August 30, 2004 – Charnell’s visit with Jean McSwain
 
    It was a magical weekend.

I just returned from California, where I spent two days as the guest of Tahoma’s very special lady friend from the early 1940s.  I’d had many phone conversations with Jean and her wonderful husband Larry (now deceased) off and on for several years, but had been unable to visit her until now.

I photographed the Tahoma paintings she and Larry had acquired. Then Jean showed me the rawhide jacket and the turquoise jewelry Quincy had given her, the wonderful Christmas card he had drawn for her, and the magnificent sketches he had made of her and her mother. The Christmas card featured a gangly colt and a greeting hand-lettered in the extravagant swooping script that he sometimes used. All had been lovingly preserved throughout the years. 
 
As we talked, she reminisced about their times together and about how very special a person Quincy was.  After a while, she brought out this lovely lady’s compact with an embedded watch on its top. Tahoma had painted two beautiful scenes on it: a cottontail rabbit in the desert on the back and, on the front, an inquisitive little fawn gazing at the time. He had given it to Jean as a special present in 1944, the date still clearly visible in his miniature next-scene signatures.     

Then Jean gave it to me, and I cried.

September 5, 2004

I grabbed the manila envelope from my husband as he walked in from the mailbox. I had eagerly looked forward to hearing the tapes of Charnell Havens interviewing Jean Wallace McSwain about dating Quincy Tahoma.

Jean evoked the Santa Fe of the 1940’s and the parties where young Anglos and young Indian artists met and talked about art and life. As Jean recounted the story of the unlikely romance of a young woman who had grown up in Connecticut and attended a private school with a Navajo who had grown up in a hogan and attended Santa Fe Indian School, Charnell asked about prosaic things like transportation. Jean said she and Quincy mostly walked around town, but sometimes he would come and pick her up in a taxi. Charnell wondered what the fare would have been, and Jean did not know for sure, but said it was cheap.

Meanwhile, back in Tucson, I had been reading Turn Left at the Sleeping Dog, John Pen La Farge’s collection of oral histories of Santa Fe. There I learned that you could take a taxi anywhere within the city limits for fifty cents. Now we can picture Quincy fishing two quarters out of his jeans pocket to pay the cab driver. You never know when a detail like the price of a taxi ride may fit into the story of a life.

Ice delivery? Milk in bottles? What detail captures your life long ago?