by Brett Rutherford
Who is it who can tell me who I am? — King Lear
One tea-and-cookies Sunday, she had more time
to spend with me, the youngest son’s first child.
As I sat, lap full of Classic Comics,
grandmother Rutherford rummaged away
in the unseen kitchen. “Where? Where?” she asked.
Wood drawers slid. Cabinets squeaked open.
“Ah! Don’t slip away — I found it again.”
She cleared the tea table. “More, please!” I asked,
and held the tea cup out. She poured, I poised
the full teacup and watched the pot vanish
onto a sideboard. Then she placed before me
a bag, soft, suede, as tan as the oak leaves
that still clung rabidly to trees outside.
It was tied with a leather cord, cram-full
of objects that tumbled out. Small things first:
shiny white shells, water-worn bright agates,
black arrowheads, a bronze scrap verdigris’d,
a miscellany of seeds and pods, dried
leaves and petals long past the hint of hue.
“It’s like my rock collection!” I offered.
“Agates like that I get from Jacob’s Creek.”
She pushes that one aside, holds the black
arrowhead in the palm of her hand, “Sharp-
edged black glass, so good for arrows,” she said.
“That’s how my mother explained it.” She traced
the edge along her cheek. I shuddered then,
“Be careful! Obsidian! Volcanic
glass. I find it in the road-fill. Aztecs
used it to cut out hearts. Sharp as a saw,
a surgeon’s saw.” — “You know too much for ten.
Your teachers don’t understand you, I hear.
That’s why I can say things no one should know
’til they are old, and writing, far away.”
She reached into the bag, removed a doll,
an almost weightless thing of dried-out corn-husks.
It had a dress, blue-printed calico,
delicate red shoes, a beaded hat, braids
made of twisted corn-silk, blond white. Round head
was pulled tight with cloth, but hard as a stone —
no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth, no name
one could call it, or any name one wished.
“Boy: these are the things my mother left me.”
She left a long pause for that to sink in.
“Things that my mother’s mother left to her.
The family called themselves the Whites. Took her
in, a young girl, Indian braids and all.
No one was who they said they were: Stouffel
White was Christoph Weiss in Germany.
Henry White, the son whose big farm it was,
he spoke English, German when he had to.
Lots of children, hands to work and pray with,
one more was easy to take in. A lot
of Mingos from here were going West,
Senecas too, driven from New York state.
Many who could pass, already had names
from husbands and fathers and from Bibles,
and settled out in the hills and hollows.
Some had their children taken out to school,
some women married whites who didn’t want
an Indian man’s children, so gave them up.”
She went to the sideboard, a drawer pulled,
“Here” — a stern old woman in widow’s black —
“is how she looked when she came back to us.
I never called her anything but ‘Ma”;
she was ‘Mrs. Trader’ to the neighbors.
Ten years they had lived in Allegheny,
across the river from Pittsburgh, chairman
of some company board he was — died there
and she came on home. None of us did church
except for Christmas, and neither did she.
“You didn’t talk about being a Mingo.
It was bad enough when the first war came
to say the good White name was really Weiss.
But then she just told everyone: not White,
not Weiss, she was Indian, plain and true.
We laughed. She tried to change her clothing then,
bought beads and buttons and Indian scarves.
My husband was furious. Our children
were called names and ridiculed, but then
a thing of shame became a thing of pride.
One day she sat on the front porch with me.
She had this brown bag and the things in it.
“Sharp-edged black glass — this is good for arrows,”
she told me, as one by one she brought out
the rocks, the shells, the copper shard, this flint
she said came all the way from Michigan.
This from our fathers’ fathers, a bone thing
from a raccoon’s private parts, and magic.
She had a name for each thing, and a place,
all in her mish-mash Mingo-Delaware.
“Then came this doll, this doll without a face.
I never saw her cry but once, and this
was it. She didn’t let me pick it up,
just held it on her lap and said, “Listen.
Remember. My mother gave me this doll
the day she left me at the White farmhouse.
She’d be gone a while, she said, and I
must look at her face, then at the doll’s face,
then at her face and at the doll’s again,
till when I saw its emptiness I saw
her grieved face, her deep black eyes, her forced smile.
‘Just keep the doll with you till I return.’
The Whites were kind, and I worked hard.
Kept to myself and sang my own music.
When done with chores, and there were plenty,
I roamed in woods with the named animals
I knew from my mother’s teachings. Three girls
I played with, not quite as sisters. They scorned
my poor clothing, my stubborn braids. Ma White
took all my clothes one night and gave me a hand-
me-down dress and underclothes and new shoes.
I was less an outcast now. No Sunday
church for me, but we would play with our dolls.
Their dolls had porcelain faces, with bright eyes
and noses and ruby lips and blushes.
My doll — it had only my mother’s face
that only I could see, and I just smiled
as happy with my little one, as they
with theirs. Summers I’d play apart, out past
the last corn-rows where the deep woods began.
Mrs.White called me in, but I wouldn’t come.
I waited — one day each summer — she’d come.
A whippoorwill call in daytime, she’d come —
there’d be no embrace so wondrous, no eyes
so deep and dark and arrowed with sad tears,
nothing I wouldn’t labor through so long
as she came with basket and moccasins,
dried fruit and candied ginger, a handful
of found rocks and feathers and those agates
that looked like sunset paintings done on stone.
Up and down and across three states she went.
The old trails ran north-south and west-to-east:
Salt Lick Path to Braddock’s Camp; Braddock’s Road
white-written over Nemacolin’s Path.
She knew her way, scavenged and traded,
did God-knows-what to visit me each June.
Strawberry-time, I knew she’d be there
calling at the wood’s edge for her daughter.
Three years it went that way. I grew. Sisters
and cousins of the Whites tormented me
for my strange ways, weird songs, and for the doll
that had no face. At night they’d turn it round
so that it wouldn’t face the other dolls.
They said it gave their dolls bad dreams. I hid
it beneath my pillow, then in a box
where I feared it would suffocate. Ma White —
I could call her ‘Ma’ as long as the ‘White’
was attached to it like an apology —
came back from town one day with a present.
A doll it was, a newer, cleaner, bright
of eye, five-fingered, five-toed, black-haired and
silver-shoed princess. She’d put to shame the dolls
my sisters had nearly wrecked with playing.
Soon I prevailed at a porch tea-party,
where my doll, ‘Abigail’ now reigned supreme.
White sisters scowled, knowing no comeuppance
could come their way before the Christmas tree
restocked their dolls with the latest fashions.
My doll was lecturing her inferiors
on the new rules of the White doll order
when, from my corner of my eye, I saw,
between two cautiously-parted branches
what might, just might, have been my mother’s eyes.
I didn’t turn to look. Girl-chatter blocked
the call of the day-time whippoorwill, once.
Maybe twice I heard it, but didn’t go
to the wood’s edge where I always met her.
Then she was there, in full sight, eyes all wide
in a wordless ‘See me, daughter’ greeting.
And then. O my daughter, and then,
ashamed that my sisters might glimpse her,
sun-burnt and moccasin’d with her traders’
basket and pack — I turned back to my doll
and — I — pretended — not — to — see — her.”
“This is how my mother lost her mother.
She never saw her again. In this bag
she hid away the doll, the arrowheads,
stones, feathers, dried blossoms and raccoon bones.
No longer could she see her mother’s face
on the wrapped rock that was the corn-doll’s head.
“She hid who she was, until the time of remembering.”
[Revised May 2019]
Deeply moving!
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