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Overview
Bound together by a lone ancestor, the lives of the American Indians form the core of these stories—tales of healing cures, poison, family rituals, and a humor that allows the inhabitants of Grand Avenue to see their own foibles with a saving grace.
A teenage girl falls in love with a crippled horse marked for slaughter. An aging healer summons her strength for one final song. A father seeks a bond with his illegitimate son. A mother searches for the power to care for her cancer-stricken daughter’s spirit. Here is a tapestry of lives rendered with the color, wisdom, and a quest for meaning that are characteristic of the traditional storytelling in which they are rooted, a tradition Sarris grew up hearing and learning. Vibrant with the emotions and realities of a changing world, these narratives—the basis of an HBO miniseries—are all equally stunning and from the heart.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806149479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 03/19/2015 |
| Series: | American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series , #65 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Sales rank: | 1,004,675 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Reginal Dyck is Professor of English at Capital University. His research and writing focus on the work of Native American authors, including Greg Sarris.
Read an Excerpt
Grand Avenue
A Novel in Stories
By Greg Sarris
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 1994 Greg SarrisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4947-9
CHAPTER 1
The Magic Pony
My name is Jasmine, but I'm no sweet-smelling flower. Names are just parents' dreams, after all. I'm thirty pounds too big and even more dull-faced than my mother, since I make no effort to camouflage it with powder and lipstick. My cousin Ruby is pretty, but it's not the kind of pretty boys see. She's thin and clothes hang on her just so, like her mom, my Auntie Faye.
Us Indians are full of evil, Auntie Faye said. She told lots of stories about curses and poison. We call it poison. Not that we're bad people. Not like regular thieves and murderers. We inherit it. Something our ancestors did, maybe, or something we did to bring it on ourselves. Something we didn't realize—like having talked about somebody in a way they didn't like, so they got mad and poisoned you.
She knew a lot about poison. She said she had an instinct for it. She'd nod with her chin to a grove of trees. "Don't walk there," she'd say. Her eyes looked dark and motionless, like she was seeing something she didn't want to see and couldn't look away from. She traced poison in a family. Take the receptionist at Indian Health, who has a black birthmark the size of a quarter on her cheek. Faye said the woman's mother stole something from someone, so the woman was marked from birth. It happens like that. It can circle around and get someone in your family. It's everywhere, Faye said.
Which is why she painted a forest on the front room wall and painted crosses over it with pink fingernail polish, to keep poison away. She wanted us to touch one of the crosses every day. "You'll be safe," she said.
I knew she was half cracked. I never believed any of her nonsense. I knew what Mom and my other aunts said was true: Faye had lost it. She was plumb nuts. And Ruby, who was fourteen, my age, wasn't far behind her. Ruby talked to extraterrestrials who landed on the street outside. She'd read books in the library and come out acting like some character in the book: Helen Keller or Joan of Arc or some proper English girl. She made no sense. Nothing about Ruby or Faye made sense, but I lived with them anyway.
I wasn't normal either.
I wanted to hear Auntie Faye's weird stories. I wanted to know what the extraterrestrials told Ruby. I wanted to sit at the kitchen table that Faye set each day with place mats and clean silverware and fresh flowers and hear nothing but their voices in the cool, quiet air of the room. I begged my mother. "Auntie Faye said I could live there," I told her. She looked at me as if I told her I had an extra eye on the back of my head. She knew me and Ruby were friendly, but she didn't think I'd go as far as wanting to live there. Seeing how shocked she was, I begged that much harder. I cried, threatened to run away. What could she say? She didn't have a place for us, not really. We lived with Grandma Zelda. Like all of my aunts and their kids when they get bounced out of their apartments for not paying the rent or something. Only Mom seemed permanent at Grandma Zelda's. She could never keep a place of her own for long.
Grandma Zelda's apartment is like the others, a no-color brown refurbished army barracks at the end of Grand Avenue. Grandma Zelda, Faye, my other aunts—all of us lived there. It was like our own reservation in Santa Rosa, just for our clan. Each apartment was full of the same stuff: dirty-diaper-smelling kids, hollering, and fighting. But Grandma's place was the worst. It stunk twenty-four hours a day, and you never knew where you were going to sleep: on the floor, on the couch, in a chair. Babies slept in drawers. And then all the sounds in the dark. The crap with Mom and her men. And my aunts, too. All their moaning and stuff. All the time hoping none of it got close to you.
So you can see how Faye and Ruby's BS sounded to me like water trickling from a cool mountain stream, pleasure to the ears. It wasn't water that could drown you. Sometimes it was even amusing. I'd guess how their stories would turn out because they got predictable. Of course Grandma Zelda and my other aunts were shocked when I carried my things to Faye's. I knew they wouldn't stop me, and they wouldn't come looking for me either. Faye's place was just two down from Grandma's, but it might as well have been in San Francisco, fifty miles away. No one hung around Faye's. If they came over, they'd stay half a second, then leave, like if they didn't get out fast enough they'd catch a disease. I was safe.
Then Auntie Faye found a man, and one day me and Ruby came home from school and found Mom and all our aunts at Faye's like it was a everyday thing.
Billyrene. Pauline. Rita. Stella. Mom. Even Grandma Zelda. All of them were there putting on a show. Big dull-faced Indian women with assorted hair colors. They fooled with their hair and tugged at their blouses, each one hoping Faye's man would take notice. Each one had her own plan to get the man for herself. I know Mom and my aunts. Nothing stops them when they get ideas, and nothing gives them ideas like a man does. First the lollipop-sweet smiles and phony shyness, then the cattiness, the sharp words. By the time Ruby and me got there they had their claws out.
"Did you come from the mission?" Grandma Zelda asked the man, who sat next to Faye on the couch.
He didn't seem to hear her. Maybe he was overwhelmed by the line of beauties that surrounded him. Me and Ruby stood pushed up against the wall. No one saw us, not even Faye, who was looking in our direction. Her eyes weren't strange. They weren't still. She looked back and forth as people talked. I felt funny all of a sudden. I'd seen the man before. There was nothing to him, I saw that right off. He was white, ugly, orange-colored, with thick hairy arms and eyes that were little blue stones, plastic jewelry in a junk shop. It wasn't him that bothered me, really. It was Faye, the way she followed the conversation, and Mom and all them in the room. My stomach slid like a tire on an icy road.
"Did you come from the mission?" Grandma asked again. She was the only one in a dress, an old lady print, with her stained yellow slip hung to her ankles.
"What kind of question is that?" Mom snapped. She smiled at Faye's man, as if telling him not to pay any attention to the idiot old woman.
"Frances," Grandma said, "all I meant was is he Christian?"
Faye laughed, trying to make light of all the talk. She gently elbowed her man to let him know to laugh too.
I turned to Ruby. With all that was going on in front of her, her eyes were a million miles away. It aggravated me that she stood there in never-never land. I grabbed her arm and whispered, "That man's going to be your new father."
She didn't focus, so I said it again, this time loud and clear.
"That man's going to be your new father."
Grandma Zelda looked in our direction. "Hush up," she snapped. She didn't really see me and Ruby. We could've been Rita's three-year-old twins for all she knew. She didn't hear what I said either. No one did.
Then Billyrene piped up, Billyrene in her aqua stretch pants and a white blouse that didn't cover her protruding belly. "Lord knows Faye don't meet men in the mission. Not like some people here." She was looking straight at Mom and Pauline and Rita, giving them an evil gap-toothed smile.
On and on it went. Then out came the beer. They drank awhile, then left. Faye and her man went with them.
I hadn't cooked a meal since I left Grandma Zelda's eight months before. Even with this guy in Faye's life, she hadn't missed cooking for me and Ruby until that night. Tuna casserole, that's what I ended up making, just like I used to for everybody at Grandma's. Ruby set the table. We ate and didn't say anything to each other. Not until we were doing the dishes. I was washing, she was drying. I was thinking about Faye and Mom and my aunts, all their catty talk. Faye would laugh but she had to know how bad it can get, especially if they're drinking. If they don't beat on one another, they'll go after somebody else. Like the time Pauline and Mom got into it over who used all the gas in Pauline's pickup. They were hollering at each other in Cherri's Chinese Kitchen. Cherri, the owner, tried to settle them down, and Mom hit her over the head with a Coke bottle. The cops came and took Mom, the whole thing. I was picturing all that when I looked at Ruby, who was drying dishes calm as you please. She might as well have been standing next to a sink on the moon. "Your mother's crazy," I blurted out. "She's a freak and so are you."
She finished wiping a plate and placed it in the cupboard. Then she reached for another plate from the dish rack.
"Did you hear me?" I yelled. My aggravation had turned into pure pissed-off. She paid no attention to me. "Damn you, you freak!" I cupped my hand into the sink and splashed her with the hot, dirty dishwater. She was stunned. The dishwater hit her in the face, all over the front of her. But she did just what you'd expect. She got a hold on herself. She dried the plate, even soaking wet as she was, and set it in the cupboard. Then she put down the towel and walked away.
She got out the Monopoly board. I knew what she was up to. She wanted me to sit down and play with her. Whenever I got upset, like with my flunking-out grades at school, she opened the Monopoly board. She cheated so I could win. She wanted me to feel better. I knew what she was up to, but I didn't say anything. I looked at her, sitting on the couch, waiting, soaking wet. I turned, picked up the towel, and finished the dishes she was drying.
The man's name was Jerry. Where Auntie Faye found him I'm not sure. The grocery store, I think. When I first saw him come into the house with her, he was carrying a bag of groceries. He was nothing special, like I said. White, ugly. He'd come each afternoon and visit with Faye. He'd come around three, about the time me and Ruby got home from school, and leave at five, when Faye started cooking supper. He always brought something: flowers, a can of coffee, a pair of candles. It went on like that for a couple weeks, until the day Mom and my aunts came into the house and him and Faye left with them.
I knew Faye was lonely. She had bad luck with men. Ruby's father died in a car crash on his way to the hospital the night Ruby was born. He had been over in Graton drinking. But Faye didn't see it that way. She said she was cursed for loving his brother first. The brother's name was Joaquin. He got killed in the Vietnam war. Six months later Faye married Ruby's father. From the way she talked, I don't think she ever stopped loving Joaquin. She never dated after Ruby's father died. I know because I used to hear Mom and my aunts go on in that dirty woman-talk way about Faye not having a man, and until Jerry came I never saw a guy near the place. It wasn't that Faye couldn't get a man. Just the opposite. She didn't look like Mom and my aunts. She wasn't heavy, plain-looking. She was slender and wore clothes like a lady in a magazine. Everything just so, even the dark pants and white blouse she wore around the house.
But Faye's loneliness was about more than not having a man. It was bigger, more than about Joaquin and what happened to Ruby's father. I saw it in her eyes when me and Ruby left each morning for school. Her eyes got wide, not really focusing on me and Ruby but just staring. She'd be sitting at the table, plates of toast and half-empty bowls of cereal all around, and from the door, where me and Ruby said good-bye, she looked so small, sitting there dressed just so.
When she told stories about poison she looked lonely, scared. She'd sit me and Ruby at the table and tell us what certain pink crosses on her painting meant. She had painted the big green forest first, the dark trunks and thick green leaves, then kept adding crosses here and there with fingernail polish, a pink color she never used on herself. Each cross had a story of its own. When she talked her eyes narrowed. They seemed to squeeze like two hands trying to hold on to something. It was always about what happened to somebody, like the one about our Cousin Jeanne's Old Uncle. It's why Jeanne and them don't live in the barracks with us, why they split off from the family a long time ago, when everybody was still on the reservation. Her Old Uncle—I guess he's our Old Uncle too— liked this woman from Clear Lake, but she was married. He liked her so much he put a spell on her husband. Old Uncle could do things like that, poison people. But the poison turned on him. Something happened. It got his sister. One night she was playing blackjack; the next morning she was as cold and still as a rock in winter. That's how our great-aunt died, Faye said. She held a pointing stick, the kind teachers use with a rubber tip, and aimed near the center of the painting. "And it's why your Cousin Jeanne has cancer," she told us. "She inherited it. His misuse of power, it's living yet."
When she talked about Ruby's father or Joaquin, she pointed to a cross near the bottom of the forest, on the right-hand side. "Man sickness," she said. "Man poison."
Somehow because of that cross and the way she talked about it I figured she'd never have a boyfriend. Maybe she thought she was poisoned when it came to men, so she'd never have one. After Jerry started coming, she stood by the painting with her fingers on that cross and whispered, "Oh, Father, help against this poison. Keep me safe from it. Don't let it turn on me." I couldn't hear her, but I knew what she said. If me and Ruby got the urge to steal something, we had to say these words and touch the cross with the stealing story. If someone wanted to hurt us, beat us up for something, we had a cross for that too.
I never thought much about Faye praying on the man-sickness cross until after Jerry and Faye left with Mom and them that day. Jerry started coming around more, not just in the afternoons but late at night, after supper, and Mom and my aunts visited more and more. I thought about my own words, what I said to Ruby that day about the ugly man becoming her new father. Faye told me more than once I had a mean mouth sometimes and I should watch what I say. Never mind that her daughter made up the tallest tales on earth. She never said nothing about that. I don't remember if there was a cross for me to touch regarding my mean teasing mouth; what I said turned out true. The man moved in.
Me and Ruby moved out of the bedroom where we used to sleep on the bed with Faye. Now we slept on the couch, with our heads at opposite ends. "You can camp out on the couch," Faye said one night, as if it were something we had asked to do and she was letting us. Our legs met in the middle, and every time one of us moved or turned we got kicked. I thought of Faye in the bed with Jerry. The door was closed. I couldn't hear anything. Still, I couldn't sleep. I tried squeezing my eyes shut, but I kept seeing Faye with Jerry, disgusting things. Either way, with my eyes opened or closed, everything was dark, a perfect empty backdrop for all I was seeing in my mind. I looked to the painting above us, over the couch. The crosses glowed faintly in the light coming through the front window. "Ruby," I whispered, "maybe your dumb mother can find a cross that'll get us a bed."
Of course she didn't answer me. I sat up and looked at her. She was awake, staring, the window light in her eyes. I knew she heard me.
"Damn you," I said and yanked the blankets off her. She didn't move. She was probably in deep communication with a Martian that was signaling her from the back side of the barracks. Hours later I was still awake. Ruby was asleep. I sat up and covered her with the blankets. I woke up that way in the morning, sitting up.
Faye didn't pray at her painting anymore. She dusted it with her feather duster the way she dusted the top of the TV. She'd remind us to think of the crosses when we left for school each morning, but that's about all. No more stories about poison and what can happen to people. No more holding hands after one of the stories, which is what we always did. She'd finish the story, put down her pointing stick, and then we'd hold hands over the table while she said the prayer about Father God helping us against the poison.
Now she talked about ordinary stuff. The ladies she knew at the cannery. Specials at the grocery store. What was in the window at the secondhand shop on Fifth Street. She talked about getting a new place, a house someplace where me and Ruby could have our own bedroom, maybe even out of Santa Rosa. She had it planned. She wasn't going to work at the cannery anymore, where she was laid off half the year. She was going to be a nurse's aide in a convalescent hospital. Jerry knew someone who could get her a job. Once she talked about tenderness, its merits; it makes people smile, she said. It makes them have faith in others. It makes people feel connected. Then she threw her head back and dropped her shoulders, like she'd got goose bumps all of a sudden. "It's like a light's inside you." Jerry was there, and I felt embarrassed, like I was hearing what I didn't want to imagine seeing behind the bedroom door at night.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Grand Avenue by Greg Sarris. Copyright © 1994 Greg Sarris. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Family Tree,
The Magic Pony,
The Progress of This Disease,
Slaughterhouse,
Waiting for the Green Frog,
Joy Ride,
How I Got to Be Queen,
Sam Toms's Last Song,
The Indian Maid,
Secret Letters,
The Water Place,
Afterword, by Renald Dyck,
Notes,
What People are Saying About This
"Greg Sarris's stories go way back and they look far ahead, writes the good stories that our grandmothers have told for thousands of years....He has made himself an exciting new part of the latest Native American literary renaissance."
"Grand Avenue is a very find colleciton, reminescent, for me, of Winesburg, Ohio. Greg's eyes are clear and his voice is true."
"Intelligent, humorous and poignant -- a very promising new writer."
