When I heard the Cormier verdict, my family was back in Brantford. I was alone in a residence room waiting for the verdict to be announced. As soon as my phone started buzzing, I knew what had happened. What had happened again, and will no doubt happen again and again and again and again to Indigenous people in this country.
Racism, for many people, seems to occupy space in very much the same way as dark matter: it forms the skeleton of our world, yet remains ultimately invisible, undetectable. This is convenient. If nothing is racism, then nothing needs to be done to address it. We can continue on as usual. Answer emails. Teach classes. Go to dinner with our families. Go to space centres. Continue our vacations, untroubled. We can keep our eyes shut inside this dark room we’ve created and pretend that, as long as we can’t see what’s around us, there’s nothing around us at all. After all, there’s no proof of it. If the man who coined the term “racism” can despise everything that makes me Indian and get away with it, why the hell can’t you?
SCRATCH
ost people’s memories of their childhood are lush with sensory details: your mother’s thick, slightly sweet spaghetti sauce; your grandfather’s persistent smell of tobacco and oranges; the tiny “hmph” your sister made whenever one of her elaborate lies was unravelled. For me, there is one consistent detail and, unfortunately, it’s far from romantic: my childhood itches. This makes sense, since I had head lice for over a decade. My relationship with head lice was, until recently, the longest relationship I’d ever had. Since the age of eight my fingernails were constantly scraping against my scalp, my hands always feeling, unseeing, for tiny eggs like seed beads strung on the strands of my thick, frizzy hair. Through state lines, too-small rental properties, homeless shelters and motel rooms, all the way to a trailer on the Six Nations reserve, those bugs nestled in the nape of my neck were the one constant in my life. I hated them but, in a way, I almost empathized with them. As a poor, mixed-race kid, I was treated like a parasite, too. I was unnecessary, unwanted, a social bloodsucker. I needed to be eradicated.
I first caught head lice at my grandparents’ sprawling property on the rez. We were there visiting for the powwow. A ridiculous number of relatives came; tents popped up on the front lawn like dandelions. Though my cousins came down every summer, it was my first time being there. Needless to say, I felt a bit out of place. My mother did nothing to ease my fears, muttering about how my siblings and I were being treated differently because we were half-white. I had numerous cousins who were half-white, so I’m not sure how she justified this, but it added to my eight-year-old sense of loneliness nonetheless.
The first night, our parents drank beer and played radio bingo—or most of our parents. My mother was devoutly sober, a trait that further isolated her from her in-laws. The kids, meanwhile, were everywhere: hanging from the tire swing in the front yard, throwing brush into a bonfire precariously situated on the side of a hill, catching crayfish and catfish in the meagre depths of the creek. My six-year-old sister Missy and I took up with my fiery, hilarious six-year-old cousin Melita. She was basically the only one who acknowledged our existence. All our other cousins were already part of well-established family cliques, so familiar with one another it was like they were speaking their own language. We spent all our time together: playing hide and go seek, pulling wood ticks off one another’s legs, running from stray rez dogs. When Melita asked if she could sleep in our tent that night, it was a revelation of sorts. You are wanted. You belong.
The next day we all started scratching.
That fall, after much pushing and persuasion, Mom finally got what she had been asking for for years: Dad agreed to let my sister and me leave Native American Magnet School #19—the only school in the city we could learn our culture—and enrol in a private Catholic school, which would be paid for with the help of my grandmother.
I became the new kid, a designation I’d wear like a runner-up sash for the next ten years. At Magnet School #19 my sister and I managed to fly under the radar because the poverty was widespread; there were levels. As long as there were kids poorer and more socially awkward than us, we were safe. At this school, in this two-floored, wide-lawned part of town, it was just us. Luckily we wore uniforms, so it was hard to tell exactly how dirt poor we were. I tried to make myself so likeable that economics didn’t matter, making jokes and faking a crush on John, the fourth-grader all the girls in my class obsessively pined after. He reminded me of a prepubescent Pat Sajak and had the personality of a broom handle, but I was so desperate to be accepted I didn’t care. I hastily replaced my surname with his and scribbled it everywhere—my folders, my desk, my arms. The Catholic schoolgirls were impressed.
That victory was tempered by an even bigger defeat. While my parents made intermittent payments for my private schooling, they didn’t pay rent on our house, so within a few months we were homeless. At that time my family included my mother and father, myself, Missy, my older half-sister Teena and my two-year-old brother Jon. The six of us squeezed into spare beds at my maternal grandmother’s house. It was large, with six bedrooms and two bathrooms, but she was the caretaker of three elderly people, so most of the rooms were already spoken for. It was hardly ideal sharing a bedroom with my sister, grandmother and parents, but at least I didn’t feel like an outsider. My mother told us Burgard Place was a “nice” neighbourhood when she was growing up, which meant it was mostly white. By the time my family and I moved in, it was mostly low-income Black families that lived there, the vibrant sixties paint having faded to light yellows and dull greens. I had no problem making friends with the neighbourhood kids. They didn’t judge me for being poor or having parents that yelled at each other constantly; they were in the same position. We bonded over our love of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and TLC, shared our sorrow over the spells in The Craft being too demanding to actually perform (who has access to all those animals and candles?) and Tupac’s untimely death.
By that point we’d had unnoticed and untreated head lice for months. We were positively crawling with them. The only way my parents figured it out was through my grandmother, who noticed one of the women she cared for scratching incessantly. Hundreds of dollars of Nix bottles were placed on the counter. Everyone’s hair was treated, everyone’s sheets were washed. I remember my grandmother’s face as she applied the prescription shampoo to my head: her lips tight, downturned, the perfect blend of annoyance and disgust. I’d seen her look at other people with that face—the people she cared for, my parents, the parish priest on occasion. She’d never looked at me like that, though. Not before that night.
Then my uncle Jerry came crashing into the picture. Uncle Jerry was a heroin addict. With gaunt cheeks and a big, bushy beard, he resembled Jesus on the shroud of Turin, only Uncle Jerry wore a David Foster Wallace–style bandana and the same plaid button-up shirt every day. He was homeless, too, so my grandmother gathered him in and gave him the basement—the same place my family was temporarily storing nearly all of our things. Within weeks, my dad’s expensive stereo system went missing. He blamed my uncle, saying he’d sold it for drug money. My grandma offered no evidence to counter this, no apology or shame on her son’s behalf. She simply told my dad to drop it. My dad was working at Sun Television and Appliances at the time and had won that stereo system in a sales competition. It was a trophy for him, recognition, a small sign that he’d accomplished something when his current circumstances were telling him the exact opposite. He wasn’t going to drop anything. He was going to stew, collect grievances and spit them in Mom’s ear, poisoning her against her own family. Then he was going to wait for the inevitable.
Like any good Catholic woman, my mother modelled herself after the Virgin Mary. She prayed the rosary every day, regularly visited the Dominican nunnery, made us watch the Catholic channel EWTN for hours in what felt like Clockwork Orange–style sessions. Her religious devotion was inconvenient when I wanted to watch cartoons, but I still admired it, viewing her with a reverence bordering on holiness. S
he’d regularly tell me about her labour with me: how she was hooked up to a myriad of IVs and monitoring devices for eighteen hours before I was finally born. She was so dedicated to being my mother she nearly died. I’m sure she didn’t mean for this story to chronicle, even mythologize, her love for me, but it did. As far as I was concerned, the Virgin Mary had nothing on her.
This is what made her sudden transition so jarring. Once Uncle Jerry started causing problems, my mom would snap at me for small things. Her eyes would focus, unblinking, her face would harden, her lips so chapped they resembled desert mud cracks. I didn’t notice the change in her at first because, at that point, all the adults in my life were constantly angry. I never knew what would set them off. It was like I was walking a perpetual tightrope. Sooner or later I’d have to fall.
It finally erupted one day in September. My uncle was carrying around a white bucket of hot tar, stirring it with a smooth piece of wood. He planned to use it on my grandmother’s driveway. At the same time he was arguing with my mother. His eyes were wide and blue, angry like my mom’s. Then he tried to fling hot tar at her. His aim was off; instead of my mother, it hit my two-year-old brother Jon in the face. There was screaming and crying and more chaos than I’d ever witnessed. The scariest part was no one was taking control of the situation. Things didn’t stop when my brother was hurt; they intensified. My mother cradled Jon with one hand while she tensed the other, darting a steely finger into my uncle’s chest, accusing. My uncle stood before her, aflame with anger.
No one was acting like an adult. Or rather, they weren’t acting like the responsible adults I saw calmly reasoning their way through family squabbles on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They weren’t sturdy and dependable like Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv; they were much worse—emotional, fallible, human. My father wasn’t there. My grandmother wasn’t there. My older sister wasn’t there. At eight years old, I found myself the only person in the house who wanted to act responsibly, so I did the one thing eight-year-olds are told to do when things get bad: I dialed 911.
Turns out that was a bad idea. My parents were angry at me for bringing the police into matters. My grandmother was livid. That all seemed backwards to me. I thought the big deal was my brother being burned, unintentionally or not. Instead I was being lectured on “family business staying private.” I don’t know if my grandmother knew that my uncle had burned my brother. There’s a scar on Jon’s face to this day so she wouldn’t have had to look hard for evidence. I do know she told my parents we had to get out of her house immediately—and we had to leave Teena with her. I couldn’t understand why Teena was the chosen one. I wondered if it was because she had blonde hair and blue eyes. She was completely white, not just half, like me. We packed what we could and, minus Teena, settled into a room at the closest Salvation Army, homeless again.
Without my grandmother’s financial aid, payments towards my private schooling fell behind. I was still driven to school every day, still allowed to sit in my normal seat in class, but even that started to feel precarious, as if the Jenga tower of our lives was one sharp tug from tumbling.
Then it did.
One evening my mom came to pick up Missy and me from the after-school program. As soon as she stepped in the room, words were pouring from her mouth—a swirling, manic saga mixing our real-life family drama with sections of the Bible and The Catholic Catechism, complete with references to demons and witchcraft. She wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular. Her story required no audience. It was as if her words were summoning her into existence, making her real, and if she paused for even the space of a breath she’d disappear. The rants were a lifeline, a plea. Help. Someone help.
The teachers reacted with judgment and disgust. They asked if she, a sober woman with an addict for a brother, was on drugs. When this made her even more upset, they asked her to leave. She was scaring the other kids.
After that Child and Family Services began circling our fragmented family. In hindsight, I’m surprised we managed to avoid their attention for as long as we did. My father tried to contain things. He quickly had my mother hospitalized while we were at school one day, then warned me a social worker was coming to talk to me. He said it was very important that I make her think everything was fine, that I was happy. If I didn’t, she could decide to take us away and break our family even more. I don’t remember what I said to the social worker but it must have been good enough. We weren’t dragged away screaming. We were still at the Salvation Army with my dad, waiting, surviving.
Almost as soon as my mom was released from the hospital, my father declared we were moving to Ohio. My mom had family in Euclid we’d met exactly once. Her father had gone to art school in Cleveland. Apart from that, Ohio meant nothing to any of us. I’m not sure what my dad thought he was running to. I don’t think he did, either. All that mattered was that he was running. Before he met my mom he’d spent his entire life running—from jobs, relationships, from his traditional territory. Any time he took a step forward, one foot was always stubborn and still, waiting for him to turn and bolt. To him, running was easy. Running was safe. And the possibility of reinvention, of abandoning whatever mess he’d made and starting fresh, was always too tempting to resist.
When you have a wife and kids, though, it’s much harder to do that. We holed up in a motel room while my father looked for a job and a place for us to live. After a year of bouncing between empty, echoing rental houses and motel rooms, we settled in Mentor, Ohio. My dad took up selling satellite services door to door. My mom’s time was split between home and various mental health units, a grim carousel that never stopped.
What also didn’t stop was my father’s libido. Once again Mom got pregnant, which would bring our family’s head count back to six. As angry as my parents were with my grandma, especially after she fought for, and won, full custody of Teena, they still needed the money she was willing to provide. Battle-axes were dropped and a tentative normalcy resumed. My parents even let Grandma take all of us kids for the summer so Mom would be able to care for the new baby, Mikey, in relative peace. Grandma and Teena spoiled us with gifts, trips to restaurants and amusement parks, luxuries our parents could rarely provide at home. We were all happy that things were finally okay—until Teena saw a louse scurrying through my hair while we were at church. She dragged us home and treated our hair, black garbage bags tied over her hands like absurd inflatable mittens. When my grandma came home and heard how we’d spent our afternoon, she decided we couldn’t come to her house again unless we were lice-free. She was the one stable adult in my life, and she had cast me out. I was devastated. It felt like she was punishing us for something we couldn’t control.
I’d never trust her again.
* * *
Every time Mom came home an hourglass was turned, and we had only so much time before she was back in the mental health ward again. My dad was very careful about it, only ever having her hospitalized while we were at school. We’d come home and he’d be there instead of her, explaining to us what we’d already guessed.
One day Missy, Jon and I got off the bus to find Mom had set up my brother Mikey in his high chair on the front lawn. She was pacing and yelling about God and my father and the Devil, her face red, her eyes wide with rage. We hoped none of the kids on the bus could see her acting weird, but apart from that we weren’t really worried. This sometimes happened to Mom. Which is probably why we were all so surprised when a police officer knocked on our door. A neighbour had called the cops. Mom pooled her considerable intellectual resources to convince the officer he was wasting his time. She was feeding her child on the lawn because it was a nice day. Was there some law against that? Her logic was surprisingly sturdy, even in the throes of illness. At that point, her diagnosis had gone from schizophrenia to postpartum depression to manic depression. Some people, like my grandmother and Teena, were convinced there was nothing wrong with her at all. It really depended on who she was speaking with and how “on” she was.
&nbs
p; Still, she couldn’t fool my dad. She didn’t even try. As soon as he got home from hours of white suburban doors slamming in his wide Mohawk face, she’d start in, recounting their unsavoury history in grotesque detail, making horrific accusations, her face inches from his as she trailed him from room to room. It was as if she needed to make him pay for her pain. Dad usually started off quiet, but eventually he erupted, too, calling her crazy, threatening that no judge would ever give her custody of us. Neither of them seemed to care that we could hear every word. Out of politeness we tried to pretend we were in a parallel dimension, just watching Nickelodeon on the couch while the next universe over they screamed and cried.
The last grain of sand in her hourglass fell again. She was gone by the time we came home the next day.
After three years I’d forgotten what it was like to not itch my head every five minutes. Through experience I had taught myself covert ways to scratch the lice so as not to bring attention to them. I scratched while flipping my hair, or running my fingers through it, or while leaning my head on my hand in a perfect imitation of preteen boredom. I even trained myself to keep from scratching as long as possible, hoping my steely determination would force the tiny bugs to wave a white flag and leave my scalp, defeated.
Despite my attempts to appear lice-free, the staff at Dale R. Rice Elementary would not be fooled. They had random head lice checks. One thing I’ll say about this particular upper-middle-class school is that they had considerable tact. I wasn’t singled out when the nurse found a small country of bugs in my hair. They called me down to the office over the intercom once everyone was back in class, claiming I had “an appointment,” mercifully omitting that appointment was with a bottle of medicated shampoo and a fine-tooth comb.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 7
