The Turquoise Ledge (4 page)

G
randma Lillie, my father's mother, was born in Los Lunas, south of Albuquerque; she was a mix of Mexican, German and English and one quarter Texas Indian—she wasn't sure which tribe. Great Grandpa Zachary Stagner, Grandma Lillie's father, ran away from his Texas family when he was fourteen, 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 fourteen. Was it because his father, Stagner the German, administered terrible whippings? Someone on Grandma Lillie'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 Lillie was a beautiful young woman, but she must not have felt or realized her beauty. I remember all the black and white Kodak snapshots in the Hopi basket with the grasshopper man pattern. Many of the photographs showed Grandma Lillie, 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.

Sometime in the late 1950s (was it one of the times she thought Grandpa Hank was having an affair?) Grandma Lillie 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 Lillie's mother's people, our Los Lunas relatives and their connection with the whipping 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 Lillie's 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 twelve or thirteen, Grandma Lillie 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 one hundred years old. We filled clean coffee cans with water; then we cut some roses and lilacs from Grandma A'mooh's yard because those were the only fresh flowers to be found.

Grandma Lillie 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 Lillie 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 Lillie 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—thirty 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 Lillie 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.

Grandma Lillie said Juana was the one who really mothered them, not Great Grandma Helen. In her eighties, old Juana raised my grandma Lillie 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 Lillie had eleven sisters and brothers and two who did not survive—so Great 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 eighties by the time Grandma Lillie was born.

I remember my great grandma Helen vividly; she always wore a long black cardigan over her 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 A'mooh 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 Lillie 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 Lillie's family included my father, and finally my sisters and me. The whippings were a legacy from Grandma Whip and her family.

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
is 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 forty-nine 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. Yet the Apache women who helped Placida escape did not let the genocide destroy their human decency.

I wanted to put the incident into historical perspective: Placida Romero was a captive for forty-nine days and then she got to go home. Juana was a captive for almost a hundred years, and she never got to go home.

To prepare to write about the captives, I reread L. R. 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 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” for labor, and by baptizing the captives. Baptismal records show that from 1700 to 1780, eight hundred 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 U.S. authorities took the New Mexico Territory from Mexico in 1846, the U.S. officials made attempts to stop the Indian slave trade, but the wealthy Mexican families resisted, and even the U.S. authorities kept Indian “servants.”

When I reread Bailey's book I came across the account of a young Navajo woman released by U.S. soldiers from her captivity with a Mexican family in 1852. The young Navajo woman complained to the U.S. military officer that the Mexican family stripped her naked and whipped her every day. Whipping slaves, it seems, was a common perversion with the founding families of New Mexico.

I happened to mention to my father that I wanted to write about Juana but I wasn't really sure when or how she came to work for Grandma Lillie's family. That was when my father told me what Grandma Lillie never told me. My father told me so offhandedly it angered me; I could tell he was ashamed and the off-handed 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? Did 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 the 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 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 Lillie told me about the huge ring of keys Grandma Whip wore on the belt around her waist. Every door, every closet, every cabinet, 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 the sugar bowl. Grandma Lillie 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.

M
y mother's ancestors weren't as well known to her as my father's ancestors were to him. My mother's maternal great grandfather, Grandpa Wood, was born in what is now Kentucky during one of the violent removals of the Cherokees from their homelands in North Carolina and Georgia. It was his daughter, my mother's grandma Goddard, who taught my mother that the black snake in the cellar was their friend. The Cherokees revered snakes before Christianity arrived. So my mother taught me to respect but not to fear snakes.

 

In my second year at the University of New Mexico, money was scarce. My elder son Robert was a baby then, and my husband Dick Chapman was in graduate school. I had good grades but in those days all the scholarship money there went to male athletes. The only scholastic scholarship available was one offered by the Daughters of the Confederacy. The financial aid counselor suggested I find out if I had any relatives who fought for the Confederacy. I asked my mother and she told me the Leslies, her ancestors, fought for the Confederacy. I got the scholarship for my high grade point average; it was two hundred dollars split between two semesters.

The Leslie name goes back to Scotland and the Leslie clan. My mother said that her father, Grandpa Dan, had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan during the years he and Grandma Jessie lived in Georgia. My mother was very close to her father; they both wept easily and loved to drink. I remember Grandpa Dan with happiness until I got old enough to want to watch
Hopalong Cassidy
when Grandpa wanted to watch the Friday night boxing matches. The anger he directed at me that night so frightened me I did not feel the same about him ever again. Some years later when he died, I felt sorry for my mother's loss and her sadness, but I didn't feel sad; I was about six years old then.

Later on when I was in high school in the 1960s, I tried to track down Grandpa Wood, and our Cherokee relatives; not all the Cherokees went to Oklahoma—some of the Wood family hid out in the mountains near Asheville. But in those days the Cherokees were poor with no casino money, and few records were kept of those who had been born or who died during the removals.

Years before, when I was in grade school, our cousin Charlie Wood from western North Carolina worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a community health worker at Laguna. He stayed at Laguna for a few years before he went back to North Carolina. We didn't really get to know him. I'm not sure why. I remember he came to our house for supper a few times, but mostly we saw him when he came into the store to pick up the mail.

Maybe it was the liquor around our house that kept our cousin Charlie away. Alcoholic drinks were and still are illegal at Laguna. As a BIA public health worker it would have been awkward for Charlie Wood because he was very conscientious. He might have lost his job.

Now I realize how the alcohol in our house determined who might or might not be invited in spontaneously. People who possessed alcohol might be reported to the village officers who had the power to punish those breaking the law. In those days there were no tribal police or tribal jail; the elected village officers took care of keeping the peace in their village.

My mother was a bright well-educated woman, and a great teacher, but she was also an alcoholic. She came from a small Montana coal mining village. She told me she started drinking in the seventh grade when she and some school chums stole the wine her father and the other coal miners planned to drink after the union meeting.

I never thought of my mother as an alcoholic because she seldom got drunk or impaired by drinking, except at picnics and parties, and Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. I was used to seeing the dramatic, extreme alcoholism of the World War Two and Korean War veterans who were my cousins, so it was easier to fool myself about my mother's drinking. She didn't drink on the job and she never missed work, but after work and on weekends, my mother kept a coffee cup full of whiskey nearby.

Except for Grandma Jessie and her sisters, Aunt Sarah and Aunt Lucy, and my mother's brother, Uncle Jack, my mother's relatives were not only distant, they didn't seem as interesting as my father's relatives who were active presences in my life. Except for Aunt Lucy and her love for Cherokee Grandpa Wood, my mother's relatives weren't storytellers; and except for my mother's brother, Uncle Jack, they weren't colorful either.

Uncle Jack flew for the Navy in the Pacific in World War Two. Afterwards he was a crop duster in Fresno with great stories to tell about close calls and the crashes he walked away from. His children, my cousins John Leslie and Lana Leslie, were like brother and sister to my sisters and me while we grew up.

Every summer John and Lana spent eight weeks with us at Laguna. They always knew the latest music, dances and fashion because they were from California and were popular and cool—far ahead of the rest of the country. Their town had a big municipal swimming pool which was the focal point of their summer. So I was impressed that they preferred to spend their summers with us in New Mexico without a swimming pool, hiking in the hills, riding horses and helping my father sell fireworks for the Fourth of July.

We never got to go stay with John and Lana in California because the summer growing season was Uncle Jack's busiest time to crop dust, and much of it had to be done at night when the fields were deserted. He needed quiet during the day so he could sleep. After high school we no longer saw as much of our cousins because they went off to college while we got pregnant and got married in college which wasn't cool.