by Win Blevins
MACY: What?
JOHNSON: A real interesting one.
[Pause.]
MACY: Why don’t you begin at the beginning? How did you meet her?
JOHNSON: At a party. The rich bitch’s cousin or something. Don’t even remember how I got there. She came on to me. Think she wanted to get next to a real nigger, know what it was like. I mean, she was half tan. I’m black black. Turned out she wanted to get right next. Maybe she got more than she was looking for. But, whatever, she liked it.
MACY: When was this?
JOHNSON: Don’t remember what year. She was still in high school, junior, senior.
MACY: You dated her?
JOHNSON: No, I only fucked her. Don’t think anyone on her side of the tracks knew about it.
MACY: When did your sexual relationship start?
JOHNSON: First night, after the party. I said, “Let’s go up to my place.” Didn’t make no secret of what I wanted. She plenty willing.
I was feeling mean that night. Wife left me about a month before and … well, a lot of shit. I was pissed in general. Didn’t feel like no come-on with Delphine. She walks in, there’s a couch, back to the front door, facing the TV. I come up behind her, reach around, put both my hands on her little tits, rub ’em, rub myself against her butt. She responds good, tries to kiss me, but I ain’t gonna do that shit. Funny thing, I never did kiss Delphine, wouldn’t let that happen, no time. Anyway, right then, I just pushed her forward against the back of the couch, bent her over, lifted her little skirt about the two inches that was needed, and fucked her from behind.
She was a virgin. Bled all over me and the couch.
Then I pulled her rough by the hand to the bedroom. I laid down on the bed, all my clothes on but my cock out. Told her to straighten her clothes back up, make herself nice. She did. Then I told her to take it off, one piece at a time, sexy as she could every step, regular dance of seduction—give it all you got, baby. She done it. All the time looked at my big black cock. When she was jaybird naked, I saw how her body was a girl’s, not a woman, and that turned me on even more. I told her to suck my cock, and she done it and done it. Rest of the night she done everything I told her. There ain’t nothing you can think of I didn’t tell her to do, no place I didn’t give it to her, the ass included.
When I was done, kind of in the spirit of the thing, I told her to get out and go home, I didn’t want her around. Middle of the fucking night. She done that too.
About a week later she was back. Same story.
Ever since, she shows up time to time, same story. Girl like it rough. Not physically rough, no, but rough talk and rough treatment, like she was a bitch. Which she was. A rich bitch.
MACY: Without enjoying yourself over the details so much, how often did this happen over the last … what is it … eight or nine years?
JOHNSON: Coupla times a year. Never called ahead. Once she showed up when I had another bitch in bed. Told Delphine to strip and get her ass in bed and get fucked. She done it. Funny, I wasn’t that crazy about talking rough, but she wanted it, and with her it was fun. Delphine probably thought I was like that with every woman, but I saved it special for her.
MACY: How often?
JOHNSON: Maybe while she was down in San Francisco going to them colleges she missed a year, I don’t remember. Sometimes she came twice over Christmas vacation. I do recall once I asked her how them college boys liked it, what I’d taught her. She said she never let one of them touch her. And she looked at me like, weird, seemed halfway like telling me I was the only one. Stone fox, stone crazy.
MACY: She came to you on the night of December 30, morning of December 31?
JOHNSON: Early morning before New Year’s Eve? Yeah, she came.
MACY: What happened?
JOHNSON: Same as ever, maybe better.
MACY: She say anything to indicate she was depressed, feeling down?
JOHNSON: What she said with her mouth wasn’t words.
MACY: Suicidal? Thinking of killing herself?
JOHNSON: Far as she said, far as I could tell, she didn’t have anything on her mind but getting laid. Which she got in fine fashion.
MACY: She say anything to you about having another relationship, a man she was living with?
JOHNSON: She hadn’t been around in a while. Quite a while. Whatever else she had, though, seem like it wasn’t enough to satisfy. Don’t it?
When he shut it off, he looked at me with triumph naked in his eyes. Congratulations, Detective Lieutenant. Put the lippy redskin in his place?
I calmed myself by breathing slow and easy. “The Ryans hear this?”
“They know the contents. Nobody has heard it but you.”
“I’m going for a walk,” I said mildly.
Whatever he’d figured on, that wasn’t it—his eyes and mouth were all surprise.
I took myself outside and thought about Delphine. Walking clears my mind, my feelings, my spirit. Walking helps me be me.
I pondered Delphine and the darknesses she held inside. Delphine and the darkness she played with outside. Delphine and the darkness she jumped into at the end.
I wondered what would be in those journals.
I knew that Delphine lived deeper in the shadow of Raven’s wing, even, than I did.
I tried to think of the stories my people have about darkness. We have lots. They’re different from white people’s stories in some ways. In the white stories darkness seems very alien, the other, the enemy. In ours it’s more a part of things. Though I couldn’t think it out, I knew this made a difference.
After maybe twenty minutes I turned back toward the Ryan house. Something had changed in me. I had a feeling for Delphine that seemed new, several feelings about Delphine that seemed new. One was compassion.
And when I felt compassion, a knowledge came to me.
I told Helmet Hair I had something to say to Meg, Beth, and Poe. She asked me to wait in the library. They arrived with Detective Lieutenant Macy. I told him to wait outside. He started to rebel, but Meg and Beth told him the same.
I sat on a plush sofa and took a moment to sort things out. For I had another feeling. It was anger, and I was willing for it to be with me, but I didn’t want it to run me.
I raised my eyes to theirs, trying to use white-man eye contact. Felt the anger and the compassion and the knowing and all the rest of it come right to the front. “Yeah,” I said softly. “I have an idea what happened to Delphine.” I hesitated, but I needed to come out with it. “I … It was simple. She … She felt like a nigger.”
I lowered my eyes. I didn’t want to see the faces. Neither did I want to feel the emotions blasting at me—offense at the word, shock at the thought, and then raging denial. But the women hurled the feelings at my head and shoulders, and I felt them.
I raised my eyes to theirs and got battered by all those energies. I waited, giving them time. I hoped they would see something good in my eyes, understanding. Then I repeated, “She felt like a nigger.”
I didn’t add, Like me.
Wild, Strange Winds
When I got back to the apartment that evening, the light on the answering machine was still blinking. The next morning when I came bleary out of the bedroom it was still blinking. Irritably, I crossed to the little table by the sofa and I hit the PLAY button.
First one was a hang-up. Also the second and the third. I was getting irritated, and I almost whacked the REWIND button. The fourth one had a voice.
“Washtay,” it said. From that moment I knew it was Grandpa and what the message was. Far as I knew, he’d never talked on a phone in his life. He must have gone to the True Bulls’ up the road.
His gravelly voice picked its way forward in the Lakota language, “Your grandmother has finished her journey.” His breath was audible on the line, and his hesitation audible. “Funeral is Friday afternoon at Wounded Knee.”
Click—he just hung up.
I fell, literally fell forward, onto the sofa, face d
own.
Whoosh! Collapse. The air farted out of the balloon. The wind was out of my sails. Now my ship was shlip-shlopping, lurching about, rocking crazily at the mercy of the waves.
In a little while I realized it was stuffy to breathe. I turned my head sideways and woke up to the fact that I’d been lying with my face in the sofa cushion.
I became aware of tears on my face, and I didn’t know I’d been crying.
Why am I crying?—this thought razor-slashed me.
It wasn’t that I was so fond of Unchee. True, she’d raised me, and done the thousand things a mother does for a child. But she’d done them grouchily, and I’d never felt glad to receive her attentions.
It wasn’t that I would miss her. Since I decided I was a Great White Doubter, I hadn’t gone home once to see Grandpa and Unchee. I had put my grandparents behind me.
With these thoughts I broke into a wail—an old-time, heart-piercing, soul-wrenching moan, sob, and cry in one. It shook the apartment. It shook the windows. It shook me.
I had no idea why I was wailing. Unchee, Delphine, my years as a white man—hell, all sorts of things frothed into my mind as reasons to be miserable, even the latest Sonics loss to the Lakers. I threw them out and went back to wailing. I wailed my heart out, and then did it again, and yet again.
O world of sorrows!
I cannot say it in words. I could play you some music. I could play you some blues. Or I could sing for you one of the songs of my people, a song that knows the great sorrows, a song in which sorrow flows eternally, as water flows in a fountain.
I was adrift, my sails slack, and a raging sea of emotion battered my ship.
I didn’t know where these storms of feeling came from, or why. I could feel that they would wreck me, if I did not take action.
The next two days were the strangest days of my life—Delphine’s funeral in Seattle on Thursday, Unchee’s at Wounded Knee on Friday.
Delphine’s funeral was at St. Joseph’s, the parish church where she’d been baptized and confirmed. Delphine hadn’t been there in eight or ten years, and the priest didn’t even know her. He knew the Ryan family, though, and did it up proper. The mass the Catholics say for the dead has a formal beauty that seems to come from time immemorial, and it is memorable.
A lot of important people in the city, particularly in the Democratic party, showed up and paid their respects. Poe and her daughters showed they still knew how to work a reception line. Michael Ryan stood like a zombie, and he was still drugged up.
White folks are restrained at funerals. Can’t think of a word that suits the case better. There’s emotion, but dignity is all. If the tears aren’t all small and quiet, people are embarrassed. Even at the graveside pathos is framed in decorum.
I felt like I was barely there. The Ryans were full of nice words—“Blue, stay in touch, we don’t want to lose track of you.” But I breathed in a new awareness in their company, like acrid smoke that fills the air. I didn’t belong there. Even the nice words were a dismissal. I didn’t belong there.
From the cemetery I went straight to Sea-Tac, used the cash in Delphine’s checking account, and took my first-ever airplane flight—Seattle, Denver, Rapid City. Emile met me, put me up overnight in his apartment in Rapid, and drove me out to Wounded Knee the next day.
The white Indian returns.
O strange, O agony. I saw Grandpa, and Senior, and Mom, and Angelee and Mayana for the first time after several years. I quivered with fear of harsh words. Grandpa shook my hand warmly. So did Senior. Mom and my sisters gave me big hugs. I cannot speak more about that yet.
O strange, O fearsome. Why are we at Wounded Knee? I knew Unchee’s mother had died near the battle time, but knew nothing more. Sure didn’t know that Unchee or Grandpa felt any attachment to the place, or why one of them wanted her service there. What I knew was, I didn’t want to be there. As a kid I’d never wanted to go there, read the big sign about the so-called battle, look at the mass grave, think about my people who died there, or those who survived, any of that stuff. The one time the family stopped for a few minutes, I sat in the car and waited. Now, as a Great White Doubter, this was what I’d left behind. It felt to me like I couldn’t breathe here.
But it wasn’t a time to ask Grandpa anything, and truth is, I didn’t want to know why we were at Wounded Knee. I was still being driven before strange, wild winds, and I was lost.
O strange, O baffling. The little church on the hill, by the mass grave, was Catholic. Most Indian families, even traditional families, have a Christian church to fall back on for occasions like this. But neither Grandpa nor Unchee had any truck with Catholics, or any Christians. Why have we come here?
I didn’t ask.
O strange, O torment! How did I feel about Unchee, and how did I feel about Delphine? I didn’t know. That was the truth, I didn’t know. My lover died Sunday, and her funeral was yesterday. My grandma died Tuesday, and her funeral is today. I meant to march through these funerals and be on my feet at the end, erect as a tin soldier. That was all I knew. Feeling like a tin soldier, too.
I decided not to tell the family about Delphine. Coming in from the airport, I told Emile. My small friend didn’t say much, as is his way, but I could feel his concern, and his support.
As we walked up to the little church, on the hill above where the massacre took place, I said to him, “Not a word about Delphine.”
He nodded, already knowing.
An overwhelming sense rose up in me, a picture. I saw myself speaking words, and the words came from the pit of my stomach, which was all bile. Whatever words came from there would be false—utterly, perniciously false. I must not say anything of consequence, for whatever I say will be a lie.
“I need to talk about nothing to no one.”
Emile nodded.
I felt a knee start to go, and he grabbed my elbow. I smiled at how a very small artist can help a very big athlete, and thanked him with my eyes. I got my balance and took a deep breath.
A lot of people, more than I realized Unchee even knew, came to pay their respects. Before the mass several men and women I didn’t know shook my hand and said they were from the Survivors’ Association. At the time that didn’t mean a thing to me. A couple of them murmured, “She was one of the last.” I didn’t understand that either. I just shook their hands and moved on. Accept, nod, say nothing, get on with it.
As we went into the church, Albert Four Horses, a medicine man Grandpa had known all his life, smudged us with cedar smoke. I hadn’t been smudged in several years, and I felt a pang.
Inside I slid into the row with the family, and Emile followed me. He touched my forearm, and I nodded—I’m okay. I’m going to make myself okay. I was not going to say anything about Delphine or Unchee. I won’t let the goddamn bile come up.
I straightened myself up emotionally by thinking about how Indian funerals were like and different from white people’s funerals. Delphine’s was the requiem mass, formal, ancient, honorable, all elegy and dignity. Unchee’s was also the requiem mass, but we turned it coyote. Our people, by God we showed our feelings. We held hands, we cried out, we sobbed loudly, we moaned. Some people went up and threw themselves on the casket and wailed.
When I say we, I mean they. Not me. I was holding the bile down. If I so much as moaned, the whole foulness would come out. I would mourn for and Delphine and myself, alone, somehow, sometime. But for now I held myself aloof.
The priest conducted things just like he would in front of white people—no mention of the four directions, of Mother Earth or Father Sky, of Tunkashila. No smudging. “Fucking white service,” I whispered to Emile. White priest, white church, red people, red corpse.
At the end of the service, I went carefully forward with Grandpa and the pallbearers. Grandpa covered Unchee’s face with a scarf, and closed the casket on her forever.
As we carried the casket out to the truck, my people turned into a mass of wild pagans. Passing the priest, I checked
his face for shock, but he’d seen it all before. People clutched at the casket, raked their hands along it like they were trying to hold Unchee back. The women set to wailing—especially the old women. Every step I took, carrying that casket, was walking through the deep water of despair. The women wailed, they found all the grief in the world and gathered it in, all the grief that has ever been, the griefs of our ancestors every one, and the griefs of all human beings and all beings that walk the earth, or fly, crawl, or stand from roots. They let this grief run, like the greatest flash flood of a river ever was, they let it pour through their bodies and through their voices and into the air until the world vibrated with it.
I didn’t wail. I kept my face even and my step even. Inside my heart was pounding, and on every beat it pounded out a name, Delphine, Unchee, Delphine, Unchee.
Emile walked next to me with a worried look.
When we slid the casket into the truck, everyone weeping, weeping, weeping, tears coming with abandon, and the songs of sadness pouring from their throats, then I permitted myself one gesture—I touched my head to the foot of the casket and said, “Goodbye.” That word felt true.
I hear tell that in the old days our women sang out their grief even bigger. They cut off their hair, too, and took butcher knives and cut their arms so they’d bleed, all to say their grief.
I needed that, all of it. I needed to reach for the belt knife I didn’t have and cut my arms and let my blood flow with my tears. I would have done it, here, now—I cared nothing for what people thought. But I had no way, couldn’t find those feelings, couldn’t get there from here.
Somehow I squeezed into a car with Grandpa, Senior, Mom, Angelee, and Mayana, and we all got moving in a big line of vehicles to the cemetery near Red Cloud School, where Unchee would be put in the ground.
At the cemetery I kept my equilibrium by thinking about how things were being done. All was in the Indian way. Albert Four Horses said some prayers, a lot of prayers. Then he smudged us all with cedar smoke, smudged even the bottoms of our feet, so nothing bad would cling to us. On top of the casket we set a bag of Unchee’s belongings, things she loved and things she might need for the journey she now had to take, beyond the pines. Then we didn’t do like white people do, walk away and leave the grave diggers to put her in the ground. We lowered her ourselves, and we, her relatives, took turns shoveling the dirt on top of the casket. Then we escorted Grandpa back to the car, and Unchee was gone.