The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  What my mother did for me, despite our disconnection, was to practice benign neglect. She allowed me to roam in this landscape of lessons. Natural laws disciplined me in ways I could not accept from her. On our starboard side of the Flint Hills, where gales explode in epic proportions, relationships within the web of living beings is most vivid.

  Underneath all her frustrations my mother centered her identity within nature. She told me I had growth “stages,” similar to seasons. These were part of the natural cycle, not personal failings or sins. At the time I resented her monologues and angry outbursts, but now I appreciate that she did not frame my childhood with harsh judgments.

  As I grew into my teens, Mother and I found a common ground—her love of gardening. From spring to late fall she immersed herself in grapevines, strawberries, asparagus, dogwood, iris, Memorial Day daisies, roses, hollyhocks, lemon balm, sweet rocket, Shasta daisies, and chrysanthemums. This was a place where control was more possible than uncertain family relationships, for both of us.

  She told me the plot outside my bedroom window was my own garden, and there she planted hen and chickens. Small round shoots grew from a center rosette, broke off, and became new plants. This was her model of mother and child, more real than the pietà figures on the living room mantel. She took me with her to visit other gardeners in the town. I loved the exotica—extravagant banks of daffodils in the spring, and then in midsummer came stretches of day lilies. She taught me by example to value beauty—the nuances of iris beard colorations or delicate striations of tulips. She talked about plants as though they were family members. This may not be ideal socialization, but it worked well enough. I learned not to step on plants and how to give a wide berth to rose brambles, who resembled the grouchy neighbor across the street.

  My mother introduced me to a living historic tradition of gardening. I overheard women’s discussions of soil, hybridization, and weather. Some neighbor women were quite elderly, from the covered wagon days, so I also learned local history, another dimension of the land. Many had Native heritage. My mother’s friend Ada talked about how “her people” gardened, sharing techniques of the tribal peoples nearby. The two traditions blended in the common ground of gardens. Everyone kept vegetable gardens as a matter of course.

  When my children were born, they were the first of my mother’s grandchildren to grow up near her, and she cautiously offered help. When she held my son for the first time, she tried to explain how she felt such satisfaction, her youngest child now mother of a baby. Despite our differences, she demonstrated for me a biological connection among the generations that transcends greeting card slogans.

  During these years I gained insights into my mother’s own mothering values. When my first son played with blocks for an entire afternoon, she praised him for having a “good attention span.” I had not thought of that quality as anything worth nurturing, but I remembered how she had allowed me to stay with my toys uninterrupted. In this way she developed my inner sense of direction, a quality that allowed me to withstand the difficulties of my growing-up years.

  My mother used a vocabulary with my babies I had never heard before, as she called my baby “cunning,” in an Elizabethan usage, probably from her mother. She played baby games. She taught me how to pace the babies’ days and to provide for their exercise. She encouraged me to value their independence as they matured. Implicitly, she approved developmental stages for her adult daughter as well and for herself as an elderly woman. She encouraged memories of my own childhood as my babies matured. I teased out intercultural aspects of her identity through the years and learned to value what she passed forward to her children and grandchildren.

  *

  Once, when I was four, my mother made matching dresses for my sisters and me, embellished with gold zigzag rickrack appliqué. I loved the full skirt and danced around and around in it. I twirled to see the horizontal circle of cloth ripple in waves. In the unconsciously racist term of the day, these were “squaw” dresses, an Algonquin term. It and the word rickrack were wonderful rhymes in my mouth. My delight made my mother happy.

  Recently, a Menominee spiritual leader sewed a full, tiered skirt for me, similar to the one my mother had made. Her prayers went into every stitch, and each time I wear it, I feel her blessings. The skirt’s circle is a universal symbol of wholeness, with a woman at the center. As a child, I wore skirts for “dress-up.” My mother often wore a man’s work clothes in the garden or for household chores, but for public occasions she wore women’s apparel, and she expected the same for me. Dresses taught me my identity as a small woman and the potential that I might one day create life myself. On ordinary days I was free to wear jeans, but church required dresses.

  Both of my parents fit Christianity to their needs in a much more relaxed way than fundamentalist neighbors. This reflected the mix of traditions in our household. We shared the potluck meals at the nearby Congregational church, and I remember our Bruner grandparents accompanying us to these “covered dish suppers” on rare occasions. My mother remained Episcopalian, so she seldom went to any services until her children were grown. Some of her family never belonged to a church. My father required that we children attend church, often alone. We were taught to pray daily to ourselves as private responsibilities.

  We observed the holidays in dresses. Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day all meant family feasts with proscribed dishes. Grace before these ritual feasts were our only family prayers. We celebrated spring, summer’s harvest, dark winter solstice, and the sun’s turning back to us in the seasonal sequence.

  Girls’ dresses were gender markers, as were dolls and playing house. Neighborhood boys in trousers joined us in this make-believe family play. Also, some boys’ activities were part of girls’ childhoods. Whittling was taken for granted as a daily skill. When I was five, my brother’s pocketknife was an object of my envy. He sharpened sticks and flung it about the yard. In time I got my own, a small folding knife with a brown handle. The knife was an important implement that signified my maturity. I took it fishing and practiced whittling techniques. My whittling was as unskilled as my sewing, but it gave me confidence. I felt more prepared for adulthood.

  Always, our mother sent us outdoors for long hours, despite the harsh weather. In the heat of summer we used the hose to create small pools and wallowed in the muddy dampness. After rain fat worms lay exposed on sidewalks, wriggling in our fingers when we plucked them from concrete cracks. Cicadas buzzed around us—small monsters erupting with noise. After frost bright scarlet and lemon leaves created a new playground, where we raked crunchy piles into forts. This natural realm was the most important textbook of my childhood.

  I grew up in the midst of huge technological changes. Sputnik was launched in 1957, when I was eight, and then came the first United States astronauts. At the time we realized these harbingers of the future were momentous but distant. Our daily lives repeated, in most ways, cycles of the past. My mother dressed me in snow pants for sledding in zero-degree weather. She spent hours making dress-up outfits for my sisters and me. We were most like her beloved dolls when we held still and let her fit us with fabric. At those times we had her undivided attention.

  *

  My mother might have loved dolls more than us children. She spent hours sewing for them, and their embroidered clothes were more ornate than what we wore. She sent to Kansas City for the best brand of dolls, Madame Alexander, with no expense spared. At Christmastime she became irritable from sewing late into the night, as she made tiny skirts and matching jackets for Betsy Walking Doll or the pixie Wendy. When we opened packages, I learned to feign appreciation for yet another doll’s outfit.

  When she was in her seventies, I asked my mother about her dolls and why they were so important. Even then, she displayed favorites on prominent shelves.

  “When I was a little girl, Grandmother Charlotte said I could have as many dolls as I wanted,” she said. “She took me shopping in downtown Kansas Cit
y in the fancy department stores, and she never complained about cost.” I imagined these expeditions on streetcars across the river to towering buildings, not unlike my own early trips to Kansas City in the 1950s. I wondered how her grandmother limited her from buying out the store.

  “She taught me how to hold them carefully and dress them,” she continued, “and never let their clothes get dirty. We made sure my dollies had new clothes every year.” She sighed. “She was the best grandmother. I just loved dolls ever since.” This early experience of my mother shows how some moments in a child’s life are preserved amid the commonplace stream of activities. The dolls triggered that one memory for my mother, with associations of her Delaware grandmother’s excitement.

  Some Native groups associate dolls with witchcraft, but for Delawares, dolls connote spiritual balance. Traditionally, certain women kept a male and a female doll wrapped carefully in a bundle. At harvest they unwrapped them for a holiday feast. Doll keepers cleaned the tiny figures, shined their silver brooches, and repaired worn cloth. Dolls were fed ceremonial meals as part of this annual celebration. Lynette Perry describes how her grandmother was among the last Delaware doll keepers in her memoir: “The legacy of many centuries is not so easily disposed of. Cultures are more resilient, tradition has a stronger hold on us, for all the styles that changed. The buried dolls come back, in different forms, to lend their healing power.” This persistence of culture took form in my mother’s love of dolls.

  Grandmother Charlotte was not a traditional Delaware doll keeper, as far as I know, but she continued the custom of renewing her dolls. My mother learned this tradition, even if she no longer understood the cultural past. Her force of character no doubt imbued her miniature people with her imprint. She insisted on having several boy dolls as partners to the girls, unusual in those days, and I wondered why. I did not play with them, yet they had a power. As Perry explains about dolls she made, “I . . . felt their power without quite understanding it.” The Delaware tradition included male counterparts.

  My mother remembered her grandmother’s doll legacy with her own observance. After a busy summer my mother healed herself each autumn by creating doll clothes. I think of her alone after her children were in bed, sewing tiny blouses by lamplight. Only now do I understand how this solitary labor sustained her. That was her true gift to our family at Christmas—she had made it through another difficult year.

  My mother taught me how to make hollyhock dolls in the summer and corn husk dolls in late summer. She showed me how to sew simple blouse patterns for my larger doll. She saw to it that our grandfather built a dollhouse with elaborate furnishings for us girls.

  When the weather turned cold, Jane, my sister nearest in age, and I spent long afternoons making our dolls act in long dramas. They would move from the dollhouse parlor to the kitchen and then upstairs to bedrooms, where they had nighttime dreams. I had many dreams that our dolls were alive and they were my friends.

  After we grew up, my mother made Christmas doll figures for the grandchildren. She made sets of felt ornaments that were fairy-tale characters or birds of paradise or Christmas bears, usually in mated pairs. She sewed sets of redbirds, doves, favorite dogs, and angels. Each winter solstice we still unwrap them and set them around the house. We eat sweets, salt, water, and meat, the four traditional elements of a meal. We eat oysters at Christmas, no matter how far we live from the ocean, and corn pudding. When I slice turkey for Christmas Eve, I use my mother’s sharp steel-edged carving knife. My hands resemble hers more each year, with veins more prominent. At winter holiday meals, with her dolls around us, we remember my mother’s indomitable life force. Our doll-keeping mother still exists, still potent.

  23. Dorothy (Bruner) Dotson, age fifty, in Emporia, Kansas, 1965. Photographed by H. C. Dixon at Granada Studio for the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Carrie (Strittmater) and William H. Dotson, Dorothy’s husband’s parents. Author’s collection.

  As I write these memories, in the wickerwork of alphabetic reality, I conjure Grandmother Charlotte, my mother, and great-grandparents I never met. I am still playing dolls with my sister as I rebuild the dollhouse of our family. The dolls also are my children and grandchildren, existing in that floating interdimensional space of words, where they come to life when bidden.

  *

  Into her eighties my mother kept a small garden of tomatoes, asparagus, squash, and green beans. The common pole beans can be eaten green or left to ripen and dry in the rows. These were the beans that Delawares and other Algonquian peoples use for winter storage. My mother also had a cutting garden of chives, spearmint, lemon balm, sage, thyme, and oregano. Often she planted the annual herbs—parsley, basil, and cilantro.

  I was not surprised when, years later, my uncle told me about the large gardens my Delaware grandfather and grandmother tended. “Victory garden” was one term he used, from World War II, but even before that crisis, the habit of farming was ingrained.

  My mother had her own memories of her grandparents’ garden. She remembered sweet shelled peas from early vines that went so well with new potatoes and fresh cream. She imitated her family’s example, and so do I.

  When I was a newly married woman, I lived in an apartment with an attached garden, and there I planted the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash. I mail-ordered “Indian corn” because I wanted to see ears of red, blue, white, and yellow kernels. The seeds arrived, I planted them, and they grew quickly. One night I dreamed of them as people coming to life, one for each color. The next morning I saw they had grown taller than the neighbors’ sweet corn. They had more scanty foliage and smaller ears, but the stalks towered—perfect anchors for green bean vines. The variegated kernels were shiny and robust. My neighbors considered them a curiosity, along with my irregular rows interrupted by hills of corn. These contrasted with their tidy plots measured out with string. But I sensed the “ornamental” (so-called by the seed catalog) Indian corn had strong vital force. I plant corn whenever I can, just as I saw my mother do, and Indigenous varieties when possible.

  Corn is natural in this part of the country, easily cultivated along sandy river bottoms. Traditions remain from the old days. My mother taught me to plant fish in each corn hill, small perch I caught at a nearby pond.

  In the Great Plains sunflowers are another staple, an important source of oil. Some varieties have edible roots, “sun-chokes.” An Arikara woman told me how women planted several varieties of sunflowers with corn along the river bottoms, then left for the hunting season. When they returned in late summer, crops were ready to harvest.

  I always feel secure in my home area because of all the foods that grow naturally or with a little help: amaranth, goosefoot (lamb’s quarters), pigweed, May grass, milkweed, and cattail tubers.

  An area seed keeper, with an Oglala-Apache and Blackfoot and Cherokee and Anglo heritage, is Dianna Henry from Jewell County, Kansas. In her house are gallon jars filled with seeds: Cherokee flour corn (su-lu), with large, white kernels; red popcorn; maroon Arikara flint corn suited to the sandbars of shallow midwestern rivers; Osage flour corn, which makes a purple flour; and dozens of others. Some are ceremonial and not intended for people’s food. In the freezer she has more rare varieties, including Delaware blue flour corn, adapted to the Northeast climate, with its short growing season.

  Dianna Henry was the first person who helped me understand the sophistication of corn development in the Americas. I recognized then how my mother had such vast knowledge of gardening. She knew how to hybridize iris varieties. When my older sister was a teenager, Mother supported Sister’s science fair experiments with hybrid strains. I went with them on some of the trips to trade iris with other gardeners. The old women were seed savers and wise in many ways.

  Mother knew hundreds of plants, natural and domesticated, and how to care for each. Through the years she learned which varieties fared best in the extreme Flint Hills weather, with its high winds and limited rainfall. She grew corn every year becaus
e fresh corn was the best.

  Corn was ubiquitous in my mother’s kitchen, and she taught us to savor the fresh, green-tinted new corn, boiled quickly and eaten immediately. This was the best of summertime. Her holiday dishes included hot casseroles of corn enriched with cream or scalloped with beaten eggs. She also made corn pudding—a baked porridge of thick, salted cornmeal sweetened with molasses and currants. She bought cornmeal at the store and always had some on hand. It was essential in a kitchen, along with cornstarch as a thickener. We often had corn bread and sometimes a baked meat pie with corn batter baked on the top, which she called “tamale pie.”

  My mother served corn in some form almost every day. She kept alive recipes that were documented as early as 1654, when chronicler Edward Johnson described tamales: “Delicious cakes were baked by wrapping the moistened meal in husks of corn, and baking them under the embers.” This was in Massachusetts, not the Southwest. Johnson went on to describe a basic corn gruel, still a staple known as “grits,” but he called it “samp.” He described stews made of parched corn, and the idea of cooking meat and grain together seemed novel to him. In 1683 William Penn described hominy, journey cakes (johnnycakes), and stews.

  Food is the basis of ultimate social power. My Menominee husband uses food to explain the importance of women in his Algonquin-speaking nation. The clan mother decides how food will be apportioned. During famines she decides who will eat and who will die. No one can override her decision.

  My mother and her friends exchanged starts of plants with each other and shared surplus vegetables. As a girl, I learned from my mother the empowerment of physical self-sufficiency. Food could be bought at the market, and also I could raise what I needed myself.

  What we eat and digest enters into our bodies in very literal ways. Our stomachs are great cookpots that break down roughage and chemicals. Our bloodstreams dissolve this concoction and redistribute nutrients as fuel for growing flesh and bone. We are constructed of plants and animals, and often they enter our dreams. I remember the dream of the Indian corn I grew forty years ago, and still it is a powerful lesson from my mother and grandmothers and many great-grandmothers.