To My Grandmother, C/O The Mush Hole
Your skin must be part of the swell of dust that washes us when we walk in. Your smell, one chemical note in songs of mold and dry rot, of flaked paint and mice and rust and old paper, slides into me on shy breaths. Strangers, us two, meeting in the dust we’re made of. You, tota, are the grandmother I never met, and this is where you were born.
The Mohawk Institute was a school for teaching Indians, first of many like it in North America. Built on Kanyen’keháka—“Mohawk”—land, with Kanyen’keháka money. A nation perched on the hinge between British invasion and the old downbeat of Haudenosaunee diplomacy, we’d been spinning it for centuries: translators, talkers, bridgers, and builders. The school, at first, was just another stone to whet our edge. That was the 1830s, when they were recruiting teachers from good Loyalist families. By the 1930s, when you were there, the trust money was being eaten a mouthful at a time by Indian agents, the New England Company, and the Queen her very self. They called that school the Mush Hole. Mushy gruel in the open hole of a broken mouth; mushy shit out the end of a wormy gut. A place for making the boys farmhands and laborers; the girls, maids and mothers. The good girls left to set nice tables for white families in Hamilton or Toronto. Were you a good girl? Did you turn the blade of a butter knife toward the silvered rim of the plate? Your other grandchildren show me photos of a skinny girl out of uniform, wearing a borrowed Sunday dress and standing at her father’s bent knee. You were the ninth or tenth child of his third or fourth wife.
The architect renovating the school guides us up to the second floor. All the plaster and most of the lath’s down, and we can see the building’s naked bones. They want to turn it into a museum. It has caged more children in its wooden hips and ribs than any of its offspring, than even its chain link descendants now hold in Chiricahua and Tohono O’odham country. The architect complains about toilets and access. The building’s monstrous and still shifting, its gables arched like raptors’ wings. This man’s nervous in the role of host, a flushed tourist showing us around our own ruins. He tells us about the times the building was set on fire. An anecdote, an oh-my-goodness trill in his voice, as if setting fire to schools were a meaty footnote in his ethnography. As if children routinely take the heft of their own lives in hand and choose death by burning.
He shows us the girls’ dormitories. He shows us the headmaster’s office and family quarters. The Reverend William John Zimmerman, M.A. was headmaster here from 1945 to 1950. You left in 1946. Drive 2,055 kilometers to Winnipeg where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s files are locked away, and you’ll find a catalog of ways they say Reverend Zimmerman forced sex on children here. I count the steps from his office door to the girls’ rooms. Thirty, for a grown man. Forty, for a little girl.
I keep waiting to feel the trace of your hum. Orenna, the word they say means song in Kanyen’kéha but really describes frequency, oscillation, the way we fold and press and loosen the air around us. It ripples now in July heat, scattered by our shufflevoices. I sift for your slender braid of air. Down in the basement, you scratch the back of my throat. We stand in a triangle formed by kitchen, mess hall, and laundry. This is the sharp-cornered heart of the place. I taste blood, mine and yours. Words rise in your voice: Who the hell do you think you are, bringing me back here? I’m a spy, looking through eyes whose fishhook slants I recognize from your pictures. They skim the frog-green tiles, the gas burners bolted to the kitchen floor in imitation of hearth fires. Kahwatsire, a hearth. A word that also means family.
“Did you hide him inside you, tota, until it was too late for them to pull him out? Or did they decide this time the sin was all yours and demand your father come get you? My father, the size of a fist. The reason you finally came home.”
From the kitchen we look across the mess hall into the laundry. It’s a big, sunny room with a locked door. In TRC testimony, this was a place for being raped. It’s tiled white halfway up the walls, the only room with paint intact. Arsenic green, same color as hospitals and asylums of that era, thought to calm lunatics. Crank washers and manual wringers—did their noise drown screams? The teachers’ dining room is next to the laundry. They ate food the children raised on school grounds. The children cooked and served in the dining room. What’s the difference, tota, between rape on a full stomach and on an empty one?
Nobody can stand the laundry room for long. We are all, except the architect, the children of the children this place made. We go into the mess hall. From a high horizon of windows, you can see the field reaching all the way back to the trees and, under their wet veil, the railroad tracks. Some children ran. If you followed those tracks, tota, they would’ve taken you to Niagara Falls and the US border. Some made it, eating from trash bins and walking at night. Some froze. Some were caught and brought back and punished. You never ran. You were born here. This was home. Even later, as a grownup with children, you kept a scrubbed kitchen, ironed shirts to stand like soldiers on hangers, served meals with knives in place. You wrote a tidy Palmer hand, your English faultless, because you were taught well in school.
The architect’s hair is dark with temple sweat and he’s talking about bracing the building from outside. He throws a dirty hand toward the lawn and chokes for decent words. Remains, he says. There are little cupped burials of miscarriages and wire hanger births on the other side of the window. Even malnourished girls were fertile enough to fertilize the earth with the eggshell domes of new faces. Your eyes and mine scan that gruff lawn growing crabgrass and chicory for the seed of an uncle or an auntie of mine, planted and still thumb-sized after sixty years. I wonder why my father’s not here, too. Did you hide him inside you, tota, until it was too late for them to pull him out? Or did they decide this time the sin was all yours and demand your father come get you? My father, the size of a fist. The reason you finally came home.
The day’s burnt and fallen, and we’ve both seen enough. When I walk us out, into the shade of my parked car, I try to pull us apart again by vomiting. But the summer grass doesn’t absorb you. I brought a mask and didn’t wear it, so breathed in too much of your dust. Now I can’t get you out. You’re in me, awake and building thunder that won’t break the sky but only split the night in my head. I wanted to know why you were a stranger, tota. Why we could never speak. Now, you tell me, whimpering in the shadow of the Mush Hole, that pain is the song you left me to sing, when I had the nerve to step in and swallow you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amber Meadow Adams is Lower Mohawk of the Six Nations at Grand River. She holds a Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies from the University at Buffalo and a B.A. in Literature and Writing from Columbia University. Her short fiction and scholarship have been published in the UK, US, and Canada. She is currently reworking her doctoral research on the Haudenosaunee story of Creation into a novel.
Read Amber’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Read Amber’s “No Equivalent” essay here.
Header photo by Elias Schupmann.
Amber Meadow Adams’s short fiction has appeared in The Tangled Web and Quarto. She holds a PhD in Indigenous Studies, and is currently at work on her first novel.