of life teachers, whose stories and lessons become indelible in memory?
To illustrate Mabel’s unique ability as an interlocutor, I have often told to friends and written about Mabel’s telling a colleague from Stanford about “the woman who loved a snake.” I had taken this colleague, a fellow graduate student, to visit Mabel, whereupon Mabel began talking about a woman she once knew who lived with her husband in the hills above Nice, in Lake County. The husband worked nights, tending cows and young calves, and one night after he left the house, as the woman was finishing the dishes, she heard a knock on the door. The woman was alarmed; she sensed something peculiar, even wrong. Against better judgment, she opened the door and found, to her surprise, a handsome man, quite tall and dressed in black. She let him in.
As Mabel put it, I guess one thing led to another. When the husband returned in the morning, he found a small black snake coiled up at the bottom of the vase on the kitchen table. He took the snake outside and let it go in the brush. The next day, the same thing happened—the husband came home in the morning and found the snake in the vase on the kitchen table. Two more times it happened this way—the husband found the snake. On the fifth morning, he said, “Something is wrong here. I’m going to kill this snake.” Holding the snake in one hand, he reached with the other hand for a knife from the kitchen sink, and then he headed to the door—at which point the woman broke down in a flood of tears and confessed her infidelity with the tall handsome man dressed in black. “Well then,” the husband said, “now I’m really going to kill the snake,” and he went outside and cut the snake into several pieces. But, as it turned out, the snake was there the next morning, and each morning after, again and again.
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
