My mother is Susan Power. And I am Susan Power. People call us “Big Susie and Little Susie,” all in one breath as if we are a single creature with two heads and four hands. Mama sews us dresses out of the same material so we will match. Though we never match, except in my little-girl aspirations. How can we? My mother is tall and beautiful, the kind of woman whose entrance into a room hushes conversation. We’re also different in color. Mama is the warm brown crayon I take to small portraits of white-girl ballerinas we picked up at the Salvation Army for a penny apiece. Their creamy fair skin is too much like my own, empty, ghost-like. They are dead to me until I color inside the lines of their skin and turn them Indigenous brown. And we don’t match in temperament; Mama despairs at my innate nonviolence, my oversensitivity, my shyness. She chides me for crying so easily—over death scenes in musicals, over mistreated animals, over Mama’s story of her pet magpie that shrieked, “Bad, bad!” as it was carried off by an eagle. But despite my being shy, what Mama terms “backward,” childhood friends love spending time at our house. My mother comes brightly alive when surrounded by company. She charms my playmates with her flattering words, her ability to detect the ones most starved for attention. She trains her dazzling light on their upturned faces until she is like another sun. I understand how they admire her energy and ability to engage our imaginations. After all, I’m her biggest fan. I am so much in reverent awe of my mother it is her voice I will carry in my head for more than fifty years, shaming myself at every turn. Mama says my friends come to see her and not me, and I believe her with all my heart because she is so exciting. But she never plays the monster game with them. The game where she pretends she is not my mother, rather a slow-moving, dead-eyed creature whose head swivels to stare at me without blinking. She stares and stares, until I beg, “Stop it, Mama, you’re scaring me!” She answers in a flat voice, stripped of all emotion: “I am not your mother.” I know she’s performing, that eventually she’ll drop this death mask, but the game always lasts too long, long enough for me to wonder if I’ve lost her forever.
_____
My father tells Mama that when she’s happy it makes him happy, when she smiles he can’t help but smile. We’re alike that way. Mama is our weather. Some days she is wildly alive and more fun than a circus. Other days she is unrecognizable, the whites of her eyes gone red like they’re bleeding, her hands and words destroying our strained peace. When I am little, six years old in the first grade, the way I explain my mother’s shift to a complicated state of both absence and presence is: Mama isn’t home anymore. Her rampaging body is there before me, and her angry words that crash like wrecking balls through my heart. But the mother who smiles and laughs and tells me stories is gone. These are the times I have to look after myself as if I’m my own mother, and hers. I head to the bathroom on the first floor of our house. It has a sturdy door that can stand up to Mama’s punishment. I lock myself in there as she pounds the door, smashing it with her fists, kicking it with her feet, bashing it with our heavy yellow telephone. She hollers: “I told you to keep your father from taking off! Why didn’t you stop him? You’re not Indian. You’re white like your father. You’re a big white cowardly baby! You better open this door right now. Open this door!” I ignore my mother’s command. I will not open the door until she returns to her body.
We bought this house from an elderly couple who decorated the bathroom with whimsical wallpaper featuring black and white poodles that speak to each other on old-fashioned candlestick phones. Long telephone cords stretch and curl between the dogs to form hearts. The Eiffel Tower rises in the background—clearly these are French poodles. I stare at the dogs while my mother hollers threats. Stare at a room full of fancy dogs who whisper love talk in France. I wish I could paste myself into their world, wish the walls would absorb me and let me use one of those phones to call for help. Dad has taken off for a cheap motel where he’s learned to check in using a different name or my mother will hunt him down and cause scenes, hurt him severely enough to send him to the hospital. These hotels are his own safe place like the downstairs bathroom is mine. When Mama goes changeling on us, wrecking our home and calling us every bad name in the book, all we can do is wait her out.
_____
I am seven years old the first time I save my mother’s life. It’s the spring of 1969, our family still shattered by the dark violence of the previous year, when two of our heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were slain. We live in a small house on the South Side of Chicago, moving here in 1967 because for a brief period the area is integrated. It isn’t easy to find neighborhoods that aren’t strictly segregated, but my father keeps trying.
Mama calls my father a “wasp,” and says that even though he’s white his ancestors were abolitionists and Native American sympathizers and later “bleeding-heart Liberals,” so he’s one of the good guys. When I’m older she’ll explain to me that “wasp” means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which she says is someone extremely privileged, someone whose ancestry can be traced back a thousand years because they were rich folks. Mama, on the other hand, comes from both poverty and wealth—a deficit of material resources but an abundance of culture. She is Yanktonai Dakota, the great-granddaughter of Chief Mahto Nunpa (Two Bear), a renowned hereditary chief. She grew up in North Dakota on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, sent to Indian boarding schools when there wasn’t enough food for the eight hungry children in her family.
“We had to be tough,” she says. “This was the Depression time and Dust Bowl days. The eye doctor says I still have grit in my eyes from all that flying dirt. Because your grandmother was an agitator, always looking out for the needs of our people, the Bureau of Indian Affairs made sure she couldn’t get a job anywhere in town. We were so hungry, scrounging for whatever we could find. We had it hard but didn’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves.” She glares as she says this, since I’ve been known to moon about the house, singing sad songs with an air of the deeply aggrieved. Mama won’t stand for pity parties in our home. My father and I are staggeringly fortunate beings in comparison to her; she won’t allow us even a minute of aggravation. We must get out of ourselves and attend to the suffering of others. My father and I concur with Mama’s assessment. We carry great shame across our shoulders, bent by the weight of empathy for her suffering, apologetic for the relative ease of our own lives. I often wish I could go back in time and help my mother, even though we both agree she wouldn’t have liked me very much, soft as I am. She teasingly admits she probably would’ve beaten me up every day to steal my shoes.
Sometimes Mama’s bad memories overwhelm her, and she can’t keep busy enough to distract dark thoughts. My father becomes the representative of everyone who betrayed her, including white America, even though he himself hasn’t yet let her down. She suspects he will leave her someday, though it’s apparent to everyone that he adores her. She’s noted how extra polite he is to white women drivers, waving them to go ahead at an intersection. His driving can bring on terrible storms.
I don’t know what triggers Mama’s anger on this warm spring day in 1969. I’m not at home when the inner tension finally erupts. I’m across the street, playing with my best friend and her siblings, though after an hour or two I’m overcome with an uneasy feeling. I leave my friends to their Barbie dolls and wander toward the front of the house. I’m keeping an eye on our place as if afraid it will suddenly burst into flames. I have this knack for sensing my mother’s moods, even when we’re not in the same building, the same city. It’s such a marked habit Mama calls me her “sponge.” I don’t want to stay at my friend’s house any longer, I want to head home to prevent disaster. Mrs. C____ coaxes me away from the window and my best friend drags me back to her room. I don’t return home until after supper and by then everything I dreaded has already happened.
I knock on the door and Mama answers, looking over my head to make sure I’m alone and no one else can see us. Our tiny foyer looks like the scene of a crime. Blood is everywhere, trailing up the carpeted steps, smeared across the living room floor, dripping steadily from a large bath towel my mother has wrapped around her arm. Dad isn’t home and I’m not sure whether he left before or after the blood. I don’t know if Mama punched a hole through a window to emphasize one of her points in an argument, or if she punched the window because Dad fled her wrath. All I know is that this isn’t the only bath towel she’s filled with her blood, so completely soaked it can’t absorb even one more drop—another saturated bath towel lies in the tub. I’m only seven, but I understand enough to realize she’s in danger, that a person can’t lose this much blood and remain alive. Despite Mama’s furious protestations I run across the street to fetch my friend’s father, who is a doctor at the University of Chicago hospitals. I figure he’ll know what to do, plus he has a commanding demeanor just like my mother, he’ll brook no nonsense. I don’t remember much of what happens after dragging Dr. C____ from his house. But I know he takes my mother to the emergency room and has his wife come over to babysit me, since a grandmother is there for his own children. I awake in the night and Mama isn’t home yet. Dad has probably checked into a hotel. The house is dark, but I can still see blood on the stairs as I creep down to the first floor. Mrs. C____ is watching television in our den. She smiles when she notices me and walks me back to my room, saying everything is going to be okay. She selects a volume of fairytales from my bookshelf and reads to me until I fall asleep. She isn’t the wonderful dramatic reader my father is, but her voice suits me just fine. Her calm, steady tone feels like a soothing hand across my forehead. In the morning she is gone and Mama has returned. Her right arm looks like a porcupine, bristling with dark stitches from wrist to elbow. She tells me how many pints of blood she lost, and it sounds like too much. It is 1969 and if you’re able to tell a good story the way my mother can, and if your friend is a well-respected doctor, you can somehow avoid being questioned too closely for an injury that should merit psychiatric help. On the one hand, Mama lets me know how close she came to dying, on the other hand, I am in the doghouse because she’s angry I “bothered” our neighbors. She is particularly cross with me for pestering Mrs. C____ in the night, enough that she read aloud to me. I hang my head in shame. I am dramatic and interfering. I never allow my parents’ arguments to play out the way that is natural. Mama tells me over and over that their conflicts are normal, and the only reason they get as bad as they do is because I don’t mind my own business. Somewhere in Mama’s scolding I’m made to forget that I saved her life, that I prevented her from bleeding to death. Somewhere in Mama’s scolding I absorb into my sponge heart the idea that every bad thing that happens in our house is my fault.
_____
Mama is a born storyteller; she uses her hands and face and eyes to dramatize each moment. Her tales are so vivid she takes me back in time with her, erasing all boundaries between us. In this way I live Mama’s childhood with her, and her parents’ childhoods. Some days their experiences are more real to me than my own: it’s 1934 and Prohibition has ended in the United States, but not on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Mama is nine years old and her sister Elsie is ten. They look like twin boys, barefoot, dressed in overalls, their thick black hair cut short at school. They have two older siblings and four younger ones that haven’t all been born yet. Elsie is everyone’s favorite. She has the best ideas for getting into mischief and has created a small cemetery she’s made in the yard where she respectfully buries dead birds and frogs and pretend-buries people she doesn’t like who are still alive and breathing. Mama and Elsie are playing in the yard while their mother is inside their two-room cabin, trying to find something to put on the table. Everyone who doesn’t work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is hungry.
Mama and Elsie are bent over the ground, gouging it with sticks. Their imaginations swoop together in the wind, closing them up in whatever stories they’re telling. A distant voice hollers, “Hey! Hey!” But they’re too busy dreaming to hear. The voice gets closer, louder, until their father stands over them and blocks the sun. He pulls them from their game, turns day into night. Mama and Elsie leap to their feet, fully awake and alert now, scenting the wind like cautious deer. Their father is Dakota, though Irish enough to sometimes pass for white when he tries buying booze in a state that won’t sell to Indians—it’s illegal for them to drink. So sometimes all he can get his hands on is homemade stuff, lethal as rubbing alcohol, hooch that makes him blind drunk, makes him hallucinate his children into other people.
Colvin Kelly (people call him “Collie”) is handsome as a film star. Women like him, like him a lot, even though he stumps around on a wooden leg. He speaks all three dialects of our people’s language—Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota—and his vocabulary is immense, as if he’s time-crawled from the days before white people and hauled back the words beaten out of his generation. His speech is like listening to older, happier times, except for those days when he’s monster drunk.
Today Colvin is mad with the drink, brain-haunted by too many bad memories. How he kept being dragged off from North Dakota to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, though he didn’t want to be there for even a minute, parading in a stiff wool uniform and tight shoes, hammered by English, kept awake at night by the crying of boys from a hundred tribes. All of them shorn and shamed and beaten. He was homesick, determined to grow up Dakota. So he ran away from Carlisle several times, eventually suffering an accident in Youngstown, Ohio, as he jumped onto open boxcars, riding the rails west. He slipped beneath a train and lost part of his foot. Infection set in and spread to his leg. He remembers the agents and policemen, how they removed him from his family, his tribal nation, his Dakota territory. He remembers the ghost of a little sister he loved so well, Elsie, who died too young. He names his second daughter after her. He recalls how she used to hold his hand and look up at him as if he were the best thing in the whole world, an unbroken boy capable of magic. He remembers the feel of her small hand in his rough one, and how when he reached in a closet after her death he felt the surprise squeeze of her hand, like she’d been haunting the closet, waiting for him to find her. No one will take him away from his sister again, take him away from his reservation, take him away from Dakota words that put him back together every time he comes apart. No goddamn agent is going to haul him anywhere ever again!
Colvin Kelly holds a shotgun on his daughters. His girls aren’t girls any longer, but government agents who want to take him somewhere he refuses to go. He tells them he’ll kill them if they move even a finger. Elsie and my mother stop breathing. They are frozen girls, too afraid to look anywhere but straight ahead at their father. They don’t speak. Their father does all the talking. He shouts at them in English, that language of enemies. Their father is so fixated on them he doesn’t notice when his wife sends the oldest girl to run for help. How long does it take her to summon Colvin’s friends? My mother will never know for sure. She stands like a carved statue for what seems like forever. She can hear her heart pound wildly—it wants to charge right out of her chest. She swallows each breath as quietly as possible so her father will forget she is still alive.
_____
My mother tells me that when she was upset as a girl she’d sit behind the family outhouse, grumping and brooding, wondering if the others would miss her. “I’d peek around the corner every now and again, and most times no one was looking for me, they didn’t even notice. Eventually my mother would call, ‘Suzie-Weezy, it’s dinner time!’ That’s what she called me, because I was Susan Louise. Usually when she hollered my name I’d run back and join everyone. But every now and then I wouldn’t budge. Angry that our father was so mean to Mama when he was drinking. Angry at her for having too many babies that were hard to feed. Mad that I was always the responsible one who did most of the chores and cleaning, who tried to shoulder my mother’s worries, and still I wasn’t anybody’s favorite. Those times my mother seemed to sense it was extra bad she’d come looking for me herself. She’d sit beside me until I felt better again.”
My mother calls what she did “grumping and brooding,” but I wonder if sometimes she wrapped her arms around herself to keep from flying into small pieces of busted-up nerves. I wasn’t born yet when she hid behind the outhouse, but I see myself sitting beside her, both of us desperately tired little girls who don’t know how to change what doesn’t work in our family. Each moment is another breath that has to be breathed, no matter how much blood is on the floor. And just when you think you can’t stand all the fear and worry, all the sour-tasting grief and shame, just when you think your body is too small to contain the feelings and you will surely disintegrate into so many pieces it will be like you were never here at all, just when you reach what feels like your absolute limit, it isn’t.
You hate that next breath because it came.
Mama doesn’t think I understand her. She’s always been suspicious of me, which used to be hurtful, used to feel personal. But now I know it’s only because my mother is suspicious of everyone—she’s never trusted a soul. I think I’d surprise her with how much comfort I could give her behind that outhouse. I would hold her hand and make her laugh, make her forget that people you love do terrible things you just can’t understand.
_____
It’s Mother’s Day, 1974. My father has been gone for one year, dying in circumstances a coroner’s inquest determines cannot be solved. I’m in the seventh grade and don’t have money to buy my mother a present, but I write her a poem and embroider an antique linen doily we rescued from my grandmother’s house when she died two months after her son. The doily has a pattern of flowers and leaves inked across the fabric. I’ve learned a new stitch and take my time to make sure the work is careful. I’m a fussy perfectionist who never thinks the job I’ve done is good enough. I go to school and get good grades. Nearly every day I think about jumping off the top floor of our school’s tallest tower.
Lakota friends drive over from Harvey, Illinois, to share a meal with us, make sure we’re not too lonesome. We tell jokes and eat frybread. Our friends ask me to sing for them. I read aloud the poem I wrote for my mother and everyone takes a look at the piece I embroidered. When they leave, my mother and I watch television together in Mama’s bed. I fall asleep there and sometime in the night I wrap an arm around her, fling a leg over her side as if she’s my body pillow. Mama says I remind her of my father because he used to sleep like that. I think she finds comfort in my presence.
The next day starts like all the ones we’ve just lived through. I’ve done my homework and packed my lunch. Mama drives me to school and waves goodbye. After school I make sure to pack up the books I’ll need to study that evening and step outside to the circular drive where my mother is always waiting for me. The two of us are punctual to an irritating fault. But on this day I look and look for her little green Ford Maverick and it’s nowhere to be found—I walk all around the block to be sure. An hour passes and I head to the principal’s office, where they phone my mother to see where she is. No answer. I don’t know how long I wait. Everyone else has gone home and the office secretary wants to leave. I keep wandering from the drive to the office, pacing and worrying. I am convinced my mother is dead. I swallow my heart. It moves from my chest to the belly, where it pulses and bleeds and dies. I have never been this scared in my life.
The Maverick appears when I’ve just about given up my last hope. Mama pulls up to her usual spot, but she’s looking straight ahead and doesn’t wave. Her face is angry stone. My heart is still dying in my belly when I step into the car and breathe the anger that has filled the front seat like scorching steam. Mama pulls out of the driveway and as we head down the street she begins shouting and pounding the steering wheel. She tells me I’m thoughtless and lazy and I don’t deserve her. She has been thinking all day about what I made her for Mother’s Day. I didn’t give her a card. I didn’t copy out the poem in a nice way. The embroidery was clearly a last-minute afterthought.
“You are so selfish! Always so selfish. You couldn’t even make me a card! Why should I keep trying when you don’t appreciate it? I’m sick of this! I’m going to kill us both now and put an end to this nonsense. I’m going to drive the car into the lake and then you’ll be sorry. I’m not giving you even one more chance!”
My mother drives recklessly, though she hasn’t been drinking and she never takes drugs, not even aspirin. Mama is sober. Mama is possessed. As we approach the drive that passes Lake Michigan, Mama swerves in the direction of an exit that will take us to the water. I grab for the steering wheel to keep us from flying off the road. I’m sobbing and apologizing, begging for my life. “I’ll be better!” I cry. I tell her: Yes, I am selfish. Yes, I am lazy. Yes, I don’t deserve her. Secretly I think maybe I do deserve to die. Maybe that’s the lure of the window in the school’s topmost tower. Maybe I’m guilty of not protecting my parents, guilty of not fixing them even though I love them. I’m hysterical with shame and fear and guilt. I want to die. I want another chance. We are hysterical together. I don’t remember how we make it home.
_____
I visit Whitestone Hill for the first time in July of 1977, the summer of Star Wars. Mama wants me to see this expanse of prairie in North Dakota where our ancestors were massacred with ruthless, calculated efficiency. My great-great-grandfather, Chief Mahto Nunpa (Two Bear), has heard of the hard times our relatives are suffering in Minnesota. They’re going hungry, the children starving, yet money owed them by treaty is delayed, siphoned away to pay for a civil war between people we don’t understand. Our relatives rise up in their misery and kill wasicuns who feast off our territory like swollen vermin, refusing to honor agreements they said they would never break. In retaliation for battles in Minnesota, Northern troops declare war on all Dakota people, whether they were part of the desperate uprising or not. Our Yanktonai Dakota village contains hundreds of lodges, and in September of 1863 our ancestors are far from the violence east of them, celebrating a successful buffalo hunt that brought in enough food to last the winter—they are busy curing about 400,000 pounds of meat. For three terrible days Generals Sibley and Sully attack our village, though Mahto Nunpa and his eldest son offer themselves as hostages in order to avoid conflict. Their gesture is refused. Hundreds of our people are slaughtered, and all of the buffalo meat, all of the lodges and cooking utensils and clothes are thrown together and burned.
My mother and I are standing on sacred ground. The wind is always blowing across these tall grasses—they never stop talking. The July sun burns us as we turn away from its white glare. We are alone on this hill. We are surrounded by spirits. Mama tells me to hush. She can hear rifle fire and the cries of wounded children. She points to a ravine and tells me she sees a dog running with a small travois strapped to its back so it can carry a baby to safety. “This wasn’t a battle, it was genocide,” she says. “An attempt to annihilate us completely. This was the beginning of the end.” She is overcome with sorrow. I don’t contradict her, though our very presence is confirmation that no matter what our government intended they have failed. Dakota women are standing atop this hill, haunted by memories. Sometimes we’re in rough shape and sometimes we’re so strong we surprise ourselves.
_____
Mama mistrusts therapists. She’s angered by my father’s plea that the two get counseling. She says the therapist will surely be white and prejudiced against her from the moment she walks through the door. She says therapy is for the weak, the privileged, the self-absorbed navel-gazers who don’t have anything better to do than cry for themselves. She points out friends of ours who have been in analysis for years, asks what good it has done them, since they’re still so neurotic. I develop my own fear of therapy, guilt that I should be so egocentric as to share my trifling woes with a stranger. Instead I become a psychology major in college, figuring I can learn enough to untangle the mysteries of my family. Years after Dad’s death, Mama still refuses counseling, no matter how tactfully I suggest we go together as a unit purely to improve our dynamic. Mama’s breath becomes shallow at the first mention of a counselor. She’s nearly panting with nerves as she interrupts my speech. She shouts over me, “It’s not so bad, it’s not so bad! Most families have worse relationships than ours!” It will take me decades to finally give up on my mother, to fully accept that I will never please her, I will never fix what doesn’t work, I will never ever make her happy. It will take me a lifetime to begin questioning Mama’s disapproving voice in my head, to wonder what good it has done me.
I’m astonished at how much anger can live in our cells, how many hard stories we inherit and carry and sometimes bleed out in dark splashes. Someone looks at us funny and the next minute we’re picking anger out of our teeth, chewing on old hurts that might not be our own. Mama says the only way she’s survived her life is to write down all her sorrows and fears and gripes, then destroy the pages before anyone else can read them. I’m touched by this gesture, this desire to avoid causing harm. I don’t tell her I’ve been reading her secret pages my whole life because she’s written them in shorthand all over me.
For years Mama is angry with her father, who eventually left the family to start another one in South Dakota. She’s angry he didn’t leave sooner. She’s heartbroken he never came back. He calls her a few times after she settles in Chicago but she hangs up on him. In her seventies she begins to soften, remembering how as soon as he had any money, even just a nickel, he’d spend it on the kids to get them a treat. She recalls how much he loved to see her and Elsie jig like he taught them on his wooden leg. She admires his command of the Dakota language, how intelligent he was, the best speaker, whom people would visit from miles around so they could hear the pleasure of his talk. He was a reader like her, desperate for books and newspapers at a time when they were precious to come by.
“Two times he beat the boys, that’s what made me hate him. He whipped them with a belt, which was shocking to us and our mother because Dakota people never hit their children. But then I found out his father, the white soldier, beat him that way, and the treatment continued in school. So I forgive him now. He didn’t know better.” She tells me that eventually he lost both his legs. “The reservation doctors used him like a guinea pig, cutting this, trying that.” She’s shown me her own butchery—an appendix scar from childhood that takes over half her stomach. “The doctor was a drunk. It’s amazing he didn’t kill more of us.”
_____
I tell Mama my writing has changed—I’ve stopped covering only the bright side of the moon. Sometimes she is so ripe and close in the sky I feel I can pluck her off a tree of stars. I imagine the full body of her, what I can see and all that is hidden. I begin unearthing stories from my joints and my bones. I am my own archaeologist, excavating scar tissue that has grown around ancient wounds.
I dream of my grandfather whom I never met. He’s a boy, young enough to be my grandson. Takoja, I call him and he smiles at me, a full beautiful smile that doesn’t hide anything. That’s all there is to the dream: his smile. I remember Mama’s story about the ghost in the closet, how he felt his little sister’s hand grasp his after she was dead. I wonder if maybe it was my hand, too, reaching across years through the mystery of time, to press encouragement on a tired boy, flesh to flesh, each of us so different, yet each of us the same.
Mama has often told me that when I write I might think I’m alone, but really there’s a throng in the room, people looking over my shoulder and tapping my arm. Whispers. Tears. The belly laugh of survival humor. She tells me to listen to these spirits, these ghosts of memory. I assure Mama that I’m listening, my spirit and heart wide open. I invite my ancestors to bring forward what is already inside me. I ask their forgiveness if I say too much. I explain that I’ve spent a lifetime saying too little. Their photographs surround me in this workroom, and though few of them are smiling there is comfort in seeing their strong faces. They haunt me in a good way, as I search for the next word and the next. They tell me that this generation is the one to heal a lot of bad stories. They tell me to keep talking and writing and facing the dark side of the moon. They tell me it’s the only way to not be a ghost while I’m still alive. I don’t want to haunt myself.
