A HalfMan Dreaming

Introduction

ix Introduction When I began this series of novels (there are three: How the Night Is Divided, A HalfMan Dreaming, and Wodziwob’s Trance) I thought of two personal fascinations that have, at once, given me the courage and stamina to write these stories, and that often seemed to crush me in their spells. Both move forward and backward over the American Landscape as I know it and dream it. The first is Cahokia. The great ruin of this city lies directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in East St. Louis, Illinois. I remember, once, driving south from Chicago with my son toward the remnant hummocks of this place. In its haunted, collecting sleep it reminds me of Chichen Itza, Etowah, Cuzco, Palenque, Tenochtitlan, Uaxactun, the Spiro Mound; all of them too, American cities conquered by sudden disease and violence or abandoned by still unidentifiable forces. We drove through the old glacially flattened Illinois plains where once wild grasses grew to twelve feet and more high, and, in this time, where the grasses of domestic corn rise in their horizon-to-horizon furrows, at least six feet high, swaying in the hot ripening winds of an interglacial summer that may hold in their stirrings the next glacial advance waiting on some unanticipated Cambrian hillock in Quebec. The edges and centers of some of these fields hold low drumlins and kames as signature of spreading, sterilizing glacial advance and retreat, lasting more than seventy thousand years. The plains of Illinois seem as deep an abyss of time and Earth to me as the plains of Kansas and Oklahoma though those crushed flattened spaces between Chicago and St. Louis, in their exposure, register more, the peculiar un-moorings of the Wisconsin ice lobes spewing their meltwater floods and sands and boulders. The sky above this flatness often seems to me, as I periodically travel under it, to go pale in receding layers of blue. In those layers I can hear the whispers of Lupe, the main character in this book, who wants to know, after three tours in Vietnam, how to stay alive, and more crucially how to ask in his bewilderments over what he has done as a sniper returning home, “When does a country have a broken neck?” East St. Louis, Illinois, is not a tourist destination. Its name calls up obscure racial dread and the legends of violence, drugs, prostitution, disintegration . Fifty miles north, in a small town gas station, we asked about East St. x Louis and Cahokia. No one ever heard of Cahokia. But East St. Louis: Check your tires, head around it, and the undercurrent of those warnings, if you get a breakdown, run. Cahokia was permanently abandoned around AD 1500. At the time of its maximum influence its population numbered at least 20,000. Its trading horizon extended from eastern Oklahoma to North Carolina. The third largest pyramid (it is also the largest earthen mound) in the hemisphere was built here of differing layers of clay and sand. Those agronomists were so expert that little erosion of this sacred “mountain” has taken place over the last five hundred years. A small, informative museum houses a collection of fine pottery, tools, basketry and a model of the city as it might have appeared to warriors returning from various war and trading expeditions who painted their faces with markings of the peregrine falcon and carried shrunken heads around their waists as they moved through the surrounding forests. The “People” whoever they were remain without name; they left no writing nor word of themselves marked by myths or other stories. When my son and I climbed the pyramid it was midsummer, the temperature around 110 degrees. We could see the edges of the Missouri River as it fed into the Mississippi and all that water draining and carrying the continental debris to the 40,000 feet of accumulating sediment in the delta. Whenever I stand on this height I think of the nineteenth-century barges carrying their cargoes of buffalo tongues by the millions down these currents, that flotation inviting far more than metaphor. I also try to connect this city to Detroit, my home city of L.A., Albuquerque, New York, Atlanta, Montreal, the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley and petroglyphs on the old shore scars of long disappeared lakes in Nevada. The distances running A to Z from La Paz in Baja to Presque Isle in Maine. How could I connect these previous...