18. The Woman Who Loved a Snake
Cache Creek Pomo
1988
Mabel MCKay, storyteller
Greg Sarris, collector and narrator
INTRODUCTION BY GREG SARRIS
Mabel McKay was born on January 12, 1907, in Nice, Lake County, California. Her father, Yanta Boone, was a Potter Valley Pomo Indian. Her mother, Daisy Hansen, was a Losel Cache Creek Pomo. Mabel was raised by her maternal grandmother, Sarah Taylor, and always considered herself a Losel Cache Creek Pomo. It was from her grandmother that Mabel learned the Losel Cache Creek language and the rich and extensive history, not just of her tribe, but of many surrounding Pomo and southwestern Wintun tribes.
But this knowledge was not what Mabel would become known for. She became an expert basketweaver, perhaps the finest of her time, weaving brilliantly colored feather baskets and miniatures, some no larger than eraserheads. And she became a medicine woman, what we call locally an Indian doctor. She was a “sucking doctor,” the most highly valued of the local Indian doctors, and she would be the last sucking doctor, not just among the Pomo, but in all of California. Every aspect of her life was guided by the dictates of her Dream, her general term for her experience
FIGURE 8. Mabel McKay, October 1, 1971. Courtesy Herb Pu er.
“What do you do for poison oak?” a student once asked in a large auditorium where Mabel was being interviewed as a Native healer. “Calamine lotion,” she answered.
At the time this story was recorded, in 1988, I had known her for more than thirty years, since I was a child.[1] I was attempting to write her life story, both because she wanted me to and because I had made her life story my dissertation project at Stanford. I figured because I am Indian (Kashaya Pomo/Coast Miwok) and because I knew her so well I would be able to understand her wishes for her “book,” as she called it, in terms of its content and narrative structure. No such luck. “You just do [the book] the best way you know how,” she said. “What you know from me.”
What I knew from her were narratives that circled around and around, connecting with one another in space and time in ways I couldn't make sense of, at least not for a book I might write. And when I countered with questions that might help me order these narratives in a way meaningful for me, I heard the same uncanny responses the student heard about poison oak.
“Mabel, people want to know about things in your life in a way they can understand. You know, how you got to be who you are. There has to be a theme.”
“I don't know about no theme,” she said.
“A theme is a point that connects all the dots, ties up all the stories,” I explained.
“That's funny,” she said. “Tying up all the stories. Why somebody want to do that?”
Eventually, I came to see and feel what she meant. The stories cannot be tied up, disconnected from one another, not her story, my story, any story. Stories live and change in contexts, with changing hearers and tellers. Mabel reminded me of this every step of the way. I became a part of the story the moment I heard it. In hearing stories, we begin to interpret, or “make sense,” of them, and Mabel always seemed to remind me of that fact. Just as Mabel broadened the student's notion of a Native healer, letting the student understand that as an Indian doctor Mabel was also a contemporary woman, so Mabel continued to open my eyes, reminding me of who I was and what I was thinking as a participant in her storytelling. It was important that I remembered my life, my presence and history, as I attempted to understand Mabel.
As I learned more about Mabel, I learned more about myself. The stories, and the dialogue about the stories, served as a way to expose boundaries that shape and constitute cultural and personal worlds. Thus, I understood how I might write her story and her book. I had to chart not just her “story,” but the story of my hearing her story. I had to expose the ever-widening world the story comes from and becomes.
Scholars familiar with my work with Mabel often question the fact that my conversations with her were always in English. Would the situation and outcome of the storytelling event be the same or di erent if she spoke Pomo? Of course, I don't know for certain, because I only know a few words and phrases of her language and could never converse with her at length in that language. But I suspect not. What Mabel invoked and inspired was
Others have asked if Mabel's talk—her narratives, conversations, and responses to questions—are typical of older, say traditional, Pomo-speakers. It seems in many ways Mabel was unique as a speaker, but I am not certain. I have known other Pomo storytellers who remind listeners of the context in which they are hearing stories. I have also known Pomo storytellers to implicate their listeners in what they are saying. None of the speakers I have known, however, was as consistent in these matters as Mabel. But I have not done a study or comprehensive survey. I have only looked at Mabel's talk in terms of its e ect as I have known it, not in terms of the ways it may or may not represent traditional or typical Pomo discourse, whatever that may be. What I wrote, finally, was what I knew from Mabel, the best way I knew how.
NOTE
1. The present selection is taken from chapter 2 of Greg Sarris's book, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts. In that edition of the story, the transcribed text of “The Woman Who Loved a Snake” is broken up, its parts presented out of narrative sequence and embedded in a larger (and fascinating) exegesis of the context and story's meaning. For this collection, what Sarris and I have done is to extract the text of Mabel's narration from its critical matrix and restore it to the chronological order of its original telling. Greg has added a few sentences of transition here and there to compensate for the reordering of the text.
Sarris's experimentation with the framework of contemporary fiction to present this story strikes me as an ingenious way of contextualizing the narrative, of incorporating both expressive and interpretive information—“atmosphere” and explanation—directly into the presentation itself, rather than handling it through the medium of footnotes and introductory essays. As a method for presenting traditional narrative (one that Jaime de Angulo experimented with as well, though from a very di erent perspective), it holds great promise, at least for those editors and translators who have a “first-person” recollection of the original performance.
Though it is not reflected in the title of the piece, the reader will discover that Mabel McKay actually tells two stories here, not just one. The second story, about the first-Contact arrival of Europeans in Kashaya territory, is technically unrelated to the main story about the woman and the snake. What I find fascinating is how the two stories, separate until Mabel called them up on this occasion, seem to adapt toward each other in their new surroundings. It's as if all her stories were really one, part of an endless, multivocal braid. Once Mabel has brought the two stories into one light, they remain forever intertwined.—hwl
FURTHER READING
Greg Sarris has written a number of books, includingKeeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (a collection of literary essays) andMabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (a collaborative account of Mabel's remarkable life, the “book” referred to in this selection). He also has a collection of short stories, Grand Avenue, and wrote the screenplay for the HBO miniseries of the same name.
THE WOMAN WHO LOVED A SNAKE
One day I took a colleague of mine from Stanford University to the Rumsey Wintun Reservation to meet Mabel McKay. “I want to meet this famous Pomo medicine woman,” my friend said. “I've heard her talk and I've seen her baskets in the Smithsonian.” My friend, Jenny, had heard me talk about Mabel also. I had been recording Mabel's stories for a book about her life. As always, Mabel proved a gracious host. She served us hot buttered toast and co ee and, for lunch, tuna fish sandwiches with pickles and lettuce. As Jenny and I ate, Mabel told about the woman who loved a snake.
“See, her husband, he would work at night. ‘Lock the door,’ he'd tell her. ‘Don't let nobody in.’ Every night he'd go o saying that: ‘Lock the door, keep everything locked up.’ She would fix his dinner, then his lunch.” Mabel chuckled to herself. “By lunch I mean what he takes to work. That's what I call lunch when I was working nighttime in the cannery.
“Anyway, this woman, she says ‘OK.’ And sometimes, after he would leave, she'd stay up for a while. She'd clean up around, maybe do the dishes, get things ready for the morning, for the breakfast. I don't know.
“Then one TIME she hears a knock on the back door. ‘What is that?’ she's thinking. First she thought maybe it was her husband; maybe he was coming home early; maybe he got sick or something. ‘But then why doesn't he just come in?’ she was saying. Well, then she thought maybe she was hearing things. She just kept working then.
“But it kept on, this knocking. Then she got scared. See in those days no phones up there. And this was far out, up on some white man's place there, where her husband worked. She could not yell, nothing. Nobody to hear her. Maybe she's thinking this to herself. I don't know.
“‘Who is this?’ she is saying. Then I don't know what he said. I forgot. Something, anyway. And she opens the door. Just a little bit. He comes in and she stands there looking at him. But she doesn't recognize him.
“Anyway, she fixes some co ee. I don't know. Gives him something to eat. They're talking around there. I don't know what.
“Next day, her husband comes home. ‘What's this?’ he is saying. He's standing there—by the bedroom—and he's looking down in some vase. Something there. It was on the table. ‘What are you talking about?’ she says. Then she goes and looks where he's looking. And she sees it, too: a snake, a little black snake all coiled up. ‘What is this?’ he says to her. Then he takes it out and puts it in the brush. He lets it out there.
“Next day, same thing happens. Then the husband, he gets suspicious of that snake. ‘What is this?’ he is saying. Then she gets worried; now she knows what the snake is. But she don't say nothing. ‘I'm going to kill it,’ he says, ‘chop it to bits out in the brush.’ He's testing her, but she don't say nothing. Then she got real worried, seeing him go out with that snake.
“But next day same thing it happens. Maybe she tried talking to that man. I don't know. ‘Don't stay around here,’ she might said to him. But it's there again, that snake. Now her husband, he shakes her; he knows something is going on. ‘What is this?’ he's saying. But he had an idea about it anyway. ‘You come with me,’ he says, ‘and watch me kill it.’ He starts pulling on her arm, shaking her, but she refuses him. She won't go. She's crying by this time.
“He takes the snake out, same way, coiled around his hand. She just
“But he never did chop that snake up. Maybe he did. I don't know. Anyway, it went on like that … ”
Jenny, a Ph.D. candidate in English, asked what the snake symbolized. Mabel didn't seem to understand the question. She looked at me, then turned to Jenny. “Well, it was a problem, I don't know.”
“Why didn't he, I mean the husband, just kill the snake?” Jenny asked. With an incredulous look on her face, Mabel focused on Jenny. “Well, how could he?” she asked. “This is white man days. There's laws against killing people. That man, he would go to jail, or maybe get the electric chair, if he done that.”
Mabel mentioned that she knew the woman, that she often visited her when she lived in the same area north of Clear Lake. “Then one night I seen that man. He was handsome, too,” she chuckled. “It was late. Lakeport grocery was closing and I seen him come out with groceries. He didn't take the road. He went the creek way, north. Then, I say to myself, ‘I bet I know where he's going.’”
“Maybe he just carried the snake with him and left it in the vase each morning before he left,” Jenny o ered. “Like a sign.”
Mabel laughed out loud. “Like a sign. That's cute. Why he want to do that?” She lit a cigarette. “See, I knew he was odd. He's moving in cold, late at night. Snakes don't do that.”
“Well, was it man or snake? I mean when you were looking at it?” Jenny was desperate now.
“You got funny ideas,” Mabel answered. “Aren't I sitting here?” She tapped her cigarette in the aluminum ashtray on the table. “You do crazy things like Greg. And he's Indian! He gets ideas where he wants to know this or that so he can write it all up for the people. Well, it ain't like that what I am saying.”
About a month later, after my trip with Jenny, Mabel and I took a ride and parked along a road on the south side of Clear Lake, where we had a view of the lake and of Elem Rancheria, the old village site and presentday reservation of the Elem tribe of Pomo Indians. Mabel had been talking about her maternal grandmother, Sarah Taylor, and about how the Elem people initiated her into their dances and cult activities after Sarah's
“‘You will find a way, a way to go on even after this white people run over the earth like rabbits. They are going to be everywhere,’ he was saying. That's Old Man, I forgot his name. He had only Indian name, Taylor's father, Grandma's grandfather. He's the one saying these things.”
Mabel opened her purse, pulled out a cigarette. She lit her cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke. Below us, on the narrow peninsula of Elem, smoke rose from the rusted chimney tins of the small, dilapidated houses. A lone dog barked in the distance.
“Well, it was over here, below them hills,” Mabel said, gesturing south over her shoulder with her chin. “This things, they come over the hill in a trail, long trail. So much that dust is flying up, like smoke wherever they go. And first to see them this people down there, where you are looking. ‘What is this?’ the people saying. Things with two heads and four legs, bushy tail, standing here on this hill somewhere, looking down at Elem people.
“Lots of people scared, run o, some far as our place, Cache Creek. They tell what they seen then. All Indians, Indians all over, talking about it then. ‘What is it?’ they is asking. Nobody knows. People is talking about it all over the place. Lot's scared. I don't know. People say di erent things.
“Some people somewhere seen them things come apart, like part man, then go back together. Then I guess maybe they knew it was people—white people. I don't know,” Mabel said and chuckled. “They Indians dance and pray. I don't know. Then they was saying these things [was] mean, killing Indians and taking Indians.”
Mabel drew on her cigarette and leisurely exhaled. “But he seen it in his Dream, Old Man. He said what was coming one day, how this would be.”
“So they knew what it was coming down this hill,” I ventured. “Hmm,” Mabel said, gazing across the lake. “They knew what he meant by ‘white man.’”
“So why did they run? Why all the fuss?” Mabel rubbed out her cigarette and looked at me as if she had not understood what I said. “If they knew from Old Man's prophecy that white people were coming, why didn't they know what was coming down the hill? Why all the fuss?”
Mabel started chuckling, then exploded with loud, uncontrollable
She lit another cigarette, then straightened in her seat. “Sometimes takes time for Dream to show itself. Got to be tested. Now we know what he told about, Old Man. He was told … He said lots of things: trails, big trails covering the earth, even going into the sky. Man going to be on moon he was saying.”
“But how did he know that?”
“But sometimes Dream forgets, too. Like them snakes. Old Man come in my dream, give me rattlesnake song. ‘You going to work with this snakes; they help you,’ he is saying. Then, after that, I seen them. All over my house I seen them: porch, closet, in my bathtub when it's hot, all over. Then I say to him, to that spirit, ‘This is modern times, better take that song out of me … I don't want nothing to happen. People around here might call animal control place.’
“You know, peoples around here they don't always understand things like that.”
After Mabel told the story about the people of Elem seeing non-Indian invaders coming “over the hill in a trail,” we headed east, back to the Rumsey Reservation. On the way home, Mabel again told the story of “The Woman Who Loved a Snake.”
“It was across there. Up in them hills where she lived. That time Charlie
[*] Charles McKay, Mabel's husband.
[was] running stock up there. By stock I mean the cattle. Charlie always wanted to have the stock. That woman lived there. Sometimes she would come down the road the other side there and talk to me. Anyway, how it happened, she was alone at night. Her husband used to go o working, where it was I don't know. I forgot. How it happened, she hears this knocking one night, at her door … ”I was quieter now, listening. “Well, you see, I know about them snakes,” she said as she finished the story. “They can teach about a lot of things.”
Mabel pulled her purse to her lap and began rummaging for her cigarettes.
“Hmm,” she said. “Maybe you'll get some idea about the snakes.” I looked at her and she was laughing, holding an unlit cigarette between her fingers. “I know you. You'll … you're school way. You'll think about it, then write something.”
She was right.