“I am going to let them sing one more song,” said the teacher when we rose hastily. “They don’t have visitors every day.”
They sang “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” and if Sweet Afton had been Niagara it would have wakened Mary less than the stertorous warning which bellowed from that schoolroom. Then a dozen brown hands waved in the air, and a clamor arose for other bits of their repertoire to be heard. Teacher was smilingly indulgent, proud of her pupils and anxious to give them and the visitors a good time. So we were treated to Old Black Joe, and Juanita, and other sad ditties, which never seemed sadder than now.
“And now you must show these ladies you are all good Americans,” said the teacher. We all stood and sang the Star Spangled Banner. The children showed individuality; they did not keep slavishly to one key. Each child started on the one that suited him best, and held it regardless of the others. By the time they were well started, every note in the scale was represented, including most of the half notes. Our patriotism ended in a dismal polychromatic howl, and the sudden silence which followed nearly deafened us. We had forgotten there was such a thing as silence.
What a pity the government does not encourage the Indian to cultivate his own arts, instead of these alien and uncomprehended arts of the white man! In his ceremonial dances, he is lithe, graceful, and expressive; when he tries the one-step and waltz he is clumsy and ludicrous. His voice, strident, discordant and badly-placed when he attempts second-rate “civilized” music, booms out mellow and full-throated, perfectly placed in the nasal cavity, when he sings Indian melodies whose tantalizing syncopations, difficult modulations, and finely balanced tempo he manages with precision. His music fits his surroundings. To hear it chanted in a wide and lonely desert scene, to watch its savage, untamed vigor move feet and bodies to a climax of ecstatic emotion, until it breaks all bounds and produces the passion it is supposed to symbolize is to understand what music meant to the world, before it was tamed and harnessed and had its teeth extracted. To wean the Indian of this means of self-expression, and nurse him on puerile, anaemic melodies,—it is stupid beyond words, and unfortunately, it is of a piece with the follies and stupidities our government usually exhibits in its dealings with its hapless wards. If I seemed to laugh it was not at those enthusiastic brown babies, rejoicing in their ability to produce civilized discords, but at the pernicious system which teaches them to be ignorant in two languages.
We finally left the strains of patriotism behind us, as we drove across the level plain to Acoma. Two tracks in a waste of sand made the road to the Sky City. A day sooner, or a day later, the wind would shift the fine grained beach sand, left there by some long vanished ocean, and block the road with drifted heaps; today, by the aid of our guide Solomon’s shovel, we were just able to plough through it.
Dotting the lonely landscape, flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indian boys with bows and arrows. They fitted the pastoral scene; for a thousand years, perhaps, the ancestors of these same flocks were watched over by the ancestors of these boys in blue overalls. Suddenly to our left, rising from the flat plain, we saw blocked against the sky a shimmering tower of soft blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock. Its sheer walls thrust upward like the shattered plinth of a giant’s castle from a base of crumbling tufa, in itself a small mountain. It was the mesa of Old Acoma, called by the Indians the Enchanted Mesa.
I believe that two Harvard students of archæology once reached the summit of this perpendicular rock, by means of a rope ladder shot to the top. But no white man by himself has for centuries gained a foothold on its splintered walls. Yet once, from legend borne out by bits of broken pottery and household utensils found at the base of the mesa, a large and flourishing Indian village lived on its summit in safety from marauders. A stairway of rock, half splintered away from the main rock was the only means of access to the village. A similar stairway may be seen today in the Second Mesa of the Hopi villages.
Up these stairs, old women toiled with filled ollas on their heads, and little boys and men clambered down them to work in the fields below. It is their ghosts the Indians fear to meet between sunset and sunrise. For one day, while the men were absent plowing or tending their herds, a bolt of lightning struck the stairway and in a moment it lay the same crumbling heap of splintered rock one sees today at the base of the mesa. To envision the horrors that followed imagine a sudden catastrophe destroying all stairways and elevators in the Flatiron building, while the men were away at lunch, and the stenographers left stranded on the top floor. The case of Old Acoma was even more pitiful, for those left on the top were old men, helpless from age, women and babies. They lived, ghastly fear and despair alternating with hope as long as their supply of corn stored in the barren rock held out,—perhaps a month, perhaps longer. Then one by one they died, while their men on the plain below tried frantically to reach them, and at last gave up hope. No wonder that when the towering mass which is their monument fades from blue and gold to grayish purple, the Indians turn their ponies’ heads far to one side, and make a loop rather than be found in its neighborhood.
ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.