Sarah Black
Caroline Weaves My Rugs
The Chinle Rug (Sisnaajini’- Sacred Mountain of the East)
I had been working on the reservation for about three weeks when Caroline came to my clinic with her pillowcase. “Are you Sarah? I heard there was a rich white lady working here. You buy rugs?”
“That’s me, but you must be looking for some other rich white lady. I mean, I work here. How rich can I be?”
She gave me a sideways smile, mostly with the eyes, like her smiles were horses that would gallop away if they weren’t kept under a strict rein. She was about my age, mid-forties, with hair drawn back into a bun and sweet round cheeks.
I had a little medical clinic at a remote boarding school. We were a ways out there, as people said, and the boarding school, Rough Rock, was known for Navajo cultural education--the kids were taught the language and the culture. Rough Rock was also known around the reservation for being extremely traditional.
It hadn’t taken long for Perry, the EMT who had been holding down the medical fort, to check me out. Was I was one of those flaky, New-Age women who loved everything Navajo, went around dressed in moccasins and turquoise jewelry? (not). Or some hippie flotsam with crack-brained ideas about the spirituality of Native Americans, secretly hoping to crash their ceremonies? (not). Or, worse, a desperate, on-the-edge alcoholic who had been run out of white society and ended up here, with no other place to go? (not).
“Run out of town for being a drunk? Are you kidding me?”
Perry shook his head. “You’re in the four sacred mountains now.” He stretched and cracked the bones in his neck. “Na-va-jo country. White people go crazy out here. This one teacher, he stayed until the first paycheck came through, then he put on a backpack, walked out to the main road, and stuck out his thumb. Never heard from again. I could tell you some stories.”
“Maybe they’re going crazy from listening to you crack your neck bones.”
“I heard they’re gonna run a criminal background check on you.”
I shrugged. “They won’t find anything interesting, I’m afraid. I just needed a job.” A job, a home, shelter from the storm. The usual.
So when Caroline asked me what I was doing at Rough Rock, I had an answer. “We were driving from Kayenta to Chinle, and I ran out of gas. You know Darryl, works in Security? He helped me out. So I said I’d stay and run the clinic.”
So far no one had thought I was particularly funny, not even Darryl, but I got her little smile again. “I used to work here, over in accounting. I left in 92, I think. You remember, Perry? But I wanted to weave. I mean, I wanted to really weave—to learn it.” She unwrapped the pillowcase and pulled out a rug, spread it on the counter.
You can’t step foot on the reservation without seeing rugs. The women are saturated with rugs; weaving is in their blood, in their eyes, and if you see a Navajo woman sitting on a bench with a gone look on her face, she is probably thinking about weaving. Their fingers weave in their sleep. There are rugs for sale in the trading posts, wool for sale in the grocery stores. But the rugs, the sharp blacks and reds and grays, the complicated designs, the prices! Jeez Louise, the prices. Hundreds and thousands. It hadn’t taken many trips to the trading posts to figure the rugs were surely worth the price, but way too expensive for me.
This rug Caroline pulled out of the pillowcase was something different. It was small, and the colors were like nothing I’d seen before, quiet, rich--pale, variegated gray, soft rose and ivory, olive green with touches of vermillion and gold.
It wasn’t just the colors that were unusual, either. The weaving seemed finer, as if the wool was very thin, and the design was almost delicate.
“It’s Chinle pattern,” she said. “See this?” Her finger traced a figure eight, but that central design was made up of what seemed thousands of geometric, blooming flowers. On the bottom of the rug there was a wide band of patterns, tiny blocks of color, a feather with a long, delicate shaft woven in vermillion and sage green and chocolate. “I don’t like it to be exactly symmetrical. It’s most interesting when the central design is symmetrical but not the rug. You know what I mean?”
“The design is symmetrical, but the rug is balanced by other things, like the colors.” She nodded, looking pleased, and I thought my heart would stop if I couldn’t take this rug home with me and study it day and night. “Caroline, I really don’t have very much money. We’ve just moved here.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Florida.”
“Florida? Your son came with you?”
I nodded.
“The rug is four hundred. If you want, you could give me two hundred now and two hundred on payday.”
Everyone in the office was studying the rug, and there was an intense discussion going on in Navajo. The lady who sold burritos out of a blue cooler came in, and she joined the discussion. I had the feeling they were talking about the colors, about how Caroline had dyed the wool to make those colors. The burrito lady came by the clinic every morning. The homemade tortillas were stuffed with mashed potatoes, Spam, and green chilies. It hadn’t taken long before I was hooked, maybe two burritos. She came over and nudged me with her elbow. “I told her you were here.”
“Thanks. Why is that rug so different from other rugs, like the ones in the trading posts?”
All the ladies turned around to answer. Caroline didn’t speak. “She dyes her own wool. Natural dyes, from the plants.”
“Spins it herself, too, so it is extra fine.”
“Caroline has a rug in the museum! That one up in Flag!”
Caroline pushed these comments away with her hand, like they were going to wrap their arms around her neck and give her a kiss. “Don’t buy rugs at the trading post,” she said. “We sell rugs to the trading post if we can’t sell them to a person. You have to get to know a weaver.”
“I can get two hundred dollars out of savings. I’ll go into town to the bank after work.”
“Okay.” She handed the rug to me and tucked the pillowcase into her purse.
“”Do you want to keep it until I pay you?”
“No, no, I’ll just come by your house tonight.”
Yei Bi Chei Rug (Soodzil’- Sacred Mountain of the South)
I was fascinated by the colors. The landscape around Rough Rock is tumbled rust and yellow sandstone, rough, scrubby plants like rabbitbrush and snakeweed, dusty sage green with pale yellow flowers, prickly pear with its deep rose fruit, juniper and pinion pine. Walk around out on the mesa, and you can pick a few plants and boil them up and dye some wool. Perry brought me a bag of wool after his family sheared, and I tried my hand at dyeing.
Yellow. Everything came out yellow. Pale yellow, bright yellow, gold. I tried different mordants: alum, baking soda, salt--though I did draw the line at aged urine. I heard aged urine could turn some yellows to green but I decided to pass. I took the wool out to show Caroline.
“How pretty!”
“But Caroline, it’s all yellow. Everything is yellow!”
“Well, but it would have to be. You’re using plants that all grow together in the same place.”
Oh. Well, actually, that made some sense.
“See how pretty, this dark gold against this pale yellow. Have you been carding and spinning?”
“I’m working on it. I got a spindle up at Navajo Arts and Crafts in Chinle. It’s a good working spindle, heavy.” Actually, the yellows weren’t bad next to each other.
“You could card and spin undyed white wool with the pale yellow, make it lighter. You go camping down in New Mexico, right?”
“Yeah, in the mountains.”
“Bring me some ground lichen next time you go, okay? You find it on the rocks. That makes good brown dye, like a nut.”
“I sure will. What have you been working on?” She had a huge warp on the loom, maybe six feet by five.
“I’ve just started a rug for this rich white lady works at the pharmacy in Kayenta. She wants a Chief’s Blanket.”
She looked gloomy, and I felt a bit smug. I would never tell Caroline what to weave! And those Chief’s Blankets- lots of bold reds and blacks and blues. It just screamed Navajo Rug. Not Caroline’s sort of weaving at all. But a woman had to make a living. I noticed the small black and white TV with the aluminum foil on the rabbit ears that used to sit next to her loom had been replaced by a good nineteen inch color job, and Caroline was watching Wheel of Fortune while she worked.
“I was going to come see you on payday.”
“Really?”
“I have this little rug. I don’t know…I don’t usually do Yei Bi Chei. Let me show you.”
The rug was small, I was happy to see, since I still could not afford a rug the size that she had on the loom now. This rug had a picture of the Yeis, a row of them, and they were bringing something to Talking God. Talking God was not a figure, he was a complicated geometric pattern in old gold. The bottom had a band of designs similar to the bottom of the Chinle rug, only wider and more complex. I recognized her feather. It was doubled, like a mirror image of itself, in pale yellow and old gold--very similar to the colors of dyed wool I had brought to show her. The top was a landscape in charcoal gray over a rose-pink sky. And it was upside down.
“That landscape, it looks familiar.”
“If you drive to Round Rock from Lukachukai, you’ll see it.”
Each of the figures was wearing a tiny, perfect pair of Navajo moccasins with a silver concho over the ankle, the whole no bigger than a centimeter.
“This feather is different, Caroline. It’s double.” The shaft was made up of tiny bands of colors, maybe fifteen different colors in the space of four inches.
“My son drew it out for me on graph paper.”
“It’s beautiful. I even like the yellows! Why is Talking God not a figure?”
She shrugged, and her face had a complicated, private look. I had heard that traditional weavers didn’t weave the Yei Bi Chei or Sand Paintings or other designs that were a part of medicine. Rough Rock was very traditional.
“I thought of you. I thought you would like this rug.”
“I do, very much. It’s like the Chinle rug, but so different, too.”
“I am selling it for two hundred and seventy-five dollars. That’s how much the NTUA bill is! Can you believe they said they would cut off the electricity?”
“Have they done that before?”
“Well, no, but they said they would. This time I think they mean it.”
“I can go up to the ATM machine and get you some cash, or I can give you a check to the Wells Fargo.”
The Rug From the Hand Trembler (Dook’o’ oosliid- Sacred Mountain of the West)
Caroline came to see me at the house, and she immediately went to the loom and checked out the rug I was weaving. It was stripes. That’s how weavers were supposed to learn, weaving stripes. I loved weaving stripes. Every woman in Rough Rock who’d heard I was taking lessons had come by the house to check out the loom.
Caroline gave the warp a little shake. “Good. It’s tight.” She had the pillowcase with her. “I had to go see the Hand Trembler,” she said. She showed me her right hand. The knuckles were swollen, and her first two fingers were twisted a little.
“What happened?”
“It was too much weaving. It’s better now, but she told me to weave a rug that was off center. A little one like you like.”
“Did it help? Your hand still looks stiff.”
“Some. It still hurts, but it’s better.”
I got the Eucerin cream out of the cabinet and rubbed some on her joints, massaged the fingers out. “I think you’ve got to rub your hand after you weave, work the kinks out. Protect the skin with this lotion. Maybe some ibuprophen if your fingers really hurt.”
“I’ve got some of that at home.” She let me rub her hand until the lotion was absorbed. “I sent another rug up to the museum. It’s like yours. I haven’t heard if they accepted it or not.” She turned her face away. “They called me Master Weaver! I told them no, I’m just a beginner. Then this young white girl told me it will help me sell rugs to be called Master Weaver.”
“I would say you’re a Master Weaver. That museum, do they like the new designs you’ve been weaving? Or do they just want traditional designs?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Most people like what they already know.”
The rug was strange and beautiful, different than anything I’d seen, but unmistakably a sister to my other rugs. Wide, intricate woven bands in rose, ivory, golden orange, pale chocolate, olive. Off center was a box that had layers of geometric shapes from the outside to the inside, the way I thought a keyhole would look if you put it under a microscope. Each layer brought your eye in, sage green, pumpkin, deep rose, and in the middle was an olive green doorway.
“Caroline, it’s beautiful! I feel like I want to go inside, see what’s waiting there.”
She laughed a little under her breath. “Some rugs, only you and me like the design. How is your son? Is he still learning Navajo?”
“Yes. He keeps trying to talk to those waitresses at the diner in Tsegi Canyon. Hopeless.”
“I want to borrow the Chinle rug. My niece, it’s time for her to do her kinaalda.”
“Is she old enough already?”
Caroline nodded. “You know, after the kinaalda, the rug’s special. You can’t sell it to a stranger, not after a ceremony.”
“I’m not ever going to sell your rugs, Caroline.”
The Wide Ruins Rug (Dibe’ nitsaa- Sacred Mountain of the North)
When I had been on the reservation for five years, I decided it was time to move on. I had lots of good, practical reasons, such as the need for a good high school for a teenager and the need for a home of our own, maybe even some retirement funds. Maybe I was starting to feel too settled. Perry warned me it was a mistake to leave. “See, you’ve been out here too long now. This place, it sinks into you. We don’t like to go outside the four sacred mountains. I think you better stay. You won’t like it out there now.”
I couldn’t believe the next place wouldn’t touch my heart the same way this one had. “If I don’t go, I can’t sell you the truck!” We had been in delicate negotiations for weeks over the sale of my pickup. It was a reservation truck now, not in any way ready to face the city.
“You can buy a new truck. I’ll find you a good one for sale on the internet.” I bared my teeth at him. The time he spent looking for trucks on the internet was something of a talking point at work. “If you go, you’ll be back in a year. We need you here. I’ll just drive the truck. Hold it for you until you come back.”
I had the cash from the sale of the truck in my pocket when Caroline came by the clinic, and she had the pillowcase with her. “Why are you going?” she asked, hugging me. “You’ve just learned to weave.”
“I’m looking for something. I don’t really know. I’ll know it when I find it.”
“I have one more rug for you. You need four.”
The Wide Ruins was a pattern of complicated, wide stripes with geometric designs woven one inside the other. This one was in the colors I loved, so warm and rich, the colors of the landscape around us--golden orange and sage green, rust and ivory and rose, olive and a beautiful, strange dusty purple-brown. She gestured toward the color. “That’s your ground lichen.” Across the top was a row of little birds, their legs and beaks impossibly fine. She shook her head. “You didn’t sell your truck to Perry! I know he didn’t give you enough for that truck. Maybe you shouldn’t go.”
“He gave me enough for this rug and some gas money, so I’m doing okay.”
It wasn’t long before I began to wonder if Perry wasn’t right, and I shouldn’t have left the four sacred mountains. I wasn’t Navajo. Rough Rock wasn’t my home. I had been a guest, forever only a guest and I needed to find us a home of our own. I kept telling myself that, but something was pulling at my chest, a tug of desperate longing for the land, the landscape and the people. I felt it like a weakness, as if something vital had twisted and torn. My strength flowed out of me like water.
Sometimes now I think my heart isn’t beating right, just a weak flutter when before it was as strong as a hand on a drum. Maybe what I was looking for was what I left behind me. I have the four rugs on the walls of my bedroom, and nights I lie in bed, listening to my weak heart, feeling the colors of Navajo country, lost to me now except in these rugs. I call off the names of the four sacred mountains, one for each of Caroline’s rugs. Sisnaajini’. Soodzil’. Dook’o’oosliid. Dibe’ nitsaa.
©2008 by Sarah Black
