For some reason I can't begin to remember I didn't want to do it. I do remember my mother and her students pleading with me during the rehearsal, telling me how cute I was and would be. It was hot in that coat. The Tiger had his Tiger head off completely. It wasn't that I was shy or I didn't know how to do the Twist. I understood the concept of the piece. I didn't have any lines to memorize. Perhaps I felt too responsible. What if I performed and the magic charm of that performance failed to work, the strings of my enchanted ukulele no match for the strung taut bow of the green archrival?
It had been just that fall my parents had taken me to Ball State, where my uncle was a student, to see the grand homecoming parade. Suddenly one of the Roman slaves, a fraternity pledge drafted to haul his house's float, broke free of his chains and ran right to me in the crowd. "You must save me," he cried, "Save me, please!" until his brothers, dressed as Legionnaires, dragged him back to the float. I must have been thinking of that incident months later in the Central gym. All these costumed people begging me to help, urged me to save the Tiger who stood there patiently, headless, happy to have this moment to catch his breath.
The War Dances of Redskins
I was a Redskin. I was a Redskin for three years when I attended North Side High School in Fort Wayne. Before that, in junior high, I had been a Chief. This was in Indiana, of course, a state named to honor, with the inaccurate name of Indian, the people killed, expelled, or assimilated in order to create a state named Indiana. The Miami mainly. Little Turtle's grave is just down the river from where my high school sits. The excavation there uncovered the remains of the sword presented to the chief by George Washington, etc. It was another excavation, however, the one on the sandy riverbank to lay the foundation for North Side in 1926, that suggested the future name of its mascot. That dig uncovered an ancient midden, relics of teeth and bone, worked stone, a few beads, remnants of fire, maybe even a grave or two, and led to the honorific of "Redskin" attaching to the athletic teams of the new high school built on top of the site. The evidence of that excavation, its meager catalogue of artifacts, a residue of an indigenous pre-Columbian, perhaps, inhabitation, is today used as justification by those who want to retain "Redskin" as the mascot in the face of the occasional efforts to change it. See, the supporters say, there is a reason, a history, a tradition for the appellation. They miss the point, of course, of using this particular epithet, its particular nuance of that history and tradition. But never mind.
The name came with a character, a student in costume who danced before the start of football and basketball games. The costume was buckskin chaps and shirt with the leather fringe on the sleeves, a beaded breastplate and full-feathered headdress, more a plains get-up than the more accurate woodland outfit. But then what did we know. And the dance and the music that accompanied the costumed character were all Hollywood too. It was supposed to be a war dance, we imagined, with a lot of rhythmic bowing, hands outstretched, moving with a step that was both shuffle and skip in the inscribed outline of the tip-off circle. There might have been a hatchet or a lance.
A kid named Kevin was the best of the three students (there was a yearly competition) who held the position during the time I went to school. All arms and legs, Kevin added a twirling dervish turn to the movements, took his shirt off even during the late football season, danced around the lance (yes, there was a lance) he ceremoniously thrust into the ground. There was war paint too, on his face, red and white, the school colors, greasebased makeup streaked under each eye. The war paint had been applied over an initial coat of copper color he sponged onto all his exposed very white and freckly skin. Often the finish was splotchy, dappled.
Kevin didn't have enough time to get into makeup during the big riot. This was my junior year, the year the school system closed Central High School downtown, where my mother had taught English and been the dean of girls for nearly twenty years, and bussed its mostly black students out to the six white high schools around the city's edge. This was in the early '70s. The integration hadn't gone well, with every high school experiencing protests, beatings, fights, vandalism, and bomb threats. This was even true at the two new high schools, Wayne and Northrup.
At North Side the alienated black students staged a boycott of classes, and a schoolwide assembly was called by the fretting principal hoping to talk things out. We met in the gym. The football team and the cheerleaders were there, already clustered on the court with the frazzled administrators and coaches. The teachers patrolled the stands. Those squads on the floor had a semblance of harmony and order, having had to work together through practices in the summer. Kevin burst in, running halfdressed in his outfit, feathers flying, to his spot in the center of the floor. He was very white, I remember, without his makeup. He seemed to glow, reflecting the bright light of the new mercury vapor lamps just then reaching the peak of their illumination, having been turned on in haste as the crowds of students poured into the gym from all around the building. They shoved a microphone into his hands urging him to speak, and I remember thinking this breaks some unspoken code to which mascots adhere. The mute mascots were to remain silent on the sidelines as if they had appeared in our midst from some preverbal land where only pantomime, pep, and pumping fists were allowed. They are to always be illustrative in their stoic silence. Indians even more so.
But our Indian said something. Did he say to the throng of angry and frightened students packed into the bleachers that we were all Redskins? Did he say it? "We are all Redskins!" I hope he said it. And then he did the dance. Yes, he did the dance. A skeletal band had been mustered, the drums beating the tomtom and a trumpet blaring that warning staccato. We watched Kevin dance the dance.
I don't remember what happened then, but we all ended up dancing on the gym floor. Marvin Gaye was on the speakers. The Stones. Carole King. We were studying Tapestry in Mrs. Neuhaus's English class.
The cheerleaders reminded us to take off our shoes before we ventured out on the gym floor. We filled that floor. We were on the edge of a riot, on the verge of a party. The administrators began to look relieved. We didn't talk. What could we say? Dancing seemed like the thing to do at the time. We were so many, nearly two thousand, we couldn't do much more than mill in time to the music that didn't stop, it seemed, for hours. We danced that way, in a kind of trance, until the buses came.
The Mother's March
I went with my mother when she went door-to-door in the neighborhood, collecting for the March of Dimes. She let me push the doorbells. I liked the illuminated ones that blinked out when I depressed them. Mother and I would visit with many of the neighbors who invited us in for a chat and for something to warm us up. This was after the polio vaccines. We had all just taken the sugar cube the summer before. The charity had altered the focus of its appeal to birth defects, but most often my mother and our neighbors shared memories of polio-the closing of the river beach, the braces and the iron lungs, Roosevelt. I drank hot chocolate and sometimes got to play at playing someone's piano. At home, my mother would let me separate the big pile of coins we collected into smaller piles of pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters.
"The first thing I did when I saw you for the first time was count your fingers and toes." She had been knocked out completely for my birth. I had been delivered with forceps. I picture her groggily counting my fingers and toes. They're all there.