Smiling all day in the sun down here.
Leslie Silko.
[APPLAUSE]
Let's see.
First thing, I have to get used to this mic.
Those of you who weren't at the forum at noon today,
we were in a room.
It was a smaller room.
And I didn't use one of these.
I like to just not have to use these kinds of things.
But in a bigger room you have to,
so I'll probably gesture with my hand
and hit it a couple of times and maybe talk too closely into it.
But I don't like these things.
Well, let's see.
Usually, and I guess even for this appearance,
they sort of book me as a poet.
But I think of myself more as a storyteller.
And that's what I really love to do.
I get started with a storytelling and the stories,
and I lose all track of time.
That's my wristwatch over there.
I was going to try to watch it so that I didn't exhaust you.
What I'd like to do though is do some of the things
that I really love to do, the storytelling.
And then I'll do a few poems.
I love to write poems.
I don't want you to misunderstand me.
But I don't enjoy reading poetry as much
as I enjoy doing stories.
So we'll get started this way.
Storytelling, the kind of storytelling that I'm into,
is something that is very much a part of where I grew up.
And it's an ongoing thing.
This kind of storytelling is something
that, as long as the people at Laguna
can still have enough strength to speak, why, this will go on.
I think it's this way with a lot of other Indian people
in different places.
And I know with the Chicano people
and maybe somewhere in rural areas with white people too.
Anyway, this is a story that is sort of X-rated.
It's called "Laughing and Laughing about Something
that Happened at Mesita."
Mesita's a village near Laguna where I grew up.
And people at home live for good stories.
And the happiest thing that can happen to you
is to hear a good story that you can tell to your friends
for the rest of the day.
And this is one of the stories.
And it goes like this.
"There was this man from Mesita.
And he was seeing this woman.
And she wasn't young, either.
And she was married, too, just like him,
with five or six kids.
Anyway, the story goes this way.
This man's wife had caught these two together before.
Or maybe she just heard about them.
I don't know.
Maybe some of her neighbors told her.
Well, anyway, it was in the summertime,
after the corn got tall.
That day it was hot and past noontime,
and everybody was inside, resting or sleeping.
And that is what these two were counting on.
While everybody else was inside resting from the heat,
they could lay down with each other out in the cornfield.
I don't know whose field it was, but I
guess they waited until all the other people left
and went inside to eat lunch.
Well, there they were, I guess, on the shady ground,
a little damp from last week's rain, sort of cool, maybe,
and all surrounded by the tall corn with the leaves rustling
in the breeze.
They were deep into those places that people
go when they are together like that, when his wife showed up.
She didn't go there by herself.
She brought her two sisters along with her.
They knew what was going on, and they were just
waiting to catch them together.
So they caught them.
And the man and that woman jumped up,
and they put on their clothes.
And all that time, the wife and the sisters
were seen standing there, silent,
probably because they didn't have anything to say.
And then, that other woman left.
And the man was alone with his wife and sisters-in-law.
And by this time, his wife was crying.
And her sisters were saying, don't cry, sister.
Don't cry.
And then the man stood there for a while, looking up at the sky
or maybe over at the long red mesa behind the village.
And then pretty soon he started hoeing weeds again.
Anyway, they were ignoring him like he didn't matter, now
that that other woman was gone.
And so that's what happened.
And everybody was laughing and laughing
when they heard about it at Laguna.
We were all laughing and laughing
about what happened at Mesita.
And then there was this time at Laguna,
this man was going up the hill to the toilet.
And it was nighttime.
And he heard funny sounds coming from one of the old barns
on the side of the hill.
He thought he'd better go check up on things in case
some animal was trapped in there or something like that.
So he opened up the door and shined his flashlight in there,
and here was this man, really respected in the community
because he always worked hard and hardly ever got drunk.
Well, there he was, laying there naked with this woman who was
big and fat and had 12 kids.
And here it was, the middle of winter,
and they were both naked there.
This man who found them didn't exactly know what to say,
so he closed the door again.
And he went back home, and he even
forgot that he had to go to the toilet.
And I guess he told someone, because pretty soon everybody
heard about it.
And we were all laughing because that man was
so skinny and small, and she was so heavy and fat.
And someone said that this man sure was taking a chance,
messing around with her.
Because she was so big, all she'd
have to do is roll over on him and that would be the end.
You have to understand about the attitudes at home,
despite Christianity and so forth,
towards this sort of thing.
It's not quite the same as if I was telling the story
and this happened to a suburban housewife in Tucson.
I realize that in Anglo-Saxon law and Anglo-Saxon culture,
this sort of thing is grounds for instantaneous divorce
and destruction and all kinds of terrible things.
But at home, it was more of a, oh, it was more of a game,
I guess, to see if you could keep
from being found out and see if you could get down
to the cornfield and back again without your husband
finding out.
And if someone cried over it, they
cried over it because of these stories
that would be going around.
Not so much for the deed, but just the fact
that everyone was going, there goes--
this is so-and-so.
Did you hear about what happened?
That kind of thing.
Anyway, so it's meant-- these things go around there,
and it's in a much more lighthearted manner,
I think, than what you might be sort of used to ordinarily.
The reasons for this go way back into the old time.