[APPLAUSE]
Good evening.
Thank you, everybody, for coming tonight.
It's a beautiful evening and we're
so blessed to have just a bit, a hint of rain
after all these weeks of dust and that wildfire
that was blowing.
And so I'm sort of recovering from asthma
that I developed here.
Started last week.
And so tonight, the fresh air and everything
is very much welcome.
Well, I was thinking about what I would read tonight.
And I was tempted to read from my novella
that I wrote in 2007.
It's called Ocean Story.
But it's a little x-rated and I didn't know how many
kids would be here tonight.
It's a little radical, and so I won't go there I
offered it to Penguin.
And they said they wanted it, but they didn't get around
to publishing it.
And I felt that what was in Ocean Story
needs to be out in the world.
So when Penguin said they wanted to wait
until I had given them Blue Sevens, my novel that I just
keep working away on.
And I finally said to my agent, I need it to be in the world
or I won't be able to work on Blue Sevens.
So I said, I don't care about money.
I said, it just has to be out there.
So Ocean Story-- if you told me that this
would happen a few years ago, I wouldn't have believed it.
But Ocean Story right now is available only as an e-book,
as a download.
Amazon was looking for short--
actually, Ocean Story is a novella,
so it's a short novel, a long short story--
but they were looking for short material for their Kindle.
Of course, I don't even own one of those things.
And I'm a great lover of books and physical books.
But then I got to thinking about wanting the Ocean
Story to be in the world.
And so that's how it has gotten into the world.
And I was a little bit tempted, like I
said, to read it tonight.
But it's a little bit radical.
And a little x-rated.
And so we won't do that tonight.
Maybe I should have.
But there's enough here to stir up trouble in The Turquoise
Ledge, probably.
I know that members of my family, extended family,
there are things here that they probably just as soon not think
about.
I think what I'll start out with right
away then is a story that I had heard growing up.
Grandma Lily always talked about Old Juana,
the woman who raised them.
She was Navajo.
And she had been captured by the slave catchers.
And she lived a very long time.
She lived till around 1920.
And as I was preparing The Turquoise Ledge,
I wanted to have a section about the family
and close members of the family.
So I asked my father again to tell me about Juana.
And I received a terrible shock.
So here I was, 60 years old and thought
that I pretty much knew the family and the family history.
But it just goes to show you, when it's something like this.
And so I think I will start out then with this section.
I might skip around.
Sometimes, relating all of the different--
my family has just so many different branches
and so forth-- sometimes it gets a little bit hard to follow.
But what I really want to do was is
to read to you about this discovery of mine.
I'll just start it.
It gets around to it.
It gives you a little idea of my Grandma Lily's background.
Grandma Lily, my father's mother, was born in Los Lunas,
south of Albuquerque.
She was a mix of Mexican, German, and English,
and 1/4 Texas Indian--
she wasn't sure which tribe.
Great Grandpa Zachary Stagner, Grandma Lily's father,
ran away from his Texas family when he was 14
and had no contact with them again.
Our cousin Joanne, after much research,
learned that Great Grandpa Stagner's mother
was a Texas Indian named Rhoda Touchstone, who
died in Sweetwater, Texas.
I used to wonder why he ran away from home at 14.
Was it because his father, Stagner the German,
administered terrible whippings?
Someone on Grandma Lily's side of the family
had begun the practice of whipping young children.
The Laguna Pueblo people, who never hit their children,
were horrified at the terrible whippings
my father gave my sisters and me when we were small.
Grandma Lily was a beautiful young woman.
But she must not have felt or realized her beauty.
I remember all the black and white Kodak
snapshots and the Hopi basket with the grasshopper man
pattern.
Many of the photographs showed Grandma Lily
when she was young--
with Grandpa Hank, but also with her younger sisters.
There were snapshots of Grandpa Hank often posed
beside fast cars.
He wore stylish suits and was very handsome.
And of course earlier, I explained that Grandpa Hank,
Grandma Alma was his mother, and then Grandpa Marmon came out
from Ohio, was a white man-- a Quaker, no less--
who came out from Ohio and married in.
Sometime in the late 1950s--
was that one of the times she thought grandpa Hank
was having an affair--
Grandma Lily took the Hopi basket full of snapshots
and a pair of sharp scissors and carefully cut out her face
from every photograph.
If she appeared in snapshots with other people,
the faces of the others were intact.
Only her face was neatly excised.
The faceless images were very strange.
Without the face, the upright figure
with the remaining top of the head and hair
looked like a corpse.
Recently, I learned something more about Grandma
Lily's mother's people, our Los Lunas relatives--
and this is the Mexicanos side, the Romero family,
the Los Lunas--
our Los Lunas relatives and their connection
with the whippings of young children.
All these years I thought I knew the whole story.
But I was wrong.
Long before I knew anything about the Indian slave trade
in New Mexico, I'd heard grandma Lily stories
about Old Juana, the Navajo captive who lived with them
and cared for them when they were children.
One Memorial Day when I was 12 or 13,
Grandma Lily asked me to go with her to take flowers
to Old Juana's grave.
She told me Juana died around 1920,
when she was more than 100 years old.
We filled to clean coffee cans with water.
Then we cut some roses and lilacs from Grandma Amu's yard
because those were the only fresh flowers to be found.
Grandma Lily drove us to the south side of Laguna village,
and then down the old dirt road near the old bridge
across the river.
A low wall of black lava rock was partially
buried in the pale gray river sand that
covered an ancient floodplain.
In the corners of the wall, dry weeds, scraps of paper,
and debris formed drifts.
The graves were from the time when the Laguna people
didn't use carved gravestones but flat pieces of sandstone
or slate or black lava stones.
I seem to remember the remains of a few wooden crosses
scattered about.
She hadn't brought flowers to Juana in a while.
But then that year, for some reason, she decided to do it.
Grandma Lily took a little while to get her bearings
among the piles of stones and small dunes of sand that
shifted in the graveyard with every wind.
Then she located the five dark lava stones
the size of cantaloupes that marked Juana's grave.
I helped Grandma Lily clear away the tumbleweeds tangled
with other debris.
And she talked about Old Juana while we worked.
Juana had been captured by Mexican slave catchers
when she was just a little girl.
Years later, when Lincoln freed the slaves,
it was already too late for poor Juana.
30 years or more had passed, and she no longer
spoke the Navajo language.
And she did not know where she had been stolen from.
Grandma Lilly gave me the impression
Juana came to work for their family
when she was an adult, after Lincoln's proclamation,
because she had no place to go.
And actually, it's the 13th Amendment--
rather than the Emancipation Proclamation,
but the 13th Amendment that outlaws slavery, which
was which was passed in 1865.
Grandma Lilly said Juana was the one who really mothered
them, not Great Grandma Helen.
In her 80s old one I raised my Grandma Lily
and all her sisters and brothers because Great Grandma Helen
followed the practices of the wealthy Mexican women
at the time.
Which meant she took to her bedroom
as soon as she was pregnant and did not leave her bedroom again
until two months after the birth.
Grandma Lily had 11 sisters and brothers,
and two who did not survive.
So Grandma Helen seldom left her bedroom.
It was Juana who cared for them while their mother awaited
another birth.
Juana bathed them and fed them.
Juana rocked them and held them when they were sick or scared,
not their mother.
Juana was in her 80s by the time Grandma Lily was born.
I remember my Great Grandma Helen vividly.
She always wore a long black cardigan over her black dress.
And she rolled her own cigarettes
from a bag of tobacco as she gossiped in Spanish
with my grandma and her sisters Lorena and Marie.
I don't remember her greeting us or hugging us.
She hardly seemed to notice us great grandchildren.
She was so different from our beloved Great Grandma Amu
that we children were a little afraid of her.
Great Grandma Helen was born to Josephine Romero whose mother
was a Luna, one of the founding families of Los Lunas, New
Mexico.
The Romeros were another founding family.
Josephine Romero had married a Whittington,
the son of an English merchant who
married a daughter of the Chavez family.
Grandma Lily always called her grandmother
Josephine Romero "Grandma Whip" because she
wore a black braided leather belt around her waist, which
she could remove quickly to use as a whip for naughty children.
My father remembers Grandma Whip, too.
He said they called her Grandma Whip because as children,
whenever they visited her, the first thing she did when they
came into the house was to warn them not to touch anything
in her house by saying, Grandma whip, Grandma whip if you
touch.
The whippings that were part of child rearing in Grandma Lily's
family included my father, and finally, my sisters and me.
The whippings were a legacy from Grandma Whip and her family.
So my suspicions, I still don't know whether Grandpa Stagner's
father back in Texas, I had speculated
that it might have come from that direction.
But I found out differently.
In 2006, I was asked to write a foreword
to a book about a corrido or ballad that
was composed in 1882 in the Mexican community of Cubero,
near Laguna.
The corrido was about a Mexican woman
Placida Romero whose husband was killed, and she and her baby
kidnapped by a band of Apache raiders.
It is likely the Apaches chose the Cubero area deliberately
because Cubero had long been the site of slave markets.
Placida Romero was taken back to Chihuahua
by the Apache warriors, where she was held for 49 days
and so badly mistreated that the Apache women felt sorry
for the Mexican woman and gave her clothing, food, and even
a burro to aid her escape.
Of course the ballad written afterward made
no mention of the compassion and considerable bravery
of the Apache women who helped Placida escape.
That angered me because at the time they helped her escape,
Apache women and children were being
murdered by Mexicans and Americans
alike for the bounty on their scalps.
And this is the 1880s.
Yet the Apache women who helped blessed escape
did not let the genocide destroy their human decency.
I wanted to put the incident into historical perspective.
Placida Romero was captive for 49 days
and then she got to go home.
Juana was captive for almost 100 years
and she never got to go home.
To prepare to write about the captives,
I reread LR Bailey's scholarly work, Indian Slave
Trade in the Southwest, first published in 1964.
Though I'd read it before, I'd conveniently
forgotten some of the more horrendous details.
The Spanish governors of New Mexico--
and of course, at that time New Mexico included Arizona--
the Spanish governors of New Mexico
encouraged and participated in the Indian slave trade.
It was their way of keeping the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches
at war with one another so they would not
unite against the Spaniards as they had in 1680.
After the fur trade collapsed, the rendezvous
held at river crossings from Taos to Tucson
became slave markets where Indian captives were traded
for whiskey and gunpowder.
The captives were mostly young children, primarily young girls
because they were less likely to try to escape.
At the slave markets in drunken exhibitions,
the slave traders raped the young Indian girls.
The Catholic Church participated in the slave trade
by possessing young Indian "servants"--
and that's in quotations-- for labor and by baptizing
the captives.
Baptismal records show that from 1700 to 1788,
800 Apache children were baptized as servants
to the households of Spaniards in New Mexico.
At the Catholic Church at Laguna Pueblo,
baptismal records revealed that the Spanish rewarded
the Pueblos, who accompanied them on military actions
against the Navajos, with young captives.
More money could be made from one slave hunting expedition
of two or three weeks than could be
made in one year of subsistence farming or ranching
in New Mexico.
When the US authorities took the New Mexico territory
from Mexico in 1846, the US officials
made attempts to stop the Indian slave trade.
But the wealthy Mexican families resisted,
and even the US authorities kept Indian "servants."
When I reread Bailey's book, I came
across the account of a young Navajo woman released
by US soldiers from her captivity
with a Mexican family in 1852.
The young Navajo woman complained to the US military
officers that the Mexican family stripped her naked
and whipped her every day.
Whipping slaves, it seems, was a common perversion
among the founding families of New Mexico.
I happened to mention to my father
that I wanted to write about Juana.
But I really didn't know for sure
when or how she came to work for Grandma Lily's family.
I had always kind of just had that assumption--
that appears earlier in this piece--
that somehow, after slavery was outlawed,
that she was set free by somebody else
and then came to our family.
That was when my father told me what Grandma Lilly never
told me.
My father told me so offhandedly, it angered me.
I could tell he was ashamed, and the offhanded manner
was his way to cover up his shame.
Four young Navajo sisters were captured by the Spanish slave
hunters during the Spanish governor's 1823
military campaign against the Navajos in New Mexico.
Juana, who was four or five, was the youngest.
The four captives came into the possession
of Grandma Whip's brother.
Did he buy the young sisters from a slave trader?
Or were they loot he got for volunteering
to accompany the Spanish troops on the assault?
Does someone owe him a gambling debt
and give him the little girls in payment?
Or were they a bribe to curry his favor?
If Grandma Whip was quick to take off the leather
belt to whip her small grandchildren,
imagine what Grandma Whip's brother was like.
He must have been the devil himself
with a whip on the little Navajo girls.
After he whipped the young Navajo girls,
what other perversions?
Was he one of those slave dealers
who participated in the drunken public rapes
of young Indian girls at the slave markets?
His abuse was unbearable.
So the three older girls poisoned their torturer.
With the son of two prominent Los Lunas
families dead at the hands of Indian servants,
the local authorities could not afford delay.
Copycats had to be discouraged immediately.
The three young Navajo girls were hanged at once.
Only the youngest Juana was spared.
Did other wealthy families of Los Lunas
send their Indian servants to watch the hangings that day
as a precaution?
Did they make little Juana watch her sisters die?
Did Juana understand then that her last links to her family
and people died with her sisters,
and there would be no reunion for her?
From her poisoned brother, Grandma Whip
inherited the only remaining Navajo child to be her servant.
Poor Juana came to be part of the strange cruel family
of Grandma Whip and her husband, the Mexican
with the English surname.
Both my father and grandma Lily told me
about the huge ring of keys Grandma Whip wore on the belt
around her waist.
Every door, every closet, every cabinet, every cupboard
and drawer in Grandma Whip's house was locked at all times
when they visited and needed sugar for their coffee grandma
whip had to search among dozens of keys
before she unlocked the cupboard with a sugar bowl.
Grandma Lily said all the locks and keys
were because Grandma Whip didn't want
the servants to steal things.
But maybe Grandma Whip wanted to make sure the rat poison stayed
out of the sugar bowl.