Welcome back, Kotter--repris

[It's a huge job, but I've been slowly disassembling this blog I've kept for the last 14 or 15 years, taking down posts and tossing some, but dropping the salvageable others in a half-dozen digital folders. I'm not harboring some death wish, but neither am I believing that, at 72, I've got another lifetime ahead of me. I'm claiming my narcissism maybe, keeping all those thoughts alive and saving my children from the guilt of having to delete them themselves. If it's a rescue mission, at least I'm not frantic about it.

This one is dated November 15, 2007. Today, it's only available in a folder on my hard drive titled "Memoir," and here, once again.] 

Somewhere in central New Mexico last Sunday, somewhere around the pueblo named Laguna, I felt an echo of de je' vu and remembered the time, more than thirty [now 40+] years ago, when me and the cat were packed into a sky-blue VW hatchback, rumbling along the very same corridor on I-40, leaving Arizona and the Southwest and returning to the green cusp of the Great Plains, where I've lived ever since. The cat died years ago. That's another story.

On that trip, it was just she and I, a gorgeous calico. My wife and new baby girl had flown from Phoenix to Sioux City that very day, as I remember. A litter box was on the floor in the back; and by the time I got to Winslow or so, she'd finally stopped howling. Poor thing had never been in a car. The howling had been awful. She'd almost died in the desert.

It wasn't the cat I remembered last Sunday, it was the memory of a strange feeling that something was over--our four-years in Phoenix, where I'd really loved teaching in the kind of city high school I'd wanted to be part of since Welcome Back, Kotter or Room 222.

Me and the calico--our leaving meant the end of all of that, but I didn't regret leaving Arizona in the rearview. I remember thinking good things about returning to small-town Iowa, to the college where I'd been taught Calvinism--among a load of other things.

The Arizona administrator who'd hired me just two years before really disliked my return, but I was taking a college job. I knew if I were ever going to write anything I had to get out of high school--no matter how much I liked it--and get to a place where day-in, day-out classroom prep didn't entirely exhaust whatever creativity I had in me. I wanted to teach in college. I remember having the feeling that I'd not travel this way ever again--from Phoenix to Siouxland.

Last Sunday morning--sun so bright I couldn't see half the time--there I was again, same road. Laguna pueblo--I've got pictures--looked a whole lot different thirty-plus years ago. The landscape is the same, of course, just more people.

I suppose the moral lesson is that one never really closes up shop. Once, years ago, I thought I was on that section of freeway for the last time. Several times I've been there since, twice in the last six months; and, I'm betting, I'll be there again--soon, in fact.

Doors don't close, I suppose, don't lock but once maybe.

It was a gorgeous Sunday morning in the New Mexico highlands.

The poetic art

There's always a gap, always a space, always an opening for us, for the reader. There has to be: art suggests; it doesn't preach. Even if the poet wants to change the world, flat straightforwardness is the enemy. "Tell all the truth," Dickinson so famously wrote, "but tell it at a slant." Art requires very little really, but if a poem is to be artful it has to leave openings for reader-participants because we're part of it. 

Case in point, “Clear and Sunny,” a little poem by my friend, Dave Schelhaas, in a new collection of poetry titled Final Exam: Poems About Teaching, collected and edited by J. Barry Koops, a treasure, by the way, for an ex-teacher.

I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.

Because I know the writer, who lives a hop, step, and a jump from a school playground, I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him. If "writing is seeing," then he's got me already because I can see him and I can hear "the music of the playground" from his own front walk.

Worried that I would not hear it,
I had listened as soon as I left the house,
and there it was,
softened by all the green leaves in the tall trees,
rich like thick jam on buttered bread,
more beautiful than church bells:
the shouts and laughter of schoolchildren.

"Green leaves," "thick jam," "church bells"--all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," or recording it for us to hear. He's playing the music, or singing it, so the notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Kids.

But the line, "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house" introduces some conflict, some darkness, the heft of his worry that's satisfied in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."

I'm in. I know the poet. I'm quite sure I know his sadness, his worry--I know the darkness he knows. I get it.

The last three lines nail it, describing the outpouring of his relief at hearing all that music a half a block away--

bubbling through air waves still trembling
with the terrible news of
yesterday.

Whatever happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, without a bit of doubt I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when that very school suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was sexually abusing his students. 

Here's how this reader's mind put the story together: Dave walked out his back door one fair morning, filled with the darkness generated by what had happened at the school down the block, the school his grandchildren attend. Then, unmistakably, he heard, "the music of the playground," and in it the sheer beauty of innocence drawing back the veil of tears, kids having fun.

I thought I had it down, this poem written by a friend.

But then--and only then--I spotted the subtitle: "September 12" and realized "Clear and Sunny" wasn't a poem about the monster of sexual abuse, but the horror of Twin Towers buckling into a cloud of poison dust by kamikaze assassins.  

I'd been thinking that, because I know the poet, the heart of the poem was obvious. I was wrong. It's not about the school, it's about 9/11, and the relief those children's playground voices sang the morning after, on September 12. 

Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If you read the poem without its datedness (or my personal associations), then the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal in its reach (about how we take solace--period--in the darkness all around us). 

Because I know the poet, I was ready almost instantaneously to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense. Then I saw the subtitle, and realized I was wrong--way wrong.  

But the gap, the space, the blank the reader has to fill, would have been even wider, its impact more well, global, because less immediate. The poem would be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated the poem via its subtitle. 

Would it be a better poem? Depends on who you ask. There's no accounting for taste. It would be less specific and more vague. Merit might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have deleted the subtitle? Talk among yourselves.

Everything I've just written, however, in the long post about a short poem attests to the joy, the human joy, of poetry and art itself. Even though writing "September 11: Clear and Sunny" didn't earn my friend a dime, I'm sure he wasn't looking to be salaried. He just wanted us all to hear the music rising from the playground on a morning he couldn't help but feel that grief and anger left the world without any harmony.

That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.

Reading Mother Teresa--To be near

But as for me, it is good to be near God.

I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;

I will tell of all your deeds. Psalm 73:28 

I’ve often wondered why God almighty points out King David as the human being closest to his heart. I’m sure theologians and academics have answers, but I’ve always speculated that the answer lies in his poems, the psalms, because even when he wasn’t connected to God (see Psalm 13), he was.

King David constantly went to God, constantly. Angry, thrilled, celebrative, envious, depressed, jubilant, unsure of himself, quizzical, thankful, joyous, or incensed – he carried all of that up to God as if Jehovah was more than a confessor or best friend or marriage partner, as if he were, in fact, God.

Here’s my speculation, take it or leave it: God loved King David – an adulterer, a murderer, a man with more moods than the moon – because David simply wouldn’t not talk to him. No man was ever closer to God’s heart because no man so consistently lugged his life’s baggage – its glories and his humiliations – to the Lord.

One more little story about Mother Teresa’s year of waiting. You may remember that, once she heard Jesus’s voice on the way to and during the retreat at Darjeeling, once she was sure herself that the voice could not be anyone but Christ, she returned to the school where she was principal and told Father van Exem what she heard, who then brought the matter to the Archbishop, who, like Van Exem initially, couldn’t help doubt the whole spiritual thing.

The idea was unimaginable – that this tiny lady hanging out on the dreadful streets of Calcutta, a place where suffering and poverty and blood came in torrents? – it was nigh unto insane. What’s more, she was, after all, reneging, after a fashion, on her own vows to the Sisters of Laredo. The request was as wrong as it was simply lunatic.

Yet, they all conceded to the proposition so that – even if it had taken a long, long time – she was finally granted permission. And here’s what happened.

August, 1948. Father van Exem is given the esteemed privilege of breaking the news to his spiritual mentee. He celebrates mass that day, then catches Mother Teresa quickly and asks her to stay behind when the rest of the Sisters departed.

She does, sensing – those who knew her say –, that finally, at long last, an answer is forthcoming. It had been Christ’s own voice after all, Jesus speaking directly to her.

Father van Exem had mentioned that he had something to tell her, and when the two of them stand stood there together, she’s the one who speaks, not him, even though he’s the one with the news.

“Excuse me, Father,” she tells him. “I will pray first."

There. That’s David, bringing absolutely everything – his fears, his joys, his excitement. She brought it all to the Lord.

One more thing, as much a delight.

Father van Exem tells her that a reply from Rome had been received and her wish and her prayer was granted.

Immediately, she said, “Father, can I go to the slums now?”

Immediately. First crack out of the box.

She was ready.

Praise the Lord.

Presidential power

Amache Internment camp, Colorado

What's going to get our President tossed is behavior he's appears powerless to control. Take "kung flu" for example. 

I'm in no position to judge the relative offense of that line. I'm not Asian. But one morning in eastern Colorado, I got up with the sun, drove out into the boiling plains and ran into the remnants of a Japanese war camp whose cement foundations stood witness to the immense size of an enterprise long gone. Once upon a time tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans lived out there, quarantined from white America because of their ethnic origins. 

And I know that during that war thousands of Japanese prisoners of war ended up on our shores, where they were stuck into prison camps not at all dissimilar to the camps created for their German compatriot prisoners. They're all, of course, long gone, but some of those camps, ghost towns really, still exist today, enough of their skeletons to get a sense of how Axis-power POWs lived. 

One significant difference between the two are the friendships that grew between prisoners and locals--in rural Iowa as elsewhere. Such friendships happened only in German POW camps, not among the Japanese. American farmers in need of it could count on the ex-Wehrmacht for help. Japanese POWs were not so requested nor received.

If Asian-Americans take offense at calling the near-and-present killer virus "Kung Flu," then some of us--me, for instance--have the same moral right to use that language as we do to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. 

Our President knows that, but he can't help himself. He knows--and he's right--that his continuing use of an offensive tag will get him a houseful of grins whenever he takes the podium, as it did in Phoenix at a mega-church in a congregation of Trump-loving Christian kids, most all of them white. You could feel the enthusiasm rise in this house of Trump worship when he started on a riff  they'd heard before: ". . .never heard of a disease with so many names," and then started in, giggles mounting into cheering and applause when he reached the big line all those white kids were waiting for--"kung flu." That's Trump magic.

Isn't that cool? He just comes right out and says it. He don't care. I love that.

It's funny only if you don't care about offense, and you deliberately and pathetically look past 125,000 dead Americans and fully as many patients alive but sentenced to suffer with a coffin full of maladies, some of them for the rest of their lives. The corona virus may well have a ton of names, but one of them isn't comedy. 

When your and my President repeats the name riff one more time, the words his minions can't wait for him to repeat feeds the bigot in us. "Kung flu" becomes a badge of his refusal to toe the line to the p.c. police, makes him a rebel at war with powers bigger than all of them, a bow-and-arrow Robin Hood of all dispossessed white men. And thus, a hero.

He knows it, and he can't help himself. He may not drink, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have an addiction. 

Can you really design something more idiotic than our President having mass events in cities where the virus is growing wildly? 

What a man! What a brave man, fighting back the way he is--no mask, none of that "social distancing." To hell with all of that. Kung Flu too--take that, you fools. He's a big billionaire rebel, a guerilla gorilla, and he's going to take down every last enemy because they're all around, aren't they? They're all around and they want our guns and our money and our power.

So how about that? 'Kung Flu.' Isn't that a riot? 

Is it any wonder he's tanking? 

Monuments of Moment

Something about the place, even today, makes it feel far more defensible than it really was. General Braxton Bragg, the Reb General, didn't over-invest for good reason. There were other arenas just then that were more vulnerable in the shaky Confederate lines. He'd smacked the Union forces at Chickamauga just a couple months before, and had a goodly chunk of the Union Army just about encircled and under siege at Chattanooga, where the river's transportation opportunities were a lifesaver, the railroad priceless.

President Lincoln famously commanded a general he'd taken a shine too, Ulysses S. Grant, to take over command of the Union forces in the region, replacing those who'd suffered defeat at Chickamauga. Grant assigned Thomas Hooker to Lookout Mountain and gave him more than a handful of troops, about 12000 to be exact, an overwhelming force when up against Bragg's paltry 1200 Confederates.

As ominous as that cannon looks, far up and above the city and a wide bend in the Tennessee River, the embankment that is Lookout Mountain is so steep that, from the top, it was almost impossible for that gang of Confederate troops to see the assault coming until they looked the Yankees right in the eye. 

Cannons or no cannons, the Union forces were a vastly greater number than the Confederate defense, but if you ever visit the place, you can't help but imagine how incredibly hard it was for Hooker's men to scale that incline. If you want to scale Lookout Mountain, you have to either follow a never-ending snake of a road, or else climb almost straight up. 

The story goes that Hooker didn't exactly obey orders when Grant told him to engage the rebels. Once he got his men scaling that mountain, he let 'em go, and up they went to engage the Secessionists in what has, ever since, been dubbed "The battle in the clouds." Mist covered things that day; lots and lots of fighting happened deep within its cold glove. 

When all was said and done and the toll could be counted, what happened was a Union victory in the much bigger battle to gain a foothold in Georgia and set the stage for what would eventually be called "Sherman's March to the Sea." An even bigger win at Missionary Ridge, just east of Lookout Mountain, put Bragg and the rebel forces pedaling backwards. Grant began to look like the kind of leader of his fighting men President Lincoln had trouble finding. 

Right up there at the tip of Lookout Mountain is a park commemorating what happened there in November of 1863. And, yes, there are monuments.

Big ones. But then what happened in the mist on Lookout Mountain one November day was not child's play, and the fighting men were not tin soldiers. No one was kidding around. And while casualties were "rather light," Wikipedia says, there were body bags. Most of the Confederates were killed, wounded or captured. One historian calls what happened up on the mountain less of a battle than "a magnificent skirmish."

Most of my ancestors were still in the Netherlands in 1863; only one family had arrived, that one in Wisconsin. They were here long enough to have a son in blue, but no one from my family went, as far as I know. 

We're into bringing down statues right now. I'm not a descendant of slaves or slaveholders. My cause is not as immediate or as painful. I can understand how it is some hate what seems the deliberate praise of long, tall granite monuments. 

But me--I'd rather they stay up so that we can think about them, for good or ill, so that we can learn what we don't know, understand how others have tried and failed or triumphed--and try to determine why or why not. Tearing down monuments for very real historical reasons is understandable, but somehow, oddly enough, anti-historical. 

Forgive me--I'm for preservation.

"Surfer Girl" by Barbara Crooker

I’m walking on the beach this cold brisk morning,
the bleached sea grass bending in the wind, when there,
up ahead, in the pewter waves, I see a surfer in his wet suit,
sleek as a seal, cutting in and out of the curl, shining in the light.
I’m on the far side of sixty, athletic as a sofa, but this is where
the longing starts, the yearning for another life, the one
where I’m lithe and long-limbed, tanned California bronze,
short tousled hair full of sunshine. The life where I shoulder my board,
stride into the waves, dive under the breakers, and rise; my head shaking
off water like a golden retriever. I am waiting for that perfect wave
so I can crouch up and catch it, my arms out like wings, slicing back
and forth in the froth, wind at my back, sea’s slick metal polished
before me. Nothing more important now than this balance between
water and air, the rhythm of in and out, staying ahead of the break,
choosing my line like I choose these words, writing my name
on water, writing my name on air.

"Surfer Girl" by Barbara Crooker, from More. © CR Press, 2010.  

Somewhere beneath the lines is music, if you're old enough to hear it. You've got to go back a long time--an old Beach Boys hit from the Sixties, some California dreamin' thing I can still hum and hit most of the lyrics. Came out in 1963. I was in 9th grade, old enough to dream.

If you're into minutia, "Surfer Girl" happens to be Brian Wilson's very first composition and the title of his first big album. 

He wrote the song when he was just a kid. To some people my age, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were as big--bigger--than the Beatles. Their sweet crooning was a perfect sunset off Malibu. Even for me back then, Southern California seemed Nirvana. It couldn't be heaven because heaven was a Christian place, and lil' surfer girls had nothing to do with church. It was Nirvana. 

The song, like the poem, is quite simple. Matters not if you're on the beach at San Clemente or at the sale barn in Sioux Center, we all got dreams, and Brian Wilson's is being loved by some bikini-clad doll whose love for the perfect wave won't be bested, even though Mr. Wilson promises he'll take her anywhere in his chariot, his Woodie. 

Don't know Barbara Crooker, who describes herself as nothing like the surfer she spots. She certainly isn't the sweetie Brian Wilson had in mind when he was 19 and spotted his lil' surfer girl, if that young thing was real at all--she may not have been. May have been a dream. That's okay too. That's what the song and the poem are all about.

There's no sex inn Barbara Crooker's "Surfer Girl," just desire--desire for something blessedly different, something beautiful, something out there, her "arms out like wings. . .wind at her back, sea's slick metal polished/before me." It's a wish that strikes her one morning on a beach, a wish to inhabit, just for a morning maybe, someone other than her sixty-plus year-old frame, someone who is not "athletic as a sofa." She wishes, just momentarily, for that which cannot and will not be. If we believe her, she's not the surfer girl of the music, but for a moment there on the beach she is. That's the joy of the poem.

I ran across a somewhat contemporary Beach Boys' rendition of "Surfer Girl" on Youtube. It's silly and even a little grody when old men croon as if they were still studly, but if you stay with this old classic until the end (starts at about 2:10), you'll see something remarkable--well, on second thought, maybe not remarkable at all if you read and heed the poem: you'll see Brian Wilson tear up. Watch.

It's the very same desire Barbara Crooker feels in her innards one morning on the beach, and it's not craven or silly or somehow sinful. It's human. And her putting that feeling down as she has in this wistful and warm little lyric is an act of kindness because, truth be told, everyone feels it sometime, a desire for that perfect wave, which isn't a wave at all. It's so much more.

Poetry does a kindness when it tells us what Barbara Crooker does in "Surfer Girl"--we're not alone.

Coming home, coming down

If, back home, the place suffered some storms whilst we were gone, the garden out back held no proof. What was impossibly clear was that we'd had an abundance of rain. Everyone seemed happy. The pile of dead russian thistles (when russia modifies a thistle, it merits no upper case privilege) was there to remind of the hours I've already spent weeding, or I could well have deduced I hadn't been out there at all. Everything was booming.

Not blooming, however. The prairie is dense as a jungle, but right now there's not a hint of color. It'll be a while yet, maybe two weeks before the place gushes.

But the chorus of garden flowers are up and about and making music, all in their good time.

Daisies are cheap thrills, I know, but when they're all turned out they're still an abundant blessings.

Coneflowers are starting to come. Soon enough they'll all be out, making the property a proper prairie. Don't let 'em fool you. They look far more fragile than they are, drooping petals and all. For the most part, they grit their teeth through almost all prairie winds.

Coneflowers are just supposed to be here, like the big blue stem. What you got is really not a prairie without 'em. Hearty?--shoot yes. They've almost completely taken over a front yard bed, big muscular things with buds that'll soon be announcing themselves, shouting to the world.

We've got some little exotics too, here and there a fourth of July of bright color that would be out of place if they weren't so embarrassingly showy.

The truth? I was out in the backyard toting a camera last night at dusk because I was hoping that all the color would somehow help me put the weekend, well, behind me. Let me tell you, we left some irreplaceable blossoms behind.

Meanwhile, I got no choice. What's coming up out back will just have to do. 

And SKYPE.

"A Day of Realization" -- conclusion

I’d like to believe that Abbie Gardner’s memoir describes a place in Flandreau just up the hill from town where, today, stands “the oldest continuously used church in the state of South Dakota,” or so the sign out front says—River Bend Church. The building was constructed in 1873; the original structure is on the grounds of the Moody County Museum, in Flandreau.

River Bend Church is on a piece of ground away from things, a quiet and beautiful place. A cemetery stands just west of the building and tells its own incredible stories, gravestones etched with Bible verses in English and the Dakota language. 

It just seems fitting that even the much-hated and much-loved Little Crow, in peace, is here too, far corner.

If you stop there sometime, you’ll almost certainly be alone. But I’m guessing that’s where Abbie Gardner stood one day in September, 1892, and saw before her death and life in a vision something akin to a new heavens and new earth, on a day she calls her “Day of Realization.”

Reading Mother Teresa--Patience

I remain confident of this: 

I will see the goodness of the Lord 

in the land of the living. 

Wait for the Lord; be strong 

and take heart and wait for the Lord. 

Psalm 27:13–14 

When it comes right down to it, only Peter left the skiff that night Christ invited all of his disciples to walk on water. Only Peter.

If Peter is the model of Christian obedience – okay, he sank, but at least he got up and out of that little fishing boat – then count me among the other 11, who likely took one look at the deep water and wondered if the supplicant voice they were hearing belonged to the Master or some guy in a mask. I admit it – I wouldn’t have left the boat.

And that may well by why I feel such sympathy for Archbishop Ferdinand Périer, the Archbishop of Calcutta and head of the Archdiocese. Here’s the story he heard from Father van Exem, MT’s spiritual advisor: a slight and thin member of the Sisters of Laredo, a woman only recently, in 1944, made principal of St. Mary’s, a high school in Calcutta, has seen a vision, a series of them, in fact.

Fine. And what did that vision – those visions – ask of Mother Teresa?

Van Exem likely cleared his throat. That she quit the school and minister to the poor on the streets of the city.

Abandon her vows?

Well, alter them significantly so that she can go to the poorest of the poor and bring them, ah, love.

Now if I were Archbishop Périer, I might reach for coffee just then, or do something to bless the room with the kind of silence such a request created.

According to her biographer, Navin Chawla, Father van Exem, who entertained no pittance of cynicism about Mother’s request himself, insisted that this woman’s interlocution was definitely to be believed. “Your grace,” he said, “it is the will of God. You cannot change the will of God” {23}.

That’s what’s called “playing the God card.” I can only imagine the look on the Archbishop’s face. He was not particularly interested, I’m sure, in being spiritually blackmailed by an underling or an overly pious nun, and now Van Exem had upped the ante.

Now what must remembered at this dramatic moment in the story of Mother Teresa’s life is that the ministry at which she became famous had not yet begun, wasn’t in planning, was nothing but a vision, a command, as she adamantly maintained, from none other than Jesus Christ. It was, after all, his voice she’d heard. Of that fact, she harbored absolutely no doubt, even if others had and would.

Archbishop Périer must have worn a slightly twisted sneer. “I am the Archbishop,” he said, “and I do not know the will of God, and you, a young priest in Calcutta, you know the will of God the whole time” {23}.

I swear, I could have said that, would have, in fact – “be reasonable!” Father van Exem was asking permission to allow a tiny little bird-like woman to go scavenging on the cut-throat streets of Calcutta, by herself, charged with the outrageous mission of befriending the poor, gazillions of them, being nice, bringing Christ’s love.

The Archbishop knew it was just a matter of time before England gave India its independence, and no one – no one on earth – knew what that action would trigger between Bengal’s warring religious factions. No one could have predicted the mass migration of people across what became national borders or that the starvation would only grow worse.

The Archbishop instructed Mother Teresa not to speak about her visions or plans with anyone, then waited a year to rule, the very year of Indian independence.

And then, finally, he said yes. I understand what was going on in his mind. I’ve got more than a touch of Doubting Thomas.

Our preacher liked to say – and often too – God seems to like to work very, very slowly. What Mother Teresa knew, even though she was absolutely sure she was, at that moment, disobeying the very voice of Jesus when not going to “the holes of the poor,” was that patience was required – painful, never-ending, turtle-like patience.

"The Day of Realization"--At Flandreau

River Bend Church, Flandreau, SD

In 1869, some of the Santees from that small Nebraska reservation determined to take up farming on their own land in the neighborhood of Flandreau. What Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell her readers is that many of the Dakota Abbie met on that visit to Flandreau would never forget their own tribulation, the great sadness of the Dakota War, just seven years—and so much suffering—in the past.

Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell the reader that Santee story, a story she had to know. If she didn't, however, her surprise at what she experienced would have been even more profound.

When she met the Flandreau Dakota, she stood before men and women who knew very well what had happened to her 35 years before. Clearly more important to her was that she also stood before people she believed were, as she had been, washed in the blood of the lamb. “It seemed as though a miracle had been wrought in this region,” she says, “and the day of realization was at hand.” 

I would like to suggest that the climax of Abbie Gardner’s story is not her release from captivity, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the memoir, but her visit to Flandreau, where a woman who witnessed horrible death and was held captive by those who harmed those she loved, met and spoke with Native men and women who experienced, in outline, a similar story, people who all, by their own testimony, had experienced immense depths of sadness, but also the great relief of forgiveness. Everyone in those two churches had suffered greatly but felt themselves redeemed. Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, and without Jesus Christ, there could not have been the triumph of that particular moment in the company of those particular people. That’s the story I think Abbie Gardner is telling in this odd, old blessing of a memoir.

That grand moment of peace, not war, what Abbigail Gardner calls her very own “ day of realization,” is the climax of the story because it was, for her , the most amazing event of all, an occasion for reconciliation, not degradation, of joy in the blood of the lamb.

And all of that, she says so emphatically, happened within sight of the very place on the Big Sioux River where she could never forget the death of her companion in captivity—19-year-old, pregnant Elizabeth Thatcher:

On an elevation about one mile north of town. . .a charming view can be obtained of the picturesque valley of the Big Sioux. From this point I beheld a promising young city (named in honor of the man who conceived the plan of my rescue), two Indian churches, and the river where I stood on the bridge of driftwood and witnessed the death of Mrs. Thatcher some thirty years ago.

She was so close to that riverbank, she claimed she could see the place where Mrs. Thatcher was beaten to death in the swirling rush of water:

The past and present scenes rose up and passed before me like a living, moving panorama, and the change that had come to pass on the stage of life seemed truly marvelous. We attended the services in these churches, listening to impressive sermons, delivered in the Sioux tongue, to large, well dressed, and attentive congregations. What had once seemed an impossibility, had become a living reality—a body of Sioux Indians, with religious thought, congregated together to praise Him whose name is Love!

Some readers may have anticipated the publication of her memoir as yet another “captivity narrative.” Those readers couldn’t help but be disappointed because Abbie Gardner could not tell her story accurately without the stunning moments at Flandreau. She wanted badly to claim she’d been healed of those maladies that kept her an invalid, freed by her belief in Jesus. For that woman, standing in the circle of men and women who could have murdered her family, men and women she knew to be mutual sufferers, then professing the name of Jesus together, was a “truly marvelous” event unlike any she says she could ever have imagined. It is a stunning moment.

Does all of that make Ms. Gardner’s book a better memoir? I don’t believe so. Massacre and Captivity still feels uneven, strangely disjointed, an awkward mix of horror and beatitude amid a file drawer full of historical reports, and a memoir that may well be withholding some of its own secrets.

But this reader, so many years later, finds it much easier to understand the memoir as a Christian “testimony” than a captivity narrative; and so may others, especially those who, like me, share Abbie Gardner’s faith in “a living Christ.”

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Monday:  Conclusion

"The Day of Realization"-- A Santee Awakening

In December, 1862, the nation was preoccupied with the Civil War. The list of convicted warriors was sent to Washington, where President Lincoln surveyed names and stories’ charges, then narrowed the list of guilty to 39, one of whom was later exonerated.

Thus, on December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged when a man whose wife and family had been killed at Lake Shetek massacre pulled a rope on the gallows erected in Mankato, Minnesota, for the public to witness

A thousand more Santees, mostly women and children, were interned on Pike Island, near Ft. Snelling, where hundreds died of infectious diseases that winter. The 275 convicted men who’d not been hanged were, early the next spring, shipped down the Mississippi to a fort near Davenport, Iowa, where they spent the next two years as prisoners.

The rest of the Dakotas interned on Pike Island were also sent down river, then up the Missouri to Crow Creek, South Dakota, where they suffered through drought and heat and long hard winters, before begging the government to let them go south to Missouri River land and a reservation in northeast Nebraska.

Hundreds of women, children, and old men were moved once more to the place where some of their descendants live yet today, a small Santee reservation where the tribal museum includes photographs of some of those hanged warriors, freedom fighters, hanged at Mankato. The museum’s prize possession is mounted in a window box on the south wall—the rifle of Little Crow himself, killer to some, hero to others.

During that deathly winter on Pike Island, something fierce happened to the Dakota people amid their suffering. It is not easy to talk about the phenomenon because historians do not propose eternal answers to spiritual questions. But what happened just before those who were hanged sang their death songs was what one might call a mass “conversion.” An immense spiritual about-face was somehow passed along from death row and into the internment camp, where their families were shivering and too often dying in a Minnesota winter. While fevers and disease raged, so did a full-blown religious awakening. Missionaries who stayed with the Santee people before and after incarceration, and were angrily reviled for visiting the savages, claimed the Holy Spirit came upon the people and created a mass conversion.

The Rev. Stephen R. Riggs, who spent his life as a missionary to the Dakota, explained what happened this way:

The circumstances were peculiar, the whole movement was marvelous, it was like a “nation born in a day.” The brethren desired to be divinely guided; and after many years of testing have elapsed, we all say that was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit.”[i]

While this reader may be less sure of what happened than was Rev. Riggs, my judgement of what happened spiritually in Mankato, and then on Pike Island, or even to Abbie Gardner, what forces ignited the fire or sustained it, is not my concern. Such “conversions” happen in a thousand ways. What interests me is the effects of a degree of spiritual enlightenment that changes hearts and minds of people who believe they have come into the presence of a living God. What is of importance to me is what happened in the lives of those people as a result of their “conversions.” 

Ft. Snelling (top) and Pike Island, circa 1840

"The Day of Realization"-- Flandreau, SD

River Bend Church, Flandreau, SD

The real climax of the story, what she herself might call the eternal climax of the story, occurs when she travels to Flandreau, South Dakota From a decidedly Christian interpretation of her story, the seemingly impossible reconciliation that happened there was an event that would not have happened without war, but neither would it have happened without both sides—Ms. Gardner and the Santees--wanting to reconcile, or at least, in Christian language, wanting peace in their hearts.

Flandreau, South Dakota, is a small town somewhat less than an hour west of the greatly revered Catlinite quarries at Pipestone, Minnesota. A few white settlers were in the region when, in 1868, 11 years after the massacre, many Santee Sioux families moved north and east from their reservation in Nebraska to claim farmland there, around a bend in the Big Sioux River.

Abbigail Gardner begins her narration of the Flandreau story this way:

On Sunday, September 26, accompanied by C. H. Bennett and wife, and H. L. Moore and wife, a drive of some fifteen miles was made to Flandrau [sic], visiting on this occasion the Indian Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. It seemed as though a miracle had been wrought in this region and the day of realization was at hand. Here at Flandreau the red man and the white man are brought face to face in daily contact, living, as it were, next door neighbors, the Indians commanding the utmost respect of the white residents.

What she says she witnessed in Flandreau is a degree of shalom she had never seen before on the frontier. Something that clearly thrilled her was going on in this small South Dakota town. Understanding her incredulity at the “utmost respect” she witnessed, once again, requires some historical background.

Historians have claimed—as Ms. Gardner does in her memoir—that the Dakota of the Minnesota River reservation were emboldened by Inkpaduta’s crimes and his having escaped punishment. That he and his band roamed free after the slayings meant depredations against settlers showed the white man’s disregard for what the Wahpakutes had done: Inkpaduta’s freedom made more attacks easier. After all, well-defined links existed between the blood shed on the shores of Spirit Lake in 1857, and Lake Chetek and New Ulm in 1862, in the Dakota War The Wahpakutes and the Santees spoke a similar language; they were all Dakota Sioux people.

What Abbie Gardner doesn’t say in her description of the Flandreau visit is that there may have been a handful of Santees at Flandreau who, years earlier, were part of Inkpaduta’s bloody band. In that town, in two churches, she had to know that.

But on Sunday, September 26, 1892, Abbie Gardner Sharp wasn’t the only soul in those churches who had suffered horrors; so had the Santees who were that day sitting in hand-cut benches. She doesn’t mention their suffering, but, again, it’s impossible to believe she didn’t know. It was the Santees, led by their headman Little Crow, who had raided the Lower Sioux Agency at Redwood Falls on August 18, 1862, the frontier town of New Ulm a day later, and Fort Ridgely on the 20th and the 21st. During the Dakota War, the total number of settlers murdered in a one solitary month of raids will never be known; historians estimate between 450 and 800, all of them murdered after the bloody fashion of Abbie’s own family and their neighbors. 

During the Dakota War, hate boiled over into death throughout the Minnesota River valley. When it was over, mass trials, some no more than five minutes long, determined the fate of the more than 400 Dakota warriors accused of atrocities. When tallied, the military tribunal found 303 men guilty of rape and murder, and thereby sentenced to be hanged.

The grave of Little Crow, Flandreau, SD 

____________________ 

Tomorrow: The Santees' travail after the Dakota War.

"The Day of Realization" --- "An Epoch of Advancement"

Without a doubt, I read Abbigail Gardner's memoir with an agenda, but I would like to believe that the style and the character of The Spirit Lake Massacre and the Captivity of Miss Abbie Gardner can be best understood by the author’s own testimony late in the book. In the chapter titled “The Epoch of Advancement,” she explains that she wrote her memoir twice, then edited again when she gained blessed relief from what she described as her own lifelong pain.

How exactly did that lifelong pain disappear? The agent, she testifies, was Jesus Christ, whose spiritual, healing powers she found by way of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science:

. . .after long meditation I resolved to give this new yet old religion a trial, with little faith or hope that I could be relieved by its ministry. However, to the great surprise of all who knew me, I was healed by this demonstrable truth.

The passage is “testimony”: a newfound faith brought her to the Throne and “the living Christ,” she says, “who forgives our sins, and heals all our diseases.”

In Massacre and Captivity, Abbie Gardner Sharp is herself conflicted by two stories of her life as a captive of the band that slaughtered her family. One of those stories is something of a “captivity narrative,” replete with bloody evidence to describe her suffering and explain her hatred for the murderers. But I am arguing here that a different Abbigail created a subsequent and different edition. That Abigail claimed to have been healed and blessed, even forgiven by that same “living Christ.”

The captivity narrative includes descriptions one might expect from victims of such crimes. Abbie Gardner includes lengthy reports, one of them written by a man who led a search team looking for others “who alike fell victims to the merciless savages’ inordinate thirst for human blood.”

She too had cause to speak the way that man did. But in her “captivity narrative,” she at times goes out of way to lend sympathy, not to the killers but to the plight of “the Indian.” She takes the opportunity to offer admonition to her own people as well. At one point, she describes the culture of Dakota men who, as boys, are given eagle feathers when they kill their first enemy warrior. At that point, she stops and gives this warning:

It seems to me that Christian statesmen, and all those who have a duty to perform toward the rising generation in civilized nations, might find a lesson in this. Is there not altogether too much glorification of deeds of blood? Too much talk about gunpowder and glory? Patriotism is a noble emotion; but love of country is one thing; love of war is quite another.

One can’t help but wonder whether, after her conversion, she didn’t herself determine that the story of her suffering could have a more blessed effect if she included less bloody spectacle and more reconciliation, more healing and forgiveness.

She gives the reader cause to believe that, in her mind, there was yet another dramatic powerful tale in her lifetime, the story she goes on to tell in the book after the massacre and captivity.

Evidence for the reality of her conversion, not just in soul but in body and strength, seems to me to be evident. What I’m suggesting is that her “conversion” lends the narrative a softness readers would not have expected in a “captivity narrative,” a softness that makes the story feel broken or disjointed. She could well have made the book a greater financial and even artistic success; but, as she herself maintains, finding God changed Abbie Gardner, made her story less sensational, and therefore less marketable.

Read instead as a traditional Christian testimony, the book feels different. After her conversion to “the living Christ,” Ms. Gardner’s attempt at a dramatic climax for the memoir begins with her rescue by three Dakotas, three “farmer Christians,”[i] but it doesn’t conclude there, or with her return to “civilization.”

____________________________________

Tomorrow: What happened at Flandreau.

"The Day of Realization"-- an odd style

Oddly enough, just a few pages before the description of that vicious murder Gardner describes the famous pipestone quarries in a passage whose style could well be lifted from a travel brochure:

Our journey led through the famous pipe-stone quarry, in Pipestone county, Minnesota. It is situated on a small tributary of the Big Sioux, called Pipestone Creek. The surface of the country is broken and picturesque, abounding in bluffs and cliffs. But its principal attraction, of course, is a layer of peculiar and beautiful rock, highly prized by the Indians and no doubt valuable to the whites. The cliffs here are similar to those at Luverne, but smaller. Beneath these, on a level tract of land, is found the precious pipestone. The stratum is about fourteen inches thick and is overlaid by four feet of other rock, and about two feet of earth, which must be removed before the coveted rock is reached. It is softer than slate, entirely free from grit, and not liable to fracture. When first taken out, it is soft and easily cut with ordinary tools, hardly dulling them more than wood does. On exposure to the air, it becomes hard and is capable of receiving a high polish. It had already been used for mantels, table-tops, and the like, as well as for ornaments, and is doubtless destined to more extensive use. In color it varies from light pink to deep, dark red; while some of it is mottled with all these shades, giving great variety.

These disjunctions in the narrative are a problem that at least one Amazon reviewer observed: “I felt like she very lightly touched on her childhood, the Massacre, her captivity. There was a lot of back and side history of the Sioux and other tribes, the US government, etc. I was hoping for more of what she actually endured personally.”

What Abbie did endure is there in the memoir, but details are sometimes hidden beneath and behind other official reports of the events and her own interest in both the region and its aboriginals. If Abbigail Gardner knew what “captivity narrative” readers were looking for, she didn’t deliver the details, even though the brutal truth of what happened is here.

Why? For what reason would Abbie Gardner Sharp hesitate to do what she might have done in her own book? It seems clear that her reluctance to overdo the violence did not originate in emotional reticence. She wrote the story first just a few years after her release, but a house fire destroyed that manuscript. This 1885 version clearly took her more years to write and publish, but she was not shy about touting it. Her life post-capture was not without difficulty; married at 14, she lost children, suffered a divorce, then moved back, oddly enough, to Spirit Lake. When, years later, she and her son could afford it, she bought the very log cabin from which she’d been taken captive and where her family was murdered, then lived there for the rest of her life.

Once in residence there, she set up her own gift shop, where she sold her memoir and told her story to the vacationers who had begun to make Lake Okoboji a popular tourist destiny. She became Spirit Lake’s own Buffalo Bill, a showman, a carnival barker right there where her sadness began, just beside Arnolds Park’s famed wooden roller coaster.

Abbigail Gardner admits she suffered from something akin to PTSD: “Never have I recovered from the injuries inflicted upon me while a captive among the Indians,” she tells her reader late in the memoir. “Instead of outgrowing them, as I hoped to, they have grown upon me as the years went by, and utterly undermined my health.”

She does not seem to have been emotionally silenced by the brutality she suffered; she spent years retelling it. If that’s true, then why does the tone of the narrative so frequently seem reluctant and scattered? How can we explain the oddly disjointed memoir of a woman who returned to the scene of her horror only to replay the story a thousand times and turn the cabin itself into an Okoboji tourist sideshow?

Abbie’s hawking her book requires psychological analysis I won’t attempt, but the book’s mottled character and reputation may have suffered from its being misunderstood--by both reader and writer.

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Tomorrow: A different way of looking at Abbigail Gardner's memoir.

Reading Mother Teresa--Mystery

The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 

“Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, 

because its wickedness has come up before me.”

But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. 

Jonah 1:1–3

Years ago, I had a student, a young woman, who was embarrassingly, even incorrigibly shy. When I was a student myself, I hated being ambushed by a teacher – “Say, Schaap, what are the three earmarks of Renaissance poetic sentiment?” Duh. 

“Do unto others” – and all that, right? So I didn’t bushwhack students once I got on the other side of the desk.

But this student – I could tell by her mannerisms – was impossibly shy. She’d sit in the back corner and hide for most of the class. She was no superstar academically, but neither was she a dolt; she did well. But it seemed to me that, at least in class, she prayed to be sheer.

I saw her at a ballgame one night – in the pep band. She was banging a drum. Seriously, of all things, she was a drummer! And she was good, even featured. That person with those sticks in her hands was someone completely other than the reserved little slip of a girl in the classroom’s dark back corner.

One of the earmarks of good writing – or so it seems to me – is surprise, within reason. Great stories never end exactly where you thought they would – they surprise us. If they don’t, we don’t care. Great characters always surprise us, as do, often, almost all human beings.

We had a preacher once upon a time, a man I knew in college as being especially acerbic – witty but capable of cutting someone up like sausage. When he accepted the call to be our preacher – something I voted for, by the way – I would have bet it wouldn’t be more than six months before he’d offend someone with something he said.

He left a dozen years later, totally loved, not an alienated member in sight, all of them in tears at his departure. I’m still shocked.

There’s a story about Mother Teresa that is similarly surprising. Father van Exem – her spiritual advisor, the priest to whom she went immediately after hearing Jesus’s command to go out into the ghettos of Calcutta and be his hands – Father van Exem told his superior about a vision one of the sisters had, told him of the fiery directness of Jesus’s voice to the young woman (he didn’t disclose her name), told that superior that she’d heard that voice time and time again during the retreat at Darjeeling and that it wasn’t just a dream that glanced off her consciousness. It was a voice, the voice of Christ. 

Father van Exem’s superior was a man named Father Henry, who, along with Van Exem, was Belgian. In fact, they were friends, close friends, since they’d entered the priesthood.

When Father Henry heard the news, he prayed and prayed and prayed, in part, one can imagine, because he too knew that the need was immense in the neighborhood where they lived. Immense, as in gargantuan. Father Henry wanted the vision to be sound and wanted the mission to be granted. He started praying immediately.

Later – significantly later, when the whole story came out and the sister who’d had the vision was identified – Father Henry learned from Father van Exem that the petitioner was none other than Mother Teresa, that little slip of a woman. 

Father Henry was amazed. He said no matter how he’d have tried, he would never guessed that the woman with the vision, the woman with the call, the woman recruited by Jesus Christ and given divine orders was little Mother Teresa. It was not to be believed. 

Mystery. 

Jesus Christ himself was the greatest mystery – how can a man be a god? How can a god be a man?

But we are his image-bearers, and it’s helpful to remember that we too are capable of things we’ve never believed, things we’ve never attempted, things we’ve never guessed were in our powers to achieve.

In each and every one of us there’s a drummer.

Who would have guessed it would be little Mother Teresa? No one. But she heard and she listened, and she wouldn’t stop banging on the door until what she believed she’d been told to do simply got done.

We’re mysteries – all of us. And that’s a divine blessing.