Beyond the green darkness

Neil Waldman, author/illustrator of The Starry Night and Wounded Knee, tells how the story behind his latest, and perhaps most important book, They Came from the Bronx began

I was born into a brick and concrete world, known as the East Bronx, NY. Along Tremont Avenue, cobblestones clattered with trolley cars and vendors wagons, while from the teeming marketplace the songs of fish mongers echoed into the alleyways.

On sweltering summer afternoons, my brother Brucie and I would climb out onto the fire escape of our grandparents' apartment on Daly Avenue. We'd sit there with crayons and sketchpads, while fleeting breezes cooled our foreheads. Then, at sundown, Grandma Gussie would call us to dinner and we'd crawl in through the kitchen window. We'd sit on sticky chairs in the unlit kitchen, with sweat dripping into our borscht.

It was a major event in our family's history, when my father came home one Fourth of July, with an electric fan under his arm. He set it up on a chair in the living room. The entire family soon congregated around it and everyone remained there until Labor Day.

That fall, the fall of 1952, we moved from my grandparents' fourth floor walk-up to our own apartment at 900 Bronx Park South, across the street from the famous Bronx Zoo. It was a really fancy apartment house, complete with a small lobby, a marble paver on the lobby's bottom step and even an elevator. My father referred to 900 as "The Pride of the Bronx."

Brucie and I had our own bedroom now, with a window that faced the zoo. I sat there for hours on that first afternoon, gazing out across the canopy of swaying treetops that now graced my world. We celebrated in the evening with a special dinner of potato pancakes and sour cream, just for the four of us, and then Brucie and I returned happily to our new bedroom. The last thing I heard that night was the distinct roaring of a lion.

Early the next morning, there was a knock at the door and Grandpa Meyer entered our apartment. After kissing Mama, he walked straight up to me, mussing my hair with his fingers.

"So, how would you like to go to the zoo?" he asked.

He took my hand and led me out onto the sidewalk. We passed rows of women with baby carriages, chatting on benches that lined Bronx Park South. Then, we turned a corner and passed through the gates of the zoo.

"Before we start our adventure," Grandpa said, "I want to show you my secret place."

He led me over a little fence, around some bushes and into a grove of tall pine trees.

"So, this is it," Grandpa smiled, "The most beautiful spot in the Bronx. Come, lie down right here."

I lay down on my back, resting my head on a pillow of pine needles. I stared up into the branches and the blue sky beyond, and the clatter of trolleycars hushed. The songs of the marketplace faded. The apartment houses vanished. The brick and concrete world disappeared.

As I looked about me in every direction, I reveled in the joyous realization that for the first time in my life, I had found a place where I could see no buildings, no vehicles, no man-made objects of any kind.

"Thank you, Grandpa," I said.

After a long while we got up, brushed ourselves off and started walking along the zoo's forested pathways. We came to a shady place, where the path was surrounded in green darkness.

"Look over there," Grandpa said, pointing to the right.

All I could see was trees. He knelt down, so that I could look past his arm, hand and pointing finger.

"What is it, Grandpa?"

"Do you see that light-green opening in the trees? Look closely."

And I did. Beyond the forest, I could make out a sunny meadow where there was a herd of dark brown animals.

"What are they?" I asked.

"Buffalo. You know, like in the movies."

"You mean, real buffalo?"

"Yes," he nodded, "real buffalo."

As we stood there, the small herd began drifting slowly toward us, munching on the grasses of the meadow. They were all sizes - from the huge male with his thick, black mane, to three small calves who seemed to be playing tag as they scampered around the slowly moving adults.

Just then a man and a boy walked up behind us.

"There they are, son," the man said. "Now you can tell your teacher that you've seen the Mother Herd."

I waited until they left and then I turned to Grandpa Meyer.

"What does the mean, Grandpa? The Mother Herd?"

"I don't know," he answered.

That evening, I wrote those three words The Mother Herd in one of my journals, etching them forever in my memory.

Years later, I was talking about my memory of the words "The Mother Herd" with a children's librarian in the Greenburgh Public Library near my home in Westchester County, NY. She said that, as a child, she'd heard about the Mother Herd as well and she didn't know what the words meant either. Together, we began sifting through books in the library and discovered that an organization called the American Bison Society was formed in the Bronx Zoo in 1905. I then visited the zoo's archives and learned more about this organization and how their mission was to bring the American bison back from the brink of extinction.

As I sat there in the Zoo's archives, I knew that I had uncovered a compelling tale - the very stuff that books are made of I looked up from the remarkable documents spread out on the table before me and thought of the small herd of bison that still roamed the meadow beyond the archive's walls. Now, at last, I understood why they were called the Mother Herd.

After composing the story which became They Came from the Bronx, I was invited to read the manuscript to a group of teachers in an elementary school in Brooklyn. I decided to tell the story through the eyes of a Comanche child, whose grandmother recounts the years of slaughter, as the two await on a hilltop in southwestern Oklahoma the arrival of 15 bison from the Bronx Zoo. As I stood there, speaking the grandmother's words, I could feel a deep sadness rising up from the pit of my stomach.

With the grandmother's voice echoing within me, I could sense another story, lurking beneath the story I thought I had written. My intention had been to write a book about the saving of the American bison from extinction. But without any conscious awareness, I had brought forth a matriarch whose sad words reach far beneath a surface I had barely scratched. Her tender lament is a eulogy for the Native American people.

As she describes the wanton destruction of the great herds by white hunters, the old woman passes on to her grandson the tragic story of a people's demise. Without the bison, there would be no food, no shelter, no clothing. The slaughter of the bison was a death sentence for the culture of nomadic hunters who had thrived for centuries in the hills and prairies of North America. As Sitting Bull so eloquently described it, "A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell...a death-wind for my people."

Who could have guessed that a stranger's memorable words overheard by a young boy, years later would bring forth the story of They Came from the Bronx.

Neil Waldman visits with

some ancestors of the

Mother Herd.

Copyright Early Years, Inc. May 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved