An Insider’s Ear : Greg...

Anthropologists generally agree that before the arrival of Europeans, California, as now, was the most heavily populated area of America north of the Rio Grande. There was no single dominant Native American nation--no League of the Iroquois or Huron Confederacy--but rather a mosaic of distinct and coexistent small cultures, each with its own language and tradition, religion and cosmology. From the Yurok in the north, whose social and economic systems were intricately entwined, to the tiny bands of kin-based bands in the south, indigenous California societies were as diverse as they were numerous, as creatively adaptive to their particular environments as they were artistically and philosophically experimental. Viewed collectively, they constitute a marvelous microcosm for the wide range of human possibility.

Over the last four centuries their numbers have been decimated. Tens of thousands perished from the Old World diseases contracted at Spanish missions; countless others, especially those unfortunate enough to live near the gold fields, were hunted down for sport. A few men and women became famous, like Ishi, for being the last representatives of their cultures, but a great portion of those who managed to survive became virtually invisible, dwarfed by booming Anglo cities, relegated to the role of migrant farm laborers in huge agribusinesses. Dwelling as they do on small, remote reservations and rancherias, outside access to their contemporary stories has been limited to the stuff of dry doctoral dissertations and scholarly articles.

Until now.

In among the most dramatic one-two literary genre punches in recent memory (Toni Morrison’s simultaneous 1992 publication of “Jazz” and “Playing in the Dark” comes to mind), Greg Sarris, a professor of English at UCLA and himself a mixture of California ethnicities (Filipino, Jewish, Miwok), has written a dazzling pair of books, one superb fiction, the other a mesmerizing interplay of biography and autobiography. Read individually, each is a spotlight trained on the complexity, sadness, humor and strength of modern Pomo people; read in tandem, they vault Sarris’ subjects--and the author himself--into brilliant, enduring relief.

“Grand Avenue” is a thematically linked collection of 10 stories, each one complete and startling in itself, that moves back and forward in time as it gives eloquent and searing voice to the interacting Pomo, Portuguese, and African American communities of Santa Rosa in Northern California. In a vivid blend of street-smart toughness and traditional spirituality, we hear the varying perspectives of men and women, old and young, on the ways that poverty disrupts relationships, does violence to every social institution, forges an anger that, unchecked, can erode even the impulse of kindness.

“Grand Avenue” is a gritty, power-filled book, unsparing and unapologetic. Sarris has too much respect for his characters to feel sorry for them, but is too sympathetic to the grim and inexorable realities of their situations to be dispassionate. It is a book to read once for story, a second time to better understand how the pieces perfectly fit together and illuminate each other, a third time for the sheer pleasure of fine writing. “Grand Avenue” is not only one of the very best works of fiction by and about Native Americans, it’s one of the most important imaginative books of the year, period.

Listen, for instance, to a young girl just moved to unexpected violence describe the staged scene when the police respond to a report of gunfire.

“I looked at Justine. She was lifting a neat piece of chocolate cake to her mouth with a plastic fork. Her I’d have to reckon with on account I upset her show. I looked at mom and the boys. They was eating cake, too. Auntie was still talking, painting that picture of us not capable of nothing. I seen the cops looking at the table while she talked. I seen what they seen, what Auntie was saying. But I seen more. I seen everything.”

Or a mother, dealing with the fact of her daughter’s terminal diagnosis: “I took myself to the library, read books, learned so much about the disease I came to speak its language, which is a hollow tongue of numbers and strange words. That’s why Doctor Kriesel goes on with me about counts and cells. But I moved beyond her. I read about Laetrile, coffee enemas, diets of brown rice and sprouts, support groups. None of which I had time or money for. Visualization seemed the ticket. It’s free for the effort. Picture the body healthy. See flowers and things. Green is a good color.”

Where, we wonder, does Sarris find this acute insider’s ear, so precise in its cadence? The answer--that he is a master listener--is amply provided in his simultaneously published, equally amazing nonfiction work. Ostensibly the “as told to” biography of the eponymous late, world-renowned Pomo basket weaver, “Mabel McKay” is an honest, heartfelt testament comparable in its authenticity and grace to such standard texts as Paul Radin’s “Crashing Thunder” and, especially, to Nancy Lurie’s “Mountain Wolf Woman.”

Mabel McKay is a character in every sense of the term: wise, iconoclastic, demanding, a self-conscious author to the story of her own life. Born in a Pomo community and raised by her very traditional grandmother, she held a variety of jobs, from Charleston dancer in a carnival to university lecturer on native California crafts. Through it all, however, she was primarily shaped and informed by the Dream--her vocation as a medicine woman and healer.

She chose astutely in selecting Greg Sarris as her chronicler, picking him out first as a confused young boy in Santa Rosa and then maintaining close contact as he went to university and became an academic. One has the sense that she kept him grounded, taught him sense while he learned facts, and indeed Sarris takes the great risk of relating his own unfolding journey in counterpart to recounting Mabel’s--a decision that enriches and personalizes the whole.

While Mabel McKay is undeniably an individual like no other, her experience is emblematic of the transition of her own and similar tribes. She bridges chasms of paradox and technology, of intuitive and science-based methods of understanding, with the easy aplomb of a person secure in her own identity and capable of absorbing without being absorbed by the disparate events of her experience. She is confident, funny, domineering and indelible, an internationally acclaimed designer of exquisite feather baskets who still toiled almost every day in a cannery. She is a worker of miracles who is practical enough to prescribe calamine lotion for poison ivy. She’s the irreverent, revered elder, the preserver and expander of culture, the heart and the soul of the modern Native American dynamic.

To say that Greg Sarris does Mabel McKay justice is to say a great deal. He renders her story with respect and candor in a novelist’s prose. She comes to life in all her complexity, a woman as compelling and full-bodied as any of the fictional creations of “Grand Avenue”--a book, I’d bet, she’d display on her kitchen table, to brag about.