SOURCE: Beidler, Peter G., ed. “Silko's Originality in ‘Yellow Woman’.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 8, no. 2 (summer 1996): 61-84.

[In the following essay, Beidler brings together eight brief essays by various writers that assess the originality of “Yellow Woman” and compares an aspect of Silko's tale to that of the traditional Cochiti story “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman.”]

INTRODUCTION

PETER G. BEIDLER

What is most original in Leslie Marmon Silko's story “Yellow Woman”? In an effort to discover the answer to that question, the eight students in my spring 1992 seminar on American Indian Women's Fiction at Lehigh University decided to write a series of short papers in which they compared Silko's 1974 short story with one of the traditional Keresan versions of the Yellow Woman story.¹ Each student, focusing on a different character or theme, would compare Silko's modern treatment of that character or theme with the parallel feature in the Cochiti tale entitled “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman.” The eight papers below are the results of the students' work.

It is important to note that the writers do not assume that “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman” was Silko's direct source. It is impossible to say with any accuracy what that source was. Indeed, we should be cautious about using the term “source” at all in connection with Silko's story, since “Yellow Woman” results from an extraordinarily complex blending of tradition, personal experience, and originality. Silko was only 20 when she wrote “Yellow Woman,” and it is unlikely that she had made a thorough study of the written versions. There can be no question, however, that she knew about the anthropological reports containing written versions of the stories of the Laguna people. In an interview not long after “Yellow Woman” appeared, Silko spoke of the collections of traditional Indian tales as collected by ethnologists:

I have looked at them myself, but I've never sat down with them and said I'm going to make a poem or a story out of this. … The things in the anthropological reports looked dead and alien. I couldn't do anything with them anyway, even though theoretically they came from here. … I've always been real leery of the kinds of things that the ethnologists picked up.

(Evers and Carr 30)

In a short preface she wrote for a recent anthology printing “Yellow Woman,” Silko suggests that much of her knowledge of Yellow Woman came to her directly from stories told by members of her family and by other members of the Laguna community:

When I was a little girl, Aunt Alice used to tell us kids the old-time stories. … There is a whole cycle of Kochininako—Yellow Woman—stories which Aunt Alice seemed to enjoy a great deal. In most of the stories, Kochininako is a strong courageous woman, sometimes a hunter bringing home rabbits for her family to eat; other times she faces dangers or hardships and overcomes them. But in some of the stories Kochininako is swept away by forces and circumstances beyond her. All realms of possibility are open to Kochininako, even that of sorcery.

(Rubenstein and Larson 1086)

Clearly Silko's knowledge of the traditional Yellow Woman story is eclectic and not precisely recoverable.

The writers of the eight essays below, then, do not pretend that “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman” is “the” source for Silko's “Yellow Woman.” They refer to it only as a more or less representative expression of one of the several and shifting versions of the story. They recognize that they are being somewhat arbitrary in selecting this one written version as the basis for comparison in an attempt to show what is most distinctive, most modern, and most original in Silko's retelling of the story.

Readers not familiar with “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman” may profit from a quick summary of the Cochiti story:²

One day Yellow Woman leaves town and goes with her jar to the river to fetch water. She sees a kicking stick and hides it in her dress. Evil Kachina comes up to her and, after a brief conversation about who owns the kicking stick, tells Yellow Woman that she must come with him. He carries her on his back to his house in the sky, then leaves her to grind corn and make wafer bread (probably piki) while he goes hunting. When he brings a deer back Yellow Woman gives Evil Kachina corn wafers to eat and gives the dead deer an offering of sacred corn meal.

Meanwhile Yellow Woman's husband returns to their house in town and finds his wife missing. He is determined to find her. He goes to Old Spider Woman for help. She feeds him a cooked snowbird head, in return for which he hunts several more snowbirds for her. Then she takes the husband to Evil Kachina's house, where he finds his wife at home alone. She hugs him and he takes her home.

When Evil Kachina comes home and finds Yellow Woman gone, he angrily pursues her. When he gets to their house he threatens to kill both her and her husband. He does not kill them right then, however, because Yellow Woman is pregnant with his child. After it is born he comes to get the child. He had already taken many Yellow Women away and killed them by throwing them down on the ice, leaving them to freeze to death. Evil Kachina kills this new Yellow Woman and her husband. He is very bad, this Evil Kachina.

That traditional Yellow Woman story seems strange to modern tastes. Why does Evil Kachina carry off women, and this Yellow Woman in particular? Is there something Yellow Woman or the husband might have done or should have done to stop him? Does she at some level want to join him to escape domination at home? What happens to the baby? Do we know Yellow Woman enough to care that she and her husband are killed in the end? What lesson, if any, is the tale supposed to teach?

The writers of the essays below did not directly concern themselves with trying to answer these questions.³ They were more interested in using the Keres version of the Yellow Woman story as the basis for trying to answer a series of rather different questions about Silko's “Yellow Woman,” a modern short story with a modern setting, aimed at least partially at a non-Indian audience.

In talking about the process of writing “Yellow Woman,” Silko has suggested that she had uncertain, or at least shifting, goals in writing the story:

I did not know, at the time I began writing this story, what the story would be about; all I had was the notion of this sensuous woman who leaves her family responsibilities behind for a handsome stranger. Then, when I was about one-third of the way into the story, suddenly I remembered all the Kochininako-Yellow Woman stories I had heard while I was growing up.⁴

(Rubenstein and Larson 1087)

Quite appropriately, Silko has avoided answering direct questions about her own version of the story. Her silence, however, has left the writers of the papers below with little to go on except the text of Silko's modern version as compared with the traditional Cochiti version. Out of that comparison they attempt to answer—not always in harmony with one another—these questions: Is the woman in Silko's story abducted and raped, or is she a willing victim of Silva? Is Silva a brutal rapist or a dispossessed Indian trying to right the wrongs of a dominant white society? Why does Silko virtually eliminate the role of Spider Woman in her version of the story? What of that white rancher, a character not present in the traditional story? And what are we to make of certain thematic changes in Silko's story—changes involving gender roles, boundary crossing, moisture, and seeing?

The writers of the eight papers below wish to emphasize that, although their method requires that they draw distinctions between the early version of the story and Silko's later version, Silko's “Yellow Woman” is not entirely separate from earlier versions. Indeed, much of the power of Silko's story lies in its unique “intertextual” blend of the traditional and the modern, and in the resulting ambiguity that so dramatically enriches it and gives it its most original complexion.⁵

1: THE WOMAN AS WILLING VICTIM

HEATHER HOLLAND

There is no question that the Yellow Woman of the Cochiti story is abducted. Evil Kachina gives her no choice. He forcibly carries her off on his back and locks her in his house in the sky. She has no apparent opportunity to leave, and when her husband comes to her rescue, she leaps happily to him and goes home with him. The woman in Silko's story, on the other hand, is not forcibly made to accompany Silva. She has several opportunities to leave, opportunities she does not—and does not want to—take advantage of.

In the Cochiti story, Evil Kachina takes Yellow Woman away immediately to his house in the sky. It seems clear in that story that the wife is an unwilling victim. In an interview with Kim Barnes, Silko was asked: “Do you see the myths concerning her as having arisen from the need for escape on the part of the woman from a kind of social and sexual domination?” Silko's reply about the meaning of the traditional Yellow Woman story is unequivocal:

No, not at all. The need for that kind of escape is the need of a woman in middle-America. … The kinds of things that cause white upper-middle-class women to flee the home for awhile to escape or get away from domination and powerlessness and inferior status, vis-a-vis the husband, and the male, those kinds of forces are not operating, they're not operating at all. What's operating in those stories of Kochininako is this attraction, this passion, this connection between the human world and the animal and spirit worlds. … There's a real overpowering sexual attraction that's felt. The attraction is symbolized by or typified by the kind of sexual power that draws her to [her abductor].

(Barnes 95-96)⁶

Silko has been less explicit in interpreting the ambiguous meaning of her own modern-day version of the story, but the woman's “overpowering sexual attraction” for Silva is clearly present in her story. When the woman in Silko's story comes upon Silva sitting on the river bank cutting the leaves from a willow twig, she is not “abducted” by him. Rather they sleep together on the river bank that night. Although the scene is not described directly, the next day she remembers it: “He undressed me slowly like the night before beside the river—kissing my face gently and running his hands up and down my belly and legs” (58). Upon waking, the woman realizes that because Silva is still asleep she is free to leave and return to her family. After mounting her horse to leave, she changes her mind when she thinks of Silva sleeping in the sand. She dismounts and returns to wake Silva up and tell him she is leaving. His reply is, “You are coming with me, remember?” (55). She easily allows him to persuade her to go with him, and they again make love on the sand by the river. Far from resisting these actions, she is a willing participant in them.

When they do leave the river bank, the woman in Silko's story acquiesces when he puts his hand on her wrist. She does so not because he is stronger than she, but “because his hand felt cool” (56). Again she lets him take her away with no resistance. She does not feel that she must accompany him. Rather, she wants to accompany him. She is far more seduced by Silva than raped by him. To be sure, she seems somewhat afraid of him some of the time, but it may be that that fear is part of the fascination. In any case, at other times she looks lovingly at him. The second evening they are together at Silva's house the narrator tells us that “I was afraid because I understood that his strength could hurt me” (58), and there is evidence of some coercion in their love-making. Yet later that night she reaches out, touches him, and kisses him: “While he slept beside me, I touched his face and I had a feeling—the kind of feeling for him that overcame me that morning along the river. I kissed him on the forehead and he reached out for me” (58). These actions are those of love or infatuation, not fear. Rather than escaping when he sleeps, she again deliberately wakes him up. She knows his power over her, yet seems more attracted to than repulsed by that power.⁷

The woman in Silko's story wonders whether she will ever see her family again, but she seems to enjoy her new situation. This modern Yellow Woman thinks less of her family than of her present situation with this mysterious and attractive Silva. When, after the night at Silva's house, she wakes to find Silva gone, she again misses an opportunity to escape. She thinks of going home, but takes a nap instead outside on the rim of the canyon. She thinks of her home and of what may be happening because of her disappearance. She is not remorseful, but accepts, almost eagerly, this new life with her mysterious new lover. She believes that her mother and grandmother will take care of her baby, and that her husband will eventually find someone else. These are not the thoughts of someone who has been abducted against her will. Rather than run off from Silva, she returns to Silva's house. She remembers that she had meant to go home, “but that didn't seem important anymore” (59).

Yellow Woman in the Cochiti story runs eagerly toward her husband when he arrives to rescue her from Evil Kachina. She hugs him, is happy to be with him again, and wants him to take her home. On the other hand, when the woman in Silko's story finally does leave Silva after the incident with the white rancher, she is sad rather than joyful. When she arrives back at the river where she and Silva had met, she remembers their first meeting. The sight of the willow branches Silva had trimmed makes her want to return to the mountains to find him again: “I wanted to go back to him—to kiss him and to touch him” (62). She believes that “he will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river” (62). That belief enables her to rejoin her family.

Silko, then, has almost totally shifted the focus of her modern-day version of the Yellow Woman story. Rather than a story about a happily-married wife who is abducted by an evil and dangerous murderer and who then is happy to be rescued by her heroic husband, Silko tells a story about a restless woman who enjoys the romantic adventure that Silva offers her. Although in some sense she is the victim of her mysterious abductor, she becomes, at least temporarily, all too willingly—even eagerly?—his victim.

2: SILVA AS BRUTAL RAPIST

ANN CAVANAUGH SIPOS

While the woman in Silko's story seems at times to be a willing participant in her own abduction, a closer look at the character of the lover suggests that she may not be quite so much in control. In fact, I would suggest that the woman is so confused, intrigued, and frightened by her mysterious lover that she scarcely realizes that he brutally abducts and rapes her. Damaged by his overpowering of her, she self-protectively romanticizes his violation of her by temporarily imagining that she has become the Yellow Woman of Pueblo legend.⁸

The Evil Kachina of the Cochiti Yellow Woman story is, as his name suggests, an evil supernatural being who comes to the earth to kidnap a helpless mortal woman. He forcibly abducts her, takes her to his house in the eastern sky, forces her to grind corn, to cook for him, and to have sex with him. When her husband courageously rescues her, Evil Kachina temporarily spares them because she is pregnant with his ill-conceived child, but in the end he does with this Yellow Woman and her husband what he has done with all previous ones—throws them down on the ice to freeze to death.

The Evil Kachina character in Silko's story is transformed from this cruel supernatural being into a mysterious and strangely attractive cattle rustler. Although he does not carry the woman away on his back, he nevertheless does find a way to force her to go with him. She seems to have a choice, but that choice is ambiguous. “I don't have to go,” she tells Silva after they have sex and he gets up to leave. “Let's go” (56), he replies. And she does. Is that force or choice? As the woman puts it later, “I did not decide to go. I just went. Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn, just as I followed him” (58). Do moonflowers decide to bloom? Of course not. It is their destiny to do so. The woman in Silko's story does not sound very much in control here. She sounds, rather, captivated, transfixed, even hypnotized by him, destined to go with him to his house in the mountains. When they leave to go up into the mountains, the woman says, “I walked beside him, breathing hard because he walked fast, his hand around my wrist. I had stopped trying to pull away from him” (56). Notice that they are not holding hands as they walk. Rather, he is holding her wrist, and she tries to pull away. Just how much physical choice does this young woman have in dealing with this mysterious stranger?

It is easy to overlook an important difference between Evil Kachina and Silva. Evil Kachina is a supernatural spirit who descends from the cold north to abduct a mortal woman to work for him. Is there not a certain spirit license that comes with such a being, or at least a certain inevitability in his repeated actions in abducting pretty young women? By making the lover mortal, however, Silko brings him into the realm of human morality. What the gods and spirits do is above and essentially beyond moral censure. What mortals do, however, is not. We cannot help but find the mortal Silva to be brutally cruel in his treatment of his fellow humans.⁹ He steals their cattle, apparently murders an unarmed white rancher with four shots from his powerful 30-30 rifle, and forces a reservation woman to have sex with him.

Forces? Is their sexual encounter seduction or rape? Modern feminist thinking, of course, suggests that there may often be little distinction between seduction and rape. In any case, in the first of two sex scenes we are shown in Silko's story, there is good reason to think that it approaches rape: “Come here” (55), he tells her, however gently. Then, “I felt him all around me, pushing me down into the white river sand” (56, italics mine, here and below). The woman tells us that immediately afterward “I was afraid lying there on the red blanket” (56). The second sex scene seems even more obviously to be a rape:

I pulled away from him and turned my back to him.

He pulled me around and pinned me down with his arms and chest. “You don't understand, do you, little Yellow Woman? You will do what I want.”

And again he was all around me with his skin slippery against mine, and I was afraid because I understood that his strength could hurt me. I lay underneath him and I knew that he could destroy me.

(58)

If that is not rape, what is? If that is choice on her part, what would coercion sound like?

These sexual encounters seem even more brutal when we recall that in the Cochiti Yellow Woman story there is no sex scene described. We know that Evil Kachina does have sex with Yellow Woman, but we know that only because she later turns out to be pregnant with his child. Silko, however, deliberately shows us the sexual encounters in scenes in which the woman seems to have very little choice. In theory she might have escaped him, but in fact she knows that he is far stronger than she. In any case she fears him and yet feels mysteriously compelled to stay with him.

The woman does escape from Silva when they are on the way to Marquez to sell the stolen beef. She looks at him and notes that there is “something ancient and dark—something I could feel in my stomach—in his eyes, and when I glanced at his hand I saw his finger on the trigger of the 30-30” (62). She is obviously afraid of this mysterious man, and when she comes to the fork in the trail who can blame her for disobeying his instructions and going home. “I went that way,” she says, “because I thought it was safer” (61). If I am right to suggest that the woman had originally justified her powerlessness in the face of Silva's power over her by fantasizing that she was the Yellow Woman of Pueblo legend, then she has apparently by now had her fill of such role-playing. That fantasy had served her well to justify the helplessness she felt when in Silva's power, but his apparently brutal murder of the unarmed rancher makes her realize just how dangerous her own situation is.

Because Silko has transformed the demon lover of the Cochiti story into a brutal and fearsome man, the woman in her story seems less willing than some readers have found her to be. Perhaps she is more psychologically than physically captivated than the Yellow Woman in the traditional story, but she is captivated nevertheless, and during her captivity she undergoes the indignities of forced sex with a mortal and very physical man who insists on calling her “little Yellow Woman” (58). She is so small and powerless, I suggest, only because he is made even stronger and more brutal than the traditional Evil Kachina abductor of Cochiti legend.

3: OLD SPIDER WOMAN ELIMINATED

JIAN SHI

In the Cochiti story Old Spider Woman plays a key role in helping the husband rescue his abducted wife. Indeed, as many lines are devoted to the doings of the grandmother as are devoted to Yellow Woman herself. In Silko's version the role of Old Spider Woman is eliminated. Silko's elimination of Old Spider Woman has two important effects on her story. It takes the story out of the realm of myth and makes it a modern story with human motivation; more important, it makes the Yellow Woman character a more important and commanding central character.

Old Spider Woman, sometimes called Grandmother Spider, is one of the most important mythical figures in traditional Indian storytelling. Indeed, she provides the “web” that joins various mythological stories into one large pattern. She often intervenes in the affairs of humans, and she is often the central character in the story, the one who makes things happen. She controls the action to such an extent that the mere human characters often seem helpless and downright insignificant. Furthermore, when she appears in a story, she often introduces a certain amount of confusion about whether the story is about mythological or human characters.

By removing the character of Spider Woman, Silko reduces that kind of confusion. We know when we read Silko's “Yellow Woman” that this is a modern, not an ancient, story, and that it is about human beings, not mythological ones. The setting is contemporary and the action involves real people with real rifles and horses and cars and coffee pots, people who eat potatoes and beef and dried apricots rather than the heads of snow birds. The tangled confusion present in the traditional Yellow Woman story is also present in Silko's modern story; significantly, however, the confusion is far more in the mind of the woman in Silko's story than in the minds of listeners or readers. We readers know that this is a modern story. The woman who plays a role roughly parallel to Yellow Woman, however, is not so sure: “I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman—I'm not really her—I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side of the mesa” (55). She says that what is happening to her and Silva is not what happened in “the old stories about the ka'tsina spirit and Yellow Woman” (57). In fact, however, we know that she is not really so very sure, and her confusion functions to help us to understand her. She half-wants to believe that she really is Yellow Woman, and that the story of her adventure with Silva will be told and retold through time. The confusion between fact and myth in this story, then, becomes a characterizing device that helps to make the woman a stronger and more vivid literary figure.

That brings us to my second point about the elimination of Spider Woman in Silko's story: that it makes the woman a more central figure. We recall that in the Cochiti Yellow Woman story, Old Spider Woman plays a dominant role. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the story without her in it. After Yellow Woman is abducted by Evil Kachina, her husband tries to search for her on his own, but fails. Then Spider Woman enters the story to help her “poor grandson” (212) in his quest. She feeds him a snowbird head, gives him the task of hunting more snowbirds, makes him a special medicine, and leads him personally to Evil Kachina's home, where his wife is held captive. Then she waits for him and guides him and Yellow Woman home.

By eliminating Spider Woman, Silko makes the woman in her story a more commanding character. Instead of being someone whose fate is controlled by Spider Woman and whose rescue is dependent on the effective magic and guidance of Spider Woman, the woman in Silko's story is very much in control of her own fate. She tells her own story in the first person. She voluntarily goes along with Silva, makes love with him, and willingly stays with him. And when it is time for her to leave and go home, she does so voluntarily. She is not the shadowy, powerless, and dependent figure that she was in the Cochiti story.

It might be argued, of course, that Silko does not entirely eliminate Spider Woman or Spider Grandmother from her story, because she does give us a grandmother figure in her story—the woman's own grandmother. But that grandmother figure is so strikingly unimportant that she might as well not be there at all. She stays home and accomplishes nothing. The most important thing she does in the story comes in the final, almost comic, scene. When the woman returns home, her grandmother is learning from her daughter how to make Jell-O.¹⁰ Surely this grandmother is no Spider Woman figure, and her very insignificance underscores my point that by eliminating Spider Woman, Silko transforms a mythological story about a traditional Yellow Woman who has little control over her own life into one about a Yellow Woman who is of interest to us primarily because she is allowed to take control over the events in her own life and to tell, in her own words, about her own actions, feelings, frustrations, and confusions.

4: THE WHITE RANCHER ADDED

NORA EL-AASSER

The Cochiti Yellow Woman story ends with Evil Kachina killing Yellow Woman and her husband by throwing them down on the ice. Silko's story also ends with the abducting lover murdering someone, but in this case it is not the wife or her husband who dies but rather a white rancher. Why did Silko make this change? I suggest three reasons: first, to remind the woman that she is living in the modern world; second, to remind readers that the real enemy of the Indian is the white man; and, third, to exonerate Silva for fulfilling a quite understandable desire to destroy his enemy.

On the first point, that the white rancher reminds the woman that she lives in the modern world, it is interesting that in Silko's version of the Yellow Woman story, Silva tries to be an “old-time Indian.” He refuses to face the reality of modern life, and he tries to make the woman think that he is an old-time kachina and that she is Yellow Woman. Rather than honoring modern land boundaries and modern ownership laws, he pretends that he is living in a time when there were no legal land boundaries and when Indian hunters were free to kill any animals they found. When the woman in Silko's story notices the “ancient” look in Silva's eyes (61), that look suggests that she recognizes him as an ancient, pre-white Indian.

The woman herself is confused about what era she lives in. She is not sure whether Silva is an ancient kachina or a modern mortal, whether she is a mythological figure or a modern woman.¹¹ As they go into the mountains, the woman thinks, “I will see someone, eventually I will see someone, and then I will be certain that he [Silva] is only a man and I will be sure that I am not Yellow Woman” (56). The first “someone” she sees is the white rancher. He is the first real proof she has that Silva is a modern mortal living in twentieth-century white America rather than a mountain spirit; the first real proof that she is not Yellow Woman. If the man had been another Indian or a Mexican, the confused woman might not have been so sure what era her adventure was taking place in, but when she sees a white man, there can be no doubt. No white men lived in Indian country in ancient times, so the rancher's whiteness signals to her with absolute clarity that she is a modern woman. Because his whiteness brings her back to the reality of her situation, it is no accident that immediately after she sees the white man she decides to return home to her family.

Another reason Silko makes the rancher white is to remind her audience that there is a parallel between the fate of Yellow Woman and the fate of the Indian people in general. Just as the coming of whites in American history signaled the end to the old Indian way of life, so the coming of whites into this previous all-Native story signals that the magic and adventure of the old Indian way of life must end. Whatever her ambiguous and confused reasons for following Silva into the mountains, the presence of the white rancher is a clear clue that the adventure is over. She knows now that she has to go back home to Al and a grandmother and a mother and a baby. The arrival of the white rancher on the scene talking about ownership of cattle and about summoning the state police brings an end to the woman's nostalgic journey back to a time when Indians controlled the land and hunted the range freely.

As Silko describes the white rancher, he is not at all attractive. His fat face is sweaty, and his cowboy shirt is “stuck to the thick rolls of belly fat” (61). He pants from the mere effort of talking, and he smells “rancid” (61). He is unfriendly and arrogant, automatically assuming that any Indian with fresh meet must have stolen it. Why does Silko describe the white rancher as so physically repugnant and so obnoxiously arrogant? Perhaps it is because she wants the reader to despise the white man because he, rather than Silva, is the real enemy of Indian people. Certainly there is no doubt in Silva's mind that the white rancher is the enemy, just as there is no doubt that the arrival of the whites brought on the destruction of tribal life and the devastation of the Indian people. And certainly no reader can feel very sad that this fat and smelly white man soon is killed.

And that brings up my third suggestion about why Silko introduces a white rancher into the story: because she wants to kill him off. After four shots the white rancher is presumably dead. Is it not fair to suggest that Silko uses those four shots to manifest her desire to rid her people of their antagonist by erasing the white man? Perhaps Silva is a brutal killer, but is not the brutality softened by the fact that it is a white man he kills? And are we not to see Silva as at least in part a culture hero for standing up to the white capitalist ranchers who have done so much to destroy the communal living that the Indians had known for centuries? If I am right, then of course this story is not merely a nostalgic modernization of a traditional Yellow Woman story, but also a denunciation of the role of whites in Indian life. If I am right, then the story itself exonerates Silva for symbolically killing off the fat, smelly, and greedy white man.

5: HUNTING, COOKING, AND GENDER ROLES

MELISSA FIESTA BLOSSOM

In the Cochiti story evil Kachina is a hunter of Yellow Women and deer, while Yellow Woman is a corn grinder and a cook. The abductor and his victim have what appears to be a workable and mutually beneficial arrangement, one apparently common in traditional Indian societies. Silko also describes the traditional roles of hunting and cooking, but she makes some interesting changes that reflect her quite different emphases and the more modern setting of her story.

In the Cochiti story, the morning after Evil Kachina steals Yellow Woman he goes hunting for deer. He orders Yellow Woman, while he is gone, to grind corn. She obediently does so, putting the flour into a basket. Then she makes the flour into wafer bread or piki for him to eat when he comes home in the evening. Meanwhile, Evil Kachina successfully hunts his deer and brings it home for her to prepare. The domestic scene in the Cochiti version is worth looking at in some detail:

He arrived in the evening. Then Evil Kachina told her that he had killed a deer which he had brought to his house. Then Yellow Woman went out and took the deer. He gave it to Yellow Woman to eat. Then she put it down in front of the fireplace and Yellow Woman took sacred corn meal. Then Yellow Woman gave sacred meal to the deer to eat. Yellow Woman inhaled. “Thank you,” she said, “you killed a deer, thank you,” said she to Evil Kachina. He was eating. Then Evil Kachina finished eating. “Thank you,” said he. “I have eaten wafer bread,” said Evil Kachina.

(212)

That scene in the traditional Yellow Woman story is interesting from a number of points of view—the friendliness of the male and the female, for example, and their polite gratefulness for the food they have provided for each other. I would call particular attention, however, to the gender roles. Evil Kachina and Yellow Woman provide each other with sustenance by doing what is required of them as men and women. He provides meat; she prepares piki. Except for the dark undercurrent in the story, where he orders her to grind corn and is known to kill Yellow Women who do not grind fast enough, this might well be any domestic scene in a traditional Pueblo home.

The hunting and cooking in Silko's modern version of the Yellow Woman story are rather different. Instead of Silva's hunting Yellow Woman, the woman might more accurately be said to be the hunter, because he is merely sitting on the river bank when she comes upon him. To be sure, she is not really “hunting” him in the usual sense, but it is interesting to note that instead of his actively seeking her, as Evil Kachina does in the Cochiti story, Silva just sits there by the river bank when she finds him. At least initially, then, she plays the more aggressive role. Silva does have a hunting knife with him, but all he does with it is passively cut leaves off a willow twig.

Later, in his mountain cabin, instead of going out to hunt while she cooks, this modern-day non-hunter tells her to cook him a meal and then sits and watches her while she cooks:

He pointed at the box.

“There's some potatoes and the frying pan.” He sat on the floor with his arms around his knees pulling them close to his chest, and he watched me fry the potatoes. I didn't mind him watching me because he was always watching me—he had been watching me since I came upon him sitting on the river bank trimming leaves from a willow twig with his knife.

(57)

The division of labor here is clear—and much more stereotypically modern: she cooks while he sits and watches.

To be sure, later on Silva does “hunt,” if killing domestic cattle with a 30-30 rifle can be called hunting rather than “rustling,” and if using his knife to cut up the beef carcass can be called a hunting activity rather than a “butchering” one. But then, instead of bringing the spoils of his “hunt” back for Yellow Woman to eat, he takes it to Marquez to sell for money. Again, this activity can more accurately be called “stealing” or engaging in “capitalism” than hunting to provide food for his family.

The other quarry for this modern-day “hunter” is, of course, the white rancher. When the woman hears the shots, those “four hollow explosions … reminded me of deer hunting” (61). It may remind the confused woman of deer hunting, but of course, it reminds us readers that this murder of an unarmed man is anything but the deer hunting that traditional Indian men engaged in to bring in food for their wives and families.

Silko's story serves, then, as a reminder of how far Indian men have come since the early days—or how far they have not come. Evil Kachina in the Cochiti story, for all his abduction of women and his forcing them to grind corn, was at least a successful hunter, able to provide meat for them. And he was at least polite enough to thank Yellow Woman for cooking him piki. In the more modern times of Silko's story, the lover Silva is not really a hunter and does not provide meat for his new woman to eat. Instead he rustles domestic beef for money and murders an unarmed rancher. And unlike his traditional counterpart in the Cochiti Yellow Woman story, Silva never thanks the woman for cooking for him. All he does after he eats is wipe the grease from his fingers on his Levi trousers.

It may be going too far to suggest that the woman in Silko's story takes on the role of both hunter and food preparer, but it is not going too far to suggest that Silva, for all of his “manly” toughness, is neither an old-time hunter nor a modern-day co-sharer of kitchen duties. He may have reasons of his own to want to seduce or rape the woman who finds him along the river bank, and reasons of his own to murder the white rancher, but in the end he is still not a hunter but a seducer and a murderer. And the woman, whether she is his willing or unwilling sexual victim, is in every way that counts his superior—not merely in hunting and cooking, but emotionally and morally, as well. By altering the gender roles, Silko has subtly shifted the focus of the traditional Yellow Woman story away from the kachina's hunting skills and toward the woman's more diversified skills.

6: BOUNDARIES CROSSED

CAROLYN GROSSMAN

We find little emphasis on physical or psychological boundaries in the Cochiti Yellow Woman story, except for the one between the human and the supernatural. Evil Kachina, for example, comes down from the spirit world to seize Yellow Woman and carry her across the boundary to his house in the sky. In Silko's retelling of the story, on the other hand, not only are boundaries crossed by the woman, but the boundaries between “life” and “story,” between “fact” and “fiction,” are often eliminated. In addition to these crossed boundaries within the story, the continued interest in the story of Yellow Woman, both the traditional one and the modern one, is evidence that the story itself crosses boundaries of time and culture.

Let me begin by defining what I mean by “boundary”: a limit or edge or rim or border that is usually not crossed. One of the first of several boundaries crossed in Silko's story is the boundary of marriage. When she has sex with Silva, Al's wife crosses the boundary into adultery. She thinks of leaving Silva the next morning to go home and recross the moral boundary she had transgressed the night before, but in the end she does not. Her hesitation comes in part when the boundaries of her own existence are blurred. She is not sure whether she is just a modern housewife having a fling with a mysterious stranger or a reincarnation of the Yellow Woman of myth.

She decides to stay with Silva. As she travels into the mountains with him, she hesitates and looks back to find that the geographical boundaries that once had meaning for her have all but disappeared: “The pale sandstone had disappeared and the river and the dark lava hills were all around” (56). Silva then points out to her some new boundaries:

“From here I can see the world.” He stepped out on the edge. “The Navajo reservation begins over there.” He pointed to the east. “The Pueblo boundaries are over here.” He looked below us to the south, where the narrow trail seemed to come from. “The Texans have their ranches over there, starting with that valley, the Concho Valley. The Mexicans run some cattle over there too.”

“Do you ever work for them?”

“I steal from them,” Silva answered.

(58)

The boundaries of the woman's world have shifted dramatically, yet she learns that these new boundaries are ones that Silva crosses at will, stealing whatever he wants. In doing so, of course, he crosses the boundary of the law.

In crossing that legal boundary he winds up in confrontation with the white rancher. They are close together physically on the trail, but culturally and politically Silva and the white rancher are miles and centuries apart. That confrontation is what finally causes the woman to leave Silva. Apparently the gulf between them looks so wide that she feels endangered and knows that she will be safer back within her old boundaries. She is still ambivalent: “I thought about Silva, and I felt sad at leaving him. … I wanted to go back to him—to kiss him and to touch him—but the mountains were too far away now” (62). Yellow Woman has recrossed the boundary for home and knows that the mountains, once the haven for her romance with Silva, are now a boundary between them.

In having an affair with Silva, the woman in Silko's story has crossed several boundaries. She has crossed the moral boundary of marital fidelity; she has crossed the physical boundary by leaving her home and her river; she has crossed another physical boundary by allowing her body to be mingled with his in sex; she has crossed a temporal boundary by escaping from the bonds that tied her to the present; and she has crossed a psychological boundary that tied her to a narrow existence as a daughter, granddaughter, wife, and mother in the little house in the pueblo. In returning to her home she recrosses most of those boundaries and becomes contained again.

But there is another boundary that she need not recross. Having crossed those other boundaries once, she escapes the temporal world of the mundane and joins the world of myth. Having become the Yellow Woman of the modern world, she will always be that Yellow Woman, because the stories endure. The Cochiti Yellow Woman story is an early version of the story; Silko's is a later version—changed, expanded, reconsidered, but still essentially the same. It is the story of a woman's journey across boundaries. Because the journey is taken by many, the story will have a lasting appeal.

The woman says at one point to Silva, “I don't believe it. Those stories couldn't happen now” (57). He replies, in words that turn out to be prophetic: “But someday they will talk about us, and they will say, ‘Those two lived long ago when things like that happened’” (57). That we are now talking about Silva and his brief affair with a young Pueblo woman suggests that he was right. The woman in Silko's story recrosses most of the boundaries she had crossed. The most important boundary, however, the artistic boundary between fact and art, she need never recross.

7: THE POWER OF WATER

JENNIFER A. THORNTON

Water is essential for growing food and for human life, yet water plays almost no role in the Cochiti Yellow Woman story. Aside from the initial abduction beside the river, neither water nor moisture are mentioned again, unless we consider the ice on which she dies to be a form of moisture. Silko's version of the story, on the other hand, is awash with water and moisture imagery. Water is important in several ways in Silko's story.¹² It serves in a minor way as a cleansing agent, but more importantly it contributes to love and sex and procreation, to the growth of food, and to the essential power of myth in Indian life.

As for the cleansing powers of water, we notice that Silva kneels on the “low, sandy bank, washing his face in the river” (55). Again, after the beef butchering, he washes his hands in a water bucket. When the woman looks into the bucket, she sees the “bloody water, with brown-and-white animal hairs floating in it” (59). By washing the sweat and blood and lingering smell of love and work and death from Silva's body, water has the power to transform him into a person: if not better, then at least cleaner. If we believe that Silva is a rapist, a thief, and a murderer, then the water enables him to change at least his appearance, to give the impression of cleanness and purity.

Much more important, and certainly more positive, than the cleansing power of water is the association of water with love and sex. Silko's story opens with the haunting line, “My thigh clung to his in dampness” (54). The woman and Silva have just made love on the bank of the river, and afterwards she can hear the water at their feet, “where the narrow, fast channel bubbled and washed green ragged moss and fern leaves” (54). When Silva takes the woman to his house in the mountains, they again make love, and she again specifically associates sex and love with moisture: “And again he was all around me, with his skin slippery against mine” (58). The dampness of sex is fused with the procreative power of sex. Sex is the root of human existence. By linking moisture with sex, Silko emphasizes the power of water as the root of human existence. Sexual images remain coupled with those of water throughout the story, thus reiterating the life-giving potential of both sex and water.

When the woman in Silko's story becomes hungry, she follows the river south, reminding us of the relationship between water and food. In a land where Indians do little large-scale artificial irrigation, the growing of food is dependent on either the natural water of rivers or the natural water of rainfall. To the extent that it provides moisture for growing corn in the arid desert, water not only has the power to satisfy thirst, but the power to satisfy hunger as well. If Yellow Woman is on some level symbolic of the sacred Corn Mother of Pueblo Indian myth, then in sustaining Yellow Woman, water has the power to give sustenance and hope to the Indian people who rely on corn for their nourishment. Thus, water is powerful in its ability to satisfy both literally and symbolically, for it both sustains Pueblo agriculture and gives support and meaning to Pueblo myths.

The river-setting is of course important in Silko's story.¹³ The woman first meets Silva on the sandy river bank, where she has come to fetch water. This meeting brings life to a bored housewife by giving her some pleasure and excitement. Little could she have known that the quest for a bucket of cleansing and life-sustaining water would bring her so much new life. Whether or not she is made pregnant by her sexual encounters with Silva—and Silko's story remains silent on this matter—this water carries with it the power to bring new life into this woman's world.

The river-setting is important again at the end of the story. After Silva kills the white rancher, Yellow Woman decides to escape from him. Significantly, she escapes to the river: “I walked to the river on a wood-hauler's road. … It wasn't very far to walk if I followed the river back the way Silva and I had come” (62, italics mine, here and below). Just as the river had brought her new life and excitement at the start of the story, so it also provides the way for her to escape back to the safety of her old life. The first thing she does when she gets back to the river is take a drink: “The river water tasted good” (62). Of course, being human, the woman in Silko's story clings to the hope that Silva will come back to see her again. It is significant that she associates his return with the river: “He will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river” (62) That hope of a mysterious lover returning to wait for her at the river will sustain her as she returns to what she fears will be a dry and meaningless existence.

The moisture imagery, then, lends additional and significant depth to Silko's story. Silko does not merely retell an old Pueblo story about Yellow Woman; she changes it by linking water with the power to cleanse, the power of sex, the power of agriculture and fecundity, the power of excitement, the power of love, the power of myth, the power of hope.

8: LOOKING AND SEEING

VANESSA HOLFORD DIANA

In the Cochiti Yellow Woman story we find not a single reference to looking, seeing, or perception. Yellow Woman is seized, made to work, and eventually killed, but she is never said to look at anything or to see anything. One striking difference in the Silko version of the story is that the woman's first-person narration includes more than 65 verbs of visual perception, such as looking, seeing, staring, and watching.¹⁴ For the woman, visual perception is symbolic of various forms of inward search. At first, her looking is a search for understanding. She seems to ask, “Why am I with this man? Who is he? What mysterious force drives me to stay with him instead of returning home to my family?” But as the story progresses, the woman's visual perception becomes a medium through which she will modify her own self-perception, making room within herself for her own Indian heritage. Throughout, her sight is selective, and what she chooses to see makes up a telling picture of her own struggle for affirmation of her Indian spirituality despite her modern-day skepticism.

The story begins with the woman waking and looking at the sleeping Silva, who is wrapped in a red blanket: “I looked at him sleeping on the white sand” (54, italics mine, here and below). Then the woman walks down along the river, apparently on her way home. She tries to see her home: “I tried to look beyond the pale red mesas to the pueblo. I knew it was there, even if I couldn't see it” (54). Unable to see the pueblo, she remembers Silva “asleep in the red blanket” (54) and returns to him. Visual perception of the red mesas seems to trigger her memory of Silva in his red blanket. What she cannot see—the pueblo—reflects what she no longer really wants to see. She sees physical reminders of home as pale, dim, or fading, while she sees Silva and his surroundings as colorful and sensual. The contrast comes to represent the difference she discovers between the colorless technological world of her home life and the vibrant Indian culture from which her learned skepticism has separated her.

Again, vision seems linked to memory when she describes an attempt to make sense of her situation: “I stared past him at the shallow moving water and tried to remember the night, but I could only see the moon in the water and remember his warmth around me” (55). She resists making sense of her motivations from the night before. She remembers, instead, what sparked life in her during that night. She seems confused, as if she were just waking from a dream. In a sense, Silko's story is about awakening, about seeing oneself in a new light.

If the woman's looking represents a search for memory, it also represents a search for proof. On the surface she looks for tangible proof that this time spent with Silva is not actually a dream: “For a long time I sat there on the blankets and looked around the little house for some object of his—some proof that he had been there or maybe that he was coming back” (58). Paralleling her search for visible proof is her search for a more spiritual proof. She senses a change within herself, a sensual awakening, during her short stay with him. But her modern-day skepticism prevents her from believing that this new feeling of vitality is in any way connected with the truth of the Yellow Woman stories. As she looks for proof of Silva's existence, so she looks for proof of the continuing validity of the stories of her people.

The woman seems almost aware of a connection between what she sees and what she knows. She predicts that vision will finally be the key to her making sense of the mysterious Silva and her strange fascination with him: “I will see someone, eventually I will see someone, and then I will be certain that he is only a man—some man from nearby—and then I will be certain that I am not Yellow Woman” (56). When the woman and Silva come across the white rancher, she does indeed “see someone,” and modifies her perception of Silva: “I looked at Silva for an instant and there was something ancient and dark—something I could feel in my stomach—in his eyes” (61). In that instantaneous look, the woman sees the strength behind Silva's eyes. He is a representation of the power present in Indian myths. At that moment he is Evil Kachina to her, and the stories suddenly become real. When she hears the four shots from Silva's rifle, she is reminded of deer hunting, a connection to the original Yellow Woman story. With that connection she has the proof she has been looking for. The association is complete. She sees that she has lived a modern version of the Yellow Woman story, and now she sees that she, like the traditional Yellow Woman, can go home.

She does go home, but her leaving is not a rejection of the living heritage she has uncovered. Instead, she reaffirms her belief in the stories and she will now preserve them in herself while living in the modern world. Before meeting Silva, this modern Yellow Woman had seen herself in a limited way. Her self-perception had been limited by the rational skepticism she had learned in school. With that kind of training, it is no wonder that her home and family looked pale and dull to her. Her modern schooling had made her an incomplete woman, and as a result her home “life” had seemed lifeless. At the end of her stay with Silva, she achieves a vision that unites the traditional power of her people with her own modern education. She accepts her Indian heritage despite the skepticism of a scientific world full of pick-up trucks, highways, and 30-30 rifles. With this new acceptance of a vibrant Indian myth, and with this renewed vision of her role in it, she will be able to add color to her formerly drab existence, to find new life in what had before seemed dead.

Notes

1. These essays were presented orally, in somewhat different form and order, at a conference on American Women Writers of Color in Ocean City, Maryland, 26 May 1992. This introductory section was expanded, and the notes were added, for publication. We should perhaps point out that for the Keresan words “Kochininako” and “kachina,” we have used the most common spellings except where something we are quoting uses a different spelling.

2. A number of versions of traditional Yellow Woman stories are available. See, for example, Franz Boas's Keresan Texts, John Gunn's Schat-Chen, and Ruth Benedict's Tales of the Cochiti Indians. The version we have used is conveniently published in Paula Gunn Allen's Spider Woman's Granddaughters, pp. 211-15. Quotations from “Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman” are from this edition. Allen also reprints two shorter written versions of the Yellow Woman story, “Sun Steals Yellow Woman,” pp. 216-17, and her own “Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman,” pp. 217-18, from The Woman Who Owned the Shadows.

3. For a helpful discussion of the near-impossibility of non-Indian readers achieving a meaningful interpretation of the traditional Keres Yellow Woman stories, see Paula Gunn Allen, “Kochinnenako in Academe.”

4. There is a certain playfulness in some of what Silko says of “Yellow Woman”: “A warning has to go along with this story: in 1976, a Navajo woman who had been a student of mine reported that after six years trying and failing, she had become pregnant during the week our literature class had read and discussed ‘Yellow Woman’” (Rubenstein and Larson 1087). Scholars, of course, would do well not to disregard the possibilities for more playful interpretations of Silko's fiction.

5. “Yellow Woman” has received more attention than most of Silko's short stories. It has recently, for example, been the subject of a separate casebook designed to introduce undergraduates to significant short fiction by American women writers. Edited by Melody Graulich, “Yellow Woman” was published in 1993 by Rutgers University Press in its series on Women Writers: Texts and Contexts. It contains the text of the story, an introduction by Professor Graulich, a 1986 interview with Leslie Marmon Silko, and reprints of eight articles about Silko.

6. Silko's words suggest that she might not agree with Linda Danielson that “Through her adventure [the wife in Silko's story] livens up an apparently dull existence. She identifies with the freedom of Yellow Woman in her grandfather's stories, reminding us that modern women embody the potential of Yellow Woman, bring the vitality of imagination to everyday life” (25).

7. I am in general sympathy with Per Seyersted's reading of the woman in Silko's “Yellow Woman.” He says that

   we understand how she is ruled by an overpowering sexual attraction and why she does not use earlier opportunities to escape, and Silko's artistry lies in the subtlety with which she shows us how the woman is confused as she tries to make and excuse the fact of her adultery by seeing through the haze of the old story, thereby lifting a somewhat everyday occurrence into the realm of the supernatural. In this warmly vibrant tale the author tells us just enough of the old myth itself so that we can follow the delicate shifts in this profound psychological study.

   (19-20)

8. I am not persuaded that Edith Blicksilver is right to suggest that the woman in Silko's story is “a contemporary, liberated Erica Jong heroine who leaves a devoted husband to satisfy her sexual desires with a handsome man whose name she has not even bothered to learn. … [She ignores] family-tribal identity to seek sensual pleasure with a stranger, justifying her rejection of her duties as wife and mother by linking her lust with the ka'tsina spirit's power to shape her destiny” (154-55). Perhaps I should point out that the woman is never said to be Al's “wife,” though it seems reasonable to assume that she is.

9. I cannot agree with Linda Danielson that “Silva, of course, is more opportunistic than evil” (25). His crushing attitude toward anyone who does not either submit to him or get out of his way can scarcely be called merely tricksterish opportunism.

10. Blicksilver reports that Ruoff had told her that “Jell-O has symbolic significance because it represents for Laguna Pueblos the Anglo's attempt to satisfy the Indian's craving for sweets” (159 n4). The significance may, however, be more generally and more simply that Jell-O is an artificial food that shows how far the Lagunas have come from the traditional native foods—deer, fish, rabbits, corn, beans, squash—of the Laguna people. Whatever the specific significance of the kitchen scene, it is clearly ironic that instead of teaching her children the old ways, the grandmother here is having to learn from them some of the most artificial of the new ones.

11. I agree with A. LaVonne Ruoff, who notes that “The farther away she goes from home and family, the more powerless she is to prove to herself that she is not Yellow Woman. She hopes to see someone else on the trail so that she can again be certain of her own identity” (13).

12. The importance of water in desert country, of course, is obvious. Silko herself comments on the key role of water and springs in Pueblo life. “Natural springs,” she says, “are crucial sources of water for all life in the high desert plateau country. So the small spring near Paguate village is literally the source and continuance of life for the people in the area. The spring also functions on a spiritual level” (“Landscape” 91). Scholars have generally not commented on the water images in the story, though in the introduction to her casebook on “Yellow Woman,” Melody Graulich speaks of the river as invoking “sexual desire” and “the female body” (15). My own reading is less Freudian in orientation.

13. Silko talks about the importance of the river in her early life at Laguna: “I was always attracted to it as a kid. I loved the river very much. … The river was a place to meet boyfriends and lovers and so forth. I used to wander around down there and try to imagine walking around the bend and just happening to stumble upon some beautiful man” (Evers and Carr 29).

14. Ruoff briefly mentions seeing, but has little more than this to say about it: “Reaching a ridge, she tries to see where she left Silva but cannot, just as she was unable to see her pueblo at the beginning of the story before she began the journey up the mountain. Her inability to see what she is seeking signals the end of her interlude with Silva” (14).

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale.” The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986. 222-44.

———. Spider Woman's Granddaughters. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989.

Barnes, Kim. “A Leslie Marmon Silko Interview.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13.4 (1986): 833-105.

Benedict, Ruth. Tales of the Cochiti Indians. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1981.

Blicksilver, Edith. “Traditionalism vs. Modernity: Leslie Silko on American Indian Women.” Southwest Review 64 (1979): 149-60.

Boas, Franz. Keresan Texts. New York: American Ethnological Society, 1928.

Danielson, Linda. “The Tellers in Storyteller.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 1.2 (Fall 1989): 21-31.

Evers, Larry, and Denny Carr. “A Conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko.” Sun Tracks 3 (1976): 30.

Graulich, Melody, ed. “Yellow Woman.” New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers U P, 1993.

Gunn, John. Schat-Chen: History, Traditions, and Narratives of the Queres Indians of Laguna and Acoma. Albuquerque: Albright and Anderson, 1917.

Rubenstein, Roberta, and Charles R. Larson, eds. Worlds of Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne. “Ritual and Renewal: Keres Traditions in the Short Fiction of Leslie Silko.” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 5 (1979): 1-15.

Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Western Writers Series 45. Boise: Boise State U P, 1980.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” Antaeus 57 (Autumn 1986): 83-94.

———. “Yellow Woman.” Storyteller. New York: Little, Brown, 1981. 54-62.