Short Summary of Lullaby by Leslie Marmon Silko
The story "Lullaby" was published in storyteller
(1981), a book in which Silko interweaves autographical reminiscences, short
stories, poetry, photographs of her family, and traditional songs. 'Lullaby' is
one of the most noted pieces in Storyteller. It is told from the perspective of
an old woman reminiscing about some of the most tragic events of her life. She
recalls being informed of the death of her son in the war, the loss of her
children after being taken by white doctors, and the exploitative treatment of
her husband by the white rancher who employs him. Ayah, Chato, Jimmie, Ella,
and Danny are the characters of the story. Ayah's only comfort is memory and
the inalterable connections between land, memory, and life. Silko can make the
readers feel the intense pain of loneliness associated with the loss of Ayah's
family and culture at the hands of the white man.
Detailed Summary of Lullaby
Lullaby begins with Ayah leaning against a tree near a
stream, reminiscing about some events of her life. She remembers her mother and
the old woman who helped her give birth to her first child, Jimmie. Yet she
also recaps the time the white man came to her door to announce that Jimmie had
died in a helicopter crash. Ayah could not speak English, and her husband;
Chato had to translate the tragic news for her.
Even more devastating is her memory of the time her two
children, Danny and Ella were taken away from her. The white doctor asked her
to sign some piece of paper. She could not read so she signed the paper simply
out of fear. She grabbed the two children and ran up into the hills. She waited
there all day until Chato came home. When the doctors came there the next day
with a policeman, Chato spoke to them and then explained to her that the paper
she had signed permitted them. Their grandmother had died of tuberculosis and
they claimed the children had contracted it as well. After this Ayah blamed
Chato for teaching her to sign. This created a rift in their relationship and
they began to sleep apart.
When the children were brought back to visit, they were
accompanied by two white women. The children spoke to her in their native
language and judged her to be an unfit mother for them. The last time the
children were brought to visit, they could no longer even speak to their
mother, and Ella did not seem to recognize her. She also remembers, years
later, the white rancher said Chato was too old to work anymore and threatened
to evict them. Chato would spend money at the bar. Ayah went there to look for
him. When she did not find him there, she went out in the snow to search for
him. When they stopped to rest, he was dying. She tucked a blanket around him
and began to sing Lullaby her grandmother had sung when she was little. The
song fulfills her belief that she had been mortising the right livelihood.
The story is concerned with the oral tradition of
storytelling in Native American culture. It deals with the loss of children due
to war and white domination. It is also related with the exploitative treatment
of Ayah's husband by the white rancher who employs him.
About the writer Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko (1948) was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
She is widely recognized as one of the finest living Native American writer.
She is known for her lyric treatment of Native American subjects. She is the
novelist, poet, and essayist. She attended Catholic Schools, took a B.A. from
the university of New Mexico, then began Law School under a special program for
Native Americans. But she soon gave it up to become a writer and a teacher.
Born to the photographer Lee Marmon and his wife, Mary Virginia, Leslie Marmon
Silko is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican and Anglo- American heritage. Her mixed ancestry has influenced her work in many ways.
Growing up on the edge of the Laguna Pueblo reservation,
Marmon Silko's earliest experiences were positioned between cultures. In 1974,
she published a volume of poetry called Laguna Woman. Marmon Silko was also
acknowledged the influence of her own family's storytelling on her method and
vision. Her works' primarily focus on the alienation of Native Americans in a
White society and on the importance of Native traditions and community in
helping them cope with modern life. She has been noted as a major contributor
to the Native American literary and artistic renaissance, which began in the
late 1960s. The Man to Send Rain Clouds (1969), Ceremony (1977) etc. are her
famous works.
Lullaby [question answer]
Explain the song sung by Ayah at the end
of the story.
Ans. The song and its explanation are below.
|
The earth is your mother, she holds you. The sky is your father, he protects you. Sleep, sleep. Rainbow is your sister, she loves you. The winds are your brothers, they sing to you. Sleep, sleep. We are together always We are together always There never was a time when this was not so. |
This song is taken from Silko's
highly acclaimed story with the title Lullaby. Ayah, the central female
character, sings Chato, her husband, this song that her grandparents had sung
to her in her childhood days. The song foregrounds the harmonious relationship
between humans and nature as reflected in Laguna myths. Moreover, it also
emphasizes the protective role of nature.
The earth is your mother, she holds you. The sky is your
father, he protects you- sleep, sleep. Rainbow is your sister she loves you.
The winds are your brothers, they sing to you- sleep, sleep. We are together
always, there never was a time when this was not so. In this way, Ayah sings
this song.
What is lullaby? What are its distinctive features?
Ans: A lullaby is a cradlesong, a soothing song to calm
children or lull them to sleep. It is quite simple and comprehensible to the
children. The vocabularies are from the children's dictionary.
What roles do the earth and the sky play
in the protection of a child? How do they complement in each other?
Ans: The earth as a mother holds and the sky as a father
protects the child. As father and mother are required to be born, earth from
down and sky from up protecting the child so they complement each other. Both
have an equal role.
Introduce the Characters of the story Lullaby in brief.
Ans. The characters of this story are below.
Ayah: She is the main character and
narrator in the story. She is an old woman, Navajo woman who bears the loss of
children.
Chato: The husband of Ayah who speaks English
and taught her to sign.
Danny: Young son of the couple who is taken
away from Ayahand Chato by the white doctors.
The Doctors: The white doctors come to take Ayah
and Chato's children away from them because they have contracted tuberculosis
from their grandmother. Jimmie: Ayah's first-born child who died in a
helicopter crash in the war.
Ella: Young daughter who is taken away
from them by the white doctors.
Why did Ayah hate Chato?
Ans: Ayah hated Chato because he taught her to sign so the
white doctor cheated her from the sign and took her two children away from her.
The loss of children was due to his reason.
Who sang Yeibechei sang to Ayah while
she was sitting under the cottonwood tree?
Ans: The wind and snow sang a high-pitched Yeibechei song.
How did Jimmie die? Was it possible to
get his dead body back? Why?
Ans: Jimmie died in the helicopter crash in the war. His dead
body was not possible to get back because the helicopter had burned after it
crashed.
Who came to take Danny and Ella? Why?
Ans: Two white doctors with a policeman came to take them
because their grandmother died of tuberculosis and they had contacted it well.
Who were chasing Ayah and her children?
Ans: Two white doctors were chasing Ayah and her children.
What pain was difficult for Ayah to
bear? Why?
Ans: The loss of children was worse than if they had died.
She could not bear the pain of losing two children who were taken by white
doctors.
Losing children is the hardest pain to
bear in the world. Do you agree with this statement?
Ans: Yes I agree. children are the flowers for the next
generation. They are grown up with love and affection. They are the blood of
the parents. The mother bears great pain while giving birth to them. Her life
is at risk. They are innocent and loveable. They continue anyone's generation.
Moreover, parental love is naturally great in any organism. So losing children
is the hardest pain to bear.
Lullaby Leslie Marmon Silko [word meaning]
|
burr (n.) |
seed
container of some plants covered in very small hooks |
|
canyon (n.) |
a
deep valley with steep of the rock |
|
cedar (n.) |
a
tall evergreen tree with wide spreading branches |
|
crystalline (adj.) |
like
crystal |
|
fluffy (adj.) |
feathery |
|
haunch (n.) |
the
hip, buttock, and upper thigh in human and animals |
|
jabber (n.) |
to
chatter, talk or gossip |
|
loom (n.) |
a
machine for making clothes by twisting threads between other threads |
|
lullaby (n.) |
a
soft gentle song sung to make a child go to sleep |
|
rancher (n.) |
a
person who owns or manages a farm |
|
shack (n.) |
a
small building made of wood or metal that has not been built well |
|
shimmer (n.) |
a
shining light |
|
spindle (n.) |
a
thin pointed piece of wood used for spinning wool into thread by hand |
|
sullenly (adv.) |
angrily |
|
tuft (n.) |
clump
or bunch |
|
venison (n.) |
meat
from a deer |
|
weaver (n.) |
a
person who weaves clothes, carpet, etc. |
Lullaby Leslie Marmon Silko [original story]
The sun had gone down but the snow in the wind gave off its
own light. It came in thick tufts like new wool-washed before the weaver spins
it. Ayah reached out for it like her own babies had, and she smiled when she
remembered how she had laughed at them. She was an old woman now, and her life
had become memories. She sat down with her back against the wide cottonwood
tree, feeling the rough bark on her back bones; she faced east and listened to
the wind and snow sing a high-pitched Yeibechei song. Out of the wind she felt
warmer, and she could watch the wide fluffy snow fill in her tracks, steadily,
until the direction she had come from was gone. By the light of the snow she could
see the dark outline of the big arroyo a few feet away. She was sitting on the
edge of Cebolleta Creek, where in the spring time the thin cows would graze on
grass already chewed flat to the ground. In the wide deep creek bed where only
a trickle of water flowed in the summer, the skinny cows would wander, looking
for new grass along winding paths splashed with manure Ayah pulled the old Army
blanket over her head like a shawl. Jimmie's blanket- the one he had sent to
her. That was a long time ago and the green wool was faded, and it was
unraveling on the edges. She did not want to think about Jim mie. So she
thought about the weaving and the way her mother had done it. On the tall
wooden loom set into the sand under a tamarack tree for shade. She could see it
clearly. She had been only a little girl when her grandma gave her the wooden
combs to pull the twigs and burrs from the raw, freshly washed wool. And while
she combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of
yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns
dyed bright yellow and red and gold. She watched them dye the yarn in boiling
black pots full of beeweed petals, juniper berries, and sage. The blankets her
mother made were soft and woven so tight that rain rolled off them like birds'
feathers. Ayah remembered sleeping warm on cold windy nights, wrapped in her
mother's blankets on the hogan's sandy floor.
The snow drifted now, with the northwest wind hurling it in
gusts. It drifted up around her black overshoes-old ones with little metal buck
les. She smiled at the snow which was trying to cover her little by little. She
could remember when they had no black rubber overshoes; only the high buckskin
leggings that they wrapped over their elkhide moccasins. If the snow was dry or
frozen, a person could walk all day and not get wet; and in the evenings the
beams of the ceiling would hang with lengths of pale buckskin leg gings, drying
out slowly.
She felt peaceful remembering. She didn't feel cold any more.
Jimmie's blanket seemed warmer than it had ever been. And she could remember
the morning he was born. She could remember whispering to her mother, who was
sleeping on the other side of the hogan, to tell her it was time now. She did
not want to wake the others. The second time she called to her, her mother
stood up and pulled on her shoes; she knew. They walked to the old stone hogan
together, Ayah walking a step behind her mother. She waited alone, learning the
rhythms of the pains while her mother went to call the old woman to help them.
The morning was already warm even before dawn and Ayah smelled the bee flowers
blooming and the young willow growing at the springs. She could remember that
so clearly, but his birth merged into the births of the other children and to
her it became all the same birth. They named him for the summer morning and in
English they called him Jimmie.
It wasn't like Jimmie died. He just never came back, and one
day a dark blue sedan with white writing on its doors pulled up in front of the
box car shack where the rancher let the Indians live. A man in a khaki uniform
trimmed in gold gave them a yellow piece of paper and told them that Jimmie was
dead. He said the Army would try to get the body back and then it would be
shipped to them, but it wasn't likely because the helicopter had burned after
it crashed. All of this was told to Chato because he could understand English.
She stood inside the doorway holding the baby while Chato listened. Chato spoke
English like a white man and he spoke Spanish too. He was taller than the white
man and he stood straighter too. Chato didn't explain why; he just told the
military man they could keep the body if they found it. The white man looked
bewildered; he nodded his head and he left. Then Chato looked at her and shook
his head, and then he told her, “Jimmie isn't coming home anymore," and
when he spoke, he used the words to speak of the dead. She didn't cry then, but
she hurt inside with anger. And she mourned him as the years passed, when a
horse fell with Chato and broke his leg, and the white rancher told them he
wouldn't pay Chato until he could work again. She mourned Jimmie because he
would have worked for his father then; he would have saddled the big bay horse
and ridden the fence lines each day, with wire cutters and heavy gloves, fixing
the breaks in the barbed wire and putting the stray cattle back inside again.
She mourned him after the white doctors came to take Danny
and Ella away. She was at the shack alone that day they came. It was back in
the days before they hired Navajo women to go with them as interpreters. She
recognized one of the doctors. She had seen him at the children's clinic at
Cañoncito about a month ago. They were wearing khaki uniforms and they waved
papers at her and a black ball-point pen, trying to make her understand their
English words. She was frightened by the way they looked at the children, like
the lizard watches the fly. Danny was swinging on the tire swing on the elm
tree behind the rancher's house, and Ella was toddling around the front door,
dragging the broomstick horse Chato made for her. Ayah could see they wanted
her to sign the papers, and Chato had taught her to sign her name. It was
something she was proud of. She only wanted them to go, and to take their eyes
away from her children.
She took the pen from the man without looking at his face and
she signed the papers in three different places he pointed to. She stared at
the ground by their feet and waited for them to leave. But they stood there and
began to point and gesture at the children. Danny stopped swinging. Ayah could
see his fear. She moved suddenly and grabbed Ella into her arms; the child
squirmed, trying to get back to her toys. Ayah ran with the baby toward Danny;
she screamed for him to run and then she grabbed him around his chest and
carried him too. She ran south into the foothills of juniper trees and black
lava rock. Behind her she heard the doctors running, but they had been taken by
surprise, and as the hills became steeper and the cholla cactus were thicker,
they stopped. When she reached the top of the hill, she stopped to listen in
case they were circling around her. But in a few minutes she heard a car engine
start and they drove away. The children had been too surprised to cry while she
ran with them. Danny was shaking and Ella's little fingers were gripping Ayah's
blouse.
She stayed up in the hills for the rest of the day, sitting
on a black lava boulder in the sun. shine where she could see for miles all
around her. The sky was light blue and cloudless, and it was warm for late
April. The sun warmth relaxed her and took the fear and anger away. She lay
back on the rock and watched the sky. It seemed to her that she could walk into
the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly. Danny played with lit tle pebbles
and stones, pretending they were birds eggs and then little rabbits. Ella sat
at her feet and dropped fistfuls of dirt into the breeze, watching the dust and
particles of sand intently. Ayah watched a hawk soar high above them, dark
wings gliding; hunting or only watching, she did not know. The hawk was patient
and he cir cled all afternoon before he disappeared around the high volcanic
peak the Mexicans called Guadalupe.
Late in the afternoon, Ayah looked down at the gray boxcar
shack with the paint all peeled from the wood; the stove pipe on the roof was
rusted and crooked. The fire she had built that morning in the oil drum stove
had burned out. Ella was asleep in her lap now and Danny sat close to her,
complaining that he was hungry; he asked when they would go to the house. “We
will stay up here until your father comes," she told him, “because those
white men were chasing us." The boy remembered then and he nodded at her
silently.
If Jimmie had been there he could have read those papers and
explained to her what they said. Ayah would have known then, never to sign
them. The doctors came back the next day and they brought a BIA policeman with
them. They told Chato they had her signature and that was all they needed.
Except for the kids. She listened to Chato sullenly; she hated him when he told
her it was the old woman who died in the winter, spitting blood; it was her old
grandma who had given the children this disease. "They don't spit blood,”
she said coldly. “The whites lie.” She held Ella and Danny close to her, ready
to run to the hills again. “I want a medicine man first," she said to
Chato, not looking at him. He shook his head. "It's too late now. The
policeman is with them. You signed the paper.” His voice was gentle.
It was worse than if they had died: to lose the children and
to know that somewhere, in a place called Colorado, in a place full of sick and
dying strangers, her children were without her. There had been babies that died
soon after they were born, and one that died before he could walk. She had
carried them herself, up to the boulders and great pieces of the cliff that
long ago crashed down from Long Mesa; she laid them in the crev ices of
sandstone and buried them in fine brown sand with round quartz pebbles that
washed down the hills in the rain. She had endured it because they had been
with her. But she could not bear this pain. She did not sleep for a long time
after they took her children. She stayed on the hill where they had fled the
first time, and she slept rolled up in the blanket Jimmie had sent her. She
carried the pain in her belly and it was fed by everything she saw: the blue
sky of their last day together and the dust and pebbles they played with; the
swing in the elm tree and broomstick horse choked life from her. The pain
filled her stomach and there was no room for food or for her lungs to fill with
air. The air and the food would have been theirs.
She hated Chato, not because he let the police man and
doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had
taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her
about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you. She
slept alone on the hill until the middle of November when the first snows came.
Then she made a bed for herself where the children had slept. She did not lie
down beside Chato again until many years later, when he was sick and shivering
and only her body could keep him warm. The illness came after the white rancher
told Chato he was too old to work for him anymore, and Chato and his old woman
should be out of the shack by the next afternoon because the rancher had hired
new people to work there. That had satisfied her. To see how the white man
repaid Chato's years of loyalty and work. All of Chato's fine-sounding English
talk didn't change things.
It snowed steadily and the luminous light from the snow
gradually diminished into the darkness. Somewhere in Cebolleta a dog barked and
other village dogs joined with it. Ayah looked in the direction she had come,
from the bar where Chato was buying the wine. Sometimes he told her to go on
ahead and wait; and then he never came. And when she finally went back looking
for him, she would find him passed out at the bottom of the wooden steps to
Azzie's Bar. All the wine would be gone and most of the money too, from the
pale blue check that came to them once a month in a government envelope. It was
then that she would look at his face and his hands, scarred by ropes and the
barbed wire of all those years, and she would think, this man is a stranger;
for forty years she had smiled at him and cooked his food, but he remained a
stranger. She stood up again, with the snow almost to her knees, and she walked
back to find Chato.
It was hard to walk in the deep snow and she felt the air
burn in her lungs. She stopped a short distance from the bar to rest and
readjust the blanket. But this time he wasn't waiting for her on the bottom
step with his old Stetson hat pulled down and his shoulders hunched up in his
long wool overcoat.
She was careful not to slip on the wooden steps. When she
pushed the door open, warm air and cigarette smoke hit her face. She looked
around slowly and deliberately, in every corner, in every dark place that the
old man might find to sleep. The bar owner didn't like Indians in there,
especially Navajos, but he let Chato come in because he could talk Spanish like
he was one of them. The men at the bar stared at her, and the bartender saw
that she left the door open wide. Snowflakes were flying inside like moths and
melting into a puddle on the oiled wood floor. He motioned to her to close the
door, but she did not see him. She held herself straight and walked across the room
slowly, searching the room with every step. The snow in her hair melted and she
could feel it on her forehead. At the far corner of the room, she saw red
flames at the mica window of the old stove door; she looked behind the stove
just to make sure. The bar got quiet except for the Spanish polka music playing
on the jukebox. She stood by the stove and shook the snow from her blanket and
held it near the stove to dry. The wet wool smell re minded her of new-born
goats in early March, brought inside to warm near the fire. She felt calm.
In past years they would have told her to get out. But her
hair was white now and her face was wrinkled. They looked at her like she was a
spider crawling slowly across the room. They were afraid; she could feel the
fear. She looked at their faces steadily. They reminded her of the first time
the white people brought her children back to her that winter. Danny had been
shy and hid behind the thin white woman who brought them. And the baby had not
known her until Ayah took her into her arms, and then Ella had nuzzled close to
her as she had when she was nursing. The blonde woman was nervous and kept
looking at a dainty gold watch on her wrist. She sat on the bench near the
small window and watched the dark snow clouds gather around the mountains; she
was worrying about the unpaved road. She was frightened by what she saw inside
too: the strips of venison drying on a rope across the ceiling and the children
jabbering excitedly in a language she did not know. So they stayed for only a
few hours. Ayah watched the government car disappear down the road and she knew
they were already being weaned from these lava hills and from this sky. The
last time they came was in early June, and Ella stared at her the way the men
in the bar were now staring. Ayah did not try to pick her up; she smiled at her
instead and spoke cheerfully to Danny. When he tried to an swer her, he could
not seem to remember and he spoke English words with the Navajo. But he gave
her a scrap of paper that he had found somewhere and carried in his pocket; it
was folded in half, and he shyly looked up at her and said it was a bird. She
asked Chato if they were home for good this time. He spoke to the white woman
and she shook her head. “How much longer?” he asked, and she said she didn't
know; but Chato saw how she stared at the boxcar shack. Ayah turned away then.
She did not say good-bye.
She felt satisfied that the men in the bar feared her. Maybe
it was her face and the way she held her mouth with teeth clenched tight, like
there was nothing anyone could do to her now. She walked north down the road,
searching for the old man. She did this because she had the blanket, and there
would be no place for him ex cept with her and the blanket in the old adobe
barn near the arroyo. They always slept there when they came to Cebolleta. If
the money and the wine were gone, she would be relieved because then they could
go home again; back to the old hogan with a dirt roof and rock walls where she
herself had been born. And the next day the old man could go back to the few
sheep they still had, to follow along behind them, guiding them, into dry sandy
arroyos where sparse grass grew. She knew he did not like walking behind old
ewes when for so many years he rode big quarter horses and worked with cattle.
But she wasn't sorry for him; he should have known all along what would happen.
There had not been enough rain for their garden in five
years, and that was when Chato finally hitched a ride into the town and brought
back brown boxes of rice and sugar and big tin cans of welfare peaches. After
that, at the first of the month they went to Cebolleta to ask the postmaster
for the check; and then Chato would go to the bar and cash it. They did this as
they planted the garden every May, not because any thing would survive the
summer dust, but because it was time to do this. The journey passed the days
that smelled silent and dry like the caves above the canyon with yellow painted
buffaloes on their walls.
He was walking along the pavement when she found him. He did
not stop or turn around when he heard her behind him. She walked beside him and
she noticed how slowly he moved now. He smelled strong of wood smoke and urine.
Lately he had been forgetting.. Sometimes he called her by his sister's name
and she had been gone for a long time. Once she had found him wandering on the
road to the white man's ranch, and she asked him why he was going that way; he
laughed at her and said, “You know they can't run that ranch without me,"
and he walked on determined, limping on the leg that had been crushed many
years before. Now he looked at her curiously, as if for the first time, but he
kept shuffling along, moving slowly along the side of the high way. His
gray hair had grown long and spread out on the shoulders of
the long overcoat. He wore the old felt hat pulled down over his ears. His
boots were worn out at the toes and he had stuffed pieces of an old red shirt
in the holes. The rags made his feet look like little animals up to their ears
in snow. She laughed at his feet; the snow muffled the sound of her laugh. He
stopped and looked at her again. The wind had quit blow ing and the snow was
falling straight down; the southeast sky was beginning to clear and Ayah could
see a star.
"Let's rest awhile,” she said to him. They walked away
from the road and up the slope to the giant boulders that had tumbled down from
the red sand rock mesa throughout the centuries of rainstorms and earth
tremors. In a place where the boulders shut out the wind, they sat down with
their backs against the rock. She offered half of the blanket to him and they
sat wrapped together.
The storm passed swiftly. The clouds moved east. They were
massive and full, crowding together across the sky. She watched them with the
feeling of horses-steely blue-gray horses startled across the sky. The powerful
haunches pushed into the distances and the tail hairs streamed white mist
behind them. The sky cleared. Ayah saw that there was nothing between her and
the stars. The light was crystalline. There was no shimmer, no distortion
through earth haze. She breathed the clarity of the night sky; she smelled the
purity of the half moon and the stars. He was lying on his side with his knees
pulled up near his belly for warmth. His eyes were closed now, and in the light
from the stars and the moon, he looked young again.
She could see it descend out of the night sky: an icy
stillness from the edge of the thin moon. She recognized the freezing. It came
gradually, sinking snowflake by snowflake until the crust was heavy and deep.
It had the strength of the stars in Orion, and its journey was endless. Ayah
knew that with the wine he would sleep. He would not feel it. She tucked the
blanket around him, remembering how it was when Ella had been with her; and she
felt the rush so big inside her heart for the babies. And she sang the only
song she knew to sing for babies. She could not remember if she had ever sung
it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her
mother had sung it:
The earth is your mother,
she holds you.
The sky is your father,
he protects you.
Sleep,
sleep.
Rainbow is your sister,
she loves you.
The winds are your brothers,
they sing to you.
Sleep,
sleep.
We are together always
We are together always
There never was a time
when this
was not so.