by Win Blevins
Solid ground again.
I took thought. That country between the Badlands on the east and the Black Hills on the west is ravine-ravaged. Hadn’t considered this. The ride to Rapid City would be dipsy-doodle, with a lot of time suspended high in the death-defying air. Where you invited me, Raven.
Now my past prowled out of the corners of my mind and yowled at me, sang into my ears like an angry, moaning wind. I knew well what I was supposed to be, the way I was supposed to live. Supposed, supposed, supposed, that word like a gavel thudding down on the judge’s bench and declaring, Guilty, guilty, guilty. I’d been picked out by my family and by Spirit for things far higher than boozing, far higher than broadcasting. Every day the black-robed judge in the back of my mind reminded me what I was supposed to do, supposed to be, supposed to do, supposed to be. Every day I plugged my ears and tried not to hear, neither the judge’s words nor the sentencing gavel. The sentencing bang was all I really could hear, of course. I spoke it to myself so constantly it became my flesh, my hair, my belly. I have lost the world of Spirit I was born to. I have gotten lost in the profane world, the world-not-mine. And I am weary of myself, weary unto death.
The wind whipped around my head, fierce, and its little eddies wandered into my ears and made echoey sounds, despair, defeat, despair, defeat … a-a-w-wk!
I waited for the train to come. I sailed over trestle after trestle, dark ravine after dark ravine. I looked and listened for death, but the bastard wouldn’t come. I watched for Raven, but the black bird hid in the black night, waiting.
After a while I saw ahead the crossing of the dirt road east of Buffalo Gap. The road cut a white, moonlit slash through the sagebrush.
Escape! I can get off!
I looked down the tracks, silver lines running into a dark hole. I wanted no escape. I wanted to roll on into the embrace of Raven. I wanted to dive off a trestle. Or smash into the skull of an engine. I imagined it. The engineer saw me, even with my lights out. He hit the air brakes. The whistle shrilled. The steel wheels screeched on the steel rails. The will of the engineer said stop, but the momentum of a hundred freight cars said, Crush.
CRUSH!
Suicidal anger? Suicidal depression? Who cares? Gavel, guilty, rapping, guilty. I want out, out, out.
Rosaphine? I don’t want to hurt you.
A pair of ghostly lights rolled up to the tracks and slowed, a pickup truck with a wooden house on the back. It hesitated, jumped forward, hesitated, stopped, lights bobbing. Evidently the driver could see our dark shadow. The headlights blinked up and down, like a beacon, an offer of refuge. No thank you, no refuge for me.
We sailed past the crossing serene as a cloud sails in front of the moon.
As we cruised past, I lifted a hand and waved goodbye, a shadow bidding farewell to light and rushing into shadow. Goodbye, whoever you are. I screwed up. Screwed up, goodbye.
Then I looked back and thought, Wasn’t the shape of that rig familiar? But I was leaving all that was familiar, except for you, Raven.
I looked ahead into the night, and smiled. If I could describe that smile to you, every twist of emotion that was in it, you would understand everything about that night.
I do not much recall the next twenty miles. Rosaphine zonked. I stood on the back seat, facing into the wind and smiling. Smiling, yes, smiling big. The smile of the man who has come to know himself, and despises himself.
I opened my mouth, summoned the full power of the radio voice of a six-foot-six man, and as loud as humanly possible roared the cry myself—“A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!”
I was dimly aware also of my spirit surging around inside of me, moving in great tides, quiet as ocean, eloquent as wind, saying something else. Something very else. But I wasn’t listening. I look for you, Raven.
Finally, after twenty-something miles of cruising, Raven darkness? No, light …
Most people imagine death as a great darkness. Some who’ve crossed over and come back say it is a white light and that you pass into it with a feeling of vast benevolence. Mine was to be a bright white light, and Raven’s malevolence.
I felt relieved. Sad, disappointed, but relieved. That’s the main feeling I remember. Come, sweet light.
Except that it was two lights.
I tossed my head and rejected that. Optical illusion. Imagination playing tricks on me. One white light would be enough, wouldn’t it? You can’t die twice, even if twice is deserved.
Two lights. I shook my head, waggled my eyelids.
Two lights, with some kind of glow behind them.
“Hey!” I shook Rosaphine with my foot. “Hey, wake up!” I jabbed her hard.
“Hunh?” She jerked and sat up. “What the hell?”
“What do you see?” I shook her with my foot. “What do you see ahead?”
Oh, sweet Raven. I will ride your wings into the blackness.
“A car on the tracks!”
“What?”
“A car on the fucking tracks! Stop this thing!”
“What!?”
She dove for the cruise control and slammed it with the heel of her hand. The Lincoln began to coast.
She vaulted into the driver’s seat and jammed on the brake.
From my standing start in the back seat, I took flight.
I groped for the lift of Raven’s wing but found nothing. I zinged through the darkness toward the double light. I reached up for Spirit but plummeted toward earth. I held my arms out and arranged my fingers like Raven’s wing tips. Somehow I rotated face up. Upside-down I tried to croak like Raven but …
A steel rail clobbered my shoulder …
A fat tie cracked my head …
Cinders peeled my back and butt …
I rolled like a log spinning downhill across some very nasty ground. I came to rest. I waited for the world to stop whirling.
Footsteps fast on the cinders. A voice growling over and over, “What the hell …?” I knew that voice. It was not Raven. It was not even Wakantanka. It was, it was … My mind surfed through clouds of confusion.
Emile!
I giggled. This was funny. Here I was, naked as nothing, drunk as a skunk, looking for a way to throw my life on the ground—BUT IT IS NOT A GOOD DAY TO DIE. Not really. And Emile pops up like magic to save me. Again.
Now I understood. That was Emile’s rig at Buffalo Gap; I should have recognized it. He saw us cruise through the crossing, saw me in my naked, backseat bowsprit pose, and caught on. Oh, yes, Emile, you know the despair of being Indian, you know the despair of the bottle.
“Emile, you saved my life.”
“Both our lives.” Rosaphine was suddenly sober too. She stood there as dressed as I was naked, as serious as I was silly.
“You saved my life.” I was surprised at the gratitude in my own voice, and in my heart.
He felt of my shoulder.
I hollered.
“You’re going to the emergency room.”
Another drunken Indian in the ER. Nobody loves a drunken Indian.
“Blue Crow, you have gone nuts.” Rosaphine’s voice. She was getting it. “JESUS!” She got it now. Yes, yes, I did try to kill us.
“I’m taking him to the ER. Help me.”
They prodded me to my feet and trundled me into the front seat of Emile’s pickup.
Rosaphine said loudly, “I got to get out of here. FUCK!”
“Drive his car to my studio.” He told her where. “Sleep on the couch. I’ll be along.”
Nothing more from Rosaphine. The sound of the Lincoln starting. A screech of tires. I didn’t hear from that girl again for a long time.
“Brother,” said Emile, “when you get out the hospital, you got to go on the mountain.”
Those words took away my silliness. Each one of them hit me like a ten-pound sledge.
I’d been waiting for the call, what I thought would be the voice of the Raven. Here was the call. It was the voice of my other life, my real life. It was the call to live again in the world of
Spirit.
Some dim part of me recognized it.
I slurred out the words, “I got to go on the mountain.”
PART TWO
Where Blue Came From
The Voices in Blue
I knew what Emile meant—“You got to go on the mountain.” He and I had been raised in that same old world, where Spirit reigns, the world I told you about, with magic, visions, and the poetry and song of the unseen. We even grew up together part of the time, a hard part, our white-man schooling. We had an awareness of Spirit that would stay with us. It would help Emile, because he was true to it. Because I wasn’t, it would haunt me.
Emile is a special man, and to understand how special, you got to be willing to expand your white-man mind some.
When Emile was five, living with his grandparents, an elder told his grandfather that Emile was a winkte. This is a word we Lakota have, means man-woman, or something like that. Man who wants to be a woman. Man who lives as a woman.
Hanh, I know what you’re thinking. Means queer. Or whatever insulting word you want to use.
This is where you got to expand your mind. The old-time winktes, yes, they had men’s plumbing and they did their sex with men, this much is true. But if you think queer or fairy and imagine bathhouses and a gay lifestyle, you got it all wrong, for sure.
The old-time winktes were picked out by Spirit to live as a kind of third gender, neither man nor woman. They adopted women’s way of living completely. They wore women’s clothes, took on women’s responsibilities, married men, even spoke like women, for in our language words take one form for men, another for women. They were female in every way, and were addressed and treated always as women.
They were good at this switch, too. Old-timers tell a story about a Catholic priest whose church was near the house of an especially good old woman. The priest and the elderly lady were friends for thirty years. When she died, the priest laid her out for burial, and was shocked to discover that she had a penis. That’s how completely she lived as a woman, so that the people called her she, and even today I call her she.
Men-women lived in this way because it was revealed to them that they should. Sometimes, I guess rarely, a Spirit told them to change back and live as men, and they did that too.
They were important in our old-time way, these men-women. Certain ceremonies require them—you cannot start a Sun Dance without a winkte. They also made the best flutes, which were used in courting, and were the strongest in elk medicine, the power of romance. If a young man wanted a strong love song, he got it from a winkte. And I think generally they did exceptional beadwork and other arts.
Emile was picked out to be a winkte, but you can’t really do it the old way anymore. Lots of our people, even, don’t understand the tradition and don’t accept it. Emile wears men’s clothes and is called he, like any other guy. He’s what the modern world calls gay. But it’s a misunderstanding, and he’s never quite going to get over it.
When Emile was a kid, though, his grandparents kept him out of school, just like me. That elder who was also a winkte, that elder came and taught him how to live right. I don’t think it’s an accident that Emile makes his living as an artist. At his studio on the highway near Keystone he creates his work and sells it—paints hides, drums, parfleches, robes, and such, and sells them to tourists, collectors, and museums.
I was held out of school to learn some old ways, but different ones from Emile. I was chosen even before I was born. My grandmother, my father’s mother, said she saw signs during my mother’s pregnancy. No one told me what she saw, or heard, or in any way how it came to her—she didn’t communicate much with me. What it came down to, I was picked out.
Selected for what? To be raised to carry the old ways. To be raised by my grandparents, not my parents. To live away from town, away from white people, even away from Lakota who were white in their ways. I spoke Lakota, no English. Instead of learning the ways of the grocery store and the refrigerator, I learned the ways of the hunter of animals and gatherer of plants. Instead of learning the ways of television and the automobile, I learned the ways of the sweat lodge, the vision quest, the Sun Dance, and the yuwipi.
We grandparents’ children, that’s what they call us, we are held apart exactly to be carriers of the old ways. White people call us back-to-the-blanket Indians, backward people, people to be left behind by time. In fact we are the keepers of our people’s spirits.
It was a hard way to grow up, serious and dedicated to a great mission, without the normal time for play and other childish things.
What was even harder was to learn that way of living, then to learn the ordinary rez way—you gotta be one of your own people—then to learn the white way, which is the way of the world.
That’s how I come to have four voices.
You’ve heard my jock voice, a hepped-up personality I put on for my radio show. Then there’s my college-educated, white-man voice, a different mask I wear in restaurants, at the grocery store, and to write this book. Then there’s my rez voice, Indi’n patter. The last voice is the one I was raised with, the voice of the traditional Lakota in touch with the old ways. Some days I can own it. Here’s how I would tell you about Emile and me in that voice.
Hanh, of those held away,
The grandparents’ children, we are two.
Of those who live close to Earth,
And who remember the old ways of our people,
The way of the Pipe,
And the seven sacred rites of the Lakota,
We are two.
For as long as these ways are known to some,
And kept by some,
The people live.
When the Pipe is forgotten,
And no man cries for a vision,
The sacred hoop will be broken forever,
And the flowering tree will wither and die.
To get by, I’ve needed all my voices. One for my show. College-educated white-man talk for most of the world, because it gets respect from you white folks. Rez talk to be a regular guy, someone my buddies can hang with. It means saying “he don’t” and “them cows,” and even more speaking in a kind of soft slur that’s hard to describe. I use my traditional voice for …
Well, the truth is, I need it for my sanity, but I haven’t used it much in a long time. More than twenty years.
I need to find it, and you need to hear it. The traditional voice is for speaking of sacred things. In truth, I can speak of these only in my own language. English does not serve. But since you understand no Lakota, I will make something like it in English, as I did above, and I will speak to you sometimes in that.
I don’t claim Lakota is only a poetic language, or only a sacred language, like the Latin of the Catholic liturgy. It is an everyday way to talk, usable for everything human beings do—you can call a dog, curse your wife, or gamble away your life savings in it. But it is also the language of the knowledge of the wakan, the mysterious. It is the knowledge my people are perishing without, and your people are perishing without, and the world will perish without.
If in English it has the cast of an older and higher wisdom, that is what I intend.
Does it confuse you that I am a man of many voices?
Then think how it confuses me.
Not only many languages of the tongue but languages of the body. When I am in the white world, I hold my body one way, in the rez world another. A Lakota speaking to a group of Indians does not take the posture or the tone of, say, a white professor addressing a class, or a white politician addressing a crowd.
One example: We traditional Lakota do not look our elders in the eye. To us that is disrespectful. We see them, of course, but we do not make eye contact with them. Old-time Lakota men could never, ever, ever look their mothers-in-law in the eye, or women their fathers-in-law.
Among white people, though, if your boss speaks to you, or your sergeant, or your teacher, you better look him in the eye. Otherwise it’s, “Look at me when I talk to y
ou, boy.” And if you don’t, they think you’re evasive or shifty. When you’re only trying to be respectful.
Learning to speak white body language has been harder for me than learning English, by far. Sometimes even today I get confused and act inappropriate. Sometimes I have to make a choice, with both red and white folks in front of me. It’s hard.
I don’t claim, though, that all four of these voices aren’t me. For better and for worse, they are. The traditional voice is the one I was raised to. The rez voice is the first one I picked up, the everyday way of my people. The educated white talk is one I wanted badly to master. It was my key to college, a career, and a good-paying job. The radio voice was my last acquisition. Got it and my show-biz name from the radio station, out there in Seattle. My first real job—I’ll tell you about it later. My PERSONALITY, on the AIR. Cause I was GOOD, baby. Do it to it, Blue!
Natcherly, this hipster voice isn’t me. This white-man life isn’t….
Until they began to be me. Until Crow’s voice sounded like me, even to me. I forgot the old voice. Hey, pretend long enough and you become what you’re pretending to be.
So that’s where I was the night Emile rescued me. A traditional Lakota who’d become a hipster, big-city boy, divorcee, and drunk.
And Emile spoke to me of going on the mountain? On the mountain? Back to the old ways? What am I, a museum?
So what was my new life? Jive and booze. Can jive and booze be your whole life? Yep, booze alone can be your whole life, and your death, too.
The way out? To go back to my beginnings and rediscover the good red road—that’s what Emile was telling me.
Here’s what my beginnings were.
Crow’s Raising
Grandpa, Unchee (my grandmother), and I lived near the mouth of Medicine Root Creek, in a back corner of the Badlands. The Badlands are beautiful, but they are a hoodoo place. The ancient peoples were strong here, Stone People, Rooted People, and Animal People, before human beings, and their bones are here yet. The paleontologists have found thousands of fossils of the original peoples. Sometimes even a kid can find a dinosaur bone imbedded in the Earth. In a way the Badlands were even badder a hundred years ago when the Ghost Dancers retreated there to dance their visionary dance, away from white people and from Indian unbelievers. And they were bad when I was a kid—only scattered, remote homes, two-tracks for roads, wagons and horses more common than cars.