by Win Blevins
Mike told a Greek story, as a matter of fact. “In the glorious summer of 1954, twenty-four years ago,” and here he gave Delphine an affectionate smile, “Poe and I went to Europe for the first time. To Greece. It was our first real vacation.”
“A month! I always had a thing about Greece,” said Poe. “You look at those statues and you think, they’re the best-looking men in the world.” Poe looked tickled.
“We went to Delphi,” he pronounced it del-PHEE, “where the oracle is. There’s an amphitheater in Delphi, thousands of years old.”
“A natural amphitheater,” put in Poe, “where they do Greek drama.”
“But not that night,” said Mike. “Your mother and I went up to the amphitheater late. There was the thinnest of new moons, and we wanted to see it.”
“I wanted to see it,” said Poe. “Your father was never that romantic.”
Now Mike smiled a smile of deep delight in the past and affection for the present. “We sang a Greek song in that amphitheater that night, your mother and I. Nine months later this one was born.” He put an arm around his youngest daughter’s shoulders. “So we named her Delphine.”
The sisters’ eyes seemed to express … I couldn’t tell what.
Poe went to the kitchen to check on dinner, and a moment later Mike made an excuse and followed.
The three sisters were eyeing each other strangely.
I saw Mike put his arms around Poe and kiss her in the hall, a passionate-looking kiss.
Finally, Delphine said, “Blue, you should know we’ve heard other versions of that story at other times.”
Meg said quietly, “Delphine”—a warning.
“We don’t know which of the stories …”
Beth coughed as a caution. Mike and Poe strode back into the room, beaming.
So what is it, a question of infidelity?
O Delphine, do you wonder whether there’s a nigger in the wood-pile?
At that moment my heart leapt the distance between my lover and me, and I understood her completely, and loved her utterly. The shadow.
Soon Poe led the way into the dining room, where a Vietnamese woman in a uniform served a dinner that was too refined for my taste. I just nodded when they exclaimed about the wine. I was sitting between Meg and Bess, trying not to look too much at Delphine. My mind was going, Why didn’t you tell me? How come they’re white and you’re black?
Had she ever said even, “My family, they’re lighter than I am”? Not that I could remember. She had a soft, whispery, come-hither voice. Feeling the way I did about her, I didn’t always listen to the words.
She sure didn’t say, “My family is white as pastry dough, and they live all the way white. My father makes money like a pasture grows grass. My mother heads up charities that give money to people like you. We’re into sailing, where even the clothes are white. One of my sisters is on track to become a federal judge, the other wants to start her own publishing company. They’ll probably make it. And then there’s little old me, with the touch of the tar brush, ain’t it cute?”
I spent dinner smiling and nodding and agreeing and wondering what every damn one of them must have wondered, and probably still wondered. Who, where, when, how? Who slipped it in, where? Grandparent, great grandparent? What were the circumstances? Was it passion, carrying the lovers to mad heights? Was it a one-night impulse? A rape? An episode between patriarch and servant? A liaison between woman of the house and gardener? Who was the man standing in the shadows of Delphine’s past?
Did Mike and Poe sometimes think they made one child too many? What did they say to each other when Delphine got to be a toddler and her skin color was no longer an infant aberration? And when her hair didn’t soften as she grew, but coarsened? And Delphine just generally looked like, looked like, well, she looked … Negroid!
Did the sisters sometimes want to disown her? Did they ignore her on the playground of the Montessori school? Did they want her with them when they tried on clothes at boutiques? Did the parents want to send her to Pine Ridge to get her out of the way? Just sometimes, to their embarrassment, under the cloaks of their smiles, behind the wash of their embraces, did these lovely, gracious people wish their daughter and sister didn’t exist?
And, oh yes, and, Delphine, why didn’t you ever talk about this? I kept looking across the table at her, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She was in her Egyptian empress mode, poised, polite, and impenetrable.
How deep is the shadow of the Raven’s wing for you?
Before we left, Mike called me to one side. “I understand you like broadcasting,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You want to continue in that.” It was a statement—clearly Delphine had prepared him.
My throat felt half clogged. “Yes.”
He two-fingered a sheet from a message pad from his shirt pocket. “This is the name of the general manager at KSOL, Kay-Soul, they call it. And the phone number. Delphine thinks this is your sort of station. Give Ed a call. I think he’ll help you out.”
Delphine wanted to risk only a quick overnight at the island house, not a whole weekend. In the morning we got up late. Fruit, cereal, and milk were set out, but everyone was gone to the yacht club. On the way to Anacortes Delphine and I stood at the back rail of the ferry. We were each lost in thought, and the ferry was lost in a gray, low-clouded day.
I’d just had my first experience of the old-boy network. Me, Joseph Blue Crow, a kid from the Badlands who never spoke English or went to school till he was fourteen—me, plugged into the old white-boy network, and maybe even using that damn thing to get a job in radio, in the media. Ain’t it a hoot?
Ain’t it something else too?
But I wasn’t quite sure what something else. My feelings about it were squiggly, and I couldn’t quite get hold of them.
But it’s good, ain’t it, getting on the inside? Where we’ve always felt excluded, we who ain’t white? This is what I’ve always wanted, isn’t it?
When you throw yourself into a new world, when you have nothing to go back to, you hold on to whatever bit of flotsam you can.
I touched the message slip in my breast pocket, took it out. The wind made it flutter, but I held on.
I turned to face Delphine. She was looking down, into the ship’s wake, a churning white in a sea of gray. It was beginning to mist, or rain lightly, and I felt chill, summer day or not. I tucked the slip back in my pocket and put my arm around her waist.
“What kind of job at Kay-Soul?”
“Ask Ed. But apparently you start cueing records and reading commercials and learn the electronics stuff, then work your way into a jock spot.”
“Jock.” I’d never got used to having that word mean disc jockey, not a real jock like me.
She turned to me. “The deal is, you start as a caddy to a jock. When you’re ready, they try you when they don’t have many listeners—midnight to six A.M. on a weekend, maybe.” She took both my hands in hers. “It’s a good shot. Call the guy.” In the mist her eyes looked bright, the one glow in a gray day.
I squeezed her hands a little. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” I meant it and didn’t mean it. Glad to have a shot, a shot at anything, but unsure about … Well, hell, it’s the way of the world, isn’t it?
I squeezed her hands hard. She gave me her eyes this time. “How come? How come you didn’t tell me?”
A wry smile.
“Who are you, dark lady?”
This she decided to answer. “I’m the same as you, one of the dispossessed.” Her lips were all quirky, but her eyes were sober. She spoke no more. She turned and looked down into the wake of the ferry.
“But you’re dispossessed in the midst of it,” I said to her shoulder. “Right in all that good stuff, wealth, position, power, influence. You’re in it but not of it. It’s them, it isn’t you. Huh?”
She turned her head sideways and looked at me. Droplets were forming in her hair. Finally she said, “We have a chance, you and I. Let�
�s not throw it away.”
That was the strangest of all, for Delphine did not say it in her own voice. She said it in Raven’s voice.
I waited, stunned. How?
She turned her face back to the waters.
“Delphine.” She looked at me in a spirit of challenge, offering the angle of her Egyptian head and the light in her Ethiopian eyes. Those were her only answers.
So I took her shoulders and pulled her to me and kissed her. Her nose was wet and cold, but her lips and tongue were warm. Cool words, hot mouth. I held her close and wouldn’t stop kissing her. I wanted to pull her inside me. I felt … strange.
Finally she lowered her head, held herself against me for a moment, and turned back. I saw her eyes go to some island, behind us, whatever island, a fleck of granite and evergreen between a dark gray sea and a light gray sky. Then she looked at the horizon—just gray, stretching forever, sea and sky the same, maybe the same all the way across the North Pacific. Finally she looked down, at the wake of the ferry, a great froth of whiteness spuming behind us. She watched it, with no expression I could see.
I watched it. I felt its draw. I felt how it would suck you down, into the depths.
Venturing Forth
At Kay-Soul I was no more a water boy than the other jock caddies. I bided my time, paid my dues. I worked on my voice. (I am deep-piped, a bass clarinet. Not a reedy bassoon or a brassy tuba—a velvety, silky bass clarinet.) I showed them I could cut a mean commercial. I listened to the pros and worked on my patter. (You don’t stick astrophysics between cuts of bubble-gum rock.) I learned pop and folk and rock, to go with blues. Where a decade before I didn’t know who the Beatles were, I now became a walking encyclopedia. I was good. Took me only six weeks to get trial spots in the middle of the night on weekends, and management told me I was in line for a regular spot. I was a young man on the rise.
Delphine did her bar studying. She dropped me off at the station in the Z car and picked me up after work. In between she crammed. When she entered the bar, her dad had promised her a place in the firm. The firm would be privileged, he said, to have a graduate of Stanford and University of Washington Law. She said she hadn’t told him her actual ambition, to get elected. She studied with a determination I didn’t quite understand. I mean, the grades were only pass-fail, right?
She told me regularly how proud of me she was. She told me I was going to make it. She told me I’d already achieved far more than most people ever did, just getting off the rez and through college and into a good job. After I got my own spot, what did I have in mind? Did I want to develop a show devoted to the blues? Did I want to develop an Indian music program? Public radio might do either one of those, she said, and it could go syndicated.
I listened and I tried to believe her and believe in a bright bauble of a future and I never stopped being afraid.
I learned not to talk about my past. Never told her much about Grandpa and Unchee. Never told her at all about being called to bear the traditional ways of my people. I’d gotten ashamed of all that. It was something I’d overcome. Talking about it would be carrying a burden into the future.
I didn’t think about it either, refused to think about it. I started putting away beer so I wouldn’t have to think about it. I anticipated the day when I could forget it with Wild Turkey instead of Oly. Like the jocks did, like the lawyers at the chi-chi downtown lunch spots did, like the real-estate agents and stockbrokers and all the on-the-rise people did. Wild Turkey obliterated more than Oly did, and faster.
I was rising. I was becoming white bread.
Indians who are red on the outside and white on the inside, on the rez they call these people apples. I prefer to call them white bread. Red-brown on the outside, white on the inside, all the good stuff bleached out, and puffed up.
I never wrote Grandpa and Unchee that first year, not once. Just didn’t. Couldn’t bring myself to do it. Slammed my grandparents into a bottom drawer of my mind, put others in there, too, like Emile. Never opened that drawer. Spent a lot of time, mentally, not even looking in that direction.
Delphine and I made new friends. With her making friends seemed a kind of program. Seattle was multi-racial and not necessarily a bad place to have a face of a different color. Unless you are dealing with cops or rednecks, naturally. Could even be an advantage, sometimes, if you needed something from just the right people, the hip, the with-it. After all, it was a brand-spanking new 1978, and things were different. Now everybody of every color had an equal opportunity to become white bread.
Our best new friends were Dennis and Li Ming Oh, a Chinese-American couple our age. Dennis was doing a Ph.D. in economics at UW. Li Ming worked in an art gallery downtown and was a painter—huge canvases, completely abstract, but with a wild vitality, made you feel like they were full of action. Good people. And people of color who were moving into the mainstream, like us. Li Ming had been born and raised here. Dennis came from Taiwan.
We went for pizza, we went to the movies, we did a few rock concerts, we talked through the night at coffeehouses. When we wanted to splurge (or Delphine wanted to treat), we went to a Sonics game, especially against the Trailblazers. I’d still loved basketball, and these guys were the best in the world. Altogether we were friends. Our biggest deal, really, was the Monopoly games we had. You cannot imagine. Every Saturday we went out or played Monopoly, and those games were a blast.
Good times. We talked about the music we loved, hot new movie stars, going to Mexico for spring break, how the Supersonics were doing, and our hopes and dreams. It occurs to me only now that we never talked about our families, the worlds we came from, our roots, the religious ways we were raised in. (For one thing, our ways now were purely secular, based on science, aimed at success, which meant money.) We didn’t even talk about the present. Our thoughts were on the future. Maybe that was because we were young.
We didn’t learn about where each other came from. Li Ming’s parents were immigrants, Confucians or Taoists or Buddhists, I guess, but we never spoke of it. Dennis’s parents were … I think their religion was the Hong Kong stock market. Delphine was raised a Catholic, but it never came up. Nobody even asked me about my religious ways, which were supposed to be interesting those days, and I never brought it up. None of us wanted to be that uncool.
I remember a curious event about the way our pasts hovered near us, but we ignored them. I kept the family Pipe on the headboard above our bed. Our bed was king-size, with one of those fancy bedspreads that folds back over the pillows. Delphine and I kept the house immaculate (her insistence), and we displayed the Pipe handsomely, like you would put out a good piece of African art or something.
Mind you, I wasn’t a Pipe carrier and had never smoked that Pipe. Carrying a Pipe is a solemn responsibility, its sacredness honored by a ceremony. I left that road before I was old enough to carry a Pipe.
Dennis saw it through the open door, my handsome pipe bag, fully beaded, displayed on a folded, white-tanned doeskin.
“What’s that?” he said. He walked into the bedroom and looked at it close.
“Beautiful,” said Li Ming. She was right behind him. Dennis wore little wire-rimmed glasses that made him look like a jeweler oculating something small. Li Ming wore the biggest glasses you ever saw, like coasters in front of her eyes. Right now their eyes were soaking up my pipe bag.
Sitting at the dinner table, counting out money for the Monopoly game, I didn’t think anything about their words.
“Blue, what is it?”
I got a bad feeling and jumped up.
They weren’t touching it, though, just standing by the side of the bed and looking.
I went straight to it and picked it up.
“My great-grandfather’s Pipe,” I said. “My grandmother gave it to me to keep.”
Delphine appeared in the doorway.
“There’s a pipe in there?” chirped Li Ming.
“White Buffalo Woman brought the Pipe to my people,” I said. “Centu
ries ago. A Lakota carries a Pipe because it brings him power.”
“Oh!” she squealed, like she’d heard a fairy tale that charmed.
“Can we see the pipe?” asked Dennis.
I looked at them. I knew what their feeling was. They were really keen to see it. Like they would have been keen to see an ankh, a scarab, a Zulu mask, or a staff made from the dried penis of a walrus. They were curious. They were titillated. They wanted a glimpse back into an exotic and romantic world.
I regard what I did next as a personal low. I undid the thongs that held the Pipe bag, reached in, drew out the stem and the bowl, and displayed them to my friends.
I take a little comfort in the fact that I didn’t put the Pipe together, making it into a living vessel of power. Very little comfort.
And I didn’t let them touch it. They wouldn’t have asked, any more than they would have asked to touch a Picasso etching.
I noticed that Delphine had come close. She was looking hard at my face, not the Pipe.
Li Ming and Dennis oohed and aahed. They asked about the circles carved in the upright part of the bowl, and I explained that these represented the four winds. Dennis asked what the bowl was made of, and I said catlinite, and told how it came from a quarry in Minnesota. They asked about the stem (water birch), the brass tacks, the paint, the feathers. I told them something about each bit, all of it factual, none of it true.
I say not true because I omitted the truths that were crucial. This was not a quaint object to me. It was not old-fashioned. It was not an example of old-time, primitive beliefs. It was not a relic of an enchanting past.
It was my great-grandfather’s Pipe. It was power, handed down through the generations, now residing in my hands. Even if I believed its power was past, not present, it was part of my family’s story.