Long before the Dutch arrived with their dikes and deeds. Before the grid was drawn and the sewer laid. Before the men in boots came to measure madness with clipboards and good intentions. She was already here.
Minetta, before she even had a name.
When I found that illuminating book about Native American Manhattan in the Revolutionary Bookstore, I wasn’t looking for myth. I was looking for history. Footnotes. Maps. Something to explain the city’s crookedness. Everything before, beneath, and beyond—as my not-yet-born protagonist would phrase it.
But Minetta wasn’t something you could footnote. She slipped between pages. Between facts. She was there in the spaces where the grid doesn’t quite hold, where memory buckles, where the city forgets on purpose.
I didn’t know then what I know now: that the book didn’t just bring us to the apartment. It cracked something open. It let the story in.
Leonard Cohen’s line came back to me later, when the writing started: There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in. It wasn’t light I heard, though. It was water. Moving underground. Remembering. Waiting.
The myth says the snake Minetta drove people mad. Not with chaos—but with clarity. She showed them too much. Dislodged the names from the things. Made them say “I’m fine” when they were breaking. Made them sing when they should have slept.
Then came Nanapush.
Not a hero. Not a saint. Just someone who refused to forget. He stood in the swamp where the giant snake rose, her body steaming, coiling through cattails and moss, and he let her wrap around him. She hissed every lie humans tell themselves—about ownership, progress, permanence. She showed him every broken promise at once.
The fight was not metaphor. She bit. He bled. But he endured long enough to trick her. He folded her into the ground. Told the others she was just a creek now. Just water.
But Nanapush stayed behind. Not as a victor. As her keeper—the first in a long line. (This, my novel will pick up as well: the keeper of sanity.) The one who waits for the moment he has to break the ground open again. Unleash the madness. Let the water through the crack.
Because she still flows.
And forgetting always returns.
