Memorial Day i

 

I was never formally introduced to my great uncle Edgar Hartman. He was dead long before I was born, even before my mother was born, in fact. But I knew of him by way of his only sibling, my grandmother, who used to tell me the same story, over and over, whenever I, as a boy, mowed her lawn.

A single ice-cube floated around at the top of a glass of lemonade she’d always bring out when I’d finish the grass on the north side of her house. She’d set that lemonade out, wave me to the porch beside her, then push that glass at me with a warning.

“You drink that slowly now,” she’d say. “Years ago, I brought my brother Edgar a quart jar of lemonade when he was working in the canning factory–one of those hot summer nights.” Her head would rise slightly, her eyes lose focus as she’d bring back the incident. “Edgar drank it in one gulp–never even brought it down,” she’d say, not without some admiration. “When he was finished he took one look at that empty jar and passed out–right then and there, flat on the floor.” She’d point at the lemonade. “Not so fast now.”

That was just about all I knew of this great uncle Edgar. I knew he was dead, of course, and that the local American Legion Post was named after him–Hartman-Lammers Post–and that he’d died in the Great War, World War I.

I was a kid then–maybe ten–and a half a century had passed since Uncle Edgar took leave from this vale of tears. He died somewhere in France, maybe in a scene like this—I don’t know—but for years the only story I knew about him featured a bout of heavy lemonade chugging and a quick trip to the cement floor at Oostburg Canning Factory, circa 1910.

Years later, my grandma passed along fistfuls of old scrapbook stuff to me, thinking, I suppose, that of her grandchildren, I seemed most fascinated by her stories of the past. Those old pictures and documents continued to yellow in a box I’d come heir to, each dutifully described in her chicken-scratch writing so I’d remember who was who and what was what.

When Grandma died, I dug into that bundle and found a bunch of things having to do with her brother Edgar. Odd. I was 500 miles from the Oostburg Canning Company and American Legion hall, but here I was, fated to be the sole caretaker of a life most everyone else had forgotten.

Edgar Hartman was not married when he was killed instantly by what his commanding officer called a German “one-pounder.” He was just one of millions killed in the endless horror of trench warfare that came to define the military madness of World War I. My mother never knew him; she’d been born a month and a half after his death. As far as I knew, no one alive knew my uncle Edgar.

 I suppose that’s why I put all those Uncle Edgar documents, photographs, and letters my grandmother had given me into a scrapbook with “Photo Album” embossed in gold across a non-descript, tan cover. There’s no picture of him sprawled out on the floor of the Oostburg Canning Company here, but there is, quite frankly, everything else anyone on earth knows of him. I’ve got all of that here in this scrapbook, so when I hold it, as I am now, I have in my hands every last shred of the life of a real human being, a man who happened to be my great uncle. You might say, I’ve got the book on Uncle Edgar.

"Above the Clouds"

For a time at least, the fog on the mountain was so thick that literally no one knew what was going on. A goodly chunk of the Battle of Chattanooga was fought in fog so burdensome that blue and gray soldiers had to look each other in the eye before they knew whether to shoot or embrace the indistinct figures in the chilled overcast. 

Basically, the intent of the Union and  Confederate armies were simple: for the Union, break through the obvious battle lines the Rebs had set up; for the Rebs, hold those lines down. But one of the enemies of both sides was the terrain of the fighting, terrain that prompted the Battle of Chattanooga to be dubbed "the battle above the clouds."

In 2010, Covenant College, right there on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, asked to visit for a semester, to teach a writing course as a visiting professor. It was a joy to be up there on the mountain, neighboring such a historical setting. If I'd been a quicker learner, I'd have come away with a better understanding of what happened in the "batte above the clouds," but I take some comfort from knowing that books--lots of them!--have been written about what happened here in late November of 1863, military action that opened the South to General Sherman's march and, eventually, the Union successes.

Like all battlefield memorials, what's here at Chattanooga's Lookout Mountain, was well as Missionary Ridge conveys inevitable seriousness. You're surrounded by so many monuments to sacrifice that it's difficult not to evaluate your self and your motivations. There's no escaping seriousness up on the mountain, where the battle above the clouds once happened,

This week, the Supreme Court paved the way for Southern states to reverse legislation that provided for minorities to have representation in national politics because racial preference, so said the conservative majority, is just another form of racial prejudice.

Almost immediately, several of those Southern states did what they could to rewrite legislation to shut down what we've come to call "affirmative action," thereby almost certainly limiting minority representation in the Congress. 

It seems the battle above the clouds, 160 years later, isn't yet concluded.

 

"The Cross of Snow"

That Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of America's very first great--which is to say "national"-- poet/treasures did not want you or me reading this particular poem of his is manifestly obvious. Longfellow never read "The Cross of Snow" publicly nor touted it for publication. I suppose it lay innocently among his papers, his letters and notes to friends--just another scribbled sheet of paper, where someone cleaning up his life picked it up and read it, then, probably immediately, wondered why no one on the face of this green earth had seen it before. 

Longfellow was an America-sized celebrity poet at a moment when great poets were lavishly celebrated. Everyone knew Longfellow and quoted him freely; but the sad truth here is that no one saw this particular poem, nor read it, until some relative, probably post-mortem, cleaned up his office and happened to find it where the great American poet clearly intended it not to be found.

No one familiar with Longfellow's work would call him or his poetry "excessive" or "overwrought," certainly none of his contemporaries. This particular poem, "The Cross of Snow," is so brutally honest that it's not difficult to see why America's favorite poet would not want it published: it painfully reflects upon grief--his grief-- at his spouse's accidental death right there at home. 

Fanny Longfellow died a frighentingly awful death when her dress caught fire. Just one day later, her heroic attempts to save her notwithstanding, his beloved spouse passed away. It's impossible to imagine his agony, but you can stand beside his grieving by reading his tribute to her in "The Cross of Snow," a poem America's  most famous poet never intended you or me to read.

When you do, you'll feel the grieving husband and see for yourself the immense cross of snow pitched up against the mountainside. A full 150 years later, the intense aching in Longfellow's soul is still here in the lines:

There is a mountain in the distant West
  That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
  Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
  These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
  And seasons, changeless since the day she died. 

Eighteen years after he lost her, the image of that snowy cross still brings Longfellow back to grief, as if she'd not left. His heart is still shorn, jagged and bloodied.

The photographer William Henry Jackson took the immense landscape photograph that wrought such intense emotion from Longfellow's grieving soul. Jackson is best known or remembered for his remarkable photographs of compelling Western landscapes like the landscape featured here in this remarkable image.

And there's a back story: Jackson had heard of a disappearing cross in a mountain view and determined to capture the image, if that could be done, a job that required more strength than sense--a huge camera, 10 x 13 glass plates, an armful of chemicals and equipment, all of it lugged up a mountain across a valley from the snow cross when the temps were just right for that cross. to be there at that moment that day. Hundreds of pounds of equipment got toted up an adjacent mountain to a spot Jackson judged to offer the finest perspective.

The landscape photo William Henry Jackson took in that place on that August day, 1872, prompted Longfellow's very personal but memorable response. 

The cross of snow is more difficult to see these days, erosion on the mountain alters the image with each passing season. Once it offered hope, like an old favorite hymn. Even today, for some at least, the story offers. The snow on this mountain has meant much more than just snow on a mountain. 

     

Wounded Knee -- vi

 

A souvenir

Now look down at the sign where the reservation roads cross, three hundred yards from where we’re standing. In summer, you might see a car or two. Go ahead. Walk down. People there beneath a brush arbor—Sioux people—will be happy to sell you some keepsake from your visit.

I have one—a little cowhide drum, two inches across, decorated with beaded fringe and hand-painted on both sides—on one, the image of a red drum; on the other, the words “Wounded Knee” painted in above a single eagle feather, two dates, one on either side—“1890” and “1973.”

Cost me twenty dollars. I bought it from an angular man in a Western shirt who had three of them strung over his hand when he showed me his goods. His dark, expressionless face was pockmarked, his eyes blood-lit. I am sad to say he looked far too much like the caricature some of us hold of reservation people today.

“My wife makes them,” he told me slowly, handing me the one that now hangs on my wall. He pointed into an old Ford parked just ten feet away. I looked into the interior where she was sitting on the passenger’s side. She didn’t move, her head bowed as if she were asleep. Maybe it was my own sinful prejudice, but I couldn’t help think the worst.

I picked a crisp twenty out of my billfold and handed it to him. He took it and left. I suppose the next day he would return with the other two he’d shown me.

I don’t know that I can unpack the whole meaning of that single twenty-dollar transaction—what percentage of what I gave him may have come from pity, what percentage from blood guilt, what percentage from the very real desire to take some icon home to remember Wounded Knee. I honestly cannot interpret my own motives, in part because I don’t know that I want to look that closely into my own heart.

But I’m happy that little cowhide drum is here beside me as I write these words, not because it’s cute—it isn’t. I have no doubt that some enterprising wasicu could create a kiosk and churn out Wounded Knee kitsch far more marketable—refrigerator magnets, ball-point pens with pinto ponies that run up and down the shaft. But there’s something about the people who sold it to me that I can’t forget, just as surely as the tawny prairie landscape all around and the entire awful story that gives the valley its ghostly life. Mystery and the sadness are here in my little buckskin drum, a drum that really doesn’t sound.

Mostly, at Wounded Knee, there is silence. When you visit, you won’t read or hear many words at all. If you’re white and you want to understand, you’ll have to look deeply into your own heart, stare into your deepest values, listen to the songs you sing, examine the history your family has lived and the faith you celebrate.

Maybe it’s best to simply to simply stand in awe at Wounded Knee and pray with your silence. That’s not easy. We’re not good at lamentations. White folks would much rather see Wounded Knee as a battle than a massacre, as we have, officially, for more than a century.

Look up. Somewhere in that vast azure dome a jet will be cutting a swath across the openness. Inside, three hundred people are sipping Cokes, reading Danielle Steele, watching a movie. Some are sleeping. Some are traveling home.

Do the math. Count them yourself—the thousands each day that only incidentally glance out from corner-less airplane windows as they pass over the spot we’re standing. Then look around and see how alone you are up here on the hill with four silent Hotchkiss guns.

Maybe we’d all rather not know. We’d all rather fly over Wounded Knee.

Visit sometime. Leave the kids at home. Welcome the silence. Stand here for an hour until the keening, the death songs, rise from the ravines as they once did. Look out over nearly a thousands ghosts assembled in space so open it’s almost frightening.

Stand here alone for awhile, and I swear that what you’ll read in the flow of prairie grasses and hear in the spirit of the wind is that, really, despite the tracks of those jets in the skies above and the immensity of silence all around, once upon a time every last one of us was here.

Wounded Knee -- v

 

Aftermath

That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, 25. Fifty-one wounded Sioux were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. The Sioux dead were left on the field and in the ravines, but exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Native people consider 300 a fairly just estimate.

That night, a blizzard came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin. Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that, from my vantage point, a white man at Wounded Knee, looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people—my own Dutch immigrant ancestors among them—went west for cheap land they assumed the Sioux didn’t value. After all, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the buildings, the cut sod? Millions of white people—my own ancestors among them—thought our holy book to a pagan people was a generous gift for the millions of acres those people had once roamed in freedom. My own family included, we wanted to own what they wanted to honor.

But the Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill where we’re standing. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost the war; they lost their way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

There’s more. You must have noticed because you can’t have missed what’s right in front of us—what’s been there the whole time we’ve been watching what happened. Be careful as you walk around on that promontory because a crumbling block foundation, scattered with crumpled beer cans and trash, marks the outline of what was once a Catholic church, right there where those Hotchkiss guns rained death on the council circle. It’s crumbling, as things do that are not preserved.

The church that once stood here was destroyed in the 1973 Wounded Knee conflict, when, once more, violence occurred not far from where we’re standing. Men and women who held radically different views of Native dignity squared off against each other in this very valley. That dispute brought in U. S. Marshalls and turned deadly, when armed wasicu, here, once again, dug in like the cavalry. For many, those government marshalls were here to defend tribal leaders some thought violent, despotic men who’d long ago sold their souls for fools’ gold.

It isn’t pretty—this crumbling shell. There’s nothing to suggest that what once stood above ground here represented—even offered—the Prince of Peace.

In Coventry, England, you can walk within the skull-like remains of a cathedral destroyed by Nazi bombs during World War II, a remarkable memento of Brit suffering during relentless air strikes. Coventry Cathedral is what much of Europe looked like after Hitler. That foundation is immense, its walls rise and fall jaggedly. But its perimeters are festooned with plaques and flowers and all kinds of memorials neatly commemorating suffering and heroism.

No walls still stand on the foundation half-buried in the crest of the hill where we’re standing. No memorials—just graffiti—decorate what’s there. No one keeps the place up, so what’s left deteriorates in the abusive hands of changing prairie seasons. You can walk into that foundation, if you dare. The empty shell of the church that once looked over the field where hundreds died is nothing at all like the monument at Coventry.

And yet it is. It’s just not sanitized. But then, nothing is at Wounded Knee. Today, there is very little to mark the spot, beyond the sign on the road and the old monument behind us. There is a circular visitors’ center down the hill to the east, the pit toilets stand just outside. The center itself is black, and it’s likely you’ve parked beside it before you walked up the hill to the burial monument. In the summer, the place is open. You can wander into its dark confines, where various displays will tell part of the story. But most of the year you’ll find a padlock on the door, which means you’re on your own at Wounded Knee.

_____________________

continued and finished on Monday. . .

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 121

 

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life;. . .”

 

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t tell me because the knowledge would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

 

One part of his job, I remember, was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

 

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

 

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that elders really should be Godly statesmen, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elderly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I was an elder, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office of elder, having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

 

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from people who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, they were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

 

I know them. I’ve walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I know that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last night—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some of the evil they’ve perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that someday they’d be doling out the body and blood of Christ?  Amazing.

 

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

 

Amazing grace.  What a celebration.  Hallelujah, what a savior. 

Wounded Knee -- iv

 

(cont. from yesterday)

“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.

It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Sioux men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.

Then, something happens—nobody knows exactly what. The bluecoats draw their rifles and swords. Rifle magazines click open and close; guns are brought into position to fire.

Death

A single troop—who knows who?—tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Sioux men. Some say he was deaf. At the same moment, the medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, his shrieking exhortation continuing in the Sioux language. The soldier and Black Coyote wrestle for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle wrapped in the blanket covering one of three young men standing close together. The medicine man keeps telling his people white bullets will not harm them.

One shot. Whose was it? Did it come from Black Coyote in the struggle? No one knows for sure. But in a moment all hell broke loose, and, for less than a half hour, what follows is a fierce and bloody battle waged hand-to-hand in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of the Sioux in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the cavalry could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted later.

An old woman who used to live down our street claims that out here on the prairie we get only about ten sweet days a year. Prairie cold locks life in its frigid jaws; the heat wilts anything that grows; and always, the wind blows. In the summer, it’s capable of sand-blasting your face; in the winter, its bite is not only dangerous but deadly. But that morning, December 29, 1890, the wind stood still. When you look down now, from the promontory where the First and Second Artillery have been firing those Hotchkiss guns into the horror beneath them, imagine a cloud of dust and smoke so thick as to stop breath. In seconds, in the very middle of the fray, combatants cannot see each other, but blindness doesn’t stop the killing. Seventeen miles away, at the Pine Ridge Agency, people claimed to hear the firing.

Just exactly who fired first might never be established, but there is no question whose rifles ended the massacre. With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run away into that ravine you see just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the madness, Forsyte’s men are in no mood to take prisoners, so for several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee. What began in intolerable heat ended in cold-blooded murder.

If you’d like, perhaps you could walk down into those ravines, no more than a half mile from where we’re standing. There are no markers anywhere, like the ones at Little Big Horn, no whited stones to mark the spots where people fell. But even in their absence, ghosts linger.

__________________

more tomorrow. . .