"The corn people have a song too. It is very good": On Beauty, Truth, and Goodness

Let me begin with a short piece, set down by the anthropologist Franz Boas in the 1920s and made widely available by Jerome Rothenberg as his opening selection in Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. Here it is, in translation from the western Pueblo dialect of Keresan:

long ago her motherhad to sing this song and soshe had to grind along with itthe corn people have a song tooit is very goodI refuse to tell it

(Rothenberg 3)

Some years ago, a country singer by the name of David Allan Coe recorded "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," a song written by his friend Steve Goodman (who also wrote "City of New Orleans," for the folk musicians out there).¹ Goodman told him that he thought it was the perfect country-and-western song. Coe replied that it was not the perfect country-and-western song, because he hadn't said anything about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk. So Goodman sat down and wrote another verse, which went like this:

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prisonAnd I went to pick her up in the rainBut before I could get to the station in my pickup truckShe got run over by a damned old train.

That did the trick, Coe admitted; it now was the perfect country-and- western song.

The purpose of this little bit of music history, other than a chuckle first thing in the morning, is to highlight our insatiable appetite for cultural stereotypes—they are, after all, the way we organize the world, as well as its literatures; and accordingly, this Pueblo poem might be said to be the perfect Aboriginal performance, with the last line being the clincher, just like Goodman's last verse. "I refuse to tell it." Exactly what you'd expect of an Indian, full of mischief, mystery, and a well-developed siege mentality. There is a keeper of the keys, who is a trickster and perhaps also something of a thief, working an inside job by fashioning his own song out of someone else's (a tradition, in every sense, to us); there's an ancient heritage, wrapped around a storyteller's habit—"long ago," he begins, conjuring up both time immemorial and "once upon a time"; and there are the compulsory rituals, echoing an artist's compulsions—"had to" is repeated twice in six lines. The songs are rooted in the land and rise up from it, in a harvest of corn, and the people accept these gifts of grace in a good way, which is to say in song. The circularity is crucial, for songs here have both material and spiritual agency, bringing the corn people together into community as surely as a constitution or a covenant and placating the spirits of place without whom there can be no community. They offer much more than a textual code to be deciphered; like a genetic code, these songs determine destiny; and in them the Pueblo people realize themselves as chosen, bound into a covenant of words and ceremonies that fortify them in a world filled with conflict and confusion . . . as the world always is, even the Aboriginal world. "As it is written in the Psalms of David," says the Rastafarian elder Mortimo Planno, recalling biblical covenants, "to Every Song is a Sign and I always Sing the Songs of the Signs of the Time."² The corn songs and their ceremonies are that kind of covenant for the Pueblo people, and like all such covenants—and like all languages—they both hold the people together even as they keep others apart. "I refuse to tell you." If you don't know the words—and more importantly, if you don't believe the words—you don't know anything. Knowledge and belief are two sides of the same coin (once again, a tradition—this time a hermeneutic tradition—to us).

Or...