary at best, and the actual market for expressionistic art of any kind was truly inconceivable for anyone but the very rich during the Great Depression. We were native veterans, an artist and a writer, with no chance of work or income on the reservation, and yet we were not authorized to leave without permission from a federal agent. The policy of consent was seldom enforced, a cruel irony of civilization and democracy. We created with paint and literary scenes an aesthetic liberty, but never pretended to be better than other natives or veterans. Yet we had original scenes and stories to deliver, truth stories of a totemic union of native memory and art. Nothing was more relevant at the time than a book, a painting, and the marvelous hand puppets.

Federal policies were withered promises.

The obvious burdens of the Great Depression were overcome with the spirited motion of the Ice Woman and Niinag Trickster, and several other puppets that my brother created later at the Bonus March in Washington.

The White Earth Reservation has always been at risk, because the separation of natives on federal exclaves was never intended to encourage enterprise, to nurture curiosity, creative art, music, or literature, or to plainly advance the principles of justice and liberty. The nasty exclaves were contrived to exploit natural resources at the crude expense of native totemic rights, but these predictable deceptions actually gave rise to resistance and the steady subversion of federal policies.

The natives were dirt poor, several timber companies had cut down most of the white pine, and the beaver and other totemic animals had been decimated in the fur trade. The great comedown of the national economy and the untold breadlines turned the cities into new reservations without the tease of treaties. Only the memories of bloody war scenes changed our art, not the ironies of poverty. The older men on the reservation were marginal trappers, and yet native families were steadfast and supported the soldiers with the purchase of Liberty Bonds. Native women who were too poor to buy bonds packed war bandages, and the rate of native combat casualties was much higher than that of any other order of soldiers in the First World War. More than the Germans, more than the French, more than the British, but not more than the high casualties of the colonial soldiers from Asia and Africa, and never more casualties than the African American soldiers who served in combat with the mighty Harlem Hellfighters.

Native veterans, my mother, and thousands of other natives on reservations and in cities were flat broke at the end of the war, destitute ten years later, and the apathetic federal government delayed the repayment of the bond money and dickered with the bonus money promised to veterans of the war. President Herbert Hoover vetoed the whole bonus for veterans and at the same time favored the rich, especially the millionaire and financier Andrew Mellon, the United States secretary of the treasury. The rich became even richer during the war, and workers who stayed home were advanced with higher salaries at the same time that soldiers faced the horrors of mustard gas and heavy artillery in combat. The very same government that advertised national patriotism to recruit native soldiers, and then touted war bonds on reservations, carried out policies of separatism. Most natives who served were not recognized as citizens of the country. Later, the abuse of veterans and the veto of the bonus by the president became the incentive to muster the Bonus Expeditionary Force, a great bond of memories, truth stories, and soldiery unions of culture, race, and liberty.

The union of veterans defied the politics of race.

Hermann Everhart, a retired bank president, one of the prosperous heirs of the war, proposed to purchase forty of the abstract blue ravens for an unnamed collector of native art through a gallery in Berlin, but the banker turned down the three abstract paintings that represented with names the native women from the reservation who had served in the First World War.

Blue Raven shunned the elegant banker that afternoon at the station and refused to accept the specific offer because it dishonored our cousins and the others. By Now served as a nurse and treated combat wounds on the Hindenburg Line. Ellanora Beaulieu enlisted as a nurse and was assigned to the American Army of Occupation in Germany. She served in a hospital, healed the enemy soldiers, and then she died of influenza in the same hospital. The painting in her name showed an enormous detached shadow of her broken face as a blue raven in flight over an ambulance and razed landscape, with heavy traces of rouge on the feathers. The blue shadow reached beyond the deckle edge of the paper, the features of a raven and human with no boundaries.

Everhart expressed his regret for the slight of native nurses, doubled the purchase price, and accepted the entire collection of original blue raven portrayals. He obviously was ready to pay more because he traveled with a wooden crate to transport the art. The abstract totemic paintings were packed and shipped by train to New York, then by a slow boat to Europe, and delivered to a gallery in Berlin, Germany.