by
The
In
an extension of this manic masochistic vein, the long night melded into the
morning gospel hour at sunrise in an area called
On
my way past he communal outdoor bathing area, I stopped to throw water on
my face to at least get one or two layers of campfire smoke rinsed off before
sprawling onto my sleeping bag. The water felt cool, the most one could hope
for in the heat of late May in
As
I stooped over the galvanized sink that smelled vaguely of cows or their leftover
feed, I heard a deep gravelly, definitely male voice.
“Are you an Indian?”
“Excuse
me,” I said. Hoping that my flat dripping gaze would send the right message,
but he was off. I had given him license to speak.
“My name’s Jim
and I’m from
“Yeah,
I think so,” I replied looking for the paper towel dispenser and not wanting
to get into the complexities of my genetic background.
“Why?”
Bad mistake a little voice said, questions lead to answers, which lead to
more questions, and before you know it, some guy wants you to have his baby.
“I’m part Choctaw,”
he said, “and my grandma always told me to look for an Indian woman, ‘cause
she said they’d make a good wife.”
At
the back of my sleep deprived mind, through the fog, came
a very incoherent thought, “Is this a marriage proposal?” Remember this was
early.
“Is that right,”
I said. Somehow I still wasn’t listening to that little voice that kept saying,
“Just walk away.”
“Yeah, she said
they’d always keep your shirts clean and your bed warm, if you know what I
mean,” he said as he leaned in closer.
“Told you,” the
little voice said loud and clear this time.
“Well,
I guess some will and some won’t,” I said turning to go, hoping beyond all
hope that whatever karma was in motion between this man and myself was now
satisfied and our paths could go in different directions. No such luck; he
followed.
“I’ll just walk
along with you. I’m down this way too. That’s my tent over there, the blue
one by the oak,” he said, “Why don’t you stop and I’ll make some coffee?”
“No thanks, I’m
really tired, I stayed up all night, and the last thing I need right now is
coffee.”
“Well,”
he began, then halted whatever was coming next as we passed the path where
he should turn; he seemed to be trying to pull up something from the bottom
of a very deep well.
He
paused there in the fork even though I continued on, leaving him in the morning
shadows of the overhanging mesquite and oak trees. His voice began again,
calling out this time to my escaping back.
“You
can take a nap in my tent if you want. Those flaps fold down; it’s real private.
Hell, what say, want to go get friendly?”
“This
is as friendly as I get,” I threw over my shoulder as I turned towards my
tent leaving him there, the dust settling around his feet.
I
managed to avoid Jim from
While
he was the only man who wanted to “get friendly” that trip and the man I wanted
to “get friendly” with, wanted to “get friendly” with someone else, he was
not the only one who asked me if I was an Indian. This scenario of strangers
wanting to know who or what I am has been repeated over and over all my life.
Some
of my earliest memories are of the waitresses in greasy spoon restaurants
learning over the counter, taking my small face in their hands, turning it
this way and that, then asking my parent, “Where’d you get her?” or “Is she
yours?”
I
still remember the feeling of being on display, of being touched when I didn’t
want to be touched and then the added feeling of shame because I didn’t know
the answer to the questions. My parents, of course, were defensive, always
united in their reply. “She’s ours,” they would say.
Sometimes
the waitress wandered off, but there were times when they just wouldn’t let
it go. After looking at me and seeing the brown skin and raven black hair,
then looking at my father, six foot three, blond hair, and blue eyes, my mother
five feet two, brown hair and eyes, both with the palest of white skin compared
to mine, the usual retort was, “must have been the milk man.”
In
foreign countries, I’m stopped on the street and the question is, “Where are
you from?” Which, of course, is an indirect, “Who are you?” My husband calls
me the generic brown person, because I’ve been called: Mexican, Hawaiian,
Eskimo, Jordanian, Indian, Native American, and Gypsy. When I’m in the southwest
the Hopi think I’m Navajo and Navajo think I’m Hopi, but it’s always from
somewhere else. And so it goes.
I’ve
tried in vain to find answers to the questions, talked to others with similar
background, latched-on to the crumbs that I know like ants covering wood when
the water rises. I studied anthropology in college and know that the cupping
at the back of my incisors is a trait of the Native Americans along with thyroid
problems, diabetes, and little body hair, all of which I have. I know that
my gene pool holds traces of a journey across the northern most tracks of
My
love of books and reading started me on part of the journey when I was young
and first found the writings of James Michener. I was intrigued by the ethnicity
of his subject matter, the depth of research to find the genetic history of
those that migrated and populated the places he visited.
First
the south sea tales and then
In
an unusual series of events, I meet Mr. Michener late in his life and during
my middle years when I received a Michener fellowship at the
I
sent him a birthday card on his eightieth birthday thanking him for the influence
his life’s work had had over mine for so many years. Telling him what his
books meant to me and letting him know that like him I was an orphan and that
the knowledge that like me he had not written until he was forty gave me comfort
because at times I was sure it was sheer folly to take up writing in these
middle years.
Of
the writing, he said that young people needed encouragement and he had always
wanted to give the kind of help to them, he wished had been there for him.
Of the search for self, he said that now it didn’t seem to matter so much
because there weren’t answers for him either. Like me he had systematically
peered over the pages of books, searched faces in other countries, listened
to foreign voices always looking for a clue or answer, but finding none. A
pragmatic approach he called it, and then he wished me well on my continued
search. What he didn’t know was that the quest, the one defining skin color
and migration, has ended. He didn’t know that for me the years have passed
like the constant flow of water seaward and I’ve come to a place of acceptance
of not knowing, and on good days a place of peace.
While
I don’t actively search anymore, I am always curious about other people’s
lives and how they define themselves through their culture because it sometimes
seems to me that it is the culture that I miss the most. The sense of knowing
that I belong to a “people” haunts me. Richard Rodriquez calls this a “hunger
of memory,” in his book of the same title. Maybe it is this hunger for a landscape
memory that I know is mine, the landscape that is inherited, the one where
I can say, “my people are from here.” A place where I can say, “we have
always done this, or my great-great grandfather lived on this land – maybe
this is what I hunger for – maybe this would help me to name my “self.”
Bruce
Chatwin writes in The Song Lines that the aboriginal peoples
of
The
questions still come on occasion and the child in me sometimes still wants
to hide. But now I try to think of the one asking as someone trying to place
themselves in their landscape by defining me; I try to remember that we are
all on a walkabout wherever we are and we have to know the names so the I
doesn’t get lost.
©
2004 |
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