On Second Thought: the FOUR SOULS issue

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

summer 12

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[the FOUR SOULS issue]

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Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND

Honoring Louise Erdrich

note from the executive director The Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider award recognizes present or former North Dakotans who have been influenced by this state in achieving national recognition in their fields of endeavor, thereby reflecting credit and honor upon North Dakota and its citizens. More than any other modern writer Louise Erdrich exemplifies the spirit of the Rough Rider award.

Through her distinguished career she has harnessed her extraordinary powers of creativity and vision to the work of preserving, interpreting, and expanding North Dakota’s cultural heritage.

It is the task of the writer to remind people who they are, what they stand for, and, in a real sense, where they came from. In our time, Louise Erdrich has risen to this challenge and provides a canon of North Dakota literature that upholds the natural beauty of the land, the strength of community, and the shape of history. The North Dakota she grew up in is the place from which her writing evolves. Honoring both her indigenous roots as a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and her immigrant roots through her German ancestors, Erdrich’s novels bring the reader home to North Dakota time and time again. Even for those who have never set foot on our soil, Erdrich offers a homecoming in the way only good literature can provide. We hope that this symposium honoring Louise Erdrich will be a springboard to this richly deserved recognition.

To honor Louise and her contribution to literary excellence, we have invited a group of widely acclaimed writers to speak to the major themes of identity and memory present in Louise’s novels and poetry. They will offer their unique perspectives coming from four different directions—a Native American, a Palestinian-American, a Jewish-American, and a MexicanAmerican. Each tells us a different story, but each tells part of the same story—America’s story.

The stories and poems of these writers illuminate both what exists in this beautiful, broken world we inhabit and what might exist if we succumb to the better angels of our nature or the dark shadows of our souls. The world of ideas that each writer creates reminds us at a fundamental level that life is an active experience not a passive waiting. In an age of political partisanship they warn us that our lives are defined more by the trajectories we embark on than the positions we take. Who you are emerges out of both the past circumstances that made your particular existence possible and the problems you struggle with along your journey. To reside in the mental space of another human being through story or poetry is to take on a new trajectory—a path not your own, but connected to yours through the pathway of the human spirit. The nobility of our humanity relies upon such interactions. The only way to truly connect with another person, culture, or country is to understand their story. In a time of high-speed sound bites, we must make time to stop and listen to the stories that sustain our humanity.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

summer 12

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features [contents] Cover artwork: This issue of On Second Thought magazine features artwork from the members of the Bismarck Downtown Artists Cooperative: Ali LaRock, Paul Noot, Mike Paul, Mary Rennich.

LOUISE ERDRICH

4 Two Languages in Mind, But Just One in the Heart 8 Fleur

17 Advice to Myself

[the FOUR SOULS issue]

ROBERT PINSKY 20 Shirt 22 Samurai Song 22 Antique

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE 28 The Words Under the Words 30 Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab-

American Poet: To Any Would-Be Terrorists 33 Kindness

LUIS ALBERTO URREA 36 Nobody’s Son 43 Ghost Sickness 14 44 The Day I Launched the Virgin Mary

into Orbit

FOUR SOULS SYMPOSIUM 48 Complete Schedule of Events

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Editor Jan Daley Jury, Line Editor Dakota Goodhouse, Researcher Four Souls: Memory and Identity from the Borders features original artwork by North Dakota artists.

To subscribe please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

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An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954. Her father, Ralph Erdrich, was of German descent, and her mother, Rita Gourneau, of French and Chippewa Indian descent.

The oldest of seven children, she grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. At an early age, Erdrich was encouraged by her parents, both of whom taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, to write stories. Erdrich continued her writing by keeping a journal throughout high school.

Louise Erdrich 2

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In 1972, the first year that Dartmouth admitted women, Erdrich enrolled there as a student of English and creative writing. She took courses in the newly implemented Native American Studies department. Erdrich graduated in 1976, and received her Master of Arts degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.

Erdrich won the $5,000 Nelson Algren Fiction Award in 1982 with her short story “The World’s Greatest Fisherman.” This would later become the opening chapter for her first novel, Love Medicine, which explores the loss of cultural identity over several generations of a Native American family. Erdrich received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction for Love Medicine, which is the first of a series of interconnected novels including The Beet Queen, which also received a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, and Tales of Burning Love.

Other awards for Love Medicine include the Pushcart Prize in 1983, the National Magazine Fiction award in 1983 and 1987, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for best book of the year dealing with Indians or Chicanos in 1984, and the Los Angeles Times Award for best novel. In 1985, Erdrich received the Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel and the American Book Award.

Erdrich followed the success of her earlier novels with The Antelope Wife, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and The Master Butchers Singing Club, a mystery which draws upon both her Native American and German-American heritage, as well as Four Souls and The Painted Drum. Often overlapping across the same fictional terrain of a North Dakota reservation, her novels together create a narrative of richness and depth that combines multiple local stories with modern techniques and consciousness.

She is also the author of three volumes of poetry, Jacklight, Baptism of Desire, and Original Fire, and five children’s books: Grandmother’s Pigeon, The Birchbark House, The Range Eternal, The Game of Silence, and The Porcupine Year. Among her many other honors, Erdrich has also won the O. Henry Prize for short fiction, the Western Literary Association Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 2009, The Plague of Doves was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Erdrich followed this novel with the equally accomplished Shadow Tag, tracing the dissolution of a marriage and family.

Photo by Persia Erdrich

Erdrich currently lives in Minnesota with her daughters. She is the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.

“Louise Erdrich captures the passions, fears, myths, and doom of a living people, and she does so with an ease that leaves the reader breathless.” -The New Yorker 3

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Essay first appeared in The New York Times, May 22, 2000.

Reprintd by permission of the author, 2012.

Two Languages in Mind, But Just One in the Heart

By Louise Erdrich

For years now I have been in love with a language other than the English in which I write, and it is a rough affair. Every day I try to learn a little more Ojibwe. I have taken to carrying verb conjugation charts in my purse, along with the tiny notebook I’ve always kept for jotting down book ideas, overheard conversations, language detritus, phrases that pop into my head. Now that little notebook includes an increasing volume of Ojibwe words. My English is jealous, my Ojibwe elusive. Like a besieged unfaithful lover, I’m trying to appease them both.

Ojibwemowin, or Anishinabemowin, the Chippewa language, was last spoken in our family by Patrick Gourneau, my maternal grandfather, a Turtle Mountain Ojibwe who used it mainly in his prayers. Growing up off reservation, I thought Ojibwemowin mainly was a language for prayers, like Latin in the Catholic liturgy. I was unaware for many years that Ojibwemowin was spoken in Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, though by a dwindling number of people. By the time I began to study the language, I was living in New Hampshire, so for the first few years I used language tapes.

I never learned more than a few polite phrases that way, but the sound of the language in the author Basil Johnson’s calm and dignified Anishinabe voice sustained me through bouts of homesickness. I spoke basic Ojibwe in the isolation of my car traveling here and there on twisting New England roads. Back then, as now, I carried my tapes everywhere.

The language bit deep into my heart, but it was an unfulfilled longing. I had nobody to speak it with, nobody who remembered my grandfather’s standing with his sacred pipe in the woods next to a box elder tree, talking to the spirits. Not until I moved back to the Midwest and settled in Minneapolis did I find a fellow Ojibweg to learn with, and a teacher.

Mille Lac’s Ojibwe elder Jim Clark—Naawi-giizis, or Center of the Day—is a magnetically pleasant, sunny, crew-cut World War II veteran with a mysterious kindliness that shows in his slightest gesture. When he laughs, everything about him laughs; and when he is serious, his eyes round like a boy’s.

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[louise erdrich] Naawi-giizis introduced me to the deep intelligence of the language and forever set me on a quest to speak it for one reason: I want to get the jokes. I also want to understand the prayers and the adisookaanug, the sacred stories, but the irresistible part of language for me is the explosion of hilarity that attends every other minute of an Ojibwe visit. As most speakers are now bilingual, the language is spiked with puns on both English and Ojibwe, most playing on the oddness of gichi-mookomaan, that is, big knife or American, habits and behavior.

This desire to deepen my alternate language puts me in an odd relationship to my first love, English. It is, after all, the language stuffed into my mother’s ancestors’ mouths. English is the reason she didn’t speak her native language and the reason I can barely limp along in mine.

English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes.

Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer’s gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast.

A hundred years ago, most Ojibwe people spoke Ojibwemowin, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs and religious boarding schools punished and humiliated children who spoke native languages.

The program worked, and there are now almost no fluent speakers of Ojibwe in the United States under the age of 30. Speakers like Naawi-giizis value the language partly because it has been physically beaten out of so many people. Fluent speakers have had to fight for the language with their own flesh, have endured ridicule, have resisted shame and stubbornly pledged themselves to keep on talking the talk.

My relationship is of course very different. How do you go back to a language you never had?

Why should a writer who loves her first language find it necessary and essential to complicate her life with another? Simple reasons, personal and impersonal. In the past few years I’ve found that I can talk to God only in this language, that somehow my grandfather’s use of the language penetrated. The sound comforts me.

What the Ojibwe call the Gizhe Manidoo, the great and kind spirit residing in all that lives, what the Lakota call the Great Mystery, is associated for me with the flow of Ojibwemowin. My Catholic training touched me intellectually and 5

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Fluent speakers have had to fight for the language with their own flesh... symbolically but apparently never engaged my heart.

There is also this: Ojibwemowin is one of the few surviving languages that evolved to the present here in North America. The intelligence of this language is adapted as no other to the philosophy bound up in northern land, lakes, rivers, forests arid plains; to the animals and their particular habits; to the shades of meaning in the very placement of stones. As a North American writer, it is essential to me that I try to understand our human relationship to place in the deepest way possible, using my favorite tool, language.

There are place names in Ojibwe and Dakota for every physical feature of Minnesota, including recent additions like city parks and dredged lakes. Ojibwemowin is not static, not confined to describing the world of some out-of-reach and sacred past. There are words for e-mail, computers, Internet, fax. For exotic animals in zoos. Anaamibiig gookoosh, the underwater pig, is a hippopotamus. Nandookomeshiinh, the lice hunter, is the monkey.

There are words for the serenity prayer used in 12-step programs and translations of nursery rhymes. The varieties of people other than Ojibwe or Anishinabe are also named: Aiibiishaabookewininiwag, the tea people, are Asians. Agongosininiwag, the chipmunk people, are Scandinavians. I’m still trying to find out why.

For years I saw only the surface of Ojibwemowin. With any study at all, one looks deep into a stunning complex of verbs. Ojibwemowin is a language of verbs. All action. Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb there are as many as 6,000 forms. The storm of verb forms makes it a wildly adaptive and powerfully precise language. Changite-ige describes the way a duck tips itself up in the water butt first. There is a word for what would happen if a man fell off a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and the stem of it went through the back of his head.

There can be a verb for anything.

When it comes to nouns, there is some relief. There aren’t many objects. With a modest if inadvertent political correctness, there are no designations of gender in Ojibwemowin. There are no feminine or masculine possessives or articles.

Nouns are mainly designated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate. The word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or if it was putting itself into my hand. Stones are not the same as they were to me in English. I can’t write about a stone without considering it in Ojibwe and acknowledging that the Anishinabe universe began with a conversation between stones.

Ojibwemowin is also a language of emotions; shades of feeling can be mixed like paints. There is a word for what occurs when your heart is silently shedding tears. Ojibwe is especially good at describing intellectual states and the fine points of moral responsibility.

Ozozamenimaa pertains to a misuse of one’s talents getting out of control. Ozozamichige implies you can still set things right. There are many more kinds of love than there are in English. There are myriad shades of emotional meaning to designate various family and clan

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[louise erdrich] members. It is a language that also recognizes the humanity of a creaturely God, and the absurd and wondrous sexuality of even the most deeply religious beings.

Slowly the language has crept into my writing, replacing a word here, a concept there, beginning to carry weight. I’ve thought of course of writing stories in Ojibwe, like a reverse Nabokov. With my Ojibwe at the level of a dreamy 4-yearold child’s, I probably won’t.

Though it was not originally a written language, people simply adapted the English alphabet and wrote phonetically. During the Second World War, Naawi-giizis wrote Ojibwe letters to his uncle from Europe. He spoke freely about his movements, as no censor could understand his writing.

Ojibwe orthography has recently been standardized. Even so, it is an all-day task for me to write even one paragraph using verbs in their correct arcane forms. And even then, there are so many dialects of Ojibwe that, for many speakers, I’ll still have gotten it wrong.

As awful as my own Ojibwe must sound to a fluent speaker, I have never, ever, been greeted with a moment of impatience or laughter. Perhaps people wait until I’ve left the room. But more likely, I think, there is an urgency about attempting to speak the language.

To Ojibwe speakers the language is a deeply loved entity. There is a spirit or an originating genius belonging to each word.

Before attempting to speak this language, a learner must acknowledge these spirits with gifts of tobacco and food. Anyone who attempts Ojibwemowin is engaged in something more than learning tongue twisters.

However awkward my nouns, unstable my verbs, however stumbling my delivery, to engage in the language is to engage the spirit. Perhaps that is what my teachers know, and what my English will forgive.

THE FIGHT TO PRESERVE NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES ISN’T OVER Native American languages are in danger of extinction. The American Indian College Fund reports the acceleration of “severe losses in Native language fluency,” across the nation. North Dakota is no exception to this devastating trend. According to Reuben Fasthorse, eminent scholar at the Lakota Language Consortium, there is a 90% language loss for the Dakota/Lakota people. As Louise Erdrich states, the state has almost no fluent speakers of Ojibwe under the age of 30. Fort Berthold Community College reports that there is only one fluent speaker of the Mandan language left.

Language carries the DNA of a culture, and its loss signals the irreversible decline of a way of life. The cultural landscape of North Dakota would be much poorer without the unique contribution of the Native peoples, who play a vital role in shaping the state’s identity and future vitality.

To reverse the trend of language devastation, the North Dakota Humanities Council announces the 2013 Native American Language Preservation Initiative.

The Native American Language Preservation Initiative supports the revitalization of Native American languages in North Dakota to ensure the survival and continuing vitality of these languages and the cultures of native peoples for future generations.

For more information visit www.ndhumanities.org, or call 800.338.6543.

Please consider a donation to the NDHC to support this important effort.

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The first time she drowned in the cold and glassy waters of Matchimanito, Fleur Pillager was only a child. Two men saw the boat tip, saw her struggle in the waves. They rowed over to the place she went down, and jumped in. When they lifted her over the gunwales, she was cold to the touch and stiff, so they slapped her face, shook her by the heels, worked her arms and pounded her back until she coughed up lake water.

She shivered all over like a dog, then took a breath. But it wasn’t long afterward that those two men disappeared. The first wandered off and the other, Jean Hat, got himself run over by his own surveyor’s cart.

It went to show, the people said. It figured to them all right.

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By saving Fleur Pillager, those two had lost themselves.

The next time she fell in the lake, Fleur Pillager was fifteen years old and no one touched her. She washed on shore, her skin a dull dead gray, but when George Many Women bent to look closer, he saw her chest move. Then her eyes spun open, clear black agate, and she looked at him.

“You take my place,” she hissed. Everybody scattered and left her there, so no one knows how she dragged herself home. Soon after that, we noticed Many Women changed, grew afraid, wouldn’t leave his house and would not be forced to go near water or guide the mappers back into the bush. For his caution, he lived until the day that his

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sons brought him a new tin bathtub. Then the first time he used it he slipped, got knocked out, and breathed water while his wife stood in the other room frying breakfast.

By Louise Erdrich

Sunset for Louise by Mary Rennich © 2012

Men stayed clear of Fleur Pillager after the second drowning. Even though she was goodlooking, nobody dared to court her because it was clear that Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster, wanted her for himself. He’s a devil, that one, love hungry with desire and maddened for the touch of young girls, the strong and daring especially, the ones like Fleur.

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Our mothers warn us that we’ll think he’s handsome, for he appears with green eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child’s. But if you fall into his arms, he sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass scales, rings to the touch. You’re fascinated, cannot move.

He casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts. He holds you under.

Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat brown worm, or a familiar man. He’s made of gold. He’s made of beach moss.

He’s a thing of dry foam, a thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive.

Unless you are Fleur Pillager. We all knew she couldn’t swim. After the first time, we thought she’d keep to herself, live quiet, stop killing men off by drowning in the lake. We thought she would keep the good ways. But then, after the second return, and after old Nanapush nursed her through the sickness, we knew that we were dealing with something much more serious. Alone out there, she went haywire, out of control. She messed with evil, laughed at the old women’s advice and dressed like a man. She got herself into some half-forgotten medicine, studied ways we shouldn’t talk about. Some say she kept the finger of a child in her pocket and a powder of unborn rabbits in a leather thong around her neck. She laid the heart of an owl on her tongue so she could see at night, and went out, hunting, not even in her own body. We know for sure because the next morning, in the snow or dust, we followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw where they changed, where the claws sprang out, the pad broadened and pressed into the dirt.

By night we heard her chuffing cough, the bear cough. By day her silence and the wide grin she threw to bring down our guard made us frightened. Some thought that Fleur Pillager should be driven from the reservation, but not a single person who spoke like that had the nerve. And finally, when people were just about to get together and throw her out, she left on her own and didn’t come back all summer.

That’s what I’m telling about.

During those months, when Fleur lived a few miles south in Argus, things happened. She almost destroyed that town.

When she got down to Argus in the year of 1913, it was just a grid of six streets on either side of the railroad depot. There were two elevators, one central, the other a few miles west. Two stores competed for the trade of the three hundred citizens, and three churches quarreled with one another for their souls. There was a frame building for Lutherans, a heavy brick one for Episcopalians, and a long narrow shingle Catholic church. This last had a slender

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steeple, twice as high as any building or tree.

No doubt, across the low flat wheat, watching from the road as she came near on foot, Fleur saw that steeple rise, a shadow thin as a needle. Maybe in that raw space it drew her the way a lone tree draws lightning. Maybe, in the end, the Catholics are to blame. For if she hadn’t seen that sign of pride, that slim prayer, that marker, maybe she would have just kept walking.

But Fleur Pillager turned, and the first place she went once she came into town was to the back door of the priest’s residence attached to the landmark church. She didn’t go there for a handout, although she got that, but to ask for work. She got that too, or we got her. It’s hard to tell which came out worse, her or the men or the town, although as always Fleur lived.

The men who worked at the butcher’s had carved about a thousand carcasses between them, maybe half of that steers and the other half pigs, sheep, and game like deer, elk, and bear. That’s not even mentioning the chickens, which were beyond counting. Pete Kozka owned the place, and employed three men: Lily Veddar, Tor Grunewald; and Dutch James.

I got to Argus through Dutch. He was making a mercantile delivery to the reservation when he met my father’s sister Regina, a Puyat and then a Kashpaw through her first husband. Dutch didn’t change her name right off, that came later. He never did adopt her son, Russell, whose father lived somewhere in Montana now.

During the time I stayed with them, I hardly saw Dutch or Regina look each other in the eye or talk. Perhaps it was because, except for me, the Puyats were known as a quiet family with little to say. We were mixed-bloods, skinners in the clan for which the name was lost. In the spring before the winter that took so many Chippewa, I bothered my father into sending me south, to the white town. I had decided to learn the lace-making trade from nuns.

“You’ll fade out there,” he said, reminding me that I was lighter than my sisters. “You won’t be an Indian once you return.”

“Then maybe I won’t come back,” I told him. I wanted to be like my mother, who showed her half-white. I wanted to be like my grandfather, pure Canadian. That was because even as a child I saw that to hang back was to perish. I saw

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I tried to stop myself from remembering what it was like to have companions... through the eyes of the world outside of us. I would not speak our language. In English, I told my father we should build an outhouse with a door that swung open and shut.

“We don’t have such a thing upon our house.” He laughed.

But he scorned me when I would not bead, when I refused to prick my fingers with quills, or hid rather than rub brains on the stiff skins of animals.

“I was made for better,” I told him. “Send me down to your sister.” So he did. But I did not learn to thread and work the bobbins and spools. I swept the floors in a butcher shop, and cared for my cousin Russell.

Every day I took him to the shop and we set to work— sprinkled fresh sawdust, ran a hambone across the street to a customer’s beanpot or a package of sausage to the corner. Russell took the greater share of orders, worked the harder. Though young, he was fast, reliable. He never stopped to watch a cloud pass, or a spider secure a fly with the same quick care as Pete wrapped a thick steak for the doctor. Russell and I were different. He never sat to rest, never fell to wishing he owned a pair of shoes like those that passed on the feet of white girls, shoes of hard red leather decorated with cut holes. He never listened to what those girls said about him, or imagined them doubling back to catch him by the hand. In truth, I hardly rinsed through the white girls’ thoughts.

That winter, we had no word from my family, although Regina asked. No one knew yet how many were lost, people kept no track. We heard that wood could not be sawed fast enough to build the houses for their graves, and there were so few people strong enough to work, anyway, that by the time they got around to it the brush had grown, obscuring the new-turned soil, the marks of burials. The priests tried to discourage the habit of burying the dead in trees, but the ones they dragged down had no names to them, just scraps of their belongings. Sometimes in my head I had a dream I could not shake. I saw my sisters and my mother swaying in the branches, buried too high to reach, wrapped in lace I never hooked.

I tried to stop myself from remembering what it was like to have companions, to have my mother and sisters around me, but when Fleur came to us that June, I remembered.

I made excuses to work next to her, I questioned her, but Fleur refused to talk about the Puyats or about the winter. She shook her head, looked away. She touched my face once, as if by accident, or to quiet me, and said that

perhaps my family had moved north to avoid the sickness, as some mixed-bloods did.

I was fifteen, alone, and so poor-looking I was invisible to most customers and to the men in the shop. Until they needed me, I blended into the stained brown walls, a skinny big-nosed girl with staring eyes.

From this, I took what advantage I could find. Because I could fade into a corner or squeeze beneath a shelf I knew everything: how much cash there was in the till, what the men joked about when no one was around, and what they did to Fleur.

Kozka’s Meats served farmers for a fifty-mile radius, both to slaughter, for it had a stockpen and chute, and to cure the meat by smoking it or spicing it in sausage. The storage locker was a marvel, made of many thicknesses of brick, earth insulation, and Minnesota timber, lined inside with wood shavings and vast blocks of ice cut from the deepest end of Matchimanito, hauled down from the reservation each winter by horse and sled.

A ramshackle board building, part killing shed, part store, was fixed to the low square of the lockers. That’s where Fleur worked. Kozka hired her for her strength. She could lift a haunch or carry a pole of sausages without stumbling, and she soon learned cutting from Fritzie, a string-thin blond who chain-smoked and handled the razor-edged knives with nerveless precision, slicing close to her stained fingers. The two women worked afternoons, wrapping their cuts in paper, and Fleur carried the packages to the lockers. Russell liked to help her. He vanished when I called, took none of my orders, but I soon learned that he could always be found alongside Fleur’s hip, one hand gently pinching a fold of her skirt, so delicately that she could pretend not to notice.

Of course, she did. She knew the effect she had on men, even the very youngest of them. She swayed them, sotted them, made them curious about her habits, drew them close with careless ease and cast them off with the same indifference. She was good to Russell, it is true, even fussed about him like a mother, combed his hair with her fingers, and scolded me for kicking or teasing him.

Fleur poked bits of sugar between Russell’s lips when we sat for meals, skimmed the cream from the jar when Fritzie’s back was turned and spooned it into his mouth. For work, she gave him small packages to carry when she and Fritzie

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piled cut meat outside the locker’s heavy doors, opened only at five p.m. each afternoon, before the men ate supper.

Sometimes Dutch, Tor, and Lily stayed at the lockers after closing, and when they did Russell and I stayed too, cleaned the floors, restoked the fires in the front smokehouse, while the men sat around the squat, cold cast-iron stove spearing slats of herring onto hardtack bread. They played long games of poker, or cribbage on a board made from the planed end of a salt crate. They talked. We ate our bread and the ends of sausages, watched and listened, although there wasn’t much to hear since almost nothing ever happened in Argus. Tor was married, Dutch lived with Regina, and Lily read circulars. They mainly discussed the auctions to come, equipment, or women.

Every so often, Pete Kozka came out front to make a whist, leaving Fritzie to smoke her cigarettes and fry raised donuts in the back room. He sat and played a few rounds but kept his thoughts to himself. Fritzie did not tolerate him talking behind her back, and the one book he read was the New Testament. If he said something, it concerned weather or a surplus of wheat. He had a good-luck talisman, the opal-white lens of a cow’s eye. Playing rummy, he rubbed it between his fingers. That soft sound and the slap of cards was about the only conversation.

“What’s this,” said Lily. He was fat, with a snake’s pale eyes and precious skin, smooth and lily-white, which is how he got his name. Lily had a dog, a stumpy mean little bull of a thing with a belly drum tight from eating pork rinds. The dog was as fond of the cards as Lily, and straddled his barrel thighs through games of stud, rum poker, vingt-un. The dog snapped at Fleur’s arm that first night, but cringed back, its snarl frozen, when she took her place.

“I thought,” she said, her voice soft and stroking, “you might deal me in.”

There was a space between the lead bin of spiced flour and the wall where Russell and I just fit. He tried to inch toward Fleur’s skirt, to fit against her. Who knew but that he might have brought her luck like Lily’s dog, except I sensed we’d be driven away if the men noticed us and so I pulled him back by the suspenders. We hunkered down, my arm around his neck. Russell smelled of caraway and pepper, of dust and sour dirt. He watched the game with tense interest for a minute or so, then went limp, leaned against me, and dropped his mouth wide. I kept my eyes open, saw Fleur’s black hair swing over the chair, her feet solid on the boards of the floor. I couldn’t see on the table where the cards slapped, so after they were deep in their game I pressed Russell down and raised myself in the shadows, crouched on a sill of wood.

Fleur finally gave them a subject.

Her cheeks were wide and flat, her hands large, chapped, muscular. Fleur’s shoulders were broad and curved as a yoke, her hips fishlike, slippery, narrow. An old green dress clung to her waist, worn thin where she sat. Her glossy braids were like the tails of animals, and swung against her when she moved, deliberately, slowly in her work, held in and half-tamed. But only half. I could tell, but the others never noticed. They never looked into her sly brown eyes or noticed her teeth, strong and sharp and very white. Her legs were bare, and since she padded in bead worked moccasins they never saw that her fifth toes were missing.

They never knew she’d drowned. They were blinded, they were stupid, they only saw her in the flesh.

And yet it wasn’t just that she was a Chippewa, or even that she was a woman, it wasn’t that she was good-looking or even that she was alone that made their brains hum. It was how she played cards.

Women didn’t usually play with men, so the evening that Fleur drew a chair to the men’s table there was a shock of surprise.

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I watched Fleur’s hands stack and riffle, divide the cards, spill them to each player in a blur, rake and shuffle again.

Tor, short and scrappy, shut one eye and squinted the other at Fleur. Dutch screwed his lips around a wet cigar.

“Gotta see a man,” he mumbled, getting up to go out back to the privy. The others broke, left their cards, and Fleur sat alone in the lamplight that glowed in a sheen across the push of her breasts. I watched her closely, then she paid me a beam of notice for the first time. She turned, looked straight at me, and grinned the white wolf grin a Pillager turns on its victims, except that she wasn’t after me.

“Pauline there,” she said. “How much money you got?”

We had all been paid for the week that day. Eight cents was in my pocket.

“Stake me.” She held out her long fingers. I put the coins on her palm and then I melted back to nothing, part of the walls and tables, twined close with Russell. It wasn’t long before I understood something that I didn’t know then. The

[louise erdrich]

men would not have seen me no matter what I did, how I moved. For my dress hung loose and my back was already stooped, an old woman’s. Work had roughened me, reading made my eyes sore, forgetting my family had hardened my face, and scrubbing down bare boards had given me big, reddened knuckles.

When the men came back and sat around the table, they had drawn together. They shot each other small glances, stuck their tongues in their cheeks, burst out laughing at odd moments, to rattle Fleur. But she never minded. They played their vingt-un, staying even as Fleur slowly gained.

Those pennies I had given her drew nickels and attracted dimes until there was a small pile in front of her.

Then she hooked them with five card draw, nothing wild.

She dealt, discarded, drew, and then she sighed and her cards gave a little shiver. Tor’s eye gleamed, and Dutch straightened in his seat.

suspicious, Dutch stroking his huge square brow, Pete steady. It wasn’t that Fleur won that hooked them in so, because she lost hands too. It was rather that she never had a freak deal or even anything above a straight. She only took on her low cards, which didn’t sit right. By chance, Fleur should have gotten a full or a flush by now. The irritating thing was she beat with pairs and never bluffed, because she couldn’t, and still she ended each night with exactly one dollar. Lily couldn’t believe, first of all, that a woman could be smart enough to play cards, but even if she was, that she would then be stupid enough to cheat for a dollar a night. By day I watched him turn the problem over, his lard-white face dull, small fingers probing at his knuckles, until he finally thought he had Fleur figured as a bit-time player, caution her game. Raising the stakes would throw her.

More than anything now, he wanted Fleur to come away with something but a dollar. Two bits less or ten more, the sum didn’t matter just so he broke her streak.

“I’ll pay to see that hand,” said Lily Veddar.

Fleur showed, and she had nothing there, nothing at all.

Tor’s thin smile cracked open, and he threw in his hand too.

“Well, we know one thing,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “the squaw can’t bluff.”

With that I lowered myself into a mound of swept sawdust and slept. I woke during the night, but none of them had moved yet so I couldn’t either. Still later, the men must have gone out again, or Fritzie come to break the game, because I was lifted, soothed, cradled in a woman’s arms and rocked so quiet that I kept my eyes shut while Fleur rolled first me, then Russell, into a closet of grimy ledgers, oiled paper, balls of string, and thick files that fit beneath us like a mattress.

Night after night she played, won her dollar, and left to stay in a place that only Russell and I knew about. Fritzie had done two things of value for Fleur. She had given her a black umbrella with a stout handle and material made to shed water, and also let her board on the premises. Every night, Fleur bathed in the slaughtering tub, then slept in the unused brick smokehouse behind the lockers, a windowless place tarred on the inside with scorched fats. When I brushed against her skin I noticed that she smelled of the walls, rich and woody, slightly burnt. Since that night she put me in the closet, I was no longer jealous or afraid of her, but followed her close as Russell, closer, stayed with her, became her moving shadow that the men never noticed, the shadow that could have saved her.

The game went on after work the next evening. Russell slept, I got my eight cents back five times over, and Fleur kept the rest of the dollar she’d won for a stake. This time they didn’t play so late, but they played regular, and then kept going at it. They stuck with poker, or variations, for one solid week and each time Fleur won exactly one dollar, no more and no less, too consistent for luck.

August, the month that bears fruit, closed around the shop and Pete and Fritzie left for Minnesota to escape the heat. A month running, Fleur had won thirty dollars and only Pete’s presence had kept Lily at bay. But Pete was gone now, and one payday, with the heat so bad no one could move but Fleur, the men sat and played and waited while she finished work. The cards sweat, limp in their fingers, the table was slick with grease, and even the walls were warm to the touch. The air was motionless. Fleur was in the next room boiling heads.

By this time, Lily and the other men were so lit with suspense that they got Pete to join the game. They concentrated, the fat dog tense in Lily Veddar’s lap, Tor

Her green dress, drenched, wrapped her like a transparent sheet. A skin of lakeweed. Black snarls of veining clung to her arms. Her braids were loose, half unraveled, tied behind

13

[louise erdrich]

her neck in a thick loop. She stood in steam, turning skulls through a vat with a wooden paddle. When scraps boiled to the surface, she bent with a round tin sieve and scooped them out. She’d filled two dishpans.

“Another round,” said Lily, his voice choked with burrs. But Fleur opened her mouth and yawned, then walked out back to gather slops for the big hog that was waiting in the stock pen to be killed.

“Ain’t that enough now?” called Lily. “We’re waiting.” The stump of a dog trembled in his lap, alive with rage. It never smelled me or noticed me above Fleur’s smoky skin. The air was heavy in the corner, and pressed Russell and me down.

Fleur sat with the men.

The men sat still as rocks, their hands spread on the oiled wood table. Dutch had chewed his cigar to damp shreds, Tor’s eye was dull. Lily’s gaze was the only one to follow Fleur. Russell and I didn’t breathe. I felt them gathering, saw Dutch’s veins, the ones in his forehead that stood out in anger. The dog rolled off the table and curled in a knot below the counter, where none of the men could touch him.

“Now what do you say?” Lily asked the dog. It barked.

That was the signal for the real game to start.

“Let’s up the ante,” said Lily, who had been stalking this night for weeks. He had a roll of money in his pocket. Fleur had five bills in her dress. Each man had saved his full pay that the bank officer had drawn from the Kozkas’ account.

“Ante a dollar then,” said Fleur, and pitched hers in. She lost, but they let her scrape along, a cent at a time. And then she won some. She played unevenly, as if chance were all she had. She reeled them in. The game went on. The dog was stiff now, poised on Lily’s knees, a ball of vicious muscle with its yellow eyes slit in concentration. It gave advice, seemed to sniff the lay of Fleur’s cards, twitched and nudged. Fleur was up, then down, saved by a scratch. Tor dealt seven cards, three down. The pot grew, round by round, until it held all the money. Nobody folded. Then it all rode on one last card and they went silent. Fleur picked hers up and drew a long breath.

The heat lowered like a bell. Her card shook, but she stayed in.

Lily smiled and took the dog’s head tenderly between his palms.

“Say Fatso,” he said, crooning the words. “You reckon that girl’s bluffing?”

The dog whined and Lily laughed. “Me too,” he said.

“Let’s show.” He tossed his bills and coins into the pot and then they turned their cards over.

Lily looked once, looked again, then he squeezed the dog like a fist of dough and slammed it on the table.

Fleur threw out her arms and swept the money close, grinning that same wolf grin that she’d used on me, the grin that had them. She jammed the bills inside her dress, scooped the coins in waxed white paper that she tied with string.

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Lily rose and stepped to the closet of ledgers where Pete kept his private stock. He brought back a bottle, uncorked and tipped it between his fingers. The lump in his throat moved, then he passed it on. They drank, steeped in the whiskey’s fire, and planned with their eyes things they couldn’t say aloud.

When they left, I grabbed Russell by the arm, dragged him along. We followed, hid in the clutter of broken boards and chicken crates beside the stockpen, where the men settled. Fleur could not be seen at first, and then the moon broke and showed her, slipping cautiously along the rough board chute with a bucket in her hand. Her hair fell wild and coarse to her waist, and her dress was a floating patch in the dark. She made a pig-calling sound, rang the tin pail lightly against the wood, paused suspiciously. But too late. In the sound of the ring Lily moved, fat and nimble, stepped right behind Fleur and put out his creamy hands. Russell strained forward and I stopped his mouth with both fists before he yelled. At Lily’s first touch, Fleur whirled and doused him with the bucket of sour slops. He pushed her against the big fence and the package of coins split, went clinking and jumping, winked against the wood. Fleur rolled over once and vanished into the yard.

The moon fell behind a curtain of ragged clouds, and Lily followed into the dark muck. But he tripped, pitched over the huge flank of the pig, who lay mired to the snout, heavily snoring. Russell and I sprang from the weeds and climbed the boards of the pen, stuck like glue. We saw the sow rise to her neat, knobby knees, gain her balance and sway, curious, as Lily stumbled forward. Fleur had backed into the angle of splintered wood just beyond and when Lily tried to jostle past, the sow raised her powerful neck and suddenly struck, quick and hard as a snake. She plunged at Lily’s thick waist and snatched a mouthful of shirt. She lunged again, caught him lower so that he grunted in

[louise erdrich]

pained surprise. He seemed to ponder, breathing deep.

Then he launched his huge bulk in a swimmer’s dive.

The sow screamed as his body smacked over hers. She rolled, striking out with her knife-sharp hooves and Lily gathered himself upon her, took her foot-long face by the ears, and scraped her snout and cheeks against the trestles of the pen. He hurled the sow’s tight skull against an iron post, but instead of knocking her dead, he woke her from her dream.

She reared, shrieked, and then he squeezed her so hard that they leaned into each other and posed in a standing embrace. They bowed jerkily, as if to begin. Then his arms swung and flailed. She sank her black fangs into his shoulder, clasping him, dancing him forward and backward through the pen. Their steps picked up pace, went wild. The two dipped as one, box-stepped, tripped one another. She ran her split foot through his hair. He grabbed her kinked tail. They went down and came up, the same shape and then the same color until the men couldn’t tell one from the other in that light and Fleur was able to vault the gates, swing down, hit gravel.

The men saw, yelled, and chased her at a dead run to the smokehouse. And Lily too, once the sow gave up in disgust and freed him. That is when I should have gone to Fleur, saved her, thrown myself on Dutch the way Russell did once he unlocked my arms. He stuck to his stepfather’s leg as if he’d been flung there. Dutch dragged him for a few steps, his leg a branch, then cuffed Russell off and left him shouting and bawling in the sticky weeds. I closed my eyes and put my hands on my ears, so there is nothing more to describe but what I couldn’t block out: those yells from Russell, Fleur’s hoarse breath, so loud it filled me, her cry in the old language and our names repeated over and over among the words.

The heat was still dense the next morning when I entered slowly through the side door of the shop. Fleur was gone and Russell slunk along the woodwork like a beaten dog.

The men were slack-faced, hungover. Lily was paler and softer than ever, as if his flesh had steamed on his bones.

They smoked, took pulls off a bottle. It wasn’t yet noon.

Russell disappeared outside to sit by the stock gate, to hold his own knees and rock back and forth. I worked awhile, waiting shop and sharpening steel. But I was sick, I was smothered, I was sweating so hard that my hands slipped on the knives and, I wiped my fingers clean of the greasy touch of the customers’ coins. Lily opened his mouth and

roared once, not in anger. There was no meaning to the sound. His terrier dog, sprawled limp beside his foot, never lifted its head. Nor did the other men.

They didn’t notice when I stepped outdoors to call Russell.

And then I forgot the men because I realized that we were all balanced, ready to tip, to fly, to be crushed as soon as the weather broke. The sky was so low that I felt the weight of it like a door. Clouds hung down, witch teats, a tornado’s green-brown cones, and as I watched, one flicked out and became a delicate probing thumb. Even as Russell ran to me, the wind blew suddenly, cold, and then came blinding rain.

Inside, the men had vanished and the whole place was trembling as if a huge hand was pinched at the rafters, shaking it. We ran straight through, screaming for Dutch or for any of them. Russell’s fingers were clenched in my skirt.

I shook him off once, but he darted after and held me close in terror when we stopped. He called for Regina, called for Fleur. The heavy doors of the lockers, where the men had surely taken shelter without us, stood shut. Russell howled.

They must have heard him, even above the driving wind, because the two of us could hear, from inside, the barking of that dog. A moment, and everything went still. We didn’t dare move in that strange hush of suspension. I listened, Russell too. Then we heard a cry building in the wind, faint at first, a whistle and then a shrill scream that tore through the walls and gathered around the two of us, and at last spoke plain.

It was Russell, I am sure, who first put his arms on the bar, thick iron that was made to slide along the wall and fall across the hasp and lock. He strained and shoved, too slight to move it into place, but he did not look to me for help.

Sometimes, thinking back, I see my arms lift, my hands grasp, see myself dropping the beam into the metal grip.

At other times, that moment is erased. But always I see Russell’s face the moment after, as he turned, as he ran for the door—a peaceful look of complicit satisfaction.

Then the wind plucked him. He flew as though by wires in the seat of his trousers, with me right after, toward the side wall of the shop that rose grand as a curtain, spilling us forward as the building toppled.

Outside, the wind was stronger, a hand held against us. We struggled forward. The bushes tossed, rain battered, the awning flapped off a storefront, the rails of porches rattled.

The odd cloud became a fat snout that nosed along the

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[louise erdrich]

earth and sniffled, jabbed, picked at things, sucked them up, blew them apart, rooted around as if it was following a certain scent, then stopped behind us at the butcher shop and bored down like a drill.

were completely torn apart, the rails stacked helterskelter. Fritzie asked for Fleur. People shrugged. Then she asked about the others, and suddenly, the town understood that three men were missing.

I pitched head over heels along the dirt drive, kept moving and tumbling in such amazement that I felt no fear, past Russell, who was lodged against a small pine.

The sky was cluttered. A herd of cattle flew through the air like giant birds, dropping dung, their mouths opened in stunned bellows. A candle, still lighted, blew past, and tables, napkins, garden tools, a whole school of drifting eyeglasses, jackets on hangers, hams, a checkerboard, a lampshade, and at last the sow from behind the lockers, on the run, her hooves a blur, set free, swooping, diving, screaming as everything in Argus fell apart and got turned upside down, smashed, and thoroughly wrecked.

There was a rally of help, a gathering of shovels and volunteers. We passed boards from hand to hand, stacked them, uncovered what lay beneath the pile of jagged two-by-fours. The lockers, full of meat that was Pete and Fritzie’s investment, slowly came into sight, still intact. When enough room was made for a man to stand on the roof, there were calls, a general urge to hack through and see what lay below. But Fritzie shouted that she wouldn’t allow it because the meat would spoil.

And so the work continued, board by board, until at last the solid doors of the freezer were revealed and people pressed to the entry. It was locked from the outside, someone shouted, wedged down, a tornado’s freak whim. Regina stood in the crowd, clutching Russell’s collar, trying to hold him against her short, tough body.

Everyone wanted to be the first to enter, but only Russell and I were quick enough to slip through beside Pete and Fritzie as they shoved into the sudden icy air.

Days passed before the town went looking for the men. Lily was a bachelor, after all, and Tor’s wife had suffered a blow to the head that made her forgetful.

Understandable. But what about Regina? That would always remain a question in people’s minds. For she said nothing about her husband’s absence to anyone. The whole town was occupied with digging out, in high relief because even though the Catholic steeple had been ripped off like a peaked cap and sent across five fields, those huddled in the cellar were unhurt. Walls had fallen, windows were demolished, but the stores were intact and so were the bankers and shop owners who had taken refuge in their safes or beneath their cash registers. It was a fair-minded disaster, no one could be said to have suffered much more than the next, except for Kozka’s Meats.

When Pete and Fritzie came home, they found that the boards of the front building had been split to kindling, piled in a huge pyramid, and the shop equipment was blasted far and wide. Pete paced off the distance the iron bathtub had been flung, a hundred feet. The glass candy case went fifty, and landed without so much as a cracked pane. There were other surprises as well, for the back rooms where Fritzie and Pete lived were undisturbed. Fritzie said the dust still coated her china figures, and upon her kitchen table, in the ashtray, perched the last cigarette she’d put out in haste. She lit and finished it, looking through the window. From there, she could see that the old smokehouse Fleur had slept in was crushed to a reddish sand and the stockpens

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Pete scraped a match on his boot, lit the lamp Fritzie held, and then the four of us stood in its circle. Light glared off the skinned and hanging carcasses, the crates of wrapped sausages, the bright and cloudy blocks of lake ice, pure as winter. The cold bit into us, pleasant at first, then numbing. We stood there for a moment before we saw the men, or more rightly, the humps of fur, the iced and shaggy hides they wore, the bearskins they had taken down and wrapped about themselves.

We stepped closer and Fritzie tilted the lantern beneath the flaps of fur into their faces. The dog was there, perched among them, heavy as a doorstop. The three had hunched around a barrel where the game was still laid out, and a dead lantern and an empty bottle too.

But they had thrown down their last hands and hunkered tight, clutching one another, knuckles raw from beating at the door they had also attacked with hooks. Frost stars gleamed off their eyelashes and the stubble of their beards. Their faces were set in concentration, mouths open as if to speak some careful thought, some agreement they’d come to in each other’s arms.

Only after they were taken out and laid in the sun to thaw did someone think to determine whether they were all entirely dead, frozen solid. That is when Dutch James’s faint heartbeat was discovered.

[louise erdrich]

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth. It comes down through the hands, which in the Pillagers are strong and knotted, big, spidery and rough, with sensitive fingertips good at dealing cards.

It comes through the eyes, too, belligerent, darkest brown, the eyes of those in the bear clan, impolite as they gaze directly at a person.

In my dreams, I look straight back at Fleur, at the men. I am no longer the watcher on the dark sill, the skinny girl.

The blood draws us back, as if it runs through a vein of earth. I left Argus, left Russell and Regina back there with Dutch.

I came home and, except for talking to my cousins, live a quiet life. Fleur lives quiet too, down on Matchimanito with her boat. Some say she married the water man, Misshepeshu, or that she lives in shame with white men or windigos, or that she’s killed them all. I am about the only one here who ever goes to visit her.

That spring, I went to help out in her cabin when she bore the child, whose green eyes and skin the color of an old penny have made more talk, as no one can decide if the child is mixed blood or what, fathered in a smokehouse, or by a man with brass scales, or by the lake. The girl is bold, smiling in her sleep, as if she knows what people wonder, as if she hears the old men talk, turning the story over.

It comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. They get the middle wrong too. They only know they don’t know anything.

From Tracks, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

Advice to Myself

By Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.

Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.

Don’t even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic—decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.

From Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, Harper Collins Publishers, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

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[robert pinsky]

Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism, and such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term.

Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world.

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans —of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state—shared their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry had a vigorous presence in the American cultural landscape. The project documents that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. The anthology Americans’ Favorite Poems, which includes letters from project participants, is in its 18th printing.

Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range.

Selected Poems is his most recent volume of poetry. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received both the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union.

Pinsky’s Tanner Lectures at Princeton University were published as Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry in 2002. His other books about poetry include Poetry

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and the World, nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and The Sounds of Poetry, a brief guide treasured by many young poets.

Robert Pinsky’s landmark, best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems

by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book, The Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture.

The poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, Pinsky appears on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and publishes frequently in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry anthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. Robert Pinsky is also the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy’s Premio Capri, and the Korean Manhae Award. He is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report.

“Pinsky is our finest living specimen of this sadly rare breed, and the poems of Gulf Music are among the best examples we have of poetry’s ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are— and can be—as a nation.”

-The New York Times Book Review by Joel Brouwer

[robert pinsky]

Robert Pinsky

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Shirt

By Robert Pinsky From Selected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011.

Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

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Shirt by Mike Paul © 2012

[robert pinsky]

[robert pinsky]

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”

Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.

One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers to wear among the dusty clattering looms.

Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.

And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

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[robert pinsky]

Antique

by Robert Pinsky I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned In the river of not having you, we lived Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms And we were parted for a thousand years.

Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover The earth and have forgotten that we existed.

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection, It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world Without regret but with stormy recriminations.

Someday far down that corridor of horror the future Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face And decide to harbor it for a little while longer From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

From Selected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011, and appears in the CD Poem Jazz, from Circumstantial Productions. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

Samurai Song

by Robert Pinsky

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When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. When I had No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no temple I made My voice my temple. I have No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited.

When I have no means fortune Is my means. When I have Nothing, death will be my fortune.

When I had no father I made Care my father. When I had No mother I embraced order.

Need is my tactic, detachment Is my strategy. When I had No lover I courted my sleep.

When I had no friend I made Quiet my friend. When I had no Enemy I opposed my body.

From Selected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011, and appears in the CD PoemJazz, from Circumstantial Productions. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

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Each year the North Dakota Humanities Council funds hundreds of free public humanities programs across the state. To learn more about our grant program and how your organization can apply for funding visit

ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org

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[naomi shihab nye]

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 37 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours. She is also the author of Mint Snowball (paragraphs); Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven (essays); Habibi and Going, Going (novels for young readers); and Baby Radar and Sitti’s Secrets (picture books). Other works include eight prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including Time You Let Me In, This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, and What Have You Lost? Her recent collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/ Young Adult category. Two new books are forthcoming in winter 2012: There Is No Long Distance Now (a collection of very short stories) and Transfer (poems).

Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry reading series in the country.

Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular columnist for Organica. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United States of Poetry” and also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. In January 2010 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

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“Naomi Shihab Nye is a voice that America needs in its time of trouble. Her clarity combined with her verbal kindness and her knowledge of multiple cultures provide a strong, audible message that the only hope for reconciliation and understanding lies in the ideals set by the human heart.”

- Billy Collins

[naomi shihab nye]

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[naomi shihab nye]

The Words Under the Words

by Naomi Shihab Nye for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.

When I was sick they followed me, I woke from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.

She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send—our voices are short and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms, He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words— otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Far Corner Books, 1995, and 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Green Willow Books, 2005.

Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

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We Are All Our Grandmothers’ Bread by Ali LaRock © 2012

My grandmother’s days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.

She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light.

[naomi shihab nye]

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[naomi shihab nye]

I am sorry I have to call you that, but I don’t know how else to get your attention. I hate that word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East? And now look.

Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that’s what they wanted to do, please know the mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now.

Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab-American Poet:

To Any Would-Be Terrorists Because I feel a little closer to you than many Americans could possibly feel, or ever want to feel, I insist that you listen to me. Sit down and listen. I know what kinds of foods you like. I would feed them to you if you were right here, because it is very very important that you listen. I am humble in my country’s pain and I am furious.

My Palestinian father became a refugee in 1948. He came to the United States as a college student. He is 74 years old now and still homesick. He has planted fig trees. He has invited all the Ethiopians in his neighborhood to fill their little paper sacks with his figs. He has written columns and stories saying the Arabs are not terrorists, he has worked all his life to defy that word. Arabs are businessmen and students and kind neighbors. There is no one like him and there are thousands like him—gentle Arab daddies who make everyone laugh around the dinner table, who have a hard time with headlines, who stand outside in the evenings with their hands in their pockets staring toward the far horizon.

I am sorry if you did not have a father like that. I wish everyone could have a father like that.

My hard-working American mother has spent 50 years trying to convince her fellow teachers and choir mates not to believe stereotypes about the Middle East. She always told them, there is a much larger story. If you knew the story, you would not jump to conclusions from what you see in the news. But now look at the news. What a mess has been made. Sometimes I wish everyone could have parents from different countries or ethnic groups so they would be forced to cross boundaries, to believe in mixtures, every day of their lives. Because this is what the world calls us to do. WAKE UP! The Palestinian grocer in my Mexican-American neighborhood paints pictures of the Palestinian flag on his empty cartons. He paints trees and rivers. He gives his paintings away. He says, “Don’t

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[naomi shihab nye]

insult me” when I try to pay him for a lemonade. Arabs have always been famous for their generosity. Remember? My half-Arab brother with an Arabic name looks more like an Arab than many full-blooded Arabs do and he has to fly every week.

My Palestinian cousins in Texas have beautiful brown little boys. Many of them haven’t gone to school yet. And now they have this heavy word to carry in their backpacks along with the weight of their papers and books. I repeat, the mission was a terrible success. But it was also a complete, total tragedy and I want you to think about a few things.

1. Many people, thousands of people, perhaps even millions of people, in the United States are very aware of the long unfairness of our country’s policies regarding Israel and Palestine. We talk about this all the time. It exhausts us and we keep talking. We write letters to newspapers, to politicians, to each other. We speak out in public even when it is uncomfortable to do so, because that is our responsibility. Many of these people aren’t even Arabs. Many happen to be Jews who are equally troubled by the inequity. I promise you this is true. Because I am Arab-American, people always express these views to me and I am amazed how many understand the intricate situation and have strong, caring feelings for Arabs and Palestinians even when they don’t have to. Think of them, please: All those people who have been standing up for Arabs when they didn’t have to. But as ordinary citizens we don’t run the government and don’t get to make all our government’s policies, which makes us sad sometimes. We believe in the power of the word and we keep using it, even when it seems no one large enough is listening. That is one of the best things about this country: the free power of free words. Maybe we take it for granted too much. Many of the people killed in the World Trade Center probably believed in a free Palestine and were probably talking about it all the time.

But this tragedy could never help the Palestinians. Somehow, miraculously, if other people won’t help them more, they are going to have to help themselves. And it will be peace, not violence, that fixes things. You could ask any one of the kids in the Seeds of Peace organization and they would tell you that. Do you ever talk to kids? Please, please, talk to more kids.

2. Have you noticed how many roads there are? Sure you have. You must check out maps and highways and small

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[naomi shihab nye]

alternate routes just like anyone else. There is no way everyone on earth could travel on the same road, or believe in exactly the same religion. It would be too crowded, it would be dumb. I don’t believe you want us all to be Muslims. My Palestinian grandmother lived to be 106 years old, and did not read or write, but even she was much smarter than that. The only place she ever went beyond Palestine and Jordan was to Mecca, by bus, and she was very proud to be called a Hajji and to wear white clothes afterwards. She worked very hard to get stains out of everyone’s dresses—scrubbing them with a stone. I think she would consider the recent tragedies a terrible stain on her religion and her whole part of the world. She would weep. She was scared of airplanes anyway. She wanted people to worship God in whatever ways they felt comfortable. Just worship. Just remember God in every single day and doing. It didn’t matter what they called it. When people asked her how she felt about the peace talks that were happening right before she died, she puffed up like a proud little bird and said, in Arabic, “I never lost my peace inside.”

To her, Islam was a welcoming religion. After her home in Jerusalem was stolen from her, she lived in a small village that contained a Christian shrine. She felt very tender toward the people who would visit it. A Jewish professor tracked me down a few years ago in Jerusalem to tell me she changed his life after he went to her village to do an oral history project on Arabs. “Don’t think she only mattered to you!” he said. “She gave me a whole different reality to imagine—yet it was amazing how close we became. Arabs could never be just a “project” after that.”

Did you have a grandmother or two? Mine never wanted people to be pushed around. What did yours want?

Reading about Islam since my grandmother died, I note the “tolerance” that was “typical of Islam” even in the old days. The Muslim leader Khalid ibn al-Walid signed a Jerusalem treaty which declared, “in the name of God, you have complete security for your churches which shall not be occupied by the Muslims or destroyed.” It is the new millennium in which we should be even smarter than we used to be, right? But I think we have fallen behind.

3. Many Americans do not want to kill any more innocent people anywhere in the world. We are extremely worried about military actions killing innocent people. We didn’t like this in Iraq, we never liked it anywhere. We would like no more violence, from us as well as from you. HEAR US! We would like to stop the terrifying wheel of violence, just stop it, right on the road, and find something more

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creative to do to fix these huge problems we have.

Violence is not creative, it is stupid and scary and many of us hate all those terrible movies and TV shows made in our own country that try to pretend otherwise. Don’t watch them. Everyone should stop watching them. An appetite for explosive sounds and toppling buildings is not a healthy thing for anyone in any country. The USA should apologize to the whole world for sending this trash out into the air and for paying people to make it.

But here’s something good you may not know—one of the best-selling books of poetry in the United States in recent years is the Coleman Barks translation of Rumi, a mystical Sufi poet of the 13th century, and Sufism is Islam and doesn’t that make you glad?

Everyone is talking about the suffering that ethnic Americans are going through. Many will no doubt go through more of it, but I would like to thank everyone who has sent me a consolation card. Americans are usually very kind people. Didn’t your colleagues find that out during their time living here? It is hard to imagine they missed it. How could they do what they did, knowing that?

4. We will all die soon enough. Why not take the short time we have on this delicate planet and figure out some really interesting things we might do together? I promise you, God would be happier. So many people are always trying to speak for God—I know it is a very dangerous thing to do. I tried my whole life not to do it. But this one time is an exception. Because there are so many people crying and scarred and confused and complicated and exhausted right now—it is as if we have all had a giant simultaneous break-down. I beg you, as your distant Arab cousin, as your American neighbor, listen to me. Our hearts are broken, as yours may also feel broken in some ways we can’t understand, unless you tell us in words.

Killing people won’t tell us. We can’t read that message.

Find another way to live. Don’t expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read Arabic poetry. Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing. A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, “If we read one another, we won’t kill one another.” Read American poetry. Plant mint. Find a friend who is so different from you, you can’t believe how much you have in common. Love them. Let them love you. Surprise people in gentle ways, as friends do. The rest of us will try harder too. Make our family proud.

Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

[naomi shihab nye]

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

KINDNESS

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Far Corner Books, 1995.

Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

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[luis alberto urrea]

Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.

Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed and bestselling author of 13 books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil’s Highway, his 2004 nonfiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. A historical novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells

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[luis alberto urrea]

the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction.

Urrea’s most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, imagines a small town in Mexico where all the men have immigrated to the U.S. A group of young women, after seeing the film The Magnificent Seven, decide to follow the men north and persuade them to return to their beloved village. A national best seller, Into the Beautiful North, earned a citation of excellence from the American Library Association Rainbow’s Project.

Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, “Amapola” in Phoenix Noir). His first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Urrea also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, and in 2000 he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos. His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He has also won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in The 1996 Best American Poetry collection. Urrea’s other titles include By the Lake of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering Time.

Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana, a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard.

Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“Everybody loves Luis Urrea...a big personality...a gregarious guy...a phenomenal speaker.”

-The Chicago Tribune

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[luis alberto urrea]

Nobody’s Son

By Luis Alberto Urrea

Here’s a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the ‘hood, hoping for the American Dream. It’s a small picture of a few moves in the chess game of disaster. The family game starting to fall apart from the buried rage and broken souls. I’m not saying it’s our story. I’m not saying it isn’t. It might be yours.

They lived at 3935 National Avenue.

When she was feeling well, Mother fed the birds on their narrow strip of lawn. She tore chunks from three or four slices of bread, and she and the boy tossed them out in the middle of the grass. Then they watched through the living room window, hiding behind the edge of the Venetian blinds, as sparrows, pigeons, and the occasional mockingbird descended to squabble over the food. The boy thought the blinds came from Venus.

Their apartment was in the last building of the development, and the pavement of National Avenue didn’t extend to the alley that ran behind their kitchen door.

They lived in the lower back corner, in a two-bedroom apartment with a small kitchen/dining alcove and a living room.

The boy shared one bedroom with his mother. His father slept in the other room, alone. Outside, there were the kinds of bushes that passed for greenery in Southern California. A dark-leaved hibiscus covered the opening beneath the concrete stairs to the second-story apartments. The boy had his cave there behind the bush. Sometimes, after he’d watched a Hercules movie with his father, he’d climb the outside of the stairway and leap onto the lawn, swinging a plastic sword.

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[luis alberto urrea]

Bridge Builder by Paul Noot © 2012

Drunken men sometimes slept on the lawn, dark-skinned skinny men, lying comatose in the creeping sun after some ghetto dance party. On those days, the birds did not come. And the boy watched the men from his window, watched their bony chests rise and fall, watched the stain of urine spread sometimes, watched their fingers curl and their feet twitch as they dreamed. The soles of their feet were yellow, cracked. His mother called them terrible names, and they thought worse things about her but dared not say them.

On the Fourth of July, Dad was usually out with friends, and Mom was too afraid of the neighborhood to walk the mile and a half to the public park for the fireworks.

So she’d make popcorn, and she and the boy would climb to the landing halfway up. From there, they could see the colored flashes lighting the sky behind a stand of trees. It looked like lightning inside a cloud, only it was red, violet, yellow, blue. Sometimes, slim puffs of smoke angled out from the tree crowns, and they turned dark before the reflected glow of the explosions. Every once in a while, a bit of the actual fireworks would rise high enough to clear the treetops.

It was shocking—like a chunk of the sky catching fire and throwing an ember.

Years later, those balmy nights remained precious to him. His mother in her dresses, her dark hair pulled back by a pale headband, flickering in silhouette against the colored sky. She sat primly, knees together, hands in lap, looking over her shoulder. As he stared up at her so lost in the spectacle, she sometimes seemed one hundred feet tall, a sorrowful monument thrown up against the dark.

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[luis alberto urrea]

Burr clover grew all over the lawn. It had tiny yellow flowers, and its tightly rolled burrs could be peeled open if you were patient and careful. You could unroll them, and minuscule yellow-green seeds revealed themselves. The boy often harvested the seeds and put them in his plastic army helmet. Then he’d go to other parts of the lawn and scatter them, trying to make something grow.

There was sourweed in the shade around the base of the biggest bushes. Pill bugs and snails could always be found there, and sometimes beetles. The occasional earwig frightened him—he thought the pincers on their tails meant they were baby scorpions. The pill bugs looked like Volkswagens. He suspected they might be baby armadillos. He picked sourweed stalks and chewed them, his lips puckering at the bitter taste. The black kids said the taste was from dog pee, but he didn’t believe them. He was in third grade.

Across the lawn, Their apartments began. They.

They had some fuchsias and poinsettias left over from the days of white families, but the lawn was already going yellow between the buildings. The landlords sold out to welfare leases, then promptly stopped attending to their buildings. The boy didn’t venture into the further reaches of the complex, but he knew there was a mattress moldering on the lawn at 3930, a broken television set on the walkway at 3929, and a wall coming down at 3925. His father offered reports of each new development when he got home from work.

“There’s a God-damned television out there,” he’d say. “The first thing they

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buy is a television.”

“Or a Cadillac,” Mom said.

“Then they don’t know how to take care of them,” Dad said.

Mom had decided to block off the stairs. She used potted geraniums— three pots per step, nine in all, because “those people will just walk up to your door and stare in at you.

Looking for something to steal.”

One day, while they were out, one of Their fathers came up on the porch and broke every pot. The boy’s family came home to dirt and fragments of brightly painted clay scattered all over the steps. The little geranium twigs lay murdered in the dirt. They reminded him of broken umbrellas.

He stood and watched Mom and Dad clean the mess, afraid less of the violence than of his parents’ response to it.

The boy didn’t know what Mom did in there when she sent him out to play. The apartment was usually dark —they didn’t like the blinds open to let in too much sun. His father was off driving a bread truck.

He’d started out as a waiter. Then he’d worked at Chicken of the Sea canning tuna. He was restless.

Nothing suited him. He was small, compact. Supercharged. The boy thought his father’s hands had the thickest, strongest fingers in the world.

Now, he was driving a 1961 Chevy panel truck, leased out from Helm’s Bakery. It was two-tone—pale yellow with black fenders—and in back there were large wooden drawers full of doughnuts, cookies, pies, cakes. The

area directly behind the driver’s seat had racks of bread and bins of rolls.

On the roof of the cab was a little train whistle, and the driver could pull a chain and the truck would go woo-woo.

In spite of his nasty racial views, he couldn’t bear to see the poor mothers on his route. Black mothers.

He extended so much credit to them that he was going out of business. He drove longer hours, longer miles, and earned less by a dollar or two a day.

He was driving himself to bankruptcy.

In the afternoons when Mom came home from work, she’d send the boy outdoors. Then she’d go inside and shut the door and stay shut in until six o’clock, when Dad came home.

And the boy would pull himself slowly out of the dusk, into the painful light of the kitchen.

He liked the back of the apartment more than the front. In the front, there was the cave under the stairs.

But the back offered poisonous plants. When he was sure Mom wasn’t looking, he broke open poinsettia stalks and watched the milk seep out. Everyone said it would kill you. It fascinated him. It smelled bland, like the smell in all the other plants when you crumpled their leaves. It also smelled a little like the black soil beneath the rocks at the edge of the alley. He’d almost let the milk touch his fingers before he pulled them away. Death, right in his hand. He thought it might be like falling asleep.

Then, of course, there was the alley.

He delighted in the alley—its wide dirt and rock surface was a wilderness to him, a desert in the middle of the neighborhood. When it rained, he

[luis alberto urrea]

saw swamps, dark King Kong rivers teeming with monsters: he sank his plastic dinosaurs in up to their haunches.

The alley sloped downhill and turned left, behind the row of detached garages. At the far end of the garages was a small washroom with two washing machines and two dryers.

Dad had the first garage. When he came home from work, the boy raced to the door and pulled it open. Dad drove in and set the hand brake.

He and the boy checked the daddy longlegs that hung upside down beneath the dashboard in its paltry web.

to me the best doughnut ever made is the glazed.”

“No, Dad,” the boy said. “It’s a chocolate-coated.”

“What!”

He did not smile.

“Really.” He pointed at the row of chocolate-coated cake doughnuts, pushed together like the coils of some delicious snake. “The best.”

Dad reached in and plucked a huge glazed one out with a square of wax paper.

“But look at this,” he said. He turned it like some fine piece of jewelry.

“He’s my buddy,” Dad said. “My pet.”

“Chocolate,” the boy said.

The boy always liked it when Dad was in his gooder mood. Sometimes Dad had his cranky mood, and the whole house turned dark gray inside and nobody spoke too loud. The gooder mood was full of jokes and Bert Kaempfert records. When Mom was in her cranky mood, they would crash together and everything would be broken, lights out, Dad gone, Mom in bed howling boo-hoos, just like in fairy tales. Boo-hoo!

They walked to the rear of the truck.

“Let’s check the inventory,” Dad said.

Yep, definitely feeling gooder today.

He opened the big door at the back and pulled open the top drawer. The indelible odor of bakeries escaped: chocolate, cinnamon, dough. In their wax-paper-lined compartments, doughnuts stood on end, tightly packed.

door shut, pulled down the garage door, and headed up the alley. It was turning dark His father smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. He poked the boy in the gut with one finger and said, “Butterball.”

Dad took out a chocolate doughnut with the other hand.

The boy laughed really loud.

“Wipe your mouth,” Dad said. “And don’t tell your mother I gave you a doughnut.”

The boy’s lips, in the gloom, looked like they were covered in blood.

She was in the kitchen heating TV dinners. Dad always ate turkey with gravy. Mom and the boy ate “fried” chicken, with apple cobbler in one triangular compartment. She was cutting lettuce in small pieces for a salad.

“No comparison,” he said.

“Cho-co-late, Dad,” the boy said.

Dad shook his head sadly.

“Well,” he sighed. “I suppose we’re going to have to taste them.” He took a bite of the glazed. “Mf,” he said.

The boy grabbed his doughnut from his father and took a bite. The hard chocolate cracked, and the golden fried cake dough broke all over his tongue.

They sat on the back bumper eating their doughnuts, the boy’s legs swinging.

Dad put his lunch bucket on the aluminum table and said, “Hi.” She kept her back to him. The boy shook a little turtle food into the turtle tank.

The yellow-eyed turtle inside was stretched out on the plastic ramp beneath the palm tree. “Don’t feed him too much,” Dad said. “You’ll make him fat.”

He rummaged in the fridge.

“Would you like some sherry?” he said, taking a bottle out.

“Oh, a little Thunderbird might be nice,” she said, He put one bottle back, took out another. He filled two small glasses.

“Mine’s better,” he said.

“Can I have a sip?” the boy said.

“I don’t know... “ Dad said. “It seems

They got done, slammed the truck

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[luis alberto urrea]

“No,” Mom said.

He and Dad giggled.

Dad said, “Just a little sip.” He winked.

Dad gave him a small sip of Thunderbird.

“You want it here or out there?” he said to Mom.

Mom came in and sat in her chair, placed exactly three feet from Dad’s.

Its feet had made four precise little holes in the carpet. She picked up one Frito with her nails and bit it.

Then she sipped her drink. She lit a cigarette.

“I’ll join you,” she said.

“Fine,” he said.

She glanced at him.

to the toes then back to the heel.

He reached between Dad’s toes and peeled out the tattered little flags of skin blistered up by athlete’s foot.

First the right foot, then the left, pushing in between Dad’s toes with his fingertips.

He could tell it felt good.

When things felt good to Dad, he made a little sucking gasp: Sst-unh.

Sst-unh.

“Aren’t we hilarious?” she said.

Cronkite’s brow was furrowed as he reported on Negro unrest and strange developments in Cuba.

“President Kennedy,” he was saying.

Dad waited till the boy was absorbed by his work, then he snapped his ear.

He liked to flick it with one nail when he wasn’t expecting it, make the kid jump. Old Jug Ear.

“Rub my feet,” Dad said.

“Ow!” the boy said.

The boy sat between his feet and began to unlace Dad’s work shoes.

They had thick, rippled rubber soles.

Dad laughed, prodded the boy away with his foot.

“Hm,” she said.

Dad took a small soup bowl and emptied a bag of Fritos into it. Then he shook a bunch of cashews into the bowl on top of the Fritos.

“I’ll carry it,” the boy said.

They went into the other room, Dad carrying the glasses, the boy carrying the bowl. They set it all down on a small TV tray table beside Dad’s favorite white chair. He sat and said, “Ah.”

“Don’t talk back to me,” he said.

“Must you do that before supper?” said Mom. “He can wash his hands,” said Dad.

He shook the last Pall Mall out of the pack on the tray.

“Turn on the TV,” he said. “Channel eight. Cronkite.”

The boy switched on the television.

Dad lit his cigarette.

There was a small crash in the kitchen.

“S---,” Mom muttered.

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He worked the shoes off. Dad always wore black socks. He had about twelve pairs of identical black socks.

He was never without a match in his sock drawer. Still, he carefully rolled each pair together and kept them neat. When he ended up with an extra sock, he threw it away. The boy rolled his socks down, over Dad’s high arches, and off. Dad’s feet were white as grubs. His toes were square and stubby. The boy put the socks inside the shoes.

‘That’s nice,” said Dad. “Isn’t that nice, Son, to talk like that?”

“Get between my toes,” Dad said.

Thinking he was in on a joke, the boy said, “Yeah, Mom. Real nice!”

The boy massaged Dad’s feet, starting on the ball and moving up

“Wash your hands,” Mom said.

As he ran the water over his hands, he could hear them in there sniping at each other. When he turned the water off, it ended. Like magic.

Dinner was served when he came out. Morn and Dad had their small trays of food set on their TV tables, with saucers of salad. Their glasses full of amber liquid jittered as they cut their food.

His supper was set out on the kitchen table. His napkin was folded in a neat triangle. He ate alone.

Whenever he complained, he was told, “You will learn to eat like a decent human being, at a fully set table.”

[luis alberto urrea]

Mom with her weird little rules.

He stared at the turtle. It stared at him.

The batter on the chicken was soggy.

It stuck to his mouth. He avoided the compartment with the gray peas and perfectly cubed cooked carrots.

“Drink your milk,” Mom said.

“I will.”

“Want some bread?” said Dad.

Dad must have gotten the idea right then—he got those ideas all the time. Real good ones. Creative. dug into his throat and choked him.

“My eensie-teensie-weensie baby boy,” she said.

She kissed him. He ducked his head away from her. The turtle slid off its ramp and plopped into the water.

“Would you like some bread?” Mom corrected.

“A little more Thunderbird?” Mom called out.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Dad.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Dad said.

fun?” She walked out of the kitchen.

“I can’t imagine a more fascinating evening! So athletic!”

“Have another drink,” Dad said.

“Show us how sophisticated you are.”

“Oh, Papa! You have put me in my place.”

“B----, b----, b----,” Dad muttered.

He could hear him gobbling his food.

Dad breathed through his nose as he ate. He sounded like an engine. He ate like a starving dog. Sometimes the way Dad ate scared him.

“Let’s not be ridiculous,” Mom said.

“I’ve only had one glass. The way you carry on, a person would think you’re an old woman!”

On TV the mystery guest was signing his name on a card. The audience applauded wildly.

“Can I come out?” the boy said.

Dad stubbed out his cigarette butt.

“Yeah.”

“Manners,” Mom said. “We won’t have our boy speaking like white trash.”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Please.”

Mom came into the kitchen and buttered two slices of bread. She cut the bread diagonally and set it on a saucer, then placed the saucer on the table. She ruffled his hair.

“How’s supper, Honey?”

“Fine.”

She patted his head.

“That’s good.” Then, suddenly overcome with emotion, she grabbed him in a desperate hug. Her forearm

The boy turned in his chair and looked at Dad. Dad was staring at the television, his face red. His jaw muscle worked furiously in his cheek. He took a drag on his cigarette and glanced at his son. He let smoke leak out of his mouth.

“Eensie-teensie,” Dad said.

Back to supper. The cobbler was gooey and sweet. He chewed it carefully, in little tiny bites to make it last. The·baked cinnamon apple chunks burst between his molars.

Mom poured herself another little glass.

“Papa’s going bowling tonight,” she said brightly. “Doesn’t that sound like

“Bring me a new pack when you come,” he said.

The boy rummaged under the sink, broke open a red carton, and peeled the cellophane off the new pack. He came out and sat between Dad’s legs again. Dad tapped the pack against his knuckle, shaking one cigarette loose.

Dad must have gotten the idea right then—he got those ideas all the time. Real good ones. Creative. He liked to play little pranks, scare his hijo a little, toughen him up. Like, when they were up high, on a cliff above the ocean or on a high bridge, Dad liked to grab him and start to throw him off, yanking him back at the last second. The boy fell for it every time. Dad would go “Whoo!”

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[luis alberto urrea]

when he did it. The boy would scream.

He ate some Fritos.

Pendejo.

“It was a God-damned joke!”

Dad was about to strike the match to light his fresh cigarette. He was looking at the back of the boy’s head, the flatness of it and the cowlick. The boy’s ears drove Dad nuts. Dad put the match on the sandpaper strip, ready to strike it; it had to be perfect for the gag.

“Joke” is a Latin word. “God” is Old English. “Damn” is Latin. “Mother” is Old English, as is “Father,” as is “Son.”

Hey,” he said.

“Huh?” said the boy, still staring at the TV. “Hey. Look.”

“Family” is Latin.

“What’d I do?” Dad was shouting.

He sat there in his white chair, waving his cigarette.

“It was a joke, God damn it! What do you think, I did it on purpose?”

He could hear them in the bathroom, making a fuss.

“Stop crying, you baby!”

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So, I’ve offered here a few words about my part of the journey. We’re all heading the same way, after all.

Whether we choose to walk together or separately, we’re going toward night. I am lucky. I have the angels of words beside me. So many of us are silent.

“Forgive” is English.

William Carlos Williams, that most American of poets, was half Puerto Rican. “Carlos” wasn’t just a New England WASP affectation. He was a Latino, just like me. He was a half-breed, just like me. He was an American. And he said:

The boy turned around.

Dad struck the match and thrust it at his face. Mom shouted. Dad said: “Whoo!” The boy, startled, opened his mouth in a gasp. Dad had already started to laugh. The match went between the boy’s lips as the sulfur ignited. The match head burst into flame, searing the corner of his mouth.

His lips sealed around the flame and stuck together. Dad’s eyes widened.

The boy clawed at his face, screamed, ran out of the room. Mom knocked over her chair as she ran after him.

to each other. You and I share the same story. I am Other. I am you.

“Of mixed ancestry, I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it.”

America is home. It’s the only home I have. Both Americas. All three Americas, from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego.

I’m not old enough to write my memoir. Yet I’d feel as if I’d cheated if I didn’t try to share some observations. So many of us live in a nightmare of silence. We are sons and daughters of a middle region, nobody’s children, marching under a starless flag. Some of us wave a black flag of anarchy, and others a red flag of revolution. But most of us are waving a white flag of surrender.

My life isn’t so different from yours.

My life is utterly alien compared to yours. You and I have nothing to say

Words are the only bread we can really share.

When I say “we,” I mean every one of us, everybody, all of you reading this.

Each border patrol agent and every trembling Mexican peering through a fence. Every Klansman and each NAACP office worker. Each confused mother and every disappointed dad.

For I am nobody’s son.

But I am everyone’s brother.

So come here to me.

Walk me home.

From Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, University of Arizona Press, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

Words are the only bread we can really share.

[luis alberto urrea]

Ghost Sickness 14

By Luis Alberto Urrea

My father, dead now for interminable years, won’t leave me in peace: doesn’t want to go: I see him every day. My old man hides in trees, in water, in clouds of smoke escaping from secretary’s cigarettes. Or he enters like a thief through my window & he steals my food. He’s a live wire: he’s capable of hiding himself on the moon. & he tells me,

—Son, nothing remains

Nothing remains.

My father, planted in his Mexican soil, laying roots into the dark meadow of forget, shines: when I turn off the lamp, his face throws sparks in the corner. When I make love, he comes running. When I step out to the street, he pursues me through the eyes of homeless children.

He wears heels of gold.

He smells my coffee.

I see him without seeing. & he says,

—Son, nothing remains.

Nothing remains.

My father, dead already and turned to dust, cries tears of clay. With the voice of stones he shouts, he sings his final advice:

—Son, your life is one coin.

Spend yourself well. For Nothing remains.

Nothing remains of me.

From Ghost Sickness, Cinco Puntos Press, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

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[luis alberto urrea]

The Day I Launched the Virgin Mary into Orbit

By Luis Alberto Urrea

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[luis alberto urrea]

Logan Heights, in the early sixties, was already changing. They called it Shelltown. Someone said it was because of the old clamshells in the dirt in some sections of the neighborhood.

Racial tensions rose as the working-class white and Mexican population gave way to black families seeking housing. Apartment owners became slumlords seemingly overnight, moving in “colored” tenants, then refusing those tenants any of the basic services they expected. The whites and Mexicans saw the tide coming up National Avenue from the east and barricaded themselves, both emotionally and physically. We were fresh from Tijuana, part of the first tide that caused white families to hide, then flee. No one knew they were part of a cycle.

Street hassles became fairly common. I was thumped by black kids, singly and in groups, several times. Yet, it wasn’t completely racial. They were going to the public school, but I was in my geeky St. Jude’s Academy uniform—brown cords, white shirt, shiny black shoes, probably a red sweater. They saw my prim outfit and just couldn’t help themselves.

Every morning, I tried to walk as slowly as possible on my way to the clutches of Sisters Martha-Ann and Paulana-Marie, girding myself for the daily observance of Mass in indecipherable Latin. Or, there was the torment of confession, when I’d have to kneel in the confessional and tell Father Sheridan anything I could think of. Hey, I was a sinner, but I was in second grade. Any sin of real value was years away. I knew he’d be happy if I’d been bad, but I had to make up sins: Bless me Father, for I have sinned ... uh … rude to Mom, and ... uh ... wanted to steal a candy bar…uh ... rude to Mom? We were color-blind at St. Jude’s. The black kids in there with us may have been as tough and bad-assed as the guys lying in wait for us on the street, but they all had to wear the same goofy outfit as the rest of us. The Chicano kids, just learning how badto-the-bone they could be, were also abashed by the outfits. How bad can you be in a bright red sweater? They had the double onus of being Catholic, something most of the black kids didn’t have to worry about. The Chicanos, in their hearts yearning to be vatos along the lines of the grizzled ex-zoot-suiters in the neighborhood, were scared of the sisters. The sisters, after all, could ship ‘em off to hell.

We gathered before the church, being barked, insulted, threatened, and hustled into raggedy lines by the sisters. I had recently informed Sister Martha-Ann that she was quite cute, thinking she would warm to the compliment. She did not. Now they had their eyes on me.

Inside, the Mass was interminable. Everybody hated kneeling especially; a few of us actually offered our suffering on our knees up to Jesus as a sacrifice. I spent almost every Mass equally split between a religious reverie and bored fantasy. Fancying myself some sort of boy Bernadette, I spent many accumulated hours mentally cajoling the plaster Christ on the cross to open his bloody eyes and look at me. The rest of the time, I was imagining how cool the church would look if a tidal wave came along and turned it upside down and washed it out to sea.

After Mass, we were herded to class. The girls, in their own uniforms—little white blouses, jumpers, knee socks—were insufferably holy. They sometimes agreed, probably telepathically, to hold up folded hands en masse, forming a smug line of prayerful saints.

We boys couldn’t help but cut up then: fart noises, giggling, and untucked shirttails swept us like a surge of demonic possession. Invariably, one or more miscreants fell into Sister Paulana-Marie’s clutches. They were carted into the classroom and whipped

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[luis alberto urrea]

We figured Jesus would just have to get over it. with a yardstick. The truly evil girls would sit and watch the unfortunate boys dance in a galloping circle, one arm clamped in Paulana-Marie’s grip, kicking and yelping as the yardstick cracked across their backsides.

Otherwise, school days in second grade were mostly composed of smuggled Monster trading cards and fat crayons that had one flat side to keep them from rolling off our desks. Aside from having my left-hand knuckles cracked with rulers to make me right-handed, and a bout of deep knee bends assigned when Paul Schnazzel and I were caught with plastic cars, things went pretty well. It was in third grade that I went bad.

It was their own damned fault.

In third grade, we were considered old enough to learn about the Rocky Path to Heaven, and the Superhighway to Hell. Holy cow—the road to heaven was gnarly in the extreme, a luridly painted narrow mountain road winding up steeply, and studded with boulders. Actually, it looked exactly like the street my grandmother lived on in Tijuana.

In the meantime, the road to hell was a four-lane, rush-hour boogie, populated with porkpie-hatted partiers speeding to their doom in convertible Buicks.

didn’t like this bloody meat idea at all. We figured Jesus would just have to get over it.

The nuns would sometimes surprise us with gifts. I still have some of them. We’d be graced with small Christmas ornaments, little plastic mangers with glitter snow, Advent calendars with cool little red plastic windows, blue plastic rosaries with faux ivory crucifixes on them, various religious pictures—one of them featuring Jesus offering us his apparently surgically excised heart ringed with thorns.

But, on my worst day as a budding Catholic, it was hot and boring. I was in a snit because the knot of disinterested vatos and black boys in the back had discovered how to do pornographic drawings. They kept passing me a piece of paper with what appeared to be a bifurcated Y on it. “It’s her weener!” one bonehead whispered.

Righteously, I marched up to the front of the room and handed it over. The nun’s face went deep pink. She put the note away, but strangely didn’t do anything. Returning to my seat, I was greeted with blood-thirsty stares. It’s payback time! After lunch, the sister came up with one of her surprises. We each got a shrine of the Virgin Mother. It was a small plastic Virgin in a tan construction that looked like three Cadillac fins.

Things had taken a turn.

Plus there was the slight problem of the Communists.

Apparently, shoe-pounding Soviets and bearded Cubans were about to invade the nation. According to the good sisters, their main goal in life was to force us to renounce Jesus. No! we children protested. They will torture you! the nuns warned us. We were still somewhat firm in our faith, but wanted to know what, exactly, was this torture deal?

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Somehow, the more the sister droned on about math that afternoon, the more the shrine began to look like Rocketship X-M. The little girl’s hair in front of me looked more and more like a giant alien man-eating blob. My imaginary crewmen scrambled across the desktop, swarming into their ship, and she launched off. I basically imagined the Holy Mother as the crew compartment, while the shrine itself was the stabilizers and wings. I was having a swell time.

The Communists were planning—this must have come through the immense Nun Intelligence Agency—to drag us behind trucks until we said we hated Jesus.

“Sister! Sister!” I heard one of the pornographers shout.

“Luis is using the Virgin for a spaceship!”

The vatos decided they could take it. So we all joined in again: We’re with Jesus, Sister!

“Am not!” I lied, Spaceship Virgin Mother held above the desk. I was piling on sin after sin at an alarming rate.

Ah, but the Communists weren’t just going to drag us down the street! Oh no! They were going to drag us over rough stones! Huge cobbles! (Wait—wasn’t that the road to Heaven?) And they were going to do it until our skin was ripped off! We would be raw, aching meat! And all we’d have to do to stop it was say we hated Jesus.

Suddenly, the sister rose like a black cloud from her desk.

She didn’t even look down as she reached for her ruler. All the rage within her—rage at the Communists, at the dirty note, at my sacrilege, filled her face. And she came. And I offered up the suffering in my butt to Jesus, while everyone around me sat and looked holy.

Some of us began to consider the doctrine of divine forgiveness. He was supposed to forgive all sins, and we

From Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, University of Arizona Press, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author, 2012.

FOUR SOULS

St or i e s from A meri ca’s Bo rd ers A Public Humanities Symposium Honoring Louise Erdrich Featuring Louise Erdrich, Robert Pinsky, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Luis Urrea August 23-24, 2012 Bluestem Center for the Arts Fargo-Moorhead FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Registration is preferred, but not required. ndhumanities.org 800.338.6543 47

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS “When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

Storytelling is an ancient art form that endures to this day. Stories tell us who we are and remind us what is most important by connecting us to our past and to each other. This public humanities symposium brings together four of the nation’s most celebrated writers and poets to share their stories. Representing the four borders of the nation, each writer brings their rich cultural perspective to bear on the American experience.

—Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

Join us and see the world through new eyes…because sometimes you have to go outside yourself in order to find yourself.

THURSDAY—BLUESTEM CENTER FOR THE ARTS 7:30 p.m. An Evening with Louise Erdrich Moderated by Jamieson Ridenhour New York Times best-selling author, Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, where her parents taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. She has said, “One of the characteristics of being a mixed blood is searching. You look back and say, ‘Who am I from?’ You must question. You must make certain choices. You’re able to. And it’s a blessing and it’s a curse. All of our searches involve trying to discover where we are from.” Erdrich will share her journey during this conversation with fellow North Dakota author Jamieson Ridenhour.

In case of inclement weather, this event will be held at Davies High School.

FRIDAY—BLUESTEM CENTER FOR THE ARTS 10:30 a.m. Writing Workshops (registration required) ADULT POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP BY JAMIESON RIDENHOUR – Scheels Room (limit 25) In this generative workshop, poet Jamieson Ridenhour will lead participants in exercises designed to explore imagery and metaphor, using works by contemporary poets as models. Ridenhour, a professor of English at the University of Mary, has had poetry featured in Strange Horizons, Dissections, and Inkspill, among others. His novel, Barking Mad, was released by Typecast in 2011.

ADULT FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP BY SUSAN POWER – Starion Room (limit 25) A workshop designed to open the floodgates of creativity. Banish the voice of the inner critic that can shut us down before we even get started. Whether you’re just beginning to try your hand at writing or have already produced a body of work, we can all use practice learning to express ourselves confidently, fearlessly. An enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Susan Power is the author of the international best-seller, The Grass Dancer.

12:30 p.m. The Stories That Tell Us Who We Are Award-winning Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis in 1952. Just four years earlier, her father and his family lost their home in Jerusalem following the establishment of the state of Israel. As a result of her father’s experiences, she learned the importance of place and of being connected–a theme that has been central to her writing ever since. As Nye explains, “When you grow up in a house with someone who lives with a very strong sense of exile, when they are disconnected from the place they love most, that casts a certain light on how you see everything–your sense of gravity, history and justice.” In 1966, Nye’s family moved to Jerusalem but left following the outbreak of the 1967 war. They relocated to San Antonio, Texas, where she resides today. “As poets we’re attracted to little things and little stories,” Nye explains. “I think as a Palestinian American that’s part of my job–to tell the stories that the news does not take the time to tell. We have to tell what we know.” Listen to Shihab Nye share her story about the amazing resilience of the human spirit.

In case of inclement weather, this event will be held in the Scheels Room at Bluestem.

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2:15 p.m. Universal Border: From Tijuana to the World Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, Luis Alberto Urrea grew up in San Diego, California. As a young man Luis served as a relief worker amongst people living in the Tijuana garbage dumps prior to receiving a teaching fellowship to Harvard University. “The border” has defined his life and colored much of his writing.

Regarding this point he once said “the border is simply a metaphor that makes it easier for me to write about the things that separate people all over the world, even when they think there is no fence.” Join us as Urrea shares his story of transformation from his beginnings on a dirt street in Tijuana to Pulitzer Prize finalist and beloved storyteller.

In case of inclement weather, this event will be held in the Scheels Room at Bluestem.

4:00 p.m. Poetry and Jazz Robert Pinsky (United States Poet Laureate 1997-2000) grew up in a lower-middle class Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. His writing amalgamates the language and images of his culturally diverse home town with a rich sampling of other bits of Americana as he explores subjects from the lofty to the commonplace. According to Pinsky a poet needs to “find a language for presenting the role of a conscious soul in an unconscious world.” Music, it is said, speaks directly to the soul.

This special program showcases these two great mediums: poetry and jazz. Pinsky will perform improvisatory poetry with a local jazz combo to create a spontaneous work of art that tells its own story.

In case of inclement weather, this event will be held at Davies High School.

7:30 p.m. Four Souls: Stories from America’s Borders Moderated by Jamieson Ridenhour Join us for an evening of stories and conversation between America’s premier writers and poets: Louise Erdrich, Luis Urrea, Robert Pinsky, and Naomi Shihab Nye. In case of inclement weather, this event will be held at Davies High School.

ALL EVENTS WILL BE HELD AT THE BLUESTEM CENTER FOR THE ARTS 801 50TH AVE SW, MOORHEAD, MINNESOTA In case of inclement weather, some events will be held at Davies High School 7150 25th Street South, Fargo, North Dakota For weather–related updates visit www.ndhumanities.org/four.php or call 800-338-6543.

If you are coming from within the city of Moorhead, the most direct in-town access route is: Head south on 8th Street (Highway 75), Moorhead. Turn right (west) onto 50th Avenue South. Travel 1.2 miles west to the entrance.

If you are coming from South Fargo: Head east on 52nd Avenue South in Fargo. Follow 52nd across the Red River into Minnesota. This same road is marked 60th Avenue South in Minnesota. Turn left (north) onto 3rd Street. Turn left (west) onto 50th Avenue South. Travel about a half mile to the entrance.

If you are coming from East of Moorhead via I-94 West: Travel west on I-94, take Exit 1A/Moorhead. Turn left at the top of the offramp onto 8th Street/Highway 75. Head south on 8th Street/Hwy 75. Turn right (west) onto 50th Avenue South. Travel 1.2 miles west to the entrance.

If you are coming from West of Moorhead via I-94 East: Travel east on I-94, take Exit 1A/Moorhead. Turn right at the top of the offramp onto 8th Street/Highway 75. Head south on 8th Street/Hwy 75. Turn right (west) onto 50th Avenue South. Travel 1.2 miles west to the entrance.

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The North Dakota Humanities Council

is a statewide nonprofit providing humanities-based educational and cultural opportunities that transform lives and strengthen communities.

Our programs—all free and open to the public—encourage people to reflect on and draw inspiration from our cultural variety, the ideas of our great thinkers, the pivotal events of our history, and the imaginative creations of our great writers.

Join the conversation.

Donate to the North Dakota Humanities Council.

RECENT DONORS Founder $500 - $999 Robert & Susan Wefald Associate $100 - $499 Thomas & Jane Ahlin Najla Amundson Aaron Barth James & Jolene Brosseau Robert Dambach Virginia Dambach Joann Ewen Tim Flakoll Kara Geiger Jay & Nancy Hestbeck Joseph Jastrzembski Rita Kelly Christopher Rausch Louise Stockman Dwight Tober Contributor $25-$99 Roderick A. Robert & Leslie Carlson Kathryn Cartwright Ellen Chaffee Betty Dendinger Kathy Fagerland Cleo Kirkland Theodore W. Kleiman Dan Koeck Kimberlee S. Leite Elizabeth Lucas Paula Martin Jane Nissen Susan Schlecht Gordon Schnell Crystal Vaagen Nicholas Vrooman Diane Weber

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in Bismarck

Living history scholars will present the stories of four people who played significant roles in the Civil War in America: Little Crow, who led the Santee Dakota in the Dakota Conflict of 1862, portrayed by Jerome Kills Small; Gen. Ely Parker, the Seneca Indian chief and Union general who drafted the surrender papers signed by Confederate General Lee at Appomattox, portrayed by Reuben Fast Horse; Frederick Douglass, the former slave, abolitionist, and writer, portrayed by Charles Everett Pace; and Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, portrayed by Karen Vuranch. Governor William Jayne who was President Lincoln’s personal physician and first governor of Dakota Territory, portrayed by Dr. D. Jerome Tweton, will moderate the Chautauqua presentations.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Programs will be held at three locations near downtown Bismarck: the Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library (515 North 5th St.), St. George’s Episcopal Church (601 North 4th St.), and the Former Governors’ Mansion (320 East Ave. B).

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 5, 2012 10:00 AM Children’s program by Charles Everett Pace at the Bismarck Public Library (BPL) 2:00 PM Adult workshop by Karen Vuranch at the BPL 6:30 PM Evening Chautauqua program by Little Crow (Jerome Kills Small) at St. George’s Episcopal Church THURSDAY, SEPT. 6, 2012 10:00 AM Children’s program by Karen Vuranch at the BPL 2:00 PM Adult workshop by Jerome Kills Small at the BPL 6:30 PM Evening Chautauqua program by Gen. Ely Parker (Reuben Fast Horse) at St. George’s FRIDAY, SEPT. 7, 2012 10:00 AM Children’s program by Jerome Kills Small at the BPL

SATURDAY, SEPT. 8, 2012 1:00 PM Children’s program by Reuben Fast Horse at the BPL 2:00 PM Adult workshop by Charles Everett Pace at the BPL

2:00 PM Adult workshop by Reuben Fast Horse at the BPL

3:00 PM Afternoon Chautauqua program by Clara Barton (Karen Vuranch) at St. George’s

6:30 PM Evening Chautauqua program by Frederick Douglass (Charles Everett Pace) at St. George’s

4:00 PM Chautauqua Scholar meet-and-greet at the ND Former Governors’ Mansion

Celebrating our community’s visual, culinary, performing, and literary arts.

HOTEL

DONALDSON

North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org

We have ways of making you think.

Board of Directors CHAIR Tayo “Jay” Basquiat, Mandan VICE CHAIR Kate Haugen, Fargo Najla Amundson, Fargo Barbara Andrist, Crosby Paige Baker, Mandaree Aaron Barth, Fargo Virginia Dambach, Fargo Tim Flakoll, Fargo Kara Geiger, Mandan Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks Kristin Hedger, Killdeer Janelle Masters, Mandan Christopher Rausch, Bismarck Jaclynn Davis Wallette, West Fargo Susan Wefald, Bismarck STAFF Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Dakota Goodhouse, Program Officer Angela Hruby, Administrative Assistant The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

“Things which do not grow and change are dead things.”

— Louise Erdrich

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