Threads of Truth

Threads of Truth

There were a few things that I thought of while reading Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water. After working in the yard on Saturday afternoons, my father and I would relax in front of the television and watch “The Lone Ranger”. King’s inclusion of the characters from this television show along with characters from The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe sent me on a voyage of nostalgia. The walls of my childhood home were lined with bursting bookshelves and included these authors as well as many others. One of my favorite games as a child was the card game “Authors”, which encouraged us to memorize key works by Cooper, Hawthorne, Stevenson, and Alcott. If my father was still alive I probably would have called him, as I always have, to share with him my thoughts regarding King’s novel. We would have had a great conversation about the characters and the allegory that King has so beautifully weaved throughout. Then there were things that I remembered from taking a lower division American Literature class at Ventura College.

Creation stories were often orated and passed down from generation to generation and the beginning of King’s narrative was true to the nature of these stories. I have family ties to several of the indigenous tribes found on the American continent. My husband’s family on his father’s side is Apache. My sister’s husband is Navajo. And on my father’s side, we are Cherokee. Traditions and stories are an integral part of our lives. In addition to this memory, I recalled the many events in U.S. history and the terrible atrocities against Native Americans. Like the character, Helen Mooney, I would ask similarly:

Well, for one thing, what happened to them? (King 19).

There has been so much of our past that has been swept under the rug in an effort to hide what has happened to a group of people. King brings it out in the open for us to examine, sometimes overtly and other times more subtle. Even though it appears that King is telling a circular story, he is also telling a story with many threads that are eventually woven together to create a beautiful tapestry. Like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, King infuses stories from oral tradition as well as themes from the Bible (including the names). As with all allegories, there is a thread of truth in both of these novels. King’s novel speaks to Melville’s, a reply to the issues presented in Moby-Dick that includes contemporary issues. My father would have enjoyed reading King’s novel and would have found great joy and humor in the reading. We would have talked about the spiritual aspects because that was our favorite topic of conversation.

I can still hear my father’s laugh and his expressions of delight when we would speak about literature (he is a retired professor and theologian). When my father was diagnosed with cancer a year ago this past March, he began writing a story that would rival the novels of King and Melville. Every week or so he would email me another 10 - 15 chapters. My father stopped writing when the cancer began to sap all the energy out of him. When he could no longer speak we would just sit together.

His story is an allegory with shimmering threads of emerald and gold that I have tried to understand and I wish that I could know the ending, as it remains unfinished. As I write this reflection, the loose pages from his many e-mails, wait patiently for me to pour over them so that I can find the threads of truth that he left for me and my siblings. Some things are as plain as day, yet others elude me. And that is the gift of the allegory. And it is likely that I will only begin to understand more of his story, and that of King and Melville, when I have experienced more in this life.