The Big Days

 If I'm not mistaken--and I could be--it was a civics class, fifth hour, just after lunch when the announcement came over the squawk box that hung from the wall over the teacher's head, a man named Ruesink--could that be?--a soft-spoken, handsome guy, not a fireball. It was his class I was in when the announcement came. 

Strangely enough, it wasn't a total surprise. What seemed a rumor had slipped out during lunch because I remember thinking that the whole idea had something to do with "initiation day," the day the new lettermen were being hazed into the club of athletic letter winners. Weird things happened on "initiation day." A not-to-be-believed rumor sounded somehow fitting.

But when the announcement came over the system and it was the familiar voice of the school principal telling the story, I had no doubts: The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, had been shot in Dallas, Texas. He was dead or dying. I don't remember the words exactly.

We didn't go home, but I don't remember what happened after that, not at all. What I'll never forget is the moment the news broke. That's with me as long as I live.

Amazingly, on 9/11 our neighbor's garage was on fire when, that morning, I walked to school. There was no way around it really. The local fire department was there trying to stanch the flames, but it was clear that the neighbor wasn't going to lose the whole structure, just what appeared to be some thing of an attic. 

I was taking my writing classes out to an old cemetery that morning, and while I was out there with them, the jets the hijackers commandeered took out the World Trade Center. We'd been gone, but the moment we returned, the whole campus knew the story.

I don't remember thinking about whether or not to take the next bunch of kids out to the cemetery. Strangely enough, a little road trip was much anticipated, and the weather that day, early September, was gracious. We went, but the difference between the two sections of Advanced Comp were unmistakable. 

That afternoon I taught a section of American literature--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. I was prepared, but everyone was watching tv then, the unfolding story on every channel. When I came to class, the students were there, as if there'd been no major tragedy, although they looked deadly serious. I told them I honestly didn't know what to do, whether or not to have class. When I gave them the option of leaving, none did. 

My classroom had no tv, so watching wasn't an option. Finally, I just started in on Scarlet Letter, as if there was nothing left to do but go on. What I remember best about that class was that it was particularly good. Strange. 

I don't know that I'll remember exactly where I was when last night's breaking news aired. I doubt I'll have memories. I'm much older now. When JFK was assassinated, I was a sophomore in high school. On 9/11, I was a veteran teacher, 53 years old. Not long ago, I turned 75.

But age doesn't account for the difference. What does is the fact that one didn't have to be a genius or a witch to conjure what happened last night. With four major investigations going on, Trump's oranging-around with the porn star was literally the least of his worries. That he'd be arrested seemed to me inevitable. 

Still, when it happened, it was momentous. The man who famously told a beloved audience in Sioux Center, Iowa, that he could gun down people on Main and not lose a voter got himself humbled. He'll turn a trick on it, rake in millions from people who see him as savior, but yesterday's striking news is only the beginning of his dance with iron bars. 

And no one was surprised. Even his impassioned followers, people sure the New York DA wants only to win the next election weren't shocked. The victim story Trump so loves had it in the tarot cards: he'd go down because the deep state, the Evil One, wants him gone, done, out of the picture. 

No one was surprised. Not me either.

But the warrant for his arrest is no less huge and historic. Never before has an American President been told to come in to be fingerprinted, to stand for a mug shot. Never before.

I'm guessing the moment won't have the sticking power of other major national events because the man has immunized us with his brutish behavior (a baseball bat over the head of the New York DA, calling the guy "an animal") that we've long ago grown accustomed to his vulgar bullying, his "American carnage," mean-spirited mission work. He's a man without shame. 

Last night, about five o'clock, will pass away soon because more will follow Be assured, Donald J. Trump is still alive and kicking.

Yesterday, on a quick-sale table in a grocery store I frequent, a whole bunch of baseball caps were strewn, bargain price. I've been telling myself to wear caps lately. I've got nothing up there to block the sun . I picked one up one of those caps, good-looking caps, brightly colored winter hats maybe. I didn't try one on because it suddenly occurred to me that all of them were imprinted with "45," nothing else, just "45."

You could pick one up cheap yesterday afternoon, but if you head over this morning I'm sure they'll still be some there, a real deal.

The cruelest month

Doesn't have to be. It was T. S. Eliot who sounded the alarm: "April is the cruelest month," and he had his reasons--not quite winter and not quite spring. But those of us who live in the cold so look forward to its promise. Eliot's not the last word. 

This morning I thought I'd look for proof that we need not heed old Tom. That shot above is Easter morning, 2004, somewhere west of town, a good place to start.

2005, on the way to Broken Kettle.

A whisper of green near Oak Grove, 2006.

Ye olde icon, somewhere west, 2007.

On our clothesline, backyard, 2008.

Big Sioux River, 2009

Read through this last night from Psalm 65:

Even during the cruelest month, 

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;

    where morning dawns, where evening fades,

    you call forth songs of joy.

Somewhere near Canton, 2010.

Rock River flood, Doon, 2011.

Somewhere south in Plymouth County, 2012.

Abandoned farm, Germantown, 2013.

Easter morning, near Hospers, 2014.

Little Sioux River valley, 2015.

 Holy Week, Sioux Center, 2016.

Spirit Mound, 2019.

Missouri River, 2018. 

Yesterday I walked out around the South Pond, the whole world in the same old persistent tawniness its worn since the snow left. Right now, the world's finery is barely worth a second look.

Eliot had his own reasons for despondency. I'll give him that. But April is  resurrection month. There's always room for hope. 

 

Iowa's first feminist writer

Iowa writer, Ruth Suckow

Last night, Stephanie Ruhle led off news commentary on The 11th Hour with three guests, two reporters and a veteran law school prof, each of them experts in their fields and able communicators, a formidable bunch and all women--across the screen, just women, only women.

That wouldn't have happened ten years ago, and Ruhle couldn't help but note that as well. When she signed off the segment, she told her cable news audience that there was nothing she liked better than starting her show with three thoughtful and experienced women.

I'd just come from a book club meeting where the writer of the month was a once-upon-a-time famous and prolific Iowa novelist named Ruth Suckow, who, during the first half of the 20th century, made a name for herself by uncovering endless fascinating levels of motivation and hesitation in the lives of women of her era. Suckow, as a writer, is not particularly charming, in part because she is adept at finding the ceilings that thwart possibilities women might otherwise experience. 

All too often, her characters struggle beneath oppression wrought by others but also by themselves. They don't achieve like men, she suggests, in part because they don't have friends, even other women, urging them to look past traditional commitments (as mother and daughter, wife and sister) to a kind of self-fulfillment which may not have existed during her time. 

No one in our group had ever heard of Ruth Suckow, the novelist, even though she was born (1892) in Hawarden and had grown up in several neighboring towns. Her father was a preacher, Congregationalist, who Suckow venerates in a memoir she wrote of her early life--and his. She treasured him, loved his gracious accepting ways and texts, with the kind of expansiveness he and Jesus offered to others. He took theological positions undoubtedly contrary to dominies down the road in Sioux County, the Calvinists who would have nothing of that "Jesus Loves Me" philandering. Ecumenicity would have been a pipe dream.

I'm not an expert, but Ruth Suckow, the preacher's daughter, may well have been the first feminist Iowa writer, in great part because nearly every one of her close to fifty stories has a woman protagonist. Exceptions are few. When I walked in the museum last night, three women were setting the table for our discussion. In just a few seconds, they made it clear that they loved the stuff they'd read, loved this writer, loved the way she peeled back layer after layer of motivation, examining each of those levels in the lives of her often belabored protagonists. 

a bit more sporty Suckow

I had been greatly worried--I'm serious. Reading Suckow, the third entry in our "local" writers discussions (Josephine Donovan, Frederick Manfred, and Ruth Suckow) was all my idea. None of them had ever turned a page of hers, and I was just plain sure the group would tell me that Suckow was interesting but tedious, because it's true, as someone said, "nothing really happens in a Suckow story." Don't look for her on the action/adventure shelf. Things do happen in Suckow, that reader said, but it's all inside. The real stories take place in the mind and heart, where there's always great drama, not to mention action and adventure. 

In a tomboy story titled "A Great Mollie," an effervescent young woman who not only loves "men's work" but is darn good at it, finds a niche in her small town in spite of her preferences. She earns her place by getting down and dirty under the hood, and insisting on cranking her own sputtering vehicle. 

In the very telling end to the story, a woman named Mate says with a kind of calculated assurance that "great Mollie" won't leave town and take off for Chicago, won't try to be something other than she is right there, right then.  "I know she won't," Mate says. 

Frank, her husband, is less sure. He thinks a bit, remembers tears in Mollie's eyes and tells himself Mate is right. "Yes sir, Mollie was a woman! After all, she was unaccountable. She's could do anything for anybody but herself."

Mate knows the truth and wins the argument with a look of "small, calm, satisfied wisdom." Mate knows Mollie, a woman, is powerless in the world of traditional commitments that can petrify caregivers, who, like Mollie, are almost always women. 

Mollie is not free to go to Chicago, as Frank would so much like to think. Mate knows there's no chance of escape.

Or does she? Or is she simply another barrier--and a woman!--between Mollie and an her own chosen destiny? 

Stephanie Ruhle started her show last night with three women, no men, as experts. Times have changed. When Ruth Suckow's stories take on what seems predetermined and often unappealing ends--they don't end sweetly!--it may well be that Suckow understood her characters lived in a world with very low ceilings. 

But then, Ruth Suckow might say, that's life. 

Interesting stuff, finely wrought. 

War memories

The town is growing, developments sprouting here and there, as what was once a sleepy village becomes more and more suburban Chattanooga. Traffic flows eagerly down roads that not that long ago were lightly traveled. That historical marker sits on a road that's become a highway. If you want to read it, you need to park somewhere some distance away and walk, or else incur the wrath of commuters. I turned down my window and took the shot from the car. 

My sister lives in a house on a hill very near to a place once known as the Cherokee Springs Confederate Hospital. I'm told that the hospital's footings are still there, on private land where the owner isn't sweet on history buffs tramping around on his land. Just the thought of a real military hospital right here--just outside of Ringgold, Georgia--conjures images that go beyond the horror words can reach. After all, Chickamauga isn't all that far north (16 thousand Union, 18 thousand Confederate casualties--second bloodiest battle of the Civil War). 

Then came Missionary Ridge, so named for a history of Christian mission to the Cherokee, who lived here before being inhospitably pushed west on the Trail of Tears some thirty years before. Confederate losses at the Battle of Missionary Ridge were heavy too:  6,667 total (361 killed 2,160 wounded). My sister's neighborhood has seen its far more than its share of miseries.

As the Union Army reconnoitered in Chattanooga for what would become  Sherman's March to the Sea, the Rebel army christened an immigrant Irishman named General Patrick Cleburne to hold fast--and he did. The numbers were stacked solidly against him, but he engineered a retreat that wasn't a retreat at all, allowing the Confederate army to steal away with its own necessities. 

If we hearken to the sign, it seems clear that the Cherokee Ridge Hospital was largely gone by late September, before the battles that would have had the place bathed in blood (Chickamauga, 9/16/'63; Missionary Ridge, 11/25/'63; Ringgold Gap, 11/27/'63). I'm not the historian, but it seems that the  hospital up on the ridge more of a spa than a civil war battlefield hospital. No matter--there's the sign for all the world to read. . .quickly.

If I lived there, I'm sure I'd get over the feeling that the place is haunted. In any quick visit, amid the trees on those hills, uniformed men are still trying to stay out of the way of musket fire, some of them advancing, falling, others moving quickly past the crumpled bodies.

But the casualties of war include much more than the bloody dead and wounded. Those casualties are written in scorched psyches and horrors that require years--and generations--to fade. 

In December of 1863, a woman from occupied Chattanooga wrote a letter to her mother, describing her feelings about the Federals all around.   

Yankee rule is nothing to boast of. It does not take but one person to make a trade. If you have an article they want, they'll tell you so and take it. Ma, I never hated a race of people before and I do believe it would gladden my soul to see the last Yankee killed, man woman and child.

How many years, how many generations, does it require to erase hatred kindled by war's unimaginable pain? It just so happens that today, the district's Rep to Congress is Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

And what about the Ukraine? Exact numbers are hard to get, but the estimates are dumbfounding: Ukrainians, about 10k; Russians, 200k. Survivors in Bakhmut, if there are any, are all casualties really, aren't they? 

Sometimes I can't help thinking when people say "war is hell," as they do, hell is no metaphor. 

Maybe it's a good thing you can't just pull over and read the Cherokee Ridge Hospital sign. Maybe it's time the thing comes down. 

Mississippi Pilgrimage

 

What do I remember? The place was close enough to Vicksburg for us to visit the battlefield, which was primarily a siege of that Mississippi citadel Grant wanted--which is to say, needed--to take to control Mississippi river traffic. And did. I'd never been that close to "the War of Northern Aggression."

But mostly what I remember was that it was a "service trip," service, as in "Christian service." We were a couple of dozen earnest members large, most of the crew high school-age girls recruited to staff children's bible schools in area churches, churches that stood out in the country, in the cotton fields where the kids' parents worked. 

The quality of these old pictures isn't good, but then they're all just about fifty years old. It was 1977, and my wife and I were also recruited to come along and help--doing exactly what, back then, wasn't always clear. Two weeks, as I remember, enough time to create maybe a half-dozen week-long Bible schools like this one. 

Back then, "service trips" really weren't intended to be history classes. Prep work, to me, seemed scanty and more than a little overdone. The KKK was alive and well in the region, and was capable and often did raise its ugly head, we were told. (I was doubtful, but they were right.) The people lived in tiny houses like this, right in the middle of the cotton, as if those tar paper shacks had grown up with the crop. 

Me? I spent at least a week working in the Center's library, an odd place with more CRC Publishing House work than I'd ever seen in one place--books like Rooftops over Strawtown, a biography of the privileged life of Dominie Scholte's wife--Scholte of Pella; two novels from the desk of Casey Kuipers, a CRC missionary in Zuni, NM, and a number of others, all of them cast-offs from church libraries from across the country because Cary Christian Center had become one of the most needy centers of relief for CRC "service groups" like ours--mission barrel books nobody in Cary would be likely to read.

I could go on and on with the oddity of the enterprise--how stark raving strange it was to believe that the whole lot of us were doing great work by bringing the natives Bible stories or painting walls in the Center (an abandoned school for "coloreds"). I could rage at what manners of racism were actually perpetuated by our belief that we were doing the Lord's work, God's own hands in his world. 

Once, needing something from a hardware store, a couple of us went into town, where a woman with an ungainly Dutch name (Alvinah Spoelstra?) ran a school for the handicapped (and, yes, I know that's brutal wording).

I can't help but remember my own enthusiasm for the enterprise, the "service" we were offering, not to mention the life experience all those young white women were accruing in the cotton fields. 

I'm not at all sure that Cary Christian Center operates anymore, whether it still offers succor to the poor that populate the area, where there are still remnants of all that work lying about, remnants like this:

Was the entire enterprise a waste of time? Of course not. Did it do any good? Undoubtedly, yes. If nothing else, none of those young women (today, they're of retirement age) ever really forgot their time on the Mississippi delta region. 

Did it only deepen racism? In some cases, perhaps the experience had the effect of making ourselves out to be "more than conquerors" and the delta people themselves as ever needy recipients. Just exactly how many of that school bus full of do-gooders are MAGA Republicans today in the most politically conservative corner of a state almost preposterously red? I don't want to know.

And, yes, we took a school bus all the way, a fifteen-hour trip, to Cary, Mississippi in 1977, where that yellow monster shuffled country kids to and from Bible school and didn't get a proper rest in swampy heat that exceeded anything I'd ever felt in my life (and we'd just moved to Iowa from Arizona). 

Maybe twenty years ago, returning from Jackson, Mississippi, I went out of my way to go through Cary, Mississippi, just to make sure that what I remembered was real. I wanted to see Cary, even though I was pretty sure no one I knew would be there, Black or white. 

I stopped for gas in town, in Rolling Fork where Ms. Spoelstra had her school, pulled over at a gas station and proceeded to lock my keys in my car when I got out to pump gas. There I was, lilly-white guy in an Delta world where I was one of few. I had a problem. No way to get in the car.

The clerk in the convenience store shook her head when I asked about cops, and then somebody sitting there over coffee volunteered that the clerk ought to call "Buzz." Everybody giggled. I had a notion why.

Anyway, she did, told the man on the other end of the phone how this customer of hers locked himself out of his car and if they were wondering if he might come over and, you know, help out; and he did. He slicky-slicked his way into that Skylark as if he'd done it before often enough.

All this comes back to me now because a tiny little burg right there on the Mississippi Delta is no more. The town where Elvinah had a school for the physically challenged is gone now, torn up and spread halfway over the parrish, I'm sure, by tornadoes that killed dozens of people and left the whole area little more than a trash dump. Eighty percent of the population is African American, about a quarter live beneath poverty level.

It's a horror. You can google the pics.

It's pretty much where we went, June of 1977, 46 years ago in a yellow school bus on a "service trip."

You know what?--if I was younger, I'd call the whole bunch--those who are still alive and kicking--and do it again because the people we met years and years ago?--good Lord, they really need help. 

Sunday Morning Meds--"We Fly Away"

 

Gone away again

 Off to Georgia today, just south of Chattanooga, where the locals are a little stubborn about just exactly what was fought there, 150 years ago, and still call it "The War of Northern Aggression."

Grant's troops, behind General Joseph Hooker, scaled the rugged edges of Lookout Mountain to score a victory by breaking the lock on the river in the "battle above the clouds."

But we're not going for the war. We're off to reconnoiter with the siblings, the first bivouac since Mom died. 

 This bunch, 75 years later.

Be back Friday. Do us a favor and warm up the weather while we're gone.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 90

“All our days pass away under your wrath; 

we finish our years with a moan.”

I received a poem from a friend of mine, who’s been thinking about Rahab the harlot, loved by men—many of them, presumably—and God. The voice of the poem feels to be woman, who asks if all Rahab’s men used her, or if maybe there were some who did not: “did not some/come to love/her?”

The answer to me was obvious: of course some did. Didn’t she know that? She had to. I did, after all.

My very first sexual experience happened when I was 13 or 14 and seemed to me—I may be wrong—delightfully mutual. We didn't fornicate; we played. It was the Fourth of July--I haven't forgotten.

I was attracted to her that night, her tank top —a triangular shift of cloth, orange, pulled across her chest and fastened with two pair of cottony strings over a naked back-- was, well, appealing.

By the end of the night, a certain inevitability led our flirting to a featureless, darkened backyard, where we lay together in the grass. Soon enough, she let me slide my hand beneath that tank top, where it stayed for a half hour maybe.

That was it. Later on, we went to the same high school but ran in different circles. I didn't lust or chase after her. It was an adolescent one-night stand.

With a short second act. A couple years later, in college and alone, I went back to her, even made our relationship public enough to make my older sisters take me aside to tell me the word on the street was that their little brother was getting seamy, seeing that girl the way I was. Soon enough, I went back to college.

What I remember about our relationship is that it was blessedly physical. She loved making out as much as I did. Mostly, we just played. I don't believe I ever tried much more.

Today she's probably a church-going grandma who has suffered her kids' woes just as deeply I ever did. Amazingly, she's 70+ years old, probably not a Rahab, nor has ever been. She's loved by God. I wish I could tell her that, in the words of my friend’s poem, I was one who, can I say it?-- loved her.

Then again, maybe I think of her so fondly because I feel the pressures of this verse from Psalm 90. I feel my age: indigestion has been a plague all week; I don’t sleep well; my back kills me in the morning; I fade by 10:30, out like a light. Lately, I'm losing friends--the forever way of losing friends. My life as yet is not a moan, but more often than I care to admit, I feel something like a bellar welling up within me.

Maybe this girl, this memory, is a fantasy that offers me some lost innocence, the sheer thrill of old summer nights, of conquest and love. Maybe. Maybe my remembrance of things past is only an escape, a gleeful, adolescent daydream, a return to joy.

I think I know exactly what this verse means, inside and out: “All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.” I know it all too well.

Maybe I’d rather not go gently into that good night. I’m not ready to finish my years with a moan. What I’d like to do is tell that grandma, wherever she is, that, yes, some loved her, I'm sure, me among them. Some have never forgotten, and the memory right now, in these days passing away, is a sweet blessing.

A Trip West (in summary)

It was all their idea, but I wasn't in a position to decline the invitation. Few things in life are as compelling as a trip out west, even if you already know the stories and are in charge of telling them. And, truth be told, there's so little most of us really know about our Native neighbors and their stories. So, "Yes, I'll do it," I told them, when they asked.

"What about weather?" they said. 

"Maybe you ought to think about waiting until fall," I told them. Farch is farch, and, if nothing, unpredictable. 

"This is the only time we can make the trip," they said, "so let's."

It was cold, winter cold--15 degrees or so. Some wind, but any wind at all when the temps are baseline is not going to be comfy. So when I took them down 20 miles of gravel to a spot high above the Santee Reservation, it wasn't fun to be so thusly exposed. We couldn't get into the Santee Museum (out of season), so things had to be explained outside. We made it. 

Then down to the river and out to a Mormon monument, set there by the LDS to preserve the memory of the Saints who'd wintered there and some who died, that number drastically reduced by the salvation the Ponca offered them--food and supplies to keep them alive.

Then, the Ponka cemetery, like all others, offers its own stories. It was bitterly cold out there, but lots of our Saints even ascended the hill to read the graves.

On to Greenwood, mostly a ghost town, where Lewis and Clark, the story goes, wrapped a brand new Yankton baby in an American flag and declared him a man who would bring peace to his people, which he was and did, after a fashion. Then Marty, St. Paul's cathedral an amazing dream in an otherwise nearly empty prairie landscape.

A stop at New Holland CRC, a museum of its own, then finally a long, cold day ended in Platte, at a motel with a pizza place conveniently next door. 

The most amazing thing happened the next day when, unannounced, spring arrived. Chamberlain's Akta Lakota Museum was a wonder, as it always is, as was a tour of St. Joseph's Indian School (a first for me). We ate at Al's Oasis, then pointed the van west, drove for an hour, got out at a rest stop, and were blessed--seriously blessed--by windless 65-degree temperatures. It was, if I dare say it, a touch of heaven, almost unbelievable, almost miraculous. We'd climbed 50 degrees up the thermometer. Stayed, that night, in Wall--where else, of course?--and experienced a unique phenomenon, unknown to the millions who journey west--Wall, South Dakota with zero tourists, Main Street all but barren, if you can believe it.

After taking the Badlands loop the afternoon before, we followed the southwest range of the Badlands, all of it dressed in garlands of snow, and even ran into buffalo--well, avoided them, but stopped for some portraits. For most of the morning we were pretty much alone in miles and miles of reservation, until we came to a much hoped-for convenience corner, where it became apparent immediately that masking was, if nothing else, obligatory--thus saith the tribe. Later, we wore them again in a Subway in Pine Ridge, a joy.

Drove on to Wounded Knee, always an experience for those who've never been there. Spring had lingered graciously for another day, so if we sidestepped the mud we could climb up to the place where the chapel once stood (during the 1973 takeover), the place where the 7th Cavalry set up their Hotchkiss gun to reign terror on Big Foot's people.

A couple of artists stopped by and sold a few souvenirs of the visit, the kind of footnote that makes the text come alive.

We stopped by several cemeteries in four days, but Wounded Knee--a killing field--stops your breath like no other. 

Got back in the bus, headed west to Ft. Robinson, from whence the cavalry had come in 1890, before Wounded Knee, heard some Ft. Rob stories, then stayed overnight in Chadron in a fine motel with yet another restaurant right next door--and, oh yes, spring had somewhat coldly departed.

What most of the travelers won't forget is brutal wind and cold and snow that attacked all the way back to Yankton. Had our fearless driver not engineered trips out of the ditch, we'd likely be there still. Twisters of snow in monster winds created a ground blizzard unlike anything the pilgrims had ever seen and hope never to experience again.

But all's well that ends well, and this weary traveler had his feet up at home in Alton, when a couple of emails came in indicating everything post-South Dakota was a piece of cake for the others. Pella must have looked beautiful when it appeared at sunset.

That's where I was this week with some joyous adventurers from Pella's 2nd Reformed Church, a few pioneers who wanted to know more about Native American history. They got an earful--and more--in a bit of winter, two days of spring, and a monster ground blizzard, four days of Farch in Nebraska and South Dakota. 

I loved it, as I believe they seemed to also. 

The journey West - iii

Badlands: A Badlands Story

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-02-15/big-bones-in-the-badlands-lies-and-a-promise-kept

Wounded Knee

https://www.kwit.org/post/oscar-howes-truth-power

A Journey West - ii

Mostly, Chamberlain SD -- Akta Lakota Museum -- and west to Wall

Pioneer Woman, Homesteading in SD

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-03-15/the-epic-of-anne-rubin-boermann-in-a-time-of-broader-understanding

Honoring the Turtle Effigy

https://www.kwit.org/post/oahe-dam-turtle-effigy-and-honoring-thy-enemy

 

A Journey West - i

Don't look for anything new for the next couple of days. I'll be on the road with a crew from Second Reformed Church, Pella, Iowa, visiting sites that will help us understand some Native American history.

Tell you what--day by day I'll post a number of old "Small Wonders" that somehow explain and describe our trip.

Today--Santee Reservation, Standing Bear/Ponca story, and St. Paul's on the Yankton Reservation.

A Santee Story

http://www.kwit.org/post/akimbo-cross

The Home of Standing Bear, of the Poncas.

.http://kwit.org/post/home-standing-bear

Here's a few, starting Greenwood, SD, on the Yankton Reservation (the monument has been repaired, by the way).

https://www.kwit.org/post/broken-monument-our-past

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

 

“You have set our iniquities before you, 

our secret sins in the light of your presence.”

I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought of Edgar Allen Poe as “junior high-ish.” Even though I’ve taught American literature for thirty years, I’ve never understood what to do with him. He fits on the standard curriculum like an elegant barnacle. Is “The Fall of the House of Usher” a study in unremitting madness, or, simply, as some critics have often claimed, “an elaborate way to say ‘boo’”? Don’t know.

“The Tell-tale Heart” may well be his most famous yarn. A delusional man-servant murders his boss and covers the crime perfectly. Yet, he’s so wretchedly haunted by what he’s done that he confesses, as a means by which to end the horrifying echo of the old man’s heart in his demented mind.

Remove the 17th century details from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and you’ve got the same story. Set it in 19th century Russia, and title it Crime and Punishment. Tell the story in apartheid South Africa, and you have To Late the Phalarope. I’m sure I’m missing a dozen or more cousins. Same story—right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Years ago, I judged a junior high forensics contest in which kids gave memorized readings; one of them did “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The performer did well but scared no one. Mostly, he got giggles. Nobody used Hawthorne or Dostoevsky or Alan Paton that day; but if someone had, I’m betting no one would have giggled. That’s why I can’t help but think there is something somewhat “junior high” about Edgar Allen Poe.

Just as there is something somewhat junior high about a verse like this one—at least, in the way an idea like this has been manipulated by believers throughout history. “Beware—your secret sins will find you out.”

Fear has always been an effective, if temporary, motivator. Somewhere I read that adolescent boys have fleshy sexual fancies about dozen times per hour, on average. I don’t doubt it. I was such a character once myself. Tell a junior high boy that Jesus knows his secret sins, and you’ll get his attention.

But some of us don’t have as much steamy seamy-ness at our leisure, nor much of a criminal record—and I’m not bragging. My testimony wouldn’t inspire anyone around a campfire, certainly not a TV producer. Any memoir I’d write would be woefully short on narrative drive. I’m an old man now: the burden of my sins would be filed under “Spirit,” not “Flesh.” From Hollywood’s perspective, that’s not going to spin turnstiles.

And yet this verse holds some fear for me—especially if I think about it in a, well, fleshy way. To be buck naked before God almighty gives me the bejeebees. To imagine him seeing me, inside and out, 24/7, claws at my guilt. I’m not haunted by the heartbeat of my latest, sorry victim, but when I imagine myself splayed before the God of love, I can feel the jagged edges of my pride. After all, I know very well what I want. I know where number one ranks in my daily to-do list. What’s worse, when I think about it, as I am doing now, I remember all that arrogance is hugely set already in his perfect presence.

And that scares me. Which it should. And I’m long, long past junior high.

Historically, the sins of the spirit have always been considered deeper and more vile than sins of the flesh, probably because they’re not front-page material. Even I don’t bother to read that kind of story, maybe because it’s my own.

Locals Make Good -- Blackbird and War Eagle

Charles Bodmer--the tiny monument on the grassy hill marks Blackbird's grave

They're not an odd couple really. They’re much alike, greatly influential once upon a time, and monumentally heralded yet today. It's hard to imagine any two historic Native leaders better known to those of us who live here than the Omaha headman Blackbird--a casino is named in his honor!--and War Eagle, the Yankton/Santee who to this day proffers a peace pipe from a hill above the Missouri.

This oddly matched pair share a history of cooperation with the white colonizers whose sheer numbers altered Native life forever. Both worked with the fur traders who ran a lucrative business on the rivers back then. 

Everybody wanted furs, in great part because European gentlemen wouldn't step outside without beaver hats. French Canadians were here, and the Spanish--they built a fort near Homer. Throw in upstart Americans too in numbers eventually beyond tallying, Yankees who thought they owned the place once Lewis and Clark drew them a map. 

Honestly, it's hard to imagine our river hub as the United Nations, but in 1800 it was greatly multi-cultural--and that's not counting the Santee, Pawnee, the Omaha or the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, all of them immensely mobile, given to hunt buffalo with the entire family in tow, hundreds of miles from home. If you threw up a cabin and parked at the mouth of the Floyd back then, you had no idea who might show up--all kinds of people speaking in tongues.

For better or worse, both War Eagle and Blackbird decided early on that their skills and experience here on the rivers could slip some money and strength and power in the bank. 

War Eagle Monument

War Eagle was a kind of scout, a pilot on the wily Missouri River, after having served as one of the region's first mailmen, running messages up and down on both sides. He knew the ins and outs of Big Muddy. It's a good thing War Eagle looks over the Missouri right now because if he didn't, his toughened spirit would have found a way to turn that whole steel statue around.

What’s more, two of his daughters married Theophile Bruguier, the three of them becoming the first permanent residents of what we now call Sioux City. 

Blackbird, an Omaha headman, learned to play along with the Yankees, just as War Eagle had. By the time smallpox took him, he was among the richest men up and down the river, a kind of Native Don Corleone, a man who sought, gained, and then controlled what went into whose deep pockets--and what didn't.

Neither of them feared the white man. Blackbird grabbed what he could when he could and had a thing about tribal rivals for his power—men who tended, strangely enough, to vanish. On the other hand, Blackbird's own wily character found ways to let whites know that, unlike the Omaha, the Yankees were the guests here. He cooperated with the colonizers but no farther than the reach of his long arm. 

When smallpox took him and so many members of his tribe (estimates vary, but losses were in the hundreds) the ceremonies surrounding his death became legendary. The story goes that he wanted to be astride his horse, looking over the river. Four years later, the mound above his grave was still of such prominence that Lewis and Clark saw it and pulled the pirogues over to investigate. 

If you'd like to know where there's an interpretive shelter marking the spot, just off Highway 75. Can't miss it. George Catlin, on an 1830s sojourn up the river, even did a painting. Way up there on the grassy hills, there's something high and mighty, enough to make a handful of the Corps get off the river to investigate.

Big names: War Eagle and Blackbird. Celebrated, both of them.  Heroes? Good question. The story of Blackbird's burial, some say, was created by white folks. The first time my grandson saw the War Eagle monument, he thought that peace pipe was an AK-47. 

The most we can say, I suppose, is that sometimes our heroes are shaped by our politics. Even today, that seems to be the truth about them--and the truth about us:  we make them what we wish them to be.

Me and Huck and the Theory of Ham

My mother loved me--didn't hate me. My mother rewarded me, especially when I practiced piano. She spanked me once, although years later, when I wrote about that summer morning, she denied it (one of us was dreaming). I didn't grow up with a witch of a mother like Philip Yancey's, although I don't know that spiritually the two of them were much different. Had they ever met, their conversations would have joyfully carried references to the Lord's great love and their great love for Him.

Yancey's Where the Light Fell is his personal memoir of growing up, and it's rife with his mother's abuse of the boys she raised alone after the early death of her husband. The recitation is a horror, really, her behavior so vicious at times that you can't help but wonder how that woman could have raised a child who would become the world's most prominent advocate of grace. My mother--and maybe his--would stake out a claim for the Holy Spirit.

Yancey's story has givens that made me smile--like a reference to Watchman Nee. I remember something of the story from Christian school a hundred years ago. Nee, a Christian preacher, was imprisoned in his native China. He suffered for his faith, a martyr for our time. Philip and I, Christian kids on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, heard the same Sunday School lessons.

And those lessons included a now soundly rejected takeaway from the Old Testament, the story of Noah's sons, who pulled a fast one on him when he passed out from the Devil's brew. One of those sons, the Bible says--or so both Yancey and I were taught--was Ham, who was sentenced to Africa and a lifetime of servitude. Down South, where Yancey grew up, the theory of Ham was, for many, a biblical warrant for institutional slavery. How could you deny it?--the Bible said black people were sentenced to servitude. Can there be any doubt?

If I can go back to my own fifth or sixth grade--as well as nightly family devotions--"the theory of Ham" wasn't used to rescue slavery as an institution but as a means of understanding how poverty came to show itself in "colored" neighborhoods. Noah's son Ham--he's the one to blame, the guy who made it happen.

It's lost some steam now because of the frequent use of the n-word, but Mark Twain's great novel, Huck Finn, ends (or at least reaches a climax) when Huck tries to figure out what he's supposed to do with the runaway slave, Jim, someone he's grown to love. Should he turn Jim in to the sheriff or just keep moving on the river toward his freedom. What Huck's rugged, innocent soul is battling is a biblical injunction he picked up somewhere in "civilization," to wit, that obeying the law was somehow the same as obeying God. Somewhere down there in his soul was "the theory of Ham." Helping Jim run away was taking on the Bible itself, God Himself.

And that's why the most precious line in 19th century American literature is belongs to Huckleberry Finn: "All right, then, I'll go to hell."

One of the grandest moments of my college teaching career happened during my first two years, when I taught American Literature and had the class read Huck Finn. The class was huge back then, when it was required. I scrambled to find a copy of Catharine Vos's The Children's Story Bible, the one my parents used for family devotions, the one my teachers in Christian school used throughout those years. 

And found it. There it was. The theory of Ham. Right there on the page. I made copies, handed them out--everybody got one--because I was sure that my students (late '70s) didn't understand the meaning of the blistering critique Huck lays on the society all along the river. "Well, then, I'll go to hell," is very much a theological declaration, a statement of faith and damnation of bigotry, racism.

I was just plain thrilled that I'd found it. I remember handing it out and going through the explanation I've just now been writing. 

I don't know what I expected. What I remember of the moment, more than anything, was a sea of faces that showed little of my fascination, my joy. It was just, well, school--"is-this-going-to-be-on- the-test?" 

I don't know that my mother would have been proud of what I did in class that day, breaking into student's psyches and souls to establish a beachhead for toleration they would have had trouble creating in themselves. I don't know that I was reflecting my parents' values that day; they might well have been, well, concerned.  I'm sure Philip Yancey's mother wouldn't have bought in.

I have no idea if any of my students, so long ago, remember "the theory of Ham" from that a survey course in American Lit. The Children's Story Bible is still published, but no longer distinguishes the reference, thank goodness. 

Right now, as the words appear on the screen before me, I can't help thinking my joy that day rises from my own pilgrimage as a very sweet epiphany. 

"Want to understand what might be the most memorable line in 19th century American literature?--let me tell you a story from the time when I was a boy."

It was, I think, the kind of moment lots of righteous Republican legislatures these days think shouldn't occur in our schools because what happens in the classroom should reflect their students' parents' values. 

Well, maybe--but then again, maybe not.

Maybe, maybe, maybe

    “We are very very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I             truly can’t wait.”

    “I hate him passionately, . . .I can’t handle much more of this.”

For the record, those memorable lines belong to the man who, for the last two nights, has been passing off the January 6th events at the capital as little more than an ordinary tourism, in defense of the man he claims--hear him?-- to hate passionately. He's a blistering liar, as well as the most listened-to talking-head on TV. People love him because they love Trump. Thusly, if Trump loses, so does Tucker Carlson, and  he knows it, so he'll fabricate the truth to keep his ratings up, keep cash flowing in, and the country at odds with itself.

Ever since Trump announced right here, years ago, that he could gun down people in cold blood and not lose admirers, he's done just that. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt. "It's, like, incredible."

Yes, it is--and demonic is another word for it. He's cast a spell. 

The BIG LIE has further fractured this country, our culture, our families, our churches. No single idea in our recent past has done so much injury to the nation or its common good. Not socialism, or wokism or CRT, whatever the heck they are.

For those of us who've been wary of Donald Trump from those early days, waiting for his forces to have some Damascus-road experience has been wearying. Maybe it'll happen when he claims John McCain was not a patriot; or maybe when he says he trusts Putin more than anybody on his team; or how about this?--maybe when he blackmails Ukraine in order to get some mud on Hunter Biden; for sure when he deliberately fosters anger sufficient to create an insurrection.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Nope, nope, nope. Drip after drip, his numbers are decreasing, but the devotion among those who stay in his orbit seems indomitable--and they've got an all-time best cheerleader in Tucker. 

But I was thrilled to hear, yesterday, that Mitch McConnell came out against Carlson's treatment of the January 6th riot. Made no bones about it because to anyone who was there, he (and several other Republican legislators) said, January 6 was not a normal tourist day.

Behind McConnell stood two senators who seconded his criticism of Tucker "I-hate-him-passionately" Carlson. One was Iowa's own Joni Ernst, the Iowa senator I've always believed was made of better stuff than she shows when she jumps up on the Trump bandwagon; also behind McConnell was South Dakota's John Thune. I've always wanted to think he was made of the right stuff too. Maybe those three--and others--will deconstruct the Trump madness.

Unlikely, I suppose. Trump's 30 percent-sized disciples may well pack more AK-47s than any other political faction, but they cannot and will not EVER win his reelection. Too many American voters know him for the demented nihilist he is. Too many people understand Trump wouldn't know truth if it shaved his orange hair. Too many people know how he led people to violence at the nation's capital because he lost the election. Too many people have known for a long time that he has a narcissistic personality disorder.

In an article in the Reformed Journal, Keith Mannes, who left his pastorate in the CRC, detailed the changes in his life and the life of the denomination to which he once belonged. "Donald Trump awakened something deeply wrong in the soul of the CRC," Mannes wrote, and he's right.

Have a look for yourself.

See that deep maroon in the far northwest corner. It designates the region most Trumpian of any area of the state--90 to 100 per cent voting for Donald of Orange. No part of the state has a higher percentage of residents of Dutch and Reformed ancestry. What's the link, really? I honestly don't know.

Maybe now--maybe with McConnell, Ernst, and Thune--maybe Tucker's false flag will break the log jam. 

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The Des Moines Register's lead story this morning declares that Trump's chances for re-election may well hinge on what he does in the Iowa caucuses. Color me joyfully doubtful on that one. 

But you can bet the whole bunch will be streaming through here with all those dedicated Republican votes to be gathered. It'll be interesting, very interesting, to see if Trump continues to sweep up the neighborhood.