Mexico and the USA: My Motherland and Fatherland

By Aurora Garcia

The USA is the country where I live. While the United States is not my motherland, it is the country where I have lived the longest and the country that gave me a new life, and a son. It is not the country where fate would have me be born in, but where I actually and consciously chose to become a citizen. But of course without renouncing to my Mexican citizenship.

For the longest time I rejected the idea of acquiring a new citizenship. I felt like a traitor. I don’t know when it started to grow into me. At first I thought, well, nothing will change the facts. I was born in a house with the scent of Lime and Plumeria. I grew up in a home where I would quietly stare at the clouds and the leaves of the Lime tree. Nothing could erase the memories of the smell of my mother’s cooking or the smell on a rainy day in my beautiful homeland, and the games and the joy. This love will remain untouched.

When I came to the USA everything was new to me—the smells, the places, the language, and the people. I felt so alone and out of place for the first couple of years. Then I don’t know how or when it started. I began to have a sense of belonging. I learned the language, studied, worked, had wonderful friends, and all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like a traitor anymore. I understood. I was no longer confused. For the longest time I’d had a fight within myself on where I belonged, and which country I owed loyalty to. Then one day, out of the blue, it came to me, and I clearly understood that there is no reason to choose. How can you answer to the question, who do you love the most, your mother or your father? Both, and you don’t have to measure it, you don’t have to explain it or compare it.

I know the feeling of my attachment to the US started before I had my son, but it became stronger after he was born. All of a sudden we were creating memories together. His childhood moments were so different from mine, but equally beautiful, and I immersed myself into it.

Mexico/USA! Yes, I own one of each flags, but I don’t display them everywhere I go. It is my belief that you mostly carry those feelings within your heart. When I lived in Mexico, I don’t remember ever displaying the Mexican flag other than at appropriate ceremonies and at institutions, and in a very respectful manner. These beautiful countries mean and represent much more than their politics and their unfortunate situations. They represent the smells, the laughs, their beautiful scenery and their natural resources. These countries are the people who don’t make the headlines, but instead keep a low profile and spend their time raising a family and working hard.

So, let the eagle continue to devour the serpent and ask for divine power for that eagle to wide spread its wings. And let the stars shine brighter and us not be blinded by the glow, but instead hold on to some of that light. There is plenty love, space and time for everything and everybody.

Copyright © Aurora Garcia. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aurora Garcia is a nonfiction writer and essayist who was born in La Piedad, Michoacan, Mexico. She moved to California in 1989, when she was 14 years old. This is about the time when she began writing, but throughout her teen and young adult years she kept her writing to herself for fear of being exposed. Although fluent in English and Spanish she instinctively writes in Spanish, as it is her native language. Aurora lives with her husband and 12 year-old son. She loves life, nature, art, music, and diversity, admiring the contrasts and richness of her homeland culture, as well as the beautiful language that Spanish is. Aurora believes her passion for writing was inherited from her father who wrote songs and poetry.

The House. Death. Dad. Thank You.

By Diane René Christian

The photograph is of the house that I lived in with my father for 8 years. The house itself was originally an outbuilding to a main house but somewhere along the way the property was divided. At some time or another the building was used as an art studio. Before I lived in the house a dear friend of my grandmother’s resided there. Her name was Mildred.

I have vague memories of Mildred. I liked all of my grandmother’s friends so I am sure I must have like Mildred too. Mildred had polio (I believe?) and, in the midst of my parents’ divorce, Mildred passed away. She was sans kin and the house was left to my grandmother who subsequently gave it to my father and me to live in. I was thirteen years old.

What I do vividly remember about Mildred was her things. Mildred was a hoarder and nearly every inch from floor to ceiling was piled with her hoards. She was particulary fond of TV shopping but she never seemed to get around to opening the boxes. When we combed through her things, after her death, many of the boxes were still sealed. All of her wares went into an estate sale and it was quite a site to see those wares spread out and filling a banquet hall.

During the cleaning of Mildred’s house, as we prepared it to be ours, we unearthed a soiled canvas painted by the artist who some years earlier resided there too.

The house is 560 square feet. When you walk in the door you enter a garage which holds an unfinished bathroom with one exposed wall. When you walk up the stairs you enter a space that would hold a dining room table and six chairs max. But, there was never a dining room table but instead two recliners and a TV. Behind the recliners are a miniature stove, sink and cabinets. That is the sole living area.

My father and I each had a bedroom but originally our rooms were one. My dad put in a dividing wall making two perfectly even small rooms. I remember when the rooms were still one.

Before the room was converted we went to visit the house with a few of my dad’s friends and their three sons. One of the sons was a boy that I was sure that I was 'in 13 year old love with’. His moppy blonde hair and searching eyes and lean strong boy body were impossible to resist. We swam in rivers together and explored trails and forests and by him I felt understood.

Fortunately he deeply admired my father. Unfortunately he listened to my father’s warning to never lay a finger on me. Only once did he break my father’s rule. 

While my father and his friends were discussing how to rehabilitate our new home the kids entered a room that was to become two bedrooms but still remained one. We went in and for some reason we decided (probably because the house had a touch of a spooky feel) to hold a séance.

We sat on the floor in the dimly lit room and we all closed our eyes. Somebody started the séance and then I felt a hand grab on to mine and squeeze. It was his hand. He kept his hand inside of mine until we were all to open our eyes and then the hand was gone and it was like it never happened. But, it did. My body remembers it well. It never happened again.

Our house and the main house shared a driveway. As I grew up and grew into new relationships with boys I never let them into our home until they really knew me and things seemed serious. I am ashamed to admit this but I would stand at the end of the driveway and allow my date to infer that I was coming out of the main house. Most people assumed that our house was a garage. Indeed the realtor who has our house listed right now describes it as.

Tax Records call it a one story bungalow. I would consider it a converted barn or garage, dating back to 1929. Great potential as an artist’s studio. Enter from the rear into what appears to have been a garage.

If I could go back in time I would wait for every date by leaning against our house and take them inside to meet my Daddy.

The last time I saw my Dad he was sitting in his recliner upstairs. I kissed him goodbye and walked slowly down the stairs staring at him and him staring at me. I said- I love you Daddy. I will see you again soon.

He smiled back and I kept walking until I reached the door and made it outside. I nearly fell to the ground as a wave of fear gripped me and gobs of tears split my eyes. I must have known. Maybe he knew too.

Days later Dad collapsed on Gram’s floor. He wasn’t breathing.  At the hospital I spoke to a kind doctor who requested that I cease life support efforts for my father. She told me that he was gone and if he somehow came back... he wouldn’t really be here anyway. I said – Ok. You can stop.

I don’t really know how I said anything coherent at all but it was clear enough for my dad to be pronounced dead.

My Dad kept my bedroom exactly the same as it was the day I moved out in my late teens. It stayed that way until I cleared my childhood space in November of 2009. I was 37 years old.

I remember when I was teenager and I was going to the bathroom in the ‘garage’ bathroom with one wall missing. There was a spider that emerged but it wasn’t an ordinary spider it was a hairy spider of nightmare proportions.

I screamed to my dad upstairs that he needed to come down immediately.

He remained upstairs and screamed down at me- You need to take care of this yourself.

And I was furious. My dad was my hero. He was my rescuer. Why wasn’t he helping me now?

I managed to circumvent the spider beast and I found a broom. I whacked and whacked the broom and the spider alluded me until finally I dealt it a fatal blow.

I swept the beaten spider into a dust pan and plopped it into a Ziploc bag. Even in shrunken death it still seemed sizably frightening.

I put the sealed spider next to the kitchen sink and wrote a note to my Dad.

I did it.

And the next morning I found a written reply from my Dad.

Good for you.

 My father was not a verbal man but he always signed his letters to me xoxo- Dad.

xoxo to you Daddy. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Copyright © 2010 Diane René Christian. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Diane René Christian, author of An-Ya and Her Diary, is an award winning short story writer turned novelist. She was raised in Pennsylvania and spent her childhood years playing in the fields of Valley Forge Park.  She now resides in the Pacific Northwest with her two daughters. Visit her at http://anyadiary.blogspot.com/

Let the Music In

By Dawn Downey

I tore open the unexpected package from my brother and a curled photo dropped into my hand. A slow breath slipped through my lips, when I recognized the teenaged girl whose fragile image I held. The wrinkled collar of a tan shirt framed her sallow face. She looked away from the camera into the void. On the back of the picture, my mother’s handwriting noted, Dawn – 1966 Age 15. I longed to forget this girl. But the mysteries behind her gaze crept into focus like an uninvited song remembering itself.

“High yellow bitch,” high school classmates screamed as they followed me home.
“You ain’t shit,” they yelled. But I already knew it.
“Do somethin’ with that pitiful head!”

We’d moved that year from Des Moines to Pasadena, California. The other girls taunted me for reasons I didn’t understand, and called me names I’d never heard before. As I slunk home with my eyes focused on the sidewalk, the voices stalked me like a pack of feral dogs.

Threats and P.E. were the joyless bookends of my 10th grade existence. And the dismal luck of the draw gave me first period swimming. The water turned my hair to sheep’s wool. I hid it under a brown headscarf until the end of the day. Once home, I headed straight for the bathroom to fight my hair.

“Dawn, what are you doing in there?”
My mother would not leave me alone.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you have homework?”
“No.”
10th grade was the year I got straight D’s.

So they shipped me off to Upward Bound, an academic summer camp for urban teenagers. We were destined to be the first in our families to make it to a university - that is, if we made it through high school. I lived at Occidental College in Los Angeles, with 49 other red, yellow and brown-skinned misfits. The federal government labeled us “high potential low achievers.” It was a kinder description than what I heard from my parents.

At Upward Bound, we spent our days in class, learning how to learn. We spent our evenings on field trips, learning how to live. One such journey introduced me to the ballet. When we stepped off our school bus at the Hollywood Bowl, the scent of night-blooming jasmine hung on the cool California air. The summer sky had not yet fully blackened. We marched, in too-tight shoes, to seats so far back that I couldn’t tell there were swans in Swan Lake. Miniature figures clad in bright colors leapt and flew and spun across the stage. Tchaikovsky seduced me. My tentative spirit unfolded to accept his embrace. At first I squinted to see the dance—then closed my eyes to imagine.

Worlds outside and inside me unfolded that summer. I released the breath I’d been holding all year.

Teachers introduced me to culture, but girlfriends introduced me to “cool.” They taught me the power of black eyeliner. They helped me cough my way through my first cigarette. I learned - if a boy smiled at me - to look at him sideways, scowl, and walk away—slowly.

On the afternoon of our first chaperoned party, we gathered in our lounge to trade clothes and do hair. We tossed skirts and dresses across the couches. Bottles, jars and shoes littered the floor. The room smelled of nail polish and perfumed lotions.

A dark-skinned junior from Jefferson High School turned my damaged “do” into a proud and towering Afro. I sat on the floor between her legs while her fingers danced across my head. When her knees pressed against my shoulders and her hands tug at my hair, the acerbic voices of the past year receded.

Conversation filled the room like soul music on a pricey stereo. Citified soprano sassiness played against the low slow rhythm of country drawl.
“You tender headed?”
“Gi-i-r-r-l-l that is so cute on you.”
“M-m-m, that boy is fi-i-i-ne.”

And then they taught me how to dance. On the radio Martha and the Vandellas wailed, "Nowhere to run to Baby, nowhere to hide," and everybody jumped up. With rollers in my hair and boys in my head, I stepped steps I never stepped before. The high yellow bitch disappeared. The feral dogs retreated

At the party that night, when Stevie Wonder sang I Was Made to Love Her, a short, skinny boy took me by the hand. He strutted onto the dance floor and I trailed behind him. When he turned to face me, the music told my body what to do. The borrowed dress swayed around my legs and I forgot to be afraid.

Decades later, I taped the photo to the frig and traced the sad, pre-Upward Bound cheek with my fingertip. The dancers-actors-writers I became whispered thank you—for those first brave steps that let the music in. I glimpsed my reflection in the glass cabinet door - the face lit by fiery crystal earrings and a scarlet blouse. Stevie Wonder played in my head and a molten rhythm oozed through my hips. I danced through the rest of my day.

First published in Skirt! Magazine. © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.

Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation.” www.dawndowney.com

Weeping Women

By Rain Prud'homme-Cranford

When we weep

Mothers cry with us.

When we weep

Grandmothers pat their eyes.



Bits of blood and spit,

Dried salt and amniotic fluid

Make tears falling briefly,

Before we push them away--

As all weeping women before us.

Gathering strength from toes

Rooted in soil memories

And arms strong with

Carrying baskets

Of babies.

Carrying baskets

Of culture.



Weeping women cling

To the edge of dream

Crying for their lost children,

Crying for their husbands.

With sobs too deep and full

Of histories of biting back moans

That their tears fall as silent as death.



Against the rough periphery of memory

The whimper of ladies’ lamentations

Carve tributaries of grief inherent

In blood, from the fishing towns of

The Mississippi river to the

Buffalo plains of Saskatchewan.

Separated by geography.

United by blood.

They sing songs of sorrow

Into our unconscious actions---

Laced with brittle

Hope,

Survival,

Unstoppable Grace.


Copyright © Rain Prud'homme-Cranford. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rain Prud'homme-Cranford is a poet, academic, musician and spoken word artist. Currently she is a Sutton Fellowship Doctoral student in English at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory, winner of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award, Poetry. Her work has appeared in various journals including Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Rain’s critical work focuses on (re)inserting Mvskogean and Creole Indigeneity into Southern Literary experience. 

Hunted

By Kim Shuck

This morning is an ambush predator
Begins late with
Sirens and alarms that spin over the
Hills there is damp the
City raccoons bumble deceptively and
Dangerously on the
Porch kitten and I both with
Lifted hackles take some comfort in hot oats
Strawberries and sweetgrass
Smoke tufted slippers the rising
Hum of central heating kitten
Captures a brace of packing peanuts and
Gradually we subdue this hour together the dark
Lifts streetlights will blink their firefly impulse
Draining even now even
Now the armament of experienced
Early browsers makes smooth this edged thing this
Day curled against the core of vicious
Financial institution highwaymen and fear led
Pathologies of greed


Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 
Kim Shuck is a writer, visual artist, curator, frustrated mom and recovering sarcastic. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry, Smuggling Cherokee, was published by Greenfield Review press in 2005 and won the Diane Decorah Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Recent work has been included in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and I Was Indian. In June 2010 Kim had a month long co-residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Visit her on the web at www.kimshuck.com

Altar of Unknown

By Lisa Marie Rollins

I have two rituals before I unpack the first box to set up in a new house. I start at my front door, light a stick of sage, walk around from front to back door, to front again. I walk each room, speak aloud to my new home, speak words to what kind of life I want to live in my new space. I walk every corner, closet, doorway, bathroom until my space is filled with the sweet smell of cleansing sage. After the sage, I choose where I will build my house altar. My altar hosts photo images of my ancestors, glass jars or bottles filled with water from beaches and rivers I have visited, and colored stones from walks in the mountains. There is a gourd I found, scrubbed, oiled and wrapped about its neck a white and copper rosary a friends mother gave me back in 1994. There is a ceramic and steel crucifix I bought in Mexico when I was 26 and a photo representation of Ile Orisha Oya surrounded by copper and rust colored fabric. 

The ancestors on my altar change. This year as I re-center my home, clean and dress my altar, I add photos of more of the dead. As I add these photos, I think about who could appear on it soon, and about those whom I have never met.

I have never been an adopted person who obsesses about my family of origin as a child or adolescent. While in many ways, I was isolated from my family and the community that I grew up in, I dreamt more about running away to far away ancient lands, and other countries. I lost myself in the myriad of books I constantly read, or conjured up my own fantastic stories of science fiction or earth or moon magic to project me away from the circumstances I was in. I didn’t spend hours upon hours wondering who my birth mother and father were or what they were doing.

I’m not sure when I started making connections to the absences of what I held as ideas of mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother or grandfather in my family of origin, to absences that live in my heart, shadow my spirit. The experience of something ‘nagging’ or missing is common for me and for so many of us who have been disconnected from our families of origin that it seems natural to everyday life. I live with empty spaces where bodies should be in photos. I travel with ghosts of the unknown. I walk with blanks on the story of my conception and birth. I reconcile what only lives in my imagination, the stories I collect from someone who has memory, and the stories I construct from timelines I make, from other’s memories, stories to tell myself.

Like many adoptees, there came a day when I sent away for copies of my adoption paperwork. I remember the day the first round of documents from the Washington state department of social services came in the mail. It was the common, brown manila envelope, thick with paper, heavy with implications. I found it tucked inside my mailbox, I took it inside, placed it in the middle of the kitchen table and went to turn on the teapot.

While the water started to steam, I opened the envelope, and examined the sheets, about 40 pages of information I had never read before. Alongside discoveries I found pages and paragraphs that reveled more secrets, hiding specific words, names and full sentences blocked out with a big black marker. Things I am never allowed to know. Information and memory that is lost forever.

How do I construct my altar when my ancestors are hidden from me? What blanks will remain when my birth father, who is alive now, but could become an ancestor very soon, passes on? What stories will they tell me once he is gone, about how I have his hands, or his chin and what photo will they give me, if any, to place alongside the other photos of ghosts that I know?

My altar has become a reminder of reconciliation of spirit, and an acceptance of the unknown. Each time I cleanse it with sage, or dust it off, or clean it fully, redressing it with fresh flowers, new colors or add new or old images of found / lost ancestors, it represents more than who has come before me. Its construction reconciles the absences, faces them as living fears, and acknowledges them as unknowns. It is a living structural way to heal, way to grow and be whole and fill the empty spaces. 

On my altar lives photos of my ancestors. Photos of those who are gone in my family like my grandfather Macan on my mother side, my cousin Mandy who died in a car accident, and of my birth grandfather Arino, whom I never knew, but whose wrinkled forehead I see in the mirror. A blank card holds space for ancestors whom I will never know from my families of origin. There are images I have claimed of my chosen family, a group that includes mentors, scholars and people who made impacts on my life and whose voices I still hear in my head when I write, make decisions, or meditate and pray.

This new year, I cleanse my altar again, dusting each trinket, resetting them into place, I am full of fear my birth father’s family will continue to keep my body a secret from him. I fear I will remain a ghost in their photos and he will die before I know him. I fear there will be another addition to my ancestors, another addition to history of unknowns I must reconcile. I pray and burn sage, ask for courage to face fear and to dive into these blanks, into the absences that live in photos with and without me in them, these unknowns that ground me as much as they unsettle me.

The prayer I give today is a prayer for you, too. Here’s to all of your and my absences being filled with light, and to the acceptance of the unknown inside the shadows, my friends.

Copyright © Lisa Marie Rollins. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Lisa Marie Rollins is a Black/Filipina writer, playwright and performer and a leading voice in transracial/ international adoption education and advocacy. She is one of Colorlines magazine’s “Innovators to Watch” for her work around reproductive justice / global adoption and race. She is a VONA alumni in Poetry and recipient of the James Irvine and Zellerbach Foundations Individual Artist funding for her acclaimed solo play, “Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girls story of being adopted into a white family… that aren’t celebrities”. Her most recent publications can be found in the anthology “Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out” and her new short chapbook, “Splice”.

You can see more of her work and contact her at birthproject.wordpress.com

Cedar Songs, Left Behind

By Linda Boyden

She stayed behind, the mother of my grandfathers,

not by choice, his or hers: theirs.

Singled out, she was, by soldiers

spared, they told her, by yaller hair, blue eyes

spoilt tho' she was, still no kind of fate

for a white woman, this trail

this Removal.

In the guile of their final night,

in the lull of the dark, they slept,

the mother of my grandfathers and her man,

her red earth man

his skin in rich opposition to her pale,

they lay entwined until he woke.

Stirred by the cadence of boot-heel crunch on gravel,

thethick man-scent rising in the air,

whiskeysmokesweatwool

he woke.

My grandfather’s father

crossed to the rough-hewn mantle for his flute,

the smoothed cedar flute,

which under my living fingers

delivers still the songs;

the haunting cedar songs,

gifts left behind by the Tree People

in the branch

he carved so long ago.

The mother of my grandfathers taught her son,

then her grandson, the songs he played that night.

In time, he taught his granddaughter,

child of pale hair and red earth skin.

Told her, too, the story:

Played me awake that night, she said,

with my fingers one by one on his;

played into them the cedar songs, one by one,

until the soldiers came.

As they broke down the door, as they dragged him away,

I faltered once, she said, but did not stop.

I released the cedar songs instead of tears

as they pushed my man from the dawn, from my arms

I played for him the songs,

for the son born after, for the grandson of my old age….

Now as grandmother I tell her words.

I, the girl blessed with Grandmother’s name and hair,

Grandfather’s red earth skin,

I play the sweet cedar songs,

the haunting holy gifts of the trees

he left behind.

First published in The People Who Stayed, Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal 2010, The University of Oklahoma. Also in a self published chapbook, “Cemetery Plots” 2006. Winner 2006 5th Annual Pleasanton Poetry Festival, Adult Poetry.

Copyright © Linda Boyden. All Rights Reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Of mixed-blood Cherokee/Irish and French Canadian ancestries, Linda Boyden has spent most of her adult life leading children to literacy. From 1970-1997, she taught in primary grades, receiving her master’s in Gifted and Talented Education in 1992 from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. In 1997, Linda decided to change careers and abandoned full-time teaching for full-time writing. Her first picture book, “The Blue Roses”, debuted in 2002. It was the recipient of Lee and Low Books’ first New Voices Award, the 2003 Paterson Prize, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers’ Book of the Year, Children’s Literature, 2002-2003, and was included on the prestigious CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) 2003 Choices list of recommended titles. In 2007 she wrote and illustrated her second picture book, “Powwow’s Coming” published by the University of New Mexico Press. She has also written and illustrated “Giveaways, an ABC of Loanwords from the Americas” published also by the University of New Mexico Press in 2010. In 2011, Giveaways was the recipient of three Finalist Awards from the International Book Awards.

Linda is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She enjoys doing author visits and storytelling at schools and libraries as well as presenting workshops at writing conferences around the country. Visit her on the web at www.lindaboyden.com

Chapter Four #49 Bear Child Blvd.

By Kimberly Wieser

10:30 pm. Swoosh, tha-thump, swoosh, tha-thump . . . he came by this time every night. She lay there in her bed, warm under the Pendleton her grandpa had given her last spring, hearing his skate board swoosh and thump down the sidewalk, past the big spruce tree, down to his house. But to him, she was just T.J.’s little sister . . . background. She wanted to be spotlight. She wanted to be like a jingle dancer everyone noticed at a powwow, full of grace and beauty, quick and fluid, but she only wanted that everyone to be him.

6:45 a.m. The moon shone barely through the basement window. She struggled to find the clock, shrill in the dark. She just wanted to stop it in time to keep it from waking her little sister snuggled under the other quilt next to her, her little brother in the next room, still snoozing in the bed T.J. had vacated almost an hour earlier. It was hard here in town without Dad, without all the aunties and uncles, grandmas and grandpas, all the cousins.

She stopped the clock . . . Mom had it harder though. She had to work so much now. Melanie knew it was hard on her, hard for her to leave when her children were sleeping, hard for her to be without Melanie’s dad, to be alone. Melanie tried to help all she could, but even at thirteen, even with the tiny love she was beginning to feel, she knew that nothing could replace the man a woman loves with her whole heart, her whole mind, her whole body, her whole spirit. That had been clear in her mother’s face, in her eyes, every day her dad had been alive within Melanie’s memory. It was clear now in the wounded woman who worked herself to death to feed her children, to offer them what she felt was a better life, here in town, off the rez with all the relatives, all the traditional ways that remained strong, all the love, and all the pain.

Melanie pulled the chain on the lamp, glanced over at her mother’s empty bed against the next wall with its neatly folded blankets, stumbled to the washroom and flipped on the switch. The bare bulb above her glared in her eyes as she stared in the mirror. She opened the medicine cabinet to find her toothbrush, placed far enough out of the reach of the little ones that none of them would swipe it, at least not without too much scene and likely a loud catastrophe. She squeezed out the last of the toothpaste, knowing she’d have to cut it open for them before she fed them some breakfast. She turned the faucet, brushed her teeth, and splashed her face with some water. Drying it, she turned her face this way and that in the mirror, wishing Mom would let her wear some makeup. “Saaaa. ..” she’d said when Mel brought it up, “you’ll be wanting to wear high heels and short skirts next! What would your Dad think?” That’s all it had taken for Mel to drop the subject, probably permanently.

But these girls in town wore makeup, even the Indian girls. Not the ones at the Catholic school close by their basement suite, but the ones at the public high school she went to across town, across the river. She was good in school, and out on the rez, they had promoted her from Grade 1 to Grade 3 several years ago. When she moved to town, the white principal had doubted her.

“It’s just extremely unusual, Ms. Scout.”

“Mrs.,” Mel’s mother interrupted him.

He looked disturbed. “Mrs. Scout,” he said hesitantly. “It’s unusual that a student from one of the reserves would be able to succeed at a grade higher than his or her age-level. In my professional opinion, it would be best to enroll your daughter at the junior high. Give her a chance to succeed. You know, our curriculum is substantially more difficult than that of the Indian school. I just have you and your child’s best interests in mind, I assure you.”

But her mother had insisted that they test her. If they wouldn’t recognize the truth of her records from the rez, let Melanie show them she could compete with them on their own grounds. Melanie had felt uncomfortable with the whole confrontation. It was bad enough, moving to town, away from her friends and family, being out of place, alone. She had passed their tests all right, at least the ones on paper.

The school was huge, and there were few Indian students compared to the whites, even compared to the Asians. Indians only outnumbered blacks and Hispanics, who were almost invisible in the packed hallways, full of girls who wore tight shirts, tight jeans, had brightly-colored hair, and makeup, full of boys who looked at her and all the girls as if they were things, as though they had the right to judge each female who passed by.

Only her brother could be counted on, him and his old friends from the rez, others whose families had moved to town over the past few years for a variety of reasons. But they were older, and each day that one of them stayed in school, didn’t drop out to do non-existent work, sleep on their mother’s couches, was a miracle. She understood, but right now, they were the only thing that made her feel remotely safe in this place. That’s why she didn’t mind T.J. leaving as early as he did in the morning. He caught a ride each weekday with a Metis guy from up the block who worked construction across town and hit the gym as soon as the custodians would let him in. Basketball was all that kept him around. In a way, basketball kept him connected to Dad, Melanie supposed.

Mom would be in from her night shift at the hospital soon, to shower up, eat breakfast with them, and take them to school before she herself went to University. Sometimes she thought of moving down across the line, moving to the States where nurses made more money, Melanie knew. But here, she was able to help her people in one of the few ways she knew how. It had to be hard, Mel knew, working the emergency room during the night shift. She knew the things her mother saw couldn’t be pleasant—the rougher side of life was more apparent at night, at night when people tried to hide things, things the bright lights of the emergency room only made sadder, made uglier. Mel was just glad that it had been too late for Dad already when they found him, too late for them to take him in, too late so that Mom hadn’t had to see him like that. It was a horrible thing to have to be happy about.

Mel went back into the bedroom, turned on the light, and woke Kalie. “Go on . . . get up if you want a chance to get in the washroom before Dyl, you’d better get up.” Kalie reluctantly left her quilt, put her feet on the floor, and moaned her way to the other room. Mel picked up the quilts, shook them out, and folded them.

Kalie yelled, “There’s no toothpaste left in here!”

“I’m coming, just as fast as I can,” replied Mel. She walked in the other room, into the corner they used as a makeshift kitchen, reached in a jar stacked among groceries on one of the folding tables, and got out a steak knife, slightly bent at the tip from someone opening milk cans hammer-style, but still usable. She walked into the washroom, tip pointed down as Mom would never forgive her for forgetting something like that, and deftly slit open the tube.

“Groooooss!” Kalie exclaimed.

“Gross, but still good,” Mel replied. “Hurry, Mom will be here in just a minute, and you know she needs to wash up. DYLAN!” Mel yelled, her usual quietness broken by the need to speed up things.

“I’m up, I’m up . . .” Dyl groaned from under the blankets.

“You’ll have to make your own bed this morning,” Mel said, coming back around the corner out of the washroom. “I’ve got breakfast to cook, and Mom should be in any minute. You know she has to be to class on time. Get ready.”

Mel got tired of taking care of other people. She didn’t know how Mom did it. Melanie’s mother had decided to become a nurse soon after high school, soon after her best friend died way too soon. That part Regina admitted to her. The rest, Mel had heard. Around here, people talked about each other so much that you even ended up hearing stories about your own parents and your own siblings. There had been that guy. Her mom’s first love, the way that Anastasia had told it. They had even been married, Indian way, anyhow. He had lived with her at Aaah’s house out in Laverne. Anastasia said his Grandpa had been a big time Indian doctor, a highly respected ceremonial person, before he passed on. They had all had big hope for that boy, that boy her mom had been in love with. But that one, he must of have turned out more like his dad, Anastasia said. Apparently got messed up on drugs or something and broke her mother’s heart.

Now her mom’s heart was broke again, Mel thought.

“I wonder if it’s worth it,” she thought to herself.

She had heard older women sigh, “Men . . .” so many times, but what they should be sighing is “Love,” Mel thought. That was the part that got you in trouble, made you foolish, got you hurt. Mel thought of that old story, one of the several about Chief Mountain, about that heartbroken chief’s daughter that threw herself off it so long ago. Mel thought that that story probably wasn’t the right one. Still, she thought, there were old stories about girls who killed themselves because they couldn’t marry the boys they wanted to, for one reason or another. Sometimes, it was because of their parents. The parents had other plans. The Old Folks used to say that love made people crazy, and it certainly wasn’t a smart reason to get married to someone. Sometimes, it was because the boy a girl was in love with hadn’t proven himself to be a man yet, hadn’t had any success in battle or sometimes even hunting. Even though the two might be close in age, the Old People would have thought that she was a woman, but that he certainly wasn’t yet a man. Mel thought those stories were sad. It was sad that people were doing things like killing themselves even way back there in the olden days. But she was starting to wonder if they might not have been right about love.

She heard Mom’s keys rattling at the door.

. . . A chapter from a novel in progress, Quilt Like a Night Sky.
Copyright © Kimberly Wieser. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Kimberly Wieser is an Assistant Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She has recently become Director of Native Writers Circle of the Americas and serves as Vice-President of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She is one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (OU Press), named one of the most important books in her field in the first decade of the 21st century by NAISA. She is currently revising her manuscript Back to the Blanket: Reading, Writing, and Resistance for American Indian Literary Critics—winner of the NWCA First Books Award for Prose 2004. She has written and published poems, stories, articles, book reviews, and reference entries for anthologies and for publications from Studies in American Indian Literatures to American Indian Quarterly to News from Indian Country and Talking Stick Arts Newsletter. Her areas of interest are Native critical theories, contemporary Native literatures, (particularly women's literatures), Native rhetorics, and Native creative writing.