by Starhawk
“Marley was always more interested in drums than people,” Madrone said.
“But what a percussionist!” Maya said. “He could drum the rain down from the sky! I had such talented grandsons, once. Bird was a genius with any instrument he touched. That’s not boasting, that’s just stating a fact.”
“I loved his voice,” Madrone said. “I loved to hear him sing.” I loved him, she thought. I loved him from the very first day I spent in San Francisco, still in shock from what happened in Guadalupe, and grieving for my mother, and scared of those strangers who called themselves Grandma Johanna, Grandpa Rio, Auntie Maya. Bird gave me his favorite stone, a flat black beach rock with the white pattern of a fossilized sand dollar on its back.
“And so handsome,” Maya went on. “The boys both had my eyes, set in that clear milk-chocolate skin. Do you remember chocolate?”
“We used to have it sometimes in Guadalupe,” Madrone said.
“Don’t outlive your descendants,” Maya told her. “It’s no fun. I’m only sticking it out until Bird comes back.”
“You may have to live forever, then, madrina.”
“No.” Maya shook her head. “He’s not dead. If he were dead, I’d feel it. Anyway, we’re here for Sandy now. Say a prayer for him, and place his stone.”
Faded marigolds and wilting chrysanthemums dotted the mound. There were no cemeteries in the city, no land that could be spared for burial, so people brought their grave offerings here. Sandy’s stone would lie in company with others, sharing their offerings in death as people shared food in life. He, at least, would not be lonely.
“What is remembered lives,” Madrone said, stooping and placing the stone on the north side of the mound. “Jiyi shi yongyuan bu mie de.” She stumbled over the inflections Lou had painstakingly taught her. Sandy had come from the north side of the city, where they spoke Mandarin instead of Spanish as their second language.
“He was a good man,” Maya said. “So sweet to everyone, and sensitive. His passing leaves a big emptiness.” Yes, she would miss him, like she missed so many others, but the ache in the back of her throat was for Madrone. She was too young to bear so many losses.
Madrone nodded without speaking. Maya could feel the earth under her, alive like a beating heart. Or perhaps, she thought, I’m feeling my own throbbing feet? Still, it was good, at the place of the dead, to acknowledge that One to whom she had pledged herself long ago, the aliveness at the heart of things, the ever-turning wheel of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. It had occurred to Maya lately that calling that the Goddess, even though she’d fought for the term all her life, was—what? Not so much a metaphor, more in the nature of an inside joke.
Madrone turned away abruptly. She felt a great need, suddenly, to be alone.
“I’m going to make an offering to Yemaya,” she said. The Yoruba Sea Goddess was her favorite of the orishas, the old Goddesses and Gods that had come on the slave ships from Africa.
“Give me a jar of honey,” Maya said. “I’ll go annoy my ancestors.”
“I thought ‘commune with’ was the operative term,” Madrone said, pulling out a small jar of honey from the depths of the basket.
“Jewish ancestors don’t commune. They kvetch. That means complain.”
“That’s one Yiddish word I know, madrina.”
Maya walked over to where a small crowd was gathered around the Jewish shrine, a brightly tiled and weatherproof ark under an arching pomegranate tree. A carved stone lectern provided a platform for the Torah scroll, and a young woman was chanting in Hebrew. The sounds took Maya back to her childhood, the voice of her grandfather praying in the morning, the voices of her mother and father, arguing.
“Lay off me, Betty!” she could hear her father say. “I’m not going to synagogue, I told you! I don’t believe in his damn God!”
“You don’t go for God, you go for him. He’s an old man, Joe. For once in your life you could do something to make somebody else happy.”
“Why should I? Would he do the same for me? Would he chant The Communist Manifesto to make me happy?”
“He’s your father.”
“Big deal!”
Maya slipped quietly behind the tree so as not to disturb the prayers as she placed the jar up against the slender trunk. The tree was encircled with a copper ribbon, inscribed with writing in Hebrew and English that said, She is a tree of life to them that hold fast to her.
“Hedging your bets, you old heretic?” whispered a crusty voice behind her. She turned and recognized Doctor Sam, one of Madrone’s colleagues from the hospital. With his mane of white hair and tufted eyebrows, he reminded her a bit of her own father in his old age, an age she had now surpassed by a good three decades. Not a handsome man but interesting, she reflected, favoring him with a smile.
“Honoring my ancestors,” Maya said.
“Are they impressed?”
“Who knows? If I really wanted to placate my father’s ghost, I suppose I could burn some incense in front of a picture of Karl Marx.”
“You are a heretic.”
“And what about you? Don’t you claim to be the last godless atheist?”
“I come for the arguments. Is the destruction of the environment the new form of the destruction of the Temple? And which tree of life should we hold to, Torah or Asherah, the Earth Goddess?”
“And did you reach any conclusions?”
“Nah, conclusions aren’t the point. You of all people should know that. If we ever came to conclusions, we’d lose the fun of the argument.”
There was that spark between them, Maya realized suddenly. Could she develop a father fixation on a man twenty years her junior?
The prayer was ending and the scroll was being replaced in the ark when the conch shells blasted forth again.
“It’s time,” Sam said, holding out his arm. “Allow me?”
Yemaya’s shrine was on the western slope of the hill, toward the ocean, although the bulk of Twin Peaks blocked the water from view. Madrone paused for a moment, beneath the statue of the pregnant fish-tailed mermaid, the great mother, Goddess of the Sea. She laid down the last of her offerings, a perfect sand dollar she had found long ago. It reminded her of the stone Bird had given her. Fossilized sand dollars were plentiful, but these days the cast shells of live ones were rare. It made a worthy offering. She hated to part with it, to lose a link to a memory: walking with Bird on the beach below the sea dikes that protected the outer neighborhoods from the rising waters of the ocean, the light playing on the waves, his songs in her ear, his hands smoothing her wind-whipped hair.
The last warning blast of the conch rang out over the hillside. Now it was really time to leave the ghosts of her old losses and get on with the ceremony. “Original mother of life, first Ancestress, accept this offering,” she murmured to Yemaya. “Preserve the lives of the living. Lend me strength. And hey, Iya, Mama, I’m sad, I’ve lost my lovers and compañeros, old and new. I’m lonely. Turn the tide for me.”
The sun was hot on the nape of Madrone’s neck as she headed back to the gathering place. To the east, shimmering waves of heat rose from the sun-scorched valleys, and ribbons of dust twisted in the air. West of the hill, blue fog lay in bands along the slopes of Twin Peaks.
At the summit, a bowl-shaped amphitheater was hollowed out. It was filled with onlookers, but Madrone saw Maya down below, in the innermost ring where those who had a part in the ceremony assembled. Sam stood beside her, and Madrone sighed softly. He’d want to know how the birth went, and she’d have to talk about it again. She left the food from her basket at the feasting site, and joined the other two. They exchanged greetings as the four concheros, bearing their shells aloft, walked proudly to the center of the circle. With eerie, dissonant harmonies, they saluted the four directions and then earth, sky, and center.
The musicians began to play, and everyone sang together, as the ritual fire was lit by four masked figures, bird, fish, coyote, and deer, who symbolized the four
directions and the Four Sacred Things.
Next came dances and songs and invocations, to the Four Sacred Things, to the ancestors, to Goddesses and Gods of all the different people assembled. Madrone loved to watch the dancers, especially the Miwok and Ohlone troupes in their feather capes, but she found her eyes closing and her head drooping during a lengthy poem in praise of communal spirit declaimed by a very earnest young woman from the Teachers’ Guild.
“They were supposed to have a five-minute limit on speeches,” Maya whispered to Sam. “If they don’t get on with it, my ass is going to atrophy.”
Finally the last speaker finished and beckoned to Maya. She stepped forward. A young girl, very solemn with the weight of her responsibility, handed her the Talking Stick, an oak staff beautifully carved, beaded, and feathered, carrying in its tip a small microphone. Powerful speakers were hidden in the branches of the four sacred trees that stood at the four quarters around the outskirts of the bowl. On the Signers’ platform, a man stood waiting to interpret as she spoke. All was ready.
She paused and looked at the crowd, letting her eyes roam over the brilliantly colored festival clothes and the faces of every hue and shade, eyes uplifted, heads set high and proud. This is good, Maya thought, this is what I worked for all my life, and you too, Johanna, you too, Rio. But how many more must we lose, like Consuelo, like Sandy? Like Brigid and Marley and Jamie and, yes, maybe Bird? What is this worth if we can’t preserve it, protect it?
The drums began to beat, a trance rhythm, steady but just slightly syncopated, to lead the mind and then shift it in unexpected directions. Maya spoke, her voice rhythmic, musical, crooning an incantation.
“Éste es El Tiempo de la Segadora, the Time of the Reaper, she who is the end inherent in the beginning, scythe to the grain. The Crone, Goddess of Harvest. In this her season we celebrate the ancient feast of the Celtic sun god Lugh, his wake as he ages and descends into autumn. It is a time of sweet corn, ripening tomatoes, the bean drying on the vine. The harvest begins. We reap what we have sown.”
Madrone sat up straighter, listening attentively. She always enjoyed hearing Maya work a crowd.
“The Crone, the Reaper, is not an easy Goddess to love. She’s not the nurturing Mother. She’s not the Maiden, light and free, not pretty, not shiny like the full or crescent moon. She is the Dark Moon, what you don’t see coming at you, what you don’t get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what’s scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth’s climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.”
A deep hush fell over the crowd. Maya went on.
“This moon brings a time of hope and danger: fire season. We watch the dry hills anxiously, knowing that the rains are weeks or months away. Those of us who are old have seen fire destroy our drought-baked cities and smoke eclipse the sun. We’ve seen rich croplands shrivel into glass-hard deserts, and the earth itself collapse on its emptied water table. We have seen diseases claim our children and our lovers and our neighbors. We know it can happen again.
“We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.”
She paused for a moment. Her voice dropped, becoming lighter, almost conversational.
“We have had two blessed decades to remake our corner of the world, to live by what we believe. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Uprising. I’ve been asked to tell you the story of Las Cuatro Viejas, the Four Old Women who sparked the rebellion in ’28 when the Stewards canceled the elections and declared martial law.
“On Shotwell Street, down below the slopes of this hill, which in that time was called Bernal Heights, lived a woman, Maria Elena Gomez Garcia, whose grandmother grew fruit trees in the back yard from peach pits and avocado pits, and she saved her tomato seeds. While the Stewards’ troops were massing down on the peninsula, commandeering all stockpiles of food, and the rest of us were debating what to do and trying to work up courage to do it, Maria gathered together with her neighbors, Alice Black, Lily Fong, and Greta Jeanne Margolis, four old women with nothing to lose. On the morning of the first of August, they marched out in the dawn with pickaxes over their shoulders, straight out into the middle of Army Street, and all the traffic stopped, such cars as a few people could still afford to drive.
“Some of them were honking their horns, some were shouting threats, but when Maria raised the pickax above her head, there came a silence like a great, shared, indrawn breath. Then she let it fall, with a thud that shuddered through the street, and the four old women began to dig.
“They tore up the pavement, blow by blow, and filled the holes with compost from a sack Greta carried, and planted them with seeds. By then a crowd had gathered, the word was carried through the streets, and we rushed from our houses to join them, bringing tools or only our bare hands, eager to build something new. And many of us were crying, with joy or with fear, tears streaming enough to water the seeds.
“But Alice raised her hand, and she called out in a loud voice. ‘Don’t you cry,’ she told us. This is not a time to cry. This is a time to rejoice and praise the earth, because today we have planted our freedom!’
“Then we joined them, tearing up the streets as the cars backed away from us, piling up barricades on the freeways, smashing the doors of the locked warehouses. And those who supported the Stewards fled south with all the goods they could steal. And we who remained planted seeds, and we guarded the sources of our water in the valleys and the mountains, and the Stewards withdrew to starve us out.
“We were hungry, so very hungry, for a long time while we waited for the seeds to grow, and prayed for rain, and danced for rain. It was a long dry season. But we had pledged to feed one another’s children first, with what food we had, and to share what we had. And so the food we shared became sacred to us, and the water and the air and the earth became sacred.
“When something is sacred, it can’t be bought or sold. It is beyond price, and nothing that might harm it is worth doing. What is sacred becomes the measure by which everything is judged. And this is our measure, and our vow to the life-renewing rain: we will not be wasters but healers.
“Remember this story. Remember that one act can change the world. When you turn the moist earth over, and return your wastes to the cycles of decay, and place the seed in the furrow, remember that you are planting your freedom with your own hands. May we never hunger. ¡Que nunca tengamos hambre!”
“May we never thirst! ¡Que nunca tengamos sed!” the united voices of the listeners chorused.
“One act, and about a thousand hours of meetings,” Sam whispered.
“Cynic,” Madrone said. “Don’t you know a good story when you hear one?”
“It’s a great story. It’s just that it bears so little resemblance to the actual history I remember.”
“Quiet. It’s my turn now.”
Madrone and several others, representatives of various guilds and councils and work groups, stepped forward into the center of the circle. The same solemn child held the Talking Stick for each of them.
“We have come here to give an accounting of ourselves, calling on the Four Sacred Things to witness what we have made of this city in twenty years,” said Salal from the Central Council. “This is how we have kept our pledges. This is what we have harvested.”
As the stick
passed around the circle, each person spoke, in turn, from the Gardeners’ Guild, and the Water Council, and the Healers, and the Teachers, and all the interlocking circles that provided for the needs of the City.
“No one in this city goes hungry.”
“No one lacks shelter.”
“No child lacks a home.”
When the stick came to Madrone, she hesitated for a long moment. “There is sickness here,” she said finally, “but no one lacks care.”
The stick moved on.
“See, the fruit hangs heavy on the bough, ready to feed the stranger.”
“We have guarded our waters well, our cisterns will not run dry, no one thirsts, and our streams run clear.”
“All the gifts of the earth are shared,” they said in unison.
“May we never hunger!” the people responded. “¡Que nunca tengamos hambre! ¡Que nunca tengamos sed!”
The drums beat a hypnotic, insistent rhythm. The music rose and the drums pounded, and suddenly everyone was dancing, in the central space, up in the ringed tiers that climbed the hill, on the ridges. The sky gleamed indigo with streaks of pink and gold in the west, and against its glowing light loomed giant figures, La Segadora herself, fifteen feet high, with serpent head and serpent skirt and a basket strapped to her back in which she carried a machete. And Lugh, the gleaming paint of his solar disc set on fire by the dying rays of the sun, and others: ancestors, spirits, visions. Maya knew, looking up, that they were only cloth or paper, but in the twilight they came alive. The musicians were playing one of Bird’s tunes, and Maya was suddenly shot through with pain like a ringing bell, the pain of missing him. The people sang:
Free the heart, let it go,
What we reap is what we sow.
The chant rose to a roar, subsided to a single harmonic tone, and ended abruptly, as if sung by a single voice. Everyone touched the earth. Silence swelled to consume all the echoes and the overtones.
