Mother Goose

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her,
Put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he …”
uh, uh, something
“… very well.”

Two syllables, what was the word? words? Sure.
“Kept her very well.”

These days I still recall several Mother Goose rhymes because some of the names like Peter are answers for clues in one of the crossword puzzles I work each day. They’re stored deep in an obscure folder in my mind and reside in the culture although we rarely think of them as important except for children’s language development.

There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile,
And found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He had a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together in a crooked little house.

I recall one of my grade school teachers explaining sixpence and stile just like my college literature professor years later explained odd words and expressions in Shakespeare. So these rhymes were an introduction not only to poetry and vocabulary but also to literary criticism.

Most important for me, though, was that Mother played the role of Mother Goose in our house. She introduced us kids to the large volume that had a picture of a spectacled and bonnet-clad Mother Goose on its cover. From it she read aloud to us endlessly. She quoted even more poetry from memory, she told stories of the family, she researched and relayed her findings about Gypsies, about cooking, about Girl Scouts, about history, and sometimes about movie stars. Mother introduced us to literature: children’s literature, classic comic books, tongue twisters, and so much more. She danced with her cats as well as with us. She entertained. She played. She challenged us to look. She wanted us to engage in life. And, like those of the literary Mother Goose, some of her tales were tricky. We had to figure out just what they were about. Of course, in the meantime, there was always the rhythm, the characters, the word play, and her charm. She never let the characters wander too far away from our conversation. She’d suggest the spider walking across the kitchen floor was just like one that so frightened Miss Muffett, point out Peter Rabbit in her mother’s large garden, or identify me with the little boy Georgy Porgy who so liked eating his puddin’ and pie. She made literature live for her children.

Father Goose lived at our house too. He read to us, usually from the Eggermeier’s Bible Stories book. He pronounced each character and place name correctly having listened to countless sermons from educated preachers and consistently following the code of his self-pronouncing King James Version Bible. He played the piano to our delight. He sang and taught us to sing. He also entertained, occasionally doing an old high school cheer—he had been a cheerleader—or dancing to an old jazz tune he put on the record player—he’d played for years in a dance band. He employed and discussed difficult words and taught us generosity with vocabulary as well as with other resources.

And we, too, all lived together in a little Cape Cod house. The children’s world of old Britain was brought close to us in our Kansas town. So was the world of the ancient Hebrews, Egyptians, and Sumerians. It’s no wonder I started devouring book after book of historical fiction on my own beginning in the eighth grade. And thanks to the creativity of my mother and father and of the effectiveness of the education I received, Mother Goose stills reigns supreme in my world of literary fantasy.

Denver, 2012

Reflection

Photo from summer Scout camp one year. I took the
picture with my Brownie camera.

     I am sick of the first person singular, not of myself, but rather of writing about myself. Employing first person leaves me feeling like I have not heeded the advice of my teachers who found its over-use distasteful, but for the past eight years I have written almost everything in the ego person. I have become the only theme of my writing. Whatever the topic, I write about myself. My writing reminds me of a friend who authored a book about her grandmother but admitted that the real subject of the book was herself. I have tired of my self-focus but cannot seem to break the habit. Second person becomes tedious and nonsensical; third seems inaccessible. I seem stuck with myself.

     I wonder if I am trying to get over an episode of arrested development characterized by too many years of setting aside my own needs, even needs for personal recognition and acceptance. Now, in early old age, I may be striving to solve a dilemma of my personality hoping to complete some task of my maturing process. I hope I’m in some kind of developmental phase, something I will grow out of as I resolve its crisis. I’ve grown weary of writing “I” even while I recognize its economy and probable necessity.

     I re-read Conrad Richter’s novel The Light in the Forest. The story describes a white teen raised from early childhood by American Indians. He is reunited with his white family whom he has never known but is unable to adjust. Running away, he rejoins his tribe only to discover he doesn’t fit there either. He is an adolescent caught between two worlds. It seems to me that I am writing about a similar kind of situation in my own life, but one that started before my teen years and persists to this day.

     I enjoyed Richter’s story, and although I liked the idea of being raised by native folk, I wasn’t the rough and ready type. For me, the skills of forest survival, which had been fostered in me by Boy Scouts of America ideology—preparedness and self-sufficiency with an overlay of Indian images—held their appeal due solely to the Indian theme. I didn’t seem the typical Scout. I sang in choirs at church and school, made costumes, and hung art in my room. I did hunt rabbits with my rifle and camped out in a pup tent with my friends. I went to Scout camp and earned merit badges in pioneering, swimming, and hiking. I knew knots, could fashion a shelter, learned how to protect myself in harsh weather, and could identify beneficial and noxious plants. But I knew I would never live like an Indian in the wild. I liked my room, books, piano, school, friends, family, and church much more than Scouts. Still, because of the Indian images, I stayed in Scouts and continued to dream.

     I realized limitations of my strength. I could tie a knot but not very tightly. I could jump but refused when the gang dared me to jump off the garage roof. I could play basketball but not sink many goals. I knew many skills; often I could not do them well. Skinny, sunny, weak, witty—I was an artist. When it came to Indians, their art, crafts, dance, and music were my deep interests, not living out in the rain. I loved Indians but didn’t know any of them. I lived Indian in my imagination, and some Native American ideals influenced my values for people, fostering an acceptance of difference and a taste for the exotic. There were Indians living along the creek of my imagination, a constant flowing and sometimes flooding of images and thoughts. I lived among them with a sense of difference and reserve.

     Why this interest in Native Americans? Why not some other group of people such as knights in shining armor, soldiers fighting wars, or baseball heroes? Some of my interest surely stemmed from their having gone missing from one of my favorite places on earth, my grandparents’ farm. A treasure of arrow points and hide scrapers, corn grinders and flint knives stimulated my curiosity. And, as my oldest sister put it, “Mom pounded into my memory the fact that an Indian ceremonial ground existed just across the creek from the farm.” It was as if I lived in an Indian presence, but their presence was unseen.

     “The Indians” were a group whose current reality was first revealed to me when my mother was faced with a pile of outgrown clothing. She declared, “We’ll send them to the Indians.” The items were shipped to a mission outreach supported by her women’s circle at the church. These poor Native recipients of white castoffs became more real to me when Bob took his son and me to powwows. Bob introduced us to Indians who were living a life rich with socials, dances, markets, and laughter whatever clothing they were wearing. He taught us how to perform dance steps and soon we were dancing with Indians at Wamego, Wichita, Ponca City, and other White towns with Red names. We visited Indian City USA in Anadarko, were entertained in the home of an ancient Iowa-tribe woman near Hiawatha, and conversed with a Pottawatomie man on his reservation farm near Mayetta. But we had no Indian guests in our home. None came to our church. I didn’t know any in our city.

     I look back into those childhood and adolescent years, now assessing my interests from an adult point of view that suggests the images of Indians were especially meaningful to me as a developing homosexual person. Jamake Highwater’s book, Sexuality and Transgression, a queer theory study arising from Native American experience, helped me understand at least one important perspective of my development: the Indian represented my difference. Although I was unaware of the connection, the Natives kept living in my mind into my adulthood. During my undergraduate years, when I thought I had left the topic behind, I still treasured two suitcases filled with costumes I had made. In my mid-twenties, I discovered the literature of sexuality and threw myself into its mastery. At the same time, I found books by Native authors, gaining new and sometimes surprising images of Indians from their own testimony and perspective. In my late twenties I started reading several gay authors, whose books intrigued me with accounts of homosexual life. Some of the experiences described seemed attractive yet somehow impure. I persisted following the work Native writers, who for me represented a more pure type of difference although it too was often marred by alcohol and drugs, paralleling much of the gay experience about which I read.

     To my childhood imagination, Indian difference and independence, as interpreted by many nineteenth and twentieth century writers, had reflected my conflict as the only boy raised among many sisters. To my adult mind, Native minority symbolized my being somewhat gay among straight others. As an emerging gay man, I clearly resonated to the Native American commitment to arts, to their inability to become White, and to their choices to keep their traditional ideals and values. Their manipulation by others who assumed they knew best seemed similar to what I observed in church and state attempts to define and regulate gay life. These images kept me reading Indian literature while I forged a bisexual and then gay identity.

     Friendships helped change me even more. I loved an Indian man. We became friends through a common project and hung out together. He knew I was homosexual and would occasionally hold me. He didn’t kiss me, though, as he did his cousin (a fact that irked me). He loved me but didn’t want a sexual relationship. He was Indian but not gay. He was no idealized person, just a guy of average intelligence, conflicted over culture, religion, hopes, and desires. He was rather burned out from the drugs and alcohol of his past, in chronic physical pain due to an accident, and not very successful in relationships, but he was lovely in spirit and, mostly, he was accepting of me. I felt kinship. I felt love. Still, I realized the huge gap that separated us.

     A few years later, after I had left my mainly straight life, I met a queer Indian. This man’s lovely Mississippi accent melted my heart. His attractive body presented itself to me openly, invitingly. His religion, though, a central motivation in his life, became a barrier between us. I respected his spiritual search for its earnestness; his need to regain a Native grasp of divine realities made sense to me. But I realized its focus didn’t jive well with my own spirituality. I admired his commitment and his body. We had fun and still greet one another warmly.

     Indians in my imagination and experience have helped me understand and embrace my own gay life. I, who am living in relationship to my traditional family with ex-wife, kids and grandkids and to my life with another man, find a sense of kinship with Natives who have long bridged two cultures. Like Laguna poet Leslie Marmon Silko’s lost boy in “Story from Bear Country,” I had wandered among the bear people, had seen their beauty and already had started to become one of them. My bear people were the Indians of my imagination, a transformation of my sexual drives into fantasies of life in the wild, away from the stultifying influences of “normalcy,” and in an arts-centered and homosexual world. Indians—read gays—have long lived on the creek of my imagination, in both my earlier and present life. They symbolize a kind of individualization for which I have striven and a call for the perseverance, creativity, and fortitude required for my full development into a mature gay man. Perhaps someday I will understand this experience well enough to describe it in the third person, but not yet.

Denver, 2004

This mixed media painting depicts a deer hoof print. Still
when I look at it, I tend to see two people in conversation.
Acrylic washes, oil pastel, and Prisma color on paper.
Phillip Hoyle

I Was Wrong

The George Smith Public Library

     The librarian at the public library in my hometown introduced me to the Kansas Collection. She withdrew a key from her desk drawer and led me to an oak-paneled reading room. I had seen the room a few times, although its door was usually closed. Rare books were kept there in glass-fronted cabinets. Now I too was invited inside. Turning the key in the lock, the librarian opened a cabinet and withdrew a book, which she handed to me, an undersized volume titled Indians of Kansas.

     The librarian stood about five feet five inches, just under my height at the time. Although I don’t recall her name, I do remember she was always dressed in a skirt and blouse or a belted dress, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. To me she seemed as ancient as the library itself. She had been present every time I checked out books, stamping the return date on the flap inside the back cover, and telling me it was due in two weeks. She must have realized that I had read almost every book on American Indians from the library’s general collection. Now she handed me this rare jewel that in its faded blue cover seemed as precious as a sapphire. I could borrow it for two weeks.

     The librarian had plenty of chances to know me as a reader since, as a younger child, I had visited the library every Saturday. While Mom got her hair fixed at My Lady’s Beauty Salon, we kids would spend our time upstairs at the library. When we had selected and checked out our books, we’d descend the wide oak stairway into the building’s common hall, from which we could enter the back room of the salon through a screen door. Greeted by the sharp smell of chemicals, we’d make our way to the front, walking past a row of patrons having their locks shorn and styled. Others were sitting under beehive hair dryers—Mother often there perusing a fashion magazine or preparing her Sunday school lesson. Waiting for Mom, we’d begin reading from our week’s selection of books or sort through the variety of women’s magazines on a table by the front window.

     By my junior high years, I had read every Indian book in the children’s section, having taken them home Saturday after Saturday, memorizing their illustrations and, sometimes, the text. Then I started checking out the adult books, reading the Dewey-Decimal “970s” on Indians, their histories, tribes, and customs. I ventured into the American history section, reading about the Indian wars and studying maps and photographs from the Nineteenth Century. I read anthropological studies of Cheyenne culture, academic summaries of troop and tribal movements at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, handbooks on Indian crafts, and collections of Indian myths and legends. I even discovered a few biographies of Native American leaders.

     Although I read a lot, I was more taken by the pictures in books. Some photographs became like old friends who greeted me from the pages of several books I checked out often. To this day I love to come across historic photos of Sitting Bull dressed in a muslin shirt, an eagle feather in his parted hair, or Little Wolf wearing his otter turban with its silver cross, or Wavoka sporting his black felt hat. I am still moved by a candid shot in a National Geographic publication picturing a modern sun dancer with a plumed eagle bone whistle in his mouth. I shudder at the photograph showing the frozen corpse of an emaciated old man killed at Wounded Knee and am saddened when I see a familiar view of a line of Ghost dancers in a trance, stomping their earnest prayer for a new age that would bring sufficient food and an end to war. These photographic images burned their realistic impressions on my memory.

     Through books, I also started to recognize the world as seen through native eyes: the fear of antelope rushing from a prairie fire as painted by Black Bear Bosin and the grace of a deer leaping as depicted by Woody Crumbo. Interesting historical insights came from unknown artists who recorded tribal experiences and heroic deeds in ledger books and on animal skins. I studied their detailed paintings, available to me in library books, and discovered an unusual cultural and artistic sense of perspective, one that fostered my sympathy for Native American cultures and peoples.

     The books took me beyond themselves, helping me understand the stone artifacts found at my grandparents’ farm. They prepared me to enjoy the Indian powwows I attended in northeast Kansas and in Oklahoma. Their instructions and illustrations helped me create authentic costumes that decorated my bedroom walls. They helped me appreciate the Native American collections at the Kansas Historical Museum and the Denver Art Museum. The books gave me a growing view of the world as well as an appreciation of things past.

     The day the librarian handed me the small blue volume marked a change in my intellectual experience. I learned that some books were prized for their antiquity and rarity, others for their information. This book presented both. Being rare, the book was kept locked up, safe from candy-sticky hands. I was impressed by its Nineteenth Century publication date. Entrusting the book to me, the librarian warned me to be careful when I turned the brittle, yellowed pages.

     I carried the treasure home, where I looked first at the illustrations, line drawings that didn’t interest me much. To teenaged me, they seemed like poor substitutes for the photographs in modern books. Then I read the sections about the Plains Indians, my favorite tribes. The book revealed that the first group of Pawnee Indians to make their way north into Kansas were called the Skidi-ra-ri. My mind made a connection between that text and a small town just south of my grandparents’ farm. Surely Skiddy, Kansas, was named for the Skidi Indians that had camped there and planted their summer crops. As I read on about Pawnee life, the creek valley of my imagination filled with Native inhabitants raising beans, squash, and corn, holding harvest ceremonies in late summer, and returning to their permanent, winter camp about ten miles downstream to prepare for the fall hunt. Never again would I see the farm in the same way as before, never hear “Skidi” without seeing braids and feathers, never hold one of the arrowheads Grandpa gave me without wondering who had made it.

     I recall Skiddy itself. Grandpa drove me there in his dark green Chevy pickup, with running boards on the sides, gearshift on the floor of the cab, and dogs, Coalie and Jack, in the back. I went with him to pick up some part for a machine he was repairing. There was a store, a smithy, and a gas station. I saw a few old houses, not much. And that was fifty years ago.

     I started wondering about the place when I began writing these portraits. I searched the indices of a number of books at the Denver Public Library. Next, I tried their computer catalogue. It kept asking me to check my spelling. Finally, after several tries at titles, subjects, and words, I made a potential hit with a title about ghost towns in Kansas.* The book was located in a full-reserve stack. The librarian brought it to me to peruse in a huge reading room. Its paneled walls and old pictures reminded me of the reading room in my hometown library, but this time I couldn’t take the book home.

     I eagerly checked the index for Skiddy and found a reference. I was wrong. Long-gone Skiddy was not named for early Pawnees but, rather, for a wealthy entrepreneur who, in the late 1860’s put up money to route the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad through the village. In return, the residents promised to name the town for him. Skiddy flourished for a number of years as a farming and shipping center, but a newly constructed bridge moved road traffic away from the community, and their bid to get the Rock Island Railroad to come through failed.

     I imagine my sisters thinking this article should have been written years ago when, in their estimation, I was almost always wrong. They didn’t like my know-it-all ways. I was a curious young student but, apparently, too eager to share what I had learned. My siblings’ criticism was the occasion of lots of kidding and irritation, but it probably did help me monitor my enthusiasm when I was in school.

     Discovering that my junior-high logic was incorrect didn’t discourage me, but it did clarify why I couldn’t find direct Pawnee-related information in archaeological literature. In the late 1930’s several digs were made in the creek beds of the area, including Clarks Creek, but references to the finds were generalized as being of Hopewellian or Plains Woodlands groups rather than Pawnee or Caddoan. Fitzgerald’s article on Skiddy preserved local traditions of Natives in the 1860’s and 1870’s and mentioned a near-by spring where the tribe’s women and children often stayed when the warriors were away hunting. The written history of Clarks Creek places the Kansas there; reason concludes many of the relics from the Indian past were from the Kansa tribe. Surely the Skidis traveled through on their long journey north in prehistoric times, and other tribal groups roamed the area for hundreds of years before them. I still see braids, as it were, when I hear of Skiddy, but now they are on Kansa Indian heads, and I wonder if the spring where families camped and the fields they tended were on my grandparents’ farm.

     Libraries still call to me, intriguing me with information that enriches my understanding. I visit the 970’s now at a library that has more books with that number than the total number of holdings at the public library of my childhood. I love reading the shelves, glancing through books, stopping to look at pictures. In response, my imagination runs free with hints from them, ideas and images that bring alive the facts I read. Imagination enlivens the figures in illustrations and sends a deep thrill through my body as I join living scenes from the past.
Denver, 2004

* Daniel Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997.