The Blue Coffee Pot
Yellow sunlight rose in still, warm pillars from the floor to the vaulted, circular ceiling of The Blue Coffee Pot, one of the few restaurants in Kayenta, Arizona, in the heart of the Navajo Nation. Even in waning afternoon, the blinds were no match for the Arizona sun; the hogan-shaped room was hot and bright, and filled with the rich scent of chili peppers and fry bread. Two young Navajo women, probably in their late teens, worked the room cheerfully and gracefully, taking and delivering orders, keeping the bar clean, and cashing out customers in between. They seemed oblivious to the oppressive heat, comfortably moving about the restaurant in a near-run, keeping every surface spotless and every customer happy.
Since landing in Phoenix two days earlier for a week-long tour of northern Arizona, I had spent nearly sixteen hours in a moving vehicle, traveling from place to place, exploring and observing the vast, unfamiliar region. It is, in every manner, a study in contrasts: stunning geographic beauty and urban sprawl; massive natural and cultural wealth and abject poverty; rich blue skies and deep red Chinle sand rock. It is also a time warp: future and past converge on this brief, fleeting moment, pulling from both sides to lay claim to every perception of those who take the time to really look at it and try to process historical and social complexities they will never fully comprehend.
Beside the highway in Oak Creek Canyon, just south of Flagstaff, I stopped to photograph the tall, thick Ponderosa pines and blazing red maples, incandescent against the deep azure sky and white Coconino sandstone. The colors might have been borrowed from any artist’s palette, but were too vivid to be anything but completely real. Then just ahead, off the side of the well-traveled road, was a large “Indian Marketplace.” Curious, I walked over to see what was going on. Much to my surprise (and dismay), there sat a dozen or so Hopi and Navajo women, most of them quite young, selling jewelry and pottery to white tourists - souvenirs, they would be, of the white folks’ visit to Indian Country. Ornate turquoise jewelry, sand paintings, and traditional handcrafted pottery adorned every square inch of the end-to-end tables. I was saddened to see these beautiful pieces of ancient artistry reduced to trinkets sold in ramshackle roadside stalls: the manifestation of a people's creative expression handed down over many centuries, reduced to a quick sale without fanfare, and for pennies, to travelers who would have exactly no idea of their meaning. A Navajo girl greeted me as I walked past her table. “Feel free to handle the items. I make all of them. I sign them if you like.” She never looked up; her youthful brown fingers were tapping a message on her iPhone, which then announced an incoming call with a popular country song. “All items are handmade,” she said. Then she disappeared into a conversation on her phone, impervious to the discussion I desperately wanted to have but didn’t know how to begin.
Busloads of tourists unloaded at Canyon de Chelly, and herds of rich, white suburbanite retirees made pitiful attempts to trek down the canyon wearing designer clothes and loafers, yelling and whooping at the top of their lungs like a bunch of drunken nineteen-year olds at a frat party. Occasionally one of them would make eye contact with me and ask, “Did you walk all the way down there?” pointing to the Whitehouse Anasazi ruins. Quiet disbelief. I nodded, “Yes,” and walked on, trying to establish and model something resembling the solemn, respectful reverence that place deserves. Do they not know what happened in this canyon? Or do they simply not care? Frustrated and angry, I ended up wishing the canyon were closed to the public altogether. If we as a society cannot treat such hallowed ground with the most sincere dignity, then none of us should be allowed anywhere near it.
There is so little that is sacred these days. What is shouldn’t be. And what should be is not.
I was gently pulled back to the present by the sound of a friendly voice in close proximity. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked, brushing strands of long, black hair from her damp forehead.
Kayenta is a small Navajo town conveniently located right off Route 160 between Flagstaff and Monument Valley. It is a reservation town in every way, full of everything The Res, over the next few days, would come to represent: rich, heartbreaking beauty and deep, stark, penetrating pain. Everywhere, every sign pointed to the collision of two worlds, and the uncomfortable arranged marriage - and subsequent spiritual death - that happened as a result. “Real Indian jewelry starting at $3.99,” reads a billboard just outside of town. This is undoubtedly good business; every tourist driving through the reservation toward Monument Valley will see it, and many will stop to stretch their legs, grab a Coke and a bag of chips, and pick up a “real” piece of Diné culture to take back to the suburbs while they are at it.
I ordered, made small talk with the waitress, and was quietly absorbed into the columns of warm sunlight. I needed a moment to reflect, to try to begin assimilating the life-changing experience I was smack in the middle of.
The trip to Arizona was one part vacation, one thousand parts education. As a citizen of the rural South with a deep and insatiable curiosity about human behavior, I had always wanted to see this place, these people, so profoundly different from the place and people I come from. As a woman with Native American blood, a deep sense of connection to my genetic past, and a fierce passion for understanding why we humans do the things we do, I needed to see it with my own eyes: the real heart of the Native American world as it is today, right now, in the 21st century. So there I was, sitting at this tiny point along the continuum, in a small Reservation town, amidst the Navajo and Hopi realities, vivid and rich and foreign, yet startlingly familiar.
Across the dining room, a young Navajo woman and her three children were sitting down to dinner. Two beautiful little girls and a gorgeous, dark-haired boy, ranging in age from about two to about seven, talked and laughed and played, running about the restaurant, trying hard to get out of eating, and concerned only with the game they appeared to be making up as they went along. At some point, the five-year old girl wandered away from the other two, turned to face my side of the dining room, and quickly glanced around in search of something entertaining to occupy herself with. She was awesomely beautiful: her deep, sparkling black eyes pierced right through my heart like one of Cupid’s arrows. Her skin, the deep, earthy color of honey, and her jet-black hair, luminous in the bright yellow back light of the late afternoon sun, were a study in simple glory. She stood near the exit door all dolled up in a Snow White dress, probably for Halloween, and even if I tried, I couldn’t have stopped looking at her. She was oblivious to her admirer; I was homesick in a big way for my own 5-year old niece, and this child became, at first, a way for me to get my “fix” of little girl cuteness.
But that is not all I saw when I looked at her.
1,800 miles to the east, in a little town in rural Southeast Kentucky, another little girl was playing dress up in her fairy costume, trying not to get it dirty before Halloween night; her long brown hair was pulled back into a loose, messy ponytail, her brown eyes glistened in the evening sun, and as she played, she wondered when I would be coming home. She paused for a moment, glancing out the window, daydreaming about the pretty, innocent things 5-year old girls daydream about. The same sun shone through her window. The same light filtered through her hair and split into rainbows of color, lit her face and placed a diamond glint across her eyes.
We inhabited three very different worlds at that moment; yet, the same sun was shining on all three of us. That was, for some reason, a great comfort, a reminder that a common thread was woven through the fabric of all three of our lives.
We humans are taught at a very young age to begin taking note of all the ways we are different from one another. Long before we would have any reason to make the distinctions ourselves, we are told about the chasm between boys and girls - and it doesn’t end at the anatomical differences. Boys are tough; girls are fragile. Boys play with trucks and bulldozers; girls play with dolls and toy kitchens. Boys are supposed to be good at getting in (and out of) trouble; girls are supposed to just be good. The gender lines are drawn early and clearly, and are reinforced throughout childhood and into adulthood. Just as surely as we are socialized at home and school and church and the playground and the neighbor’s house, we are handed our very first sense of identity, and we generally accept it as it is given to us, not realizing there is any possibility of shaping and molding it. The dimensions of the mold are prescribed, and it’s up to us to make sure we squeeze ourselves into it for the rest of our lives, or face dire and unpleasant consequences.
And the categorization does not end with gender. White and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, straight and gay, rich and poor, young and old - the stereotypes are innumerable, and frighteningly powerful. Having just spent two days discussing the importance of evaluating stereotypes with my own students (who are college freshmen), the topic was fresh and warm in the incubator of my mind: “Question everything,” I admonished repeatedly. “Don’t assume it is right just because it’s what everyone else says you should think.” This particular group of students participated with a great deal of candor and interest when we discussed they ways in which stereotypes develop, the many purposes they serve, and how they can be, in reality, either helpful or harmful. They seemed to genuinely want a reason to think for themselves, and as blissfully happy as that made me, I was even happier to see them sit up a little straighter when they realized it was completely acceptable to question what they have assumed to be true, what they have been told is absolute and unquestionable. What they didn’t know was that I also had a personal stake in this; having grown up a little “different” in the rural South, I know first-hand what it feels like to be teased for not being one of the crowd, and how ridicule born of ignorance can cut a person right to the core. I didn’t look like my classmates; they were mostly white, and I was mostly not. My Native American and Mediterranean DNA tagged me with a label that nothing could conceal; as a result, I was constantly teased and called out for being different from the rest. For being who I am. It didn’t matter that every single person in that group of antagonists shared as rich and diverse a collection of DNA as I had (the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with the African-American great-grandfather wouldn’t have agreed); what mattered was - is - what appears before our eyes. We believe what we see. And we see in terms of difference.
So, for me, all the talk about questioning stereotypes and embracing diversity isn’t just rhetoric. It’s a little bit personal.
1,800 miles east of Kayenta, a five-year old girl, whom I love more than my own life, was absorbed in play, unaware of the powerful forces at work in her own psyche, shaping her identity and her sense of self. And here, in The Blue Coffee Pot, on a late October afternoon, I was painfully aware of the consequences of those forces.
We live in frightening times. More and more each day, it seems that American society is becoming dramatically and dangerously polarized; an “us and them” mentality infuses political dialogue, and no aspect of American life is immune to the metastasizing bigotry and hate. Each day, basic civil rights, fought for and hard won by the blood and tears of thousands of brave men and women, are being viciously and blatantly butchered at the hands of elected leaders and citizens alike. I ask myself many times each day, “How this can be so?” It wasn’t long ago that we, as a people, were outraged at the insolent ethnocentrism that threatened any of our basic rights; for we knew, or it seemed so, that to deprive one person of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is to deprive every single one of us of that precious right. Have we forgotten the lives that were lost so that all people could walk into the same businesses and use the same restrooms and water fountains? More importantly, have we forgotten how deeply and fatally we wound ourselves when we deny one among us the fundamental respect and decency we are all born entitled to? If any one of us is to be free, we must ALL be free. Most of us have come to know this as prima facie truth. But something happened; something dramatic and heartbreaking happened. We now accept - even cultivate - attitudes and worldviews that deny basic rights to human beings because of their skin color, their religion, their sexuality, or their nationality. And we seem to think it’s alright. We, Americans - who claim to constitute “the land of the free and the home of the brave” - have succumbed to the basest of our motives: we have given in, surrendered to that dark and shadowy devil within us. We engage willfully and proudly in the murderous practice of judging and condemning others, and we feel righteous in doing so. We’ve become a society of people who find it easier to pass judgment on a massive scale than to really look at another human being and see, as we should, ourselves and our children looking back at us.
We have conceded. We have accepted a new identity, and in so doing, we have agreed to be driven by fear instead of love.
We do not want to hear the beautiful dissonant harmony that comes only from every voice in a choir singing with its own pitch and timbre. We want every voice to be identical to ours. As a result, we’ve lost the beauty that is born from the blending of infinite variation. We don’t want contrast; we don’t listen for harmony. We hear instead the high, heartbreaking sound of loneliness.
We have been told, and have chosen to believe, that difference is dangerous. Hate crimes are rampant, and discrimination (on the basis of religion, race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity) - while it may be against the law - is more widely tolerated than it has been at any previous point in my lifetime.
How could that happen? I whispered the question into the air, and it vanished without a trace. A shadowy mess of tangled fears, hatred, self-centeredness, and greed appeared momentarily, as though to confess and claim responsibility, then ran off into the void.
The Diné girl noticed me watching her. I smiled and waved, and she smiled back at me, then ducked under a table. She reemerged a few feet away, her hair tousled on top of her head, and her Snow White dress slightly wrinkled and dusty at the hem.
The little girl in Kentucky, watching wistfully out the window as cold rain pooled into puddles on the autumn ground, emerged from the tangled maze.
If she were here, that little girl would look across the room and see another little girl dressed up in a Snow White costume, playing make-believe, and would ask me sweetly, “Can I go play with her?” And I would say, “Yes, of course you can.” And she would walk shyly over to the little Diné girl, stand before her without a word, and the two would look at one another for a few moments, and then they would, without a word, agree that adding another little girl to any game can only make it double the fun. And that is all they would need to know.
I remember once, a few months ago, when she sat on my lap and looked into my face for a long time, and then announced, as if she had stumbled across something nobody else knew, “You’re brown and I’m white.” She held her little arm up next to mine, and sure enough, she was right. Our Cherokee blood is much more noticeable in me than in her, and our contrasting colors set the stage for an important discovery. It is obvious, even to a five-year old, that kind of skin-deep difference. Even though we are extremely similar genetically, there’s an obvious dissimilarity, one so clear that no child could miss it. Science tells us that all human beings, the world over, are at least 99% genetically identical; the traits that make us “different” compose, at most, only 1% of our DNA. But that 1% sure is eye-catching.
She seemed a bit troubled by the realization. I explained to her, gently and in 5-year old language, how we have a grandmother who was Cherokee, and I look like her, “just the same way that you look like your mommy and daddy, and me.” She smiled and buried her face in my arm.
Some things just are what they are. And they are, in every way, just as they are supposed to be.
I looked at the Diné girl, and something crystallized. These two little girls, though miles and miles apart literally and metaphorically, are exactly the same in every single way that matters.
The pillars of light had begun to gradually weaken in the swiftly sinking sun, and swirls of warmth drifted into view, delivering tiny specks of dust into the faltering light. Suspended in mid-air and brightly illuminated, they appeared surreal and in willful defiance of the laws of nature. They shone brightly; then, in a blink, they were gone.
I thought to myself, if she were here, perhaps she would look at the Diné girl and notice only how pretty she is. Perhaps she would see a little girl who is different from her, but just as beautiful. Perhaps she would notice only that she looks a little bit familiar. Like family.
Then a smile crept across my heart, and I had the best thought.
Perhaps she wouldn’t see anything different at all.