Give Me Some Truth
Page 41
“Amazing Grace,” John Newton, trad., Tuscarora translation: Marjorie Printup
“Come Sail Away,” Styx: The Grand Illusion
“Silly Love Songs,” Paul McCartney and Wings: Wings at the Speed of Sound
Chapter 24
“I Have a Woman Inside My Soul,” Yoko Ono: Approximately Infinite Universe
Mind Games, 1973 release by John Lennon
Imagine, 1971 release by John Lennon
Double Fantasy, 1980 release by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Rubber Soul, 1965 release by The Beatles
Revolver, 1966 release by The Beatles
“Watching the Wheels,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy
“Yes, I’m Your Angel,” Yoko Ono and John Lennon: Double Fantasy
“Woman,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy
“Working Class Hero,” John Lennon: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Chapter 25
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” The Beatles: Help!
“Working Class Hero,” John Lennon: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Chapter 26
“Now or Never,” Yoko Ono: Approximately Infinite Universe
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” The Beatles: Help!
Chapter 27
“Give Me Some Truth,” John Lennon: Imagine
“Imagine,” John Lennon: title song from Imagine
Chapter 28
“Don’t Count the Waves,” Yoko Ono: Fly
“Give Me Some Truth,” John Lennon: Imagine
“(Just Like) Starting Over,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy
Chapter 29
“I’m a Loser,” The Beatles: Beatles for Sale
“We Will Rock You,” Queen: News of the World
“Ballroom Blitz,” Sweet: Desolation Boulevard
Chapter 30
“Air Talk,” Yoko Ono: Approximately Infinite Universe
Double Fantasy, 1980 release by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Chapter 31
“Working Class Hero,” John Lennon: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
“Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” John Lennon: Walls and Bridges
Chapter 32
“Growing Pain,” Yoko Ono: Feeling the Space
“Round Dance,” Allegheny River Singers: Social Dances of the Iroquois
Part Five
“Unfinished Music No. 2. Life with the Lions,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Unfinished Music No. 2. Life with the Lions—album title
Interlude One
“Some Time in New York City,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono, title song from Some Time in New York City
Double Fantasy, 1980 release by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Chapter 33
“A Day in the Life,” The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
“Instant Karma,” John Lennon: Lennon Legend
“Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps),” David Bowie: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
Interlude Two
“Imagine,” John Lennon, title song from Imagine
“Walking on Thin Ice,” Yoko Ono: Season of Glass
Chapter 34
“Give Me Something,” Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy
Interlude Three
Revolver, The Beatles, Revolver—album title
Chapter 35
“Scared,” John Lennon: Walls and Bridges
Chapter 36
“Walking on Thin Ice,” Yoko Ono: Season of Glass
“And Your Bird Can Sing,” The Beatles: Revolver
“Woman,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy
“Remember,” John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band
“Imagine,” John Lennon: title song from Imagine
Chapter 37
“Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” The Beatles: The Beatles
“Imagine,” John Lennon: title song from Imagine
“Strawberry Fields Forever,” The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour
Chapter 38
“I’m Moving On,” Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy
Chapter 39
“Give Peace a Chance,” Plastic Ono Band: Lennon Legend
Chapter 40
“There’s No Goodbye,” Yoko Ono: Onobox, Disc 4: Kiss Kiss Kiss
Imagine, 1971 release by John Lennon
Magical Mystery Tour, 1967 release by The Beatles
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” The Beatles: Revolver
I have been fortunate to have found editors who trust that the kind of specialization that prevails in the broader culture of the United States is not really applicable in indigenous communities. I’ve been a professional visual artist for exactly as long as I’ve been a professional writer. The two are inextricably linked. In most indigenous communities, this is largely a matter of course. In addition to the kind of bridge I’ve navigated my whole life, I’ve known many ironworker/leatherworkers, roofer/painters, social worker/beadworkers in endless variation. That my professional fields are solely in various arts is perhaps more uncommon.
That said, my talents in any of the Traditional arts are woefully inadequate. I know just enough to understand how much I do not know. One thing I’ve always found fascinating in that world is the adventurous sense of reinvention present within those artists. Popular culture subjects often wind up reflected in Traditional art media. For example, I’ve been given two separate Beadwork Batman emblems. When I knew this novel would be about that bridge indigenous artists build daily, I felt like the paintings should reflect that sensibility.
In If I Ever Get Out of Here, the characters had a fondness for Wacky Packages Trading Cards, satirical reimaginings of real products, so those paintings were done in the style of Wacky Packages. That did not seem like the right take for this novel, and as I played with ideas, I remembered that, as a child, my nephew had a corn-husk doll of Superman that his grandmother had made for him. It wasn’t solidly in either world, and yet, entirely of both. It was so very clearly both a corn-husk doll and a Superman action figure. I decided to imagine what a Traditional Haudenosaunee artist would do in rendering these iconic album covers, so I limited the re-creations I painted to imagining them in Traditional media. The figures have been recast as if created in beadwork, beadwork and silk and velvet, cornhusk dolls, ribbon work, soapstone and basswood carving, sweetgrass weaving, and images from wampum belts. Haudenosaunee’s primary colors are purple and white, the colors of shell beads that make up wampum belts: our culture’s defining documents. Even though I knew the images in the book would be reproduced in black and white, any time an original image appeared in black and white, I painted it in purple and white. The images here are details from larger, more expansive paintings. You can view the paintings, in both detail and full, at www.ericgansworth.com, under the Give Me Some Truth visual art gallery.
If you’re a teacher using this book in class, first, thank you for your commitment to diverse voices, and second, please do not use this passage for quizzes … not even for bonus points (you know who you are). If you’re a young person taking such a quiz, I apologize in advance. This book has been five years in coming, and could not have been written without these contributions, so this list is a little long. I’m hoping not to get “played off the stage,” but if you must, let it be to “Imagine.”
As always, thank you first and foremost to Larry Plant, first reader, endless reader, co-Imaginer in all things. Thank you to E.R. Baxter III for continuing to read drafts after all these years. Thanks to Jeffery Richardson who diligently tracked down key media I was unaware of—like the film Lennon NYC—that boosted my memory and clarified key information. Thanks (and admitted tremendous jealousy) to Cliff and Sharon Greathouse, for detailed and repeated shared memories of their experiences at The Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival, where they witnessed the first public performance of the Plastic Ono Band.
Thanks to the following friends who were willing to have complex, nuanced, occasionally tough conversations, and some of whom read k
ey passages, so that the book would benefit from insights that definitely would have eluded me: Susan Bernardin, Jen Desiderio, Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Allison Hauck, Kathleen Steele, Amy Wolf.
Nyah-wheh, eternal, to Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo) for her essential work at American Indians in Children’s Literature (http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/) for her courage, kindness, activism, fierceness, and generosity, and for sparking this flame in my voice that was waiting for the right person to wake it and then know where to point it. And Nyah-wheh to Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee Creek) for her enthusiastic commitment to community.
A bittersweet thank-you to Cheryl Klein, my editor who took this book on the first leg of its journey, for her sound advice and sharp eye and for making me a better editor of my own work. A relieved thank-you to Nick Thomas who saw this novel through to the end, intuiting the final missing pieces and knowing how to help me find them and serve them with fava beans and a nice Chianti. Thanks also to the broader supportive community at Scholastic: Arthur A. Levine, Lizette Serrano, Tracy van Straaten, Emily Heddleson, Chris Stengel, and to Ellie Berger, for guiding that ship with warmth.
Thanks to Jim McCarthy for making that leap of faith, taking so much mystery out of the process, for his unfathomably quick responses, and for his overall commitment to diverse voices.
Thank you to Canisius College for its support, specifically the Joseph S. Lowery Estate for Funding Faculty Fellowship in Creative Writing. Thank you also to colleagues and students who always keep me on my toes, and a special shout-out to Deanna Pavone and Victor Mandarino for some immense last minute help. Thank you to Carol Ann Lorenz and Chris Vecsey for facilitating an NEH-sponsored Visiting Professorship at Colgate University during the period I worked on this book.
Nyah-wheh forever, to my family, ever complex, ever fascinating and inspiring, even when they don’t know it. Nyah-wheh to the women who taught me how to do beadwork when I was young, quietly showing me what it meant to add one more bead, like a seed, to take the story one layer forward. And as a last time, finally, thank you to the Beatles, the family of my soul, and to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, specifically, for knowing it ain’t easy, how hard it can be, but who kept going anyway, imagining a world of possibilities other than the one in front of your face.
Eric Gansworth (S▼ha-weñ na-saeˀ) is Lowery Writer-in-Residence and professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, and was recently NEH Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colgate University. An enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation, Eric grew up on the Tuscarora Indian Nation, just outside Niagara Falls, NY. His debut novel for young readers, If I Ever Get Out of Here, was a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick and an American Indian Library Association Young Adult Honor selection, and he is the author of numerous acclaimed books for adults. Eric is also a visual artist, generally incorporating paintings as integral elements into his written work. His work has been widely shown and anthologized and has appeared in Iroquois Art: Power and History, The Kenyon Review, and Shenandoah, among other places, and he was recently selected for inclusion in Lit City, a Just Buffalo Literary Center public arts project celebrating Buffalo’s literary legacy. Please visit his website at www.ericgansworth.com.
Also by Eric Gansworth for young people:
If I Ever Get Out of Here*
Also by Eric Gansworth for adults:
Novels:
Indian Summers*
Smoke Dancing*
Mending Skins*
Extra Indians*
Poetry Collections:
Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon*
A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function*
From the Western Door to the Lower West Side
(collaboration with photographer Milton Rogovin)
Creative Nonfiction, poems:
Breathing the Monster Alive*
Drama:
Re-Creation Story*
Rabbit Dance*
Home Fires and Reservation Roads*
Patriot Act
Editor:
Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing, Volume II
*includes visual art by the author
Turn the page for a sneak peek at how Lewis and Carson’s story began!
“Cut it off,” I yelled.
“Shut up, or my dad will hear you,” Carson Mastick said. “He’s not that drunk yet, and I’m gonna have a hard enough time explaining how you come down looking like a different kid than the one that went upstairs.” For ten minutes, he’d been farting around, waving the scissors like a magic wand. Now he yanked the long tail of hair from my neck and touched the scissors an inch above my collar. “Is this about it? There’s no turning back once I start chopping.”
“Yup, that’s it,” I said.
“You think cutting off your braid is going to make those white kids suddenly talk to you?” Carson’s cousin Tami said. “If you believe that, you need brain surgery, not a haircut. What do you care what they think anyway? You’ve had this braid since, what, kindergarten?”
“Second grade,” I said. “If you’ll remember, someone stuck a massive wad of gum in my hair that year and I had to cut it all off and start over.”
“Was an accident,” Carson said, the same thing he said whenever he did something terrible that he secretly thought was funny.
“Give it to me,” Tami said. “I got better things to do.” She grabbed the scissors.
“Wait,” Carson said, “I didn’t—”
Suddenly, it was gone, the hair I’d grown for five years. Tami held it out in her hand and I turned around.
“You didn’t fix it first,” I said. Everyone on the reservation knew that when you snipped off a braid, if you wanted to save it, you had to tie off both ends before you cut. And since almost no one cut off a braid casually, you always saved it to remember the reason you had cut it. What Tami held looked like a small black hay bale. “What am I gonna do with that?” I yelled, and Carson made the shush expression with his face. “You can’t braid it loose. It’s not boondoggle.”
“You could always do what I do,” Tami said. “I have my stylist sweep it up for me, and then when I get home, I let it go in one of the back fields, so the birds can nest with it.”
“Your stylist,” Carson laughed. “I’m the one that cuts her hair.”
In the mirror, my hair fell in strange lengths from Tami’s cut. “Let me even this out,” Carson said, but with each slice he made, my hair looked worse, like I was in one of those paintings at school where the person’s lips are on their cheek and one eye sits on top of their ear.
I noticed something else in the mirror I hadn’t registered before. “When did you get a guitar?”
“Last week,” Carson said, picking it up and strumming it, then tossing it back in the corner. “I told my old man I wanted one, and he knew I was talking electric, but he brought this piece of crap home. Showed me a few chords, said if I’m still playing it in December, we’ll think about the electric.”
“Where’d it come from?” I walked over to pick it up, but he grabbed it away.
“Sorry,” he said with a fake sad face. “The old man said no one else could touch it. We just got it on hock. Bug Jemison was hard up for some of his Rhine wine, so the old man bought him a few jugs ’til the end of the month, and we’re holding the guitar hostage. If he don’t pay up when his disability check comes in, the guitar’s mine. But until then …”
“Can you play any Beatles?” I asked, hopeful.
“Beatles! They broke up and ain’t never getting back together. Get over it.”
I left a few minutes later, starting my long walk home across half the reservation, still gripping the hank of hair. I opened my fingers a little every few yards to let the August breeze take some for the birds. As I turned the corner at Dog Street, where I lived, I could see my old elementary school. The teachers would be in their classrooms now, decorating bulletin boards with WELCOME TO THE 1975–76 SCHOOL YEAR! in big constr
uction-paper letters. They were going to be puzzled by the fact that the United States Bicentennial Celebration wasn’t exactly a reservation priority, since we’d been here for a lot longer than two hundred years.
The sight of the school reminded me how I got in this situation in the first place. It probably started back in third grade, when I had become a novelty. When I told my ma I was going to be featured on Indian Culture Night as the only kid from my grade who could speak Tuscarora fluently, I thought she would be happy, since she was always talking good grades this and good grades that. But she laughed like she did when the case worker asked about my dad’s child-support payments during our monthly visits to her cubicle.
“You’re just the dog and pony show,” Ma said. She spoke a couple of sentences in Tuscarora. “Know what I said?” she asked. I shook my head. “Didn’t think so. They’re looking for cash to keep the program going. Everyone wants to believe we can rebuild what the boarding schools took away from us. You’re Lewis the Horse, the proof that it can be done, that kids could learn the traditional language. But I don’t know who you’re going to speak it to,” she said. “No one your age speaks it, and no one out in the white world would understand you. Concentrate on subjects that are going to actually help you out.”
She refused to attend Indian Culture Night. I walked to school myself and did my bit to amaze the teachers. Then I went home the same way I’d gone, on foot. I was known as a carless kid, but for that night, I was the smart kid, and I liked the change. I kept up my grades, moving into advanced reading with the fourth graders, a year older than me, and I kept up with the work, welcoming a change of identity.
So when Groffini, the reservation school guidance counselor, sent our names over to the county junior high at the end of fifth grade, they tracked me into what my brother, Zach, called the smarties section, the brainiacs. Trouble was, they apparently didn’t think any of the other rez kids would make it in that section, so they tossed me in with twenty-two white strangers.
Maybe the fact that I’d been good at learning Tuscarora made them believe I’d be able to pick up the white kids’ language easily. But with all my supposed brains, I didn’t grasp that the way we talk to one another on the reservation was definitely not the way kids talked in this largely white junior high. On the rez, you start getting teased a little bit right after you learn to talk, and either you learn to tease back or you get eaten alive. One girl in my class, Marie, got stuck with the name “Stinkpot,” courtesy of Carson, when we were in first grade. You can see how I was okay with “Brainiac” by comparison. You might also be able to see that if I thought calling someone “Stinkpot” was a good way of making friends, I was in for a fairly rough ride.