Mabel stopped talking, and my friend, writing her dissertation on some aspect of Renaissance literature, asked Mabel what the snake symbolized.
“I don’t know nothing about symbols,” Mabel answered.
Mabel then recalled a warm summer evening in Lake County, when, parked in a car, she saw a tall man dressed in black come out of the grocery store in Middletown. He was carrying a bag of groceries and, instead of taking the road, he went down into the dry creek bed adjacent the store and began walking northward, toward the hills.
“I think that was the man—the snake,” Mabel said. Then she added with a chuckle, “And he was—he was real handsome, that guy.”
My friend, her question still unanswered as far as she was concerned, became all the more frustrated. “I mean, Mabel, was it a man or was it a snake?”
Mabel appeared to think a moment. Then she looked at my friend.
“I don’t know,” she answered, “but it was a problem.”
Stories and then more stories. Mabel’s stories and our memory of and retelling of the stories—how many times have I told about “the woman who loved a snake"?—not only challenge the confines of our thinking, but help us to understand ourselves as thinking, cultured beings in a world we share with other people and all forms of life. Consequently, we can begin to think of ourselves anew in place and time. We can open ourselves and, when necessary, change, heal, or as the old saying goes, find ourselves. Certainly, my very writing of this book—my writing Mabel McKay’s life story—became just that for me, a finding of myself.
It has now been eighteen years since the first publication of this book. So much has happened. “The world, it happens,” as Mabel would say. I sometimes wonder what she would think of things today. The son she raised, Marshall McKay, the exemplary leader of the Rumsey Wintun Tribe, known today as the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, is not only an important collector of Indian art and basketry, but also serves on several boards for organizations and institutions preserving American Indian art and culture, including the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Clearly, Mabel’s influence can be seen in the person closest to her. Likewise, Violet Chappell, in carrying on the teachings and instructions of her mother, Essie Parrish, incorporates Mabel’s songs in “prayer sessions” held on the Kashaya Pomo Reservation. Mabel’s baskets remain on display and in permanent collections throughout the country. Her art and songs are timeless. No less, then, her life, from which these things came, and what we can glimpse of that life yet today—timeless, transformative.
It was by looking at the land about my house this morning—and seeing the smoke and soot in the sky—that I got my answer about how to start this preface. I was walking in the garden, wondering what to write, when I found myself distracted by the hazy sky and began worrying about the dry brush outside my yard—I worried about fire on this mountain. My lavender, which feeds so many bees, looked dry; the mimosa tree that draws the hummingbirds, wilted. Mabel came then, clear as a bell. I heard her talking about her Dream. And more: “You got water in your well, don’t you? . . . Well then, water the lavender, water the mimosa.”
Sonoma Mountain
August 2012
Sarah Taylor’s Granddaughter
I never knew nothing but the spirit.
The scene was typical. Mabel lecturing, answering questions from an auditorium of students and faculty who wanted to know about her baskets and her life as a medicine woman. As always, she was puzzling, maddening. But that morning I studied her carefully, as if I might see or understand something about her for the first time. She had asked me to write her life story, and after knowing her for over thirty years and with stacks of notes and miles of tape, I still didn’t know how.
“You’re an Indian doctor,” a young woman with bright red hair spoke from the middle of the room. “What do you do for poison oak?”
“Calamine lotion,” Mabel answered. She was matter-of-fact. The student sank into her chair.
A distinguished-looking man in gray tweed raised his hand. Mabel looked down from the podium to the front row where he was sitting.
“Mabel, how old were you when you started weaving baskets?”
Mabel adjusted her modish square glasses. “Bout six, I guess.”
“When did you reach perfection?”
Mabel didn’t understand the professor’s question and looked to where I was sitting, behind a display table showing her baskets.
“When did your baskets start to be good?” I ventured. “When did you start selling them?”
Mabel looked back at the man. “Bout nineteen, eighteen maybe.”
“Was it your grandmother who taught you this art?”
“It’s no such a thing art. It’s spirit. My grandma never taught me nothing about the baskets. Only the spirit trained me.” She waited for another question from the man, then added, “I only follow my Dream. That’s how I learn.”
The young woman from the middle of the room shot up again. Clearly, she was perplexed. “I mean, Mabel, do you use herbs and plants to treat people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you talk to them? Do they talk to you?”
“Well, if I’m going to use them I have to talk, pray.”
The woman paused, then asked, “Do plants talk to each other?”
“I suppose.”
“What do they say?”
Mabel laughed out loud, then caught her breath and said, “I don’t know. Why would I be listening?”
At that point the professor who had sponsored Mabel’s visit announced that time was up and that people could look at Mabel’s baskets on their way out. He reiterated the fact that Mabel was an Indian with a different world view, reminding the audience of her story earlier about meeting the Kashaya Pomo medicine woman Essie Parrish in Dream twenty years before she met her in person. The professor, an earnest man in his mid-forties, turned to Mabel. “You must have recognized Essie Parrish when you first saw her in person, didn’t you, Mabel?”
Mabel, who was fussing to detach the microphone from her neck, looked and said, “Yes, but she cut her hair a little.”
There it was. Quintessential Mabel. Nothing new. Same stories and questions. Same answers. This small Indian woman, over eighty years old, with coifed black hair and modish glasses, this little Indian woman in a mauve-colored summer dress adorned on the shoulder with a corsage of imitation African violets, had turned a Stanford auditorium upside down. No one cracked her.
On the way back to the Rumsey Reservation that day, I kept wondering how I was going to write about Mabel’s life. She was baffling, even for me. Certainly the facts of her life were interesting and warranted a story. World-renowned Pomo basketmaker with permanent collections in the Smithsonian and countless other museums. The last Dreamer and sucking doctor among the Pomo peoples. The last living member of the Long Valley Cache Creek Pomo tribe. The astute interlocutor famous for her uncanny talk that left people’s minds spinning. The facts were easy. The life was not.
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