Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (6 page)

Commission Row, the center of wholesale groceries, vegetables, fruits, and perishables, was one of the few quiet places in the city that afternoon. The white and brown horses were harnessed to empty wagons. The deliveries were done and the horses were waiting to return to the stable.

Nicollet House, an old hotel with four stories, was across the street directly behind the park pavilion on Washington and Nicollet avenues. The entrance was spacious and shabby, and it was the first time we had ever been in a grand hotel lobby. Many dignitaries had stayed there over the years, and we sat in the very same leather chairs as the ordinary and grandees. Oscar Wilde, the poet and playwright, who we later learned more about from a trader on the reservation, was pictured alone in the lobby. He posed for the photograph with long hair, and he wore a heavy fur-trimmed coat.

Oscar Wilde had lectured about decorative art at the Academy of Music near Nicollet House. The
Tribune
newspaper review of his lecture was framed and mounted near his photograph. “Ass-Thete” was the headline of the review dated March 16, 1882, thirteen years before we were born. The reviewer noted that Wilde was “flat and insipid,” and from “the time the speaker commenced to his closing sentence, he kept up the same unvarying endless drawl, without modulating his voice or making a single gesture, giving one the impression that he was a prize monkey wound up, and warranted to talk for an hour and a half without stopping.”

Actually, as we read, we thought his lecture was learned, more than a jerky vaudeville lecture. We could not understand at the time his traces of irony. Wilde lectured, for instance, “The truths of art cannot be taught. They are revealed only—revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by the study of and the worship of all beautiful things.” Reading the story for the first time at the hotel we understood only the first part of his lecture, “art cannot be taught.” Rather, and
we agreed, art can be “revealed,” and that was an obvious description of the inspired blue ravens painted by my brother. Aloysius wanted to meet the great Oscar Wilde but he died when we were five years old.

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Minneapolis was a commercial center of great lumber and flour mills built on the shores of the river. Most of the lumber came directly from the reservations, White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake, and the grain was delivered by railroad from the plains. Our father was a lumberjack, a timber cutter for the agency mill on the reservation. Honoré continued to cut timber with older men because he could not survive in the new reservation communities. He was a calm and quiet man. The white pine was his natural destiny, not his investment or enterprise.

Aloysius created a blue raven totem in the timber ruins of the reservation. We were cosmopolitan natives by words, by preprinted stories in the
Tomahawk
. The city was our new world, but we were not worldly by experience. Yet we pretended to be cosmopolitan natives overnight on Hennepin Avenue.

Minneapolis, we learned later, had grown by more than a hundred thousand people in the past decade, a wealthy city of immigrants and newcomers. We were fourteen years old at the time and knew just about everyone in our reservation community. Our uncle was absolutely right that the mind and heart must change to live with so many people. The city was abstract but not aesthetic, rather a strange and exciting creature of fortune and politics. That summer the river city was an unwashed window after a storm, and a noisy scene in constant and unnatural motion.

Aloysius created the aesthetic scenes with blue ravens, the natural presence of great abstract totems. The city was no sanctuary or state of creation for traditional native totems, no natural site or marvelous estate for bears, wolves, plovers, migratory sandhill cranes, kingfishers, or even the stories of the ice woman.

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Hennepin Avenue was already famous for the great theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Every building, every hotel was impressive as we walked up Hennepin Avenue from Gateway Park past the Bijou Theater and the Pence
Opera House that had been converted to a rooming house. We might have stayed there, but our uncle insisted that we stay at the more secure Waverly Hotel on Harmon Place near the Minneapolis Public Library.

Napa Valley Wine Company, located in the next block, had sold wine “continuously for the last twenty years.” We were too young to enter the establishment, so we read the advertisements in the window and pretended to be wine enthusiasts. “Our house is the only one in the wine and liquor line in the city catering to the family trade, which has no bar.”

Father Aloysius used sacramental wine at services in Saint Benedict's Mission Church. Luckily one of our older cousins was an altar boy. He was obliged to share the taste of red church wine from the Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa Valley, California. We were rather conceited about the sacramental wine that was bottled in our family name. Naturally we used that coincidence, the relations of a surname wine, to our advantage when we first arrived as infantry soldiers in France.

Napa Valley Wine could be ordered by telephone, and that was very modern at the time. We knew about telephones because our relatives had established the first system in Callaway on the White Earth Reservation. Telephones were cosmopolitan at the time, but not the party line conversations. Simon Michelet, the contentious federal agent, ordered reservation telephone lines to the government schools in Mahnomen, Beaulieu, and Porterville. The Napa Valley Wine advertisement explained, “Ladies can visit our establishment as unconcernedly as any dry goods store.”

Early the next morning we visited the three great dry goods stores on nearby Nicollet Avenue. Aloysius was inspired by the fortune and display of clothing in the stores, the great bay windows, and naturally he painted blue ravens in every display window of Dayton's Dry Goods Company, Donaldson's Glass Block, and down a few blocks at Powers Mercantile Company. We did not have enough money to buy anything, not even a paper napkin or a handkerchief, but we tried on shirts, coats, hats, and my brother painted me as a grandee in an enormous raincoat. The black sleeves became great blue wings that reached over the counters. The blonde clerk waved her hands and told us to leave, but when she saw the painting by my brother she was much more friendly. Aloysius painted the woman in a fedora and a brim of blue raven feathers over a train of light blue hair.

Aloysius paused at his reflection in every window.

The West Hotel was a great cruise liner afloat on a sea of shiny cobblestones, and surrounded by new theater buildings on Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street. The Masonic Temple, a secret mountain of sandstone with decorative carved emblems, was only a block away. As the streetcars turned the corner in front of the hotel the trolley wheels sparked, a magical ritual at the foyer of the hotel.

The doorman was courteous, raised his hand and inquired about our business in the hotel. We were young, native, and not properly dressed for the entrance, but we were not skanky. Aloysius told the doorman that our uncle was the publisher of a newspaper, and then announced that we were there to paint blue ravens.

What is the name of the newspaper?

The
Tomahawk
.

Surely not a newspaper?

Yes, and with international news.

How the world changes.

We only want to see the hotel lobby.

The West Hotel lobby was luxurious and lighted by an atrium. The blue settees inspired my brother to paint blue ravens in every cushy seat, claws crossed as moneyed gentlemen, and disheveled wing feathers spread wide over the padded backs and arms, and across the marble floor of the huge lobby.

Rich ravens in shiny blue shoes.

Mark Twain, the great writer, had stayed at the West Hotel on July 23, 1895, in the same year that we were born on the White Earth Reservation. In a leather-bound book near the registration counter we discovered photographs and news stories about his visit to Saint Paul, Duluth, and Minneapolis.

The
Minneapolis Journal
reported that he suffered from a carbuncle on his leg, and had declined the invitations of admirers to visit the Minneapolis Public Library and Minnehaha Falls. “To the casual observer, as he lay there, running his fingers through his long, curly locks, now almost gray, he was anything but a humorist. On the contrary, he appeared to be a gentleman of great gravity, a statesman or a man of vast business interests. The dark blue eyes are as clear as crystal and the keenest glances shoot from
them whenever he speaks.” Twain entertained an enthusiastic audience for ninety minutes that night at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Mark Twain left traces of his marvelous irony in the grand lobby of the West Hotel, and surely he would have told memorable stories about native totems and blue ravens from the White Earth Reservation.

Aloysius painted blue ravens on streetcars, a conductor with blue wings, blue ravens in dance moves on the cobblestones in a rainstorm, and dark blue eyes reflected in the bay windows of the West Hotel.

Hennepin Avenue was crowded with streetcars, motor cars, and horse-drawn wagons and carriages. The sounds were strange, unnatural, strained machines, and engines so loud we could barely hear the most familiar sound of the steady clop clop clop of horses on the cobblestones. We walked past great stone buildings, theaters, and restaurants, on our way to the Waverly Hotel.

The Orpheum Theatre was a majestic dominion of murmurs, theatrical recitations, ironic pronouncements, acrobatics, the lively tease of vaudeville, and the memorable voices of great lectures and plays. The theater that late afternoon was empty but not lonely. No one was at the ticket window so we entered the great auditorium without a ticket or a story. Everywhere we could hear the rich and evocative voices of actors in the balconies, the secrets, shouts and moans in the cluttered dressing rooms backstage.

Aloysius declared the theater his second home of visions and fantasy. He selected a seat in the front row of a side balcony and painted blue ravens in a stage play. The ravens of the theater turned a wing and raised their beaks to the audience. The only real play we had ever seen was the shortened government-school production of
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare.

The Waverly Hotel rented rooms by the week, but the manager was a friend of our uncle so we paid only five dollars for two nights. “Electric lights, bath, and telephone” were advertised in theater programs and newspapers. The hotel was located near the public library.

We walked past several restaurants on the way to the hotel and later read the advertisements, “Superb Cuisine at Café Brunswick,” and “Schiek's Café Restaurant,” but the menus were too expensive and ritzy. So, we ate meat, potatoes, and corn at a nearby cafeteria for students. That first night we lingered in the tiny lobby of the hotel and found a program of events scheduled earlier in the summer at the Orpheum Theatre. Aloysius imagined
the grand performances from our special seats in a side balcony. The program listed matinee admission to the gallery for fifteen cents. We were two months too late for the performances.

“Scotch Thistle,” a musical program directed by Theodore Martin, was advertised in the May 1909 program of the Orpheum Circuit of Theatres. Miss Charlotte Parry and Company presented “The Comstock Mystery” that same month.

“Master Laddie Cliff,” featured in another program, was “England's famous little Comedian and Grotesque Dancer.” Another program announced the “First American Tour of Three Sisters Athletas, Direct from New York Hippodrome.” The sisters were “Extraordinary Lady Gymnasts.” “The Kinodrome New and Interesting Motion Pictures” reported that the pictures were about a “Ring Leader” and a “Jealous Hubby.”

Naturally, we were excited to read the programs and would have attended every matinee performance. We were more interested in the Lady Gymnasts than the Kinodrome. The movies we saw on the reservation were trivial and flimsy. The stories in the movies were monotonous, more about agents than the ice women or the dance of the plovers.

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C
ARNEGIE
T
OTEMS

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1909
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The Minneapolis Public Library was only ten years old that summer of our migration, a massive stone building with magnificent curved bay windows. The turrets on two corners resembled a baronial river castle, but the books inside were never the reserved property of the nobility.

Andrew Carnegie, the wealthy industrialist and passionate philanthropist, donated more than sixty million dollars to build public libraries, and more to establish schools and universities around the country. A slight portion of his great treasure acquired from the steel industry and other investments was used to construct the Minneapolis Public Library.

Carnegie was a master of steel, stone, railroads, and the great bloom of libraries. More than two thousand libraries were built in his name, but he would not give a dime to build even a bookrack on the White Earth Reservation, our uncle explained, because the federal agents were not reliable and the government would not promise to support the future of books for natives.

Carnegie was a new totem of literacy and sovereignty. The libraries he created were the heart and haven of our native liberty. No federal agents established libraries on reservations, and not many robber barons constructed libraries and universities.

Aloysius painted a huge blue raven, our great new totem of honor and adventure, in one of the turret bay windows of the library. The beak of the raven almost touched the sidewalk and stairs near the entrance. My brother never painted humans, but some of his great ravens traced a sense of character, a cue of human memory. Carnegie was portrayed as a stately blue raven with a bushy mane and great beak in the turret windows.

We could not believe that the books were stacked on open shelves and available to anyone. We walked slowly down the aisles of high cases and touched the books by colors, first the blues, of course, and then the red
and black books. In that curious hush and silence of the library the books
were a native sense of presence, our presence, and the spirits of the books were revived by our casual touch. Every book waited in silence to become a totem, a voice, and a new story.