by LeAnne Howe
Savage Conversations
Savage Conversations
LEANNE HOWE
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Minneapolis
2019
Copyright © 2019 by LeAnne Howe
Introduction © 2019 by Susan Power
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Howe, LeAnne, author.
Title: Savage conversations / LeAnne Howe ; with an introduction by Susan Power.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027629 (print) | LCCN 2018028476 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895408 | ISBN 9781566895316 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781566895408 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lincoln, Mary Todd, 1818–1882—Fiction. | Indians of North America—Fiction. | United States—History—1849–1877—Fiction. GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.O95 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.O95 S28 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027629
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Excerpts from Savage Conversations have appeared in
World Literature Today and on Literary Hub.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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For the enduring and courageous spirit of the Dakota people
CONTENTS
Introduction
Savage Conversations
Scene 1: They Speak of Dreams
Scene 2: A House Divided
Scene 3: An Uneasy Union
Notes
Funder Acknowledgments
The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
INTRODUCTION
Susan Power
LeAnne Howe was living and teaching in Illinois in 2008 as the state was on the cusp of celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s two hundredth birthday the following year. As scholars delved into well-traveled Lincoln archives in search of fresh perspectives on old stories, LeAnne was intrigued by all the fuss.
Being Native American in this country means often having a very different take on American history and historic figures generally accepted as national heroes. Just because they’re your heroes doesn’t make them automatically ours, since what benefited non-Native settlers was often dangerously harmful to indigenous communities. So from the very outset of her investigation, LeAnne’s analysis of Lincoln history was brilliantly original, innovative, and fascinating. She drew conclusions that were wildly different from those that came before, yet she made a good case for her astonishing insights. I was honored to take the journey with her, hear what new theories leaped to mind while she sorted through old papers and familiar stories. As she read biographies, letters, and diaries, she became increasingly interested in the former first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. Perhaps because Mary’s own story is compelling, perhaps because LeAnne is Choctaw—a tribal nation following matrilineal kinship ties that invest Choctaw women with enormous political power—LeAnne focused on this troubled woman who was the mother of a nation while its territories were awash in the blood of a vicious civil war. And what she thought of Mary Todd Lincoln was riveting.
LeAnne phoned me one day to share an exciting revelation she’d had as she tracked the various illnesses of the Lincolns’ four children, only one of whom survived to full adulthood. She said the boys seemed to revive when they were in the care of people other than their mother, but would often fail again soon after Mary returned to nurse them, dose them. LeAnne suspected Mary Todd Lincoln might have suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. I gasped at her words, how unexpected yet profoundly sensible they were given what I knew of Mary and her desperate need for attention—first from her father, as a worshipful daughter having to compete with fifteen siblings, and then from her husband, with his brutal schedule and professional obligations. While Mary absolutely supported her husband in his political ambitions, she was often left alone to manage their affairs. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a rare disorder whereby a parent or caregiver seeks the sympathetic attention of others by exaggerating the symptoms of their children, or inventing symptoms, or making the children ill, sometimes fatally. LeAnne couldn’t be positive of this diagnosis, but as her version of Mary Todd Lincoln began to develop, this possibility informed the world of Savage Conversations.
Through LeAnne’s research I learned that after the assassination of President Lincoln, Mary’s mental health continued to decline, and by the 1870s, she was complaining to her doctor of nightly visits from a violent “Indian,” who she said scalped her, cut bones from her cheeks, and made slits in her eyelids, sewing them open. Who was this “Indian”? LeAnne wondered. Why did he haunt Mary’s imagination? Another intuitive leap told her he was Dakota, one of the thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in a mass killing the day after Christmas in 1862. Mary’s husband signed the order for their execution. LeAnne told me this news in a whisper, respectful, tactful, aware that these murdered men were members of my own tribal nation, my relatives, mindful that I grew up hearing stories of all the damage that was done to my people by President Lincoln, his administration, his troops and generals. The terrible impact he had on the Dakota nation is usually omitted in Lincoln biographies and films. The president lives on through worshipful legends and scholarship, while Dakota people and their stories are overlooked, ignored by mainstream society. LeAnne’s character Savage Indian asks Mary, “Who says Abe is dead?” I shivered at the question, realizing that Abe will never be dead, not while his story lives on. And were it not for LeAnne’s discovery of the Dakota character whose voice she resurrects from a mass grave, and for the dedicated work of Dakota writers and educators, his would be the ultimate death—an erasure of his experience.
When I first heard LeAnne perform excerpts of Savage Conversations, I was awed by the power of her dialogue. Her emphatic words singed my breath. With a few deft lines she introduced the dark history I’d grown up hearing from my Dakota mother and grandmother, passed down from my great-great-grandfather, Chief Mahto Nunpa (Two Bear). He was living in Dakota Territory in 1862 but had heard of the hard times our relatives were suffering in Minnesota. They were going hungry, their children starving, yet money owed to them by treaty was delayed, and the trader whose store carried all the supplies the Dakota needed to survive refused to extend them credit. He offered them nothing but the most cruel words: “If they are hungry, let them eat grass or dung.” Our relatives rose up in their misery and killed white settlers who feasted off our territory like greedy locusts, refusing to honor treaty agreements they said they would never break. In retaliation for the violence in Minnesota, Northern generals declared war on all Dakota people, whether they were part of the desperate uprising or not. Ultimately hundreds of Dakota people were massacred, including many members of Two Bear’s village. And on a startlingly beautiful morning in 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men passed through a mob of four thousand jeering white people. They ascended with great dignity a scaffold that was built for the purpose of hanging them simultaneously. After the order was given to release the platform, many took a long time to die. One man’s rope broke and he fell to the ground. A new rope was summoned in order to hang him again. Once all th
e Dakota were gone, a cheer burst from the crowd. This is the terrible story I hear LeAnne’s Savage Indian reference in his remarks, this man whose name is lost to Mary, who sees him as nothing more than a caricature dreamed up in her nightmares.
LeAnne was well into writing an early draft of Savage Conversations when a new character arrived, seemingly from nowhere: The Rope. The Rope cannot contain his anger, his violent work; he “seethes.” He appears as a noose. He tells us, “I come when I’m called,” and “This is how I make brothers and sisters.” He begins to fashion another noose with his hands, creating relatives, his brothers and sisters. The words sound so innocent, but the action tells all: as he winds more rope into another noose, I can’t help thinking of all the rope that in human hands has viciously strung up so many people of color—the horrific tradition of lynching in America. The Rope is a merciless truth-teller. The Rope’s appearance in LeAnne’s project confirmed for me that this was sacred work. To underscore this conclusion I soon learned from LeAnne that the same week The Rope manifested in her text, one of the original nooses used in the mass execution of 1862 had been unearthed at Fort Snelling in Minnesota. The instrument of Savage Indian’s death had been preserved as a curiosity, then was hidden for countless years, only to reemerge as LeAnne’s story developed on the page.
LeAnne Howe has been my favorite writer since I first came across her work in the late 1980s. She is always a step ahead of nearly everyone else’s ideas. She is fearless. Her characters break my heart and then mend it. Her vision is utterly unique. Her Savage Indian character tells Mary, whose eyes he has skewered open to make her look at everything she never wanted to see: “With your eyes sewn open you still see nothing.” Mary isn’t able to see beyond the madness that will ultimately claim her, but I am the grateful beneficiary of LeAnne’s perceptive vision in this book that burns through accepted stories like fire, calling me to look harder. We create the world and unmake it with our stories. There are times when only imagination can save us.
Savage Conversations
THE STORY
President Abraham Lincoln gave the order to execute thirty-eight Dakota Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, for their actions in the Dakota War against white settlers who had first stolen their lands, then their rations, and raped their women. At 10 a.m. on December 26, 1862, the synchronized hanging of thirty-eight Dakota was, and continues to be, the largest mass execution in United States history. Four thousand settlers attended the execution. After the mass burial, the bodies of the American Indians were dug up by a local doctor and used as medical cadavers.
Fast-forward eleven years to November 1873. Dr. Willis Danforth of Illinois treats Mary Todd Lincoln for “nervous derangement and fever in her head.” He notes peculiar symptoms. Nightly, Mrs. Lincoln claims, someone lifts her scalp and replaces it by dawn, sometimes cutting a bone out of her cheek. She attributes the fiendish work inside her head to an Indian spirit. “The Indian,” she says, “slits my eyelids and sews them open, always removing the wires by dawn’s first light.”1
Mrs. Lincoln’s nervous condition becomes legendary much to the dismay of her only surviving son, Robert Lincoln. In May 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln goes on trial in Chicago for insanity. Judge Marion Wallace presides. Robert testifies against his mother. The jury deliberates for ten minutes before bringing in a verdict. They recommend that she be placed in an asylum. Robert Lincoln escorts Mary Todd Lincoln to Bellevue Place Sanitarium on Jefferson Street in Batavia, Illinois. Once there, she’s ensconced in a private residence. Mary Todd Lincoln continues to have visions that an American Indian spirit enters her room and tortures her.
1. Mark E. Neely Jr. and R. Gerald McMurtry, The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 11.
THE CHARACTERS
MARY TODD LINCOLN. Wife of slain President Abraham Lincoln. She wears a wrinkled dress with Tad Lincoln’s pistol hidden in the pocket. At night she refuses to remove the tattered nightdress and undergarments that she’s worn for months. Her hair is disheveled.
SAVAGE INDIAN. One of the thirty-eight Dakota men hanged the day after Christmas, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota. He sits in a chair in a dark corner of her room. His hair is dark brown and shoulder length. He wears a black vigilante town coat, the one he was hanged in. The coat droops open because the hangman’s wife cut off the buttons to sew onto her new frock.
THE ROPE. Both a man and the image of a hangman’s noose used in the largest mass execution in United States history. The Rope eavesdrops on Mary and Savage Indian’s conversations. He sometimes twirls around the room like a dancer.
Scene 1
They Speak of Dreams
APOCRYPHA
June 1875
Bellevue Place Sanitarium, 333 S. Jefferson Street,
Batavia, Illinois
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Before you can think, you forget and then remember
A dress of blood, gloves I refuse to wash.
Ever.
What is it to a wild Indian? The president is shot.
Fool, I was his all-in-all, his Molly, his child-wife and mother, his puss.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Thoughtfully.
Well … he called me puss, too.
CATAFALQUE
June 1875
Bellevue Place Sanitarium, 333 S. Jefferson Street,
Batavia, Illinois
Midnight, Mary’s bedroom. The underarms of her nightdress are badly soiled. Her small feet are swollen, the skin paper-thin. She speaks to Mr. Lincoln as if he’s in her room.
Savage Indian has a small box on his lap filled with her jewelry. He fingers each piece and finally fastens a pearl necklace around his neck.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Nightly, I examine our ruined heads in my hand mirror: yours and mine.
Our eyes dangle like dull grapes on a broken vine. Is it the candlelight?
SAVAGE INDIAN
Watches her with menacing eyes but does not move.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
I touch the blemish on your face, finger your blood-stained shirt; a drop of spittle has escaped your tight lips, your bare feet clammy as fish, all there, and here; I kiss the mirror, beg you to wake, fight to catch your attention through some mad, theatrical gesture, remember? My bed, always a catafalque to you: oh let fly my flesh, hair, and eyelash; pay the Nightjar who regularly serenades and, like us, steals the milk of goats.
Here, at last, I’ll tell it all: I did wish you dead, sir, eight thousand thirty-nine times for all the days you ran sideways from our home, whistling a Nightjar’s tune. Pay them all now, sir, before dawn’s light.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Reads aloud the inscription of her wedding ring.
Love Is Eternal.
CATAFALQUE II
June 1875
Bellevue Place Sanitarium, 333 S. Jefferson Street,
Batavia, Illinois
Mary Todd Lincoln and Savage Indian pace around the room like amateur boxers.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Arriving nightly without invitation,
You make my room a ceremony as
Nightjars sing, wing-clap, chirr their song,
Inhibited at dawn by God’s will, like we are.
When shall I tell them the truth?
Where shall I keep the truth?
Under my frayed petticoat,
It will not flower now.
She fingers a small picture of Abraham Lincoln on her bureau.
There is no need to wait for tea: I confess,
Though you coveted another, I longed for
The pleasure of your coarse skin,
Money to spend, kid gloves, chiffon and satin
Ball gowns with lavish trains properly hemmed.
Doomed children.
Tonight, let us hoist the catafalque over a new grave.
Hold my hands above the dank earth as the Nightjars serenade.
Oh what a great heart-smasher y
ou are, Mr. Lincoln.
Adieu, my confessor, my all-in-all, lover, protector, ghost husband.
Turns to Savage Indian.
Wishing for nothing, not even breath,
Take the flint knife,
Cut me, I dare you.
THE ROPE SEETHES2
2. A single noose from the Dakota hangings of December 26, 1862, has been preserved in the collection at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. In 2011, representatives from the Dakota Nation visited the collection to see the noose. Prayers were offered. For additional readings on the histories of hangings, see The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose by Jack Shuler, 2014.
SAVAGE INDIAN FEEDS GAR WOMAN
June 1875
Bellevue Place Sanitarium, 333 S. Jefferson Street,
Batavia, Illinois
3:00 a.m. A slight breeze blows the gauzy curtains open.
Moonlight floods the room.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Cleave unto me,
Seduce,
Fetter,
Handcuff,
Wheel clamp the irons,
Savage, I cease all protestations.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Checks her scalp for nits.
Wipes excess bear grease from his hands on her nightdress.
Fills her gaping mouth with fescue and sod.
How does it taste, Gar Woman?
You said,
“If they are hungry, let them eat grass
Or their own dung.”3
Trader Andrew Myrick’s words,
Lower Sioux Agency, August 15, 1862, but
Your sentiments spoken more than once.
MARY TODD LINCOLN
Swallows.
June 9, 1875.
I am in possession only of my name,
Mary Todd Lincoln, bewildered with a joy so noble
I, too, could expire.
SAVAGE INDIAN
Places her wedding ring on his little finger.
