Shutter(45)

Grandma kept pulling things from it and gazing at them longingly, reliving her childhood and her past in front of me. A piece of me wanted to look away. Another part of me knew that this could be my one opportunity to understand the mystery of my past and to learn about the ancestors that came before me.

“Give me that red leather book.” Grandma pointed to the corner of the trunk. “This was the beginning of all of it. Right here.” The outside said PHOENIX INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL, 1931 in faded gold letters. When Grandma opened it, the pages creaked with anticipation—the years in storage stifling its remembrances, forgetting the feeling of human contact.

“This is me. This is your grandma, a long time ago.” She pointed to a large picture of herself as a young girl—maybe eight or nine years old, her hair cut into a bob right above her shoulders. Grandma wore a boxy dress and sagging white socks pushed into black-and-white saddle shoes. She stood next to an antique camera, the kind with a huge leather bellows and the sort of flash that could catch fire to anything or anyone standing too close to it. A throwback from the early days of portraits, with their dangerous chemicals and blasts of light. On the other side of the camera was a haggard man, his deformed fingers sticking out of his vest pockets.

“That was Mr. Wilson.” Grandma paused. “He taught me how to take pictures.” There was a huge space of silence in the room. “I was about seven. It wasn’t even a year after your great-grandma passed. I had just come in from helping your great-grandpa with the shearing. It was hot, right before the summer’s end, right before we were going to do the last of the harvesting in the peach orchard. It was a still day, no wind, not a cloud in the sky. We could hear the approaching roar of an engine way out there on the dirt road that led up to our home site. He and I watched as the black car came closer and closer, a huge plume of dust and smoke in its wake, finally coming to a stop near our hogan door. Your great-grandpa came out, waving his hand at the dust and smoke that settled around us. We watched as two white men with powder-white shirts and black ties came up to our home. They held papers and leather satchels. One of them stopped and smiled at me, but I ran away up into the hills. I knew they were there for me. They had come and taken my friend Esther two months before, sent her off to school. She never came home. Not even in the summer. I haven’t seen her since.”

Grandma shifted in her seat. The bed had no back support, so I moved out of the way and helped her onto her rocking chair. She sat quietly, remembering things. I could see her mind at work, her two thumbs twiddling in her lap. In the kitchen the sizzling continued, the walls and windows filling with condensation. I brought her another cup of tea. Grandma sighed and started her story again, her feet up on a footstool.

“My dad walked to the hilltop and sat with me as we watched the two men sit under our cottonwood tree. I always wondered what they were saying down there. But Dad was there to tell me that I was going. ‘I don’t want you to be stuck in this place all your life,’ he said. ‘I want you to go and learn about the world.’ I didn’t care about the world. I remember being happy there in the homestead; the water was so pure up by the springs, and we had lots of sheep and land. I did not want to leave. But we walked down the hill together anyway and packed a small flour bag full of my things—some clothes and a tintype of my mother. I was so sad. My father cried, and I cried too. I got into the black car with the two men in ties. My feet hung just over the seat, my toes touching the back of the passenger side where this white man with teeth the color of butter kept turning around to smile at me—nodding up and down.” Grandma set her tea on the floor and slowly started to rock her chair.

“An hour up the road and we were in Gallup, where the big train would head toward the ocean. The train was gigantic and made of silver. I made my way up to the train with the two men on each side of me. I guess they thought I would run away. I thought about it, I’ll admit. But when I got on the train with my little flour sack, it was shocking to see fifty or more kids just like me sitting in every aisle. The younger ones, who sat up at the front of the train car, cried—the kind of cry that makes your whole body shake. They didn’t look like they could breathe in between. They were saying ‘I want to go home’ in Navajo, over and over. It was heartbreaking. Before I knew it, I had tears of my own stinging on my burned cheeks. I sat down in the back row with two brothers who just sat there looking out the window. The cries would only stop when the little ones fell asleep, then they would wake up and see where they were and start crying all over again. It was a relief to get to school, to not hear them cry anymore.”

I really wanted to ask Grandma a million questions, but I knew the story was not over. I wanted to hear about this one picture of Grandma that rested inside the box. The quality was perfect, even though the photo had been taken years ago. I could see the determination in Grandma’s eyes.

“When we got to Phoenix, they took our pictures first. They would bring us all up one by one and that man, Mr. Wilson, would hold a bulb over our heads and take our picture with a flash that would cut through our eyes. I was mesmerized by that flash and by the big camera. I knew about pictures—that in the cities, there were cameras that could capture people just as they looked. I think Mr. Wilson could see I was interested. I remember his hands were all curled up at the fingers and he could barely use them.” Grandma looked down at her own hands and rubbed them. She stopped rocking.