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FISSURE: A Life Between Cultures

CHAPTER VI, Installment 2, NATURALIZATION

Neale had opened to me a treasure of African-American literature—Countee Cullen, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. We read aloud to each other, nights and Saturday mornings, propped against our twin reading pillows, and also on road trips. I remember exactly when and where we read Alice Walker's Meridian. We were driving to San Antonio, Texas, to visit friends for Thanksgiving. Somewhere between Artesia and Carlsbad, under a fine autumn rain, my voice broke, and I couldn't read more for grief. I don't remember now specifically what I was grieving. It could have been the troubled relationship between Meridian and her mother, the relationship that made Meridian feel she needed to ask forgiveness because she existed—not unlike my relationship with my mother. It could have been for the way we humans in our deepest intimacies are capable of such hurtfulness. It could have been for shame and hopelessness over the way race has become an excuse for not extending ourselves in love. Whatever it was, Neale pulled our sky-blue Beetle onto the desert shoulder and held me while I sobbed.


In New Mexico Blacks represented less than two percent of the population in the seventies. "Just because we're only two percent of the population doesn't mean we're not here," Neale complained. "They need to stop calling New Mexico the tri-cultural state. Native American and Hispanic, yes. But there's no such thing as a White culture. There are Dutch and Italian, German and Polish cultures, but not White culture. And just because the black presence is small, doesn't mean we haven't been here contributing. We've been in New Mexico since before the Civil War as cowboys and during and after the war as soldiers."


The size of the Black population meant we spent hours searching for Black hair products, and we were jubilant when we finally located a store on South Broadway in Albuquerque that stocked them. We searched until we found a Black barber in the same neighborhood to trim Neale's Afro after a Gallup beautician and I had both made her look less than presentable. I asked the barber if he knew how to cut "White" hair. "Of course," he said. "That's all I learned in barber school. I had to teach myself how to cut Black hair."


I found out that's how a lot of things are, how Black people, raised in the dominant culture, know so much more about White people than Whites do about Blacks. I saw that it wasn't very different from growing up lesbian in a straight world. Raised to be straight, I knew more about what it meant to be heterosexual than about who I might be in a gay world I knew nothing about for the longest time.


I experienced the odd effect of living in photonegative when we visited Neale's family in Brooklyn. At home in New Mexico, I sometimes felt that I lived in Neale's shadow. People who forgot my name always remembered hers. They remembered things she'd said; next to her I often felt small and, well, colorless. Intellectually sharp, a voracious reader, charming and outspoken, she was a presence to be reckoned with in any setting. It wasn't until we visited Brooklyn for the second time that I realized context had something to do with how memorable each of us was to the people who met us.


We were upstairs in Neale's sisters' bedroom, dressing to go out. "You know what?" I said, amazement in my voice. "Those people who came to the party this afternoon, they all remembered my name from when we were here last Christmas. They remembered things about me from our last visit. I couldn't believe it. Usually it's you that people remember."


"That's because in New Mexico, I'm the one who's different. Here you're the one who's different. That's all. It's not that I'm more memorable. I keep telling you that."


Our early educations also showed up in silver and black. In the public schools of urban New York with their high Black enrollments, Neale had never once had an African American teacher. My first teachers, on the other hand, were all Black. Growing up in Teec Nos Pos, deep in the heart of Dinétah, my first school, which ran from kindergarten through second grade, was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In the early fifties the federal government was one of few equal opportunity employers, so most teachers in the BIA schools were Black and came from places like Arkansas, Mississippi and Georgia to pass on the soft, round English of the Black South to Native American children who were just learning the language.


My first crush was on my younger brother's caramel-colored teacher who wore lipstick and smelled like perfume. I was looking for the mothering that my own mother seemed too busy with her five other children to give, and Miss Huff patiently listened to me chatter every afternoon after school, even letting me visit her tiny round-ended trailer while she cooked supper. Before I fell asleep at night I imagined burying my face in the nubbly roughness of her knitted, ribbed beige dress and breathing in her smell while she cupped the back of my head in her hands.


I can only imagine that in the evening, when they spent time together, the teachers used words like the ones Neale would teach me—among them, nappy and high yellow. But in public, which consisted of the school, our family, and the traders' families, they lived the assimilated lives of professionals. They called themselves colored and were more refined by middle class, White standards than my mother was.


Of the two of us, Neale would undoubtedly have benefited more from having African American teachers, from seeing women whose careers might tell her, "I did it, and you can too." Although they taught me nothing of African American culture and never spoke in front of me about the racism they'd experienced, though they appeared to be part of whatever I knew of mainstream culture, they might well have related differently with Neale and other Black children. Nevertheless, I benefited from these teachers in some different ways than Neale would have.


One day when I was in second grade, we were called out of the classroom, one by one, to a room that looked like a little clinic. I had never been in there before, so I looked around with interest at the examining table, the scale, the jars of cotton balls, tongue depressors, applicators and medicines. A chart with rows of the capital letter E hung on one wall. The Es were placed upside down, backwards and sideways, and as they moved down the page, the letters got smaller and smaller.


Miss Huff was already in the room, sitting at a desk with a clipboard and pen. She told me to cover one eye with my hand and use the other hand to show the positions of the letter E. I moved my hand up and down and sideways with ease, sure that I was doing a fine job. The teacher-principal, Miss Holbrook, also Black, came in before I'd finished and stood beside Miss Huff. By this time I had covered my other eye and was confidently showing the positions of the Es with my other hand. Miss Holbrook whispered loudly to Miss Huff, "Look at those hands, so white and skinny, compared to the brown chubby ones."


As soon as she said it, my stomach knotted up, and my fingers turned cold. I wanted to hide my face, and in a way I did, by not showing that I had heard. I finished all the rows, but my feeling of accomplishment had vanished. Back in the classroom, I held my fingers below the top of my desk and stared at them. I knew there was something wrong with them, something wrong with me, and it was about the color of my skin.


I was one of three White children attending the school, and all the personnel were either Diné or African American. Ever since we'd moved to Navajo Country for my parents to take up missionary work when I was three, although I was racially part of the American majority, I almost always found myself in the minority. It was something I was accustomed to, and now I would say that being in the minority from day to day enriched my life. Even Miss Holbrook's words, while painful to hear, enriched me, helping me later to empathize more deeply than I otherwise might have with anyone who suffered discrimination. Those early experiences were like an alcohol swab, preparing my skin for that first needle prick on Old 66.


True naturalization takes place over time, through the mundane, through the breaking of bread, through experiences that enter one's consciousness slowly, often in such small increments that the events are scarcely noticed or recognized as bringing about deep transformation. Neale and I brought our family recipes to our kitchen, but it was when I ate with her family that I noticed some of the differences in how our families cooked. Her West Indian grandmother made turkey for Christmas dinner, but the gravy had a tomato base, and golden rings of onions floated in it, instead of the giblets in brown sauce that my mother made. Neale's stepfather, in a very big production, made peas and rice with pigtails, and I was amazed to see how long a pig's tail really is—more than a foot. Back at home I learned to cook collard greens in pot likker until the tastes of ham and brown sugar and greens had married into an irresistible mix of flavors and textures. I replicated Grandma's gravy when I roasted a chicken. I did not think that I was drawing sustenance from another culture and becoming part of it at its edges; some habits changed without Neale or me or anyone else taking notice.


I knew I had truly arrived in my adopted homeland when Neale said laughingly, sounding surprised at herself, "I almost called you niggah just now. You know, in the way only we can call each other that." A couple of days later, it happened; in a moment of hilarity she called me the word I always referred to as the N-word. Maybe she couldn't do it without first preparing me. So I would know it was a good thing, a sign of belonging.


Often the things that knit us most tightly together are less the joys and more the difficulties we survive together. It makes some sense then, that I mark the beginning of my naturalization process at that motel on Old 66, with Neale's and my shared humiliation and anger. Much later, when Neale was trying to get into medical school, she paid a visit to the dean at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Afterwards, my hopes for her took a slide when she came home with a grim face. I poured tea and held her hand at the kitchen table  "The woman barely even let me say anything. She took one look at me and said, 'We already have one of you. Why don't you try the law school?'"


Perhaps the greatest agent of naturalization comes from deep bonding experiences brought on by shared tragedy. One morning when we were getting ready for work, the phone rang. It was Neale's mother, calling from Brooklyn. She told Neale that her stepfather had died the night before of a heart attack. We decided we couldn't afford two plane tickets, so we made flight arrangements, and I drove Neale to the airport. When I got home that evening, she called. She sounded almost as if she were choking as she told me that Harold hadn't had a heart attack. A family member had stabbed him. "How long did my mother think it would take me to find out what really happened? It's crazy here." Neale's voice broke.


"I'm coming there," I said.


Neale protested for about a second, then sounded relieved.


I arrived in Newark at noon the next day. Neale was right. It was pretty crazy, and I dove into the craziness, trying to help, to be a support. The party where everyone remembered me was really Harold's wake. Some of the guests continued to go along with the pretense that he had died of a heart attack. That was crazy in itself because Harold was a retired police officer, and of course his police brothers knew all the details.


I helped to serve the food people brought—hams, turkeys, casseroles, sweet potato and bean pies. I visited with the people who remembered me. I sat with the family at the High Episcopal funeral service and watched the police honor guard bear the casket out to the hearse. Afterwards we drove for miles and miles through glorious red, yellow, and rust foliage to the cemetery in Long Island. And for days we ate leftover black-eyed peas and collard greens and turkey.


***

©Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To Be Continued on Monday, 3/25/24

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

 

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CHAPTER VI, Installment 1, NATURALIZATION

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.

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CHAPTER V, Installment 3, BORDER TOWN

X. CONFLICT


I was twelve the summer our family camped in a tiny trailer fifteen miles outside Gallup in Tohlakai. The little green shelter was parked by the chapel where my father was the missionary. The Goldtooths lived a few hundred yards from us. Mr. Goldtooth was one of several people who might show up on a Sunday morning red-eyed, smelling of booze and still under the influence from a twenty-four-hour bender in town. His usual self-control destroyed by drink, he would shout out in the middle of a sermon or prayer. Ours was not a shouting church, so it was noticeable. The yelling ended in loud, histrionic crying. The services went on as if nothing unusual were happening. I knew Mr. Goldtooth hadn't always been that way. He had helped build the chapel on his family's land and had worked as a missionary's interpreter, years earlier.


One night that summer, I got to feel up close how the clash between the border town and Dinétah had seeped across the line into Tohlakai. Our family had finished supper when Birdie Goldtooth came to the trailer. At first, I thought she just wanted to hang out, but then I saw in her eyes that something was wrong.


"My dad's drunk again," she said. "He's really mad. He's yelling and tearing up the house."


My mother heard her. "Why don't you and your sisters come over and sleep in the chapel?" she suggested.


They brought their bedrolls, and I begged to join them. We laid our pallets out on the floor, and the problem of the evening turned into a sleepover. We chattered and giggled until a fist pounded on the door, silencing us. It was Mr. Goldtooth. He yelled at us to open the door. "This is my chapel. I built it. Open the door!"


I tensed. Mr. Goldtooth rattled the door and pounded some more. I was petrified it would come crashing down.


The girls didn't seem fazed, now that we were safely locked in. By silent agreement we said nothing, and he left after what seemed like an hour, though it was probably only minutes. As I lay there, letting my body go soft again, it came to me that being safe was unusual for my friends while being terrified was unusual for me.
 
XI. EDGE EFFECTS
 
At the Scandinavian Yoga and Meditation School I was assigned to weed and thin a large field of young parsnips. I noticed that whenever I came to an edge of the field, the parsnips were much smaller and thinner, scrawny really, than those a few rows in. They bore the effects of the wind, the cold, dust from passing cars, and maybe other stresses I knew nothing about.


Ecologists and mappers refer to edge effects, particularly where ecosystems overlap. In those places flora and fauna compete for resources, and the competition can result in peaking or falling biodiversity. For example, where the eastern escarpment of the Andes meets the tropics in Ecuador, a remarkable diversity of bird species lives. Birds find what the mountains have and have not, and all that the jungle has and has not, which creates an environment amenable to diversity but one that also fosters conflict and competition.


Other things happen on ecological edges, too; invasive species exploit the vulnerability of edges. Plants, such as my parsnips, struggle to thrive on the edges. When I was tending the parsnips, I thought of the puny roots as offering a buffer for the vegetables at the center—bearing all the exigencies that occur in the borders. I drew an analogy to people who live on the margins—how we may also provide a cushion for those who live at the center. Maybe there is always conflict, discomfort, in the edge places, in border towns—for everyone—whether Red or White. Some people thrive on the discomfort, find their creativity and growth challenged and become productive, venture farther out. Others bear the brunt of the stresses that come to bear on them at the verge and perhaps retreat toward the center or withdraw into the numbness of addiction. Still others experience the edge and ponder what goes on there.
 
XII. LOVE/HATE


I love Gallup, and I hate it; my Diné friends testify to this even more than I. When I was young, I didn't know how my Navajo friends felt about Gallup. A Diné woman recently told me, "Natives won't tell you what they really think. They'll tell you what they think you want to hear." I was hurt, and I had a hard time believing it. But it's possible I only get the truth when Diné feel they're talking to each other, and I'm just an invisible observer.


My friend Alice Whitegoat laughs as she tells me about being a teenager in Gallup, sneaking down into the Rio Puerco with her friends on a summer night, about the tattletale who didn't know how to have fun, a Presbyterian convert. And then she shows me the black-and-white photo where she is marching at the front of the protest after the Gallup police shot and killed Larry Casuse. The police had their photo taken, posed over his body as if he were a deer they'd bagged. Three hundred students walked out of Gallup High School the day of Larry's funeral. We never knew the truth of what happened when he was slain—what really went down. Larry had remonstrated hard at the State House in Santa Fe against police brutality and the exploitation of Natives by the Gallup liquor industry. Not until after his tragic death were the state alcohol licensing laws changed.


The summer after Larry Casuse was killed, I went back to UNM to take courses toward my master's degree. One class required a local field study, and I called my project "Gallup: An Ugly City." On a south-side hill I took images of sprawling ranch-style homes with landscaped front yards—the homes of those who profited from liquor sales and from selling the work of Native hands to tourists. I photographed bars and pawnshops. I went to the north side to take images of the condemned hovels in which people still lived.


When I presented my report, a student took exception to my title. "Those houses on the hill," she said, "they're not ugly."


I had already called attention to the fact that those houses were built on exploitation. I reiterated, "The people who own those houses gained their money from alcohol sales to Natives, from price gouging, and unfair lending practices."


The instructor understood and reinforced my argument, but the woman, a public- school educator said, "Still…"


I shook my head.


Gallup. Border town. The place in-between that oozes over its borders. Gallup. My hometown. The place I keep coming back to. The place I love and hate.
 
XIII. AT THE ROOT


I hadn't seen alcoholism in Teec Nos Pos. In Gallup, I heard White grownups speculate that Natives were genetically predisposed to alcoholism. According to the former Director of Substance Abuse Treatment and Prevention for the Navajo Nation, a medical doctor, research does not support the theory of genetic predisposition. In fact, the demographics say there is no higher incidence of alcoholism among the Diné than among any other group of people.


The question then arises: Why does it appear otherwise? One reason is that the Navajo and Zuni Nations, the reservations closest to Gallup, are dry by law. If people want to drink, they must go to a border town or a bar just off the reservation to do so. It is also forbidden to bring alcohol, even in closed containers, into the Nation. This makes Diné who want to drink highly visible in the border towns.


There are root causes for addiction. In this case, colonization in its manifold manifestations destroyed a way of life that functioned well—the way of life that was still largely in existence in Teec Nos Pos in the 1950s. Near border towns, the story was otherwise. The colonial system did not replace that effective subsistence economy with a viable alternative. Colonization has brought with it poverty and often purposelessness to Indigenous peoples the world over.


In the Dinétah, excess drinking numbs the generational pain of trauma and loss—loss of homeland, family, language, and culture. Generations of Native people have been ripped from home and family and forcibly taken to boarding schools where the stated goal was to "make them White," to "pacify" them, "to kill the Indian but save the man."
 
XIV. MY PLACE IN THE BORDERLANDS


Sometimes, as on a sheet of stationery, a border serves as the edge; no stationery exists beyond it. More often, a border lies between two places. Sometimes, as with a living cell, the borderline is microscopically thin. Other times there is a space that is much wider than a line, a sort of no-man's-land. When I first came to live in the Navajo Nation, I began a lifelong fall into a fissure between two worlds—into an invisible, yet very real, border. At first, I lived physically close to the center of the Nation. As a child, I thought I belonged there because that was my life. Then we moved to the border town, and I began to know that I had not belonged at the center, after all.


Maybe that is why I have kept coming back Gallup. Because my place is here. In the borderland. The in-between place. Prickly and uncomfortable and rough-edged, full of conflict. We live here together, work here, make our art here. A place where no one quite belongs.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

This is the final installment of "Border Town."

The first installment of "Naturalization will post to this website on Monday, 3/18/24.

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CHAPTER V, Installment 2, BORDER TOWN

V. BORDER TOWN
The main border towns are these: Gallup, the most well-known, except maybe Winslow, Arizona because of the Eagles song; there is also Farmington, New Mexico; Cortez in southern Colorado; and Flagstaff and Holbrook, both in Arizona.


These towns both serve and exploit the people of the Nation, the Diné. They supply goods similar to those provided by trading posts in the Nation. They provide commodities that people can't or don't grow or produce and sell larger items like cars and trucks, appliances, electronics, and mobile homes. Border town businesses exploit Native people by selling these goods, especially durable ones, at inflated prices with exorbitant interest rates. In return, businesses pay low prices for fine jewelry and rugs crafted by Diné, Zuni, and Hopi and resell them to tourists at huge profits. Without Indigenous people, tourism in Gallup would be limited to an overnight stay en route to natural wonders like the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley.
 
VI. WHY INDEED
People asked why when I said I was moving back to Gallup in 2018. Again. Really, I moved to an edge between edges, to land a few short miles north of town. Gallup and other border towns were built for commerce and religion. They are not lovely. But all around them lies beauty of heartbreaking wonder.
 
I came back

To hear the wind rise suddenly, soughing through piñon and juniper.

For the hills.
The mesas.

 

I came
For the flat chocolate slabs of sitting-rocks,
from there to watch the glory
of dusk—the pink flush, gold blaze,
the ginger and orange, the scarlet—
all diminishing to mauve and indigo.

 

I came
For the smell of rain-washed earth and sage.
For cedar smoke at night.
To cut small sprays of scarlet paintbrush
and purple asters,
to line them with juniper,
place them in a small brown vase.

 

I came
To hear Diné spoken every day.
To speak Diné with others.
Perhaps to finish something I'd begun.
To make the circle round.

 

Maybe that.
 
VII. CULTURE SHOCK
When we first moved into Gallup, the way I saw Diné people became the greatest shock. I wandered downtown for a cherry coke at the Rexall drugstore or to the library and came face to face with Diné stumbling toward me. Their eyes were red and swollen, weeping, their clothes dirty and torn. When they came close enough, I smelled the sickening sweet stench of alcohol. Sometimes instead of bumbling toward me, they lay in a huddle next to a building, sleeping or blubbering.


When I got home I told my mother, "I'm scared of them."


She said, "You don't need to be scared. If they're drunk, you can knock them over with your little finger." I didn't believe it for a second, but I learned to steel myself and keep walking when a drunk passed me or tried to talk to me.


In Teec Nos Pos people walked upright. The women wore traditional satin and velvet with loads of turquoise-and-silver jewelry. They tended their flocks and fields of corn and melons, took their sheep up the mountain in summer for good grazing. They rolled up to the mission in wooden wagons to fill fifty-gallon barrels with water and gave us rides to the trading post. They brought loads of wool to the trading post to be packed into burlap bags as tall as a man and walked out with coffee and sugar and Bluebird flour.


Close by the border town, Diné women wore long, gathered cotton skirts and button-down cotton blouses, less jewelry. They owned sheep, but not as many. If they drove, it was pickups, not horses and wagons. Homes were tarpaper-covered rectangles, not round, earthen hogans. I saw poverty, but I didn't understand that it was because the original, sustainable way of life was mostly gone, and nothing had replaced it. Alcoholism was evident on the land skirting Gallup, as if the town had slowly leaked into the border and beyond.
 
VIII. THE NATURE OF BORDERS


The border that cannot be permeated doesn't exist.


I know a man,
carried on his father's shoulders
when he was a baby,
held above the water of the
sewers of Berlin,
crossing the wall from East to West.
 
Cell walls are semi-permeable membranes.
Our lives depend on the exchange of
nutrients, oxygen, inorganic ions,
waste products, and water
across those thin barriers.
 
My colleague comes up too close;
I step back.
I excuse myself,
saying my trifocals make
it uncomfortable to stand so close.
But really, our personal boundaries
are not the same.
 
I tell my Hispanic students,
children of undocumented immigrants,
about marrying my
New Zealand friend so we could
get permission to stay in each other's countries.
"Isn't that illegal?" one of them asks.
"Yes," I say, "but I don't believe in borders.
We should be able to cross
over into any country we want."
They are silent.
No one has said this to them before.
 
Poland could be said to have
too many borders.
It has been taken,
retaken,
gained independence,
only to be taken again.
And again.

New Mexico, the state in which
I have lived most of my life,
was taken from Mexico,
along with parts of California,
Arizona,
Texas,
following the border war
known in the US as the Mexican War,
known in Mexico as
the American Intervention in Mexico.
 
Borders are in-between places. They are places where contact and contrasts take place. They are places where we rub up against each other and discover differences in language, customs, religions, and life goals. In Gone Native in Polynesia, Ian Campbell writes that culture contact is simply "an abstraction of what happens when people from different societies meet and attempt to satisfy their respective needs." This is a benign view of what happens in the borderlands. But Campbell goes on to add a critical piece, saying which group makes the most cultural adjustments "depends on how important the transaction is to the respective parties, location (on whose territory is the transaction taking place), or which party has the most coercive power." And therein lies the recipe for the conflict that so often happens at borders.

 

Some boundaries, such as cell membranes, are natural, and, unless a disruptive process such as disease occurs, exchanges pass freely across them, to the benefit of all. But the borders we humans create are arbitrary. Because of their artificial nature, when a crossing is attempted without permission, conflict occurs. The ancestral lands of the Indigenous Tohono O'odham Nation, stretch from southern Arizona in the US into the Mexican state of Sonora. To them the Mexico-US border is eminently artificial. Originally, crossing of boundaries did not exist; there were only homelands.

 

One of my brothers has lived most of his adult life in Gallup. He says of the conflict that exists here, "I've learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable." Discomfort arises because he lives in the imaginary space that lies between the White and Diné worlds. There is confusion as to where and whether he belongs. It is in the nature of borderlands—this not knowing.
 
IX. CHANGED AND UNCHANGING


Nighttime, the second Saturday in November, and downtown Gallup is teeming with people in winter coats, scarves, and stocking caps. It is the night of the monthly Arts Crawl. Galleries and shops are lit, doors open. Outdoor vendors sell crafts, coffee, and snacks. The air crackles with good will. Businesses that were once grimy and tired have gotten facelifts, making their facades clean and appealing.


I enter a Diné-owned shop where every piece is thoughtfully and lovingly curated. An outsized painting shows four Yé'ii (Holy People). In a traditional painting, the Yé'ii would be stylized, painted with squared lines, offering no sense of the men beneath the masks. This one is full of mystery, humor and humanness, revealing the emotions and character of the subjects and the artist. Shelves in the store contain sleek marble sculptures, fabric arts that blend traditional craft with contemporary motifs. Black-and- white photos that showcase the high desert.


I leave the bustle and noise of Coal Avenue to see what, if anything, is happening on Route 66. On the way I pass a puddled, unlit alley where the backs of those refurbished fronts reveal dark, rough-hewn stone. The bleak, narrow passage is emblematic of borders, boundaries that still exist, unchanged. Gallup—the same, yet different; changed and unchanging.


Earlier that week, I saw three small Indigenous boys leaning against a low adobe wall in a middle-class neighborhood. They watched two black-and-whites pull up to join a parked paddy wagon. White officers stepped out and joined a Native policeman, the driver of the wagon. I asked myself, Why all the firepower? The Diné officer had already cuffed a Native man who sat on the ground, head bowed. I wondered what the boys were thinking—if they were simply curious, if they saw the unfolding scene as an exciting crime drama, or if they felt ashamed, living in this town where Natives have been unwanted for so long. Except for the money they bring.

 

©Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved. 

 

To be continued on Friday, 3/15/24

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