She,
Woman Who Strokes My Face,
Kisses my mouth,
Her hands slide up and down my body,
Gently scratching my belly.
We laugh unaware that in six moons hence,
I will be taken captive with
Her delicious scent still hovering in my dreams.
There is only the grimmest sketch of what happened
December 26, 1862.
The lamentable wailings, an anxious white child gawking,
wringing his hands,
Hangman William Duley's tight lips as he cut each rope,
His green eyes blazing,
Or red eyes popping blood,
My flesh becoming dust, my bones in a doctor's iron pot,
Only a story. I am no one's uncle, no one's father,
No one's husband.
Serving a mad woman's unearthly pleasures.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution by hanging of 38 Dakota Indians. Their crime was, ostensibly, rebellion, having attacked several frontier towns. But the Dakota were starving, left without resources after a series of broken treaties and maltreatment at the hand of white settlers. The execution, which remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history, was not a punishment thought appropriate for rebellious white southerners. And in what sense could the Dakota, whose people would not be U.S. citizens for sixty more years, "rebel" anyhow?
Later, after Lincoln's own execution, his wife Mary Todd Lincoln was placed in a sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois, where she claimed that every night, a "Savage Indian" crept into her room and sliced her eyelids open before scalping her. He did this every night--presumably, she recovered between, like Prometheus chained to the rock. In this book, LeAnne Howe imagines the interactions between Mary Todd and the "Savage Indian," who is both a figment of her own haunted conscience and a real ghost, chained to the widow of the man who ordered his death.
Savage Conversations is what you might call a "closet drama": It's written as a play, with lines, but it's mostly impossible to imagine staging. Really, it's a book of poetry, written in free verse but redolent of Shakespeare more than anything. (The Savage Indian knows a little Shakespeare, taught to him by a white man at Ft. Snelling--so don't think just because I can quote Shakespeare and the Bible that I'm all in your head, he tells Mary Todd.) There are only three characters: Mary Todd Lincoln, the Savage Indian, and the Rope, a mysterious and sinister character who both is a rope and sits on stage fashioning 38 nooses. He's a reminder, a physical instantiation, of Lincoln's sentence:
THE ROPE
I know the secret thrill of taut,
Tying up, tying down,
Binding tight,
Strapping hard,
Lashing knot to payload--for kicks,I am a collar,
A strangler,
I float in the wind like a flag on holidays.
I inspire national pride.
For the first few sections of Savage Conversations, it seems like Mary Todd and the Savage Indian are talking past each other. She spends much of the time talking to the absent Lincoln, ignoring the Savage Indian sitting by her bed, trying on her pinafores. The Savage Indian compels her to confront him, but she's unable, until the nightly moment when he slices her eyelid open. Only when she's unable to close her eyes will she be able to really see those she has harmed, including her own children. The Savage Indian calls her "Gar woman," in reference to a legend that Gar fish eat their own eggs, alluding to a theory that Mary Todd may have killed several of her and Abe's kids due to Munchausen's by proxy. Mary Todd's conscience is the nation's conscience; it secretly craves to be forced, even at the price of great pain, to be forced to bear witness.
"Yesterday my shadow climbed out of the abyss," Mary Todd writes, "Leaving behind a human ruin in the asylum at Batavia." But the Savage Indian follows her even outside of this place, forcing a final detente: in the final section, "An Uneasy Union" (har), the Savage Indian forces her to confront the truth of her life. Is there a way out for Mary Todd? Is there a way out for the nation? Maybe, maybe not, but like Mary Todd, we keep needing our eyes opened again and again. Her final words in the play are, "Again, please."
I was impressed with the quality of the poetry here. Mary Todd is spiky and solipsistic, one of those Shakespearean blusterers who is always lying to themselves. The "Savage Indian" is coy, wise, sympathetic, lost; his fate is to be Mary Todd's accuser, and never more. His identity as a Dakota and his individuality as a person are subsumed in the historical task of making the oppressor see their wrongdoing; it is a tragic task because it keeps him subordinate to her moral life in unto eternity. When, Savage Conversations ask, will the oppressed people of North America be more than the oppressor's conscience?
It's a slim little book, easy to speed through without stopping to navigate the poetry carefully, and even as I forced myself to take it slow, my first thought when I finished it was that I'd like to go back and read it again. I think I will, with my students, later this year. Again, please.
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