Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline had scored her own small successes by the mid-1880s. In 1885, she and Evelyn were included in a delegation of seventeen people from the Six Nations Reserve who attended a ceremony in Buffalo honouring the Iroquois leader Sagoyewatha, also known as Red Jacket. Red Jacket was a fiery Seneca orator who had championed the Iroquois Confederacy and deplored encroachment on Iroquois lands and customs by European immigrants. He had died in 1830, but his remains were scheduled for re-interment fifty-five years later. The two granddaughters of the great Mohawk chief Smoke Johnson received official invitations to the occasion. Pauline immediately put pen to paper and wrote an ode to this “master mind” whose thought was “so vast, and liberal and strong.” The ode was a paean of unalloyed admiration for the handsome advocate of Indian rights, but the poem’s main thrust was a plea for reconciliation: “Forgive the wrongs my children did to you, / And we, the redskins, will forgive you too.” It was not read out at the ceremony, but the Buffalo Senecas liked it enough to include it in a commemorative booklet. And it was probably the cause of an invitation to Pauline from the City of Brantford to write a poem for a similar ceremonial occasion: the unveiling of a statue of Joseph Brant, to stand in Victoria Square.

  The Brantford ceremony, which took place in October 1886, began the way that all Brantford ceremonies began, with a parade led by the Dufferin Rifles Band. The city had made every effort to include its native neighbours; Iroquois chiefs and warriors from both Canada and the United States marched behind the band. Alongside the police, the firefighters, the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Imperial Order of Foresters and the massed choirs of all Brantford’s churches, they bowed their heads when the Reverend William Cochrane read the prayers and the 100th Psalm. Twelve of the chiefs assisted the Mayor in unveiling the splendid monument, designed by the famous British sculptor Percy Wood. The figure of Brant himself, and those figures representing the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras, were cast in bronze from British cannons that had been used at Waterloo and in the Crimean War.

  The high point for Pauline and her family, however, came when William Foster Cockshutt, owner of Cockshutt Plough Limited and Brantford Roofing and a future MP, rose to his feet. “The lines I am about to speak,” he informed his audience, “are from the pen of Miss E. Pauline Johnson: they are creditable alike to the young Indian poetess and the race for whom she speaks.” A few people began to clap, then the applause swelled as a slim figure, eye-catching in a furtrimmed suit and hat, was assisted onto the platform of celebrities. Pauline was shown to a seat next to Mr. Cockshutt, who then declaimed, in his booming voice, her “Ode to Brant.”

  “Ode to Brant” has a darker tone than the Red Jacket poem. Pauline alluded to Brant’s role in the Iroquois loss of “their valley home…blessed with every good from Heaven’s hand” because of Brant’s loyalty to Britain. Indians were doomed to extinction as a separate people, her poem implied, reflecting the grim logic of the Dominion government’s new policy towards Indians. “Indian graves, and Indian memories,” she wrote, “will fade as night comes on.” But once again her overriding message was that natives and European immigrants can achieve “one common brotherhood.” At this stage, Pauline chose not to challenge the status quo of race relations. Either she didn’t see the need to rock the political boat or she was more concerned to establish herself as a literary figure. She certainly knew her mother would be shocked and hurt if she offended the local celebrities on the platform. Her ode ended with a ringing endorsement of British authority, embodied by “the loving hand of England’s Noble Queen.” When Cockshutt finished reading the poem, the crowd erupted into even louder applause as Pauline rose demurely to receive a bouquet of flowers. At the age of twenty-six, Pauline had made a discovery that she would put to good use in the years ahead: crowds love uplifting patriotism and a great outfit.

  The following day, a long article about Pauline appeared in the Toronto Globe, written by Garth Grafton. Sara Jeannette Duncan, who had a good nose for a story, had already recognized that the half-Mohawk woman living quietly on Napoleon Street was someone to watch. Like Sara herself, Pauline had recently been discovered by Goldwin Smith’s monthly journal The Week; despite the editor’s wariness of clever women, at least six of Pauline’s poems had appeared there in recent months. And Sara knew enough about the Six Nations Reserve to find the Johnsons’ family history intriguing. She resolved, she told her readers, “that all Canadiennes deserve to enjoy” Pauline’s acquaintanceship. However, Sara was intent on making Pauline out to be as exotic as possible. Small facts such as the colour of Pauline’s hair (brown) and her petite stature (5 foot 2 inches) were not allowed to get in the way of Sara’s portrait of a powerful, raven-haired warrior princess: “She is tall and slender and dark, with grey eyes, beautifully clean cut features, black hair, a very sweet smile,” Sara wrote, “and a clear, musical, pleasant voice…She has certainly that highest attribute of beauty, the rare, fine gift of expression. She is charmingly bright in conversation, and has a vivacity of tone and gesture that is almost French.”

  Sara interviewed Pauline in the parlour at 7 Napoleon Street, where she was fascinated by the Indian relics. Pauline showed her George Johnson’s scalping knife. The writer knew how to spice the interview with just the right blood-curdling touches for the Globe readership:

  “But don’t they-didn’t-he-I mean isn’t it unusual for people who indulge in that kind of amusement to do it with their tomahawks?” I inquired rather delicately, for I wasn’t at all sure that their fair descendant would relish this allusion to the peculiarities of her warrior ancestors. My compunctions were unnecessary. “Oh, no!” she laughed. “It would be very awkward to scalp with a tomahawk. You see, this is the way they do it,” and she raised some of her own dusky locks and made a mimic circle around it.

  “Really!” I said, “Please don’t. I always thought that to scalp a person was to deprive him of his hirsute adornment out and out!” “I know most people think that,” she responded, “but it is only a single lock and the portion of scalp it grows on. I saw once a scarf of several hundred and fifty Indian scalps, all braided together with beads and things.”

  “Garth Grafton” ended her article on an upbeat note. Miss Johnson’s poems, she suggested, “have a dreamy quality that is very charming, and while she has given us no sustained work as yet, we

  Pauline and her girlfriends [unidentified in this photograph) frequently picnicked on the banks of the Grand River.

  may doubtless expect it ere long.” Pauline was encouraged by Sara’s prediction, but it was only half right. Pauline continued to work hard on her literary technique and tone, turning out both poetry and prose that appeared with increasing regularity in the handful of small-circulation literary journals that limped along in Canada. But it would be a while before she had reason to feel that she was taken as seriously as Sara Jeannette Duncan.

  Most frequently Pauline found herself described with the kind of patronizing phrase employed by the Toronto World reporter who covered the unveiling of the Brant statue. “Miss Pauline Johnson,” he told his readers, is “a pleasant looking Indian maiden [who] is the writer of some good verse.” Pauline’s rebuttal, preserved in her scrapbook, reveals both a quick wit and a thin skin:

  Alas! how damning praise can be!

  This man so scared of spoiling me

  Shook all the honey from his pen

  Dipped it in acid, and scribbled then—

  “No compliments on her I’ll laden

  She’s but a pleasant looking maiden.”

  Pauline Johnson was now twenty-six years old. In the next five years, her output consisted largely of poetry—much of it lyric poetry which is rarely reproduced today. Many of the poems share the same theme: nostalgia for a lost lover with whom she spent happy hours in a canoe. Does he remember her? the poems ask. No private diary or personal letters detailing her romances have survived, so the verses themselves are the only clues to what was going on in her heart
. The poems are sentimental and unmistakeably erotic; they combine exquisite phrasing, awkward diction and echoes of Swinburne. In 1888, for example, Saturday Night published “Unguessed,” which includes the lines

  Beneath this tangled bower

  We’ve idled many an hour

  And tossed away too many tender days—

  I quite content in love

  To watch your face above

  The netted couch, in which you lie, that softly floats and sways.

  Did young Apollo wear

  A face than yours more fair,

  More purely blonde, in beauty more complete?

  Beloved, will not you

  Unclose those eyes of blue

  That hold my world and bless and curse the life they render sweet?

  Two years later, Pauline published “The Idlers,” a poem of breath-taking intensity in the same metre, and with the same aching sense of impending disappointment:

  The sun’s red pulses beat

  Full prodigal of heat,

  Full lavish of its lustre unrepressed,

  But we have drifted far

  From where his kisses are,

  And in this landward-lying shade we let our paddle rest.

  So silently we two

  Lounge in our still canoe

  Nor fate nor fortune matters to us now—

  So long as we alone

  May call this dream our own—

  The breeze may die, the sail may droop, we care not when or how.

  Against the thwart near by

  Inactively you lie,

  And all too near my arm your temple bends,

  Your indolently crude

  Abandoned attitude

  Is one of ease and art with which a perfect languor blends.

  Your costume loose and light

  Leaves unconcealed your might

  Of muscle so exquisitely defined,

  And falling well aside,

  Your vesture opens wide

  Above your splendid sun-burnt throat that pulses unconfined.

  With easy unreserve,

  Across the gunwale’s curve

  Your arm superb is lying brown and bare.

  Your hand just touches mine

  With import firm and fine—

  (I kiss the very wind that blows about your tumbled hair.)

  But once, the silence breaks,

  But once, your ardour wakes

  To words that humanize this lotus land,

  So perfect and complete

  Those eager words and sweet,

  So perfect is the single kiss your lips lay on my hand.

  Has destiny a bliss,

  A counterpart of this

  Wild flame your kiss has left upon my palm?

  Does heat respond to heat?

  Does fire with fervour meet?

  Or does a storm tempestuous but image empty calm?

  The uninhibited passion of Pauline’s love poetry leaps out at the reader. So does the way, unique for the period, that she portrays herself as the active partner in the romance. In most nineteenth-century love poetry, the woman is a delicate, passive flower overwhelmed by her lover’s ardour. That is how Emily Johnson expected to be treated. But Pauline is no shrinking violet: in all her poems, she is in charge of the canoe in which the lovers sit (“My arm as strong as steel…the boat obeyed my hand”) and the momentum of the affair (“My hand still tingles where / It touched your windblown hair”). But who was the object of Pauline’s passion? Who was her young Apollo?

  “Pauline had many offers of marriage,” her sister Evelyn recorded. “Few of these were Indians. I know of eight that she received, but of those she had later when she began to travel, I do not know.” There were so many opportunities for Pauline to meet young men—at church, with the Brantford Players, at the canoe meets that she had started attending. Critic Carole Gerson observes that the love poetry falls into two distinct groups, suggesting two chapters to this period of Pauline’s life. One group of poems, dating from the 1880s, suggests a liaison with a young man who offers only friendship rather than love and who disappears to England. The second group dates from 1890 and points to another romantic encounter which also ends sadly with the young man’s departure. In Pauline’s scrapbook at Chiefswood, there is a small, undated, anonymous photo of a handsome young man in a beautiful cedar-strip canoe. A melancholy pervades much of Pauline’s verse as she wonders whether a boating companion recalls the days spent “In listless indolence entranced and lost, / Wave-rocked and passion-tossed.”

  Names flit in and out of Pauline’s own correspondence, and of reminiscences of her recorded by others. There was “the fancy Londoner,” Hugh Hartshorne, whom Pauline mentioned to Lottie Jones and who remained a family friend. There were two regular canoeing partners, James Watt and Frank Russell. There was Cameron Wilson, who would call at Napoleon Street to talk to Pauline, only to discover that she was out and he had to make polite conversation with Evelyn. There was Archie Chetwode Kains, who was briefly manager of the Canadian Bank of Commerce’s Brantford branch in 1888, and with whom Pauline had a lively but chaste correspondence after he moved to New York City.

  Many of these suitors treasured a tobacco pouch or handkerchief sachet, hand sewn by Pauline and sent to them with an intimate note. (“I have spent many pleasant hours embroidering…pleasant memories into this little sachet,” she wrote to Archie. “Of course you have other sachets, but ever selfish, I wish you would use mine, just because I designed it specially for you.”) On one occasion, as a group of young people was about to set off on a canoe trip, Douglas Reville ostentatiously pulled out of his pocket a fine leather tobacco pouch on which Pauline had embroidered his monogram. Immediately, five other young men pulled out identical pouches on which Pauline had embroidered their initials.

  Maybe there were two particular beaux. Maybe there were more. Maybe there were several lighthearted flirtations and one heartbreaking affair. “I wonder why women think that because you are fond of a person you must necessarily be in love with them,” mused Pauline herself in another letter to Archie. “Bless me, if I were in love with Laddie and Jeff and all the boys I am fond of I would never have any appetite left for breakfast and I am painfully healthy.”

  One particular name, however, spirals down through the years: Michael Mackenzie, son of the Reverend Garland Crawford Gordon Mackenzie of Grace Church.

  Michael Mackenzie was a young teenager, and the Johnsons still lived at Chiefswood, when Pauline first met him. Michael’s father had arrived in Brantford in 1879 after spending most of the previous ten years as minister in Haliburton and Kincardine. For the rector, the large and growing industrial town was a big switch from rural parishes where most of his congregation still lived in log houses and made their living from the land. But the Reverend Mackenzie quickly made Grace Church, an ugly brick building on the west side of Brantford, the town’s leading Anglican place of worship. Filled with the benevolent paternalism typical of leading churchmen of the day, “Maxie,” as the good rector was known, threw himself into his work. During the forty years he spent in the parish, he set up a coal and grocery fund for Brantford’s poor, got three more Anglican churches built, founded a large (but not always tuneful) choir, and each year organized a summer camp on Lake Erie for boys from underprivileged homes.

  The Grace Church rectory, on the corner of Charlotte and Darling streets, was on the other side of town from Grace Church, so the sight of a bulky, black-coated figure striding across Victoria Park, past Joseph Brant’s statue and down Nelson or Wellington street soon became familiar to Brantford citizens. The rector’s wife, Helen, was a tall, elegant woman, with a ready smile and endless patience for her six children and the gaggle of relatives and visitors who thronged the rectory. Those who dined at the rectory were always amazed at the fare; thanks to relatives scattered through India and the West Indies, the Mackenzies had developed a taste for such exotica as curried fish, melons with black pepper, fruit stewed with ginger,
and red peppers liberally used in salads.

  The Mackenzie family played a large role in both Brantford and the Johnsons’ lives. The Reverend Maxie was on the platform in 1886 when the Brant memorial statue was unveiled and Pauline’s ode read out. He served on the boards of all the local institutions, such as the Public Library, the Institute for the Blind and the Brantford Sanatorium. As his granddaughter wrote in a family memoir, “His great social gifts were at his Master’s service; he made the humblest household feel that he was happy to be with them.” This often meant accepting a cup of tea even though the proffered cup was filthy; he had learned to prefer, in the Scottish parlance of the day, to take his tea “strong enough to trot a mouse.” He enjoyed calling on his parishioners, and regularly visited Emily Johnson in the parlour on Napoleon Street. And Pauline would frequently join in the evenings of charades and musical chairs at the rectory, when Francie (the only girl in the Mackenzie brood) would play the upright piano with its blue silk panels, and Norman (the youngest son) would serenade his terrier on his flute. The highlight of the evening usually came when Francie persuaded her father to give a solo performance of his favourite ballad, “When Polly and I Were Sweethearts.”