by Jock Soto
When I compared my mother’s early childhood and my own, I was struck by the strange circles of irony that can stack up in life. When my mother was a toddler, her father broke with tradition and taught his little daughter the Navajo hoop dance, a ritual that was traditionally performed only by men and boys. Grandpa Bud taught his little daughter a dance that was meant only for boys, and then years later Mom taught the dance to me—her little boy, who was in some ways more like a little girl. I was also struck by how my mother and I, though our lives had started on the same reservation and our experiences were only one slim generation apart, could have such different attitudes and responses to the world around us. I thought about an “encounter” with a snake I had had as a young boy one hot desert afternoon, when Kiko and I and my mother’s brother and youngest sister, Orlando and Rochelle (Shelley), who were about our age, had hiked to a distant mesa where we liked to go whooping and sliding down the dusty, dry gullies. It was not much of an encounter really—in fact, the three of them simply mentioned to me that they had seen a snake along the way—but that was enough for me. I ran all the way home, screaming and laughing at the same time, tears streaming down my face at the thought of my close call.
But my mother had real encounters with rattlesnakes in the desert, and she never ran home screaming. Quite the contrary: “My mother prepared us for such encounters by tying a small pouch of an herb that is used to keep snakes at bay to the bottom of our skirts,” she explains in one of her stories. Figuring they were protected from any possible harm, she and her sister Alice took turns jumping back and forth over a snake—“until we got tired or we tired the snake.” I thought about how my mother used to send me pouches of magic healing herbs whenever I was injured as a dancer, and how I would dutifully tuck them into my backpack and carry them around with me everywhere. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine there existed a pouch of any substance that could ever, under any circumstances, have induced me to casually jump back and forth over a rattlesnake. Was this because I was a misfit as a Navajo from the very beginning—just not made of genuine Native American–brave material? Or was it because the traditional Native ways had fallen off so much by the time I grew up? I wasn’t sure why, but reading my mother’s stories about her childhood awakened feelings of regret and remorse at having “lost” my original culture—I felt haunted by a phantom way of life that was my road not taken.
For years I had heard people talking about the laws of circular motion as applied to dance, but as I looked backward I seemed to be discovering the laws of circular motion as applied to family and life in general. I wanted to take all the new information I was gathering and break it down into beats, which is the language I understand best, to try to choreograph a kind of family hoop dance. But the more I tried to understand about my life and my family history the more I realized I didn’t know. To fill in some of the holes I began to read—very tentatively—about various Native American traditions, and almost immediately I came across two ideas that fascinated me and helped me make sense of my situation. The first was the Native American belief in a circular, or “living,” past, as opposed to the linear past of Western European tradition. For American Indians the past is never over; every “then” still exists in the “now”—it just exists on a different level. This made perfect sense to me as I thought about a dancer’s constant challenge to show, with his or her body, how moments in time are linked, connected, and interactive—“We exist in time,” as Mr. B had said. This concept of a “living past” was exciting to me because it implied that experience does not evaporate, so that if you miss the meaning of something the first time around, maybe you could go back and look again. In which case all those years that I had not spent with my family, as well as all the experiences I had enjoyed as a dancer with the NYCB, should all be—in some sense—still available for exploration.
The second Native American tradition that intrigued me was the intense physical and spiritual journey that Indian braves sometimes took, in search of their true self, called a vision quest. All my life I had been taught—by my mother and by my NYCB family—that I should try to move through life with truth and beauty and meaning. I realized that in order to do so now, given the recent changes in my life and the unknown topography of the future, I would need to embark on a vision quest through my living past, to try to see and feel all kinds of things I had not managed to see and feel before. If I could understand more about the steps I had or had not taken in my past, then maybe I would feel ready to choreograph my future.
The Sweet Confusion of a Multicultural Identity Crisis
THERE HAVE BEEN times when I have found my multistranded heritage as a half Navajo, half Puerto Rican, All-American, dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker confusing. But as the years have passed I have become more comfortable with my unusual blend of family legacy and cultural experiences. I sometimes use cooking as a secret language, and at a small dinner party I recently hosted I decided to serve four different desserts: Navajo Fry Bread, Puerto Rican flan, American apple pie, and New York cheesecake. My guests were surprised by the bounty, but none of them guessed that there was a message in my madness.
My grandma Rachel taught my mother this recipe for Navajo Fry Bread, and my mother in turn taught it to my brother, Kiko, and me. Kiko became quite the expert Navajobread chef (and still is), and as young boys the two of us ran our own Fry Bread concession at various rodeos and powwows all over the Southwest. I would love to eat Fry Bread every day—but then I would be as big as a house.
Grandma Rachel’s Navajo Fry Bread
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SERVES 12
4 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1½ cups lukewarm water
4 cups vegetable shortening or vegetable oil for frying
In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder. Add the lukewarm water slowly, kneading the mixture until it is soft but not sticky. Shape the dough into about 3-inch balls—you should have enough for 12 balls. On a floured surface, flatten the balls into patties and then roll them out to about ½-inch-thick circles.
On high (the surface of the oil should be shimmering but not smoking), heat the shortening in a large heavy skillet and fry the bread circles one at a time until nice and golden. Transfer the fried bread to a plate covered with a few paper towels. If you want to use the fried bread as a dessert, sprinkle the circles with powdered sugar and serve with honey. If you are going to eat the fried bread with chili or make a Navajo taco with meat sauce or beans with cheese, then salt the disks instead.
CHAPTER FOUR
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Papa’s Got a Brand-new Name
But the love of adventure was in Father’s blood.
—WILLIAM FREDERICK “BUFFALO BILL” CODY
When my mother was alive, my father and I rarely had a telephone conversation that lasted longer than thirty seconds. He would always say, “Okay, Hon, well, here’s Mom,” and pass the phone to her. When I was very young and first living alone in New York I would get offended by this, not just because Pop seemed to have nothing to say to me, but also because he had called me “Hon.” It was well-known in our family that before I was born my father had been hoping I would be a girl, and he always called my brother, Kiko, by the more manly nickname “Pop.” I knew my father disapproved of gay men—as a child, before I even understood what he meant, I had heard him make fun of homosexuals by calling them “faggots”—but no one had ever talked to me about the issue of my own sexuality. (I know now that it must have been pretty obvious to others from early on that I was gay, even if not to me.) As I got older and more aware, I couldn’t help resenting the disapproval, or at least the attitude, in the nickname my father had chosen for me. The desire to keep our telephone exchanges brief became mutual.
In the weeks immediately following Mom’s death, however, my father and I began to call each other quite regularly, sometimes every day, and for the first time in our li
ves we even began to have some long talks. I was eager to connect with him on a new level and was full of questions as I explored my “living past,” trying to fill in the blanks of my own and my parents’ histories. He was lonely and at loose ends, traveling around the Southwest in his RV, trying to outrun the sadness that settled around him whenever he stopped moving. I never knew where he would be calling from, and in one of our late-night exchanges Pop announced that he had decided to go to Puerto Rico to visit his parents—my ninety-six-year-old grandmother and ninety-two-year-old grandfather—in their dilapidated hillside shack in a rural area of Puerto Rico. He said he needed to see them because there was a matter he had to put to rest. I had a hunch I knew what he was talking about, and it made me nervous.
My father has always believed that his father is not his biological father. For years he has told my brother and me that the tall green-eyed neighbor who lived next door to his parents looked like him—and that the big-eared, short person that his mother lives with, the supposed father whom he calls Don Lolo, did not. When I was growing up and during all my years dancing I never paid much attention to my father when he muttered these suspicions. But in my newly tender state as the motherless son of a widowed father, I found myself thinking about what it must have been like for Pop to carry such a painful doubt around inside him all his life. My father is a tall and handsome man, six foot one with a strong build and greenish eyes and thick white hair that was blond when he was younger. It is difficult to imagine anyone pushing him around, but he has told me and Kiko that Don Lolo used to beat him regularly when he was a little boy—sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a broomstick.
“He had a thick belt. He was a carpenter,” Pop confirms when I ask him about this in one of our conversations. “Mom used to get in between Lolo and me when he started using his belt—she would be taking the shots for me.” Finally a day came when my father was big enough and mad enough to grab the broomstick away from Don Lolo and threaten him back. “I was fourteen,” he says, “but I was almost six feet tall already. Lolo was still five foot two.” By that time Pop and his family had moved from Utuado, the small town in Puerto Rico where he was born and spent his first eight years, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Already he had established a pattern of constant rambling.
“My dad hated my guts. I’d go anywhere not to be there,” Pop says. At age fifteen my father lied and said he was seventeen so that he could join the air force for a three-year stint that kept him moving all over the United States in a nice agitated pattern. When his stint with the air force was over he wandered back to Puerto Rico for a while, where he took up with a woman named Lucy who was fifteen years his senior and the bartender at a local bar.
“We got sexually involved,” no-nonsense Pop explains to me in his very faint Puerto Rican accent. I can almost hear him shrugging. “She gave me food and drink. I didn’t have any money. It was very convenient.” Lucy had two children from a previous marriage, and when she got pregnant they got married and moved with their baby—my half brother Mac Joe—from Puerto Rico to Philadelphia. That was in 1961. My father was twenty-two, and my mother, who was seventeen and just starting her nursing career, was also living in Philadelphia.
When Pop tells the story of how he and my mother started dating, despite the fact that he was married and had a young son, I hear him shrug again. “Puerto Rican men go out on their wives all the time. Same as the Cubans, same as the Mexicans,” he explains. “They always have another woman. You know I cheated on your mother. A lot.” Pop has taken to blurting out this last confession frequently ever since Mom has died—I don’t know why—and hearing it always gives me a queasy feeling. As I get to know him better I am learning that my father has a roomy soul that can accommodate some very strange contradictions. Moments after declaring his numerous infidelities, he returns to the saga of how he and my mother met at a Puerto Rican salsa club in Philadelphia that he used to visit every Saturday when he took the night “off” from his wife, Lucy. Pop gets all sentimental and teary.
Mom was sitting in the corner with another girl from the nursing school when my father spotted her. “She was sitting there, her glasses were like Coke-bottle bottoms, they were so thick,” Pop says. “I went over and asked her to dance, and she got up and danced with me. And I went away, but then I came back and we danced again and again, until she had to go home. I knew right away this was supposed to happen.”
My mother was allowed to leave the nursing school only on Saturdays, provided her grades were good, so every Saturday for the next four weeks my father picked her up in his ’49 Ford to take her out for the night. “She used to sit right next to the door,” Pop says. “I told her, ‘You know what? If I had a seat on the outside, you’d be out there.’ Little by little I says, ‘Come over here, sit next to me.’ And little by little she did. Her grades were excellent—because she wanted to go out.”
On the fourth Saturday my father announced to my mother that he was feeling restless, that he was going to leave Philadelphia and head out to California. “Do you want to come?” he asked her. Mom asked him for a week to think about it, and when he called the following Saturday she agreed to go. She had never had sex—in fact she didn’t even know what sex was—and she headed off across the country with an older, married man she’d met only weeks before. “She quit school for me,” Pop says, with a tremble in his voice. “She had a scholarship and everything. You know, love is funny—she quit school, and I just picked up and left my wife and baby.”
My father may have had some trouble remembering he was married from time to time, but he has always had a beartrap memory when it comes to anything about cars—which is why he can tell me that a friend who had a 1957 Pontiac four-door drove him and Mom across the country. They had a ham in a can and some bread and crackers—and not much else. Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon. When they got to Sacramento, they hung out in the park and ate at soup kitchens and stayed in flop joints where the rate was fifty cents per night per person. Pop would go up to the clerk to rent a room for one, and Mom would G.I. Joe–crawl past the desk so the clerk wouldn’t see her. They had sex for the first time there in California, Pop tells me in one of his “overshare” moments. “Poor thing,” my father says, shaking his head. “She was very, very naive.” Not long after this they got the idea to stuff a pillow under Mom’s shirt to make her look pregnant—as if this brilliant ruse was possible only now that they were having sex—and convinced a sympathetic banker to loan them three hundred dollars. “We ate for three days,” remembers Pop.
When they had run through the last of their money, Mom called home and the two of them made their way to my grandparents’ farm on the reservation. “I was not accepted,” my father says bluntly. “I was not Navajo. They didn’t like me. And I didn’t want to stay.” My father left the reservation and returned to Philadelphia by himself, but only two weeks later he came back to get my mother. This time the two of them left the reservation together, and by the time they returned, Mom was pregnant with my older brother, Kiko. When they got to my grandparents’ home my grandpa Bud was waiting for them at the gate with a loaded shotgun in his hand. And it was not long after that my father got divorced from Lucy and he and my mother married. They settled into my grandparents’ hogan on the reservation and on August 24, 1963, Kiko—whose full name is McKee Duane Soto—was born. A year and a half later, on April 16, 1965, I arrived.
Clearly my parents’ first encounters and subsequent romance do not qualify as classic fairytale—or even Hollywood “meet-cute” material. In fact, I have never really let myself focus on several troubling details before—such as my mother’s extreme innocence when she met my father and the fact that she scrapped her education to run off with a married man, and the existence of my half brother Mac Joe, who would have been just a baby when my father walked out on him and his mother. My father’s casual attitude toward the marriage contract is another touchy issue that triggers painful memories that I have been reluctant to address
over the years.
But despite all these less than perfect wrinkles, there is much about my humble family’s humble beginnings that impresses me. Both of my parents went through some pretty rough times in their early years—much rougher, in fact, than anything I have had to endure. Both of them not only survived but in the process evolved into kind, decent, generous people. My father was brutally beaten as a child, but he grew beyond the awful example he was given. Pop never raised a hand against Kiko or me when we were young, and he always did his best to provide us with everything he could. My mother was practically a child herself when she started her family, and yet she was the most embracing, wise, and self-sacrificing mother anyone could ever want. She held us to high standards, but she was always there to help us meet them.
I was sitting at home alone, contemplating these stories about my family, one night when my father called and gave the family narrative a new twist. He was in Puerto Rico, visiting my grandparents, and he had had a very exciting day, he announced. After all these years he had finally extracted the truth from his mother, my grandma Margo. She had confirmed that Don Lolo was not his real father.