General III had recently been stopped at 5:00 a.m. while riding his bicycle to work; he is a custodian at the community college. He was told drug dealers often use bicycles now. He was given a ticket for not having reflective gear.
The father of Delphine’s basketball teammate was made to lie handcuffed in his own driveway for an hour by city police, who’d been called because his neighbors didn’t recognize him when he sat on his own block wall, resting after gardening. He was wearing sweatpants. He is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department.
It took two more hours to get to Huntington Beach and find a parking space.
We followed the van forever in the stalled traffic. We talked about July 5, seven days earlier. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Avery Cody Jr., sixteen, left a McDonald’s with three friends, and was stopped in a crosswalk by a patrolman. They were ordered to put their hands on the police car. They did. They were ordered to lift their shirts, and Cody Jr. ran. After a two-block chase, he was shot in the back. Video footage from a 7-Eleven shows him running past with something small in his left hand. The police say it was a weapon. Witnesses say it was a cell phone.
“He shouldn’t have run,” Dwayne said, shaking his head. “You never run.”
“But what if you panic? What if D—had panicked?”
He was quiet for a while. My van ahead rode low, with all those kids. “I was just hoping CHP didn’t make him get out of the car,” Dwayne said.
“What if the cop saw the cell phone and panicked?”
“You never run,” he said again. “You just don’t.”
“Don’t you remember Westwood?” I said, and he frowned.
“I don’t think about that.”
“I do,” I said. “I tried not to until she started going out with D—. But now I think about it all the time.”
My ex-husband looked at me like I was crazy. “What?”
When Delphine got her speeding citation, that January, D—was in the passenger seat of Thelma, the old red Honda. He was questioned at length, about his identification, his address. The patrolman didn’t believe that he was seventeen. They were there nearly an hour. When our daughter called me, she was crying, afraid of what I would say.
She was right. I was furious, but not about the ticket. “When you get pulled over, you put him in danger,” I shouted at her. “You’re risking his life. Don’t drive even four miles over the speed limit! He could have been shot and killed!”
Only some mothers say that to their children.
I said to Dwayne then, “It feels horrible to be the person watching, too. Okay? It’s like that thing you get from being in a war.”
“What are you talking about?”
I can remember scenes and dialogue from hundreds of books, but not acronyms because I hate them. “PTS something. Post-traumatic stress something.”
For weeks after something like this happens, I want to sleep all the time, but I can’t sleep until I know where everyone is. In their beds, at work on the graveyard shift, or in a gym.
At Huntington Beach, the six-feet-four Black Guy and the six-feet-five Black Guy arranged themselves on chairs. They were surrounded by us and six more girls on the blankets now, friends of Delphine, eating chicken and watermelon and cupcakes.
Dwayne didn’t go into the water, as he always did. He loves to swim, and the girls love to jump on his back. But today, he dozed. He had slept only the two hours.
Our Laurie went in the water. He was alone for a long time, the farthest out in the powerful waves, because he was so tall the water only reached his chest. His baller shorts were long and wet. It’s the braids under his ball cap that make white people nervous, the intricate tiny cornrows his mother plaits every week, that cross his skull in complicated patterns and end just touching his shoulders.
Rosette said, “Why does everyone make fun of watermelon and fried chicken anyway? Why did people always talk about Barack Obama and watermelon?”
Gaila said, “Oh, my God, could you be any more annoying? Learn your history, okay?”
Rosette was offended. “Why don’t you ever eat watermelon, Daddy?”
“’Cause it’s nasty,” he said, opening one eye like a parody of a grumpy father. “Just like green peas. They made me eat it when I was a kid, and I ain’t a kid now.”
He was slumped in his chair, half-asleep. His feet were covered with sand.
That night, Dwayne called me at 11:15. He was on shift. “They make it back okay?” he said quietly, anxiously, in the echoing vacuum of the cement walls of the correctional facility.
We had left the beach in his truck after only two hours. He had to sleep before work.
“They came back about forty minutes after we did,” I told him.
“For real?”
“I guess they got cold,” I said.
Maybe they had been nervous. We didn’t talk about it. “You working security unit?” I said. “You gonna fall asleep?”
He said he had court calendar, making the schedule for juvenile offenders who would be escorted in the morning. He would shackle and prepare them before he left for home, at 7:00 a.m. “I just wanted to know they made it back,” he said, and hung up.
I stood in the kitchen doorway. Our Laurie was on the couch, with the little women heckling him while he took out his braids, which were full of sand. They had never seen his shoulder-length curls before, and they kept trying to take pictures with a cell phone.
IV
31
Switzerland, Loveland, Cuddyland
Always, January 12, 1950, Always
To my daughters:
You’ll have to imagine your father hiking up to a remote mountain in central Switzerland, to a wooden house perched on a nearly vertical slope, a chalet built in the early 1800s, in which lived a man we knew as “Uncle Willy,” hermit and moonshine-maker who could have been in the classic novel Heidi. Theo Erb, nephew of my grandmother Rosa Erb Leu, took us to this mountain, where we drank homemade schnapps, distilled from apples and pears from Willy’s own trees, the kind of alcohol you pour on a wound to sterilize it. Then, as your father says, “Man, I ate some hundred-year-old cheese!”
Uncle Willy accepted us immediately as family, because Theo brought us to him as such, and Theo’s father, Fritz, was Willy’s brother and Rosa’s. Though Rosa Erb never returned to Switzerland, and we had no blood relation to the large network of Erbs, they have always considered us kin. I’ll never forget standing there watching Willy tease your dad by offering him “mountain vitamins,” a handful of goat droppings, Theo holding the goat, your dad cracking up. Willy looked exactly like all the roughly comic uncles in Riverside and Colorado—skin brown, olive drab pants exactly like General II, labor-thickened hands, and sly grin. The universal hardworking human in all our families.
This was a place my own mother never saw, a place that made a great story in the California driveway of the Simses, near the domino table, where Dwayne talked about the moonshine’s power—we kept the one bottle Willy gave us, and if you threw a few drops into a fire, an explosion sparkled the most beautiful deep purple.
Your father and I stayed three weeks in Aeschlen, the village of Erbs, working in the plant before sunrise, sorting newly hatched chicks from the incubators into cardboard boxes to deliver hours later to farms all over Switzerland. Your father ate the brown bread and cheese in the dark with me, and the Erbs still talk about how his hands were so big he could hold up four chicks in each grip, for inspection. The rest of us could manage only two or three.
But your father and I, and you girls as well, would never have made it to the Alps if not for my stepfather, John Watson, from whom we inherited the traveling bone, as people call it. He bequeathed that bone to me as surely as if it were in my blood. No one else in our families had wanderlust like my dad John, or me, and now, you three. For we five, travel is always worth going broke. To see a new place is to make ourselves into different humans. Once, Delphine, you said to me that the most valuable thing I eve
r gave you was our travel, because when we were in the big world, we saw how insignificant we were. But it was my stepfather who gave the world to me.
Dwayne Sims, Theodore Erb, Willy Erb, Swiss Alps, 1985
John Paul Watson was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, in a blizzard climate (all three of your white grandparents survived thousands of feet of snow, and ended up living in one of the hottest places in America, and they sure as heck never went back.) He hitchhiked from easternmost Canada to California when he was seventeen, to visit an uncle. When he graduated high school, he came back to live in Montebello, California, following his parents, who had left those winters on doctor’s orders because of lung disease. But his mother died not long after she got here, and his father passed away a few years later. My dad didn’t go back to Canada. He joined the U.S. Army, then lived in a tiny shack with no bathroom, outside San Bernardino, and started building things—apartments, laundromats. He became a citizen, met my mother, and took all of us on the road—we kids standing up in the truckbed of his yellow pickup while he gunned the engine to make backfires that sounded like gunshots, causing passing motorists to look at us like we were insane. We pulled an eighteen-foot travel trailer.
My dad first gave us America: We rode down into the Grand Canyon on burros, we walked on salt formations in Death Valley; we saw Yellowstone, Zion, and Crater Lake. We hiked into the mist of Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite, where I held my wet face near the thundering power of the earth tossing water into beauty.
Then he took us to Mexico on second-class trains, where we met older women in rebozos, chickens in wooden cages, and kids with whom we drank the best Coca-Cola ever. In Chihuahua, we hiked into Copper Canyon caves where the Tarahumara indigenous people wove baskets. In Jalisco, we saw the cathedrals and zocalos of Guadalajara.
When I was sixteen, he took my two brothers, me, and my mother to Switzerland. She hadn’t returned in twenty-eight years, since she first left, and he sold a laundromat to take her home.
We stayed with Rosa’s brother Fritz in the Erb family compound—six sons, their wives and children, the chicken hatchery and orchard and vegetable gardens and a machine shop where the two eldest sons, Theo and Hans, fabricated metal parts. On that trip, my mother couldn’t find her mother’s grave, but we saw the Wolf Church, and the tombs of the Erb ancestral women who’d died in childbirth. By the end, the Erbs felt like my true family.
I went to Aeschlen alone in 1980, when I was nineteen, staying with Marie and Fritz Erb. We woke up at 3:00 a.m. to work in the hatchery, sorting the chicks, then ate a quick breakfast of bread, cheese, chocolate, and coffee, and traveled all of Switzerland in a panel truck. We delivered chickens to remote mountain valleys where I talked to farmers and their wives, drank schnapps and herbal tea, and learned Swiss-German dialects.
Then your father and I went in 1984, when we were newly married, and drank the schnapps, too. But he also hiked one day alone with Hans, up to the summit of a secret mountain; with Swiss Army knives, they carved their names into a stone. Hans, whose nickname is Hausie, told your father he was the only American to ever set foot on that mountain.
In 1995, my dad John and your father and I took the whole family to Switzerland, when Gaila and Delphine were six and four. But we’d planned the trip early—and by the time we went, I was seven months pregnant with Rosette. (Yeah, Rosette, I shouldn’t even have been flying then. I sucked in your presence on the plane. You responded by kicking the crap out of my kidneys. But you ingested goat cheese and chocolate and Alpine air. You ended up quite Swiss.)
We went back three times since Rosette was born, just the four of us, staying always with family. You girls swam in remote mountain rivers, hiked Alps and were butted by bell-wearing cows, and lit fireworks in the cornfields with Swiss cousins. You picked green beans with your great-aunt Marie. When I was nineteen, Marie taught me how to mix flowers, green beans, radishes, and herbs in the garden rows—something you all learned working in our garden, kneeling near the sunflowers, corn, and basil that grew so companionably. You knew the word Bohnenkraut, which means “bean herb,” which Americans call savory. You knew the word züpfe, the braided bread, and landjäger, the dried sausage carried by young boys who tended summer cows in the highest Alps.
When your father and I got home to Riverside back in 1984, he told everyone in the driveway about Hausie and the mountain, and how all our Swiss cousins had nicknames just like our Sims cousins. No one but us could talk about how alike were the villages in Switzerland and in Cuddyland, where lived Nacho, Snooter, and Gato.
Cuddyland is the settlement across the Santa Ana River, on the west side, home of six generations of the branch of the Sims family begun by Mary Louise, eldest daughter of Daisy. For our family, the word cousin had evolved decades ago to cuddy, as in, “Hey, cuddy, give me a ride out to the Westside,” and, “Leave her alone, man, that’s my cuddy, she comes with backup you don’t want to meet.” If you do the math, and think about the people who came to California—ten siblings who marry into families with ten siblings, and then their own children marrying into families with six or seven siblings—the possibilities for cousinhood, and survival, are endless. It is the definition of Linda Hogan’s lovely line: We are the result of the love of thousands.
When Mary Louise Morris was seventeen, she married Henderson “Gato” Butts, who was from a huge family in Rubidoux adjacent to the river, about two miles from the market where my mother bought my first Little Golden Book and my father bought the laundromat. Rubidoux, one of the first places granted to the Spanish Californios when the land was “claimed” from the indigenous people in the Riverside area, the Cahuilla and Serrano, had been settled in the 1800s. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Butts and Dumas families left Idabel, Oklahoma, after terrible race violence, and settled in a small area called Belltown, where Gato’s father, a plasterer and builder, constructed a family compound of several homes.
You know the tales of Cuddyland. The cousins were tough—when your father was five, they put a wooden box over him, with rocks on top, in a vast field. He’s still not a fan of enclosed spaces, like elevators. Cuddyland was where the deadly junkyard pig lived. When you’d see our cousin Snooter, he’d tease me about my first suit—a jacket and pants of sapphire-blue wide-wale corduroy that he sold to your dad when I was seventeen, after the suit fell off a truck. You three couldn’t figure out that truck, which also dropped bottles of fine liquor and certain brands of shoes. I still have the suit. I still wear the jacket.
Your dad took each of you in turn, when you were sixteen, to practice driving on the dirt roads and fields in Cuddyland. He might have claimed there was less traffic out there, but I knew he loved to visit with Snooter and Rita and the other descendants of Mary Louise, and to show them your faces, because they ask about you all the time. “Where the girls now? Texas? Peru? What? They got the travelin’ bone.”
At night, after I visit with the cousins, I think of all the tiny villages I’ve seen, in Iowa and upstate New York, in Utah and West Virginia, small places made up of mostly kin. I think of Aeschlen, and Belltown, and wish I’d had cousins, wish I’d had the prairie of Colorado, wish I’d had my grandmother Ruby.
Not until I was twenty-two, driving across the country with my brother Jeff, to Nunn, Colorado, did we meet our father’s cousins. We found a prairie town inhabited by our ancestors: our grandmother Ruby’s sister’s children. They were in their fifties. My brother and I stayed for three days, painting a barn for the widow of Carl Triboulet, Ruby’s only brother. The town held about four hundred people. My brother and I sat one afternoon in an abandoned grain elevator, thinking we could move there, onto our family land. But he was nineteen, growing ten varieties of marijuana, and he sure couldn’t grow that on the prairie.
No one talked to us about our grandmother. Not until I went back to Nunn in 2014, when I drove to Canada with my dog, did I see my cousins again, and then they thought I was old enough to hear the stories of my grandmother. By the
n I was fifty-three, and they were in their eighties. Dale and Kahla Barnaby, Ruby’s nephew and his wife, fed me ham sandwiches, put me and the dog in the tiny second bedroom in the little wood-frame house, and took me out on the county roads raising dust to the lost places everyone had left, the land where my grandmother and her sisters went to dances, the abandoned ranches where they once grew white wheat and ate antelope they shot for supper.
But you, my daughters, have never seen those people, and now they are almost all gone.
I have lived longer than Frieda Roesti Leu, who died at thirty-nine, and Ruby Triboulet Straight, who died at fifty.
Ruby’s sisters tried for years to save her. Her sister Hazel went out to Los Angeles, became a fervent member of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Church of Foursquare Gospel, when the famous Angelus Temple was built at the lake in Echo Park. Hazel sent for her mother, Amanda, and the youngest sister, Helen. They lived in Echo Park near the temple, and Amanda Baldon Triboulet was saved by the voice of Aimee Semple McPherson as it resonated through the radio upon which my great-grandmother laid her hands. She fell onto the floor, sanctified. She never returned to Colorado. Genevieve, the second-eldest, also went to California, and eventually became a Foursquare Gospel minister in the San Joaquin Valley. Amanda and Genevieve are buried in Lodi, California.
Ruby’s sister Emma had married Frank Ball, and had two sons on a farm near Pierce. Vara had ten children out in Purcell. But when Ruby took her youngest child, my father, Richard, and fled the Rockies and Robert Straight, she didn’t head east to the prairie. Three times, they went west to Hazel in California.
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