"Tiger"
On family and loss and the patches made by art, memory and mystery
Hello from New York City, from someone who hopes to not see the inside of a plane for at least a month. There have been six trips in the past two weeks, all but one involving 3-to-15 hour delays, with one flight cancelled altogether. I wish I could only blame American Airlines but this time, Delta got in on the game.
This last trip was last-minute. Rusty Powell, whom I love very much, died last week in Tulsa area. He was 77. Here’s Russ with his daughter Buffy in 1976, and with me three years ago.
It was good to gather with family and friends, some of whom I had not seen in three decades, down at Grave Creek Indian Baptist Church in Hitchita.
“I’ve driven this road at all hours, at 2am, at midnight, at dawn,” said my daughter afterwards, taking us back to Tulsa on Route 75, a road I recall driving for the first time when I was ten years younger than Tafv is now, to meet with her would-be dad Tim Sampson’s family, many of whom were full-blood Creek and who, in 1987, were gathered for the memorial for Will Sampson, father, brother, son, uncle, friend.
Because Will was famous, the funeral took place in a very large church; I don’t recall which one. I do recall Will’s sister Norma Jean keening “Sonny!” as she saw her little brother in the coffin. I do recall a handful of movie stars standing at the back of the church and then leaving before the family drove back home to Preston, a dot of a town between Tulsa and Okmulgee where a rotating mix of family members lived in three houses.
It was in Grandma’s house that maybe 15 elders gathered post-funeral to sit and visit. I was Tim’s new girlfriend, the white girl he’d been living with for two years in Los Angeles. Now, it’s not that there was any specific prejudice against a white girl, more that Grandma, who’d raised Tim, wanted him to marry a Native girl. And yet, Grandma and other family members I’d met kind of liked me. What to do, what to do…
“This is Nancy,” Will’s sister Vena Mae said, as she introduced me one by one to the elders. “She’s Eyetalian.”
Two years later, Tim called home to tell Grandma, “Nancy’s having a baby.”
“Mm-hm,” she said. “She’s having a girl, and her name is Tafv,” meaning “feather.” Later that week we got a call from the aunties, Tim’s cousins, informing us that Tafv’s middle name would be Mae, and that was that.
I saw Peggy, one of the cousin-aunties, at her brother Rusty’s funeral. (Also, their sister Pam, who took a picture of me and said, to someone, “She’s still cuckoo!”)
The shirt Tavie is wearing was given to her by Jed, who’d been wearing it at an event they were both at a few years ago, and when Tav said she wanted to get one like it, he of course took it off and gave it to her. That’s Jed on the right; we had a good talk, including my recalling that the minute I stepped out of the car in summer 1990, after driving 1500 miles from LA to Okmulgee, nine-year-old Jed had come up to me and said, “I got a tic on my head,” which I dutifully dug out. Jamie, who radiates movie star vibes 24/7, is on the left.
Before heading back to Tulsa, where Tavie is shooting the new Sterlin Harjo-Ethan Hawke series “The Sensitive Kind,” we went and visited her grandpa.
When we’d seen the wooden structure (built for Russ’s grave by Jamie, among others) being carried in, I said to Tavie, “There’s the chukogee.”
“Mom!” she said. “That means ‘toilet.’”
Yes, I told her, but it also means “little house” - adding “gee” makes things little in Creek (Muscogee) - and used to refer to outhouses, which her dad recalled the family doing into the 1960s. One of the pleasures of watching “Reservation Dogs” was picking up the Creek words, which the show sometimes let you in on.
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It was more than good to be around the Tulsa family, which aside from my friends, are pretty much my only family, a family that today, in part due to multiple airline delays, grew by at least two. Before I tell you how, please watch this.
Several weeks ago, Tavie asked if her friend Loren Waters could come stay at my apartment. Of course. I think she and I both forgot about it until two days ago, when we were trying to figure out how to get Loren and her friend Robert into my apartment, what with me being in Tulsa. It made sense for me to fly back a day early yesterday, which resulted in Loren and I texting from various airports - she was coming from a shoot in North Dakota - that our respective planes were delayed by three hours, by four, it was a race to see who would get to LGA first. I won, walking into my apartment at 12:45am, ten minutes before Loren and Robert lugged a massive amount of film equipment up four flights of stairs.
“Gotta love New York,” said Robert, the Director of Photography on “Tiger,” which Loren directed and which last month won at Sundance. She and Robert are in New York en route to SXSW this weekend, where her film - her beautiful moving short documentary about the Creek/Seminole/Cherokee artist Dana Tiger and her family - is in competition, and which I watched this morning and wept.
But why, do you ask? Well, it’s about tragedy, and the hardness of living, sure. We all get pierced in our hearts, something does it and we slow leak, sometimes forever. I am getting a little poetic here but stay with me: we also patch it, or have it patched, in ways that we may not seek or even understand. The patches are made from art and memory and mystery, and they throw off a juicy residue of love. I met Loren 12 hours ago and I already love her, and more than that, have a deep and no-need-to-talk-about-it gratitude for what she is making. Art is healing and eternal, mvto Loren, mvto Dana Tiger, mvto Tafv and Rusty and Timmy and all my relations xx