RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  “Secretive, hidden. She gave me her father’s name, but never told me whose it was. She gave me his Pipe and didn’t tell me why. She never told me a thing about herself, or about Wounded Knee. Even yet I don’t know the name of her mother.”

  I looked into the faces of my friends. “And I never asked. My ancestors were killed at Wounded Knee—I guess they were, I don’t even know that for sure—and I never cared. I turned my back on it.

  “I tell you, you can turn your back on the nine-hundred-pound gorilla, but your mind is right on it.

  “I been living in the shadow of Wounded Knee and pretending I didn’t. I grew up with a strange, withdrawn parent because of it. I grew up with expectations I didn’t understand. I grew up to a mission, I didn’t know what it was. I grew up with the past weighing on me, and I pretended it wasn’t there. I felt the pain but held onto the pretense, held on hard.

  “I am here to change that. I’m here to know what happened. Then I’m gonna march myself out of that shadow.

  “I’ve resisted this like hell, knowing who I came from, what they did. Now I’m gonna look at the past. Not like a historian does. I look at the past because it’s biting me in the ass.”

  “It’s very late,” Sallee said. She looked excited. “Why don’t we stay up very, very late?”

  “I haven’t done that in years,” said Emile.

  “Youngsters,” said Chup in mock disgust.

  Plez whipped some more candles out of his back pack. “You’re going to get too tired to journey tonight,” he said.

  I nodded. I wanted to be here with my friends.

  Plez lit the candles and the little flames flared. It was like the light on our faces was the bond that held us.

  “Why do Indian people kill their feelings with booze?” Plez started. “Who can stand feelings like living in ravenShadow?” It wasn’t a question to be answered but a comment.

  I could see Sallee deciding to speak. She spoke only occasionally, and then spent words carefully, not like a miser but like a person who knows they are valuable and sets them out one by one with attention, so that others can see their value. “My mother was a remarkable person. She was born into what you call ravenShadow. This is her story, the way she told it to me.

  “Her great-great-grandmother survived Wounded Knee but lost all her family, not only her husband, parents, and children, but aunts, uncles, cousins—every adult. Every adult. After the massacre she stayed with a family at Pine Ridge, then married a Pine Ridge man. A lot of Wounded Knee survivors stayed at Pine Ridge, didn’t go back to Cheyenne River. About six months after the massacre my mother’s great-grandmother was born. Then an unbroken chain of us first children for five more generations, girl babies every one. My mother was born in 1953, the same year as you, Blue. I was born in 1970. I am the seventh generation.

  “I figured it out. Though some of those women were mothers as early as fifteen, some a little later, on the average every one of them gave birth to a girl baby at sixteen. That was the way it was in the old days, probably, and that’s why we say seven generations is about a hundred years.

  “As far as my mom could remember, these women were drunks and led useless, shattered lives. Mostly they had busted marriages, or no marriages, and mostly they didn’t live long. My mom was a single mother. Her mom was a single mother. She didn’t know who her father was. Neither do I. My mother’s grandmother, born in 1921, lost her husband to World War II. So there it is, a chain from 1890 to 1990 of girl children with mostly no fathers, no families, no way to have a life. Alcoholism, depression, every disease that comes from hopelessness.

  “My mother was the same, seventeen years old, new kid, didn’t know who the father was, drunk a lot, stoned a lot, no job, living with her mother. She spent my first year drunk and stoned, she told me this. On my first birthday she went out with her friend, Virginia Wayans, drove to White Clay, gonna meet some guys, drink.

  “I was born January 20, so it was middle of winter. Virginia was getting stoned, driving. Culvert. She was going fast, did something wrong, went into a skid, went off the highway, back onto the highway, right into the abutment.

  “That abutment came right through the driver’s door. Virginia got mashed into my mother’s seat. Mom got slammed hard into her door, but she only had cuts and bruises and a couple of teeth knocked out.

  “At first they thought Virginia would be okay. Then she seemed to be getting worse in the hospital, and they figured she was bleeding internally. They didn’t get it stopped. About dawn she died.

  “Virginia was my mother’s best friend. Had been all her life.

  “Mom said she came home and promised me things were going to be different from that day, promised me though I couldn’t even talk. She was probably in a daze, but that was one serious promise.

  “She went to AA. She stopped drinking, she stopped using. She left me with her mom and went to college, worked her tail off, graduated in three years, studied social work. Came back and went to work for Social Services, an alcoholism counselor.

  “She never fell off the wagon. She never used. She told me lots of times she had to be a warrior every day, and she was. She never got married or had any more children. She did more good on this rez than ten, twenty, a hundred people. She worked for the people. And she worked for me. She told me there was this chain that started at Wounded Knee, this misery handed down, generation to generation, maybe even getting worse and worse. And she said it was stopping with her. She was breaking the chain, she was not handing that to me. And she didn’t.

  “She’s my hero.

  “She was leaving the filling station down here last December, started to pull onto the highway, saw somebody driving too fast and stopped. That drunk lost it, came off the road and put his front end right into her. Killed instantly. That’s when I went to live with Uncle Chup.

  “My mother is my hero. She was born in as dark a shadow as anybody, but she didn’t murk about in it. She did something about what’s wrong. And she loved the idea of these Big Foot Memorial Rides. She said that was the way to wipe away the tears, heal the people. She would have ridden if she could have gotten the time off. That’s why I’m here. I’m riding for her.”

  Sallee looked straight at me, then at my chest. “RavenShadow, that’s an excuse. It’s not a warrior’s way. You give in or you fight. My mother fought.”

  We all sat silent, but Sallee had no more to say. She’d said plenty, from my point of view.

  “What was your however-many-greats-grandmother’s name, the one who survived Wounded Knee?”

  “Walks Straight. I took her name when my mother died.”

  I made up my mind, inside myself, to look for that woman at the first Wounded Knee, if I got there.

  Chup pitched in. “Hey, I agree with Sallee. I understan’ it, understan’ why all of us Indi’n people want to drink ourselves to death. But the reasons don’ make no difference. You want to drink, that’s your enemy. You deal with your enemy, every day, one day at a time.” This was just what Chup said to me every time we talked. That’s what a sponsor does.

  Everybody waited.

  “What I do,” says Emile, “is paint them. Those feelings. I would have painted Raven threatening me, and the ravens feeding on carrion in the background, paint it like a dream, and full of terror. Some way that changes it, when I paint it.”

  Everybody waited. It was up to me. “What I did was, I lived in it and it lived in me.” I looked at Plez. “I better tell them about Delphine.”

  He nodded. “These are your friends. Lay down your burdens.”

  So I did it. Just like I told it to Plez. I even said one thing I hadn’t said before. “I haven’t thought of this before, but I think, I think Delphine’s blackness meant something bizarre to me. I think it connected her to Raven in my unconscious mind and in my heart. I think, when I chose to live with her, I chose to live in ravenShadow, and somehow I knew it, and I sought my own destruction. With queer satisfaction I sought my own
destruction.”

  They looked at me with kind eyes.

  I felt ashamed. I felt relieved and grateful.

  Plez waited. Finally he said, “You want me to offer some words? Is this a good time?”

  I thought on it. I’m afraid you’ll make my effort less, somehow. I nodded yes anyway.

  “What’s hard here, what tells a story, is that you never told your best friend how Delphine died, you never told your wife, you never told your sponsor. You never told them about the feeling of ravenShadow either. So you didn’t have any help. That’s what alcoholics do, they bear their burdens in secrecy, then they try to drown them.

  “Tonight you laid some things down. Now what you want to do, you want to use your Pipe and tell these things to Spirit and ask for help. That’s what you want to do, kola.”

  I looked at them all. The candles were guttering out, the light flickering, their faces fading. I looked up. Buffalo, help me finish what I started.

  “My Pipe. You know, that’s where I went off the red road. I was fourteen, Grandpa and Unchee said, ‘Go to school.’ Another year or two I would have gone on the mountain. Then I would have had something to guide me, and I would have been carrying my great-grandfather’s Pipe. That was where I was supposed to walk. But when I went off to school, I lost the path.”

  They looked at me, their faces barely lit now, darkness descending on all of us.

  “I abandoned the good red road,” I said, “and put my feet on the black road. That’s how I dived into ravenShadow.”

  Sitting under that big buffalo head, Plez says, “You know that word ravenShadow, I like it, I like the way you spell it. But I think you need a bigger understanding. Raven, he’s a trickster.”

  I said, “I know Raven and Crow, they’re essentially the same.”

  “Yeah, and Magpie is their close relative too. But that’s not what I mean. Raven, he’s real tricky. He is what he is, but he’s also something else, maybe even the opposite. I say he’s black but he’s white, too. That Spirit bird you’ve seen, Big Raven, he’s white on the tips of his wings, you said. That’s telling you something.

  “Raven is the creator, did you know that? We think of him as black, the bringer of death, but he’s also the one created all living things, made the crawlers, wingeds, swimmers, two-leggeds, four-leggeds, everything. But here’s the trick. He creates by guile. He brings things into being by guile. I don’t why, I guess ’cause it tickles his bird fancy. He creates by guile.

  “So if Raven was my animal guide, my Spirit bird, I’d know everything he brought was a little off from what it looked like, maybe a lot off. Hey, Spirit is everything. Made everything, is everything. And one of his favorite things is playful.”

  The Second Journey

  “O, friends, I need this day off!” Plez stretched his arms high into the air and then snuggled back down into his sleeping bag. It felt like we’d slept half the day, and Chup’s old pocket watch said we had. Sallee was sitting on her bag, tight in its storage sack. She looked perfectly dressed, hair braided, poised. I wondered how she always looked perfect with the rest of us were so disheveled. Emile was getting up, another one who always looked perfect. Chup was all spiky hair and sleepy eyes, about like me.

  “How about some breakfast?” said Emile. He was the smallest and always the hungriest.

  “I’ll bring nuked breakfast from the convenience store,” said Chup.

  The folks who’d gone home for Christmas night would stay home today too, be with their families. We’d agreed to hang around the school today, the five of us—agreed not to take ourselves mentally back into the world of highways, television, and coffee shops, but to stay mentally with the pilgrimage. Which meant we were not going out to eat at the Wild Horse Cafe.

  The riders were taking the day off because Big Foot’s people did. They gave their chief a rest; we would give our horses and our butts a rest. Or for Sallee and the other walkers, their legs. A day of not being in the dreadful cold. Though no day had been as bad as that first day, none had gotten above zero either. Was it Wakantanka teaching us the meaning of suffering, or Waziya, the mean giant of the north, tormenting us gleefully? Or Iya, the Evil One, acting malicious?

  “I’m worried about being bored all day,” I grumbled.

  “Here,” says Plez, “read this.” He hands me an old book, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1892–93, Part 2. Oh, the regular title is, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. 1896, it says on the inside—a real old book. By James Mooney.

  “Was Mooney white?” says I.

  Plez grins. “An Irishman.”

  “I read all the white-man books on this I want.”

  “What, you think Spirit is a racist, picks out people by their red skin, points them toward the truth?”

  I shrugged.

  “Those other books you read, learned a lot about the massacre. This one, teach you about the Dance. About the Dance, where you’re going tonight. See where I dog-eared a page? Skip everything else, start there.”

  “Okay, I’ll read today.”

  “I am gonna sleep,” says Plez, “then see if I can get Sallee, Chup, and Emile to play dominoes with me, fetch us all supper from somewhere.”

  “I’m going to sketch,” says Emile.

  “I’m going to sew,” says Sallee.

  “I’m gonna have one more day of sobriety,” says Chup.

  I flipped through the book. It had pictures of Ghost Shirts, a Thunderbird, and other ceremonial items of the Dance. Then I found the Ghost Dance songs, then the Sioux Ghost Dance songs. I saw the first one, “Opening Song,” was the song I heard on the mountain and in my journey yesterday. I spent the whole day lost in Ghost Dance songs.

  Come dark, we feasted. “Here’s to wild horses!” hollered Plez. He’d bought fifteen meals of double burgers and fries for the five of us at the cafe. I thought three apiece was ridiculous, but when Sallee and Emile left a burger each, Plez and I knocked them off. Don’t have many memories of feeling that satisfied. Must be that you use a lot of calories staying alive in below-zero cold, and we needed all the fat we could get, even hot oil for deep frying.

  Anyway, it brought my head out of my book. The songs had inspired me for another journey.

  Sallee modeled her sewing project, and it flabbergasted us. She had cut plain, white muslin into a Dance shirt, loose and flowing as a nightgown. And with fabric paint she had made red suns and crosses and moons and black ravens all over it. Her eyes gleamed. “I will wear it at the ceremony on Saturday. In honor of our people who danced.”

  “Under twenty pounds of warm clothes,” said Chup.

  While we picked at the leftover fries, Plez beat Chup at dominoes for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  “Enough to drive a man to drink,” said Chup with a grin.

  “Blue,” said Plez to me, “you ready to go journeying?”

  I’d been longing to go all day. “Yes.”

  “Let’s use the janitor’s room again. Buffalo power! Sallee, you’ll stay with him?”

  “Yes.”

  Stretched out under the buffalo head, I declared my intention aloud three times. “I wish to return to the Stronghold and see the rest of the Spirit Dance.”

  The drum banged at me. I hurried to the altar, and dived down the hole like it was easy.

  As I floated out of the tunnel this time, I recognized the Badlands, and Cuny Table. Raven hovered in the air. He did not carry me to the Dance on his back but guided me as I myself flew at his wing to the dance ground, where the rite was in progress.

  I looked around. Nothing seemed changed—same medicine people, same watchers, same dancers in the same circle. Some were on the ground inside the circle, making their journeys or being attended to. I accepted calmly the ease with which I had traveled to a time a hundred years past.

  I knew that the first song had just ended, and the refrain words, “The Father says so, the Father says so,” sang themselves in my head
. The dancers were at a pause.

  A lead voice sent up the second song. The dancers grasped hands and began the slow shuffle step to the left, sunwise, and immediately lifted their voices in the song. Like the first, it was voices alone, unaccompanied by drum, and I realized that I had heard no other Indian songs without drum. The words were,

  My son, let me grasp your hand,

  My son, let me grasp your hand,

  Says the father,

  Says the father.

  You will live,

  You will live,

  Says the father,

  Says the father.

  I bring you a Pipe,

  I bring you a Pipe,

  Says the father,

  Says the father.

  By this Pipe you will live,

  By this Pipe you will live,

  Says the father,

  Says the father.

  During this song another woman began to fall into a trance, an old woman with a kind-looking face. I stepped close behind and danced with her. First she showed difficulty stepping sideways. Then she began to tremble, and her movements got stiff and awkward. I danced behind her to my own eternal music. A medicine man hurried to her and began to wave an eagle feather in front of her eyes with one hand and a white scarf with the other, and looked at her piercingly. I looked away from the feather and scarf, up at the sky, and thanked Wakantanka for all. She staggered toward the center, I followed. The dancers closed the circle behind her. Her eyes glazed, she fell to the ground, and started making motions almost like convulsions. Everyone left her alone now, gave her room to make her journey to see her ancestors. I sat beside her, as a companion. I did not let myself look into her mind, or go on her journey.

  Incredible. Incredible how much I know of things that did not exist for me only two days ago.

  I made no effort to think, to use the thinking part of my mind to make ideas about her journey or mine. I did not let her shakes disturb me. Though I felt no convulsions, perhaps my body, back in the other world next to Sallee, looked the way this woman’s did. I simply sat there, thinking my spirit might make her feel less alone.