There There(12)

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    Out on the sidewalk, our mom turned to face the house. “Say goodbye to it, girls.”

I’d gotten used to keeping an eye on the front door. I’d seen more than a few eviction notices. And sure enough, one was right there. Our mom always kept them up so she could claim she never saw them, in order to buy time.

Me and Jacquie looked up at the house. It’d been okay, the yellow house. For what it was. The first one we’d been in without either of the dads, so it’d been quiet, and even sweet, like the banana cream pie our mom made the first night we spent there, when the gas worked but the electricity hadn’t been turned on yet, and we ate standing up in the kitchen, in candlelight.

We were still thinking of what to say when our mom yelled “Bus!” and we had to scamper after her, dragging our matching red duffel bags behind us.



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It was the middle of the day, so hardly anyone was on the bus. Jacquie sat a few seats back like she didn’t know us, like she was riding alone. I wanted to ask my mom more about the island, but I knew she didn’t like to talk on the bus. She turned like Jacquie. Like we all didn’t know each other.

    “Why should we speak our business around people we don’t even know?” she’d say.

After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Mom,” I said. “What are we doing?”

“We’re going to be with our relatives. Indians of All Tribes. We’re going over to where they built that prison. Gonna start from the inside of the cell, which is where we are now, Indian people, that’s where they got us, even though they don’t make it seem like they got us there. We’re gonna work our way out from the inside with a spoon. Here, look at this.”

She handed me a laminated card from her purse the size of a playing card. It was that picture you see everywhere, the sad-Indian-on-a-horse silhouette, and on the other side it said Crazy Horse’s Prophecy. I read it:

    Upon suffering beyond suffering; the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again. I see a time of seven generations, when all the colors of mankind will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become one circle again.



I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me with that card, or about the spoon. But our mom was like that. Speaking in her own private language. I asked her if there would be monkeys. I thought for some reason that all islands had monkeys. She didn’t answer my question, she just smiled and watched the long gray Oakland streets stream by the bus window like it was an old movie she liked but had seen too many times to notice anymore.



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    A speedboat took us to the island. I kept my head in my mom’s lap the whole time. The guys who brought us over were dressed in military uniforms. I didn’t know what we were getting into.



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We ate watery beef stew out of Styrofoam bowls around a bonfire some of the younger men kept pretty big and hot with chunks of wood pallets. Our mom smoked cigarettes farther out from the fire with two big old Indian women with loud laughs. There were stacks of Wonder Bread and butter on tables with pots of stew. When the fire got too hot, we moved back and sat down.

“I don’t know about you,” I said to Jacquie, my mouth full of bread and butter, “but I could live like this.”

We laughed and Jacquie leaned into me. We accidentally knocked heads, which made us laugh more. It got late, and I was dozing when our mom came back over to us.

“Everyone’s sleeping in cells. It’s warmer,” she told us. Me and Jacquie slept in the cell across from our mom. She’d always been crazy, in and out of work, moving us all over Oakland, in and out of our dads’ lives, in and out of different schools, in and out of shelters, but this was different, we’d always ended up in a house, in a room, in a bed at least. Me and Jacquie slept close, on Indian blankets, in that old jail cell across from our mom.

Everything that made a sound in those cells echoed a hundred times over. Our mom sang the Cheyenne lullaby she used to sing to put us to sleep. I hadn’t heard it in so long I’d almost forgotten it, and even though it echoed like crazy all over the walls, it was the echo of our mom’s voice. We fell asleep quickly and slept soundly.



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    Jacquie got on a lot better than me. She fell in with a group of teenagers that ran all over the island. The adults were so busy there was no way for them to keep track. I hung by my mom’s side. We went around talking to people, attending official meetings where everyone tried to agree on what to do, what to ask for, what our demands would be. The more important-seeming Indians tended to get mad more easily. These were the men. And the women weren’t listened to as much as our mom would have liked. Those first days went by like weeks. It felt like we were gonna stay out there for good, get the feds to build us a school and medical facility, a cultural center.

At some point, though, my mom told me to go out and see what Jacquie was up to. I didn’t want to go out there alone. But eventually I got bored enough and went out to see what I could find. I took Two Shoes with me. I know I’m too old to have him. I’m almost twelve. But I took him anyway. I went down to the other side of the lighthouse, where it seemed like you weren’t supposed to go.