Taos Horsefly Review, December 2008
“Running Alone in Photographs.” By Robert Mirabal, Red Willow Press, Taos, 2008.
Review by Steve Fox
This is a haunting and well-written book that everyone in Taos should read, and that will rise among Native American literature to be compared with similar books by Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. It is a “House Made of Dawn” and “Ceremony” for our time, but one in which the blunt humor of touring musicians leavens the tribal oral histories of massacre, the constant dirge of personal and cultural loss, and the rocky road of finding one’s identity in two worlds.
This is a Native book, but like Mirabal’s music and performance art, it is a universal meditation on the truth that “to fly off alone again and again is the only real journey.” Mirabal calls it a novel, but Reyes Wind, the female protagonist, is a cutting-edge musician struggling to make original individual statements against the inertia of the Pueblo and the music business, just like Robert. It is set in Santa Teresa Pueblo, but all named roads and geographical features identify it as Taos Pueblo. Mirabal gives us a look at Taos, the town, and Taos Pueblo, through several generations of Pueblo people, and it’s a point of view all residents should welcome and consider.
The plot begins and ends with Reyes’ returning from the road life of a fusion musician to her Pueblo to be with her beloved Grandma as she dies.
Mirabal unfolds sections of back-story explaining who the current characters came from and what life was like for Reyes’ great-uncles, who were her predecessors in wandering far from the Pueblo. In the first 26 pages, Mirabal gives us the terrific oral story, told to Reyes by her Grandpa, of his brothers (Reyes’ great-uncles) Beaded shirt and Grey War Shield who, hunting buffalo hundreds of miles into the plains, had to take shelter in a long blizzard with some Cheyenne camped at Sand Creek, Colorado. Grey War Shield fell in love “with a big ‘ol [Cheyenne] girl,” even though he was already married back at Santa Teresa, and so he stayed at Sand Creek while the younger men returned to Taos. The electric new twist in the oral history is that Grey War shield was at the fringes of the camp one morning and witnessed the notorious Chivington-led massacre of women and children. “Uncle Grey War Shield was never the same again.…’In peace time is when the white man kills you,’ he would say.”
Mixing oral stories with his narrator’s voice masterfully, Mirabal identifies another beloved character in Reyes’ family tree who “was never the same:” her uncle José Concha, who made a conscious decision to live out his life as “an admirable alcoholic warrior”: “If you’re going to be a drunk, be the best damn drunk you can be,” he tells Reyes.
Explaining how José got to that point, Mirabal recounts an unforgettable character, Frybread Dolly, who was driving the car young José and a Santa Ana Pueblo girl he was dating and his friend Calvin were in when it went out of control and was hit head-on by a snowplow over in Mora. Mirabal’s genius for description and pathos is embodied in José’s narration: “’The Famous Indian Clown Car was hurled down some indiscriminate canyon, like the same irrelevant crushed beer can that Dolly threw out of the window, bouncing around on the cold dark pavement. Faithful to gravity, we rolled down like a huge metal boulder. The once quiet, cold, wintry, lonely valley now was full of the eerie sounds of screeching brakes, breaking branches, screaming voices, and Stevie Nicks echoing about the freezing woods, singing about a landslide.…I remember the smell: burning antifreeze, the stench of gasoline, oil, warm beer. Flipped over upside down, sideways, in all the signs of the cross directions, we suddenly stopped; arrested by the smallest possible aspen tree.’ …José was crying as he finished his story. He sobbed in front of Reyes and Paul in the old wooden chair, his overweight body shaking, convulsing frantically.”
Mirabal amplifies the contexts of his chapters by putting poetry between them, in a more removed narrator’s voice, and placing pictures at appropriate points, some archival portraits, some more recent snapshots. Most have young Pueblo girls in them, some with grandfathers. The whole book may be read, in a sense, as a hymn to Pueblo women, from the central character who lives a Mirabal-like life, to her tragic dark-side sister Maggie, to the grandma she is returning to see. As he writes: “Reyes was driven by a sense of obligation, regret, and accountability. These were the traits she’d learned from the amazingly powerful, sad women of the Pueblo. No matter how fast and how far you run from your family, they will always be one step farther and closer to you.”
The sections on Reyes’ budding career as a musician and her first tour with a polyglot band of dopers is so bittersweet and hilarious: “They set sail with dreams inherent in their music; the curiosity of the next mile became their wind, set their course, and soon they were lost in the fairytale of the open road, off into the void.
“Stop!” she shouted at Diego, scaring him half to death. The trailer swerved, jiggling the whole vehicle on the edge of the highway.…Diego turned around, looking at her like a scared rabbit in a corner, groggy-eyed and tired. “Eeee! Don’t yell at me! You almost made me shit my pants!” he shouted in his thick Mexican accent.
“Sorry, Diego. I just want to run. I feel like running,” Reyes said. “Run! What the hell’s wrong with you? Yer crazee! Here, in the corn fields?”
…Reyes walked out into the frigid air, jumped the fence, and ran.…They waited for her as they ate their breakfast (tuna from the can), their unkempt hair blowing in the wind. …“How’s the breakfast of champions today, boys?” she said as she returned.
As in his music, Mirabal is a great phrase-maker: “miniature goblets of tears”; “drunk android stares”; “When the Indians ran the forest, and danced like the deer”; “Nothing ever ends—it just turns the page”; “the massive muscle of music was driving her”; Japan’s trains were steel serpents in concrete caves”; “It was a soft arpeggio melody played on some traditional string instrument, a little waltz-type thingy.”
Finally, this book addresses us all: “We all must run alone, unaided. It is the great plan of our lives when we are young. Our running is our own, just as our memories are our own.…The photographs embedded into our hearts are the lightest possessions to carry when we choose to walk alone.”
Charming, witty, profound, ironic and elegiac, this is the most important book written in Taos in many years.
