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Gloria
The life expectancy of a male American Indian was 44.5 years in 1984. As May 10, 1984, approached, I became increasingly aware that by that measure, my life would soon be over. Instead of brooding, I joined some AIM leaders at a conference on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.
The subject I spoke on there was the way we had schooled our children in their culture at Yellow Thunder Camp. Afterward, an older man I had known for years—an Omaha (pronounced U-Ma-Ahah) from Nebraska named Leon Grant—brought his Navajo wife and two adult daughters to the stage to meet me. One of them was tall, slim, graceful, and she radiated class. Her name was Gloria. I thought, I’ve got to find some way to meet this woman again.
The next day there was a powwow at the high school. I went with Glenn Morris, a Shawnee and a University of Colorado professor, as well as a Harvard lawyer and co-director of Colorado AIM. After a while, he came up, very excited, to say, “You’ve got to see this beautiful woman.” We went into the gym, where he pointed her out. It was Gloria. I said, “Yeah, nice,” thinking maybe I was going to have some competition.
The dance at the powwow was about to begin just as I saw her. Plains Indian dances include one for the Soldier Society, an ancient brotherhood of defenders, called the gourd dance. As it began, Gloria and her sister politely took me to the circle and stood me next to their father, who was being honored in celebration of his birthday. To show respect for Leon, people came up to put money at my feet. Afterward, I gave it to the singers on his behalf. When the dance ended, I had a moment to talk to Gloria and her sister. I wanted to thank them for the respect they had shown by putting me next to their father. My opening line was original, if not brilliant. I said, “Hi, how are you doing? Are you married?”
“Yes,” said Gloria. She started to blink rapidly. “To a white man. He’s not here, but he’s a good man.” It looked as though she was trying hard to stand up for her absent husband. I wondered about that as I said, “Do you have kids?”
“No.”
If she had been happily married and had a child, I would have walked away. The instant she said she was childless, I knew her husband must be merely a carpetbagger. I had a lot more in common with her than he or any other white man could. I had no idea how or when, but as far as I was concerned, it was all over except the formalities. She would be mine. Wildly excited but trying not to show it, I said, “We’ll talk later, OK?”
“Okay,” she said with a little smile. A thrill shot through me from my scalp down to my toes, yet I was not mentally undressing that elegant and beautiful woman. I had no thought about taking her to bed. It was more of a spiritual feeling, that we were complementary halves of a single soul that were soon to become one.
I immediately told Glenn that Gloria was married, since I knew his values wouldn’t permit him to go after another man’s wife. I would like to think that if Gloria had been married to an Indian, I wouldn’t have pursued her, but from the moment I looked into her eyes, I was thinking only with my heart. For the rest of the evening, I sat with a Pine Ridge guy named Poor Thunder. He had a drum and had taught his Navajo friends some Lakota songs. I helped them sing, but the real reason I chose that spot was so I could stare at Gloria while racking my brain for words that would attract her. She knew I was looking at her; I could see it made her nervous. Finally I hit on an angle. There was an upcoming meeting of the National Indian Education Association in Phoenix. Maybe I could parlay that into an excuse to see her again. During a break in the dancing, I went over to her and said, “I want to speak at the National Indian Youth Council. Do you know anyone on that board?”
“Oh, I’m with the NIEA—I can help. Do you have a resume I can give them?”
“I don’t do resumes. I’ll give you a copy of one of my speeches”—the one in Mother Jones—“and if you want me to speak, you can take it from there… What are you doing tomorrow?” I added.
“We’re going to Chinle to celebrate my dad’s birthday.”
“My son Scott is dancing at First Mesa on the Hopi, so I’ll be over that way. Could we meet Monday?”
“No, I’m working. I teach school.”
“What do you teach?”
“Art.”
We traded small talk for a while, then made a date to meet on Monday for breakfast at the Navajo Inn, where I was staying. When I arrived late, Gloria, nervous and shy, stuttered with her eyes, blinking rapidly and looking down. I found that endearing. It told me she had attached importance to our meeting. We talked about her life. She told me how much she wanted kids, but her husband didn’t.
The words leaped out before I could think. I said, “I love kids—I want to have more. Will you marry me?”
“You already have children. Why do you want more?”
“Because I love them. I could give you a big line and all that, but I want to marry you. I just know it’s right.”
“I’m already married!”
“I don’t care—he’s only a white man, and from his actions, it’s clear that he thinks you and your people aren’t good enough to bear his children.” Gloria seemed to agree without saying so.
We talked until she was late for work, but we never mentioned my speech. Just before we parted, I asked for her phone number and she wrote it down for me. Then she realized what she was doing and gave me her work number. I checked out of the motel, happy and whistling, and drove toward home. As I hit the Colorado line, I suddenly thought, why the hell did I propose? Why couldn’t I be like other guys and have a nice safe affair? Why did I have to go whole-hog and let my feelings all hang out? Why did I just blurt out, “Will you marry me?”
I decided I could live with it, but as I drove on, I thought of the words of my Uncle Matthew King—“It’s all in the blood.” I remembered what Betty’s Hopi parents had worried over when I had come to marry their daughter twenty years earlier—and all their fears had been realized in Michele and Scott, who will never be quite sure whether they are Lakota or Hopi. I reflected on what I had learned again at Yellow Thunder Camp: Golden eagles do not mate with bald eagles; our relatives follow the original instructions given them by the Great Mystery. If we have respect for life, we must make sure future generations will enter a world at least as strong as ours was when we came into it. I thought, what the hell has gotten into me? I realized that the old love bug had bitten me in the ass again. I didn’t care about anything except being with Gloria.
It was evening when I got home, but I couldn’t wait until morning, when she would be at work—I just had to hear her voice. I had my daughter Veronica call her—and, of course, her husband, Gary Davis, answered. Gloria came to the phone wondering who Veronica was, and was startled to hear my voice. She asked me not to call her at home again, so I telephoned her at school, sometimes twice a day. Soon she was pouring out her heart to me, and I was sharing my dreams with her.
As I had suspected, Gloria was very unhappy in her marriage. Things were so strained that there was no physical contact between her and Davis. We arranged a meeting during the last week of May, in Albuquerque, where we planned an extended rendezvous in San Francisco. I was so afraid she wouldn’t come that when her plane landed, I made my way to the door of the aircraft—something I had never done before—or since. When she appeared at last, I was filled with joy. We went to a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant with a panoramic view of the harbor and the bay and I sat next to her rather than across the table, because I wanted to be as close as possible. After eating, we walked along the pier among the boats. Then, in full view of the diners peering through the huge windows, I eased my body against hers and we held each other. After a while, I kissed her very tenderly. That was the kiss that sealed our commitment to each other. I was hopelessly and totally in love, and happier than I could ever remember.
We stayed in Berkeley in the home of an absent friend, honeymooning for four days, scarcely leaving the apartment except for a sacred pipe ceremony on Alcatraz. When we parted, every bone in my body cried out to be with her again. I had never met a woman who fulfilled me so completely. When she returned to Phoenix, Gloria told her husband that their eight-year marriage was over. They had been married in the traditional manner; and in the Navajo way, when a man removes his clothing and personal items from a woman’s home, they are divorced. Davis took his possessions and moved out.
After he left, Gloria and I were on the phone constantly. We agreed to meet in Denver, and from there I took her to an International Indian Treaty Council conference in Sisseton, South Dakota. One of the speakers was a Palestinian. His English wasn’t good, and I was very familiar with the issues—I had heard the same rap about conditions in the refugee camps and the Occupied Zone countless times before—so I was soon bored. I wanted to be alone with Gloria. Impatient to leave, I started to tug at her. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” I whispered. “No, this is interesting,” she replied. “I’ve never heard any of these things before, and I had no idea what the Palestinians have endured.” Then it dawned on me. What was I thinking? How could I show so little respect? No matter how often I had heard their message, I wouldn’t walk out on my own elders—so why would I do that to people from other cultures? It woke me up and embarrassed me. That kind of thing hasn’t happened again—an insight I owe to Gloria.
After the conference she went home, and I went to Albuquerque with Glenn to meet Phillip Anaya, his classmate at Harvard Law School. Anaya worked for Tom Lubban, who represented the Western Shoshone. Their research had confirmed what the Shoshone had been saying for generations—because their only treaty cession in 1851 to the United States was a right-of-way to the California goldfields, the tribe still possessed aboriginal tide to all land in Nevada. Although the few remaining Shoshone raise horses and cattle, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management had illegally claimed jurisdiction over all their land.
Many Shoshone ranchers refuse to pay grazing and usage fees for their own land, so the BLM periodically raids their ranches and confiscates their livestock. When that happened to two elderly women, the Dan sisters, they sued for the return of their herds and for punitive damages. While their case worked its way through the courts, the BIA, without the tribe’s knowledge, hired attorneys who went before the Indian Claims Commission with a claim for wrongful appropriation of their Nevada land. The commission awarded the tribe $27 million dollars—a few cents an acre. Very surprised to learn about the settlement, the Shoshone said, “We didn’t ask for this money and we don’t want it, because we never agreed to sell our land.”
When the Dan sisters’ lawsuit reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the government twisted the law, ducking the larger issue of land ownership and turning the case into a personal claim. The high court refused to hear their appeal, thus upholding lower-court rulings, which held that the Dan sisters must pay grazing fees and penalties—and would never get their cattle and horses back. In yet another example of the white man’s justice, the BLM was given a license to steal Indian livestock. The final irony of the case is that Shoshone lands are not being used by non-Indians—so it was a clear-cut case of theft, among the most blatant by the federal government in this century.
When I heard about all that from Anaya and Lubban, I concluded that the U.S. government wanted to force all Indians to become welfare recipients. There are very few Western Shoshone. They have no tourist attractions and live in remote corners of the state, so they are largely out of sight and out of mind. Why not leave them alone? Because the U.S. government’s policy is to impoverish all Indian people, including those who for centuries have been self-sufficient and productive, even by the standards of white society.
Lubban asked me to do something to help the Shoshone and the Dan sisters. “As much as I want to, as much as this is a terrible injustice and these women deserve every bit of support, I follow AIM’s policy,” I replied. “I don’t go anywhere unless I’m invited.”
“Well, I’m inviting you,” said Lubban.
“You might be from the lost tribe of Israel, but you’re not an Indian and don’t live among the Shoshone,” I said. “Unless they ask me to get involved, I can’t.” The Shoshone never did ask for my help, but the lesson of the Dan sisters has remained on my mind. I knew the white man couldn’t let those Indians have their rights because then other Indians would demand the same. It galled me that there was no national outcry over the case, that the media and ordinary Americans didn’t know or care what happened to Indians. If I couldn’t go charging around championing the Dan sisters without an invitation, I could take another look at the history of Indian policy in this country and publicize my observations, at least by speaking at universities and in Indian country.
I learned that after 1891, most Indians were confined to America’s concentration camps—the so-called reservations. The practice of religion and other forms of Indian expression went underground. Within about fifteen years after we were “pacified,” Indians had made the socioeconomic adjustment to farming and ranching and were running horses and cattle on our reservations and becoming successful, outperforming their white counterparts in farming and ranching. When the United States saw this, they passed new laws and illegally opened up more Indian land to white homesteading.
The myth of pioneer America is that people swarmed out to the frontier because they were tough and independent. In reality, few white men wanted to leave the safety and comfort of “civilization.” The government had to bribe immigrants to get them out of the eastern cities. Besides land—Indian land—the government had to offer free farm implements, livestock, and even cash before homesteaders would come.
In that way, white immigrants became mercenaries to settle our land. Still we survived, even prospered, while white farmers, unaccustomed to living on Grandmother Earth, struggled and even failed. Some returned to the East. That wouldn’t do, so after the turn of the century we had federal “stock reduction” programs. They came and shot our horses, cows, and sheep right in front of us so whites could get higher prices for their own stock. That set us back, but we made still another adjustment. In about ten years, we were again making it economically. There were no fences on reservations, so herds were run communally, whole communities pitching in for branding, calving, and roundups. We had little cash, but it didn’t matter. We bartered with one another, Oglalas from Pine Ridge swapping for produce or Missouri River fish with Yanktons. They also traded with local whites.
When World War I came along and many Indian farmers went off to fight, the government came in with another stock reduction plan. Unwilling to believe that a people who had lived in harmony with nature for millennia and who knew all there was to know about their environment could care for their land, the government introduced “land management” and white “experts.” They installed “boss farmers” in each community. Indians couldn’t do anything without their permission—and they acted only on orders from the bureaucracy. This was accompanied by yet another stock reduction—but this time, instead of shooting the animals, they hauled them away.
Still, it took only another dozen years to recover from this third assault. About the time prosperity returned to the reservations, the Depression hit.
The industrial world shuddered to a halt and white workers relearned the lessons of misery. Ironically, it was the best of times for reservation Indians, especially on the Plains. Whole families lived in cast-off military tents, even through those bitter winters—but institutions like the extended family survived and prospered because people still had control of their economic lives. When Civilian Conservation Corps camps were established to give people jobs building roads and other public works, many Indians were employed. Their wages and those of the whites became an enormous boon to the local economy. By 1934, Indians once again prospered.
So that year the Congress passed the Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the Indian Reorganization Act, which was supposed to give tribes self-rule and eventually end their dependency on the federal government. Thirty years later, the South African government decreed the Bantu Development Act, which institutionalized, apartheid in Africa. Except for slight differences, those two documents are almost identical. The Indian Reorganization Act created red apartheid in America. It imposed tribal constitutions that forced us into the evils of elective government.
The act provided that each reservation could accept the BIA’s constitution or reject it by a majority of the popular vote. This in itself was illegal. The Fort Laramie Treaty specified that changes can’t be made unless three-fourths of adult males agree to them. While virtually no Indians favored the act, voting isn’t part of our tradition—we believe in consensus and avoid participating in such divisive rituals. Among thousands of eligible Hopis, for example, only nine voted in the Indian Reorganization Act election. So it was throughout Indian country. Hardly anyone voted except a handful of hang-around-the-forts. Nevertheless the BIA announced—after the election, of course—that because travel on reservations was so “difficult,” everyone who didn’t vote against the act would be counted as a “yes” vote. Thus the Wheeler-Howard Act was passed by an “overwhelming majority.” Once “accepted,” the act could not be rescinded by tribal councils, even though it made economic opportunity virtually impossible by putting tribal affairs into the hands of people who couldn’t assemble a consensus, thus assuring that continuing political instability would discourage all outside investment. That left all important matters in the hands of BIA agents who bucked all decisions to Washington. The boss farmer, who had at least lived on the land, now gave way to faceless bureaucrats thousands of miles away.
A few years later World War II began and great numbers of young Indians, convinced by U.S. propaganda that if Germany and Japan won, their people would be even worse off, enlisted for military service. For most, it was the first time they had seen the outside world; they returned to their homes much changed. Within a few years, relocation began, and with no way to support themselves on reservations, tens of thousands left for the cities.
Despite the devastating effects of U.S. Indian policy, still there were aboriginal people prospering in dignity and preserving their traditions. The United States stole two billion acres of our land—but we still had almost fifty million acres. Under it was 40 percent of all mineral reserves remaining in this country, including vast quantities of low-sulphur coal and uranium. By all the rules of capitalism, American Indians should be the wealthiest people on earth, richer per capita than the Saudis or Japanese. The federal government, however, holds all our land in trust and allows America’s wealthiest corporations to exploit our oil, gas, coal and other minerals in return for token royalties. As of this writing, less than 500,000 Indians live on reservations, yet we and our lands contribute more than six billion dollars to America’s gross national product. The American taxpayer pays two billion dollars to the government’s Indian Affairs offices, of which more than 80 percent is taken by administrative costs. We give six billion dollars and are repaid two hundred million? Hardly a fair deal.
When I called Gloria on August 22, 1984, she said, “Guess what? I’m pregnant!” Overjoyed, I said, “I’ll drive down to Albuquerque to see you tomorrow.” We headed back to Yellow Thunder Camp, where we were joined spiritually through a Lakota marriage ceremony. Eventually we would also participate in traditional rites in Porcupine and at Chinle. To please Gloria and her family, devout Christians all, we were also blessed at the Presbyterian Church. To ensure that our children would be enrolled as members of the Oglala Sioux tribe, I bit my tongue and participated in a civil marriage ceremony recognized by the BIA. A few days after the first of the ceremonies, Gloria and I went on our honeymoon—to Tripoli, to attend a conference, which included Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
In 1984, when Jesse Jackson ran for president, Farrakhan held a rally for him at a Chicago National Guard armory and invited me to speak. I issued a challenge to Jesse, his Rainbow Coalition, and the Nation of Islam to get involved in the Indians’ land struggle and to study U.S. government Indian policies and how they were being applied around the world. It was a night of political hoopla, and people had come to lionize Jesse. Few were interested in a dose of reality, so my words were not well received.
Listening carefully to the other speakers, I was amazed to hear Farrakhan scolding his own people, yet also pumping them up. I had never heard a black man speak to his own that way, using all the hateful racist words and phrases such as spade, coon, and nigger that are so offensive to people of color. Farrakhan spoke also about Islam and Zionism, throwing blame around and condemning Jewish people for certain acts. But as hard as he was on Jews, he got on his own people many times worse. It was a masterful speech, starting slowly and thoughtfully, his voice becoming louder as he picked up the pace to condemn blacks while simultaneously reminding them of their untapped potential. He castigated blacks for continuing down a road toward exploitative misery when they could change themselves. He reached a crescendo of enthusiasm as he told them how to use the beauty of their souls, and then abruptly concluded with wisdom, thoughtfulness, and hope.
Every time I’ve been with Farrakhan I have admired his personal kindness and gentle ways. He is a humble person who always gives credit to others—first to Islam, then to his people. Always very polite, he compliments those around them. He’s not afraid to take heat for his words. When he speaks in public, whether at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the Los Angeles Forum, the Chicago Armory, or anywhere else, tapes of his speeches are available for anyone to dissect or criticize. I admire that in any person.
From the moment we met, Farrakhan showed great respect for Indian people. Of all the non-Indian leaders who say they are allied with Indian people, only he brought his whole family into the inipi. Only he and his wife and sons camped out with us and stayed to help us pray at our 1984 sun dance—actions we have never before seen from non-Indian leaders. Even today, when New Age wannabes and hippies come to our sun dances, they do it in search of selfish goals, hoping that by appropriating our religious ceremonies for their own use, they will find a path to personal liberation. Farrakhan had no agenda except being there to participate, to share spirituality with Indian people. I’ll respect him for that as long as I live.
My married life with Gloria began when we returned from a honeymoon in Libya in September to live in my hillside log cabin at Porcupine. At Yellow Thunder Camp, Shorty Blacksmith and other elders had taught me many new things, including my responsibilities as a father in an extended family. In the clan system of the traditional closed Lakota community, everyone has a role in raising children. To us, life begins at conception. The first twelve months of a baby’s life are broken into four quadmesters, and in each we have a different responsibility. Gloria’s pregnancy was a very beautiful time for me. Fascinated by the life growing inside her, I was reawakened to the knowledge and the stories that my grandparents had filled me with when I was young. For the first three months, I sang to the child in Gloria’s womb. For the next quadmester, I continued to sing, but I also began to talk to our baby, which we both felt sure was a girl. In the third quadmester, I divided my time almost equally between song and storytelling.
Early in her pregnancy, Gloria went for a sonogram, but when we saw the little fetus squirming in pain, trying in vain to get away from the waves of intense sound blasting into the womb, I made the technician turn the machine off immediately. How can we scream at our children that way? I realized again that the brutality and violence of Western medicine is yet another indicator of how primitive it can be.
That was a tough time for Gloria. Her parents had ostracized her for her abrupt divorce and for marrying outside her Navajo heritage and refused to visit us at Pine Ridge. Despite her increasingly obvious pregnancy, she threw herself into AIM, taking an active role in a series of demonstrations. Gloria carried signs at Bismarck jails and courthouses to show support for Leonard Peltier, the AIMster who had been convicted wrongly of having killed two FBI agents at the Jumping Bull ranch in 1975. She also joined a demonstration against the brutal incarceration of a young Pine Ridge woman who had fasted to protest being jailed and beaten after she refused to testify before a grand jury.
During Gloria’s third quadmester, an Indian woman named Margaret Yankton came to us and said she had had a dream. Our child, despite what we believed, would be a boy, she said, and we should consider naming him Tatanka—male buffalo. A few weeks later, in January—the eighth month of Gloria’s pregnancy—we drove back from Rapid City through the Badlands, north of Pine Ridge. It was a dark, moonless night, about twenty degrees below zero. Suddenly an enormous black bull buffalo appeared in front of my headlights. He was standing astride the highway on the first part of a gentle S curve near the reservation boundary. As I slammed on the brakes, he ambled to the shoulder and walked past us on Gloria’s side. Pulling up as quickly as I could, I turned the van around and started to look for him. Both sides of the road were lined with high barbed-wire fences. As I drove along, searching with high-beam headlights, I realized it was impossible for an animal that size to leap the fence, and there were no breaks in it. We never saw him again—the bull had apparently vanished into thin air! Gloria and I knew then that our child was a boy, and we would name him Tatanka.
Gloria’s father is an Omaha, a nation that follows a patrilineal line, so our son belongs to the Deer Clan. We were honored to name him, according to the clan’s wishes, Xila Sabe, Black Eagle. Few Indian nations allow two animals in a single name, but we Lakota are among the exceptions. Sapa means “black” and Wanblee means “eagle” in Lakota, so our son would be named Tatanka Wanblee Sapa Xila Sabe—Black Buffalo Eagle.
I was so emotionally involved with the developing baby that I experienced a sympathetic pregnancy, including swollen ankles, tender nipples, morning sickness, and everything else. When Gloria’s water broke on February 18, 1985,1 was so excited that I gathered up all the stuff we had packed for the hospital, loaded them in the van—and drove off without her! I was about two miles down the road before I realized what I had done.
Only weeks before, Gloria and I had demonstrated at Pine Ridge Hospital over the death of a dehydrated infant, whom IHS doctors had misdiagnosed and given a drug that had caused its agonizing death. Before that, no Indian had successfully sued the IHS, but after our demonstration, the Young Bear family filed suit and the hospital paid off. If they had insisted on a trial, they might have won ten times or more what they settled for, but at least a precedent had been established. For the first time, Indians could hold accountable those who practiced medicine on them. Because of that, Pine Ridge Hospital officials wanted nothing to do with Gloria. They sent her to Rapid City Regional Hospital in an ambulance. I followed.
With Peggy, I had witnessed the miracle of Tatuye Topa Najinwin’s birth. Just thinking about what women go through to create life fills me with a sense of wonder each time I witness a child’s entrance into this world. As I had believed when Peggy gave birth, it seemed impossible to break the bond forged by sharing the beauty of that experience. Even today, I don’t think a couple can ever really break apart after sharing the birth of their child.
Gloria’s water had broken, but she wasn’t dilating. I stayed up all night in the labor room until Sherry came to help. After twenty-five hours of labor, Tatanka’s heartbeat became very erratic, so we decided on a Caesarean—a good thing, since his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. Gloria recalls that as soon as Tatanka emerged, I cried, “He’s a darkie!” I was very proud of his coloring and his thick black hair. Like most brown babies, he had a blue birthmark that would disappear before he was two.
I wiped the blood from his face, ears, and eyes and held him close. I wouldn’t let the nurses have Tatanka back. I began to sing to him. One of the white women in the delivery room, perhaps an anesthesiologist or the head nurse, said something like, “I suppose we’ll have to listen to these savage chants now.” Gloria heard her, but fortunately I didn’t. I held Tatanka for four hours, walking through the corridors singing and talking to him in Lakota. It was a beautiful time. According to South Dakota law, every newborn must have a solution of silver-nitrate drops placed in its eyes to prevent the transmission of venereal disease from mother to child. To me, it is the ultimate insult, the most offensive thing I can think of. I wanted to scream and punch the doctors every time I think of that assault on motherhood that demeans and dehumanizes the birthing canal and the wonder of life itself. When I finally took my son to where doctors put drops in his eyes, I said, “You’re not going to do this in my presence. I won’t be part of allowing it.” I took my son to Gloria and left the room.
For the next three months, I never left Tatanka’s side. He must have thought I was his mother and Gloria was just a feeding bag. When he awoke in the middle of the night, I got up and walked with him. Only I could get him to quiet down; I sang the Inkpata, a little boy’s song. I didn’t mind losing sleep—I loved caring for him so much that it never seemed a burden. As I fulfilled my fatherly responsibilities, I came to understand a bit about motherhood. That was so soul-satisfying, so inherently good, that it was beyond description. At the same time, I was sad—because my people were colonized by the white man, at forty-five I was just beginning to comprehend and enjoy the life I should have known at twenty. If my ancestors had remained a free people, I could have raised all my children that way.