Creek Running North

The storm we had two weeks ago did some damage to my corn. The stalks are still healthy, a good sixty degrees off vertical and canted to the north.

I tear off two or three long leaves, feed them to the rabbit.

The middle of December and the ears are still not ready. I have abandoned the idle notion of blanching kernels in lye, rubbing off the skins, and making tamales from the masa thus produced. I planted this corn in June, dark purple kernels an inch below the soil. A cupped blade-like leaf pushed through the surface from each kernel, then another, from inside the cup, then another from between them. Turn your back and the stalks are four feet high. I pulled a firm fruit from a stalk last week after our first frost and shucked it. The kernels were small, pale white with only the slightest purple stripe. I will plant earlier next spring, and buy tamales from the carniceria up the street.

I bought the corn from that same store, dark purple dried ears, maiz morado imported from Peru. In the Andes children drink chicha morada, water that has been boiled with this purple corn and the skins of a few pineapples. Their parents sprout the corn and make a weak beer chicha, from the malt. When I go to Bolivia I will relax my no-drinking policy.

The lack of harvest saddens me only a little. We eat well, and even were I so allergic that a bite of corn would send me into anaphylactic shock, I would still grow it. Call it a tic, though one requiring more time and planning than most. I plant corn and watch the stalks grow. We have perhaps a hundred square feet of garden bed. Fifteen of them are in corn, wedged between the asparagus and the Cabernet vine. It is not a garden without corn. I feel the swelling ears through rough papery husks. That is sufficient. Any eventual tamales are a bonus.

My job is to put the kernel in the ground.

In 1993 I got a call from a man I didn’t know. Hopi elder Thomas Banyacya was slated to give a speech at the United Nations to mark the close of the International Year of Indigenous People. The man asked if I would organize a benefit in Berkeley to help raise travel funds for Thomas.  I said I would, and went back to work and forgot all about it.

Twelve years ago last week I realized the event was in a few days. I had made no preparations, asked for no help, arranged for no venue, gotten no publicity. I made a somewhat nervous phone call, and then another, and then got back to editing my magazine, due at the printer in a day.

The next morning the phone rang. It was the director of a small local event hall in Berkeley, offering the space for free. I thanked him and hung up. The phone rang: the proprietor of a local native arts store offered her place for a second event, and the schedule she suggested would work just fine.  I hung up. The phone rang: the host of the morning show on KPFA asked for the event info so that he could publicize it on the air in the week before the event. I thanked him and hung up.

Both venues were full. We didn’t charge admission. Thomas passed the hat at the second event. He raised more than a thousand dollars in a few minutes.

His flight to Flagstaff was at five the next morning. At 4:15 we sat in the Oakland airport eating vending machine cinnamon rolls. Thomas fretted mildly about his schedule. All the traveling, the giving speeches, all the advocacy for the Hopi and their way of life, he said, was getting in the way of his important work.

In the 1940s, Thomas spent seven years in Alcatraz for draft refusal. Hopi prophecy foretold that three great, world-shaking events would take place, representing forces symbolized in Hopi culture by two important icons: the sun and the swastika. Then a gourd full of ashes would fall to earth two times. The gourd would be able to boil the oceans and burn the land. This would signal the advent of a time in which the world was in great peril. This age would culminate in the day of purification. Our fate that day would be determined by whether we lived their lives well, whether we lived them ethically.

After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hopi elders told Thomas that the gourd full of ashes had been dropped twice, that the great earth-shaking events were the two world wars, the most recent one with the sun and the swastika actually on the flags of the combatants. How much more clearly could a prophecy be fulfilled? Go to the front door of the house of mica, they told him, as is spoken in the prophecy, and bring the assembled people of the world the Hopi message of peace. For four decades he had tried to address the people in the house of mica, but had been rebuffed each time. Now they had invited him in. He was a week away from the culmination not just of his career, but of the central myth of his whole people. According to the prophecy, the fate of the world went with Thomas to the house of mica. And he fretted that all of it was getting in the way of his important work.

He was afraid he would not have time to plant corn that winter.

Hopi farmers do not water their corn. The plants must rely on rain, snow, and groundwater. Hopi farmers do not plant their corn in rows. Instead, they drive a stick a foot into the earth and drop a handful of seeds into it. Planting this deep will kill most varieties of corn, but Hopi farmers have bred their corn to breach that thick cover of soil. A foot down, moisture from winter rains will linger, feeding the growing plants until they bear fruit. A Hopi cornfield is a sparse, compelling thing, thick clumps of stalks some feet apart. The outer stalks take the brunt of desert wind and sun.

Thomas had filled two pickup trucks with ears that spring, ears of all four Hopi colors — blue, white, yellow, and pink. You take the white, he said, and leach it with wood ashes to make hominy, then get some lamb meat from a Navajo herder and boil the two together for a few days. This is called Noq Qi Vi and I should try it. But he had little time to plant before heading to New York. He was afraid the planting season would slip away. He woould try to get as much planted as he could that week, then he would give his speech and fly home to plant more.

Corn has forgiven us a multitude of sins; the sterile male plant debacle of the 1970s in which nearly the entire US corn crop failed, the loss of a hundred different varieties to F1 hybrids planted in Mexican valleys, the splicing of soil bacteria code into its genome. It has to forgive us. The plant cannot husk itself, shed its seed and push it an inch — or twelve — into the ground. It is a wonder of evolution that it is accompanied by a being that can fulfill those necessary tasks. Five thousand years this partnership has lasted, corn evolving from teosinte to maize, into Hopi blue and Mojave and Mandan reds and the tasteless, insipid white industrial corns, Silver Queen and whatever monstrous cultivar they use to make chips these days.

We are corn’s way of making more corn. What choice does it have but to trust us? What choice do we have but to plant it? What more fitting life than to watch it grow?

The year after I met Thomas, a Native activist with whom I was meeting loudly questioned my commitment, my worth, and most importantly my ancestry. I smiled and nodded. I forget what we were talking about. He seemed to regret his anger. He left the room and came back with a bundle, handed it to me. Inside was piki, a flatbread made by the Hopi by spreading blue cornmeal paste on a very hot rock. “Try some!” he urged, and I broke off a leaf, thin and translucent as phyllo. It nearly disappeared on my tongue.

“That’s the best you’ll ever have,” he told me. “No one makes piki like Mrs. Banyacya.”