Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  We lived first in withdrawn canyons in the Santa Lucias, miles up dirt roads into the creases of the Coast Range where we kids squirmed through buck brush and plotted long hunts to the ocean. But there were no trails and the manzanita would turn us back with what we thought must be the scent of the sea in our nostrils. Rattlesnakes, bears and mountain lions lived back there. And stories of mythic wild boars drifted down from ranches to the north. In the spring the hills would shine with new grass and the dry creeks would run for a few brief weeks. We’d hike across a ridge to ride wild horses belonging to a man who never knew that the kids rode them. In summer the grasses burned brown and the clumps of live oaks on the hillsides formed dark places in the distance.

  Later we lived down in the valley on the caving banks of the river. At six and eight years we had hunted with slingshots in the mountains, but at ten and twelve we owned rifles, .22s, and we stalked the dry river brush for quail and cottontails and the little brush rabbits that, like the pack rats, were everywhere. Now and then a deer would break ahead of us, crashing thickets like the bear himself. Great horned owls lived there and called in drumming voices, vague warnings of death somewhere. From the river bottom we pinged .22 slugs off new farm equipment gliding past on the flatcars of the Southern Pacific.

  Once in a while, we’d return to Mississippi, as if my father’s mixed blood sought a balance never found. Seven kids, a dog or two, canvas water bags swaying from fender and radiator, we drove into what I remember as the darkness of the Natchez Trace. In our two-room Mississippi cabin, daddy longlegs crawled across the tar papered walls, and cotton fields surged close on three sides. Across the rutted road through a tangle of tree, brush, and vine, fragrant of rot and death, was the Yazoo River, a thick current cutting us off from the swamps that boomed and cracked all night from the other shore.

  From the Yazoo we must have learned to feel water as a presence, a constant, a secret source of both dream and nightmare, perhaps as my father’s Choctaw ancestors had. I remember it as I remember night. Always we’d return to California after a few months, as much as a year. And it would be an emergence, for the Salinas was a daylight world of hot, white sand and bone-dry brush, where in the fall, red and gold leaves covered the sand, and frost made silver lines from earth to sky. Here, death and decay seemed unrelated things. And here, I imagined the water as a clear, cold stream through white sand beneath my feet.

  Only in the winter did the Salinas change. When the rains came pounding down out of the Coast Range, the river would rise from its bed to become a half-mile-wide terror, sweeping away chicken coops and misplaced barns; whatever had crept too near. Tricked each year into death, steelhead trout would dash upstream from the ocean, and almost immediately the flooding river would recede to a thin stream at the heart of the dry bed, then a few pools marked by the tracks of coons, then only sand again and the tails and bones of big fish.

  When I think of growing up in California, I think always of the river. It seemed then that all life referred to the one hundred and twenty miles of sand and brush that twisted its way northward, an upside-down, backwards river that emptied into the Pacific near Monterey, a place I didn’t see till I was grown. As teenagers, my brother and I bought our own rifles, a .30-.30 and an ought-six, and we followed our father into the Coast Range after deer and wild boar. We acquired shotguns and walked the high coastal ridges for bandtail pigeon. We drove to fish the headwaters of the Nacimiento and San Antonio rivers. And from every ridge top we saw, if not the river itself, then the long, slow course of the valley it had carved, the Salinas. Far across were the rolling Gabilan Mountains, more hawk hills than mountains, and on the valley bottom, ranches made squares of green and gold with flashing windmills and tin roofs.

  After school and during summers we worked on the ranches, hoeing sugar beets, building fences, bucking hay, working cattle (dehorning, castrating, branding, ear-clipping, innoculating, all in what must have seemed a single horrific moment for the bawling calf). We’d cross the river to drive at dawn through the dry country watching the clumps of live oak separate from the graying hillsides. Moving shadows would become deer that drifted from dark to dark. Years later, coming home from another state, I would time my drive so that I reached that country at daybreak to watch the oaks rise out of night and to smell the damp dead grasses.

  Snaking its way down through our little town was a creek. Dipping out of the Coast Range, sliding past chicken farms and country stores, it pooled in long, shadowed clefts beneath the shoulders of hills and dug its own miniature canyon as it passed by the high school, beneath U.S. 101, around the flanks of the county hospital and on to the river where it gathered in a final welling before sinking into the sand. Enroute it picked up the sweat and stink of a small town, the flotsam and jetsam of stunted aspirations, and along its course in tree shadow and root tangle, under cutbank and log, it hid small, dark trout we caught with hook and handline. From the creek came also steelhead trapped by a vanished river, and great blimp-bellied suckers which hunkered close to the bottom, even a single outraged bull-head which I returned to its solitary pool. At the place where the chicken-processing plant disgorged a yellow stream into the creek, the trout grew fat and sluggish, easily caught. We learned every shading and wrinkle of the creek, not knowing then that it was on the edge already, its years numbered. I more than anyone, fisher of tainted trout, kept what I thought of as a pact with the dying creek: as long as the water flows and the grass grows.

  Up on Pine Mountain, not so much looming as leaning over the town of my younger years, a well-kept cemetery casts a wide shadow. From this cemetery, one fine summer evening, a local youth exhumed his grandmother to drive about town with her draped across the hood of his car, an act so shocking no punishment could be brought to bear. Later, when I asked him why, he looked at me in wonder. “Didn’t you ever want to do that?” he asked. That fall, after a bitter football loss, members of the high-school letterman’s club kidnapped a bus full of rooters from a rival school, holding them briefly at gunpoint with threats of execution. The summer before, an acquaintance of mine had stolen a small plane and dive-bombed the town’s hamburger stand with empty beer bottles. The town laughed. Later, he caught a Greyhound bus to Oregon, bought a shotgun in a small town, and killed himself. It was that kind of place also. Stagnant between Coast Range and river, the town, too, had subterranean currents, a hot-in-summer, cold-in-winter kind of submerged violence that rippled the surface again and again. Desires to exhume and punish grew strong. Escape was just around a corner.

  Behind the cemetery, deep in a wrinkle of the mountain, was an older burial ground, the town’s original graveyard, tumbled and hidden in long grasses and falling oaks. Parting the gray oat stalks to read the ancient stone, I felt back then as astonished as a Japanese soldier must have when he first heard the words of a Navajo code talker. Here was a language that pricked through time, millenia perhaps, with painful familiarity but one that remained inexorably remote.

  A year ago, I drove back to the house nine of us had lived in on the banks of the river. The house was gone, and behind the empty lot the river had changed. Where there had been a wilderness of brush and cottonwoods was now only a wide, empty channel gleaming like bone. Alfalfa fields swept coolly up from the opposite bank toward a modern ranch house. “Flood control” someone in the new Denny’s restaurant told me later that afternoon. “Cleaned her out clear to San Miguel,” he said.

  GRACE

  Vickie L. Sears

  For many Native American children in the foster care system, incidents of physical abuse are often compounded by psychological assaults of racial and cultural bigotry, Vickie Sears’s short story, “Grace,” demonstrates that the Trail of Tears is not yet over for Native American people. The personal suffering endured by nine-year-old Jody Ann and her younger brother acts as a mirror for the historical and contemporary abuse, disruption, and dislocation of Native American people in North America.

  Vickie L. Sears (Cherokee) i
s a writer, storyteller, and psychotherapist. She currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

  I THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO ANOTHER FARM BECAUSE IT WAS time for spring planting. But the lady, she said we were going to be her children. You know how it is grownups talk. You can’t trust them for nothing. I just kept telling my brother that we best keep thinking of ourselves as orphans. Our parents got a divorce and we don’t know where they are, so we need to keep our thinking straight and not get fooled by this lady. I don’t care if her skin is brown just like us, that don’t mean nothing.

  I hear my brother dozing off to sleep and I want to shake him, wake up, but these people are driving this truck and they can hear everything I say anyhow, so I just let him sleep.

  This is the second time we’ve been riding in this old beat-up green pickup. The first time they came and got us from the children’s home they took us down to Pioneer Square. I could see right away they was farm people by the truck having straw in the back and them not having real good clothes, like they wear in the city. City people talk more too. These people were real quiet right off. They answered the questions the orphanage people asked them but they didn’t tell them much of anything. I guess I liked that some, but I wasn’t going to tell them nothing about me. Who knew what they’d do? We never went nowheres before with brown people.

  The man, he had on bluejeans and a flannel shirt and a jean jacket. His hat was all sweaty and beat up like his long skinny face. His boots was old, too. I guessed they didn’t have much money and were needing to get some kids to help them with their work. Probably we’d stay with them until harvest time and then go back to the orphanage. That happened before, so it didn’t matter much anyhow.

  The woman was old and skinny. She had hands what was all chewed up and fat at the knuckles and she kept rubbing them all the time. She had white hair with little bits of black ones popping out like they was sorry to be in there by themselves. She had a big nose like our daddy has, if he still is alive, that is. She and the man was brown and talked like my daddy’s mother, Grandmother, she talks kind of slow and not so much in English. These people, though, they talked English. They just didn’t talk much.

  When they said they was going to take us downtown I thought they was going to take us to a tavern because that’s where the orphanage lady took me real late one night, to show me where all the Indian women was and what kind of people they are, always being drunk and laying up with men. That woman said that is all us Indian girls like to do and I will be just like that too, so I thought that’s where these people would take us, but they didn’t. They took us to dinner at this real nice place and let us have soda pop and even bought us a dessert. Me and Brother both got us apple pie, with ice cream, all to ourselves. I started thinking maybe these people are okay, but a part inside of me told me I best not get myself fooled. So I told them they wouldn’t want us to live with them because my brother is a sissy and I’m a tomboy. But the lady said, “We like tomboys and Billie Jim looks like he is a strong boy. You both look just fine to us.” Then they took us to walk in the square and we stopped by this totem pole. The orphanage lady told me that pole was a pretend God and that was wrong because God was up in heaven and the Indian people was bad who made the pole. This lady, though, she said that the totem pole was to make a song about the dead people and animals and that it was a good and beautiful thing. She had Brother and me feel the inside of the pole. Like listening to its belly. I don’t know what she meant by that, but the wood was nice. I liked better what she said about the pole.

  We walked around for a while and then they took us back to the orphanage. The lady said they would come back, when all the paper work was done, to get Brother and me, but I thought she was just talking big, so I said “Sure,” and me and Brother went inside. We watched them drive away. I didn’t think they would come back, but I thought about them being brown just like my daddy and aunts and uncles and Brother and me. They were more brown than us, but I wondered if they were Indian. They didn’t drink, though, so maybe not.

  We didn’t see those people for a long time. Brother and me went to a big house to help clean for spring coming. I don’t see why you clean a house so good just because the seasons change, but we done that anyway and then went back to the orphanage. I kept thinking on how nice those farmers were and how they might be Indians, but I didn’t want to ask anybody about them. Maybe, if it was for real that they were going to come back for us, it would spoil it to ask about them. Seems like you don’t ever get things just because you want them so it’s better not to ask.

  Then, one day, one of the matrons comes to tell me to find Billie Jim because there are some people come to visit.

  My brother was up in a tree hiding from some of the big boys. First, I had to beat up Joey so’s he would let Billie Jim come out the tree. We rolled in the dirt fighting and I knew I was going to be in trouble because I was all dirty and there was blood on my face. I thought I would get whomped too for getting in a fight. I spit on my hand to try to clean up my face, but I could see by the scowl on the matron’s face that I didn’t look so good. I pushed Brother in front of me because he was clean and maybe the people wouldn’t see me so much. We went into the visiting room and I saw it was those farmers whose names I didn’t remember. They asked the boss man of the home if they could take us now. He said, “Yes. It’s so nice to place these ‘special’ children. I hope they’ll be everything you want.”

  The man reached out his hand and the farmer brought his long arm out his sleeve. The orphanage man pumped his arm up and down, but the farmer just held his still. It was funny to see. The woman, she just barely touched the hand of the man. She was not smiling. I thought something was wrong, but I knew we were going with these people anyhow. I never cared much about where I went, long as the people didn’t beat on us with sticks and big belts.

  We didn’t have to do nothing to get ready because we found our suitcases in the hall by the bottom of the stairs. The boss man gave Brother and me our coats and said, “You be good children and perhaps we won’t have to see you here again.”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t like him, but I just took Brother’s hand and we went out the door.

  The people went to lots of stores downtown and then we went to lunch again.

  I asked them, “Do you use a stick or strap for spanking?”

  The man said, “We don’t believe in spanking.”

  Before I could say anything, Billie Jim pinched me under the table and I knew he had to go bathroom. So I said, “Excuse us,” and we got up to leave. The lady, she asked Billie Jim, “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  Brother just shook his head and the woman said, “Paul, you take him.”

  They left and I worried about Paul messing with Billie Jim. My stomach felt all like throw up. When they came back, I asked Billie Jim, in our secret way, if something happened and he whispered no.

  I wondered if these people were going to be all right, but I kept on guard because grownups do weird things all the time, when you never know they’re going to.

  After we ate, we walked and stopped at this drinking fountain what is a statue of Chief Sealth. Paul, he told us what a great man Sealth was and Billie Jim asked, “You know him?”

  Both Paul and the woman laughed and Paul said, “No. He lived a long time ago. He’s a stranger with a good heart.”

  Then the woman reached down to take my hand, but I didn’t want her to get me, so I told her I had to take care of my brother and took Billie Jim’s hand.

  So then we were riding in this truck going to some place I never heard of, called Walla Walla. Grace, that’s the lady’s name, said they lived on a farm with chickens, pigs, a horse, and lots of things growing. She said we can have a place all our very own to grow things. When I sat down next to her, she let me ride by the window. I seen how my legs didn’t touch the floor and how long hers were. She wasn’t as long as her husband, but way bigger than me. She put my brother in her lap where he went to
sleep, with his chubby fingers in her hand, but I stood guard just in case things got weird. Paul said I should help him drive home by looking at the map so he’d know the roads he was going on. I thought that was dumb because I knew he came to the city lots and must know how to get hisself home. I went along with him though, because he seemed to be nice and it was easy for me. I can read real good cause I’m nine years old. I told him that and see that Grace is smiling. She’s got wrinkles that come out the corners of her eyes and more that go down her cheeks. She has on a smelly powder that reminds me of cookies. She says that there are lots of other children in neighbors’ farms and that they have grandchildren who visit them lots. I guessed I would have to do lots of babysitting.

  It’s a long long ways to where they live and I couldn’t stay awake the whole time. I woke up when Grace said, “Come on, sleepy heads. It’s time to go to bed.”

  She gave my brother to Paul to carry, but I walked by myself, up one step into the house. We went through the kitchen, up some stairs, to the second floor with four bedrooms and a bathroom. She asked me if I have to go to the bathroom and I said yes. She showed me it and then closed the door. That’s funny because she didn’t stay. After a while, she came to knock and say, “There’s a nightgown on your bed. I’ll show you where you will sleep.”

  She took me to a room with only one bed with nobody else in it. I asked her, “Where’s Brother going to sleep?”

  Grace tried to take my hand to go with her, but I put it behind my back and followed her. She led me down the hall to a room where Billie Jim was already in a bed, all by hisself, sound asleep. Then we went to a room Grace said was for her and Paul and said I could come there if I’m scared or having a bad dream.