Inheriting the Cracks
The Poetry of Diane Glancy
By Fr. Spencer Reece
Aunt Fannie Fixes Bison Bourguinon
By Diane Glancy
My father was Cherokee. My mother English & German. My father decided he would live in this world and migrated north to the stockyards of Kansas City. My mother also came north, from a small farm in Kansas. They married, struggled through the depression, and bought a small house by the time I was born. I was integrated into my mother’s white family. I went to a white grade school. In the winter our faces lined the window. Once my tongue stuck to the frost on the glass. I was just a little darker than the others, a little quieter. I walked home over the field, breaking thin plates of ice like locust wings. There was always a sense of puzzlement & loss. Something undefined wasn’t there. The smell of old campfires? The green corn dance? I had the feeling I was always at the window, my tongue forever on the cold glass.
We did not yet possess the endless humility that tragedy brings.
A cold Minneapolis night. 1990. Mother and I scurried from the frozen snow-packed parking lot into Odegard’s bookstore, a new stand-alone bookstore in the suburbs of Edina. My mother was sixty, the age I am now. I was thirty. I have more compassion for us two now. Vibrant, engaged, lipstick and a silk scarf with Audubon birds, my mother was relieved to spend a night not thinking about real estate agent bids on our family home. Snow falling down, white and piecemeal, covering our tracks and covering the roads, the whole cold erasure of the Midwest humbling us. We walked across the ice cracks gingerly.
The bookstore spacious and plush to match the rush of money and entitlement that made up that suburb where I had grown. The wide expanse of books comforted my mother and me: bookstores our churches. The smell of fresh published books comforted us like incense. We were selling our family home and soon losses mounted. That night we were blithe. We did not yet possess the endless humility that tragedy brings. That bright Minneapolis night we were going to hear Diane Glancy read from Iron Woman, a first book published under a prize for first-time older women writers. Glancy was in her fifties then. Glancy was a new teacher at Macalester College. Someone said she was part–Cherokee Indian. Mom whispered to me, “Dad has Indian blood.”
Soon we would go from Minnesota. Soon the bookstore would close, bookstore closures matching church closures. Minnesota glowed in its beautiful coldness. Much I didn’t know. Glancy had come to us on her own long journey. There was a quiet gentleness in her demeanor. I introduced myself and my mother to her that night. After our family home was sold, before I left Minnesota, one of the last things I did was visit Glancy in her office in Saint Paul. I wanted to be a published poet in those days, yet there was little indication this would occur. She paused in her office and said, “Let us pray over these poems.” I’ve often felt that prayer has remained all these years with those poems. Gave them a kind of patina and grit. And gave that to me.
Who is Aunt Fannie? Why is she in the title only to be absent for the rest of the poem? She’s like some ancient black and white photograph found at a garage sale. The poem is bifurcated from the start. “Aunt Fannie Fixes Bison Bourguignon” is from Diane Glancy’s poetry collection Iron Woman, the one we heard her read from on that cold night. There is a melancholy disenfranchisement in this prose poem. The father of this child is a sad man with a wife who does not appreciate his heritage. In a later poem, Glancy writes of this pair: “When he brought home his horns and hides / my mother said / get rid of them.” The poem is in the voice of the half-Indian child we assume without doubt is our author: born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri, to an undocumented Cherokee father and an English/German mother, Diane Glancy is a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. Or she’s like two puzzle pieces that don’t quite snap together. The poem breathes and glides along the dashes between this poet’s genes: English and German and Cherokee. Is Aunt Fannie one of her white relatives? Or one of her hidden Indians? Who is Diane Glancy?
The emotional temperature chills to match the weather.
Straightforward, unadorned, bold Anglo-Saxon, “bourguinon” being the fanciest word we have, a hint of Julia Child in the humdrum Midwest, the poem employs uneventful verbs of “to be” and “to go.” The poem is shaped like a recipe index card. The title marries “bison,” a meat the Indigenous regularly ate, with a fancy French word. What follows are the ingredients on how to make a child, not how to make bison bourguinon. It’s winter in our poem, and our mixed-blood child attaches her tongue to the frozen window-pane of the school. A Kansas school that no doubt taught a reductive version of Indigenous history: ugly stereotypes with Redface and tomahawks.
The child in the white school of the poem is “a little darker than the others, a little quieter.” Her skin color setting her apart. Her quietness setting her apart. This quietness is an active thing. The child is alert to her difference and the quietness seems to be building within her. Perhaps a quiet child is the first sign you have an artist on your hands. And if the quiet child is sensing injustice, there’s the foundation for poems to come.
The emotional temperature chills to match the weather. The poem zeroes in on the child’s tongue touching the cold window-pane. The tongue helps you chew and it helps you makes sounds. Thousands of taste buds cover the sandpapery surface of the tongue that connect to the nerves that run right into the brain. All animals need tongues to survive. In the book of Acts, in the Bible, people speak “in tongues,” inspired by the Holy Spirit. Like at Caesarea or Ephesus, Glancy is poised from this early poem on to begin speaking in tongues, a manner of poetics that will at times be misunderstood, loved and discounted all at once.
Note our speaker steps on plates of ice like locust wings, an allusion to a violence. Broken plates and broken wings. Perhaps the child’s flight or fight response as she makes her way to Aunt Fannie’s kitchen? Perhaps the steps are that of the poet as she makes her way across the brittle, testy world of academia? Or the manner in which any child must move into the crazy adult world? Glancy’s poems perpetually open out with possibilities; they are almost blurry.
David Treuer in his definitive account of Native America, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, wrote: “It is impossible not to feel a kind of sickness at the thought that the government stole Indian land in order to fund the theft of Indian children.” Later: ”America ‘won’ the West by blood, brutality and terror.” This history drips onto Glancy’s tongue.
“There was always a sense of puzzlement & loss,” she writes. That statement links to the history Treuer documented. “Something undefined” was there, she writes. Who and what is our writer? Specifically, while growing up, Glancy has said, her father told her stories about their Cherokee heritage, “although the lineage wasn’t perfectly clear.” After a DNA test linked her with relatives in Arkansas, she visited them. After extensive research, Glancy had a direct link to the Cherokee. Michael Waters, her great-great-great-great-grandfather, is on the 1835 Cherokee rolls. Were others in her family not listed on any census? Who in her family albums might have been Cherokee but unwilling to be documented? Did other great aunts or uncles choose to bury an Indigenous heritage rather than embrace it? What bloodline she was able to corroborate at the Family Research Center at the Cherokee National Museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, made Glancy a member of the Cherokee Nation.
Oh, who are we in the end? What we say we are? What our blood says we are?
Yet, in the zeitgeist of a postcolonial lens, DNA testing is regarded skeptically: take the controversy that surrounded presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and her claimed Indigenous identity. Warren’s DNA test showed she had a substantial amount of Native American DNA, like Glancy, but that did not make her Native American. The identity, many argue, is social and cultural. President Donald Trump nicknamed Warren “Pocahontas,” damaging her bid for presidency. She retracted her claim to her Native American heritage. Warren’s attempt to use her Indigenous ancestry for political gain tarnished her public image.
Lurking under the fray, the insults hurled, Twitter vitriol violent and vituperative, is the suspicion that a politician or writer uses heritage nowadays opportunistically. Scrupulous judgement crossed with an unspoken superiority is in the ether, reminiscent of the Pharisees. Dangerous it is to deem one person more pure than another.
Lineage can matter for tribal membership. Some tribes use a system called “blood quantum” which requires members to meet certain cutoffs, such as one-quarter, or one-half, to be officially a member. The Cherokee Nation, of which Glancy is a member, does not have specific blood quantum, but requires proof of descent from an enrolled member in the historical record.
I wonder now what my mother made of it all, the night my mother and I sat listening. Her own immigrant past, a father who came over on a boat from Vilnius, Lithuania, whom she thought was Jewish. He had buried whatever his identity was so thoroughly that no one will ever know what he was. At times she will invest in this mythical identity. What if she wasn’t Jewish at all? Then what? DNA tests would prove my mother’s bloodline inconclusive, yet throughout her life, nearly everyone that meets her speculates she “seems” Jewish. Including Glancy. “She’s like that Woody Allen character in Interiors,” says a college friend. “She’s right out of Central Casting,” says an acquaintance. Based on what? An attitude? A look? Who are we in the end? She never sat one shivah, never said one Kaddish, and yet. What? Oh, who are we in the end? What we say we are? What our blood says we are? What creed we memorize? The kind of nose or skin we have? The houses we go to? The bison bourguinon we eat?
Glancy does not have Native language or any familiarity with practicing Native ceremonies. She lives at a distance from the culture. She reminds me of Latin people I know who were discouraged from speaking Spanish: they have a look in their eyes, a dislocated look, a kind of homesickness. Choosing to identify as a Cherokee meant accepting the consequences and struggles inherent in claiming an Indigenous heritage from which she was at some remove.
Navajo activist, Dartmouth graduate, and granddaughter of a prominent Episcopalian family, Jaqueline Keeler, writer and activist, coined the phrase “Pretendians”—not real Indians. Case in point: Sacheen Littlefeather, the actress in Hollywood who took to the stage in Indian attire at the Academy Awards in 1972 to accept Marlon Brando’s best actor Oscar award. Littlefeather presented herself as a White Mountain Apache. She was half-Mexican and Spanish from Spain with no Indigenous ties.
Keeler accused Glancy of being a Pretendian, despite Glancy calling herself “an undocumented Cherokee.” Since “Aunt Fannie” Glancy has stridently pursued her social anthropology through her work, unthwarted by negativity. She spent a life writing on the Trail of Tears, the removal of the last Plains Indian warriors, the Native American boarding schools, the impact of Christianity on Indigenous peoples, and the Spanish missions in California. She’s given voice to Sacajawea; Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th-century Mohawk woman converted by the Jesuits; and David Pendleton Oakerhater, a Cheyenne man and Fort Marion prisoner who later became an Episcopal priest. Speaking in tongues against erasure. Glancy’s bloodline has informed a dedication to unearthing and animating the history of the Indigenous. Her work has been a long conversation with her melancholy father. Starting with Aunt Fannie, Glancy pieces together a mystery of who she is. She’s not pretending; she’s intending. Her facts, her feelings. Usually, we end up being what we cannot see. Still. Joy Harjo, first Indigenous United States Poet Laureate, left Glancy out of her voluminous Native anthology.
Usually, we end up being what we cannot see.
Furthermore, Glancy experienced a divide from academia where she lived and worked for the majority of her life. Macalester College wanted a culturally diverse faculty: the English department was enthused about her Cherokee concerns, but much less so about her outspoken Christian faith. She said regular attendance at church isolated her at Macalester. Even though the sound of Christian evangelism was there from the start, when she writes of watching the world with her cat:
Just any moment
We’ll hear the trumpet, and those who believe
Jesus, who know he’s coming and listen for the
Blat, will hop right out of this earth as if
Suddenly untied from the dock.
When I visited her in that office, I didn’t understand much and certainly possessed the tunnel-vision ambition of the young which cancels out a wider compassion. Now, thinking back, I think that image of her as a child at the schoolhouse was always with her. Much later she writes the poem called “Childhood Memories”:
When God was young
his family was poor
flesh was the only crayon he had left
with paper peeled back like hangnails
he named his drawings, people
coloring arms and legs
the land shook like sheet metal when they walked
his fingers sweaty as he worked
waxy as a butcher
damp as bacon
but he was pure in mouth.
One wonders if this is the school lesson Glancy never got and now must teach herself. Imagining God as childlike using crayons like flesh. Again, there is a return to the mouth, the tongue, and what she yearns for and finds in her faith: a purity.
From her office there in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for decades Glancy wrote, separated from her origin. Maybe she needs the isolation to make her sound? Sometimes (Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, T.S. Eliot in London) distance makes the music stronger. In Glancy, her stubborn origins survive in her despite the direct contact with the culture. Her poems, she said, make the voice of America, land of immigrants. She has said, “though the Natives were here when the immigrants came, they still suffer a sense of separation.” Indigenous humans swallow the paradox that their emancipation is their dissolution. As Louise Erdrich’s character, Thomas, says in The Night Watchman: “But every so often the government remembered about the Indian and when they did they always tried to solve Indians… They solve us by getting rid of us.” With her German/English mother and her previously “undocumented” Cherokee father, Glancy’s poetic math adds to literature what has been subtracted.
Her first book opened with this note to the reader: “I keep thinking why bother with my Native American heritage, What does it matter? Let it go. How does it relate to my life in this ‘world that is’ anyway? But I pass the Noguchi sculpture on my way to class at Macalester and I see ‘Iron Woman.’ I hear old footsteps of the ancestors in the leaves in autumn. In winter I feel a sense of loss that blows in the cold wind between the buildings. So I dedicate this book to… the ‘remains’ of a heritage I feel everyday.” The tongue that stuck to the ice fashioned itself into an iron woman. Her search and her prayer galvanize her. Paul says to the Corinthians, “my power is made perfect in weakness.” If we want to call her genetic murkiness a weakness, it somehow adds to Glancy’s iron, whatever she is in the end, whatever we all are in the end.
She tackles the subject that is perhaps the most controversial when Christian and Indian are in the same sentence: boarding schools that orphaned and killed native children, leaving them in large, unmarked graves. In “Holy Week at the Mission School,” she writes:
When the buffalo were gone
we had no hides for shelter or meat.
When horses were gone we had a house
that could not be folded and moved another place.
The pack dogs questioned
why they were kept in the yard on a chain
and how the wind would speak and stars move
without us to follow.
At the Mission of St. Agabus
candles flicker.
We watch the yellow light.
Lord, the air is full of holy beings from the wounds
in your hands and feet and side.
Her poems keep walking across a battlefield of broken plates and shattered wings.
The voice of this poem collects the abused voices of Indigenous children in mission schools. The children confined in a world of abusive Christianity. Her volta turns to Jesus, to his stigmata, in these wounds some sense can be made of this cruel world, even for Indigenous children stripped of their language and culture. Her epigraph for this poem comes from Paul Celan, Holocaust survivor until his suicide, who wrote: “Handled already, Lord, / clawed and clawing as though / the body of each of us were your body, Lord.” Glancy adheres to the apostle Paul’s call in Galatians that “we are all one”; somehow, despite all the divisions, her faith unified her. This powers her work with hope.
Glancy equates the betrayals of the Indigenous with the betrayals of Christ: America is her Christ story, suffering and resurrection. In the end she seeks connection rather than rupture. She believes as John Calvin, a French philosopher from the 1500s whose thought influenced The Book of Common Prayer, that we are “knotted together.” Her poems keep walking across a battlefield of broken plates and shattered wings.
What lies below the surface? Glancy once said, “I’ve used the word ‘undertext’ in describing the other world that comes both in poetry and dreams. An imaginary, irrational world. Sometimes associative.” Many of her poems are entirely undertext. What lies beneath Aunt Fannie’s bison bourguinon? The soul of Aunt Fannie? Somehow Aunt Fannie is Glancy: her tongue twisted.
An undertext pulses throughout her work. She writes about Ada Blackjack who went with four explorers on the 1921 Wrangel Island expedition. Blackjack was the only survivor, an Inupiat seamstress and cook. Now the dark child in the white school with her tongue on the frost speaks through the voice of Blackjack:
I was sorry I came on the expedition.
I felt stranded with the men when the boat left us
on the island.
The missionaries said I would not be alone.
I had Jesus.
But I had married Jack Blackjack and he deserted me.
Now I loved Allen Crawford.
I followed him around the camp.
The men teased him.
They laughed.
I was an outcast.
I had crying spells.
When Glancy held Ada Blackjack’s diary in the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, she felt another diary moving under it. Ada’s diary was daily-activity oriented. There was another voice within those activities that she didn’t know to write. John Kinsella called it a symbiosis—her diary and Glancy’s diary in the same book. Blackjack had been sent to a Methodist Mission when her mother could not support her. Blackjack learned to write and learned about faith. It was what sustained her on Wrangel Island until the rescue boat could get through the ice. It’s all of piece, the child with her tongue on the window-pane, the converted Indigenous woman surrounded by ice.
Glancy has in a sense worked outside her element since she was that child in the school in Kansas. She relates to the historical character of Blackjack, stranded on an island two years. “They ate me like horsemeat. / Yet I survived. / A horse is not an Arctic animal. / Neither were they.” Glancy remembers when the word, horsemeat, came to her mind from that underneath world. Glancy said, “Poetry comes from inside the iceberg.” Glancy has gone deep into the iceberg.
In another work, entitled Island of the Innocent, a phrase taken from the Book of Job, Glancy could just as well be referencing America as the Indigenous first inhabited it. A literary reverse mission, this book looks at the Book of Job through Glancy’s splintered cultural identity. She writes in “Abstract”: “The essay is an avant-garde study of the Old Testament Book of Job—using the practice of poetics to get to meanings that float under the surface of the written language—or maybe above. A meta-poetry. An unorthodox meeting of roads. Job and the Native American experience of loss. Poetics and its undertow.”
Since Iron Woman, Glancy has kept her ear to the ground, listening to the American earth and writing into the deepest rupture the world has known between the Indigenous people and the white settlers who destroyed their world. Whether Spanish conquistadors or later pioneers and land–grant grabbers, the intent was to dominate and brainwash the Native American into submission.
What’s missing is rancor. Present is mercy.
In a poem published in 2019, Glancy combines the sounds of the missionaries with the sound of the Indigenous:
The Unwelcome News
How do I explain the hard things to the sharp voices of the wind?
He came to earth. He talked to people. He died.
What had he said? — He was the Road. A place
We could not travel without him. He left us in a world
We’re strangers to. He is with us though we can’t see him.
He’s working in another place with his hammer and nails —
Making souvenirs for the tourist stands. These are our choices.
Rejection and suffering in a place the storm-winds blow,
Or a trade we could unload. It doesn’t make sense to anyone.
But for those who believe — the power of his suffering
Would change a camp-ground of house-trailers into a row
Of brush arbors on a desert highway where Indians sell their wares.
“I tell you none of it is easy,” writes Glancy. In all her pages Glancy brings in everything from villanelles to micro-essays to make her point that the Native American consciousness and the Christian can speak to one another. Unwelcome news can be the Good News. Tackling these twin violent stories, the “cruelty of boarding schools and indoctrinations,” and cross-referencing it with Job, her sound somehow does not result in a bottomless abyss of injustice.
She writes: “I wanted to explore the Book of Job… until the fissures appeared.” Her books swirl like a cyclone with these fissures. When she writes of Job “stuck with faith no matter what, even when wondering where was home-base after all,” one wonders if the author isn’t describing herself.
After the murder of Sitting Bull, Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, wrote that he felt it would be better if Indians died rather than live as “the miserable wretches they are.” Any wonder Glancy would turn to Job to make meaning of her heritage? Imagine our author as a little dark-skinned girl in Kansas watching Judy Garland.
Glancy centers her Job story in the land of Uz where Job lived. Uz her Oz: Glancy illuminates Indians with complexity. In sound, Uz is close to “us.” Her vision is expansive rather than reductive, her Christian faith is not searching to isolate victims but to make us united and indivisible. The music of her words ponders what sort of God lives behind the curtain in the face of unmitigated unfairness and harm. More questions than answers, and what’s missing is rancor. Present is mercy. The mind and hand that made this work is mature. Perhaps there is kindness to not fleshing Aunt Fannie out? Circumspectness deepens in Glancy’s work. She writes:
I like the landscape of land.
The language that stretches like landscape on the road before me.
The rough weather. The distance.
I want to struggle.
I want to see what there is to write.
To see how it can be written
I find failures and rewrites and rewrites rewritten
Until my words are served on the page —
Until my writing is curtains for that window I want always to leave open.
The image of curtains and a window reoccurs for Glancy, harkening back to the school and her skin darker than the other children. In “It was over there by that place” she writes:
My first memory I remember was the sun through the curtains in a moving breeze the sun. I was in the crib. I am when no one else, it said. The curtains my mother bought. Not made. There were all these words in the world for the place on which the house sat in which my room was in the house… I would be hurt. That was known. It was in the words the place carried. It was in the description of what it would be. It was part of the word that meant place where I lived. They had been hurt where they came from. He from a longer journey. She from a shorter one, but which took longer.
Elliptical, subtle, laconic, kind, discreet, direct, potent, opaque, firm.
I inherit my own cracks. The cracks our lineage. Documented.
On July 20, 2017, Glancy, close to eighty, drove from eastern Kansas to the Ash Hollow Historical State Park in western Nebraska to view seven Native American artifacts on loan from the Smithsonian. She’s a kind of Sam Shepherd character, in her car instead of on a horse—the ancient tableau of the Wild West still there somehow. Radiant and sorrowful, my iron woman of a friend. I had been in touch with her. Told her our mother was soon to be placed in a nursing home after a stroke broke her brain in half. Glancy prayed over the phone with me for my mother. She was grateful our faith was something we shared. And so was I. She knew a thing or two about mourning a parent who was now distant. In a poem about her father she wrote: “I remember the silence of his lost power, / the red buffalo painted on his chest.”
Glancy turned onto 1-70 to US 183, north to I-180, 26 west of Ogallala to the State Park. She drove 563 miles. Something of The Grapes of Wrath to her journeying. Frequently she stayed in anonymous motels, the blinking neon lighting up her dark skin and her gray hair. She has said to me she travels frugally, that she has a sunroof and sometimes at night sleeps in her car and looks up at the stars. She wrote: “Long drives in a short time have become a means of research, my forward going on the road revealed a backflow.” Driving in her Ford Edge, lone, intent on her mission. While she was driving, a pebble from a passing truck cracked her windshield. She watched a crack cross her line of vision, dividing the line of hills, dividing the road. Light reflected from the crack as the sun moved across the division. Her view split along two different lines that didn’t meet.
She wrote: “How appropriate the crack in my line of vision. It is the way I feel with two heritages. It is how I felt at a liberal arts college as a Christian where Christianity was not recognized. It is the way I have almost felt everywhere.” She writes around the cracks. As I write this now, my father is dead four months and three days and my mother is institutionalized and pressing a button to be put onto the toilet by an overworked nurse, and I inherit my own cracks. The cracks our lineage. The cracks Glancy’s lineage. Documented.
Father Spencer Reece is the vicar of St. Paul’s Wickford, Rhode Island. Acts, his third collection of poems, will come out in 2024 with FSG.
