Read Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Online
Authors: Tori Amos,Ann Powers
Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (6 page)
Poppa John was a woodcarver and made furniture. The chair that old Granny sat in all those years ago, having been taken in by the little boy she'd abandoned, sits in my beach house. It was lovingly made for her little size by Poppa John. This was in the Carolinas, near the Eastern Cherokee Nation. They all eventually settled right outside Charlotte to work in the mills in Catawba County, ancestral land of the Catawba tribe. I was born in Catawba General Hospital.
The Cherokee land … I heard about the broken treaties all my life, from my grandfather, and then my mother, who can go on and on and on concerning the details; she knows a lot about it. The idea that your possessions can be taken, your land can be taken from you, has been fundamental to me and has made me very clear about what I own spiritually. And I refuse to let anybody be able to take my sacred ground. You can take my land, but not my sovereignty, my inner sacred ground. That's what my grandfather held on to with his stories; what my mother kept with her books that she memorized, so that if they were taken from her, or burned,
the words would be emblazoned across her heart. Words by Emily Dickinson, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Robert Frost, wove an invisible gown for my magical mother. My mother's family learned through the hardest experience that you must preserve the realms within.
CANVAS:
“Ireland”
Hazelnut, the village mutt, lives in a call box in Timoleague, Co. Cork. Two buckets of rose hips sit next to the Aga rangecooker for Dunc's special syrup. Ireland in the summer …
Here is where I seem to remember slices. Here is where I've come to remember Poppa's stories of the Cherokee Nation. Go figure. The Cherokee and Irish have both had their cultures invaded, and maybe that's why they have bonded within my family bloodline—but it's more than that. I don't know if there is something in the water, something in the rain. And jeez. It's been raining. The August fires are burning steadily here in the old Irish house. The tank tops we all brought are whispering warm-weather chants under cardigans. The guys have gone down for a Murphy's or a Guinness on tap, down at Paula's place. It doesn't matter if she hasn't seen us in a year; she always acts like we're regulars. Maybe that's just the Irish way, but it pulls me back time and time again. When I was writing the song “Ireland,” I was reading some book a journalist had given me on James Joyce and I was drawn into the fabric that made up his tapestry, his life. There was a spoiled nun who taught him the names of the mountains on the moon … I figured if “Ireland” was referring to James Joyce, then it needed to have nuns, and if it had nuns, then it needed to have white-collar sadomasochists from Wall Street, and if it had that, then it needed to have Vikings, since anywhere you go around Ireland their presence is still felt. And if you had
Vikings, then you needed to include the ancient Irish legends, which are usually divided into four cycles. The first one is the Mythological Cycle, whereby the Tuatha Dé Danann, who are descendants of the goddess D'Anu, known as the divine people, begin the richness of Irish mythology with stories that tell of their origins and their ways. Stories of the malevolent Fomorians, who battle the Tuatha Dé Danann for control over Ireland. Tales of the Sídh—a term for an otherworldly being, or a place—a mound where the Sídh live. The Tuatha Dé Danann were defeated by the Milesians by the end of the Bronze Age (circa 300 B.C.), and their otherworldly presence took the form of the Sídh in the legends. After their defeat, writes their contemporary chronicler Eithne Massey the Sídh “took refuge in the world of hollow mounds and magical islands far out to sea, but often used their otherworldly powers to help or hinder mortals.”
The Sídh's historical myth is the source of the bastardized concept of a fairy—as if anyone gives a rat's ass. But for all those fairy haters out there, at least now you'll know the origin of that which you hate.
Next up comes the Ulster Cycle, then the Fianna Cycle during the Celtic Iron Age, and then the Cycle of the Kings during the early Christian era. “Ireland” incorporates the story of Macha, a goddess of Motherhood and Blood, who was nine months’ pregnant when she was forced by her husband to race against the king's horses to fulfill a boast he had made. Macha did in fact run faster than the horses—and cursed the sons of Ulster after having given birth to her twins. Late at night in pubs in Ireland, sometimes you will hear a reference to Macha and her curse, which many believe can still befall you when you least expect it.
Queen Maeve and the warrior Cú Chulainn are the main characters in the Cattle Raid of Cooley also known as the famed Táin Bó Cuailgne. The Morrigan embodies one of the triple battle fairies. The desire men
felt for the beautiful Deirdre was what ended her life, as far as I'm concerned one of the saddest stories of all time. Eithne Massey's book
Legendary Ireland: A Journey Through Celtic Places and Myths
is where you can dive into more on this.
Okay so here I dive. I dive into my father's side. In Co. Cork I find the Irish-Scottish Rib and jump on. The whole Irish-Scottish part of my culture has never been a problem, for chrissake. I mean, come on, I bought a house in Ireland in 1995. The Irish, the Scots in the family, you know how that can be—for sure there was the usual family stuff, but not usually much of a problem. But there was one person. The Puritanical. The Shame Inducer. I was five. She was and always has been my greatest adversary and challenger. She was my grandmother. My father's mother. I think she was made a saint somewhere in the hills of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia between Fancy Gap and Galax. Galax—home of the fiddler's convention. I remember going when I was five, and there was a sign that read ACUPUNCTURE AND CHINESE MEDICINE, and my grandmother issued the edict that Chinese medicine was sent from the devil.
Can someone not be considered evil but do harm? Harm to those who serve the Great Mother, while Grandma herself proclaimed to be a feminist because she had a college education in the early 1920s … all the while preaching that women should turn over their virgin bodies to their husbands and their souls to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Yes, Grandma was an ordained minister/missionary as well as a teacher. I would say to her, “Why do you have to bring Jesus into this, Grandmother? I happen to like the guy, so let's just leave him out of this.” “I can forgive you for your sinful words, Myra Ellen,” she would say. “I am just guiding
your father on how you should be handled. How you should be molded into a respectful Christian young woman. Everything we do we do because we love you.” Yeah, right. Barf. At around this time, as punishment, she had me in the corner, trying to pray the fear of Jesus into me after I “talked out of line,” because I spoke out against the horrifying decision that she had made to put my brother in a shoulder brace in the hopes that he would hold his shoulders back. I felt I just had to unravel the way she planted thoughts in people. Soul-destroying thoughts.
The Irish side of my dad's family had been weavers, and that became my first clue into this. I made an oath in that corner: Grandma, I will weave myself into your ideology so I can hunt for the hidden codes of control that affect those around you who fear your judgment, even including, at times, my father. I will escape your grasp by holding your hand. And I will pray—take me to your God because this cannot be Jesus’ loving Divine Father, so take me to your God, this control freak who makes boys think that their John Hancocks will grow boils if they let themselves spill their seeds into shy but friendly thighs. Take me to your God, this control freak that has suggested that Satan, with barracuda jaws, lives inside the petals of a girl so that if you let a boy between your jeans, then guess what? Grandma will be waiting with Bible in hand. If she could she would pull you in front of the judges at the end of days, during their roast lamb dinner, and make you drop your jeans so that they can extract a sample from your love stains—to prove what? The need to control … The need to dominate by subjugating others so they believe in your God, in your way. Where is emancipation in this kind of spiritual bullying? At five I knew I was at war with my grandmother. As far as I was concerned, she was masquerading as a feminist while jailing the Feminine. If a woman wanting to choose her own path, sexually and spiritually, went against Grandmother's puritanical belief system, then she would be treated—
I would be treated, or you would be treated—as a pariah. This made me close ranks within my Being. Close ranks so that my grandmother's methodology and orthodoxy could not filter the coffee out of this bean. The American Inquisition. It can be traced. And chased.
So, this was the Scotch-Irish grandmother who instilled the fear of God in me, in a very negative way. Yet I respected the mental capabilities of this woman, because she did recognize something. She knew that I was not one of them. In a way, she gave me a huge gift. Because of her reaction to me, I began to understand my path. I was given a clue: I began to see the burn-the-witch mentality of strict Christianity, and I began to recognize that I really needed to search out my spiritual family. Because her ideology wasn't part of it. Behind the Christian love-your-neighbor-as-yourself facade, there was another story. There was not a lot of compassion there if you had been deemed a sinner. There was not a lot of support for who people really were. But I realize, now that I'm older, that the Great Mother even encompasses the adversarial Grandmother. From the Beginning, from the myth of Sophia breaking away from the ancient Creatrix to find her autonomy, the Great Mother was forming herself. From the ancient Inanna forcing herself to the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal—passing through the seven gates of the underworld and then being hung on a hook, rotting—where she had to look at her sister, and her sister had to look at her. Both needed each other to see inside themselves, to see inside their own shadows. To come to terms with who they really were, not who they thought they were. And again, the Great Mother was learning to relate to other pieces of the Feminine.
Many years after I faced down my grandmother as a child, the mythic astrologer Wendy Ashley told me that my chart contains a crazy number of planets in the house of religion. I mean, it's just there. It's part of who I am. I am a daughter of the Church. From very early on, I've seen how
Christians can manipulate people by manipulating Jesus’ message, but I've also known loving people within the Church who walk the path of compassion. Either way, I can't fully get away from Christianity's influence, and I don't want to get away from certain aspects—the message to love your neighbor as yourself, the idea of resurrection—those aspects of Jesus’ message. Many people believe in those principles though they are not practicing Christians. The truth is, I believe that if Jesus were alive today he would not be a member of a Christian church, because hypocrisy is at the center of many a church's crossroad.
ANN:
The oppositional elements among Amos's immediate forebears found a resolution in the marriage of her father and mother. The partnership flourished, though it had its costs. Amos grew up witnessing the dreams of her parents collide and transform, and she found both inspiration and much to challenge in their loving example.
My father was going to be the next Billy Graham. That was his inspiration, his calling. When I was a child, he was grooming himself for that. He was pastor at a really big church in Baltimore; I think at one time there were 2,500 members. He had his aspirations. But I'll tell you this, when somebody was on their deathbed, or a family had lost someone— and this could happen once a week in a big church—he always paid serious attention, whoever it was.
He says ministers and priests are the last ports of call. Doctors can explain what happened clinically, and say, “We're very sorry.” But at that point the families are saying, “Where are the guys with the dog collars [our church slang for clerical collars]?” The family is standing there saying, “They've just sewn our daughter up and, you know, she's twentythree
years old, she has breast cancer, and it's taken over her body and we're going to lose our baby.” Or, “She was in a car crash and is gone now, though she was perfectly fine an hour earlier.” These people are looking death squarely in the face. And my father will sit there with them. In that hour, in that time of need, I've seen him show up time and time again. In our own family he couldn't always show up, even for a dinner conversation. But he fully understood his responsibilities in those moments of grief.
Sometimes all you can do is just sit and hold a space. It's the hardest space you'll ever hold. You pour the tea, you bring the food, you don't have to make silly talk. They'll talk or not talk. I watched him do that and began to see that there's a rhythm to it. And it's one that I have to find in performance, when people are bringing their grief to me in a similar way.
What I find really intriguing about my dad is that certain aspects of his character that he doesn't think are of value are his true gold. And I believe every person has their gold. It gets tricky when people put so much value on their gifts because it makes it hard for some of us, mainly because they don't give us much of a chance to value their gifts. Other people think their gold is something other than what it really is, so they keep their gift in the background. That was his reality.
In 1963 my father marched with Martin Luther King Jr., in the big March on Washington. He was always close with the African-American ministers in the conference. His best friend was a guy called Bobby Bishop. We would be sitting at the Orioles baseball game surrounded by black people. When Bobby would drop me off at school, the teachers would say, “Who was that black man who dropped you off?”—they thought he was a kidnapper. I'd say, “That's my Uncle Bobby,” which he was. My father joined the civil rights movement because he'd seen how his friends had been in chains. And I think that is one of my father's qualities
that people don't understand. He believed in education for women and he believed in civil rights all the way.
