Anna Redsand

NATURALIZATION
 
 
Naturalization: becoming established as if native

[Emphasis mine]
~ Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

 
It would have made sense for me to feel angry or, at the very least, annoyed. Instead, my stomach flipped and my throat tightened. The anxiety was momentary, but it had made itself known. The rest of my class had gotten there on time, and I had given them the day's assignment. Now I had to give it all over again for one student. One chronically late student. Tineesha. She found an empty desk, nonchalantly pulled off her puffy pink nylon jacket and deposited her book bag on the floor. Then she looked expectantly toward my desk.

With two fingers, I motioned for her to come up, gave her the handout, explained the assignment, and asked her to join one of the smaller critique groups. "Oh, I haven't finished my essay yet," she said.

I swallowed past the constriction again and said, "Why don't you go ahead and join a group anyway? You can give the others feedback. Part of your grade is based on you giving feedback. And maybe they can help you move forward with your essay, give you some suggestions."
"Actually, I didn't start it yet. Oh, except for that free-write we did in class last time."

"Okay. Well then, you can decide how to best use your time, whether to draft your essay or give feedback. If you don't give feedback, though, you will lose some points, so you might want to draft later. Plus, your group may have some good ideas for you. And remember, the essay still has to be turned in on time." Tineesha nodded and went back to the desk where she'd left her jacket, took out her notebook and a pen and began writing.

I circulated among the groups, listening to their comments, making a few suggestions, recording points for peer feedback. When class was over, I went up to my office in the English department. I stared out the window at the skeletal trees and gray sky. As I pondered my earlier reaction to Tineesha's work habits, storm clouds gathered on the horizon. Tineesha's way of doing Freshman Composition represented the extreme in my class, but the other two African American students were also more often late and asked more frequently for extensions on assignments than anyone else did.

As I watched the steely clouds roll in, however, I was less preoccupied with my students than with my feelings about their performance. Something shriveled inside me when I saw them appear to sabotage their success. My first inclination was to examine myself for racism, but it didn't take long for my thoughts to shift to Neale and the world I came to know intimately through her.

***

My naturalization process had begun at the door of a motel on Old Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thirty years earlier. Neale and I were friends then, but it wouldn't be long before we became lovers. We'd gone to Albuquerque for the weekend, and around midnight, after seeing a late movie, we decided it was time to look for a place to stay. Old 66 is lined with one-story, courtyard-style motels from the Mother Road's heyday. Today the seamy side of life—prostitution, drug deals and transient stopovers—takes place in them. But in 1973, while tourists stayed in multi-storied chain establishments just off the new Interstate, we New Mexicans found comfortable, cheap lodging in the old, low-slung motels there.

The vacancy sign at our first pick was still lit that night, but the office was dark, so we rang the buzzer. A frowsy, middle-aged White woman came to the door in her housecoat and looked us up and down and back and forth, when we said we wanted a room. I'm a medium-height White woman, in my early twenties then. Neale is Black, almost six-foot-four with her Afro, my age. She was solidly built but not fat; in the dark she could easily have been mistaken for a man.

"We're full," the woman said abruptly.

"But the sign…" I said.

"I forgot to turn it out."

"Come on," Neale said. "We'll go someplace else." Back in the car, her voice turned hot. She said, "It's because I'm Black. They had rooms."

"But she said she forgot…"

"She didn't forget. They don't forget to turn out the sign when leaving it on is going to get them out of bed in the middle of the night. You go to the window alone at the next place, and I guarantee we'll get in."

She was right. After that, whenever we needed a motel, I went to the window, and we were never again turned away. That experience on Old 66 was like a needle shoved under my skin, inoculating me with a sample of the disease, creating the antibodies that would make me see things through Neale's eyes, sometimes even experience them the same way, the way generations of her family had.

As we became family, Neale tutored me in a new language. Nappy hair was too curly, unkempt. Of interest is the fact that this meaning of nappy does not appear in Webster's Eleventh Edition Collegiate Dictionary, although the British variant, meaning diaper, does. Now, at the opening of the twenty-first century, despite its absence from the dictionary, nappy is a word that many Whites are familiar with from movies and television; in the early seventies, learning this and other words was part of my naturalization. Good hair in African American English is hair that's not so curly—the less curly, the better. A conk is what a man gets when he wants straight hair. Ashy skin is just dry skin, but on a Black person it's gray, ashy looking. An Oreo is a black person who's Black on the outside, White on the inside, lacking in self-pride. High yellow refers to someone whose skin is very light.

CP time means Colored People's time, and it's not much different from what I grew up with in Dinétah—Indian Time. It's a kind of time that flows with the larger rhythms of life—the seasons, the tides, the changing from sun to moon, rather than with the sweep of a second hand. When people are attending to these bigger increments of time, there is no such thing as being a few minutes or even a few hours late. I never internalized Indian Time. My mother shouted at us every day except Saturday as she propelled us toward the door on our way to church or school, "Would it kill you to be a few minutes early for a change?" That's what I internalized, and it's helped me fit into the world of clocks and day planners with ease. So much was against Neale's and my partnership that it was fortunate for me and for the relationship that she didn't operate on CP time any more than I did.

***

In my university office, rain began slapping the windows, and the dark tree limbs swayed like small twigs about to break. I figured Tineesha was operating on CP time, and I thought of other possible reasons for her actions. She's a freshman, I thought, maybe overwhelmed by being away from home and being on a large university campus with all that entails. She could be afraid of success. Maybe she just hasn't learned yet how to prioritize—not unusual in freshmen.

But what about me? I didn't have to dig very deep to know that my anxiety came from wanting my Black students to do well, to not be laid bare to any criticism from their White peers. I didn't want anyone to be able to lump them into a stereotype, and I knew stereotypes abounded. I wanted success for them, but I didn't know if there was anything I could or should be doing differently to help them achieve it. And I was painfully aware of my own Whiteness.

 

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To Be continued.

"Naturalization" was first published in Clockhouse.

It was notable in Best American Essays 2014.

 

If you are just joining this serialization of Fissure: A Life Between Cultures, you can use the Table of Contents to help you navigate.

 

***

 

Sometime after my father's years of preaching were over, he, my brother Ed, and I went for a drive after a holiday dinner. We saw a man by the side of the road with his thumb out. Seeing the hitchhiker triggered a memory for my dad, who still had memories then, and he told us about recently picking up a Navajo man.

"He was a young man," my father said. "I asked him where he was from. He said Twin Lakes. I told him I used to hold Sunday night services there. 'Oh, you're a missionary,' he said. Then he asked me, 'Why did you missionaries ever come here? Why did you have to come and destroy our culture?' He was so bitter. So angry." Dad sounded bewildered. "I told him that wasn't true. We loved their culture."

Ed is much more able than I am to confront both of our parents with the flaws in their logic, and he does it lightly. He is a middle child, while I am the firstborn. Gently he said, "Really, Dad, you were. Destroying their culture." I was grateful to Ed for articulating what I thought but felt unable to say.

"No." That was all my father said, his voice laden with sorrowful protest. Not understanding. Maybe he even recognized a grain of truth in the young man's words or in what Ed said. He could not accept it.

Neither of my parents would have said that converting people to Christianity was also about converting them from traditional Diné ways to White ways of living. Within their missionary circle, few if any questioned whether or not those might be the same thing—Christian belief and mainstream culture in North America. It didn't occur to them that they were interlarding the majority way of life into their message, as if that were part and parcel of Christianity.

My mother's viewpoint was filled with her own pain, which so often caused her to be caustic. Her acceptance of the received missionary and government perspectives flowed through her demeaning speech and actions. The physician's first principle, "Do no harm," was also embedded in my mother's nursing practice, and she followed it, as so many other rules, to the letter. But she limited that code to providing physical medical help. She saw the effort to force Indigenous assimilation as a good thing, not harmful. And generally, as Janice told me in the girls room, she was not liked by people who saw deeper than her willingness to provide nursing care.

My father was a critical thinker, though always within the framework of a World War II veteran, a patriot, and a zealous evangelical Christian missionary. He was also, in many ways, a humanitarian, insofar as that did not conflict with his religious beliefs. As my mother's corrosiveness came from her early pain, my father's desire to help came from his pain as the son of a physically abusive father, whom he was determined not to emulate.

Curiosity is often a saving grace, and my father had it even after he began to lose his mental faculties. I, too, was curious about the Diné world that surrounded me. I wanted to learn to speak Diné bizaad. I ate the food, absorbed the love of the people I knew and loved them back. I embraced my parents' beliefs during childhood, but I sometimes secretly edged outside them. I relished my summer lullabies––the ceremonial drums and chanting that floated down from the hill above the mission. I would have liked to peer around a juniper tree when I heard them, to see what was happening, no matter how much I also believed my mother and father when they condemned the happenings.

From the stories I've told here, it's clear that, as a child, I observed and absorbed the differences in the ways my mother and father lived as guests in Navajo Country. Their ways often contrasted sharply, rising to the level of heated verbal conflict between them. Not until I reached high school did I begin to disagree with the beliefs they shared, even when they lived them out differently. It would be several more years before I understood the damage caused by how White missionaries drew a separation between religion and culture, thinking in all sincerity that they were offering a great gift. However, on an unconscious level I was deciding where I stood. At first, as children often do, I aligned myself without knowing I was taking a stand.

I have a sharp memory from when I was four and hadn't lived in Navajo Country for long. The house the mission board had assigned us in Shiprock stood on a hill overlooking the main road. The living room had a large picture window that looked directly onto Jack's Trading Post. We could watch people pull up in their horse-drawn wagons and go in bearing hand-woven rugs, bags of raw wool, or Bluebird flour bags wrapped around turquoise and silver jewelry. They came out with Bluebird sacks full of flour, red cans of coffee, bags of sugar, and boxes of canned goods. Old men sat along one exterior wall of the trading post visiting while their horses ate from their nosebags.

One day, we had visitors from Michigan, and they stood watching the scene unfold below. I was playing on the living room floor, when I heard one of them say, "Just look at those Indians down there."

By then I probably knew that Diné could be called Indians, but I heard something denigrating in the tone. Somewhat righteously, I imagine, and without a pause, I said, "They're not Indians. They're nice Navajos." I wasn't punished; I would remember it if I had been. But I was undoubtedly reprimanded for disrespecting an adult.

As an adolescent I became conscious of wanting to truly belong to the people who surrounded me, to be one of them. There is a minor incident that stands large in my memory. Our high school choir was bussed to Red Valley, Arizona, where our church had one of its missions. Before our performance, the Navajo church ladies stood behind long tables to serve a traditional Navajo meal of mutton stew and frybread. We lined up on the other side, and when I reached the tables, Mrs. Redhorse (Diné), the wife of the missionary there, greeted me by name. She handed me a bowl of stew, and I picked up an industrial sized salt shaker and shook a generous amount into my stew. Mrs. Redhorse laughed. "You're just like us. You love salt." A warm glow suffused my chest. I had been seen. Some White students stood near me, and I hoped they'd heard her. I wanted them to know who I belonged with. I had added all that salt because I knew that traditional foods were cooked without it. You were expected to add it later.

 

***

 

When the washing of diapers, the canning of fruits and vegetables, the cooking of gallons and gallons of soups and stews had been done, when there were no more church services to accompany, and most of all, when my father had more or less retired, my mother's harshness softened and diminished. My father preached whenever he was asked, until he fainted one Sunday on the podium. He continued to deliver Bibles to a stand at a Gallup truck stop, and he went regularly to the nursing home where he would spend his last years, so he could read the Bible in Diné bizaad to residents there.

In North America at large, in the Navajo Nation, and even in the evangelical mission world, an emergence from post-colonial policies and practices was in progress, and this seems to have had something of an effect on my mother. When she moved from my youngest brother's home into a nursing home, she was genuinely pleased to have a Diné roommate, a woman she already knew. Two days after Hilda's death, my mother had a stroke, and four days later she passed away. To me, this was not unlike a spouse dying within days of their partner. I chose to take my mother's departure so close to Hilda's as additional evidence that she had changed and grown with changing circumstances in the world around her.
I hesitate to write that my mother's prejudices can almost be seen as a gift because I am definitely not advocating or excusing her racism. But if Janice was right, and I think she was, my mother's expressions of antipathy, even when only felt, not heard, could have given the Diné people who knew her something to resist. It was probably unlikely that anyone would abandon their traditions because of her influence. Or maybe I'm projecting, and her attitudes eventually became something for me to confront.

 
My father's genuine interest in the people he met, on the other hand, made it more likely that they would readily trade in their traditional practices for Christianity along with its cultural trappings. It was my father's example I followed as a guest in Dinétah. In fact, perhaps how I related to life around me was one of my earliest steps away from both of them––taking my own path, which would turn out to be different from both of theirs. I didn't feel as if I was taking any sort of a stand. I was only doing what seemed natural.

Acculturation is generally defined as adaptation to a culture different from one's own, typically the dominant one. I acculturated in certain ways, not to the culture that prevailed in the US at the time and at home, but to the one that surrounded me and dominated so much of my early life. No one exerted any pressure on me to assimilate, the way the US government and missionaries did on Indigenous people. I did so mostly unconsciously because Diné people surrounded me with love and acceptance, because I viewed what enfolded me as positive, desirable, and natural, whether in spite of or because of my parents' varying views and actions.

***

Recently my brother Rick interviewed a Diné woman on her thoughts about missionaries. She was a child in Teec Nos Pos when our family lived there and attended the mission school. She spoke of how missionaries entered Diné homes without a thought as to whether or not they were welcome or belonged there. "And we served you food. This wasn't reciprocated." And then she said, "But your family invited us into your home." Her voice took on a sound of surprise, almost amazement. She repeated it. "You had us into your home! And your mother served us cookies. She gave us medicine, probably from her own stash. We knew she was," and here she used the Diné phrase meaning, the one who carries medicine. She laughed, "She was a pharmacist. From her own stash."

"From her own stash" was an incorrect but generous assumption. In reality, the hospital at Rehoboth provided my mother with various medicines she could distribute, including injectable penicillin. But the interview with Sharla helped me see my parents, and especially my mother, in a different light from what Janice had said to me in the Girls Room. We all have public and private personae, and in this telling of how I saw my parents encounter and influence the lives of many Diné people, I have exposed what went on behind the scenes. Sometimes the private spilled over into the public enough that people saw my parents in contrast to each other, in the way that Janice had undoubtedly overheard it from adults.

In a conversation with my mother, a few years before her death, I said something about her attitudes toward the Diné people. Her reply has left me still parsing the layers of its meaning. She said, "You and Dad always loved them so much. I felt like there wasn't any room for me to love them."

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

This is the final installment of Chapter IV of Fissure: A Life Between Cultures, "In the Girls Room."
Serialization of Fissure, will continue on Friday, 3/8/24 with the first installment of

Part II, Chapter V, "Naturalization."

If you are just joining this serialization, you can use the Table of Contents to find your way to the beginning.

***

 

In the early part of the 20th century, progressive Christians promoted the Social Gospel Movement, which they saw as living into what Jesus preached in his Sermon on the Mount––not just taking his words as nice ideas. To them it meant actually feeding the poor, bringing clean water to countries where people were dying for lack of it. It meant sharing the love they believed was the essence of Christianity in concrete ways. If that drew people to becoming Christians, well and good, but proselytizing was not their goal.

Evangelical Christians like my parents disparaged the Social Gospel; they believed the people they called liberals (progressive Christians) were taking an easy path, substituting the Social Gospel for preaching. The battle against liberals was almost as strong as the battle against Satan. They went so far as to say that liberals were not really Christians. My father talked about the Social Gospel pretty often, always with a sneer. And yet, in many ways he practiced it alongside his preaching by doing things like burning a dead horse so an old woman could eat.

My father was not a saint in the conventional meaning of the word. He could've put his wife first on the day of the dead horse and sat at the table for another fifteen minutes before heading out to stack tires on the corpse. It would've been a loving thing to do and wouldn't have asked much of him.

On the other hand, he helped the people around him because he loved doing it, not because it was his duty. He'd grown up poor on a farm in Southwest Michigan with an abusive father, and early on he vowed never to be like the man he'd seen hitting the farm horse on the forehead with a two-by-four. Instead, he took his mother, whom he did consider a saint for her kindness, her patience, and her prayers for her children, as his life model.

When we moved to Gallup, on the edge of the Navajo Nation, some of the members of my father's new congregation at Tohlakai suffered from alcohol addiction. My dad was deeply moved by how it affected not only the alcoholic but entire families, and he got a member of AA from Gallup to start evening meetings there. He saw fatherless children and took them fishing with my brothers, included them in hot dog roasts, and piled them into the pickup to go sledding. At my father's funeral, a grown man who had gone on these boyhood jaunts with our dad, talked about how much that had meant to him. Whereas I had left the church, this man was still an active member, maybe in part because of my father's kindness.

My father definitely preached to convert, however. At funerals he preached that "the wages of sin is death," always hoping to save those standing around the grave from an eternity in hell. He picked up every hitchhiker he could. Countless times, I sat in the back seat and heard him launch into the same talk with his captive audience.

"Do you have sheep at home?" he would ask. This was invariably a gratuitous question, as Diné life centered on raising sheep.

"Yeah. Sure."

"I'm sure you take good care of your sheep—taking them out to graze and get water. You watch out for coyotes that might attack them. You put them in the corral at night. You would know if one of your sheep was missing, right?"

The hitchhiker would nod, probably already regretting having accepted the ride.

"And if a sheep was missing, you would leave the others in the corral and go out to look for the lost one?"

The hitchhiker nodded again.

"Jesus told a story about the Good Shepherd who goes after one lost sheep. He doesn't want even one sheep to die. The Bible calls Jesus the Good Shepherd because he doesn't want you and me to be lost, either. Anyone who believes in Jesus will go to heaven when they die. If we don't believe in him, the Bible says we will go to hell, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth."

While he felt and showed concern for the lives of people in the here and now, his greatest concern was for their lives in the hereafter, and any way he could reach them for Christ was beneficial. He believed that traditional Diné ceremonies must be eradicated because they were of the Evil One. Some practices, like summer squaw dances (also called that by Diné, despite the otherwise pejorative term squaw) were mainly social but still wrong, in his mind. Other ceremonies were for healing. One in particular represented a form of what I see as restorative justice: the Enemy Way Ceremony, performed for returning soldiers to help relieve them of pre- and post-combat stress and return them to connections with family, community, and Native culture. To my dad and missionaries like him, they all had to go.

He saw rules that traditional Diné lived by as superstitious restrictions that fostered fear if they were broken. In his mind, Christianity could relieve people of those fears and offered the pathway to an afterlife in heaven. Diné friends have told me that many people have tremendous fear about breaking the taboos of traditional Diné ways. But fear of breaking cultural and religious rules is part of living socially; rules have, at least initially, existed to prevent behavior that can damage the group. Many restrictions in traditional Diné culture have to do with living in harmony with the natural world or have their origins in common sense, such as rules about water use in an arid land. As in many cultures, the origin of these rules has often been forgotten, so the proscriptions can seem irrational, not connected to real life any longer. The replacement religion and culture my father felt duty-bound to offer meant tearing apart a culture that had functioned well, but not perfectly––like any culture, my dad's included.

On one hand, Dad believed it was his mission to destroy the aspects of Diné culture that he saw as a false religion, and on the other, paradoxically, he was passionately curious about the culture, even the parts of it that he believed must be wiped out. He was able to live within this contradiction because he saw Diné religion and culture as two separate things, which is not how traditional Diné experience them. To them, all of life and how we live it is one great, interconnected whole. I learned this from Diné elders and healers, not from Bilagáana missionaries.

I've never been more aware than I am at this point in the 21st century of the necessity for vetting information sources. And I have to say that my father's sources were often suspect—White missionaries with their soul-saving agenda, White traders with their commercial agenda, the federal government with its assimilation policies, and Diné who had embraced Christianity within the post-colonial ethos and would thus have a bias against their own traditions.

 

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved. 

 

To be continued on Monday, 3/4/24

If you are just joining the serialization of Fissure, you can read earlier installments in order by using the Table of Contents

 

***

 

Diné people might not have liked my mother, but quite a few came to trust her as a nurse, and when she was called on in that capacity, she was always ready to serve. When she was offered Navajo Country as a temporary substitute for Nigeria, my mother agreed and took her first airplane ride to the Rehoboth Mission Hospital, five miles east of Gallup. It was 1946, and she met my father at the mission. He arrived after her by a few months to work as the cook for the boarding school and hospital, having learned institutional cooking in the army during the war. They married in 1947 and drove to Michigan so he could attend Bible School and become a Bible-preaching missionary instead of a cooking one. I think they had always hoped to return to Dinétah. By the time the mission board sent them in 1952, they had three children, of whom I was the eldest, nearly four years old.

Over the years, I saw things my mother did for which Diné people could have loved her. And maybe they did sometimes. One Sunday, after the morning church service, someone came to the interpreter who worked with my father and told him a baby had been born the night before and was very sick. Could my mother come to the family hogan to see him? We drove over, and my mother stooped to enter the traditional earthen home. She was in there only a few minutes when she came back out, walking swiftly and carrying a small bundle wrapped in a blanket.

My father turned the car around, and we headed for Shiprock, where there was an Indian Health Service hospital. From the back seat I watched my mother hold the tiny, naked, wrinkled baby upside down by his ankles. His skin, which should have been a rich brown, was blue-gray. Periodically my mother thumped his back, and she kept wiping him down with a wet cloth.

"Why are you holding him that way?" I asked.

"He's barely breathing because there's mucus in his air passages. If I had a bulb syringe, I could suck some of it out. Holding him upside down helps drain the fluid, so he can breathe easier. He has a high fever. That's why I'm using this wet cloth. I'm trying to bring the fever down"
The car bumped over the dusty, rock-strewn road. My father didn't watch out for rocks the way he usually did. We jerked over them, going faster than we ever had.

At the hospital, my mother rushed in with the baby. Hardly any time passed before she came back without him. "They said his temperature went all the way up to the end of the thermometer. Probably past it," she said. She sounded so serious, so worried. "They don't know if he's going to make it."

The boy did live and got named Clifford. The doctors said my mother had saved his life. Clifford grew brown and chubby, and whenever we saw him, his family called him my mother's baby. Surely that was a kind of love.

Still, it's not difficult for me to see why my mother was not liked in the same way my dad was. Her own mother was a brusque, direct woman, quick to judge, and she included my mother in her pronouncements. There never seemed to be room for doubt about what Grandma thought of people and their foibles. Once in my mother's kitchen, I was a silent witness to one of her cruel comments. By that time my mother had given birth to nine children (her mother had had only three), and my mom said something about the joys and maybe even the religious obligation to bring children into the world. Grandma said, without pause, "Yes, but a woman is not a cow, for instance." I almost laughed, but I saw my mother's face and bit my lips.

Despite, or more likely because of, having absorbed many more belittlements and perhaps worse, my mother became a judgmental person herself. If she didn't come right out and say what she was thinking, and she usually did, at least at home, her attitudes were communicated by her withholding visage.

***

There was a bit more to the rattlesnake story. Before my mother went for the shovel, she noticed that there was a Navajo Police vehicle parked up the hill at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. She went back to the house and called the school, which, since it was a boarding school, was staffed on Sundays. She asked to speak to the officer. She wanted him to kill the snake for her. When she told us the story at dinner, she said, "He hemmed and hawed, said maybe, and I knew he wasn't going to do it. What a chicken."

My father said, "But you know Navajo people aren't supposed to have anything to do with snakes."

"Yes, but he's a policeman," she said. "Why be a policeman if you're afraid of a snake? If you can't help people who need help? Those Navajo Police are useless."

My mother raised us the way she was raised––not to question authority; it didn't even occur to me to have an opinion about what my mother had just said. Though I had no opinion then, clearly my mother's blatant othering, made an impression, as I stored this and similar incidents. They would lie at the root of my radically opposing views later on.

***

Old Lady Appel was thin and bent and moved swiftly down the dusty road in front of the mission whenever she came by. No one seemed to know where her name came from, though her face did have as many wrinkles as the skin of an apple ready for the compost. Her long skirts swished around her high-top work boots, and her cane barely touched the ground. "What does she carry that cane for?" my mother complained. "Obviously she doesn't need it, walking at that clip. She's practically running."

When Old Lady Appel turned off the road and onto the mission compound, my mother groaned. "Why does she always have to come here when we're eating? And when you're home for once?" That was addressed to my father, who was rarely home at lunchtime.

Sometimes it was a mystery why Old Lady Appel came at all, and contrary to my mother's complaint, it wasn't always at lunch. I thought she was the oldest person I knew, and I can still see her sitting on the kitchen floor, even though she'd been offered a chair, while my mother, who probably spent more time in the kitchen than in any other room, worked at the sink. Neither spoke each other's language, though I could sometimes hear the old woman rattling on at my mother in Diné bizaad. It was almost as if she thought my mother would grasp what she was saying if she just kept on talking long enough.

When I look back, I think Old Lady Appel's visits might even have been a form of hospitality. Possibly she thought my mother must be lonely––a Bilagáana woman in Dinétah without her extended family nearby. Or maybe the old lady was just out walking and wanted the cup of water she knew my mother would offer.

I try to understand my mother's antipathy, which descended to its nadir when it came to Old Lady Appel, but was often present when other Diné people showed up unannounced. Although she was a guest in their land, my mother's attitude reflected the US government's post-colonial assimilation policies of the 50s. I often heard her refer to "those people," resentment in her voice, for many reasons, one of them because "they" had not adopted the White habit of arranging a visit ahead of time. It was an empty, ridiculous wish, as only the trading post, the school, and the mission had telephones, which made pre-arranged visits an impossibility. Never mind that scheduled visits weren't part of the Diné hospitality culture.

Aside from her insensitivity to the host culture at best and her racism at worst, I know my mother lived under constant stress. While we lived at Teec Nos Pos, her passel of children doubled to six; in the summer we had electricity only two hours a day in the evenings; her hands were always red and cracked from laundering clothes on a washboard and in a wringer washer––including piles of cloth diapers––and from hanging them outdoors to dry in all weathers; she accompanied church services (sometimes three on a Sunday) on the piano, pump organ, or accordion. But chief among her grievances, was the fact that my father was absent far more than she thought necessary.

He was gone to passionately spread the gospel. And to help people––probably one explanation for the first half of Janice Becenti's pronouncement: " You know, the Navajo people really like your dad."

One day my mother's nemesis did come by when we were eating lunch, on a day when my father happened to be home. We saw her scuttling along the road, turning in at the mission. My mother had things to say from the moment she saw the woman. When Old Lady Appel knocked at the back door––the only door we used––my father went to answer. A few minutes later, he came back. "I need to get John's help," he said. "She keeps mentioning łíí', her horse. She's making the motions of throwing up and holding her nose, but I can't put together what she's talking about."

The interpreter's house was a few hundred yards from ours, and my father went to get Mr. Tsosie, who was doubtless also eating lunch. Together they talked with Old Lady Appel. Then Dad came back and said he had to go out to her place. "Her horse died a few days ago, and the smell is so bad, it's making her sick. She hasn't eaten for three days."

He knew my mother would object, and she did. "Can't you at least finish your lunch first? That horse isn't going anywhere." But he put on his fedora, which I suppose looked odd with his short-sleeved, white nylon shirt and khaki pants with the front pleats. He left in the mission pickup with Mr. Tsosie and Old Lady Appel.

Over dinner that night he told us the story. "She was right, you know. The smell was so terrible, John and I had a hard time not vomiting. We threw a couple old tires on top of the horse, and some gas, and started the pile on fire. The burning rubber smelled terrible, too, but it got rid of the decaying horse smell. If we had just burned the horse, the stink would've hung around."

"Wasn't there anyone else around there who could help her?"

"She asked us," Dad said.

"Well, I hope she was thankful."

"She didn't say anything about that." He grinned.

 

"Of course not."

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To be continued on Friday, 3/1/24

If you are just joining this serialization of Fissure, you can find your way to the beginning by going to the Table of Contents