by Tommy Orange
“Just tell them where you’re from, what’s your tribe, and your role here,” Blue says.
“Okay, so I grew up here in Oakland, and I’m, um, I’m Cheyenne, well I’m not enrolled yet, but, like, I will be, with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, my dad told me we’re Cheyenne and not Arapaho, and, sorry, I’m gonna be interning for the next few months leading up to the powwow, I’m here to help with the powwow,” Edwin says.
“We’re just waiting on one more,” Blue is saying when another guy walks into the meeting. “Speak of the devil,” Blue says.
He’s a young guy in a baseball cap with an indistinct tribal pattern on it. If he didn’t have that hat, Calvin doesn’t know if he’d have guessed he’s Native.
“Everyone, this is Dene Oxendene. Dene Oxendene, this is the powwow committee. Dene’s gonna set up a storytelling booth kinda like StoryCorps. Have y’all heard of StoryCorps?”
They all murmur various noncommittal answers.
“Dene,” Blue says, “why don’t you go ahead and say a few things about yourself before we start.”
Dene starts to say something about storytelling, some real heady shit, so Calvin tunes out. He doesn’t know what he’s gonna say when it comes around to him. He’d been put in charge of finding younger vendors, to support young Native artists and entrepreneurs. But he hadn’t done shit.
“Calvin?” he hears Blue say.
Dene Oxendene
DENE CONVINCED BLUE to let Calvin do his interview for the storytelling project during work hours. Calvin keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and pulling at his hat by the bill. Dene thinks Calvin is nervous, but then Dene is nervous, he is always nervous, so maybe it’s projection. But projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection. He is regularly subject to solipsism’s recursive, drowning affect.
He set up the camera and mic in Blue’s office beforehand. Blue’s on her lunch hour. Calvin is sitting still now, staring at Dene mess with the recording equipment. Dene figures out what was wrong and hits Record on the camera and on the recording device, then adjusts the mic one last time. Dene learned early on to record everything before and after, as those moments can sometimes be even better than when the interviewee knows they’re being recorded.
“Sorry, I thought we were good to go before you came in,” Dene says, and sits down to the right of the camera.
“It’s cool,” Calvin says. “What is this again?”
“You’re gonna say your name and tribe. Talk about the place or places you’ve lived in Oakland, and then if you can think of a story to tell, like something that’s happened to you in Oakland that might, like, give a picture of what it’s been like for you specifically, growing up in Oakland, as a Native person, what it’s been like.”
“My dad never talked about being Native and shit to the point that we don’t even know what tribe we are on his side. Our mom has Native blood on her Mexican side too, but she doesn’t know too much about that either. Yeah and my dad wasn’t home hardly ever, then one day he was really gone. He left us. So I don’t know, I feel bad sometimes even saying I’m Native. Mostly I just feel like I’m from Oakland.”
“Oh,” Dene says.
“I got robbed in the parking lot about to go to a powwow at Laney College. It’s not really a good story, I just got fucking robbed in a parking lot and then I left. I never made it to the powwow. So this one coming up will be my first one.”
Dene isn’t sure how to help him get to a story, and he doesn’t want to force it. He’s glad he’s already been recording. Sometimes not having a story is the story.
“It’s like having him as a dad and not knowing, and how he fucked us up as a dad, I don’t wanna come off like I think that’s what being Native means. I know there’s a lot of Natives living in Oakland and in the Bay Area with similar stories. But it’s like we can’t talk about it because it’s not really a Native story, but then it is at the same time. It’s fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
“When are you gonna start recording for me to say, like, whatever I’m gonna try to say?”
“Oh, I’ve already been recording.”
“What?”
“Sorry, I should’ve told you.”
“Does that mean you’re gonna use anything I already said?”
“Can I?”
“I mean, I guess. Is this shit, like, your job?”
“Kind of. I don’t have another job. But I’m trying to pay all the participants out of the grant money I got from the city of Oakland. I think I’ll make enough to get by,” Dene says. And then there’s a lull, a silence neither one of them knows how to recover from. Dene clears his throat.
“How’d you end up working here?” Dene says.
“My sister. She’s friends with Blue.”
“So you don’t feel, like, any kind of Native pride or whatever?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah.”
“I just don’t feel right trying to say something that doesn’t feel true.”
“That’s what I’m trying to get out of this whole thing. All put together, all our stories. Because all we got right now are reservation stories, and shitty versions from outdated history textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.”
“I just don’t think it’s right for me to claim being Native if I don’t know anything about it.”
“So you think being Native is about knowing something?”
“No, but it’s about a culture, and a history.”
“My dad wasn’t around either. I don’t even know who he is. My mom’s Native too, though, and she taught me what she could when she wasn’t too busy working or just not in the mood. The way she said it, our ancestors all fought to stay alive, so some parts of their blood went together with another Nation’s blood and they made children, so forget them, forget them even as they live on in us?”
“Man, I feel you. But then again I don’t know. I just don’t know about this blood shit.”
Jacquie Red Feather
JACQUIE AND HARVEY RIDE in Harvey’s Ford pickup through a moon-purple desert on that stretch between Phoenix and Blythe on I-10. The drive so far has been full of long silences Jacquie maintains by ignoring Harvey’s questions. Harvey is not the kind of man comfortable with silence. He’s a powwow emcee. It’s his job to keep his mouth running. But Jacquie is used to silence. She has no problem with it. She’d actually made Harvey promise she wouldn’t have to talk. That didn’t mean Harvey wouldn’t.
“You know, one time I got stuck out here in the desert,” Harvey says, keeping his eyes fixed on the road in front of them. “I’d been out drinking with some friends, and we wanted to go for a drive. A night like this would have been perfect. It’s not even dark. That full moon on the sand like that?” Harvey says, and looks over at Jacquie, then rolls down his window and sticks a hand out to feel the air.
“Smoke?” Jacquie says.
Harvey pulls out a smoke for himself and makes a vague grunting sound Jacquie has heard other Indian men use before and knows means yes. “I used to drink with these twins, Navajo guys. One of the twins didn’t want the truck to smell like smoke, it was his girlfriend’s truck, so we pulled over on the side of the highway. We’d brought a handle of tequila along. We drank too much of that, talked nonsense for a couple hours, then decided we needed to distance ourselves from the vehicle. We stumbled out into the desert, ended up getting so far out we couldn’t see the truck,” Harvey says.
Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’d want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it
allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have. Take Harvey here. Telling this terrible story like it’s captivating. There are so many people she comes across who seem born with confidence and self-esteem. Jacquie can’t remember a day going by when at some point she hadn’t wished she could burn her life down. Today actually, she hadn’t had that thought today. That was something. That was not nothing.
“And then even though I can’t remember having passed out on the desert floor,” Harvey says, “I woke up and the twins were gone. The moon hadn’t moved too far, so not too much time had passed, but they were gone, so I walked toward where I thought we’d parked. It was all of a sudden real cold, like I’d never felt before. Like it’s cold when you’re near the ocean, like it’s cold in San Francisco, that moist cold that gets to the bone.”
“It wasn’t cold before you passed out?” Jacquie says.
“This is where it gets weird. I must have been walking for twenty minutes or so, the wrong way of course, farther into the desert, that’s when I saw them.”
“The twins?” Jacquie says, and rolls up her window. Harvey does the same.
“No, not the twins,” he says. “I know this is gonna sound crazy, but it was two very tall, very white guys with white hair, but they weren’t old, and they weren’t so tall that it was freakish, just maybe like a foot and a half taller than me.”
“This is the part where you tell me you woke up to the twins lying on top of you or something,” Jacquie says.
“I thought maybe the twins had slipped me something. I knew they were Native American Church guys, but I’d done peyote before and this was not that. I got maybe ten or so feet away from them and stopped. Their eyes were big. Not in that alien way, just noticeably big,” Harvey says.
“Bullshit,” Jacquie says. “This story goes: Harvey got drunk in the desert and had a weird dream, the end.”
“I’m not joking. These two tall white guys with white hair and big eyes, hunch-shouldered, just staring off, not even at me. I got the hell out of there. And if that was a dream, then so is this, because I never woke up from it.”
“You act like when you’re drinking your memory is, what, reliable?”
“True enough, but get this, when the internet came out, or when I started using it I guess is a better way to put it, I looked up tall white guys in the desert in Arizona, and it’s a thing. They’re called the Tall Whites. Aliens. No joke. You can look it up,” Harvey says.
Jacquie’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She gets it out knowing Harvey will think it’s to look up these Tall Whites. It’s an unusually long text message from Opal.
I already assumed you would have told me if you found spider legs in your leg, either when we were younger or when I told you about Orvil’s, but that assumption doesn’t make sense because I found spider legs in my leg right before everything happened with Ronald. And I never told you I found those legs, I mean until right now. I need to know if it happened to you. I feel like it has something to do with Mom.
“I read one website that said the Tall Whites are controlling America now, d’you see that?” Harvey says. And Jacquie feels sad for Harvey. And for Opal. And about these spider legs. If she’d ever found spider legs in her leg, she probably would have ended it right there and then. She suddenly feels so overwhelmed by all of it that she gets tired. This sometimes happens to Jacquie, and she feels grateful when it does, because most of the time her thoughts keep her up.
“I’m gonna get some sleep,” Jacquie says.
“Oh. Okay,” Harvey says.
Jacquie leans her head against the window. She watches the white highway line stream and waver. She watches the lines of telephone wires rise and fall in waves. Her thoughts wander, loosen, reach out aimlessly. She thinks about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bites into something too cold or hot. She thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the dentist. She wonders about her mom’s teeth. She thinks about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating. She looks at her head leaned against her head’s dark reflection in the window. She blinks an erratic pattern of blinks, which ends with her eyes closed. She falls asleep to the low drone of the road and the engine’s steady hum.
PART III
Return
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield
EVERY TIME she gets into her mail truck Opal does the same thing. She looks into the rearview and finds her gaze looking back at her through the years. She doesn’t like to think of the number of years she’s been working as a mail carrier for the USPS. Not that she doesn’t like the work. It’s that it’s hard to see the years on her face, the lines and wrinkles that surround her eyes, branch out like cracks in the concrete. But even though she hates to see her face, she’s never been able to stop the habit of looking at it when she finds a mirror there in front of her, where she catches one of the only versions of her face she’ll ever see—on top of glass.
* * *
—
Opal thinks as she drives of the first time she took the Red Feather boys in for a weekend at the beginning of the adoption process. They were at a Mervyn’s in Alameda for new clothes. Opal looked at Orvil in the mirror, at an outfit she’d picked out for him.
“You like it?” she said.
“What about them?” Orvil said, pointing at himself and Opal’s reflection in the mirror. “How do we know it’s not one of them doing it and not us copying?”
“Because look, I’m deciding to wave my hand in front of it right now,” Opal said, and waved. It was a three-panel mirror outside the dressing room. Loother and Lony were hiding inside a clothes rack nearby.
“She could have waved first, then you couldn’t help but copy. But look at this,” he said, and then he broke out into a wild dance. Arms flailing, he jumped and spun. It looked to Opal like he was powwow dancing. But he couldn’t have been. He was just trying to act crazy in front of the mirror to prove no one else was in control but him, the Orvil on this side of the mirror.
* * *
—
Opal is on her route. Same old same old one. But she’s paying attention to where she steps. Opal doesn’t step on cracks when she walks. She walks carefully because she’s always had the sense that there are holes everywhere, cracks you can slip between—the world, after all, is porous. She lives by a superstition she would never admit to. It’s a secret she holds so tight to her chest she never notices it. She lives by it, like breathing. Opal drops mail in slots and in boxes trying to remember which spoon she’d eaten with earlier. She has lucky and unlucky spoons. In order for the lucky ones to work, you have to keep the unlucky ones with them, and you can’t look to see what you’re getting when you pull one out of the drawer. Her luckiest spoon is one with a floral pattern that runs up the handle to the neck.
She knocks on wood to cancel out something she’s said she wants or doesn’t want to happen, or even if she just thinks it, she’ll find wood and knock on it twice. Opal likes numbers. Numbers are consistent. You can count on them. But for Opal, certain numbers are good and others are bad. Even numbers are generally better than odd ones, and numbers that have some kind of mathematical relationship are good too. She reduces addresses to a single number by adding them together, then judges the neighbors based on their reduced number. Numbers don’t lie. Four and eight are her favorites. Three and six are no good. She delivers mail on the odd side first, always having believed it’s best to get the bad out of the way before getting to the good.
Bad luck or just bad shit happening to you in life can make you secretly superstitious, can make you want to take some control or take back some sense of control. Opal buys scratchers and lottery tickets wh
en the jackpot gets high enough. Her superstition is one she would never call superstition for fear it would lose its power.
Opal is done with the odd side of the street. When she crosses, a car stops for her—the woman inside impatiently waves Opal across like she’s doing all of humanity a favor. Opal wants to lift her arm, lift a single finger as she crosses, but instead she slow jogs across in answer to the woman’s impatience and feigned generosity. Opal hates herself for the jog. For the smile that came to her face before she could stop it, turn it upside down, straighten it out before it was too late.
Opal is full of regrets, but not about things she’s done. That damn island, her mom, Ronald, and then the shuffling, stifling rooms and faces in foster care, in group homes after that. She regrets that they happened. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t cause them to happen. She figures she must deserve it in some way. But she couldn’t figure it out. So she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her—rise up to her eyes. Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably. Like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.
Opal takes out her earphones when she hears a sound up above somewhere. A nasty buzz slicing through the air. She looks up and sees a drone, then looks around to see who might be flying it. When she doesn’t see anyone, she puts her earphones back in. She’s listening to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” It’s her least-favorite Otis Redding song because it gets played too much. She shuffles her music and it lands on Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” This song gives her that strange mix of sad and happy. Plus it’s upbeat. That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.