SOUTH

South is the direction of release. Birds migrate south for winter. It is flowers and food growing. It is fire and creativity. It is the tails of two snakes making a spiral, looping over and over, an eternal transformation.

hen I lived in Tahlequah I used to walk through town, up and down hills, along the creek, by storefronts filled with items I had no money to buy. I walked when I was hugely pregnant and then after my son was born. It was my time alone. As I walked I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. They urged me out the door or up in the night, so they could speak to me. They wanted form, line, story, and melody and did not understand why I had made this unnecessary detour.

“Think for yourself, girl.”

“Your people didn’t walk all that way just so you could lay down their dreams.”

I wanted more and I didn’t know how I would get it.

My days were consumed with the drudgery of survival. I took care of the household, made meals of beans, fried potatoes, and cheap meat. I negotiated with a husband who was essentially a boy. He didn’t know how to grow up. His father had abandoned the family and he had no father-map.

There were flashes of inspiration and joy. I saw my son sitting by the screen door making dirt parachutes, his fine baby hair lit by the sun, singing with the radio: “See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me . . .” And my stepdaughter in a striped jumper with balloons in honor of her fourth birthday climbing up swings in a park.

But this wasn’t enough to sustain the need for artistic expression. I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned. I felt like I had left my dreams of being an artist in Santa Fe. My husband felt the same way, so we packed up the children and returned.

In Santa Fe we’d get together with our Indian school friends and visit, and while we discussed the state of Indian affairs, tribal aesthetics, and our aspirations at our kitchen tables or studios, we’d paint, draw, and make notes. I made ribbon shirts for extra income, and even tried out for the part of Ophelia in Hamlet for the Santa Fe Community Theater, for which I was made understudy.

Otherwise things were the same. Every day my husband went looking for work and came back with nothing. I worked as a carhop and an attendant at a health spa. One day I accompanied my husband to check on a job at a Cerrillos Road gas station. The supervisor came out to the car, looked in past my husband, and told me I was hired, though I wasn’t the one who’d come dressed for the job interview. I was wearing jean cutoffs and a T-shirt.

I took the job pumping gas, filling tires, and cleaning windshields. I also made a miniskirt in the oil company’s colors, which became my uniform. Lines of cars waited their turn for me to pump gas. The name of the station was changed to Mini-Serve Gas Mart. Months later, when I quit to begin training at the city hospital to be a nursing assistant, the supervisor said I was the best worker he had ever had. After that, he only hired women.

I paid half my paycheck to the babysitter every payday. One day when I was putting the clothes in piles to take to the laundromat, I discovered a love letter from my husband to the babysitter. I’d been paying her to take care of him. At least she kept the house clean, something he didn’t do before I hired her. But the betrayal marked the end. I didn’t see it at first, but I was set free. I left him.

Because of my hospital work, I decided to go to the university to study premed. I got help from the Eight Northern Pueblos Talent Search, an educational agency. Without their aid I would never have found my way the fifty miles south to Albuquerque to gain entrance to the University of New Mexico. I was assisted in getting money from my tribe for my studies. I stayed with the Martins, a Hopi family, until I could rent an apartment for my son and me. My stepdaughter stayed with her father. He would not allow me to adopt her.

        

Not long after I began my studies at the university, my stepfather ordered the youngest child, my brother Boyd, out of the house. He wasn’t quite fourteen.

It wasn’t the first time. When Boyd was around twelve, he was sent to Wyandotte Indian School, near the Kansas border. Unlike me, he didn’t look Indian. He took after my mother’s Irish side. Nor did he have any connection to the culture. He had been a baby at the time of the divorce. Boyd fled from Indian school with a boy who was teased for being overweight. Both were sent home after they were found walking down the highway, away from the school.

When my mother came home from work, I was told, my brother was waving a knife around, threatening to kill himself. When my stepfather came home, my mother reported the incident to him. He responded by demanding that her son be gone from the house by the time he got home from work the next afternoon.

Boyd was immediately sent to me by bus. I wrote my mother a letter expressing outrage at my brother’s banishment. My stepfather was the one who should leave, I said, not the children. He was the problem, I wrote, venting, not our baby brother.

What I didn’t know is that when my stepfather walked to the end of the driveway every day to get the mail, he opened everything and read it without my mother’s permission, even her private mail. When my mother called to tell me that he’d read the letter and that I was now banned from the house and that my name could no longer be spoken, I reminded her that opening someone else’s mail is a federal offense.

Because of the banishment by my stepfather, I was dead to my mother’s home for many years.

        

In the country there was a revolution going on. I’d seen it lift its head at Indian school as fresh art began coming through us. Indian country began riding the wave of a giant waking consciousness, inspired by the civil rights movement. We were waking up all over the country, at Alcatraz, in Pine Ridge, in Minneapolis, in Washington, D.C. As students active in the Kiva Club, the university’s Indian student organization, we were on fire with the possibility of peace and justice for our peoples. We stepped forth to take care of the spirit of our peoples, in the manner of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, whose organized front in the early 1800s fought to protect and renew tribal rights and traditions. Our generation was the seventh generation from the Tecumseh and Monahwee generation. Seven marks transformation and change, the shift from one kind of body to the next. Though black America inspired us, Indian peoples were different. Most of us did not want to become full-fledged Americans. We wished to maintain the integrity of our tribal cultures and assert our individual tribal nations. We aspired to be traditional-contemporary twentieth-century warriors, artists, and dreamers.

There was also a revolution of female power emerging. It was subsumed for native women under our tribal struggle, though we certainly had struggles particular to women. I felt the country’s heart breaking. It was all breaking inside me.

After one semester as a premed major I immersed myself in art studio classes and dance. I did not have the math and science background to do well in the chemistry and biology classes that were required for premed. I changed my major to studio art.

“I’m not interested in marriage or finding yet another man to break my heart,” I remember telling a friend as we stood in the heat in front of the student union. The tech people were making a racket while they set up the microphones and tables for a National Indian Youth Council and Kiva Club press conference. I had just finalized the divorce with my son’s father.

A fine-looking contingent from NIYC made its way to the makeshift stage to join our leaders for a press conference. Its members were modern-age warriors in sunglasses and with long black hair. There is my future, I remarked to myself as I watched a Pueblo man whose hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail. I watched his sensitive hands as he balanced his coffee and unclasped his shoulder bag full of papers. He felt familiar, though I didn’t know him. I had heard him holding forth at meetings and had seen him in passing on campus. 

As we stood in the hot sun listening to the prepared statements, I felt the immense preciousness of each breath. We all mattered — even our small core fighting for justice despite all odds.

That day would become one of those memories that surface in my mind at major transitional points in my life. I feel the sun on my shoulders, hear the scratch of the cheap sound system, and become emotional. I recall a Navajo girl in diapers learning to walk, her arms stretched out to her father. I remember picking up my son at the day care across campus, his bright yellow lunchbox shaped like a school bus swinging as he darted along beside me.

That night there was an impromptu party after the strategy meeting. I watched from the doorway of the kitchen of the student apartment we gathered in, as the eloquent Pueblo man I’d eyed at the press conference easily rolled a cigarette with his hands, pulling me over to him with his eyes. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my direction. The lazy lasso hung in the air between us. I passed him a beer and took one for myself. 

“Who are you, skinny girl?” he asked. “Come over here.”

I pretended to ignore him. He was too sure of himself.

“You must be one of those Oklahoma Indians,” he said. I could tell he was used to getting what he wanted when it came to women. “Come on over here and sit next to me, next to an Indian who is still the real thing.”

These local Indians could be shortsighted when it came to the rest of the Indian world. To Indians not from here, he could be Mexican.

“Why would I want to?” I said.

His eyebrows flew up.

“We’re full-bloods. We haven’t lost our ways.” 

“And what does that mean? You don’t even know me or my people.” Then I asked him, “Why do you have a Spanish last name?”

Of course I knew the history, but he had pissed me off. Still, I couldn’t help but notice his eyelashes, so long they cast shadows on his cheeks. I stood close enough for his smell to alert my heart.

Then my ride was leaving, and I made my escape. 

“Hey, girl,” I heard him shout as I shut the door, “I’m going to get you yet.” 

        

The next morning he called me up and recited poetry. His poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood. I agreed to see him, and we began going out. Together we nurtured a common language. I began to understand that poetry did not have to be from England or of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe. In his poems were his pueblo and his people, our love and the love for justice. The English language was pleased to occupy new forms.

Soon we were a couple living together in an apartment I’d inherited from another Indian student, who was graduating. There was a water line along the apartment walls from spring floods. I made a note to move come next spring.

One night we were out after the bars had closed. I waited on the Central Avenue sidewalk while he disappeared behind the Starlight Motel to take a piss. The vacancy sign flashed on and off. Closing-hour traffic jammed the street. Everyone was heading to the forty-nine, our after-closing-time gatherings in the hills outside the city, to sing our songs of home and love. Cars and pickups passed us with our friends, cases of beer squeezed under their legs.

I looked up at the stars in the clearing sky. Each direction was a world, and each world had its own set of rules, its own hierarchy of gods and demigods, each with its own particular color. I was working on a painting series of tribal leaders, one from each of the four directions, but I was stalled by tension.

When I was five, my mother began standing me on a chair to wash dishes after dinner, because otherwise I couldn’t reach the sink. The front of my dress was often soaked when I finished.

“Don’t get your dress wet like that,” she’d warn me. “It means you’ll marry a drunk.”

Yet night after night after dinner she would drag my little chair to the sink and my dress would get soaked, no matter how hard I tried to keep from marrying a drunk. 

Every morning that I woke up with a hangover after trying to keep up with the poet with whom I was so in love, I’d remember the wet belly of my dress. I’d promise myself I’d let him go. I knew I could not save him, but to let him go felt unbearable.

One morning he mentioned that his brother was coming into town from California and wanted to have dinner before heading out to the pueblo. He asked if I’d like to go to Jack’s for pizza with them. I knew that his brother was a hard drinker. I tried to ignore the premonition and remembered his words after the last binge, when he had promised that he was going to quit drinking. Jack’s, though it was also a pizza joint, was one of his favorite bars. They did make the best pizza. I decided to go.

That night after cleaning the house for company, I took my son to the babysitter. When I handed him over with his pack of clothes, toys, and snacks, I hugged him close, savoring his freshly shampooed hair.

When my son saw the babysitter’s new puppy, he wriggled free to go play with it. The babysitter was roasting green chilies and had just pulled out of the oven a fresh batch of little fruit pies that her people made. She offered me some. I wanted to stay put in her warm house, to wash dishes, set the table, and visit and forget the teeth of anxiety. If I followed it to the source, I would be slammed back into childhood, to my father staggering in drunk and beating my mother.

The first time the poet hit me was on a Saturday night. We hadn’t been together long. We were in that amazed state of awe at finding each other in all the millions and billions of people in the world. We were partying at Okie Joe’s up the street. He was talking politics with his buddies while I played pool with some of the other native students in the back room. I kept feeding the jukebox quarters, playing the Rolling Stones, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” over and over again. 

He was down about the anniversary of the death of his best friend, who had been his idol. He had been the only man from a pueblo to finish law school at the university, and he fought the U.S. legal system by any means possible, including his fists. But he couldn’t fight alcohol. He was taken down by drink, his body found in a field weeks after his death. His grieving brothers were honoring him that night at the bar by drinking themselves to oblivion. They were getting rowdy. 

I tried to ignore them and kept shooting the solid balls into the pockets of the pool table, just as I had ignored my father when he and his friends partied, argued, and played. I knew the routine. There was a high, and then there was a low. 

Every tiny hair on the back of my neck went on alert when I heard his voice yelling above the crowd, “Fuck you!” We all ran in from the pool tables to see what was the matter. He aimed a pitcher of beer at the bartender; it missed and smashed into the bar mirror with a terrible crash. We all scattered as the bartender called the police. The poet refused to go; instead he decided to climb the fence to the roof of the bar. I tried to stop him. He climbed to the roof and jumped, then stood up, unhurt, like a defiant child, and walked away, the sound of approaching sirens growing loud and shrill. 

I should have left him then. Instead I caught a ride back with friends who tried to convince me to leave him. 

“No, I want to get the sad goodbye over with,” I told them.

They convinced me to stay the night with one of them and go back in the morning. The next day, when I opened the door, all the lights in the house were on, the stereo was playing Kris Kristofferson, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and all the burners were on full blast, filling the house with gas. He was passed out on the couch with an unlit cigarette and matches in his hands from starting to make breakfast.

Later he apologized profusely. This will never happen again, he promised. He made us his specialty breakfast: chorizo and eggs. He came back from the 7-Eleven with a newspaper and a bouquet of wilted flowers. I told him to pack his bags and get out.

“No,” he said. “We can’t work politically for a better world for the people if we can’t hold it together in our own house.” 

I convinced myself that we owed it to ourselves to keep trying. I found excuses: He had been overcome with grief for his buddy. He was an Indian man in a white world. And most of the time he wasn’t like that, I reasoned.

I stayed with him. He planted a garden with my son in the small yard behind the apartment. He wrote beautiful poetry to me. He loved me. 

“So did your father,” one of my friends reminded me. “You’ve gone and married your father.”

I didn’t want to hear it, and felt even more alone in the path I had chosen.

        

That night as we walked home from the bar and I waited for him behind the motel, he seemed to take forever. It was about two-thirty in the morning, and as I stood there the avenue grew quieter after the initial rush of traffic from the bar. The desk lamp inside the motel office made me lonely. I felt far away from everything.

I carried an ache under my ribs that was like radar: it told me I was miles away from the world I intended to make for my son and myself. I saw my easel set up in the corner of the living room in our apartment, next to my son’s box of toys. I imagined having the money to walk up to the motel office to rent a room of my own. I knew what I would do: I would sleep until I could sleep no more. I would wake up with my dreams and listen and sketch and paint the visions I had put aside to take care of everyone else.

I recalled the dream I’d had of a daughter who wanted to be born. I had been painting all night when she appeared to me. She was a baby with fat cheeks, and then she was a grown woman. She asked me to give birth to her. This isn’t a good time, I told her. I was in the middle of finals and assisting in planning for a protest of the killing of Navajo street drunks for fun by some white high school students. They had just been questioned and set free with no punishment. Why come into this kind of world? I asked her. Her intent made a fine unwavering line that connected my heart to hers.

I walked behind the motel to look for him. I found his shoes under a tree. Beyond them were his socks, like two dark salamanders. A little farther beyond his socks was his belt, and then I followed a trail of pants, shirt, and underwear until I was standing in the courtyard of the motel. My stomach turned and twisted as I considered all the scenarios a naked, drunk Indian man might get into in a motel on the main street of the city.

I heard a splash in the pool. I remember thinking, He’s a Pueblo Indian; he can’t swim. I considered leaving him there to flounder. It would be his foolish fault, as well as the fault of a society that builds its cities over our holy places. At that moment, his disappearance would be a sudden relief. It was then that I first felt our daughter moving within me. She awakened me with a flutter, a kick. As I walked to the pool, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I never told her father about the night she showed up to announce her intentions, or how I saw her spirit when she was conceived, wavering above us on a fine sheen of light. I never told my daughter how I pulled her father from deep water.

Not long after Rainy Dawn was born on a hot July day in Albuquerque when everyone was wishing for rain.

I can still close my eyes and open them four floors up

looking south and west from the hospital

in the approximate direction of Acoma—

and farther on to the roofs of the houses of the gods who have
       learned

there are no endings, only beginnings.

That day so hot, heat danced in waves off bright car tops, we both

stood poised at that door from the east, listened for a long time

to the sound of our grandmothers’ voices

the brushing wind of sacred wings, the rattle of

rain drops in dry gourds.

I had to participate in the dreaming of you into memory,

cupped your head in the bowl of my body

as ancestors lined up to give you a name made of their dreams
       cast once more

into this stew of precious spirit and flesh.

And let you go, as I am letting you go once more in this ceremony of the living.

And when you were born I held you wet and unfolding,

like a butterfly newly born from the chrysalis of my body.

And breathed with you as you breathed your first breath.

Then was your promise to take it on like the rest of us,

this immense journey, for love, for rain.

        

I felt close to my ancestors when I painted. This is how I came to know my grandmother Naomi Harjo Foster intimately. I never got to know her in person because she died long before I was born.

Throughout childhood I studied her drawing of two horses running in a storm, which lived on the wall of our living room. And now, as an art major at the university, I found her in the long silences, in between the long, meditative breaths that happen when you interact with the soul of creation.

I began to know her within the memory of my hands as they sketched. Bones have consciousness. Within marrow is memory. I heard her soft voice and saw where my father got his sensitive, dreaming eyes. Like her, he did not like the hard edges of earth existence. He drank to soften them. She painted to make a doorway between realms.

As I moved pencil across paper and brush across canvas, my grandmother existed again. She was as present as these words. I saw a woman who liked soft velvets, a clean-cut line. She was often perceived as “strange” because she appeared closer to death than to life. I felt sadness as grief in her lungs. The grief came from the tears of thousands of our tribe when we were uprooted and forced to walk the long miles west to Indian Territory. They were the tears of the dead and the tears of those who remained to bury the dead. We had to keep walking. We were still walking, trying to make it through to home. The tears spoiled in her lungs, became tuberculosis.

She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow.

My grandmother Naomi copied the famed 1838 lithograph of Osceola, her uncle, to make a painting. He stands regal in a stylish turban with ostrich feathers, with a rifle in his hand. She was proud that he and the people never surrendered to the U.S. government. Osceola did not subscribe to the racist politics of blood quantum that were and continue to disappear us as native peoples. He was Seminole, and he acted in that manner.

Just as I felt my grandmother living in me, I feel the legacy and personhood of my warrior grandfathers and grandmothers who refused to surrender to injustice against our peoples.

Because my grandmother’s thinking inspired me, I was sketching an idea for a series of contemporary warriors to present in one of my university art classes. I considered including Dennis Banks, a leader of the American Indian Movement, and Phillip Deere, one of our Mvskoke spiritual and cultural leaders. He was a beloved prophet and a teacher. I considered Ada Deer, the Menominee warrior who fought for tribal recognition for her people after the U.S. government disappeared them.

As I sketched, I considered the notion of warrior. In the American mainstream imagination, warriors were always male and military, and when they were Indian warriors they were usually Plains Indian males with headdresses. What of contemporary warriors? And what of the wives, mothers, and daughters whose small daily acts of sacrifice and bravery were usually unrecognized or unrewarded? These acts were just as crucial to the safety and well-being of the people.

There were many others who fought alongside Osceola, and as a true warrior he would have been the first to say so. For the true warriors of the world, fighting is the last resort to solving a conflict. Every effort is made to avoid bloodshed.

I often painted or drew through the night, when most of the world slept and it was easier to walk through the membrane between life and death to bring back memory. I painted to the music of silence. It was here I could hear everything.

        

One early evening I left the university for home after a full day of classes. I began crossing Central Avenue in rush-hour traffic. It was not unusual for me to zigzag my way agilely through exhaust and congestion, my arms full of books and papers, a child in one hand and the other pushing a stroller carrying the baby while vehicles zoomed in both directions. I’d somehow even balance a stretched canvas. I didn’t have to think about it. It was a natural dance.

But this time I was alone; the children were already home.

I thought about what I was going to cook for dinner. Was the hamburger meat thawed, and did we have enough potatoes? And what about salad? It would be dark soon. Was my mother doing all right?

Then, without warning, I was gutted by panic. It coiled around me and opened uncountable hungry mouths.

I would die if I continued to stand in the middle of the avenue. I would die if I continued my way through traffic.

As I press the pulse of memory, I tell myself that if I knew exactly the direction the darkness came from and the shape of the clouds forming in the sky when the panic found me, then I might be able to stop it, even now.

If I am going to die, will I explode into millions of pieces? Will I evaporate? Or will I rabbit out into traffic and be run over?

When there was an opening in the traffic, I sprinted across the street. My lungs were panicked butterflies in gale-force winds. I made it to the telephone booth outside Jack’s Bar. I hugged myself. I was alive, but, to my dismay, so was the panic. I’d only succeeded in running from one island of panic to the next.

I dug through my pockets for change to call home, to tell my daughter’s father that I couldn’t make it. I shook as I deposited the coin and dialed.

“Please come and get me,” I told him. “I can’t make it home.”

How could I tell him that to make even one step was incomprehensible? That to make it the several thousand steps to go a mile up the road was beyond incomprehensible? I would die.

“Of course you can make it home.”

“Please,” I pleaded. “I don’t know how.”

He told me they were all waiting for me. I was late; he’d already started the potatoes. And then he hung up.

I can hear my voice now as I spoke into the telephone. It was flat, a dry plain. In the distance was the muscle of a whirling black tornado. How could he or anyone know? No one watching this slim young woman with her jacket hugged close would have any idea she was dying.

I had no choice but to try to make it home. I didn’t have money for a taxi, or even to call a taxi. I was terrified. I had to reach with my mind to imagine each step. I walked a tightrope over an abyss that whirred with the sound of a thousand bullroarers.

All around me students walked by to classes, to study, to dinner or home. Cars went up and down Central. The sun continued to fall toward the sea, into the west of endings. No one could see the force that wanted to kill me. Nor did anyone know how I had to coax each breath, each swallow. I had to count, so I could live. I had to make it home.

For months I continued to will myself to walk and swallow. Vast holes of panic appeared to open in the atmosphere. Crossing streets was particularly difficult. As I came to a corner, I’d hold on to signs, lampposts, or grip the handle of the baby stroller. Then I’d cross in a blur of fear.

One night I was driving back late from Acomita from visiting friends. Just as I started over the Laguna Pueblo overpass, the panic yanked the steering wheel toward the edge of the bridge. I fought to gain control of the car. Just before I was close to going over, I prayed for help. The panic let go and I was able to pull the car into the driving lane.

I was introduced to a native woman who was a psychic. She helped police find the dead. Two of my concerned friends asked her to read me while she was having coffee in the student union. She agreed. She asked me to open my hands. She looked at my palms. I saw what she was seeing. I saw the wreckage of my life, what no one else could see when they looked at me. I appeared normal, as I took care of my children and went to school.

She warned me, “Be careful. You are in great danger.” Then she gently closed my palms.

        

One night when the baby’s father was away in California teaching poetry, I felt a small island of peace. The children slept. I painted, listening to the song of the cricket who lived in the corner of the living room, near the front door. The cricket sang about the coming rain. It would be a light, misty rain. It was a day away.

I turned on the television, the story box that changed the story field of the world. The commercial aspect of stories threatens the diversity of the world’s stories and manners of telling. The television stands in the altar space of most of the homes in America. It is the authority and the main source of stories for many in the world.

Once when I was a student I had two televisions. In one the picture worked and not the sound. In the other the sound worked and not the picture. Together I had a working set—an Indian television set, I often joked.

That night as I sat in the quiet house alone, I was taken in by a story. I was taken to somewhere in the Pacific; it could have been Indonesia, Malaysia, or New Guinea. I watched as a shaman was called to assist someone in need of healing. There was an exchange between the patient’s family and the shaman. He called his helpers. He chanted and sang, and as he sang, the song literally lifted him up into dance. As he danced, he became the poem he was singing. He became an animal. A medicine plant accompanied him. He became a transmitter of healing energy, with poetry, music, and dance.

As I sat there alone in front of the story box, I became the healer, I became the patient, and I became the poem. I became aware of an opening within me. In a fast, narrow crack of perception, I knew this is what I was put here to do: I must become the poem, the music, and the dancer. I would not truly understand how for a long, long time.

This was when I began to write poetry.

EAGLE POEM

To pray, you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know that there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear

Can’t know, except in moments

Steadily growing

and in languages that aren’t always sound

But other circles of motion

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River

Circled in blue sky, in wind

Swept our hearts clean with sacred wings

We see you see ourselves

And know that we must take

The utmost care and kindness

In all things

Breathe in knowing we are made of all of this

And breathe, knowing we are truly blessed

because we were born and die soon within a

true circle of motion.

Like eagle, rounding out the morning inside us

We pray that it will be done

In beauty, in beauty

I knew I had to break off from the father of my child. He’d stop drinking, and then his friends and relatives would come by to visit with six-packs and brown paper bags of hard stuff. We’d sit around the table and they would pass a beer or a drink to him, though he’d tell them he had quit.

“Come on, brother,” they’d tease and urge him on. “What kind of Indian are you?”

I’d get angry with them.

I’d remind him and his friends that he wasn’t drinking. They’d look at me askance. I was a woman, and my tribe wasn’t even from here. I was not a real person.

But then he would take one, just one. And he couldn’t stop.

At first he burned eloquent. He was funny. He’d sing. He’d read poetry that would break you and put you back together with sunrise. It was hard to believe that this was the same boy who had caused great concern in his family when he reached the age of four and still couldn’t speak. One of the tribe’s helpers performed a ceremony with fire and loosened his tongue. He joked that they were probably very sorry now.

He would get sad. Then he would get angry.

One night I was forced to leave our house in the middle of the night. I managed to wrap the children in blankets and carry them through the dark to the neighbors’. I remember blood dripping in the white falling snow.

When I began dreaming of killing him with a broken vodka bottle, I knew I had to call an end to it.

        

One night after I had forced him to move out, he came looking for me. He’d been drinking for weeks. I asked my friend and her husband from Acomita to stay with the children and me that night for protection. We locked the doors and windows, visited around the kitchen table while we waited.

He showed up a few hours after the bars closed. We heard his footsteps kick gravel in the yard. He tried the front door handle, then attempted to force it open. He knocked, calling my name softly, familiarly, asking me to let him in. Then he kicked the door, yelling, “I’m going to kill you!”

He walked around to the back. He called out that he was pulling down the telephone wires so we couldn’t call the police.

The house went dark. We lost electricity.

He kicked in the back window. The glass shattered and he began attempting to crawl in. He was drunk and awkward. My friend’s husband entreated him in their tribal language to stop.

The police came just as he got into the house. I watched, pained and relieved, as they shackled him.

The electric cables crackled with power on the dirt lawn. The police had never seen anything like it. Anyone else would have been killed with all those volts of electricity. He appeared unhurt by the voltage and called out drunkenly to me from the back seat of the police car, “I love you, Joy. I love you.”

I did not get him out of jail that time. I did not take him back. My dreams had warned me.

I had taken him back many times, when he showed up freshly showered, smelling sweet, with sorry, charm, and flowers. I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn’t your real husband. He was a bad dream, an alien of sorts who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.

During that period my house became the safe house for many of my Indian women friends whose husbands and boyfriends were beating them. One night there were three or four of us camped out together. We listened to music, laughed, and cooked dinner. Our children ran around in the yard and played. After the children were put down to sleep, we sat in a circle and told our stories.

One friend’s husband had broken her ribs. The last time he had beat her she was in the hospital with her jaw wired together. Because she was hospitalized for so long she lost a semester of credits. Yet he was affectionate. He came to pick her up from school once with their pet goat in the back of the truck. I watched them laughing as they drove away together. She left the circle that night because she got a call from her mother. Her husband had come for the children and she had to protect them from his anger.

There were no safe houses or domestic abuse shelters then, especially for native women. We weren’t supposed to be talking about personal difficulties when our peoples were laying down their lives for the cause. We were to put aside all of our domestic problems for the good of our tribal nations and devote our energies to our homes and to justice.

These fathers, boyfriends, and husbands were all men we loved, and were worthy of love. As peoples we had been broken. We were still in the bloody aftermath of a violent takeover of our lands. Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. We were all haunted.

        

After he left I sometimes partied on the weekends. One early morning I realized I was partying into the weekday. The knowing lifted me far above the car in which I was a passenger as we traveled from one bar to another. This is what your life will look like in a few years if you take this path, said the knowing.

On one path I saw myself in a never-ending party. I would wake up every morning promising myself to change. Today will be the day, I would tell myself, and then I would open up another beer to deaden my knowing.

I took the other path.

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in
that world. Then we took it for granted. Discontent
began a small rumble in the earthly mind.

Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.

And once Doubt ruptured the web, all manner of
demon thoughts jumped through.

We destroyed the world we had been given for inspira-
tion, for life. Each stone of jealousy, each stone of
fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.

No one was without a stone in his or her hand.

There we were, right back where we had started.

We were bumping into each other in the dark.

And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
how to live with each other.

Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another and
shared her blanket. A spark of kindness made a light.

The light made an opening in the darkness.

Everyone worked together to make a ladder.

A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world.

Now, follow them.

Everyone is carrying a light that was given to be shared.

One night after a long, exhausting day of studying for finals, I lay down and fell into sudden deep sleep. But sleep didn’t last long. I felt demons grab hold of me and tug me with them into their lower world. I wrestled, struggled, and fought to get free. I got loose, leaped up, and turned on the light by the bed. I kept it on all night to keep them away. They didn’t like light. I could see their cold stares at the edge of the lamp. In the weeks that followed they began appearing even before I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what to do.

Not long after, some Navajo friends and I had driven back together from a native rights conference in Oklahoma. They were crashing at my place before heading back to the reservation. I woke up my guests with my noisy struggle with the demons. The next day one of my friends drove me to get help up near Farmington. A Navajo roadman took care of me with prayers and the spirit of the peyote plant. The demons disappeared.

        

Though on the surface I continued as a student who garnered scholarships and made excellent grades and was now beginning to publish my first poems in the university student magazine, I continued to struggle with panic. I considered all the possible reasons: the mother-in-law witching, tribal history, the strangle of jealousy from others, the banishment from my home, faltering into territory and offending spirits there. But no matter the reasoning, it remained a fact of my life.

I recalled how the dream of the chase began around the time our father left home. It would begin with the sound, just like the panic, like whirring bullroarers making an eerie echo that traveled across time. And I would begin running.

One night after writing my last paper for a class, I struggled in a sweaty, anxiety-ridden sleep. I was running, and then I was cornered in a white room. I could not find my voice. In all the years of the chase, I had never come to this place.

I heard a congested, snuffling breathing. The monster rose up before me. I saw him for the first time. The horror transfixed me. I had no room in my mind for such a being.

I realized how tired I was of the chase, of all the years of the chase.

Just when I was about to give up, the knowing reminded me that I knew how to fly. I thought fly, and I leapt to the ceiling of the white room. I felt safe.

Then the monster flew up.

There was nothing else I could do.

With a sudden, unexpected grace, all the fear within me escaped. There was no panic. I was a lightness I had never experienced before in my life.

The monster put his hand to me. It did not touch me. He disappeared. I was free. Free. Free.

I carried that dream back through several layers of consciousness, to where I stood in the future, with a stack of poems and a saxophone in my hands.

That night I wrote this poem. It is one of my first poems.

I release you, my beautiful and terrible

fear. I release you. You were my beloved

and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you

as myself. I release you with all the

pain I would know at the death of

my children.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the soldiers

who burned down my home, beheaded my children,

raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.

I give you back to those who stole the

food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold

these scenes in front of me and I was born

with eyes that can never close.

I release you

I release you

I release you

I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.

I am not afraid to rejoice.

I am not afraid to be black.

I am not afraid to be white.

I am not afraid to be hungry.

I am not afraid to be full.

I am not afraid to be hated.

I am not afraid to be loved.

To be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.

You have gutted me, but I gave you the knife.

You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the
fire.

I take myself back, fear.

You are not my shadow any longer.

I won’t hold you in my hands.

You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice

my belly, or in my heart my heart

my heart my heart

But come here, fear

I am alive and you are so afraid

of dying.

It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love.

There are many such doorways in our lives. Some are small and hidden in the ordinary. Others are gaping and obvious, like the car wreck we walk away from, meeting someone and falling in love, or an earthquake followed by a tsunami. When we walk through them to the other side, everything changes.

I had come this far without the elegance of speech. I didn’t have the physical handicap of stuttering, but I could not speak coherently. I stuttered in my mind. I could not express my perception of the sacred.

I could speak everyday language: Please pass the salt. I would like . . . When are we going . . . I’ll meet you there.

I wanted the intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors to pass through to my language, my life.

Much like the night I witnessed the healer become a poem in a far-away country (though in spirit nothing is ever far away), the spirit of poetry came to me.

To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.

“You’re coming with me, poor thing. You don’t know how to listen. You don’t know how to speak. You don’t know how to sing. I will teach you.”

I followed poetry.