Children of the Sun

Children of the Sun and Other Stories

Eight thematically linked stories of multi-culturalism, immigration and globalism from the conquest of the New World to the wars in the Middle East today

The first grouping of stories, Blue Mood, follows seven women in succession, each story building upon its predecessor. Unexpected Arrival introduces an unnamed narrator as she suffers the loss of her childhood homeland and is thrown into the turbulence of the United States during the 1960’s. Chains is a poignant and hilarious tale of an eccentric and unappreciated creative artist. In Rare Earth, the protagonist is healed by the land itself, following a devastating loss. All Good Things is the story of globalism gone wrong along with a terrible life altering love affair. Blue Mood follows the creative process of a young jazz musician, and Trading Horses is about growing up and taking on responsibility. Old Woman chronicles a turbulent life from the Russian Revolution, to the rise of Nazism, to the camps and battlefields of Eastern Europe, finally ending in Argentina’s Dirty War.

Children of the Sun is a story of spiritual transformation focusing on the ill -fated Narvaez expedition to North America in 1528. It is told from the perspective of the Moorish slave Esteban; his owner, the nobleman, Andres Dorantes; Alonso de Castillo, a physician’s son from Salamanca; and Cabeza de Vaca, second in command and treasurer of the expedition, who saves their lives by becoming a renowned healer among the Indian Nations they encounter.

Blue Mood

Read an excerpt from Chains

Sashenka Dashenka, the boys all called her, imitating her mother’s reedy foreign voice and laughing. But Sasha never paid attention to them, walking with her head bowed, clasping her books tightly to her chest.

She grew up like that and hated being noticed. In school she hung back, turning in her work quietly, and quickly walking home, where her mother was waiting and fretting.

Her mother never knew if there would be a scene when her father arrived, if he would like his dinner or throw it on the floor. When he was drunk and happy, he’d pick up his guitar and sing sad love songs to her, and she would be happy for a while though her eyes were always sad. But if he was drunk and angry, they would scramble out of his way until they were sure he was asleep, and they would be quiet, so quiet and careful, never raising their voices above a whisper so as not to wake him.

Sashenka’s mother tried to make everything beautiful as if they were living in an enchanted land. She had worked in the theater before she was married, and she sewed and painted old broken furniture, and reupholstered, and painted some more. She embroidered, carved wood, and showed Sashenka how to decorate Easter eggs. But everything Sashenka tried to create was odd. She saw things in a skewed way, convex for concave and long where there was short. When she drew, her world was populated by talking bears and old witches who lived in tree houses and ate small children.

As she grew older, Sashenka continued to fill whole notebooks with her creatures despite her mother’s looks of dismay.

‘She’s wondering why I’m not normal, why I don’t grow out of it,’ Sashenka said to herself. But she only grew odder.

She collected fallen nests, and old feathers, stones and branches, and pine cones and leaves.

‘What do you need that for?’ her mother asked, but Sashenka only shrugged and continued to fill her notebooks.

One day she came home from school with a painting depicting four witches in a forest dismembering and eating a group of children.

‘They want you to sign something, Mama,’ Sashenka said. ‘They want to send me for testing.’ Sashenka’s mother signed but did not sleep whole nights for fear, until the report came back. Sashenka seemed normal enough according to the psychiatrist, a case of an overactive imagination. He advised her to take up sports. And so, Sashenka’s mother dutifully bought her a bicycle which Sashenka rode everywhere, though it did not diminish her enthusiasm for her secret world.

She hid her findings under her bed. They went undiscovered until spring cleaning, when her irate mother threw everything away. Sashenka did not despair. She circumvented her mother’s eye by adding to her cache in the cellar each time she put her bicycle away. Her mother had a horror of cellars, having had survived the Red Army’s operations in Kiev during the German occupation, and never went down there.

In time Sashenka created an entire tableau, an enchanted forest of twigs and moss, and streams of pebbles, spiraling through it. She painted the sun and the moon with human faces and filled the night sky with shining stars and hung it as a back drop. She curled herself in an old blanket and having learned her lesson at school, only dared to imagine the figures who lived in the forest.

Her favorite was a girl with long blond hair, three breasts and one leg who was married to a giant black wolf. The wolf could breath fire and lived in the hollow of an old chestnut tree. A dragon with golden scales and a green underbelly dwelt in a paper- mache cave on the other side of the woods and guarded a ruby treasure. Azure and celadon horses with white wings lived on the mountain and visited the girl when her husband was away hunting people. A wizard with a magic cloak made himself invisible and tricked the devil, who had set his sights on taking over the entire forest and cutting it down for firewood. The princess in the castle, though unbeknown to her furry subjects, was really a shape-shifting toad.

Read an excerpt from All Good Things

San Francisco 1967

Lee packed her bag and left the big house on the hill where no one had spoken to each other for years. Her mother had squawked and flapped her arms ineffectually, realizing she would be embarrassed at the country club by Lee’s absence. Her banker father had merely disowned her.

She was seventeen, tall and blond and bursting with health in the manner of all American beauty queens. Lee moved into a house in the Haight on the invitation of her friend Linda, which was shared with seven other people.

One evening, Lee found herself in Roger’s bed, if his naked mattress could have been called that. He had gotten Lee a job at the record store where he worked. She had the look, he said, once her hair had grown long and been ironed. And she had grown thin away from Drusilla’s home cooking.

As inexperienced as she was, Lee knew that Roger was a clumsy lover, and so, she had lain there waiting for him to finish, waiting for him to smoke his bowl, waiting for him to stop talking and fall asleep before she could sneak away. Linda wanted to know how it had been and Lee lied, ‘Wonderful,’ she said dreamily.

All the girls in the house had crushes on Roger, so attractive with his chestnut beard, and blue eyes, and skinny weasel body. And then Linda had gone on about how she and Roger and some of the others wanted to live in a commune in the desert where they would paint, and weave, and make pottery, and raise chickens and pigs. Lee knew it would never happen. She had heard enough of Linda’s schemes about hitch-hiking through India or Peru, and living on the beach in Hawaii, and making a business of tied-dying T-shirts to know that it was just another pipe dream.

She rolled into a ball and tried to wish the memory of Roger away. Before she fell asleep, she murmured, ‘Could I borrow your camera?’ and Linda, surprised to find out Lee’s mind had been elsewhere, had said yes.

The next day she went to Golden Gate Park where the hippies had assembled. Music was playing, and there were topless girls with heavy Indian jewelry, and naked girls in body paint, and drugged people, all dancing together, grooving to the vibe. She snapped some photos, but she knew no matter how she hard she tried, she would never be a part of it but only a watcher, the same way she had watched her parents drinking themselves into a stupor night after night.

Oddly enough, it had been Roger who encouraged her, who recognized some quality in her photographs, who took them to the local papers and showed them to anyone who wanted to chat when they stopped in the shop. She had been grateful to him, so grateful that she had continued sleeping with him though he never improved his performance or noticed that she wasn’t really there.

They moved away from the group and on their own, the two of them until the day her period didn’t come, and Roger, man -o- man, he wasn’t prepared, but he had taken her to a friend of his, a medical student, who handled it right on the kitchen table, handled so well that when she recovered three weeks later there was nothing left, and she had walked out on Roger to an unknown future.

New York 1975

Lee was snapping pictures despite the horrendous sound coming from the stage and the crush of bodies that were threatening to engulf her. She had followed the band from their small beginnings in a garage in Los Angeles to New York, where they were playing in an underground club that looked like a cavern. She didn’t understand the music, but she could feel the energy and rage, so different from the disco scene, with its beautiful women and careless indulgence.

The lead singer snarled something and spit at the audience, which cheered.

‘Fuck all of you!’ he shouted, ‘Fuck God and the Easter Bunny!’

The crowd surged, shouting their approval while he broke into a nonsensical song accompanied by a lightning fast guitar riff. She caught it all. The swastikas and inverted crucifixes, the Mohawks, the ripped clothing held together by safety pins, the tutus and combat boots, and the piercings: noses, nipples, and ears, all done with safety pins.

At home, in a dingy walk -up, she developed her photographs in a primitive darkroom and wondered what happened to the airy-fairy floral period of long hair and peaceniks. Somehow the dark violence that was manifested in Viet Nam overtook them, and it all became one stream, the Weathermen, Watergate, the Manson family, urban violence and unrest. She thinks punk is a faddish expression of discontent, but following the band to London, realizes that it is a political movement. She intuitively understands that something has changed and the landscape for young people is bleaker than it has been for a long time.

She shoots the punks and the squatters, and the end of industrial revolution, and the dying manufacturing cities and wonders what will happen next and where western civilization is headed. Her black and white photographs are considered gritty and important, and suddenly she finds herself hovering on the brink of success. She is offered a position as a staff photographer at a commercial magazine with an arty outlook. She forgets about the punks. She forgets about what is happening around her. She now shoots portraits of the beautiful people.

Paris 1983

It’s the end of summer, but most people haven’t returned home from their holidays yet. Paris is empty, quiet and clean. Lee has a map and her cameras. She walks through the city and snaps photographs of apartment houses, and of churches, and shops. She walks eight or ten hours a day. It’s her first trip to this city. Everything is new to her, everything a sensation; coffee with milk in a large cup, crusty bread, fine cheeses. She can’t stop eating, and her curves return. She looks funny with her spiky hair, and she lets it grow long again.

Her summer shoot is over, a pretty French pop singer making a video on the Pont Neuf, who was profiled by her magazine. She is about to return to London when she is sent on another assignment. A British rocker and his model girlfriend on location in the city of lights. His look is edgy: white-blond hair, leather, chains and studs. The girl is tall and brunette, cat’s eyes, red lips and mile- long legs. Lee photographs them in what will become one of the iconic photographs of that era. The boy is skinny, dead white, a medieval saint, a tortured crucifixion. The woman is powerful, menacing in a black cat suit and high heels. She turns her back to him and glances over her shoulder with indifference while he waits passively for his fate to unfold. Lee doesn’t know what it means, but it strikes a chord with everyone present.

She stays to watch the making of the video. She is fascinated by the jerky camera work and quick cut editing. Everyone on the crew is young, dressed in black, terminally cool. One man stands out. He is quietly but expensively tailored, though his clothes have a deconstructed quality. She glances at him hastily, averting her eyes, until she feels him staring at her. She looks up and realizes that he is Asian. She can’t quite place him. Her mother has always had Chinese servants, and her grandfather used Korean laborers on his farm. This man is neither. She estimates he is over six feet tall.

‘Victor Cheng,’ he introduces himself.

What was the possible story behind Cabeza de Vaca's La relación y comentarios / The Account and Commentaries?

Background

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish hidalgo, or an untitled nobleman, which often connoted class status, and in his case like many others, a lack of financial resources. In June of 1527, he joined the ill -fated Narvaez expedition to what is now known as Florida.

Panfilo de Narvaez was a cruel and ill- tempered man, and in the tradition of his age, considered the native people of the New World as less than human, either to be exploited for their labor or killed outright for their gold and other treasures. Narvaez hoped to make his name and fortune in the New World and set out on his expedition with four hundred men, four of whom survived and made it back to Mexico City to tell their unusual tale.

Of these four, only Cabeza de Vaca left an account of their perilous journey and their encounters with the numerous peoples that lived in Florida, along the Gulf Coast, Texas and Northern Mexico. His journey lasted eight years, some of it spent living as a trader among the indigenous inhabitants.

Unlike most of his peers, Cabeza de Vaca recognized the humanity of the indigenous peoples he came in contact with and chronicled their habits and customs in the book he wrote for the King of Spain, entitled La Relacion, or, The Account.

Cabeza de Vaca lived with these people, traveled among them, and became renown, as did the three other survivors, as a great healer. Their capabilities were considered so profound that they became known among the Nations they encountered as the Children of the Sun.

In his scant account of that period, Cabeza de Vaca glosses over the healings saying that in most cases, the Spaniards made the sign of the cross over the Indians, who by the grace of God, were made well. Perhaps he truly believed that or perhaps he wanted to escape the Inquisition by avoiding any claim to special powers.

Anthropologists, who perceive themselves as rationalists, have also dismissed this portion of the book as mambo-jumbo, mass hypnosis, delusion and wishful thinking. However, they have overlooked the fact that one member of the group, Alonso de Castillo, was the son of a well-known physician from Salamanca.

Salamanca was one of the four great university cities of the era, and medicine at the time was based on the works of the Greeks, Galen and Hippocrates, which had re-entered the Western Canon through the commentaries of Ibn Sina [Avicenna], and other Muslim thinkers and physicians. Muslims were at the forefront of learning during the medieval period, not only in mathematics and astronomy but in engineering and medicine. They translated and added to the Greek and Indian texts they were familiar with and developed surgical techniques, herbal treatments, anaesthesia and antiseptics. They knew about airborn diseases and understood there was a difference between ailments of the body and maladies of soul, or psychiatric disorders, as we call them today. It may be that Castillo was able to pick up quite a bit of his father’s knowledge, which aided him in healing the Indians. He was, according to Cabeza de Vaca, the most reluctant yet the most talented of the four.

Estebanico, the Moorish slave of the fourth man, Andres Dorantes, was the group’s translator and navigator. From Cabeza de Vaca’s description, he was an ambitious and highly intelligent man. As a teenager, he was either taken captive or had been sold into slavery to pay off his family debts. It may be a fiction or it may be fact that while living in Azemmour, Morocco, he not only was aware of Muslim contributions to medicine, which were considerable, but also may have been exposed to Sufi mysticism and Sufi methods of healing. Interestingly, the Sufis were well versed in what would come to be known as Quantum Healing among our New Age contemporaries. Of course, there is nothing new about this method, as ancient Chinese and Indian texts which focus on chi and prana, respectively, attest to. This method deals with energy or quantum healing of the body, mind and spirit. There is something similar in the Christian tradition known as the laying on of hands, or faith healing, which is not unlike the healing techniques practiced by American Indian medicine men.

This story is a reconstruction of what might have possibly happened to these men.

Read an excerpt from The Children of the Sun

Cabeza de Vaca:

These things I have committed in the Relacion for my King and these things I have omitted:

Of the time I spent living with the Indians as a trader, I will say nothing to spare my poor wife, who did not deserve the betrayal and shame I heaped upon her. I will not make the excuse that I did not know if I would return, though I never lost hope, and that I fell back on human comfort in a woman’s arms.

But there are other things more wondrous which I have experienced and seen with my own eyes, and I have set them down here, though after long debate, I have decided to keep them to myself. My life these eight years has been filled with too much hardship, and I would like to avoid entanglements, which could cause more harm than good and deter me from my life’s goals. Before I burn these papers, I will read through them again. I wish I could trust them to the fine judgement of others, but I fear that they will not believe that these healings came from God and perhaps despise them as works of the Devil, and future generations would, no doubt, think of the many miracles that were wrought through us, as we do the miracles of the Bible, as something distant that happened when the World was young, and saints and prophets walked amongst us.

Alonso del Castillo:

When we four came together, we were already poor and broken, buffeted by the elements and far from hope. Cabeza de Vaca, a pragmatic man, pushed us forward, though I believe if it was not for him, we three would have stayed with the Indians and lived out our lives in the north.

Sometimes the Indians were kind to us and shared everything they had, and sometimes they worked us like beasts of burden. I think it would have gone badly with us, and we would have perished for lack of food and exposure to the elements if we had not been embraced by the people of those lands.

It was Cabeza de Vaca who began the healings. He was a bold surgeon, and he did not hesitate to remove arrow heads and stitch up wounds. Some of the people we came across cauterized wounds by fire, and the Moor confirmed that it is so done by the infernal physicians of his race. I could never bring myself to do such things, but Alvar is a man who is not squeamish and took it upon himself to treat the worst of injuries.

In the beginning, the small part I played was confined to asking the petitioners questions about their symptoms through the clever Moor, who was quick to learn languages. I knew my father treated his patients such and by understanding the nature of the imbalances of the humors: blood, bile and phlegm, could advise them on the cure. The woman I was with at the time, and who stayed with me until we came to the great desert, advised me in the use of herbs and native plants. She was a clever woman, and though I believed my sinning with her would hinder the cures which came later once we had discovered the powers, she laughed at my worries and dark thoughts. She said it is enough to abstain for a few days before healing or gathering herbs in order to be clean of certain bad energies. But in the beginning, I was using tried methods which I knew about, though I came to believe that in time the body affects its own healing if left alone and perhaps herbs only hasten a result.

Andres Dorantes:

Estebanico was the first to embrace the methods of healing used by the Indians. When I saw the medicine men blow on the sick, I thought, this is nothing but superstition of the worst sort, and these savage, naked people are deluded in thinking that such nonsense can heal the sick.

Estebanico was, in the beginning, afraid to say what he thought and bring his experience to bear on matters, but when several of our company were killed when the Indians had bad dreams about them, he began to speak to me of his life in Azemmour. He said that in his town there were what the Muslims consider to be holy men, called Sufis, who partake of the Divine Nature of God and who can affect holy cures through the purity of their own natures. I told him, we are not pure men, having sinned with women, but he said that we had no choice, and in this he was backed by the pragmatic Cabeza de Vaca, himself.

Estebanico told me that as a boy, he had witnessed a cure in which a Sufi had asked the sufferer to put his hands in water and send the illness through them, and in that way the bad and stagnant humors were released, and the man was made well. He said that it is no different when a medicine man blows on an ailing sufferer – he is blowing away the stagnation which causes the illness.

I told Esteban that he should make free to affect the cures he believed were possible and that I, for my part, would pray to Jesus and to the beloved Virgin for mercy on these people and mercy on ourselves so that we would not be killed if the cures were not effective.

Estebanico:

In my hands I hold the gourd and owl feathers that I carry as an emblem of healing. It is necessary at times to affect the accoutrements of the healer, though I believe it is the intention behind the thing which matters most.

It is the same with the Spaniards. When they quarreled about the way back to New Spain and would have gone in all directions, I pulled out my own spectacles which were made for me by my previous and loving master when he had found my vision to be poor. These spectacles were known about in the Muslim world seven hundred years ago, but to these Spaniards they were a miracle, and so I told them I could see ahead when I put them on, and the spectacles showed me that it was best to follow the path chosen by Cabeza de Vaca. Though they scoff at the idea that the Indians can be shown the way forward into the future by their dreams, they are willing to believe in the power of man-made things readily, and that is what I believe will be the undoing of these poor people, since the Spaniards have the guns and matériel necessary to subdue them and the belief in the superiority of these things.

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What readers say:

Once again L.S. Temmer delivers a superb read in her newest book, Children of the Sun, a collection of short stories – stories connected by suffering, awakening and renewal. As in her earlier book, Death of an Activist, the protagonists here are outsiders, sometimes social and other times cultural. They all struggle in a hostile world to reach an inner vision, at first dimly perceived but then becoming clearer as each individual loosens the bonds to a life which no longer serves authentic needs.

The book climaxes with a historically based story about the spiritual awakening of the four sole survivors of an ill-fated, 400 man Spanish expedition to Florida in 1527. Having lost everything of material value, these one time treasure hunters, in order to survive, must learn to see the region’s indigenous people as humans worthy of respect and not as livestock waiting to be enslaved. As each man gradually recalibrates his value system, he develops the power and ability to heal all kinds of ailments. Their reputation precedes them in their wanderings of the Gulf region, and the group is revered by the natives as the Children of the Sun. After years of wandering, our four make their way back to Mexico to resume their former lives but now as much wiser and humbler men.

Temmer’s well written prose is rich in the imagery which makes her imaginative stories such a compelling treat to read. This book will be savored by those discerning readers who are comfortable with out of the ordinary characters and themes.

mickey Propadovich

Children of the Sun & Other Stories is a rich, thought-provoking and thoroughly delightful read. Although the eight short stories weave together to create a singular colorful book, each also stands on its own, with the result that this reader, at least, ended up with particular favorites. I took the book with me on a recent trans-Atlantic flight, and found myself devouring it with absolute pleasure, oblivious to the pack of peanuts and glass of water on my tray table. Ms. Temmer writes with clarity, erudition, sensitivity and a keen sense of wit; one can’t help but wonder the extent to which her own life experiences have informed her narratives, which lilt gently between fiction and historiography. From the reflective story of a young immigrant from Yugoslavia to the intrepid photographer who finds love and then loss to the ancient Russian émigrée whose conscientiousness is buried in her past, Children of the Sun & Other Short Stories is a truly marvelous book to savor.

Scott G.

After reading ‘Death of an Activist’ I thought I knew what to expect from Children of the Sun and Other Stories – characters, environments and events which were created by a true, craftsman-like story teller. I was wrong. I was quite unprepared for the tenderness and the muscularity of Ms Temmer’s approach to these stories and the depth of her vision as well as the depth of my own while under her spell!
As an artist I found myself often envying the way she drew and painted her characters.
I don’t usually approach writing or stories like a metaphor for painting or vice versa but Temmer lets me see her world that way.
I sense somehow that if she weren’t a writer she’d be a painter with an illustrative bent and she’d be the best!
Her mind and her heart would demand it – demand that she let you in to the depth of her soul.

Children of the Sun