RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  Dribble—I am a doubter! Dribble—I am a destroyer! Dribble—I am rampaging.

  Leap and shoot.

  It bounced back—I couldn’t see which rim.

  Leap and shoot—bounced back—couldn’t see front or back rim.

  Leap and shoot—looks perfect—the hoop sent it back.

  It was like the old phrase says, there was a lid on the basket.

  I tried a fourth shot. It was right in but I knew it had no chance. I reached out and palmed the rebound.

  Couldn’t throw the Pipe away. Well, hell. I’ll keep my Pipe as a sign of … a great past. Hell, I want to keep it anyway.

  Funny, it was like medicine made all those shots go in, and medicine kept the last one out. Funny, ’cause I was throwing away medicine. I gave a twisted grin and headed for the locker room.

  I stood in the shower a long time. It takes a long time to wash away the past. Go! I said in my head. Down the drain! Tradition, gone. Medicine, gone. Wash it away with the soap of science! Cleanlinness is next to white-man-ness. I looked down at my bare, red body, and watched the white soap float down all over my skin, and took pleasure in my whiteness.

  I felt my eyes well up, but with the shower water hitting my head, I couldn’t tell if tears flowed.

  It doesn’t matter. It hurts to throw away a past, even a burdensome past. Tears are okay.

  I am an agnostic. I am a skeptic. I am an agnostic. I am a skeptic.

  I didn’t yet have the term Great White Doubter.

  I am a white man.

  I dressed slowly, hoping no one else would come in. I walked out of the gym alone. It was twilight, the early evening of autumn in the north country. I looked around at the dark clouds, their edges lined with weak sunlight. I ran my eyes around everywhere, and suddenly I realized I was looking for Raven.

  Raven? Why now?

  Then I grinned and walked on. White people aren’t haunted by Raven.

  I checked out how I felt. Certain bounce to my step there. Wild, loose feeling in my joints. Hey, I feel liberated. Yeah, liberated.

  I waggled my ass.

  And maybe I feel queasy, too.

  I hesitated, then kept going.

  Now I can do stuff. Now I can go forth and succeed.

  I waggled my ass with almost complete conviction.

  It’s okay. It’s hard to become something new.

  I’m liberated!

  From that day I threw myself into college life in a new way. No more did I go home for visits, not to Grandpa and Unchee at Medicine Root Creek, not to Mom and my sisters at Wambli, not to Senior, wherever he might be. It was partly that I had an awful dilemma. I couldn’t tell any of them, especially not Grandpa and Unchee, that I had thrown their ways on the ground, that I was walking not the red road, not the black road, but the white road.

  To them agnostic, skeptic, and Great White Doubter would be just other words for white man. The killing at Wounded Knee was not an ultimate defeat. The loss of their offspring to the white man—that was defeat. I could not bring myself to deliver that blow.

  Yet I was not like my ancestors, I was not like my family. I was setting down the old, dying ways, and taking up the new, the way of the future. I was setting down superstition, ignorance, poverty, and misery and taking up the path of science, technology, knowledge, productivity. I was setting down the ways that had lost, and taking up those that had won.

  I was a Great White Doubting apple, red on the outside, white on the inside.

  I was a turncoat.

  I sought consolation immediately. When I picked up Bradley at the airport, I told him about my crisis of spirit, and my new stance—“I am an agnostic.”

  “Yes, I know.” These quiet words felt like solid footing, a new beginning.

  The next day I found Ron in his office and told him, “I am an agnostic.” (You’re with white people, you talk the way they talk.)

  “That’s the way it works,” Ron said.

  I can hardly describe to you, during that long North Dakota winter, how alone I felt. I stopped seeing my Native friends, simply stopped—I was not like them. I could not go home. I made new white friends—Bradley’s crowd at the radio station—but they didn’t become my friends exactly, they adopted a Native as a friend—it isn’t the same. For the first time in my life I was truly alone, more alone than I had been in the early days at Kyle boarding school.

  I was determined, though, absolutely determined, to live my new way, wherever it took me. And I had one great consolation. Though my family and my people would be disappointed in me, they were few. All the wide world of white people would support me. And they held the keys to the doors of success. If only I could outlast the hurt in my heart.

  Luckily, Bradley came up with a good idea. He said I was the best interview on the team, and got me on the air after every game. Finally one day when we were sitting around his office at the station, he suggested, “Why don’t you do an interview show with college athletes?” he asked. “You have a good voice, you have ideas, the athletes see you as one of them, it’ll be good.”

  I did it and it came off well, a five-minute gig once a week. I liked being on the radio and began to work on my voice.

  “Why don’t you do an hour show on the blues?” he asked.

  I thought about how much I liked the music, gave the show a shot, and loved doing it. I think Bradley was tickled by a red guy pumping the blues to a white audience.

  Whatever, it worked out kick-ass. Bradley had tapes and records enough to fill a U-Haul. I was hot—knowledgeable, enthusiastic—and getting hotter by the day. My senior year was basically broadcasting Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, throwing myself into it. I picked the tunes, I intro’d them, I commented on them. It was fun. The Blue Crow, my show was called.

  And it was looking like a door. I mean, I was a red kid, an outsider, thrown into the turbulent waters of a world that wasn’t mine. How would people accept me? How the devil was I gonna get a job? You don’t exactly see help wanted classifieds saying, anthropologist wanted. And I sure wasn’t going to go to university for five or six more years and get any Ph.D. Oh, hell no.

  I knew what would happen when the companies came recruiting. Who would get the jobs, the big fellowships, the government appointments? Wasn’t the old-boy-white-boy network gonna take over? Wasn’t the red nigger headed back to the rez the day the white boys and girls got their real start? Wasn’t the red boy’s first career move gonna be unemployment?

  With Bradley and Ron’s encouragement, I began to think, Hey, I am good at this stuff of spinning platters, even at punching out the news. I could make a living at this. It’s a damn silly job, but it’s a start. And maybe …

  I had no faith at all. Hokahey, faith was a big part of what I threw away. You don’t believe in spirits, you gotta make your own way off the rez.

  In the end radio and my new white-man road did come through for me. For good and evil, they brought me Delphine.

  PART THREE

  Red Road, Black Road, White Road

  Delphine

  “Mr. Blue Crow,” said this voice on the phone, pearly but very professional. “My name is Delphine Ryan. I’m with the National Lawyers Guild Task Force on Racism and Jury Selection. I’d like to talk to you.”

  I mumbled something.

  “Do you have time to meet with me? Perhaps tomorrow morning at the International House of Pancakes? I’ll buy your breakfast.”

  I mumbled something she took for agreement.

  She named a time and finished off with, “See you then.”

  She showed up with Santa Fe Red, a guy I knew from down at Cannon Ball on the Standing Rock Reservation. Red introduced us awkwardly, because our eyes were already making like magnets, couldn’t let go of each other. She and Red sat across from me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. To me the name Ryan meant Irish. Picture an exquisite, catlike creature, with small, high breasts, a sleek body, perfect—like she was turned on a lathe and given a high polis
h. She couldn’t have been Irish because of two details: the kinkiness of her red-brown hair and the color of her skin. The skin was the color of coffee with a lot of cream, I mean a lot of cream. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Especially the most beautiful black woman I ever saw.

  She was dressed in a dark red silk suit and cream-colored silk blouse with matching Gucci purse and shoes, saddle-colored. Gold stud earrings. I learned later that Delphine never wore jeans or other casual clothes. She always looked fit to be photographed for Town and Country. Even the long, slender, brown Sherman cigarettes she smoked looked elegant.

  First off she launches into her spiel, forming her words and sentence with that same elegance. “I am a law student. I haven’t taken the bar yet. At Standing Rock I’m doing some research. The National Lawyers Guild Task Force on Racism and Jury Selection sent me to Pine Ridge, actually, to find out why Native Americans never get on juries. We think a red man deserves a jury of his peers. The Task Force intends to help formulate some new rules, or procedures, or whatever is needed.”

  She paused for breath and I jumped in with a tease. “So folks like me can be hanged by people of our own skin color.”

  “Something like that.” Her eyes smile for the first time. She rushes on with those words. “I have just arrived at Standing Rock, with the same questions I asked at Pine Ridge. Do you have anything to say? As a Sioux you must be concerned, and as a member of the media perhaps you’d like to speak out. I would be glad to quote you.”

  She took all this very serious, and I guess I do too. But right then I was feeling like Billie Holiday had walked into the House of Pancakes in Nowheresville and was lighting it up. I wanted her to sing “God Bless the Child That’s Got His Own.”

  I mumbled, I stumbled, I moved my mouth and said nothing. Finally, I supposed I guessed I didn’t know anything about it. They brought me pancakes, and I buttered and syruped. Ever after, Delphine would be linked in my mind with hot butter and sweet syrup.

  Out she came with a whole bunch of questions. “Do you know that juries are selected from lists of registered voters?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know that Shannon County, down at Pine Ridge, is a jillion percent Lakota but only a small percentage of the registered voters are Indian?” (She quoted the numbers, but I don’t remember them.)

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “What do you have to say about why Indians don’t register to vote? Or vote?”

  I just shrugged. But I was glad she was asking me. She had me mesmerized. I kept mumbling things like, I suppose I guess I don’t know.

  “You’re an important person in the college community,” she said. “You have a radio program, you’re a star on the basketball team. You ought to inform yourself about issues that concern your people.”

  Feeling real BMOC for the moment, I said, “I’d like you to teach me.” I reached out on the table and covered her hand with mine. She left her hand there.

  “About time,” said Red. “You two gonna do it right here or you gonna go home to bed?”

  Delphine and I laughed, and turned a corner into our future.

  Delphine Ryan spent the weekend in bed with me, gentle and sweet and loving and altogether terrific if you didn’t mind listening to her theories. Monday morning she pointed her Datsun 240 Z, which fit in the Dakotas about like banana trees, toward Pine Ridge, bound to do her job. She drove back every weekend until school ended, and we experimented with blending sex and politics. I got an education in what white folks think should be done for red folks. (Funny that she was always the leader in this department—she wasn’t the redskin.) She tried to teach me about modern jazz, which I hated (and still do). She told me about her ambitions. She was going to represent her home district in Congress. The first woman, she said, never said a word about being the first black woman, from the somethingth district in Seattle, which I presumed was a black area. She talked politics, she talked philosophy, she talked social change.

  I listened, after we’d made love. I didn’t care what we talked about. I loved the color of her skin, and its softness, like the skin of a peach. I loved her perfect body and her elegant way of moving. I loved her Nefertiti head. I loved the way she used her eyes, her hands, and the language of her body in place of words. I loved how loving she got, and how loving she made me. I loved Delphine.

  In bed in our motel room one night (she always got us a motel), I woke up without knowing why. We were a mismatch in one way. Not long after the sun went down, those days, I got sleepy and went to bed. Maybe it was the basketball workouts. Anyhow, ten o’clock was near my limit. So she’d come to bed with me, make love, and get back up. Stay up through the dark hours, she would, sometimes write, write, write in her journal. Seemed she never slept.

  This time she was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at me, looking at me serious and deep. As usual, she had that way about her. Dressed in nothing but a big T-shirt, Delphine could look like she was fitted out in cocktail party dress, high heels, and a single strand of real pearls.

  I looked back at her. I could never read her eyes when they got dark like that.

  She says, “I want to talk about the future.”

  I sat up on some pillows. I didn’t want to talk, really. What future? I was about to finish (not graduate) and go back to the rez. She was slumming between Stanford and the House of Representatives. ’S been good to know you, kiddo, I thought, but I didn’t say the words.

  “Come with me,” she says. “Live with me.” And then she gives her quirky smile and says,

  Come live with me, and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove.

  She was like that, quoting things. It felt like … wearing drop-dead earrings or a really fetching silk blouse of a color so exquisite it hurt your eyes. It made life seem … special. Elegant and formal. But formal with queen-sized play of emotions just under the skin. Even that theoretical stuff she was always going on about, it animated her face and eyes and made her skin glow and you could see her passion. If you turned the discussion real personal, she’d clam up or steer it back to politics. But you could see the passion. “I have a great apartment in Seattle. I’m going to spend months studying for the bar. Come live with me.”

  Oh, Delphine, I loved you.

  So my heart said, Go for it. I confess it also said, Meal ticket.

  I reached out and took her ever so gently by the ear lobes and pulled her to me, kissed her seductively, and said, “Sure.”

  She nuzzled me, and let me hold her a long time before she got up again. When I turned over at two or three in the morning, she was standing by the window, taking turns between writing in her journal and smoking a Sherman, staring into the dark glass. For the first time I wondered, How dark is the shadow for you, the shadow of your Raven’s wing?

  I didn’t even go see Grandpa and Unchee, just wrote them a note that I was going to Seattle and I’d send my new address—that’s how far I’d gotten from the way I was raised. Delphine had an apartment overlooking Lake Washington, west of the university, handy for her law school years. It was handsomely furnished, and I noticed she had enough money that she didn’t even sublet it while she was gone. I was just beginning to get the plenty-of-money picture, and I wondered how a young black person gets affluent. But I waited for her to tell me, all in her time.

  Right away she drove me downtown—in that 240 Z—and got me fitted up with a couple of good-looking suits, not old-fashioned three-piece outfits like from Brooks Brothers but slick threads for a swingin’ dude. I was still waiting.

  Hoka hey, I was also feeling pretty good. Good digs, good threads, good entree to the world I’d been shut out of, good woman. Woman shadowed here and there, maybe, but good materials, the best. And I was feeling queasy all at the same time. I mean, Delphine had confidence, but me, why should I? Man with red skin out in the white world, nothing he can go back home to. Good woman but no job. No lead on a job. And maybe no white peo
ple want me to have a job. How long can a red man keep a woman if he doesn’t have a job? What happens if the meal ticket gets canceled?

  The second week Delphine took me home. The family pretty much spent summers on the island, she said, like I knew what “the island” meant. Turned out we drove up to Anacortes, rode the ferry to Friday Harbor, and Delphine’s dad picked us up there in a Land Rover.

  “Welcome, Blue,” he said to me, holding my one hand in both of his. First surprise—Michael Ryan was white as the Michelin Tire man. She’d said he was a lawyer, a partner in a powerful downtown firm. I expected him to look more like Ed Bradley than Morley Safer.

  He steered the Land Rover up high to a house that had a splendid view of the harbor and the Sound. Matter of fact, Puget Sound spread out in every direction, looking like gold leaf in the sunset. You might have thought, How beautiful. I thought, From a place like this, even the ocean looks like money.

  “The ladies are late,” Mike said as we entered the house from the garage. “Sailing—it’s racing season. I leave that to the younger generation now,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “Poe is a judge.”

  “Poe is my mother’s name,” said Delphine. From what she’d said, she thought her mother was a waste.

  Mike steered us to a big living room with a spectacular view of the Sound. My mind was straying. Since this man was utterly white, Poe must look like Cleopatra, right? It would take a Cleopatra of a black woman to win a man as upscale as Michael Ryan.

  At that moment three of the best-looking women you’ll ever see in your life strode up the stairs and greeted me. Delphine’s sisters, Meg and Bess, led the way with sisterly hugs. Poe gave me a bigger hug, and murmured, “Welcome, welcome, Blue. We’ve heard so much about you, all of it wonderful.” Delphine hung in the background, half-smiling, watching my face.

  I hardly heard what was said. I kept looking at the color of Poe’s skin. It was radiantly pink. Her eyes were green. Her hair was blonde.

  I checked out the sisters. Fair as could be, one auburn-haired, the other blonde. Any of them could have auditioned for the lead role in the life of Grace Kelly. Poe showed me photos of Meg and Bess racing on a variety of small craft, each representing more bucks than Grandpa would make in a lifetime. They were so keen, even now they were using their vacations to race together. Their talk of Cal 20s, spinnakers, steering downwind, and hitting marks was Greek to me. I thought, Well, Lakota would be Greek to them. It didn’t occur to me, not yet, that they wouldn’t care.