Coyolxauhqui, daughter of Coatlicue, as a broken woman at the base of Templo Mayor.


Las Lloronas/The Crying Women

As she cried,
she drowned her children,
wrung them breath-
dry in the river
after he left.

He left with cudgels, rifles, and short knives,
perhaps with another woman's
                                                wet
on his lips, she tells me.

I know about crying.
I tell her my words left
under river stones and broken-
down bridges failed
to come up that day.
I found only an inadequate list:
weep, wail, bawl, keen,
a collection of girl-words
soaked in absurdity.

Yes, I killed them, she tells me,
like a man, then I wept
like a woman.

We part at the end of the river
where the water turns
                                  brackish.

Her laments follow me
home, entangle in my damp
hair, sway me to sleep.

I wake when the night
                                   dawns
with a splatter of stars across the ink-blood sky.
Outside, the mourning
                                   doves speak little cries,
feed the young and feather-
cover their eyes. Tear-
stripped naked, I swim
in the river next to her, run
my fingers in the hair
of her first-born son
as he descends.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans


S and I spent the summer of 2003 in Oaxaca City, a colonial town of 75% indigenous population in the thick of the largest state in Mexico, the state Cortes described to the Spanish crown by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on a table. To walk through the mountains of Oaxaca, he said, was to walk through that crumpled parchment.

That summer I studied Spanish and S worked at an archaeological site on the road to Mitla about 35 miles outside of the city. The site was an ordinary household in a Zapotec suburb of 1,000 years ago, a collection of patios surrounded by rectangular structures each with the family's dead entombed beneath the patio and in front of an altar. Many of the men S worked with were from a nearby Zapotec village, Maquilxochitl, which means "Five Flower" in Nahuatl. Some day in the future, after he's done with this war, S will do his doctoral research in Maquilxochitl, where families live in the same patio-structure compounds their relatives did those years ago and where the tlyudas are made on adobe stoves fired by craggled mesquite.

I was flooded with the stories of the women I met there, particularly the women of Maquilxochitl who fed us stewed squash with onions, chile, and Oaxacan string cheese, and those miraculous tlyudas made from corn they'd ground themselves on volcanic metates. So many of the stories were about goodbyes. Women had said goodbye to their children years ago before the children went north to cross the border, and some hadn't seen them since. Others had said goodbye to their chidren before they had left to cross the border themselves, returning years later when their children were no longer children. One woman had four daughters and only one was still in Oaxaca. The other daughters were scattered from San Jose, California down to Baja and Mexico City, where one daughter worked in a plastics factory. This woman had crossed the border herself several times, outwitted coyotes and was beaten by one, but ended up coming back to Oaxaca for good and married one of S's good friends, Procopio. Her cousin crossed fifteen years ago and she never heard from him again. He was presumed to be dead.

How many have died in the river of two names, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, or in the dusty, waterless desert? Can you imagine how many?

I had been reading about Mexico for a few years before that summer we spent in Oaxaca, including books about Mexico's rich religious and cultural heritage. The country is crawling with stories. legends, myths. When I got home, I started a series of poems about women facing what we face at this beginning of the third millennium, and how these stories relate to the histories of our anscestors and my own life. Las Lloronas is one of these poems.

I wrote this poem the day after S was "called up," one week and two days before Thanksgiving last year. They really did call. Early, before 7. We were both still in bed in our leaky New Orleans apartment because it was a Tuesday and neither of us had class. They called on the cell phone we shared and they told him he was to report to his base in Indiana the following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. We were supposed to leave that day for New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with S's family, but suddenly everything was uncertain, unknown. S was in his final semester of classes in his PhD program. In just a few months he was to take his comprehensive exams then his orals, and then the following autumn (right now in fact) we were to go back to Oaxaca where S was to begin a dig at the temples ringing the small chapel on top of Cerro Danush, the symmetrical mountain that sits prominently inside the village of Maquilxochitl, a mountain that the entire village ascends on May 3rd to celebrate the Festival of the Cross. Now we weren't even sure he'd be able to finish his semester. I was a full-time instructor at University of New Orleans and I knew I had to make some decisions too. Should I stay in New Orleans or go back to Chicago to be near my mother? This all happened in an instant, and as a stark reminder that nothing is constant, all is change, our lives were changed instantly.

Yes, you'd think that there would have been a little more consideration for national guard soldiers, an understanding that they would have to "tie up loose ends" and make arrangements at work, school, home. But no. There was none of that until S and the other four men who were called (the unit had been split up and splintered the previous August, with some of the group sent to Afghanistan and others ordered to stay home to help train new members) complained so bitterly they were given a reprieve. But this happened a few days later, just before we were to leave for New Jersey, and just after we called the airline to see if we could change our tickets (the answer was no, by the way). It was the first of several mid-play changes, some good, some not, that would define our next several months and demonstrate how absolutely incompetent and confused the military brass were.

After that call I yelled at S, told him he clearly didn't love me since he had put our relationship and our future in jeopardy for the army (why he was still in is for another day). I cried and yelled, then cried again. He said that of course he loved me and that he regretted this as much as I did. I had to get away from him. I was too angry, too upset. I went into our roommate Rebecca's room. She was awake and had her coffee, which was curious. Usually she woke much later, but she was studying for her comps too and at the side of her bed was a mountain of books she was studying from. Her days were beginning early and ending late as she filled out note cards and typed out synopses of anthropology and archaeology texts. I went into her room and she took me in her arms and said "What's wrong, honey?" and I told her and she cried with me.

That day S and I talked a lot. We talked about what would happen. We talked about how much we loved each other and how surprised S was because he was certain, dead certain, that Kerry would win and he wouldn't get called up. He apologized and apologized again, and then I forgave him.

The call had come after weeks of disappointment. The three of us were still in mourning over Kerry's loss, still stunned and stressed and dreading another four years with Bush in office. Election night we had sat together in the living room batting away brown june bugs and the occasional flying cockroach that had moved in through the open windows, and watched the results come in. When it started to look bad, Rebecca and I ran around the house and found things that represented the contested states: a Pretenders disc for Ohio; a chunk of cheese for Wisconsin; a book of poems by Florida poet David Kirby. Rebecca had spent eight years in West Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, so she gathered up her super-fine African juju sculptures like the two figures with nails and shanks sticking out of their bodies, and I gathered my Zuni fetishes (buffalo, toad, bear, Corn Mother). We placed it all on the table in the living room then rang the booty with La Virgen candles, curios, small bowls of our just-finished dinner, and several shots of tequila. Rebecca got sage out of the refrigerator and burned it, blew the smoke across the table and at the windows, and we both begged the spirits to help John Kerry win, to help all of us escape the Bush-born madness. As the night wore on and things got even more dire, we knocked on the door of our neighbor George, a voodoo practitioner who had helped Rebecca rid the apartment of evil spirits when she'd first moved in two years before. George wasn't home, which we should have taken as an omen, I guess. When we knew it was over, Rebecca went to her room and we crawled into our bed for a sleep deep enough, we'd hoped, to erase the night and start us over again.

Well, obviously it didn't work. S knew it wouldn't, but then he's much more practical than me. It was that morning after when I started to worry. I knew it would take more good juju than we had in our leaky apartment to prevent S from being called up. Three weeks later I was proven right.

The story of the La Llorona, the Crying Woman, comes from Mexico and it varies from the scorned harlot who kills her children out of revenge, to a scorned woman who kills her children to protect them from poverty, to a woman whose children are murdered by their father, to a woman who has a vision of her children being wisked away by floodwaters, only to wake up and find her nightmare had come true. In every version La Llorona dies, usually from her own hand, on the banks of the river that also took her children. For her crime she is condemned to die and to walk the banks as a ghost. In most versions of the story she feels regret and remorse for her rashness, and cries in longing for the children she will never see again. In the version of the story told around fires and at bedside by malicious babysitters, she roams the banks looking for children to snatch and take as her own.

When S was called up, I became a crying woman myself. The original version of the poem had allusions to the fact that we hadn't gotten pregnant yet (and that I therefore had no children to drown), but the wise ladies in my poetry workshop urged me to take that stuff out, and as usual they were right. But when I let loose the river inside of me and mourned for the forced separation that was to come, I felt an affecton for las lloronas who had come before me, and the thousands who are struggling with difficult goodbyes right now.

(I wonder, even, if Cindy Sheehan feels like la llorona too. She is trying to 'right' the wrong of her son's death, a death she feels all of us, including herself, are responsible for because we allowed Bush to be elected. She is wailing for her dead son on the banks of concrete rivers across the country.)

The photograph above is of Coyolxauhqui, the daughter and murderer of Coatlicue. She is part of the web of legends and myths that La Llorona is a part of. In this picture of the stone at the base of Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she is a broken woman, beheaded and shattered to pieces, the work of her just-born brother. Wikipedia has decent versions of the stories of Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and La llorona.

I decided to post this poem and this story today after reading two excellent posts yesterday about Lashaun Harris, a severely mentally ill woman who drowned her children and who faces execution for her crime. Dr. Omed's wife Elsbeth has a powerful personal essay about living with a manic-depressive, knowing a man who'd "sacrificed his arms to a train," and the possibility for mercy. And Phila at Bouphonia talks about Harris and the question of hearing voices. Of course Lashaun is a version of la llorona and Coyolxauhqui (she is certainly a broken woman), and sadly, her fate may be the same as the women of those legends. She may not die by her own hand, but rather by the groping hands of the state.