OUR LITTLE SISTER OF YESTERDAY
With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with
necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’
eggs, with her modern American dress barely showing under her Indian
blanket of holiest red, her head pillowed against the mountains of the
North, and her little pueblo feet in the high-heeled Spanish slippers
stretched out upon the plains of the South, Santa Fé sits dreaming in the
golden sunlight.
Sometimes she dreams idly of her girlhood when she ran about the
mountains barefooted, her hair done in two squash-blossom whorls on
either side of her dusky head, so long ago that no white man had ever set
foot on the western continent. Or perhaps, half shutting her unfathomable
eyes, she remembers the heroes who fought and died for her, or the pomp
of her marriage with her Spanish first lord, Don Juan d’Onate—noble in
estates rather than character, though he brought her a wedding-gift of
white wooly animals, afterward called sheep, and furthermore, dressed her
in fine clothes, put her in a palace, and made a lady of her. Her little
bare feet were shod in scarlet slippers, and she had many skirts of silk
and velvet, though never a bodice to one of them, but her breast was
strung with necklaces and her arms with bracelets, and she had shawls of
silk and mantillas of lace to wrap most of her face and all of her bare
brown shoulders in. The palace had walls six feet thick; some say the
thick walls were to hide the true palace already built by her own Indian
forefathers. All the same, nobles in broadcloth embroidered in silver
and gold crowded her audience room when the Island of Manhattan was a
wilderness, and the wood of which the _Mayflower_ was to be built was
still growing in the forest of England.
But then the dream becomes a sad one of injustice and cruelty; of long,
long miserable years under the oppression of a dissipated gambling tyrant
who put her family to the sword or made them slaves. Then came revolt and
savage warfare; massacres that made her palace steps run red, vivid days
of flame, black ones of darkness until——And this is her dream of dreams!
She forgets it all happened in the long ago. The quick blood leaps again
in her veins, her heart beats fast, her pulses quiver at the magic name
of her hero, her conqueror, her lover, Don Diego de Vargas! Again she
sees him, surrounded by his panoplied soldiers, lances flashing, banners
waving, marching victorious across the plaza, and planting his cross at
her palace door in the name of the Virgin, demanding her glad surrender!
“Ah, to love was to live!” says Santa Fé. “Yet in all the world there
was only one De Vargas—and he has passed!” And she wraps herself in her
Indian blanket and falls again to dreaming.
Her alliance with the American Republic is what one might call a marriage
of arrangement. Foreign in race, in sentiment, in understanding, she
has never adopted the customs or manners of her new lord, but lives
tranquilly, uneventfully, dreaming always of the long ago.
And even though Don Diego de Vargas has lain for two centuries in the
grave of his forefathers, though Indians no longer go on the warpath,
though the eight-horse wagon mile-long caravans of the traders and
travelers from the far East beyond the Mississippi no longer come
clattering down over the mountains, to the excited and welcoming
shouts of the populace of, “_Los Americanos! La Caravana!_” crowding
into the Plaza to receive them, if the streets of Santa Fé no longer
riot in tumult and bloodshed, they at least still riot in color
and picturesqueness, kaleidoscopic enough to vie with anything in
Constantinople or Cairo. You might think yourself in the Orient or in a
city of old Spain transported upon a magic carpet, but nothing less like
the United States can be imagined. Along the narrow crooked streets,
dwellings hundreds of years old stand shoulder to shoulder with modern
houses that have wedged themselves between. Down a zigzag lane you may
see an Indian woman hooded in a white cotton shawl, and balancing a jar
of water on her head as in the Biblical pictures of Rebecca.
Besides big modern automobiles are Indians leading little burros so
loaded down with firewood that their meek little faces are all there is
to be seen protruding in front, little switching tails or kicking heels
in the back, and the whole bundle supported by spindly tiny-footed legs.
On a corner is an Indian wrapped in his bright blanket. Two Mexicans in
high-crowned wide-brimmed sombreros lean against a door frame and smoke
cigarettes. Cowboys in flannel shirts have vivid bandannas around their
throats, and there is more color yet in women’s dresses, in flowers, in
fruits, in awnings—color, color rioting everywhere. Over everything the
sun bakes just as it does in Spain or Northern Africa, and the people all
look as silent and dreamy as the town.
Only a few hundred miles away are typical striving American cities
shouting to anyone who will hear, and assailing the ears of those
who won’t, “Watch me grow—just watch me!” The big ones boom it, the
little ones pipe it, but each and every one shouts to the earth at
large, “Yesterday I was a community of nesters’ shanties; today I’m an
up-to-date thriving town. Tomorrow—wait, and you shall see!”
Yet their little Indian and Spanish sister in the center of a vast domain
of buried cities, of unmined treasures, dozes in the sun and cares not
a bit how much the world outside may strive, or teem or grow. Can anyone
fancy her waking from her reverie, dropping her indolent soft Spanish
accent and shouting in strident tones, that she, too, will be a bustling
growing town? Sooner fancy the Sphinx on the African desert urging,
“Votes for women!”