Apple, a memoir in verse and pictures by Eric Gansworth is an important addition to the literature of Niagara. Gansworth, who was raised on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in Niagara County, New York, just outside Niagara Falls, still resides in the area and teaches in Buffalo, NY. The book has been longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award and is a Junior Library Guild selection.
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How about a book that makes you barge into your boss’s office to read a page of poetry from? That you dream of? That every movie, song, book, moment that follows continues to evoke in some way?
The term “Apple” is a slur in Native communities across the country. It’s for someone supposedly “red on the outside, white on the inside.”
Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple: Skin to the Core. The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds.
Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.
Run to your nearest library or book store to read this remarkable collection by Eric Gansworth.
Who does not know that dreadful gulf, where Niagara falls,
Where eagle unto eagle screams, to vulture vulture calls;
Where down beneath, Despair and Death in liquid darkness grope,
And upward, on the foam there shines a rainbow without Hope;
While, hung with clouds of Fear and Doubt, the unreturning wave
Suddenly gives an awful plunge, like life into the grave;
And many a hapless mortal there hath dived to bale or bliss;
One—only one—hath ever lived to rise from that abyss!
Oh, Heav’n! it turns me now to ice, with chill of fear extreme,
To think of my frail bark adrift on that tumultuous stream!
In vain with desperate sinews, strung by love of life and light,
I urged that coffin, my canoe, against the current’s might:
On—on—still on—direct for doom, the river rush’d in force,
And fearfully the stream of Time raced with it in its course.
My eyes I closed—I dared not look the way towards the goal;
But still I view’d the horrid close, and dreamt it in my soul.
Plainly, as through transparent lids, I saw the fleeting shore,
And lofty trees, like winged things, flit by for evermore;
Plainly,—but with no prophet sense—I heard the sullen sound,
The torrent’s voice—and felt the mist, like death-sweat gathering round.
O agony! O life! My home! and those that made it sweet:
Ere I could pray, the torrent lay beneath my very feet.
With frightful whirl, more swift than thought, I passed the dizzy edge,
Bound after bound, with hideous bruise, I dashed from ledge to ledge,
From crag to crag,—in speechless pain,—from midnight deep to deep;
I did not die,—but anguish stunn’d my senses into sleep.
How long entranced, or whither dived, no clue I have to find:
At last the gradual light of life came dawning o’er my mind;
And through my brain there thrill’d a cry,—a cry as shrill as birds’
Of vulture or of eagle kind, but this was set to words:—
‘It’s Edgar Huntley in his cap and nightgown, I declares!
He’s been a walking in his sleep, and pitch’d all down the stairs!’
Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown that was popular at the time this poem was written.
Source: Thomas Hood. The Works of Thomas Hood: Comic, in Prose and Verse, with all the Original Illustrations. vol. 1. London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1882
Annie Taylor, “Queen of the Mist,” posing with the cat, “The King of the Mist,” and the barrel used to go over Niagara Falls. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
Annie Edson Taylor
Wanted to be first over the falls
A school teacher from New York
She was gonna’ show them all
She had a custom barrel made
But first tested it on a cat
The poor thing plunged over the falls
It had no say, cause that was that
Luckily the cat emerged
A little tattered but still alive
So on her 63rd birthday, 1901
Ms. Taylor, finally took her dive
They called her Queen of the Mist
Queen of the Mist
The first to conquer the falls
But in real actuality
The cat deserved it all
The glory, the title, the award for the first
The cat deserves it all
Cause the Queen of the Mist, the Queen of the Mist
WHERE the great cataract, Niagara, fills
The air with mist, the earth with shuddering sound,
A winding path leads to the utmost verge
And down the steep a narrow stair is flung,
Confronting in its fragile nothingness
The world of hurling waters. There, alone,
A blind girl stands. As on the dizzy brink
Of Alpine heights, a snowdrop half afraid
Hangs trembling petals o’er the dark abyss
White-robed she bends above the roaring gulf
And clasps with timid hands the slender rail
That guards the deep descent. A pale, sweet face
Upraised to wonders that she cannot see,
And tremulous with passionate despair,
Half-parted lips that in their tender curves
Droop mournfully, and heavy lashes wet
With sad and hopeless tears.
Before her sweeps
The crystal glory rounding from the rock
And melting into mists of pearl and rose.
A thousand changing tints of opal light,
Bright magic blossoms of the sunlit wave,
Flash upward in their flights of fairy bloom
Like garlands tossed in triumph to the sky.
Higher and higher in showers of starry spray
Till one wild leap flings to the farthest crag
Its vivid splendour, and across the foam
There glows a rainbow arch of victory!
But not for her the beauty or the power,
She hears the sound of mighty harmonies
And vainly pictures the Unseen. And yet
Not hers, not hers the pain that wrings the heart
Of one who gazes on her sightless eyes,
And knows not why the kind, the cruel world
Holds Blindness and Niagara!
So stands
The soul who comes at last to that dim verge
Where Reason falters and where Science fails,
These were his chosen guides who led him far
Down shadowy vistas of the shrouded past
Through myriad forms of faint, primeval life
Back to the great First Cause,—a step, and then
He hears the waters of Eternity
Sounding mysterious music through the night,
He trembles on the verge of the Unknown,—
The Darkness closes round him—he is blind!
Oh, Light of faith! touch thou his closèd eyes,
And lo! the vision of a rainbow flung
Across the viewless depths of Time and Space,—
A sacramental splendour set aloft
In sevenfold glory, mystical, divine,
To span the gulf that lies ‘twixt God and Man!
Source: Lily Alice Lefevre. A Garden by the Sea and Other Poems. London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1921.
Within Cayuga’s forest shade
The stocks were set—the keel was laid—
Wet with the nightly forest dew,
The frame of that first vessel grew.
Strange was the sight upon the brim
Of the swift river, even to him ‡‡The builder of the bark;
To see its artificial lines
Festoon’d with summer’s sudden vines, ‡‡Another New World’s ark.
II.
As rounds to ripeness manhood’s schemes
Out of youth’s fond, disjointed dreams,
So ripen’d in her kindred wood
That traveller of the untried flood.
And often as the evening sun
Gleam’d on the group, their labor done— ‡‡The Indian prowling out of sight ‡‡Of corded friar and belted knight—
And smiled upon them as they smiled,
The builders on the bark—their child!
III.
The hour has come: upon the stocks
The masted hull already rocks—
The mallet in the master’s hand
Is poised to launch her from the land.
Beside him, partner of his quest
For the great river of the West,
Stands the adventurous Recollet Whose page records that anxions day.
To him the master would defer
The final act—he will not bear
That any else than him who plann’d,
Should launch “the Griffin” from the land.
In courteous conflict they contend,
The knight and priest, as friend with friend— ‡‡In that strange savage scene
The swift blue river glides before,
And still Niagara’s awful roar ‡‡Booms through the vistas green.
IV.
And now the mallet falls, stroke—stroke—
On prop of pine and wedge of oak ‡‡The vessel feels her way;
The quick mechanics leap aside
As, rushing downward to the tide, ‡‡She dashes them with spray.
The ready, warp arrests her course,
And holds her for a while perforce,
While on her deck the merry crew
Man every rope, loose every clew, ‡‡And spread her canvas free.
Away! ’tis done! the Griffin floats,
First of Lake Erie’s winged boats— ‡‡Her flag, the Fleur-de-lis.
V.
Gun after gun proclaims the hour,
As nature yields to human power;
And now upon the deeper calm
The Indian hears the holy psalm— Laudamus to the Lord of Hosts!
Whose name unknown on all their coasts,
The inmost wilderness shall know,
Wafted upon yon wings of snow
That, sinking in the waters blue,
Seem but some lake-bird lost to view.
VI.
In old romance and fairy lays
Its wondrous part the Griffin plays—
Grimly it guards the gloomy gate
Seal’d by the strong behest of Fate—
Or, spreading its portentous wings,
Wafts Virgil to the Court of Kings;
And unto scenes as wondrous shall
Thy Griffin bear thee, brave La Salle!
Thy winged steed shall stall where grows
On Michigan the sweet wild rose;
Lost in the mazes of St. Clair,
Shall give thee hope amid despair,
And bear thee past those isles of dread
The Huron peoples with the dead,
Where foot of savage never trod
Within the precinct of his god;
And it may be thy lot to trace
The footprints of the unknown race
‘Graved on Superior’s iron shore,
Which knows their very name no more
Through scenes so vast and wondrous shall
Thy Griffin bear thee, brave La Salle—
True Wizard of the Wild! whose art,
An eye of power, a knightly heart,
A patient purpose silence-nursed,
A high, enduring, saintly trust—
Are mighty spells—we honor these,
Columbus of the inland seas!
Source: Thomas D’Arcy McGee. The Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee. London: D. & J. Sadlier, 1870
Note: The Griffin was originally known as Le Griffon. It was built at Cayuga Creek, just south of Niagara Falls, New York.
