Well, hm. Almost hate to put this big long thing out here right now, but since I haven’t yet set up my own blog and am anxious to post this
See, I was talking to this friend of mine the other day–the author of this article who was pretty frank about the pointlessness of chasing windmills and told me my time would be better spent telling stories. So I wanted to get this story out to him, and …well, Justanoldman, this one is for you.
The Personal IS Political: The Story of a Coat
The personal is political. It was the catchphrase that fueled the feminist movements of the 70s and 80s. Looking back on those times, it’s hard to remember what the phrase even meant. But I’ve still got that old Feminist Dictionary (Kramerae and Treichler) on the shelf, so I look it up:
The Personal is Political: A major slogan of feminist theory and politics which argues that personal and intimate experience is not isolated, individual or underdetermined, but rather is social, political and systemic (333).
Yeah, well, OK, so the phrase has gone out of fashion, and the phenomenon filed in the annals of his-story under “A” for anachronism. Better to be “objective,” not to admit that there really is no such thing as “objectivity.” Better to write and speak from a perspective of “distance” from the subject matter and to pretend that it’s really not about “you”–certainly don’t want to be accused of “being full of yourself,” even though any writer who contends s/he is not “full of him or herself” is, in my opinion, full of shit because being full of yourself is the nature of the beast that is the written word. In other words, writers–all writers–regardless of subject matter, genre or tone–write from the basis of their own experience and in the attempt to get across their personal (and often political) views, the difference being that some are honest about this “subjective” aspect of their writing, while others seek to hide behind the fictitious veil of “objectivity.”
The personal is political. Well, we saw how that dynamic worked when the Republican smear machine got its hands on Monika Lewinski’s blue dress. But we also saw how that dynamic can act as a positive force when one heartbroken mother took her personal grief to Crawford, moved a nation to tears and gave the peace movement a sorely needed jump start. I’m still waiting for stories of personal grief from the FEMA fiasco to have the same cathartic effect on the American public.
The personal is political all right, but acknowledging that can get you in a helluvalot of trouble. Well, I’m no stranger to trouble and never will be. I am a born troublemaker. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.
And most of the trouble I’ve gotten into in my life has started with some skeleton of a story buried at the bottom of my closet. But I didn’t make the connection between those skeletons and my most recent bout of troublemaking till I read the personal stories of a coupla women on the Boomantribune website, A Tale of Two Strong Women, or the story of how Diane of the Wind, meets Shirl of the Stars.
After a few days of eavesdropping on these personal stories (some might call it “lurking”) –acutely aware of their political implications and the power of personal narrative they at once contained and released–I got up from my chair and went to the closet to pull out a winter coat. I don’t know what it was that prompted me to drag that old thing out of the closet today of all days–I can only surmise that it had something to do with these stories I’ve been reading.
The coat is black cashmere, knee length, classic A line cut. It was a gift from a woman I once knew (or tried to). When she first gave it to me, I was tempted to throw it away because at the time, the coat was not at all fashionable. But, as the woman who gave it to me had stressed–it was cashmere, after all, and she’d gotten it as a gift from her grandmother, the Avon lady, so it was a family heirloom of sorts.
The woman who gave it to me was a welfare mom with an eighth grade education and a heavy-duty drinking problem who had a hard time holding down what jobs came her way–waitressing at the local yacht club, working third shift at the foundry, or cleaning houses for wealthy landowners on the far side of town, so the fact that it was a cashmere coat was not insignificant. She was giving me the good stuff.
Her grandmother–the original owner of the coat–had been born to an Indian woman on some reservation up in northern Minnesota and both of them had left the reservation decades before the coat ever entered the picture. I don’t know what they were wearing when they left, I only know that they left on foot, where they went and what they did next.
They left the reservation, and like most Indian women in their day, desperately sought to “marry up”–which, in those days meant to “marry white”; to marry white so that their offspring would be “light enough to pass” and perhaps then would have a better shot at surviving in a world utterly hostile to Indians and the other “dark-complected” people in “God’s country.” Well, that grandmother almost succeeded: she landed a man who was at least half white, so that the children, from that generation onward were “light enough to pass.” In the adoption records for the sixth child of the woman who gave me the coat, she is described as being “dark-complected.” That was code talk for potential adoptive parents, warning them that the child they were about to adopt wasn’t “quite white,” wasn’t “quite right.” Yeah, there might be a streak of savage in this darksome one. There was a time when it was not “fashionable” to be Indian in this country, and if you could get away with it, you pretended that you weren’t. You were “French Canadian”. Beaudoin. Archambeau. These days, seems the opposite is true.
But anyway, that damn coat’s been hanging in the closet for well over a decade now–every five years or so I take it to the cleaners to have the dust collecting on the collar removed. I have worn it perhaps once in all those years, and was actually reaching for another one today when suddenly I found myself standing there with this cashmere coat in my hand. I put it on and realized, “Wow. Amazing how fashions change, this is a damn sharp coat.” Indeed, precisely this cut has come back in style. Today it is the height of fashion. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing it.
The woman who gave me the coat was my mother. She died a few months after she handed me that coat and it is the only one of her possessions that I have. So I suppose that’s why I’ve kept it. Her grandmother outlived her–by two weeks, and when my great grandmother died at the age of 107, she may well have been the oldest living Ojibwe in the state of Wisconsin. She’d been light enough to pass, but was still registered as “American Indian-Ojibwe” on her death certificate–miraculously so, because on her birth certificate, she is registered as “white.” I am reminded of a story she once told, when one of her caretakers at the nursing home adopted a black baby. The woman’s husband, it seemed, was skeptical, and this was not lost on my great-grandmother who cast a dubious sidelong glance at the adoptive father and said: “Don’t worry, he’ll get lighter.”
So, yeah, the personal is political. And the rest of the story I’m about to tell is political in the sense that it is a story every Indian I know could probably tell, and most could probably tell it better. In some of the circles I travel in today, my story is the “exception” to the rule: it is “shocking” in the mere telling of it–but in Indian country, this story is the rule. In fact, mine is only a very diluted, tamed down version of the tale. I was one of the “lucky” ones. I was light enough to “pass.” This story is typical, but it is still a slap-on-the-wrist/by-the-skin-of-your-teeth story. As tragedies go, it really is a cakewalk.
The rule–that is, the “average” story of “Indian boyhood”– is probably closer to the story of Jeff Wiese, the kid from the Red Lake Indian Reservation who was so profoundly shattered by his own version of this sordid tale that he went out and shot nine others before he turned the gun on himself. I was struck dumb by Wiese’s story when it happened. Mostly because I knew: that kid could have been me. And there are many many more of us who were sitting there thinking, knowing the same damn thing: Yeah, that coulda been me. At the time, I went out and read the now infamous internet postings that kid had written. As gruesome as they were, one thing was clear: that kid was a writer. That kid was a talented writer. Extremely so. That kid’s writing was better than a lot of what I get from my freshman undergraduates at the university today. His stories are still out there. You can google his name and you’ll find them. Yeah, they’re there. For the record. They haunt me because of what they could have been.
My story is his story. Rather, my story is a milder version of his. My story is my mother’s story, and her mother’s before her. It’s always the same story. It repeats itself in a pathology that is passed down from one generation to the next in a continuum of tragedy that extends from the Trail of Tears to the Red Lake Reservation. And anyone who has studied the written record of the “trail of tears” that Jeff Wiese left behind will also be acutely aware of the fact that a big part of the problem was that no one wanted to listen to him and his story. At the end of one of his stories, the one last desperate plea … “Any comments? Any at all?..”
There was one, it read: “One. R.I.P.” But by the time that came in, Jeff Wiese and nine others were already dead.
Yeah. It coulda been me, but we all know that ain’t never gonna be. The point, though, is that Jeff Wiese was trying to tell people that they really do need to listen to these tales from Indian country. You must take the good with the bad. Non-Indians love to hear the stories about how corn came into the world, love to hear the stories of the way muskrat dived down to the depths of the ocean to bring back the clump of earth to make Turtle Island, to recite Navajo prayers and recant Hopi prophecies, just as much as many of them love to believe that if we would just sit down together at the table on Thanksgiving day, everything, yes, everything would suddenly be OK. The universe takes care of itself.
What they don’t want to hear, it seems, is the narrative of uprooting, of suicides, homicides, and genocide: they don’t want to hear about these trails of tears–things that have been described elsewhere, and aptly so, as “chronic intergenerational post-traumatic stress syndrome.” Trauma heaped on trauma heaped on trauma, over generations. But most people shy away from the story that every Indian knows could have been, maybe even would have been….were it not for this twist of fate or that…Well, with the absolutely alarming increase in suicide rates among Native American youth, the universe does not appear to me to be “taking care of itself.”
So here’s a fairly palatable version of that story, one that pales, indeed, pales by comparison to most. These stories need to be listened to because they are ubiquitous. Every Indian knows some version of this story. And these are the stories that need to be heard before we can all get together and move on to the “good stuff”–the coyote tales, the trickster tales, the stories the grandmothers told. Because these stories haven’t been listened to, and just about every time we try to tell them, someone comes along and tells us to STFU. God, you’re just full of yourself, aren’t you?
Well, if that’s what you want to call it. It is my story, and my mother’s story, that of her mother before her. It was not the story of her grandmother’s mother. I must have written the first version of this about the time my mother gave me that coat. Today, it is the story of a coat. But that’s not what it was yesterday.
Thanks to all who listen.
Death Wish
(a partial listing of parenthetical Truths)
by Lilian M. Friedberg©1992
She is never more than eleven touch-tone digits away – this phantom at the receiving end of the line whom I have pursued like the chimera of dream not yet dead or the flight of a bright blue butterfly. Each time I pick up the phone, my otherwise murderous memory fails me –
it steps
quietly
around the bend —
of possibility dormant in the blackness of a blank slate beside one last chip of chalk that might not screech. Maybe, just maybe I will get an answer. This time. This one last time. She might be there.
“Hi. Mom?” the questioning never ceases.
A moment of silent sorting through the voices, then, slowly, memory creeps from the depths, “Oh. Hi, Honey, How you doin’?”
“I’m okay.” I have come to speak in half-truths. “How are you?” And to pose rhetorical questions. I have called to tell her they have come. The fleeting has stopped. And the pursuit. Finally, they have made their way to paper. I am as excited as a typewriter that’s lost its stops. My tabs, pulled and tallied–I have begun re-collecting. The memories. A lifelong stringing together of facts unfolds now in a tapestry of words as I sift fiction from the fabric of this heretofore unspeakable truth. (This, mother, is the ineffable.)
“I’ve gone into print, Mother. Someone has published my work.” The letter of acceptance, already stained with coffee from a night of rat-te-tatat and tears, quivers, still crisp, in my hand. “Can you believe it, Mom? Really, can you believe it –“
But the familiar voice at the other end deadens archaic memory, squelches the primal urge. Ancient eruptions emerge.
“I’m dying,” she says. My lips tighten and clench between their fleshy red palates the unanswerable question. (Still? Are you still dying? Haven’t you always been lying there on that same deathbed? When will it end, this long dramatic death? When will the theatrical throes subside? How many fathoms must we both endure before you sink like a treasure embedding in the sea floor with a gentle, yet emphatic, thud?)
“It’s more than I can take,” she says, “your brother Dan and your sister Jeannie, they bring their children. Day in, day out – I sit with them thirteen hours a day. I am too old. The doctor says I am too old for this. These cuts and scrapes, bandaids and Bactene. They scream and cry, begging for attention. They pull at your legs and tug at your purse strings. Never have I known anything but this nagging, ‘I want. I want.’ Now it’s ‘Gimme some gum, gramma.’ These are supposed to be the best years of your life. The ‘golden years.’ You’d think that now, at my age – I am 62 – why this? Why now? And for what? A couple fifty bucks. For this I slave and sweat? All day, I have them at my feet, in my hair. My nerves are shot. I’m up to two packs a day. I’m down to 88 pounds. The doctor says I should quit. Too much stress, he says, the kids and all.” (Yes, mother please quit. Please do. Please do what you haven’t done before.)
“I’m working on a book, Mom.”
“Oh yeah, honey? What’s it about?” For a moment, she is there.
“About your life – and mine. I thought maybe you could tell me more about the times when –“
“Now you ask. When I’m dying you ask. Why didn’t you ask years ago, when it might have mattered? When you were sixteen, fifteen, fourteen? All those years you never cared about my life, you never bothered to ask…(Mother, you were locked away in alcohol treatment centers – when you weren’t stumbling down drunk. At 16, I was in jail, don’t you remember? The time you came home from the third shift at the foundry and caught me partying with my friends? Have you forgotten the way we crawled through the basement window, escaping narrowly into the wintry dawn before you could fuel your rage with what remained of the whiskey bottle we left on the table in our haste? Remember, Mom, I came back just a few hours later? In your solitary stupor, you’d piled my belongings in one corner of the room. The drawers were as empty as the whiskey bottle and the shadows cast by a woman’s face on the wall, sketched in shades of black and gray on white pasteboard – traces drawn by the young artist’s hand. I was so proud of that picture. They said I had talent – in the seventh grade, at the school where I went when I left you, mornings – they tried to tell me to draw, to paint, to tell the tale in black and blue tones, not red. Mine is a ruthless memory, Mother, it retains every detail; every line on every face. I could not forget. Not even the whiskey that cleared your conscious could erase from my mind the memory of all that had been. And all that had not. It whetted, sharpened, honed, whittled everything down to one thin white line: the line you crossed when you tore that face in two, leaving it hanging in tatters on the wall of what had been “my” room. The gaping wound where the mouth once was still begs for audience today. This line, more than any other, has cut out my tongue. Those dark eyes still seek in yours an answer to the question: Why? Have you forgotten how quickly the police answered your call? Coming, ordering me out of my nightgown? Demanding that I proceed peacefully with them? I was so weary, then, wanting only a crisp white sheet and a pillow to cradle a head worn with worry. Still, they handcuffed me and threw me in the back seat – as though I’d had the will to put up a fight.
There, on the steel cot in a cell under the cover of one threadbare blanket, you were more than eleven digits away. How could I have asked you then, when there was no black telephone – no receiver, no dial tone. Just one line gone dead, the unsteady hand of a child, and one more drunken Indian in the county jail. Another statistic, just for the record.)
“You don’t know how much trouble you kids were. Twelve hours a day I ran – between the tables in the cocktail bars, the factory shifts, the smell of oil and grease.” (Whiskey is all I remember, Mother, whiskey and gin.) I tried. God, how I tried. I was a good Christian woman. Episcolpalian. Do you know what my life was like? Do you know how I searched the bars up and down looking for my mother? Do you know how I watched my father beat her? Do you know what it is like to see your own mother beaten?” (Yes, Mother, I do. God, how I know.) “And what did she ever do for us? She left us there with him. Took off for Boston. Or somewhere. At thirteen, I ran away trying to find her, and landed in reform school. For trying to find my mother they put me away. Since when is that a crime?”
“I know, Mother, I know. I know it hasn’t been easy. I know what your life has been.” (Because you’ve told me this goddamned story so many times, in the very same words, you have painted it over and over and over again on my mind. I know this story by heart. It is imprinted on my memory for eternity and I can still recite the names of the taverns I called looking for you. Did you know there are more bars per capita in our home town than anywhere else in the United States? I have dialed those numbers, punched them out in the dee-doo-doo-dee-dee-doo-doo rhythm of touch-tone totality more times than I care to remember. And, yes, I still know my line – by rote: ‘Have you seen my mother?’).
“I never wanted you kids in the first place, you know.” (Yes, I know, Mother, I know.). “We didn’t have birth control, then, or abortions, not like you kids have now.” (Even without them, mother, I have managed. An ounce of prevention, they say; one thing you managed to give. I was never able to risk having a daughter I might hate in your place for becoming everything I might have been, but did not).
“The welfare. They took you kids away. They got no right. Then they had to tell you about the adoption. They told you. Aren’t adoptions supposed to be secret? What’s the word? Co’fidential? Where was my right to that? What made them think they could tell you?”
“No, mother, it wasn’t right for them to tell.” (But they wouldn’t have had to. I remember it all. Every last detail. The way you got sick and how they took us to live with the preacher when you went away. I remember the empty crib and the whiskey bottles crashing against the wall above it, leaving shards on the sheets to shatter deep sleep. I remember it, the interrupted rhythm of your mother’s broken heart. Beaten, barely beating, busted heart. I can still hear the cry of the child that never came home).
“How did you find out about that?”
(I’ve told you a hundred times at least, Mother, but I’ll tell you again). “It was in the squad car on the way from the county jail to the reform school in the city where they took me when you said you didn’t want me back. They were just trying to explain, Mom. Certainly it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t yours either. It was just that there was no place else for them to put me, so I had to go. The social worker gave me my file – I don’t know why. Maybe she thought then I would understand. I just remember the thrill of opening the brown manila, forbidden documents, an insider’s view of my life – and yours; stunned, I’d blurted out to them, ‘I didn’t know I had another sister.’ It wasn’t until years later that I made the connection between the preacher’s house, the empty crib and the adoption. But really, Mother, even if they hadn’t told me, I’d have figured it out sooner or later. I saw it. I saw more than you know.” (Which is why I believed what the file said about my father, and how you told the social workers you really didn’t know. You couldn’t remember. You weren’t quite sure. Who he was. Where he was. Which one he was.)
I am struck by the tenacity of maternal memory and how, even after all these years, she still seems to read my mind.
“You never believed me, goddammit. Never. I told you have the same father as the rest. He’d remarried by then. How could I have said I was shacking up with my ex-husband? In 1961? He is your father, I swear it, he is.”
“Mom, it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter.” (And it wouldn’t matter, really, if you would only have faith in this scathing memory of mine. It does not lie. Never, ever has it failed me. Not once. Your ex-husband was 500 miles away when I was conceived. I am six years younger than the youngest of his sons. Frankly, the who of it is irrelevant, and the why, but this constant battery of lies is more than I can stand. I saw them pass through your life, Mom. The men who never stayed more than a day. I remember the drunken fiascoes with my brothers’ buddies and the night the cops came in through the bedroom window to break it up because the neighbors couldn’t sleep. I know how much you do and do not know).
“You never asked me for the truth. You always believed what those goddamned foster parents told you. Now, when it’s too late you ask – “
I am without words. (And the others, Mother? Do they bother to ask even now? Do they know your life like I do? Oh the way you lavished what little you had on Jeannie. Jeannie who drank like you do. Jeannie who couldn’t help what her life had become any more than you could: she had, after all, had it so hard: she never was pretty, never was smart; at thirteen, gang-raped in the city, she came home in the aftermath – broken – to you, where she has stayed to the bitter end. She is there now. And when she hauls off and slugs that baby or puts a little whiskey in the bottle to get the screaming to stop, you pretend not to hear. Together you drown out the sorrow and the sound, driving each other to drink. You drink to remember, then drink to forget. And finally, drink a toast to regret).
“You, with your foster homes, you had it so good. All the time you were gone – traipsing around Europe, Africa, who the hell knows where – all those years, they kept calling, asking me where you were. They never stopped calling, ‘Do you know where I can reach your daughter?’” (What bothered you more, Mother, their questions, or the answer you couldn’t give?)
“You think those phone calls have made my life any easier, Mother? They couldn’t take your place. Hard as they tried, they could not. I will spend a lifetime cleaning up the mess the foster parents couldn’t sop up.”
She is quiet. Ruminating. “I never had that kind of money.”
“It wasn’t the money, Mom. Not then, not now, not ever.”
“You kids were all I had.” (And why couldn’t it have been enough?) “Then they came and took you away. I fought for you kids, believe me, I did. It was you who didn’t want to come back.” (I tried, Mother. I am still trying.)
“I know it hasn’t been easy, Mom, I know.” (And yet, I have somehow found a way. In my back pocket, I carry a passport bearing your name and mine. In spite of it all, I have been happy to share your name. More than any line of poetry engraved on any stone anywhere in the world, this name has sufficed. Somehow, it has been enough. Isn’t that perhaps what stands between us now? The fact that you hate this name as much as I have come to love it? You despise it. Yours has been the constant struggle to shake the memory of a man who left you with nothing but eight letters of an alphabet and the taste of whiskey on your breath. Mine has been the relentless search for a woman who left me with a mind that could not forget. You have hated your past as much as I have loved the prospect of the future. But the past cannot be pacified, mollified, nullified or mummified. You can’t sculpt it into a past perfect event: The memory of what might have been, if it hadn’t been this. Keep hating your past, Mother, and you’ll never have to relive it because you’ll despise your present and your future with the same Pavlovian zeal.)
I can almost hear tears trickling down her face and in my mind’s eye, I watch her rise in search of a bottle, a beer, brandy, anything but the damp regret falling from her eyes. I’m not sure what’s driving her to drink today: fear of love or fear of hate. Maybe just an automated response to a phone ringing ten thousand miles away.
“Listen, Mom, I have to go now. You take care of yourself, you hear?” My wish is sincere. But I’m no longer afraid of losing something I’ll never find.
“You, too, honey. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.” I mean it but in truth I am wishing she’d just hurry up and get it over with cause I’m tired of watching her die. I need to get on with my life, and with hers.