BLUE CORN

What I remember most was the hush. The people in the grocery story, nearly all women, moved soundlessly through the aisles. Few pushed shopping carts, no one seemed to be speaking, the infants and children who accompanied their mothers on that bright spring morning were as silent as their parents. There was no whining or bawling, no screaming after a treat denied. And no piped-in music. The only sound I recall was the soft clatter of an electric cash register up front. A grocery store as quiet as a library; it beckoned silence from anyone who entered.

            We fell silent, too – my friend Pete Reynolds and I – when we walked into that store on a bright weekday morning. I don’t remember what day it was – all of this happened more than fifty years ago – but I remember being surprised at the newness, the modernness of the building, standing at the edge of Chinle, Arizona, the heart of the Navajo Reservation. It looked like any number of small IGA’s of the kind that served little rural towns everywhere, but its shelves carried items that could be found nowhere but in Indian Country. That’s why we went there, Pete and I. We were down from Colorado on a long car-camping trip, making our way slowly from one Ancestral Puebloan site to the next (they were still referred to then as Anasazi ruins) – Aztec, New Mexico; Chaco Canyon; the Salmon great house near Farmington, NM – and now we were approaching the terminus of our trip, the White House cliff dwelling in Canyon de Chelley, a national monument and Navajo sacred site just outside of Chinle. We went into the store for just one reason: I was looking for blue cornmeal.

            The stuff was rare then, at least in the Anglo world. I had learned about it the way I learn nearly everything – by reading. But again, I have no precise memory. Maybe I first ran across it in Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi, where he refers to the tribe’s unique, delectable food item piki as “thin wafer bread,” properly made with blue corn meal. Maybe it appeared in Don Chuka Talayesva’s 1942 classic, Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. Wherever I learned about it, blue cornmeal was not something you could find at King Soopers in Denver, but it did show up on the mimeographed order form of the Fort Collins Food Co-op, founded in 1972.  Before the Co-op could afford an actual store front in town, it offered a bulk ordering service. I was a student at Colorado State University then, and I joined. Among my first orders: one pound of blue cornmeal. I made waffles.

            The Co-op store finally opened – on Mountain Avenue, as I recall – but my main ingredient remained elusive. Sometimes the Co-op stocked it, sometimes they didn’t. The pretty young women who staffed the tiny store seemed to know little about it. I knew three things: Its flavor and aroma far surpassed any other cornmeal. When it was available (rarely) it only came in one-pound cellophane bags, and these were expensive as corn meal went. It was sacred to Native people of the Southwest.

            So I walked into that Chinle grocery store with a wish and a prayer. The hush inside seemed to accentuate both. Pete and I started strolling the aisles, struck by all the “normal” things on the shelves. Cheerios, Spam. Crisco. Clover Club Potato Chips. Pepsi and Coke – lots of Pepsi and Coke. We finally found the aisle with baking supplies, big bags of flour, small canisters of dry yeast. An old woman in a long velvet dress was shopping there, quietly, intent on her search. I asked her in a soft voice if she knew whether the store stocked blue cornmeal. She said nothing but pointed to the bottom shelf, just past where we stood. Blue meal packed into nondescript, sealed paper bags, just like Gold Medal Flour, five pounds each. I hadn’t seen it because I was looking for little cellophane packages – my eyes and mind unaccustomed to the idea that something so special would be sold in such quantities. No brand name adorned the bags; they were simply ink-stamped “BLUE CORN.”

            I bought two.

            Fifty years later the sacred meal is still a pantry staple for me. No longer an exotic food in Anglo America, it shows up in many brands of corn chips, packaged tortillas, even a ready-made pinole, the ground, roasted flint corn that can be used to make pinolillo, a thick, hot beverage prized by some endurance athletes. In the never-ending American quest for perfect nutrients, blue corn stands right up there with blueberries for its super anti-oxidant properties. Super-food, but with the qualities I always thought sacred ground down to a dust of quantities suitable for upscale consumers. 

            I eat the maiz azul sparingly, still feeling the need to ration it for reasons that have nothing to do with price or availability. I can buy it bulk now, where I live, and it’s cheap – even the organic variety. I ration it for the sake of mnemonics. It’s a memory food for me, stirring some of the most intimate, most vivid recollections I possess.

            My strong, skinny frame at age 23, picking my way carefully down the perilously steep bushwhack into Utah’s Owl Canyon – backpack and gravity working sideways, wanting to hurdle me down to the stone creekbed. Anasazi ruins everywhere. Little corncobs littering each site, many still harboring hidden granaries.

            A canyon dream of human beings as agile as whiptail lizards, slithering, mostly naked, up to their impossibly perched redoubts in the cliffs. Their voices sound like the buzzing of insects.

            Kokopeli, the hump-backed flute player, always in profile, casting a playful eye at anyone who came to visit. Sometimes he was painted onto a stone wall; sometimes pecked into the desert varnish. Sometimes he followed his own huge erection across the art panel.

            Sunday morning pancakes when I was first learning to cook. Bacon staying warm in the oven. Fresh, hot coffee just reaching the table in the farm cabin where a beautiful young woman looked up from her plate and asked me, “These hot cakes – are they okay?”