by Bill Adler
What do I look like? The features of my face are big: a beaked nose, lips that are too sensitive, and sand-brown eyes and dark eyebrows that lift one at a time like the wings of a bird, a low forehead that looks higher because of receding brown hair, an Adam’s apple like a broken bone, two ears that were normal before wrestling flattened one of them. Unlike my grandfather’s, my skin is not brown throughout the seasons but sallow in the winter months, though it tans dark and quickly when the sun’s warmth returns. It is, as you might gather, a face I did not used to love. Today I look at it in the mirror and say, Bruchac, you’re ugly and I like you. The face nods back at me and we laugh together.
The rest of me? At forty-two I still stand 6’ 2” tall and weigh the 195 pounds I weighed when I was a heavyweight wrestler at Cornell University. My arms and hands are strong, as strong as those of anyone I’ve met, though my two sons—Jim who is sixteen and 6’ 4”, and Jesse who is thirteen and close to 6’—smile when I say that. When they were little their games included “Knock Papa Down.” Each year they’ve found it a little easier to do. My physical strength, in part, is from my grandfather, who was never beaten in a fight. Like his, the fingers of my hands are short and thick. I hold them out and see the bulges in the knuckles, the way both my index fingers are skewed slightly and cannot completely straighten. A legacy of ten years of studying martial arts.
Do we make ourselves into what we become or is it built into our genes, into the fate spun for us by whatever shapes events? I was a small child, often alone and often bullied. I was different—raised by old people who babied me, bookish, writing poetry in grade school, talking about animals as if they were people. My grandfather joked when he called me a “mongrel,” a mixture of English and Slovak and “French,” but others said such things without joking. When I was seven I decided I would grow up to be so big and strong that no one would ever beat me up again. It took me nine years to do it. (“Be careful what you really want,” a Tai Chi master told me. “If you really want it, you’ll get it.”) My junior year in high school I was still the strange kid who dressed in weird clothes, had no social graces, was picked on by the other boys, scored the highest grades in English and biology and almost failed Latin and algebra. That winter of my junior year my grandmother died. My grandfather and I were left alone in the old house. That summer I grew six inches in height. In my senior year, though clothing and social graces showed little evolution, I became a championship wrestler, won a Regents’ scholarship, and was accepted by Cornell University to study wildlife conservation.
How can I now, in only a few pages, cover the next twenty-five years? How can I adequately describe five years at Cornell and the year at Syracuse University, where I held a creative writing fellowship? At Syracuse, told by an expatriate South African writing instructor that my prose was too poetic, I smashed my typewriter in frustration and burned everything I had written. (Carol, my wife of a year, looked out the window of our small rented student housing bungalow and wondered what kind of bear she had married.) What about the Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights movement, the march on Washington and that long walk in Mississippi where James Meredith and Martin Luther King, Stokeley Carmichael and Marlon Brando took water from canteens I lugged up and down the line while state troopers with shiny insect eyes took our photographs with Polaroid cameras, waiting for the night when their eyes would look out from under white Klan hoods? And what about three years spent in Ghana, West Africa, where I taught in a school by the Gulf of Guinea? The Thunder Cult’s drum rumbled at night in the next compound and a mad old man asked me to join him in a visit to Mammy Water under the waves of the man-eating sea. It was in Ghana that our son James raised his arms to the brightness in the night sky and spoke his first word, Moon! (I fictionalized my Africa experience in a novel completed in the 1980s. In it a half-breed American teacher discovers himself and his own country through life in a foreign culture—which he finds less foreign than his white expatriate colleagues. It is called No Telephone to Heaven.) Then came ten years of teaching in American prisons, and a decade and a half of editing and publishing multicultural writing: my introduction to How to Start and Sustain a Literary Magazine (Provision House Press, 1980) is a brief autobiography of my life as an editor. And all of that was made richer and more complicated by twenty years of marriage and sixteen years of learning from two sons—whose accomplishments bring me more pride than anything I’ve ever done. There isn’t space enough here for more than the mention of all those things.
I can only go onward by going back to where my memories begin. I was not a black belt in pentjak-silat then, not a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, a Rockefeller Fellow, a published poet, a “well-known Native American writer,” as articles about me usually begin. (Thoreau might have written his famous “simplify, simplify” for the average newspaper journalist. How easily a few ill-chosen words can be used to encapsulate an entire human life!) Then I was only a child, with few experiences and fewer scars. All that I had in common with the person I am now is a confused heritage and the house I lived in then and still live in today. It is an old house with grey shingles, built by my grandfather on the foundation of a house owned by his wife’s parents before it was burned down in a feud. It sits on Splinterville Hill, named for the ashwood baskets once made here. Just to the north of us, the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York begin. I look out the window of the bedroom where Carol and I sleep and see, below the blue spruce trees my grandfather planted, the yard where I used to play.
How many memories of my childhood are my own and not those someone else had of me and told me about when I was older? I know that the image of a fence taller than my hands can reach is my own. I can still feel the chill, slightly rusted surface of its wire mesh against my face, my tongue almost freezing to its surface as I taste it on a day when the frost has glazed its red weave to the shimmer of a mirror. Is that my first memory or does the litter of puppies in Truman Middlebrooks’ barn come before it? A warm milk smell of small animals, the sharpness of their teeth, the gentle insistence of their mother’s muzzle nudged between me and them, pushing me away to roll on my back in the straw while someone’s adult voice laughs. I know I am not being laughed at, so it is my grandfather’s laughter that I hear. I never heard my father or my mother laugh when I was a child, and somehow life seemed too serious to my grandmother for her to indulge in much humor, even though she won her battle to keep me from my parents—that battle which I cannot remember but which has been replayed for me from the reluctant memories of those older than I. My grandfather, though, was often joking, often teasing. When he was serious it was a seriousness that no one laughed at.
The memory of me climbing the ladder, unafraid and right behind the old man, all the way to the roof forty feet up when I was only two, was my grandfather’s. But it was recited about me so often that it became inseparably associated with my thoughts of my childhood. I know that I always dreamed of flight. I still do fly in my dreams. Its secret is simple—just lift your legs when you’re falling and you’ll never touch the ground until you’re ready. To this day I don’t understand why I can’t continue to do it in the seconds after I wake from such dreams. But I have faith that eventually I will solve that problem one way or another and float away, with my body or without it. And though I’ve had some spectacular falls—at least one of which I should never have survived—I still love high places, cliffs and trees and resounding waterfalls. I inherited that fearlessness about high places and dying from my grandfather, just as I inherited certain stories. Here is one of them which is as much a part of my own fabric as if I had been there when that day was being woven:
I only went to school until I was in 3rd grade.
What happened then, Grampa?
I jumped out the window of the school and never came back.
Why?
I got in a fight with a boy who called me an Indian.
My grandparents raised me. I grew up only a quarter of a mile away from my mother an
d father’s home on what we always called “The Farm,” a plot of ninety acres with several outbuildings, which had been the home of my grandparents when they were first married. My grandfather gave The Farm to them after they’d been married a few years and were still living with my grandparents. The room where I type this was my parents’ room when I was a baby. They moved to The Farm with my younger sister, and I stayed “for a while” with my grandparents. I sat with my grandfather in the wooden chairs he had made and painted blue and placed in front of his general store: Bowman’s Store. I was wearing shorts and my toes couldn’t touch the concrete as I dangled them down, using a stick to keep my balance as I stayed in the chair. There was a shadow in front of me. My parents. My grandmother took my hand and led me back into the house. “Get to your room, Sonny.”
There my memory is replaced by that of my other grandmother, the Slovak one who lived three miles away up the South Greenfield road.
Your fader, he was ready to leave your mother. Dere vere so many tears, such crying about you. Ah. Den your fader and mother they come and say they vill take you back, now. Dat is ven your grandfather Bowman, he goes out of the room. Ven he come back it is vith the shotgun. And he hold it to his head and say take him you vill never see me alive again.
Though I did not hear that story until after I was married, I knew that I was important to my grandfather. I realize now I must have been, in part, a replacement for my mother’s older brother, who died at birth. I was always close to my grandfather. He delighted in telling how I was his shadow, how I carried my stick just like a spear and followed him everywhere. But, close as I was, he would never speak of the Indian blood which showed so strongly in him. I have a tape recording we made soon after we returned to live with him, back from three years in West Africa to the old house on Splinterville Hill with our new son, his great-grandchild, whose life would start the healing of wounds I had caused by simply being wanted.
Are you Indian, Grampa?
No.
Then why is your skin so dark?
Cause I’m French. Us French is always dark.
Yet I was conscious of the difference, of the way people looked at me when I was with my grandfather. When I was a freshman at Cornell University he came to visit, bringing two of my friends from high school, David Phillips and Tom Furlong. They spent two nights in the dorm, all of them sleeping in my room. My grandfather told everyone that David was my younger brother. They looked at my grandfather and then, more slowly, at me. David was black. When they asked me if it was true, I said, “What do you think?” When the fraternity rushing week came later that semester, I was on more than one “black list.”
O my God, Joe, that’s Grampa sitting there by the coffin!
I looked at the old man sitting in the front row in Burke’s Funeral Home, right next to my grandfather’s casket, and my own heart clenched its fist. Then the man looked at us. His face was younger and slightly less dark than that of his last surviving older brother. It was Jack Bowman. Though he lived in Lake George, the home of a more or less underground community of Abenaki Indian people even today, we had never met him before. In the year we had to get to know Jack before his own heart found a weak aorta less strong than his love for the land and his wife of fifty years, we heard more stories about my grandfather and his family. We also heard some of the denials of Indian ancestry, even though Jack offered no more of an explanation than his brother had for my grandfather’s cutting himself off from his own side of the family after he married my grandmother, a woman of high education with degrees from Skidmore and Albany Law School, whose marriage to a semiil-literate and dark-skinned hired man of her father’s sparked scandalized comment in Greenfield and Saratoga. In the face of those denials I felt, at times, like one who looks into a mirror and sees a blur over part of his own face. No matter how he shifts, changes the light, cleans the glass, that area which cannot be clearly seen remains. And its very uncertainty becomes more important than that which is clear and defined in his vision.
After Jack’s death his wife Katherine fessed up. Yes, she said, Jack and Jesse were Indian. Everyone knew the Bowmans were Indian. She put it into writing and signed her name. It is the closest thing to a tribal registration that I will ever have. But it is enough, for I want to claim no land, no allotments, only part of myself.
There are many people who could claim and learn from their Indian ancestry, but because of the fear their parents and grandparents knew, because of past and present prejudice against Indian people, that part of their heritage is clouded or denied. Had I been raised on other soil or by other people, my Indian ancestry might have been less important, less shaping. But I was not raised in Czechoslovakia or England. I was raised in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains near a town whose spring waters were regarded as sacred and healing by the Iro-quois and Abenaki alike. This is my dreaming place. Only my death will separate it from my flesh.
I’ve avoided calling myself “Indian” most of my life, even when I have felt that identification most strongly, even when people have called me an “Indian.” Unlike my grandfather, I have never seen that name as an insult, but there is another term I like to use. I heard it first in Lakota and it refers to a person of mixed blood, a metis. In English it becomes “Translator’s Son.” It is not an insult, like half-breed. It means that you are able to understand the language of both sides, to help them understand each other.
In my late teens I began to meet other Indian people and learn from them. It seemed a natural thing to do and I found that there was often something familiar about them. In part it was a physical thing—just as when I opened Frederick John Pratson’s book Land of Four Directions and saw that the Passamaquoddy man on Chapter 2 was an absolute double of photographs of Jesse Bowman. It was not just looks, though. It was a walk and a way of talking, a way of seeing and an easy relationship to land and the natural world and animals. Wasn’t no man, Jack Bowman said, ever better with animals than Jess. Why he could make a horse do most anything. I saw, too, the way children were treated with great tolerance and gentleness and realized that that, too, was true of my grandfather. He’d learned that from his father, he said.
Whenever I done something wrong, my father would never hit me. He never would hit a child. He said it jes wasn’t right. But he would just talk to me. Sometimes I wisht he’d just of hit me. I hated it when he had to talk to me.
The process of such learning and sharing deserves more space than I can give it now. It involves many hours of sitting around kitchen tables and hearing stories others were too busy to listen to, and even more hours of helping out when help was needed. It comes from travels to places such as the Abenaki community of Swanton, Vermont, and the still-beating heart of the Iroquois League, Onondaga, and from realizing—as Simon Ortiz puts it so simply and so well—that “Indians are everywhere.” If you are ready to listen, you’ll meet someone who is ready to talk.
This short sketch of my early years, which I shall end here, represents only the beginning of a long apprenticeship I’ve been serving (forever, it seems). I seem to have an unending capacity for making mistakes just as my teachers seem to have an unerring ability to turn my mistakes into lessons. But the patience, the listening that has made it possible for me to learn more than I ever dreamed as a boy, is also the lesson I’ve begun to learn.
The most widely anthologized of my poems describes one lesson I was taught in the way most good lessons come to you—when you least expect them. Let it represent that part of my life which has come from continual contact with Native American people over more than two decades. Because of that contact my own sons have grown up taking such things as sweat lodges and powwows and pride in Indian ancestry for granted. The small amount that I have learned I’ve tried, when it is right to do so, to share with others.
BIRDFOOT’S GRAMPA
The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our lights and leaping,
live drops of rain.
The rain was falling,
a mist about his white hair
and I kept saying
you can’t save them all
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.
But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go to
too
(from Entering Onondaga,
Cold Mountain Press, 1978)
TURBULENT CHILDHOOD
Lee Maracle
Native American women have always been at the forefront of indigenous struggles against colonialism and genocide. Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel exemplifies the ongoing tradition of Native American women’s resistance and invalidates the stereotype of the submissive Indian woman. It is a rough, sometimes humorous, and often brutal tale of one Metis woman’s lifelong battle against oppression.
This section of Maracle’s autobiography brings to life a childhood fraught with poverty, abuse, and racism—a childhood where good times are few and far between. Against this backdrop, a young Bobbi Lee begins to question the poverty and injustice that is her life and learns to fight back in whatever ways she can.