2
Early Years
Vallejo’s Carquinez Heights presents a breathtaking panorama of San Pablo Bay. The lucky—and mostly wealthy—people who now enjoy those vistas from their exclusive homes didn’t live there in 1942, when my family moved into a small two-bedroom house at 444 Winchester. It was on the north side of an enormous low-income federal housing project.
Although racially segregated, it was an attractive place to live. Each unit was a single-story flat-roofed house, painted deep rust-red, with dark wooden skirts joining each home to its neighbors. From a distance, they looked like row after row of little wooden railroad trains. I’ve never seen anything like that old public housing on Carquinez Heights.
My first recollection of meeting a white person was when I was three, there in Carquinez Heights, when an older boy tried to take my tricycle away. Comparatively few white families lived on our street. On the north end of the projects lived blacks—then called coloreds or Negroes—many Mexicans, lots of Filipinos and Chinese, and one Indian family—the Meanses.
We met plenty of Indians, however. Since World War I, the U.S. military has welcomed Indian cannon fodder. Out of love for the land of our birth, higher percentages of Indians than of any other ethnic group have enlisted whenever the country was threatened. During World War II, men and women from almost every Indian nation passed through the great naval bases and army depots around San Francisco Bay. My parents welcomed all Indians at any time. Word got around, and a steady procession of young men and women, mostly in uniform, came by for a home-cooked meal of fried bread, corn on the cob, stewed rhubarb, and beef stew or perhaps roast turkey—and a few hours of fellowship. It was party time almost every weekend.
When the war ended in 1945, the enormous shipyards laid off tens of thousands of workers. We moved back to South Dakota to live with Grandma Twinkle Star. By that time, she had divorced Grandpa John and married a Yankton man, Raymond Blacksmith. One day he was describing something—it might have been a car he had seen somewhere—and he used the word snazzy. That was a new one to us kids. From then on, we all called him Grandpa Snazzy.
We lived in Huron, about 125 miles north of Greenwood. Huron was a farm-belt town, not very big, with grain silos, stockyards, meatpackers, and a few sawmills. We lived on the edge of town, on a hillside with a huge backyard that included an orchard. Behind our house, a narrow path descended to the James River through thickets of wild blackberries. On most evenings, after he returned from his job at the municipal power plant, Grandpa Snazzy took me down to the water. He set out half a dozen bamboo poles, each with a bobber, sinkers, and about twenty hooks baited with worms. Grandpa jammed the poles into the riverbank and left them overnight. In the morning, we went back to check the lines. Usually there were two or three dozen perch and bluegills. On deeper hooks, we often found catfish. We ate a lot of fish and blackberries when I lived in Huron.
Grandma Twinkle Star was always sewing. Mom told me Grandma worked for rich white people, reupholstering sofas and easy chairs. She went right into their homes to do that. For some reason, that really impressed me. Grandma Twinkle Star also did superb beadwork. She became widely known for her art, and wrote a book about Yankton/Sioux beadwork designs for the University of South Dakota. Whenever she showed me something she had made, Grandma pointed out that every item included a tiny, deliberate mistake. “That’s the Indian way,” she said, explaining that it is to show that nothing is perfect.
By ancient custom, we Indians regard the children of our mother’s sisters as our sisters or brothers. Cousins are the children of our father’s siblings and of our mother’s brothers. We do not differentiate between first, second, or third cousins, or even more distant relatives. We are all, together, a single family. To offer proper respect to members of the family, they are addressed not by name but by relationship—Uncle, Auntie, Grandpa, Grandma, Cousin, Friend.
I learned more about that custom when Auntie Faith and her kids came to Grandma Twinkle Star’s home for a long visit. It was a fun time. I played with my sisters Marilyn, Mabel Ann, and Madonna—Auntie Faith’s children. Marilyn was about two years older than I. The others were younger. When we played house, I got to be the daddy. Marilyn, all dolled up in lipstick, tottered around on Auntie Faith’s high heels and threw herself into the role of mommy.
Mom had taught me to read and write at age four. At five, after we got to Huron, I was enrolled in school. Because my birthday is in November and I entered first grade at five, I was always a year younger than most kids in my classes. Also, until well into my teens, I was considered small for my age. Because of those two circumstances, I spent many years having to prove that I was just as tough as my classmates.
I attended an all-white school—very few Indians then lived in South Dakota’s towns. I remember a redheaded woman, a teacher, telling me, “You know, kid, you’re never going to be anything. You’re going to be just like the rest of them,” meaning Indian.
Eventually, I made a few friends. One was a boy named Bobby. When his birthday came around, I wanted to give him a present, but we had no money. Grandma made a little toy drum from a Campbell’s tomato soup can. My uncle painted it with Sioux designs and Grandma told me what they meant.
Not long after that, on the school playground, I stood up to a fourth-grader who picked on Bobby and me. He was an enormous kid, much bigger than I was, but I beat him up. Suddenly I was a hero in school, and had many friends to play with. In winter, I went sledding with my new friends down the hill near Grandma’s house. It was a great time in my life.
Our house was on a corner of a dead-end street: Passing cars had to turn one way or another. After dark, the headlamps of those turning left swept across our front windows. On Christmas Eve, Mom told all us kids those occasional flashes of light showed that Santa Claus was making his rounds. A little later, my uncle slipped outside and tossed handfuls of coal on the peaked roof. Grandma said it was Santa’s reindeer skittering across the shingles. Because Grandma’s house had a stovepipe instead of a chimney, Santa was too fat to drop down it, my uncles explained. Instead, he handed our presents through the bedroom window.
So effective was that deception that to this day, my brother Dace claims that when he was three years old, he saw Santa Claus and his reindeer-drawn sleigh take off into the night from the snowy street in front of Grandma’s house.
In Huron, I first became aware of racism. When some of the kids in my school came down with head lice, I was the first in my class to be inspected—as though /had infected everyone else. I burned with shame and embarrassment while the school nurse looked at my scalp through a magnifying glass. She found nothing but hair and skin. More than half my classmates—all white kids—had lice and had to have their heads scrubbed with lye. When I told my mother how I had been singled out, she was steaming.
Racism was not merely limited to the classroom. On my way to school each day, I passed a house with a little towheaded kid, perhaps a year younger than I was, sitting on the front porch as if waiting for me. When I got closer, he ran to the front gate yelling, “Nigger! Nigger!”
Well, I liked that! I didn’t know what nigger meant. To me, it was that little kid’s way of saying hello in some foreign language. When I told Grandma about it, she got hot under the collar.
“That’s a dirty word,” she said. “A bad word. If he says that again, you call him ‘white trash.’”
Sure enough, the next morning as I passed by, the kid came running and yelled, “Nigger!”
I stopped and said, “You’re white trash!”
His mother came out of the house, boiling mad and screaming, “Get out of here, you nigger! You dirty Indian, don’t you ever talk to my kid like that! Now run, before I call the police!”
That scared me a little. When I told Grandma, she took me by the hand, walked over there, and talked to that woman for quite a while. I never saw that kid again. I’ve wondered about him for years. There were no blacks living in Huron then, and few Indians. Where did he learn hate words such as nigger? Who taught him?
And why?
When the school year ended in June 1946, we all returned to Greenwood and moved in with Grandma Aggie. Her husband, Henry Frederick, had gone to the spirit world some years before, leaving her alone in one of the grandest homes on the entire Yankton Reservation—surely the largest owned by an Indian. The original house had been a two-room log cabin built by Walter Arconge, Grandma Twinkle Star’s grandfather, on a bluff overlooking the town of Greenwood and the Missouri River. Later generations had added a second story, extended the ground floor, and put in a porch supported by tall white pillars. By the time I went to live there, it seemed huge. Upstairs were two bedrooms and downstairs another bedroom, a living room, a large dining room, and a big kitchen.
Behind the house were an outhouse, windmill, barn, granary, woodshed, and smithy. My great-grandfather, Theodore Arconge, who had taught himself the farrier’s craft, had earned a living at that smithy, shoeing horses and repairing farm implements. Among Grandma Aggie’s chickens, which nested in a large coop, were several banty roosters that fought almost constantly. Dace and I loved to watch them.
Before we returned to Greenwood, Dace and I were told that Mom was going to have another baby. We really wanted a sister. By midsummer, after quite a bit of discussion, we had chosen her name—Judy. When Mom went off to the hospital to bring back our baby sister, we were so excited that we could hardly eat or sleep.
Mom came home a few days after having given birth, on August 9, to twin boys. Dace and I were devastated. She took us aside and explained that when she got to the hospital, there were no little girls left—none at all. To make up for that, Mom had picked out the two best-looking boys and brought them instead.
Well, two good-looking boys instead of one sister—that was all right. We quickly got over our disappointment. Although they are fraternal twins, Mom decided to dress them alike. Until Bill and Ted were almost three, sometimes we could hardly tell them apart.
Grandma Aggie’s neighbor, Oscar Bernie, lived down the hill in a one-room shack. Like Grandpa John, he sometimes hauled barrels of water from the river and sold them around town. He had a small boat which he used to carry firewood and wild fruit—blackberries, chokecherries, plums, and grapes—which he gathered on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. He traded them on the reservation for eggs, milk, home-baked bread, and other produce. Sometimes Oscar took Dace, me, and his own son, whom we called Skin—a kid about my age—for a ride in his boat.
Oscar kept several horses in a pasture next to Grandma’s house, and allowed us to ride and play with them. Dace and I called the mare Lady. She had a new colt that summer, and sometimes we would make believe that we were her foals, too, dropping to all fours and crawling underneath to reach up and pull out her teats, pretending that we were baby horses feeding.
When the twins were big enough to travel, we returned to California, where the shipyards had begun to hire again. Pops went back to work at Mare Island. He was so skilled with an acetylene torch, so good at making seamless welds in thick steel, that he soon was given the most demanding work—welding submarine hulls. We returned to Carquinez Heights and moved into 465 Winchester, directly across the street from the house we had lived in during the war. Except for summers in South Dakota, when I learned more about Indian ways, I became very much a child of small towns.