The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  Once when my grandfather visited our family, a few years before he died, I awoke in the night, terrified, and turned on the lamp, waking everyone in the room. My grandfather said nothing, and I was ashamed of my childish fears. After a while, I turned off the lamp. We never spoke of this. I never understood until now where my fright came from—there was no dream, and I never again startled in the night like that. But I remember that sense of sudden jarring into consciousness. Unseen terrors could arise at any time as well as magical music riffs. That night I caught a ripple of fear. Perhaps it was an aftershock of the Gnadenhutten killings and other nighttime tragedies.

  Grandfather did not seem surprised at my night panic. He did not complain, nor did he comfort me. My disturbance was a fact, like a dog twitching in its sleep. As I think back, this was the most chilling fact. We shared, in that unspoken exchange, the fact of terror. It is the text behind the stories, suspended in unrecorded oral histories of loss through the generations—massacres, plagues, accidents. Night’s silence can be prelude to safety or loss.

  *

  Like most people, I learned a one-word story of Native history in the Americas: “Defeat.” Details of genocide were not in the elementary schoolbooks. Thirty-five of us children sat through history lessons at Walnut Elementary, fall semester, 1959. Baby boomer classes were overcrowded, with no time for questions.

  We first studied Spanish explorers, then the Revolutionary War, then more pages devoted to settlers. Blue and green and red edges of the book arranged historic eras like dominoes. For the Civil War we learned how wilderness in the West was empty but also Indians—the book’s term—inhabited it. I waited for the teacher to explain this paradox, but all I heard was Lewis and Clark were hero explorers. Davy Crockett killed Indians in Kentucky, so real civilization could advance. Almost half the students in that part of Kansas had Native heritage, but that fact was ignored except for a few times, when we were asked about our families.

  The classroom had a large pastel wall map, and soon I realized the middle part of it, our lime-green part, had few famous people or battles. The textbook author did not know about Walnut Elementary or the Kansans or midwestern Indigenous people. We were phantoms.

  My impression of school days history is not exaggerated, nor is it antiquated. One year ago, at a library discussion near my hometown, I heard audience members insist that the Great Plains region was empty before the nineteenth century. The same people, lifelong inhabitants of the region, find flint tools in their fields. Gardening in the center of a large town, I have uncovered pink flint tools made from stone mined in Iowa. Scrapers, knives, and points turn up along every stream bed between St. Louis and Denver. By the nineteenth century most arrows were tipped with metal, not flint, so these are several hundred years old, and some Ice Age points appear in local river rubble. Everywhere evidence of history is underfoot.

  Burial mounds are common along midwestern valleys, despite destruction of the plow. I know the locations of several local mounds. Place names such as Kansas, Wakarusa, Neosho, Wichita, Topeka, and Shawnee label the landscape. Yet this reality is almost invisible in pioneer history.

  I learned more European settler perspective through Saturday afternoon movies, attended by all of us neighborhood kids. In the 1950s Native people appeared as second-rate people who were sidekicks, never the real heroes. Tonto accompanied the Lone Ranger but made no arrests. “Good Indians” were helpful Squanto types; “bad Indians” fell off horses into oblivion.

  In John Wayne movies some Native audiences can understand the insults of Lakota and Navajo actors as they create dialogue in their own languages. “You smell like dog excrement!” says the stoic Indian guide to John Wayne in Lakota. “Wasicu, you greedy hoarder, go that way to roll in more of it!” he says as the parley ends and the Duke saddles up. “Yah-Ta-Hey!” says John Wayne, as he waves good-bye, which is poorly accented Navajo for “hello.” These jokes are some small revenge for the indignities of Hollywood westerns.

  We kids imitated Matt Dillon’s drawl, Maverick’s jokes, and Paladin’s slit-eyed glare. On the playground, unlike real life, odds were even. We all had noisy cap guns and arrows made from stripped willow branches. In southeastern Kansas, former Indian Territory, many of our neighbors descended from Oklahoma tribal members who had fought against the Confederates and fled to Kansas during the Civil War. I heard Cherokee and Creek words at recess, mostly exclamations: Gaaaw! and Ooo-weee! Native history was woven into our lives, but we had few ways, as children, to understand how.

  In high school history we learned a few one-sided details. For the Trail of Tears story we heard that Indians had ruined farmland and had to be removed. In our text we did not see a portrait of Sequoyah with the Cherokee syllabary. We did not see murdered families at Horseshoe Bend.

  I learned of the Cherokee Trail of Tears from a high school friend, Cathryn. Her grandmother had walked from Georgia to Oklahoma. This was real history, not a lesson of dates and battles from the textbook. “Grandma told how soldiers beat them and raped the women,” she said. We were old enough to understand, and I sat horrified. She continued, “They shot anyone who fell behind, even pregnant women.” As she spoke, Cathryn used the term Grandma as though this were her own grandmother’s story. Only later did I realize the story had been handed down through the generations, and it would have been a great-grandmother four or five generations back. Her words had immediacy, and so this blonde, blue-eyed classmate helped me realize how experience is the defining identity of an Indigenous person. Her oral stories defined her, stories she had learned at her grandmother’s knee.

  As long as a people remember, my Cherokee friend taught me, they are not conquered. In time I learned my own family’s connection to Cherokee traditions, on my father’s side. My parents downplayed their family history, but many of my classmates kept alive the stories from their own Native families. They helped me understand the continuity of community from pre-reservation times into the future.

  *

  Grandfather leaves behind gifts. His lifetime is a lesson. He remained silent about his spiritual beliefs, and so he avoided conflict. That was one teaching. As other relatives insisted they had absolute truths, he remained silent, a form of tolerance. He was no evangelist.

  Another teaching is physical health. He had good basic health until he became ill with lung cancer, in his seventies—a goodly life span in those days. He smoked cigarettes but before they were understood to be a health hazard. He ate with relish but moderately. With coffee, he dipped doughnuts or cookies, to sweeten the dark brew. He did not turn down food, but he did not take second helpings. He lived through all the stages of life: childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.

  Every Christmas an enormous box of chocolate candies arrived from him and Grandmother, and on Christmas Day we children rustled through the brown tissues for coconut haystacks, caramels, chocolate-covered cherries, and truffles. The lesson of sweetness is an easy one to learn.

  One Christmas it was my turn to purchase Grandfather a gift. At eleven years old I saved my allowance and poker earnings diligently for Christmas expenses. My mother added a few dollars to the sum. It was a mild December Saturday, and downtown was filled with ranchers from outside of town as well as neighbors. My family went to a large clothing store, and I wandered through the aisles of the men’s department. Because it was an overcast day, the indoors was deep in shadows. The wooden floorboards under my feet were as dark as wet tree bark. I knew I was in foreign country, especially when I saw a rough-looking cowboy in a ten-gallon hat standing by the aftershave gift boxes.

  As I looked over shelves, I tried to imagine what my elderly grandfather would want for Christmas. Certainly not toys. Even then, I understood he was poor, so I wanted to make the dollars count. The pearl button cowboy shirts, with matching handkerchiefs, enticed me, but they cost too much—eight dollars. Eventually, I settled on a brown tie with stud. It would match his eyes.

  24. Denise (Dotson) Low, age nineteen.
Photograph taken in Emporia, Kansas, 1968, by Bruce Balkenhol, family friend.

  My mother reviewed my choice without comment. I sighed with relief. Since she was not critical, it must be acceptable. “Don’t lose it,” she finally said. “You need to wrap it in time for the mailman.”

  Now I wonder at my mother’s restraint as she left me on my own to solve this problem. She was teaching me the importance of gifts, as my grandfather once had taught her. And this is the way of Native parents—letting children make their own decisions, whether good or bad. She showed me how consequence is the best teacher.

  I never knew how Grandfather received my gift, but that did not matter. He was there, he was alive during my childhood, and he was my grandfather. I sent the gift, and this demonstrated that my grandfather was important.

  Grandfather gave me another gift, one I did not recognize at the time—a red-and-black wool blanket. My mother had several blankets in our unheated upstairs room, where we talked, played cards, and watched television together. In the winter we used these blankets, which had come from Grandfather. When I left for college, my mother let me choose one, the red-and-black, to take with me. My mother always called it a “Mexican” blanket, yet I never saw that simple pattern before or since among Mexican textiles. It was scratchy wool, not cotton. I remember its fringes, the warp ends wound and tightly twisted, and the even lines of wool yarn. I used it for decades before it fell apart. The vermillion red and ink black colors never faded. When I slept at night, I had the warmth of my family, especially my grandfather, laid over me, even when I was far from home.

  The linkage of child to parent is formed of many gifts—the strands of DNA as well as gifts of teachings. A simple blanket also is a daily gift, as it lends emotional as well as physical shelter.

  *

  In my hometown youngsters roamed widely with no fear. Alleys, other people’s backyards, or construction sites—kids free-ranged everywhere. Land was cheap, and suburban lots were half-acres, with mown lawns in front and tangled underbrush in back that crossed property lines. At the time I almost believed school social studies texts that presented Kansas as two-dimensional wheat fields. Yet at the edge of town, streets dipped and rose to sharp-edged ridges. Winding side streets named “Terrace” led toward sharp drops to teeming creeks. This was almost the same surroundings as my grandfather’s hometown of Burns, which lies west eighty miles on Highway 50. As I grew up in this natural playground, my experiences were not unlike those of my grandfather when he was young.

  I remember especially a neighbor’s vacant lot of unplowed tallgrass prairie. This one perimeter—of giant bluestem, pokeberries, sunflowers, and a huge Osage orange tree—is my origination point as an adult. Lost within city limits, the rectangle of unbroken sod was a window into another dimension.

  This new awareness began one afternoon when I was about eleven, as I cut across the neighbor’s yard, through the alley, and past an old garage edged with damp earth. Shale broke into layers in the muddy pathway, and between the layers were delicate images of ferns. Here I tarried. The impressions were fresh, as though made yesterday, and so the rock’s history seemed near at hand. I may have collected a sample, or maybe only my sight collected the images for this memory. Eventually, I roused.

  On past an old well I crossed an abandoned rose garden and then arrived at a city lot, probably fifty feet by seventy feet. Like Alice in Wonderland gone into a rabbit hole, I stopped in my tracks before a six-feet-tall wall of big bluestem grass. It was late summer, and grasshoppers buzzed about the stems. Dragonflies busy themselves this time of year as they migrate. Prisms flashed from their wings. This lot somewhat resembled my mother’s unweeded strawberry patch but on a much grander scale. I had read Conan books by Robert E. Howard and relished how he evoked bizarre civilizations. Howard’s citadels were not unlike the stumbling old houses on country roads around town. And here this unique stretch of grass, with broken brickwork at one end and old vines at the other, seemed exotic.

  At that age I was no longer a small child and not yet a teenager. I was alone but not abandoned, teetering at the edge of decision. I experienced a sense of eternal time. Poet William Stafford describes this sense, which he felt after camping along the Cimarron River in Kansas: “No person was anywhere, nothing, just space, the solid earth. . . . That encounter with the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky has never left me.” Stafford also records how this one experience initiated a lifelong quest. His childhood experience wends through his writings, not as nostalgia but, rather, as imagery that evokes the ongoing experience of childhood. His writings do not recall the past; they nurture its continuing presence.

  On that fateful afternoon I considered the invisible tether to my mother. She was cross as a bear if I strayed too far. I knew I was within earshot of her, so I could hear her call for dinner, but I was far beyond her sight. The squared realm of towering wildlife was irresistible, and so I plunged in. Like Stafford, I entered and never left.

  During the next weeks I did not notice how solitary I had become, but I was never lonely. Once I took my sister, but she soon became bored and left. But as I trampled grass and counted pokeberry spikes, I became aware that two older women in the next-door house watched. It was a brown-shingled bulwark, a wooden ship stranded in the grassy shallows. Now I understand how, as they sat by their window, they were enjoying the novelty of a child absorbed in play, like a species of animal. That bit of natural space was also theirs. My memory of passing time there now entwines with images of those women, so that I see myself from their window. Their presence foreshadowed my adult self, and I was their past childhoods. We mirrored each other, like paintings are yet another facet of past and present time.

  At first I ignored the couple’s presence, but finally they greeted me and warned me away from their garden pond, just off the path, in case I might drown. The shallow pool of scalloped lily pads was a temptation, but I kept my distance as instructed. Another time the women asked me indoors to see their African violets. They took me down root cellar steps to a primitive basement with dirt floor. There, glow lights illumined an indoor garden, organized in neat rows. The pale-blue, fuchsia, cerise, lilac, lavender, ivory, and baby-pink blossoms were an amazing discovery in the midst of a drab drought.

  Grass outside grew in whorls according to a seasonal calendar, and the women cultivated their potted garden according to human design. The natural world was not at odds with their view but, rather, another aspect of it. As Native peoples organized the Flint Hills into hunting parks with fire, so these women entered into a partnership with the plant world. Their engagement in aesthetics—the lily pond, the violets, and their ordered parlor furniture—prepared me for experiencing natural order in language. The cultivated African violets were one view; the unplowed lot of bluestem grass was another. Neither excluded the other.

  As the days went on, I learned how an undomesticated space did not privilege humans. Snake holes in the grass and their papery, scaled skins gave evidence of co-inhabitants. Red squirrels and rabbits came near me when I was still. I observed how my own form has a bisymmetry similar to mammals, a capacity for motion and rest, and digits. I wished for a tail. As I learned about different beings in this outward space, our commonalities became clear. Each night we all seek shelter from the four winds.

  During another visit with the old women, in that tomblike basement smelling of potting soil, we talked about death. As a youngster, my notion of the afterlife was a biblical punishment for accidents or polio. Yet they told me death was beautiful—a part of the cycles. I did not believe them, but I later found a desiccated squirrel corpse and looked at the ingenious workings of its skeleton, rather than throwing it away.

  Becoming old was the lesson I learned, in all its forms—old age for the women, late summer, and the full-blown Osage orange tree with thorns. An ancient box turtle trudged through the grassy aisles one of these days, dusty and weary looking, and I marveled at it as a living fossil. The e
lderly women were substitute grandparents. Grandfather Bruner was still alive at that time, connected by the same hot winds that blow continuously from the west, all summer and into September, but I seldom saw him.

  As I recall that summer, I conjure the women again and bring them back into existence. I recall when I first entered their sight, beyond glass panes, near the end of their earthly lives. Then I was living within a make-believe world, barely differentiated from the life around me. As a child, I walked into that expanse of unlimited waving fronds, and then I crossed the line into the realm of those old women. I now observe nature more than participate as a natural being.

  I enter my own house now and sit in a stuffed chair covered by doilies. I describe that child in the grassy lot as though she were someone else. This story of my grandfather and my mother has become my own, as my past grows longer than my future.

  *

  My mother instilled in me a fear of capture. In our small town she watched over me like a hawk. One of my greatest forbidden actions was to roam beyond earshot. This hypervigilance was out of proportion for our midwestern town, where few crimes occurred. Parents kept an eye on all the neighborhood children as they wandered. We roamed with dogs at our heels, on foot, on bikes, and occasionally on horseback. Within a several-mile span we were safe, but my mother never relaxed. Unspeakable fears were the most powerful forces in her life, even though she could not explain them. She just warned: “Gypsies will get you. I could never forgive myself.”

  “Gypsies” hardly appeared in our part of Kansas—I never saw any, ever. A few Gypsy, or Roma, groups traveled two-lane highways to the north on their way to other parts of the country, but the Kansas grasslands were no regular destination.