Lullaby

“They walked to the old stone hogan together, Ayah walking a step behind her mother. She waited alone, learning the rhythms of the pains while her mother went to call the old woman to help them.” 

Ayah’s memory of giving birth to Jimmie highlights the idea of motherhood as an experience that connects her to the natural world. Ayah goes through childbirth guided by her own mother; in this way, the process of becoming a mother links her to the generations of women who have lived before her. The physical experience of labor also reinforces Ayah’s place in an eternal natural order, as the “rhythms of the pains” recall the rhythms of the earth itself. 

“It wasn’t like Jimmie died. He just never came back, and one day a dark blue sedan with white writing on its doors pulled up in front of the boxcar shack where the rancher let the Indians live. A man in a khaki uniform trimmed in gold gave them a yellow piece of paper and told them that Jimmie was dead.” 

One reason behind Ayah’s struggle to come to terms with Jimmie’s death has to do with the sterile and bureaucratic way in which the news reached her. When Chato relays the information to Ayah, he “use[s] the words to speak of the dead” (45) in an attempt to translate to Ayah that Jimmie has died both literally and culturally; nevertheless, the loss of Jimmie remains outside the patterns and rituals of life and death as Ayah understands them.

“[S]he mourned him as the years passed, when a horse fell with Chato and broke his leg, and the white rancher told them he wouldn’t pay Chato until he could work again. […] She mourned him after the white doctors came to take Danny and Ella away.” 

Although Ayah’s vivid memories are often a source of comfort to her, this passage demonstrates that they can also hurt her. Silko describes Ayah’s grief in repetitive terms and the word choice is significant; while grief is a state that can continue indefinitely, “mourning” is an activity normally associated with the immediate aftermath of a death. Silko implies that Ayah experiences Jimmie’s loss as a recurring event, because the way in which it happened left her with no sense of closure and because memory is for her a living thing. 

“Ayah could see they wanted her to sign the papers, and Chato had taught her to sign her name. It was something she was proud of. She only wanted them to go, and to take their eyes away from their children.” 

Ayah’s signing of the government papers is a turning point in her life, marking both the loss of her two youngest children and the deterioration of her relationship with Chato, whom she blames for the loss. Ayah’s pride in her ability to sign her name indicates that Ayah was not always as suspicious of American culture as she later becomes; it can also be interpreted as a sign of her pride in her Navajo name and identity. In this sense, it is deeply ironic that the act of writing her name destroys Ayah’s hope of passing on her cultural identity to her children.

“It seemed to her that she could walk into the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly.” 

The sense of peace and transcendence Ayah experiences while looking at the sky has its roots in Navajo mythology. Just as the earth is a mother goddess, the sky is a father god; this spiritual relationship provides balance to Ayah, who as a woman and mother is aligned with the land. The passage also prefigures the story’s conclusion, when Ayah will again find solace in the sky. 

“She laid [the babies] in the crevices of sandstone and buried them in fine brown sand with round quartz pebbles that washed down the hills in the rain. She had endured it because they had been with her. But she could not bear this pain.”

Jimmie, Ella, and Danny were not Ayah’s only children; in this passage, Silko reveals that several other of Ayah’s children died in early infancy. While Ayah found these losses painful, they did not devastate her the way that the losses of her other children do. By burying these children in the hills, Ayah is able to keep them close both literally and figuratively; the losses, as well as Ayah’s response to them, take place within the framework of Navajo life and custom. By returning their bodies to the earth—a mother, like herself—Ayah can continue to experience a sense of connection to her lost babies. 

“She hated Chato, not because he let the policemen and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you.” 

Ironically, knowing how to sign her name does not give Ayah a higher standing in her interactions with the white doctors; it has the opposite effect, because Ayah does not comprehend the effect of signing her name in this particular situation. Ayah’s knowledge of English threatens the long-term survival of Navajo culture and identity and leads directly to Ayah’s loss of her children. This situation symbolizes the way in which the shift from the Navajo language to English threatens to undermine a worldview that is shaped by oral rather than written tradition. 

“They looked at her like she was a spider crawling slowly across the room.” 

The patrons of Azzie’s Bar respond to Ayah’s presence in a nod to Navajo myth. Though spiders often carry negative connotations, the Navajo honor the deity of the Spider Woman who, in Navajo lore, first taught the tribe how to weave. The imagery links Ayah both to Navajo culture in general and to her particular heritage as a Navajo woman. Ayah responds to the patrons with dignity, meeting the men’s gazes “steadily”—a gesture that suggests pride and self-respect.

“The blonde woman was nervous and kept looking at a dainty gold watch on her wrist. She sat on the bench near the small window and watched the dark snow clouds gather around the mountains; she was worrying about the unpaved road. She was frightened by what she saw inside too: the strips of venison drying on a rope across the ceiling and the children jabbering excitedly in a language she did not know.” 

This passage suggests that the removal of Ayah’s children from her care has less to do with their health than it does with the U.S. government’s desire to break their connection to their ancestral culture. The glance the social worker throws at her watch is a reminder to the reader of the two different ideas of time at play in the story: the linear time that controls the woman and her schedule, and the cyclic time of Navajo culture and “Lullaby” itself. 

“Ayah watched the government car disappear down the road and she knew they were already being weaned from these lava hills and from this sky.” 

In this moment, Silko suggests a parallel between a mother’s pregnant or nursing body and the Navajo’s ancestral land, which similarly provides its “children” with food and shelter. The earth is a mother goddess in Navajo tradition and is referred to as such in the closing lullaby: “The earth is your mother, / she holds you” (51). Ayah experiences the loss of Ella and Danny as a worse loss than the deaths of her newborns; by assimilating into white American society, Danny and Ella lose their connection to the elements of nature that Ayah experiences as eternal and unifying. 

“They did this as they planted the garden every May, not because anything would survive the summer dust, but because it was time to do this.” 

Silko’s description of Ayah and Chato and their garden hints at the ways in which the patterns of nature that once governed Navajo life have been disrupted. The couple try to live as they have always lived, planting in synch with the changing seasons, but their efforts are hindered by a five-year-long drought. Although the story’s conclusion holds out hope that harmonious existence with the land has not been truly or permanently lost, this passage paints a bleaker picture.  

“Once she had found him wandering on the road to the white man’s ranch, and she asked him why he was going that way; he laughed at her and said, ‘You know they can’t run that ranch without me,’ and he walked on determined, limping on the leg that had been crushed many years before.” 

Chato’s memory loss symbolizes his relationship to white American society and to his own heritage. Chato speaks English and Spanish fluently, and he spends his adult life working for a white rancher. For Ayah, this willingness to engage with white America is tantamount to a betrayal of his own culture and people. The fact that the white rancher ultimately “rep[ays] Chato’s years of loyalty” (47) by firing him lends further credence to Ayah’s belief that Chato has been duped into compromising his Navajo identity while getting nothing in return. 

“She watched [the clouds] with the feeling of horses—steely blue-gray horses startled across the sky.” 

Silko’s description of the clouds as horses draws attention to the relationship between horses and Chato. Chato routinely rode horses as part of his work on the ranch, and Ayah implies that he particularly misses that part of the job: “She knew he did not like walking behind old ewes when for so many years he rode big quarter horses and worked with cattle” (51). The reappearance of “horses” in the sky therefore allows Chato’s story to come full circle.