High Tide in Tucson (14 page)

Expectations soared, and the economy sagged. It's hard to depend on one other adult for everything, come what may. In the last three decades, that amorphous, adaptable structure we call “family” has been reshaped once more by economic tides. Compared with fifties families, mothers are far more likely now to be employed. We are statistically more likely to divorce, and to live in blended families or other extranuclear arrangements. We are also more likely to plan and space our children, and to rate our marriages as “happy.” We are less likely to suffer abuse without recourse, or to stare out at our lives through a glaze of prescription tranquilizers. Our aged parents are less likely to be destitute, and we're half as likely to have a teenage daughter turn up a mother herself. All in all, I would say that if “intact” in modern family-values jargon means living quietly desperate in the bell jar,
then hip-hip-hooray for “broken.” A neat family model constructed to service the Baby Boom economy seems to be returning gradually to a grand, lumpy shape that human families apparently have tended toward since they first took root in the Olduvai Gorge. We're social animals, deeply fond of companionship, and children love best to run in packs. If there is a
normal
for humans, at all, I expect it looks like two or three Families of Dolls, connected variously by kinship and passion, shuffled like cards and strewn over several shoeboxes.

The sooner we can let go the fairy tale of families functioning perfectly in isolation, the better we might embrace the relief of community. Even the admirable parents who've stayed married through thick and thin are very likely, at present, to incorporate other adults into their families—household help and baby-sitters if they can afford them, or neighbors and grandparents if they can't. For single parents, this support is the rock-bottom definition of family. And most parents who have split apart, however painfully, still manage to maintain family continuity for their children, creating in many cases a boisterous phenomenon that Constance Ahrons in her book
The Good Divorce
calls the “binuclear family.” Call it what you will—when ex-spouses beat swords into plowshares and jump up and down at a soccer game together, it makes for happy kids.

 

Cinderella, look, who needs her? All those evil stepsisters? That story always seemed like too much cotton-picking fuss over clothes. A childhood tale that fascinated me more was the one called “Stone Soup,” and the gist of it is this: Once upon a time, a pair of beleaguered soldiers straggled home to a village empty-handed, in a land ruined by war. They were famished, but the
villagers had so little they shouted evil words and slammed their doors. So the soldiers dragged out a big kettle, filled it with water, and put it on a fire to boil. They rolled a clean round stone into the pot, while the villagers peered through their curtains in amazement.

“What kind of soup is that?” they hooted.

“Stone soup,” the soldiers replied. “Everybody can have some when it's done.”

“Well, thanks,” one matron grumbled, coming out with a shriveled carrot. “But it'd be better if you threw this in.”

And so on, of course, a vegetable at a time, until the whole suspicious village managed to feed itself grandly.

Any family is a big empty pot, save for what gets thrown in. Each stew turns out different. Generosity, a resolve to turn bad luck into good, and respect for variety—these things will nourish a nation of children. Name-calling and suspicion will not. My soup contains a rock or two of hard times, and maybe yours does too. I expect it's a heck of a bouillabaise.

The drive from Tucson to Phoenix is a trip through merciless desert, where tall saguaros throw up their arms in apparent surrender to the encroaching cotton fields. Some of the land belongs to farmers holding tight to a parched midwestern dream; some belongs to the state of Arizona, mainly because nobody in particular ever bothered to want it. And a big chunk of what we were passing through belongs to the Gila River Reserve, the state's oldest Indian reservation, though nothing I could see from the highway set those particular cacti and irrigated farmlands apart from the rest, as Indian country.

Because Camille was five, and liked to know what to expect at all times, I reminded her that we were on our way to visit the Heard Museum, which was all about Native Americans.
“Indians,” I clarified. “You know who Indians are, right?”

“Sure,” she said. “People that lived a long time ago.”

I felt between my shoulder blades the weight of this familiar frustration. We were driving past fields being tended this very morning, presumably, by Maricopa and Pima Indians. My daughter played routinely with children from other nations including the Tohono O'odham and Yaqui. She had been a guest at their dances and passed almost daily through the Yaqui village that lies between our house and town. But five-year-olds will hear what you tell them, and merrily go right on believing what they
see
. Movies and storybooks say that Indians lived long ago, period, and there's so little else for a modern child to go on.

As a woman with some Cherokee ancestors on my father's side and a blonde, blue-eyed daughter, I find it impossible to pin down the meaning of ethnicity. It's an especially delicate business here in the Southwest, where so many of us boil in one pot without much melting. We're never allowed to forget we are foreign bodies in the eyes of our neighbors. The annual Winter Holiday Concert at Camille's school features a bright patchwork of languages and rituals, each of which must be learned by a different subset of kids, the others having known it since they could talk. It sounds idyllic, but then spend half an hour on the playground and you're also likely to come away with a whole new vocabulary of racial slurs. On the playground no one's counting the strengths of your character, nor the woman your great-grandfather married, unless her genes have dyed your hair and fixed your features. It's the face on your passport that gets you in. Faces that set us apart, in separate houses.

When I pack up my child and head off to a place like the Heard Museum, it's not to claim some piece of our own lost heritage. I have only an inkling of my forebears, and they represent
more worlds than I could claim: Scottish stonemasons; Portuguese sailors; farmers from the Eastern Band of Cherokee; planters and sharecroppers and hapless conscripts to both sides of the Civil War. They died without passing on to me the secrets of constructing a limestone chimney flue, navigating by the stars, or planting by the moon. Half the living souls in the southeastern U.S., it seems, claim to be descended from Sacajawea, and that is their business, but I'm not so interested in bloodlines as motivation for multicultural appreciation. I appreciate because I'm interested, just as I can admire tropical fish without being part fish. (And if I
am
part fish, that is
my
business.) We go to the Heard out of love for the great elaborate world, and also to feel more at home in our own neighborhood. I want my child to be so completely familiar with differences that she'll ignore
difference
per se and really see what she's looking at. When she looks at an Acoma water jar, I don't want her to think less of it because it was made by hand in a nonelectrified village high on a mesa. Neither do I want her to think it is the rarefied relic of saints. It seems odd to have to add the latter, but lately we've been besieged with a new, bizarre form of racism that sets apart all things Native American as object of either worship or commerce, depending on your proclivities. It's scary enough to see Kokopelli on a keychain—God for sale, under five dollars—but I'm not much more comfortable with the other angle, the sweat-lodge suburbanites who borrow the material trappings of native ceremonies as a spiritual quickie to offset the stresses of corporate life. What began as anthropology has escalated to fad, and it strikes me that assigning magical power to a culture's every belief and by-product is simply another way of setting those people apart. It's more benign than burning crosses on lawns, for sure, but ultimately not much more humane.

An equal in our time and place is someone with an address and friends, who works and plays and buys groceries in packages with brand names, who is capable of both nobility and mistakes. People who are picture perfect, magical, untouchable, or worse yet, only historic, do not need equal opportunity or educational grants.

An Acoma water jar is just a useful thing, really. Like a soda-pop can, only beautiful.

 

The Heard Museum stands today because of a hobby that grew out of hand. Dwight and Maie Bartlett Heard settled in the pioneer town of Phoenix in 1895, and long before it was fashionable or provident, they found an absorbing interest in the culture of Arizona's Native peoples. By the 1920s, their collection of artifacts had grown too large and valuable as a community resource to keep on the parlor shelves. Steadily and gently, over more than half a century, the Heard has grown to be one of the world's great centers of Native American heritage.

The entry courtyard welcomed us with the grace of whitewashed arches, orange trees, and weathered
metates
—corn-grinding stones—hunched on the basket-weave brick floor. Mary Brennan, communications coordinator for the museum, met us there, and explained the museum's mission of appreciation for Native people and their culture, especially those of the Southwest. This is not a museum only of artifacts, she pointed out, but of modern Native American life, expressed through both traditional and fine arts. Museum programs bring Native American artists and dancers into schools, for example. Later today there would be a dance performance in the museum auditorium.

I was glad the museum's directors undertook this as part of
their mission: to counter the prevailing notion that Indians made nice pots and shot buffalo and now are dead. I silently wished them luck.

Camille and I were immediately drawn to the wing called “Old Ways, New Ways,” a permanent interactive exhibit where kids (and adults, if they're game) can learn to play a drum under the videotaped tutelage of a Kiowa elder, and use a computer to design a Navajo rug, and find enough other adventures to fill an afternoon, easily. I stood with a crew of teenagers at a display showing how the ancient Anasazi fashioned little willow-twig animals that archaeologists frequently find tucked into high crevices in the Grand Canyon. Earnestly we all followed instructions, wrapping and looping our twigs to make horses. Mine looked like a giraffe. I stuffed it deep down in my pocket, wondering if maybe the Anasazi stuck
their
failures into those out-of-the-way crevices for the same reason, and kept the good ones around for the kids to play with.

Camille had better luck fitting wooden forms together to make a Tlingit mural. I stood behind her, watching how two simple shapes—a blunt oval and a curly U-shape—repeat over and over in all the familiar totem-pole aggregations of owl and raven and whale, adding up to that instantly recognizable gestalt of the art of Inuit and other northern tribes. If I hadn't seen it taken apart and reassembled, I would never have understood this amazing principle.

I've always felt half-blind in places where I couldn't touch anything. I find I need to assess textures, and pick things up to see how they're put together; I am far more likely than my child to get in trouble for doing so. Camille has escorted me out of many a china shop. Once, in a Japanese park, I reached out and touched a palace wall because I couldn't identify its material by sight, and
wanted to know whether it was stucco or stone; my finger set off great honking alarms and brought a police car up the gravel path. (The lovely signs in Japanese, which I'd taken for part of the decor, apparently said T
OUCH
T
HIS AND
D
IE
, H
UMBLE
T
OURIST
!) It's true we're a sight-biased species, but still it seems odd that museums that aim to instruct us about a multisensory world tend to convey their information entirely through sight, and maybe a little sound. In such places I generally feel like a child, not quite worthy of the material I'm meant to admire; in the children's wing of the Heard, oddly enough, I felt more respected.

Every part of the museum begged for our attention. The main gallery's permanent collection of ancient and modern Native arts are displayed as a living continuum. The entry is a spare, dark auditorium; in a continuous audiovisual loop, Hopi and Tohono O'odham and Dine people talk directly to the camera about their children and grandparents, their villages, their history, their funerals and blessing ceremonies. Their verbal portraits fall against shifting images of their lives' dramatic backgrounds: the Grand Canyon, Taos Pueblo, saguaros with their arms in the air.

The words of an unidentified Taos Pueblo man are inscribed on the wall of the gallery's entrance: “We have lived upon this land from days beyond history's record, far past any living memory, deep into the time of legend. The story of my people and the story of this place are one single story.”

Who else could make this claim? In North America, no one. All American tribes other than the Pueblo have been forced off their home ground, and everyone else migrated here from another hemisphere. The gallery is designed, I think, to stop in our tracks those of us who take transience for granted. It tells an extraordinary tale of human landscapes cradled and shaped by physical ones. Tall photographic murals show the lay of the land,
and the exhibits explain life, history, and survival in these beautiful, severe places. The objects of art in the collection are exquisite, but that is not the point, for all of us have surely seen disembodied pots and baskets in a glass case. Here, those objects lie together with the matrix of their origins: the colors of Colorado mud and stone, the need for transporting water, the human passion for both survival and beauty. Baskets that celebrate the whispering colors of grass and the designs of the human heart. Wool blankets, woven from a pastoral life supported by sheep and a reverence for Spider Woman, the mother of weaving. Blankets so beautiful they are coveted by people a world away, who can hardly imagine the sound of bleating sheep in a bone-dry canyon.

The spaghetti-western caricature of “Indian” had been slipping away from us all day, but it was erased once and for all for Camille, I think, by the houses. We got to walk into fastidious replicas of a Zuni pueblo adobe, a Northwest Coast long house, and a Dine hogan. I've driven many times through the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona and looked longingly at these low, eight-sided, cozy-looking log hogans, whose chimneys poke through the center of the roofs to trail thin, blue-gray signals into the desert sky. I have even stopped by these homes to ask directions, but was never invited in. And now I found one here, dismantled and reassembled in the middle of a gallery. Camille and I went in and sat on a plank bench with our backs to the hewn logs, letting our eyes adjust to dimmer light, admiring the way the home's roundness accommodates both function and the human need to feel hugged. On the woodstove in the center sat an iron kettle, waiting (a long time) to cook the next mutton stew. Camille poked through the assortment of bare necessities arranged in an open shelf, and touched the traditional velvet
shirts and gathered skirts on coat hangers hung from nails in the wall. She talked as she went, and I was surprised to hear her taking up her own hogan fantasy. “If I meet a Navajo girl in school, maybe she'll invite me home with her and we can sleep on the floor on sheepskins like these.”

I got it: my daughter is beginning to believe, truly, that Navajos are people who still walk the earth. They are potential school pals.

Just then, a woman in a sequined sweatshirt ducked in through the doorway, glanced up at the low roof, and remarked before ducking out again, “Boy, they must have been
short
back then.”

 

To write novels, to design a museum, to teach fourth-graders about history—all these enterprises require the interpretation of other lives. And all of them, historically, have been corrupted by privileges of race, class, and gender. The Heard, and places like it, are paddling upstream from the get-go simply by calling themselves “museum.” We go there expecting dead things, explained in flat, condescending voices.

“Books,” as a category of papery things with the scent of mildew, are paddling up the same stream. I spent plenty of my young womanhood resenting the fact that nearly all the fictional women I'd ever read about were the inventions of men (and that I'd learned about female sexuality from D. H. Lawrence!). But I'm old enough now to stand in the shadow of my former brilliance and face incertitude: would the world really be a better place if Mr. Tolstoy had not invented Anna Karenina, or Mr. Flaubert his Emma Bovary?

More to the point: who, exactly, is entitled to write about the
relationships
between women and men? Hermaphrodites? This is the dilemma upon whose horns I've built my house: I want to know, and to write, about the places where disparate points of view rub together—the spaces between. Not just between man and woman but also North and South; white and not-white; communal and individual; spiritual and carnal. I can think of no genetic or cultural credentials that could entitle a writer to do this—only a keen ear, empathy, caution, willingness to be criticized, and a passionate attraction to the subject.

Of these I can claim in adequate measure only the last; I'm drawn like a kid to mud into the sticky terrain of cultural difference. How wondrous, it seems to me, that someone else can live on the same round egg of a world that I do but explain it differently—how it got here, and what's to be done with it. How remarkable that other people's stories often sound more true to me than my own.