This morning I’m groggy because a Blackfeet woman I know who is a little older than me called me on the phone late and talked for an hour and a half. My day begins at 4:30 AM with a stint of writing, includes more sleep (often full of dreams), and then goes on in more normal fashion. This woman insists that she is a full-blood and says you can tell because she has a Blackfeet name, though when asked she gives the English translation of that name and actually goes by the name of her white former husband. This woman is a type who shows up in Louise Erdrich novels: powerful and aggressive by temperament, educated because father and church insisted, and displaced from the reservation early in her working life to a major city where she succeeded very well through white upper-class management patrons. Now her problem is how to cope with a subsidized apartment on the rez, diminishing health, and the hard loss of friends from childhood. Also, she says she called to see what I (“an educated white woman”) thought about the world’s sudden catastrophic financial outlook.
This is not the standard mental picture America has of Blackfeet women on reservations any more than I am the standard small town woman. But we are not at all alike. One of the major differences is her enormous emphasis on appearance, specifically clothes. She says she can tell what she calls “intellectual” white people in high places because of their fine clothes. When asked whether she approves of Obama taking off his suit coat in the Oval Office, she dodges by saying, “Well, he’s black. I don’t talk about black people.” On the other hand, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of mildly mocking Stephen Toulmin and his wife for dressing in very expensive “putty-colored” raw silk clothes. (They’re white.)
There are two dimensions here: one is that I enjoy flouting dress codes and flew in the face of expensive clothes at seminary by wearing flannel shirts and homemade jeans without pockets, waistband or even a sewn hem. Partly I was teasing my faculty which boasted about wearing blue workshirts with reverse collars while they did social organizing in the Sixties. They were mock-working-class Unitarian-Universalist, of course, considering themselves major scourgers of society. Fritscher, a conservative Catholic at the time, says that in the same place at the same time while doing the same social work he wore short sleeved white shirts with a tie. I suspect that’s about how Obama dressed in his more recent stint of social organizing.
While I was dressing as low as one can go without being in rags, I was privately keeping up with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar -- high fashion. I’ve always loved it. If I had a lot of money, the first thing I would buy would be expensive shoes (low heeled), then some “putty-colored raw silk” garments, and a lot of hats. My problem is that I’m shaped like a barrel (very unhealthy) -- thus hats and shoes. Beyond that, I really HATE all the maintenance and storage issues. Anyway there is no clothes cleaners within a hundred miles. So much for silk.
Of all the L.M. Montgomery stories of Avonlea, the one I reread the most was “Old Lady Lloyd” about the aged spinster in her ancestral home who wore her mother’s remodeled old-fashioned silk clothes. When I type my grandmother’s journals to share with cousins, much is about my aunt and her renewing their wardrobes by applying new lace collars or changing the buttons, though in the prosperous years they sewed whole outfits from patterns. My cousins and I all grew up in home-sewn clothes and proud of it.
In the summer of 1960 I was costumer for a repertory company, which was a little beyond my competence, but then we were all beyond our competence and there to challenge ourselves. This little town had been a rich resort once and the costume department -- an old ice house -- was a trove of trunks and racks of the most marvelous beaded chiffon dresses, slowly disintegrating, in that strange jazz-era style with no waist and handkerchief hems, meant to wear while doing some outré dance like the Charleston.
My current BBC series is “House of Eliot,” which I had thought would be something existential, maybe a mystery. Instead it is the next step in the thinking of Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins who devised “Upstairs Downstairs” to explore the dislocations and damage of the end of the Edwardian Era. “House of Eliot” goes on through the Twenties and Thirties with two sisters, one older enough to have helped raise the younger one when their mother died, now orphaned by a dissolute Victorian father and thrown on their own resources. Like Old Lady Lloyd, they remodel a parental clothes stash, this time across gender lines: the silk and cashmere of their father. Their lively convention-challenging outfits (rather like Chanel) intrigue the toffs and there they are: a couture house. The rest takes on the two-level problems of changing times for the sisters, who are eligible for upward mobility into the nobility, and their workers (including beaders) who must make their futures as chances arise.
We seem to be in another of those challenging times of social rule-change. They say the last unemployment crunch this big was 1973. That’s the year I quit teaching and returned to Portland. When I went job-hunting while my resources shrank, I made shirtwaist dresses out of my flowered sheets, using a Halston pattern. I still have them -- can’t quite make myself throw them away.
My Blackfeet acquaintance (she is very choosy about whom she allows to call her a friend) would not have approved. She appreciates that part of the appeal of upscale clothes is their high cost. In fact, her definition of “intellectual” is someone who has a generous income, earned through the careful management of power. Many of her role models are post-WWII, influenced by European news and appreciative of order: Eisenhower people. My idea of an intellectual is Stephen Toulmin, a man of such elevated philosophy that hardly anyone can understand him. He’s a “history of” thinker, a meta-thinker, an analyzer of thinking. Maybe post-modern, I suppose. I reach for that standard but will never get there. I can manage something more on the level of Jean Marsh and am content to do that well.
At 4:30 AM I was not a clear enough thinker to compose this blog. When I rolled back into my flannel, ultrafleece, down-equivalent, and electric nest with Crackers on my arm, I dreamt I was at an important dinner party at a table with Michelle Obama who was wearing a purple lace gown. I had come in a wash dress. I excused myself, went home a few blocks away and changed into a dress I’d made myself long ago: a black shantung v-necked garment with flaring trousers that I always wore with a jacket. In the dream it was persimmon velveteen with jet beading, which I made for the dedication of the heroic-sized Bill Linderman statue at what was then called the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. (It's on Persimmon Hill.)
The message, I guess, is that we must adapt, but that we should value the past. But maybe it’s something about life being a rodeo.
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