CHAPTER 5. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—REFUSAL TO PAY INCOME TAX 80
which I brought along in a sack with the papers.
I stopped at the house where about fourteen Indians were meeting with a visiting Baptist preacher who gave the same kind of a hell-fire message that I had heard when a child. From this meagre crowd the missionary took up a collection of $21 for, of all things, paying another missionary to go among the Jews and convert them to be Baptist! The absurdity of this cleansing of the outside of the platter was never more evident to me.
I went to visit a young returned soldier who was not religious and who was more attracted to anarchism. His wife was from another pueblo. It was Easter Sunday and I carried the baby for her as she hurried to mass; her husband following later, and doing as most men did, standing outside. Each of the Indian women had a bright shawl over her head and a small woven rug as a protection from the splintered floor when kneeling.
Coming back home in my white dairy suit I met some Isleta Indian cowboys who good naturedly said "Hello St. John." I was to receive the appellation from another source years later but thought nothing of it then.
In writing my novel I had read much about Indians. I feel that the following poem expresses much of the spirit of the Navajos, whose waste lands stretch from west of town nearly to the Grand Canyon.
- OLD SHAMAN
- My son was killed in war against the whites
- My son's son starved on their way to exile
- The son of my son's son is at the white school
- I would have taught him Navajo magic
- Lightning and thunders in the medicine-house
- While bright noon waits outside;
- Wonder of the Holy Corn, grown from kernel to ripe
- Ear in a day;
- Songs that bring sunrise and sunset to the sacred room.
- No other of my blood will swallow great plumed arrows
- And bathe in fire without hurt.
- I am last to stand the lone eagle feather on end,
- making it dance, a living thing.
- None will come after me to see in the deeps of the hoganda water-bowl
- All that was and is and will be.
- The son of my son's son reads a book.
- He counts one and two.
Lillian White Spencer
