The Toulouse Jingle Dance
Nicole Cantrell

Chance Whitedeer was born on January 1, 1977. He’d
always hated the Minnesota winter, so he ate his yearly solitary
birthday cake June twelfth. No one knew his actual birth was
in January or seemed to care that he went through the invented
motions despite reality. He figured it wasn’t much to celebrate,
given the way his mother had rarely described it. Whitedeer was
the “most defining disappointment” of her life, she joked. There
was enough truth in it to sting. His mother, Agave, had been
quite the Bohemian in her time and seen all there was to see in
the wide world of the hipster vanguard. She had returned to her
virtual tribal home in Minneapolis just in time for his breach
birth. Splat, he’d landed on the ice of the Indian Health Services
Hospital parking lot. The nurses thought it was very considerate
of him to enter the world without their medical assistance
and were glad to send him home without spending a dime of
that precious imaginary treaty money. There, in the post-tribal
ice, they remained, a boy and his mother against the city and
themselves.
Since his first seizure in the year of his sixth birthday, he
had imagined things when he wanted to be distant from the
conversation. Typically, his mother would prattle on about his
aimlessness, and he’d picture dancing pink robots. In Whitedeer
country, disco robots had a vibrant culture, an evolving, living
story. Sometimes, he couldn’t think of anything but dancing
pink robot stories when he watched lips moving vague syllables
towards him. It was comforting, the ease of his stroking smooth
cold metal thoughts, like the feather weight of an aluminum
baseball bat. It brought him pleasure to see the foreign, hard
motions of the robots. It distracted him from the vestigial urge to
speak his desperate mind. He couldn’t tell his mother how badly
he needed to escape from his life, from his own skin. He couldn’t
wait to be a man so that his life would begin.
Finally, the day came. His childhood ended in the sunny
backyard as he relished the taste of his first adult bite of cream
frosting. Whitedeer, the man, made plans. His absurd resolution,
in the January of his magic twentieth year, was to visit the Black
Forest. For as long as he could remember, he had fantasized
about traveling there. He imagined it was like eating cake, the
cherries, the almond frosting spreading across the tongue in his
dark mouth. The concept percolated until it became a fetish.
It encapsulated his desire to escape the “rez” of his mind. To
Whitedeer, his brown skin seemed to be an invitation for the
whole world to preserve him in an allegory. Every interaction
was ultimately about his conquered culture confronting their
unbearable whiteness. He didn’t care. All he really wanted was
to shed his skin like a serpent and crawl into a new one when
it looked like a good ride. It was so boring to listen to their
questions about what his wise ’naabe grandmother taught him
about nature, or exactly what an Indian was in postmodern
America. He did not try to dispel their notions. For him, nothing
worth saying could ever be said—he was there only in the act
and the experience. And so he acted the way he felt and hoped
whiteys would appreciate his stoic example. They did not, and
he barely registered their confusion. He remained focused on his
goal. He wouldn’t have to tolerate their self-centered attempts
to connect with him much longer. There was a perfect Teutonic
spirit waiting in the Black Forest for him to inhabit, and he was
on his way as soon as he could get the cash.
His stomach churned audibly as he handed the money to
the Nicois ticket clerk. She was staring at his face in that familiar
way, but, thankfully, she didn’t ask about who his ancestors might
have been. She bent down and handed him the trash bin behind
the counter. He sprayed curdled stomach acid all over the bottom
of it and then rested his throbbing head on the counter.
“Are you sure you’re well enough to board the train, Sir?”
she asked, seeming genuine enough. “Do you have maps and an
itinerary scheduled? Is there something else I can help you with?”
Stammering through his ticket order must have raised
her suspicions, and now he was going to be harassed by clerkly
concern. “Uh, I feel, uh…fine, mmm…thanks. I’ll be alright um,
as soon as I get to my hostel in….Toulouse? Yeah, Toulouse,” he
said, mostly to convince himself. He opened the massive envelope
from his inside coat pocket. With a sudden guilt playing across
his broad face, he handed the clerk the fat tangle of bills from
inside his fist.
Unimpressed, she continued, “According to your passport
records, you’ve been halfway across Europe in the last two weeks.
How on earth did you wind up in Prague trying to get to western
Germany?”
He had no defense for his irrational decisions. “I got drunk
on the wrong train… and… didn’t want to go back through…to
Paris. So I just stayed on the same railway.” He knew that was a
nonsensical excuse, but he couldn’t concoct anything better in the
moment.
The ticket clerk glanced around quickly, possibly looking
for some kind of intervention, but no one had noticed her
strange customer. She sighed and handed him the tickets and his
passport. “Well, there are several hostels here in Nice, so if you
can’t get where you’re going, you can always come through here
again. There are medical services available—”
He cut her short, “Thank you, but that won’t be, um,
necessary.” He fumbled in repacking his documents and gathered
his bags to make his shoddy exit. He could feel her confused eyes
following the back of his head all the way through the baroque
entryway and onto the fragrant street.
Whitedeer had been enjoying his random travels and didn’t
think it was problematic to adjust his wanderings—at first. He
had been guided by his mother’s partially-read journal into this
gross miscalculation. It turns out that one of the perils of having
been born to a mother late in her life is that many of her written
memories were enshrined in places and things that simply no
longer existed. Most of the landmarks, routes, and people she
described were long gone or unrecognizable. He wondered if
it was wise to continue following her muse, but he had already
come so far.
The train wrenched from the tracks laterally. It was
refrigerated, just stiff, freezing, empty metal inside. The sound
of the steel scraping across the track forced the pink robots
in his head to slam dance and self-destruct. He could not
sleep through the whole ride, frozen eyes watching him from
puddled passengers sitting on the other side of the freight car.
His impulse to hop a free train to Warsaw was obviously not
an advantageous one, and he was thrilled to jump off as soon as
the rails groaned from brake pressure. Within about an hour of
effort, he spotted a bus depot and arranged a tour of the nearby
Bialowieza Forest. He felt a modicum of satisfaction that his
aimlessness still had some benefits.
From the bus window, he was overwhelmed by the tiny,
visible slice of the forest boundary. He almost ran from the bus
straight into the thick of it, but he saw the tour guide gathering
a small group of hikers. He hid behind the nearby post office
wall until they had moved on and cautiously approached the
fencing. He wriggled between the wooden slats and hid behind
the nearest tree. He continued to keep watch for signs of human
traffic until he had walked far into the tightly woven forest.
Close to sunset, he spotted a couple of feeding wisent. He
felt an instant kinship with the beasts, which looked so much
like the buffalo from the Anishnaabe tribal cooperative. For
a flash of a second, he was homesick for the rez. He followed
them into a valley clearing, and they continued to move along
towards a stream in the distance for a drink. He was immediately
distracted by the overgrown sign a few feet ahead. He walked
up to it and pushed the vegetation aside to expose the English
words written just below the Polish. Bialowieza Forest, refuge of
Armia Krajowa soldiers. Site of mass execution by Nazi officers. Long
live the resistance! There was an engraving beside the message
depicting an execution of Third Reich generals. The words of an
accompanying poem particularly struck him.
Here is our long-forgotten family home.
And, having heard now and then the voice of ancestors calling,
Like a grey little forest bird, from far-away centuries,
I fly to you, Belovezhskaya Pushcha.1
It was some heady stuff, and Whitedeer decided he’d better
recuperate while he had the chance. He lay in the high grass
near the sign and stared up into the darkening violet clouds.
After daydreaming for a while, he noticed the stiffness in his legs
prickling for attention. He stretched out until he bumped against
something hard beneath the forest litter. He sat up and brushed
the grass and dirt off the stone near the impression he’d left
behind of his body. He was surprised to find it was not stone, but
a crumbling grave marker. It read Leleke Edelman. Polish partisan
and Armia Krajowa soldier. August 15, 1920–July 1, 1942. A chill
passed through him, and he decided it was time to go back the
way he’d come before he found anything else.
Whitedeer walked among the ferns and sweetgrass until
he stopped to admire a single ghost orchid shining among the
cattails. Paused in reverie, he suddenly felt his paper heart hurtle
forward a few beats. Then, it shuddered back a bit. He did not
feel fear, only admiration for the massive creature suddenly in
front of him. It must have been traveling the primordial forest
for half an eternity looking for a large enough meal. It was a
monstrous teddy bear that ate millions of smaller screaming
teddy bears for breakfast. First, his backpack was torn off his
back with a shocking Velcro unzipping sound. The creatures’
swiping nine-inch claws sliced through the bag’s canvas without
the slightest apparent intention. It then fixed its tiny black neon
eyes on him in a passive and lethal kind of way. He thought it
likely he had only disturbed its sleep—but that matters little
when you are a creature so near God in earthly power that you
can kill, without even a momentary malicious whim. He would
have thought the bear might smell of honey and berries, like a
furry bottle of mead. Instead, the creature stank of musk and
fermented evergreen Christmas.
He hadn’t ever considered a bear eating him. He decided
that the bear should be named Ivan. He would travel down the
bear’s muscular throat and rest inside its cave stomach. He would
be turned inside out by the bear’s juices, like a stop-motion
flower. He would transform into an inverted orchid. His petals,
stamen and pistol would stretch out as fingers spelling a message,
then curl under to drop to their shriveled death. He would be
unwrapped like a gift to the circus bear, joining his bloodstream
to be incorporated into his strong flesh. He addressed a mental
letter to the bear, “My dearest Ivan, your fur is a velvet bristle
brush.” Nothing would remain of him but a trail of human hair,
the fuzzy bits that trace the shower drain.
As the eye teeth pierced his left arm, he let out a shrieking,
inhuman whelp. The sound must have caught Ivan off guard,
and slipping on damp earth, Ivan seemed stunned. Quickly,
Whitedeer took the chance to pick up one of the heavy rocks
strewn around his feet and menaced it towards the beast. His
strange instinct paid off. The forest gods spared him, and the
startled bear blinked and just as quickly seemed to bore of the
pathetic human disturbance. Ivan awkwardly shuffled off towards
whatever noiseless, rank, secreted home he had been slumbering
in.
The forest was silent again. After his encounter, Whitedeer
knew the darkness crawled and vibrated with the muffled sounds
of a million glass-eyed creatures. Unable to locate any with his
primitive paranoid eyes, he worked towards any footpath in sweet
morphine numbness.
Finally, he had dragged himself to the edge of the forest.
In a cartoon parody of unconsciousness, blue feathers, sans bird,
circled his head. A sudden deafness blinded all his faculties,
and he melted into the vacuum. He dreamed of wicked
smiling crocodiles playing backgammon with his crafty ’naabe
grandmother. Someone lifted his shredded arm carefully, and it
momentarily woke him from the rapture. He slid between the
resting void and pained waking for uncounted days. When he
was healed, he opened his eyes to the village hospital ceiling.
Someone had cared enough to carry his prostrate body all the
way to the rudimentary doctors. He thanked them by sneaking
across the room to his folded clothes in the cabinet, dressing
quickly, and slithering his way out of a medical personnel exit. It
felt miraculous to be free from the emanation of death. He found
his bearings and headed for the train station.
Whitedeer crossed into Prague but had no idea what exact
course had led him there. He no longer believed in accidents, so
he embraced his error and took in the sights. He got off the train
and wandered in the rain among the brothels and cryptic store
fronts. Not far from the train station, he was knocked flat on his
ass into the snow by a reeking red elf. The running weirdo looked
behind him and seemed to note that his invisible attacker was
no longer in sight. The drunken Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost,
stopped and turned to help Whitedeer to his feet. He explained
that a frothy-mouthed dog had chased him from the alley where
he was dumpster diving, towards the hostel where he was hoping
to give the beast the slip. Whitedeer welcomed his prompt
invitation to sleep somewhere warm, even though Ded Moroz
was a smelly, drunken little creep. They walked the few blocks to
the elf ’s room, Grandfather Frost all the while chattering about
his previous follies in England. After they settled in on the thin,
single Murphy mattress, they shared a nip. At some time during
the tale of Saint Nick’s Foundation for Former Youth Sex Slaves,
the liquor caught up with Whitedeer, and he fell into a frigid
narcotic sleep.
He woke up in total darkness with Santa’s tongue in his ear,
dripping vodka backwash into his bloodshot eye. It took a full
two minutes for Whitedeer to comprehend the carnal absurdity
of the situation. He had finally had enough of turning the other
cheek. He stabbed the jolly pervert straight in the groin with the
bedside telephone near his good right arm. Then he ran from his
crime and waited at the station for the next train to Nice, France,
far from that Slavic hell.
Thankfully, he’d retained custody of his backpack somehow,
and during all the traveling he’d had ample time to read. He’d
finally reached the passages about his mother’s own college days,
backpacking through Europe and how she’d encountered his
father. Although he could look in the mirror and tell his father
had obviously not been Native, his mother had only replied
that he was “May-born” and refused to say anything more. He’d
researched the term as soon as he was able, but the books told
him nothing about who his father was or who a May-born
half-breed in Minneapolis was supposed to be. It was strange
to him to know this side of his elusive mother. He had always
respected her fierce privacy and kept his questions to himself,
like everything else he bottled up. It greatly upset him to feel so
close to her in her writing now and never in her actual presence.
Still, Whitedeer was excited to see the city where he had been
conceived and even more impatient to reach the end of his travels
in the Black Forest.
As soon as he arrived in Toulouse, he went straight to the
last known address of his father. Courtesy of his mother, there
was a surprise waiting for him. A statuesque Ethiopian woman
answered the door. As it turned out, it was his father’s widow.
He had died several years before, under vague and mysterious
circumstances. The widow was used to visits from his far-flung
children and was quite absently congenial to Whitedeer. She
offered him a tour of the house, use of his father’s library, and a
guest room to bed for the night. Rummaging through the library,
he found strange allusions to the person his father may have
been. There were numerous photos: daguerreotypes and                                                                                        sepiatones, black and whites, and even a few Polaroids. Most were
frankly labeled “wives,” “lovers,” “children,” or “friends” of this
man—but they couldn’t be from this man, they looked to be over
a hundred years old! His mother had written in her journal that
he was a feisty, ancient one-legged man when they met in 1976,
but he couldn’t be that old. There were still other documents.
There was a crude death certificate in the name Rimbaud, Jean
Nicholas Arthur, dated November 10, 1891. There was another
death certificate for 50 years later under the name Etienne
Rimbaud, and an accompanying photo of the same, but aged,
man. More mysterious, there were private journals and books of
poetry under his name, too. Whitedeer tucked the journals into
his backpack and walked to the guest room. He spent most of
the night there, skimming the writings and trying to make some
sense of them.
Apparently, Mr. Rimbaud was so disturbed by the writing
of his poetry that he had a nervous breakdown at age twenty and
never wrote again. After his first death, he married again, moved
to Montreal, and began painting. His paintings now covered the
walls of nearly every room in his widow’s three-level flat—and
they were definitely something to behold. Even more curious
were the passages written about Mr. Rimbaud’s third death in
1942, after which he came to Toulouse and married a previous
family friend he’d met in his military service in Ethiopia.
Then, Arthur, or Etienne, had met a young man named Leleke
Edelman. Leleke had escaped from the Nazi’s ravage of the
Warsaw ghetto but could not stand to leave his family behind
in the death camps. Etienne was so in love with the beautiful
young man that he followed him back to Poland and stayed with
him until the end. Afterward, a lone and despondent Etienne
allowed himself to be captured among the French resistance in
Wolfach, where all were summarily executed. Etienne was never
resurrected, and Arthur lived out the rest of his days wondering
what could have been.
Whitedeer woke to a scream, but it was only inside his
dream-mind. He had nodded off. Shaking and sweating, he felt
not horror, but a deep craving. He thought it was a craving. In
afternoon sex, furry things such as us frenzy against the last moments
of sun, he wrote at the end of his father’s journal. He set it down
on the writing desk. He imagined the sweetcake and knew he’d
better head east. The sweetcake compass told him there was
something waiting for him. His plans would not endure any
more delays.
Before he boarded the train for Wolfach, Germany, he
bought a few supplies. The shop near his father’s home was well
equipped. First, he found an adequate tea pot and large cup,
along with a portable camp fire. He bought several sprigs of
mistletoe, ripe pearl-berries still attached. He paid for the items
and solemnly walked to the train. The twinge of guilt was hard
to ignore, but he was comforted by the ceremony he had created
for himself. The plan had been in motion since before he left
Minneapolis, and now, he had only to let it unfold.
Whitedeer sat inside the circle of stones he had carefully
arranged. The Black Forest was more beautiful than the richest
cake and sweeter than the most vivid sunrise. He boiled the
bottled water and placed the herbs in the bottom of the teapot.
He pulled the wide teacup out of his pack and set it in front of
him, making sure each item was in its proper, cozy place. After
the herbs and berries had steeped, he stirred in some honey and
began to sip it. The warmth soothed his noisy stomach, and he
rested his head against the towering bent beech tree just outside
of his circle. As he drank, he was sure he saw the face of the
Green Man jumping between lily of the valley and bleeding
hearts. Their fine petals dripped down into his bearded face,
and he smiled on Whitedeer. All in all, he was pleased that he’d
gotten there with a little money to spare. His mother’s insurance
had been enough to satisfy his needs, and he didn’t have to feel
guilty anymore. His hands began to shake, so he quickly downed
the rest of his tea and placed the empty cup and all the rest in his
backpack next to his mother’s journal. His legs began to spasm,
and he bit down on his tongue, hard. He lay down in the circle to
prepare for the pink robots. Then, nothing.
Sleep paralysis: Something pushed his tongue backwards in
his dark mouth, sealing it against the tender hind of his throat.
A perfect circuit was created in that moment, and all breath in
the universe coincided with his own. An occidental and holy
image of his ossified pineal gland hovered above his frozen body,
in poetics of delirium. A horn like a giant incisor tore its way
through his skull and into the infinite starry space between his
eyes. The horn acquired blinking lids and a vividly receptive eye.
The horn-eye allowed him to anticipate the coming armies of
deepest dark he somehow feared and knew were on their way
to him. A fiery garnet of imprecise immensity and incalculable
ferocity emerged from the mistletoe in his gut. It spoke and
handed him his own heart to eat, a luscious pomegranate full of
seeds that might impregnate him with an ecstasy foreign to him.
He swallowed, and the heart began to beat again in his chest.
His tongue was unglued from his throat, and he joined with his
levitating and glowing body.
Suddenly, his mother emerged from behind the Great
Rabbit. Whitedeer was overwhelmed with emotion at the sight
of Agave and fainted straight away. He woke up a few moments
later to the sound of her shaking her anklet bells. The ringing
easily passed through the loose forest ground, and its gentle
rhythm helped to soothe his shock for the moment.
Great Rabbit said, “Listen now, Uncle. I have come to show
you that your mother lies beyond the sky-road, dancing for your
grief. I have allowed only you, among all humans, the presence
of the dead. No others have seen this since the time when I first
showed creatures the need for death.”
Whitedeer tried to interrupt but only managed to say, “You
brought her back to me?…You…You!.. You cannot take her back!
I won’t go back without her!”
Great Rabbit was not happy with Uncle Whitedeer, and
the trees nearest him exploded with black and blue lightning
strikes. Rabbit began again, “Uncle, you MUST listen. This is
not just for you, but for all your relatives. This dance of grief that
your mother is doing on your behalf has exhausted her. It is not
in balance with the upper worlds for the dead to be bound to
the living like this, and the Gitche Manidoo will have no more
of it. Watch. The grief dance will be taught to you. It will help
you to transform your struggle, and you will go back to your
proper home. You will teach your people the dance as well, and
it will heal their struggles. Most important, Uncle, you WILL
cease your backwards motion. The water panther listens to these
things, and he will poison you again with his powers. You must
move with the sun beyond death. And you must release your false
self here, before it consumes you. You were born in the land and
among the people that I intended for you. You will teach others
like yourself this dance, and it will help them to release their
division. You will need to be a new kind of people, and so I have
made all of you stronger than those who stay among only their
own relatives. I have shown you where you come from, it is time
now to go back.”
Whitedeer watched his mother moving through the
motions. She gained speed as she wove around the fire, sparked
by the metal and turtle shell jingles of her anklets. As her dance
became more graceful, she seemed to become her old self again.
Her hair grew back to its full shining length, and her shapeless
aura became a flowing, multi-colored gown. She smiled and
looked vibrantly alive. After her song and dance faded, she sat
down in front of him. She took his hands in hers and looked into
him for a long while. Finally, his crying stalled, and he asked his
mother, “Why?”
Mother Agave kissed the back of his hands and said, “Live.”
He woke up as he always did after a seizure, drained and
suffused with the spirits of what he’d experienced. On that day,
he was happy to go home.
Note 1
from the Russian ballad Belovezhskaya Pushcha, lyrics by
Nikolai Dobronravov