Take This Man: A Memoir

by Brando Skyhorse

  “Come work for me,” he said. (My mother never found his card, no matter how often I asked.)

  It could be leading a group of wide-eyed “Pilgrims”—my mother’s term for whites—around a jewelry store rubbing “southwestern” squash blossom necklaces and sterling silver bracelets between her fingers. Using a just-for-white-people “Indian” voice—a taffy pull on her slight Latina accent—she’d pronounce whether a piece of turquoise had been crafted by a real “on the rez Skin.”

  Of course, my mother had no idea which pieces were authentic, but if her details didn’t line up—or connect at all—you still wanted to believe her. Why? You felt privileged that someone with such an extraordinary story would choose to confide in, of all people, you. You’d forget meeting a hundred people, but you’d remember meeting my mother. Her story became your story.

  “I can’t wait to tell my friends I met an Indian!” one of my mother’s Pilgrims told her in a sincere embrace. She rattled with the jewelry my mother helped her buy. “Thank you.”

  Hey, she’d say, at least it’s never boring.

  • • •

  Maria met Candido Ulloa when she was twenty-five at a Mexican LA nightclub in the summer of 1972. He drove a big American car with a velvet burgundy interior and wore checkerboard polyester shirts with flashy jewelry—all those tempting accessories that make you forget you’re poor. His mustache and wavy shoulder-length hair made him a ringer for the soon-to-be-famous Chico and the Man star Freddie Prinze. My mother’s blood red hair from high school was now an inky Morticia Addams black that didn’t drape so much as slide down her body, accentuating the svelte curves she would later spend years and thousands of dollars on worthless exercise videos and equipment trying to get back.

  My mother did most of the talking with Candido. Though she had been born to Mexican parents, she spoke—and would learn—nothing beyond fast-food Spanish. It’s not my language, Maria told Candido. Her mother, June, was, in fact, a Plains Indian from Oklahoma, making Maria half Indian.

  “And your father, Emilio,” Candido asked, “is Filipino?”

  “He’s my papa,” she said. “But he’s not my real father.”

  “What was he?” Candido asked.

  “He doesn’t count,” my mother said, “like most men.”

  Born in Yahualica, Mexico, to a family of five brothers and three sisters, Candido spoke just a handful of English words. He had left school in the fourth grade to work picking onions in Ensenada. When he came to Los Angeles, his first job was at a car wash working for a black man who called him amigo because he never learned his name. Then he went to work at a Love’s Bar-B-Que, where, as someone without a car, he was popular both with the waitresses eager to give him lifts home and the gay cruisers driving on the boulevard. He took English classes at night and, eventually, so he could have weekends free for partying and the clubs, left the restaurant to work at a furniture factory.

  When Maria got pregnant a few months later with what she told Candido was her first child, he became her husband and a temporary legal resident. They posed for a grim picture outside the city courthouse, a fresh marriage license in my father’s hand. He wrote to June, “We dedicate this photo to you with all affection from your daughter and son so that you can keep it as a souvenir.” Young, pretty, and stone faced, they both embrace like two precarious towers forced together by a high wind.

  Watching American Indian Sacheen Littlefeather (who, like my mother, was born with a stereotypical Mexican name, Marie Cruz) refuse Marlon Brando’s Oscar to protest Hollywood’s depiction of American Indians convinced Maria that, if their baby was a boy, Brando would be a great name to honor her own nonexistent Indian heritage.

  “If you don’t like that,” my mother said, “how about Pacino?”

  (Pacino Ulloa? Pacino Skyhorse? As it was, my first name was misspelled Brandon on my birth certificate, and, in a weird precursor to a life filled with shifting identities, a change-of-name form was filed when I was three months old.)

  Their marriage was a Napoleon complex, short and furious. Candido worked six days a week and took English classes at night. That was his life. Maria was angry that her life as Candido’s wife was so fucking boring and always ended a fight by kicking him out of June’s house, where they lived.

  “I don’t want a deadbeat around my son!” she screamed when Candido came home late from work.

  “Why haven’t you learned English already?” she said when Candido came home late from school.

  He didn’t know the English or Spanish words to calm down Maria. One time they took the bus to Disneyland, parking their car in a lot downtown. They had a wonderful time, but when they returned, the car battery was dead. Maria cursed out Candido, took the bus home, and told my grandmother to change the locks.

  He was kicked out, moved back in, kicked out again—over and over during the next three years. Once, when they were separated, she told Candido she’d been raped by a black man.

  “Did you go to the police?” he asked.

  “Why would I go to the pigs?” she shouted “Don’t you fucking care about what happens to me? What kind of husband are you? I’m seeing a real man now.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Paul Skyhorse,” she said. “He’s an Indian. He’s in jail,” she said proudly.

  “How do you see a man that is in jail?”

  “Have you always been this dumb?” my mother asked.

  • • •

  I don’t remember the day my father left. I was three years old. What I’d be told, long after I found out that Candido was my father, came in slivers, the last of which I’d collect when I was in my midthirties.

  It was pouring rain. My mother and Candido went shopping for toddler furniture. When Candido opened the trunk to put the furniture inside, it filled with water. Their boxes soaked in puddles. Maria was angry that their shopping was ruined and wouldn’t calm down at home.

  “I want you out of this house!” she screamed.

  This time Candido said, “If you want me out, I will go, but I will not come back. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes! You’re a good-for-nothing wetback! I want you out for good!”

  He packed quickly while Maria complained to my grandmother, “What kind of man leaves his wife and son?” My mother went to the kitchen and found a knife. Then she blocked the front door.

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” my mother said. “If you leave, I’ll call la migra on you!” Then she came at Candido with the knife.

  My grandmother stood in front of him and faced my mother. “If you want to hurt this good man who goes to work every day and tries to make you happy, you’ll have to get through me. You’ll have to kill me first.”

  “You’ve always been on his side!” my mother screamed. She put the knife on a table and then grabbed me. She picked me up and shook me, hard.

  “Don’t do that to Brando!” Candido said “You’re going to hurt him!”

  My mother said, “I’ll kill Brando if I want to! He’s my child!” Then she threw me onto the couch and reached for the knife again.

  “Go! Go!” my grandmother told Candido.

  My father ran out of the house to a friend’s apartment, stayed there for a few months, and then found a place of his own in East Los Angeles. That’s where he’d forget who he and his family were and start his life again.

  • • •

  A parent who disappears, if he’s spoken of at all, is at the mercy of the one who stays behind and of a child’s wishy-washy memory. Birthday parties, trips to the park, walks to the grocery store, hugs, kisses—nothing with Candido in it stuck.

  My father’s forgetting was more specific, more deliberate. Candido hadn’t been married to my mother long enough to earn a green card. He was terrified of the power she had to potentially destroy his life. His fear was so great it ma
de a Mexican illegal risk deportation and convinced a proud man to abandon his only son.

  My mother wanted to forget Candido. There was a massive photo purge, but she kept a handful of documents and pictures she could have easily thrown away. She doctored the backs of these surviving pictures poorly with false captions, such as “My friend Candy” or “Uncle Candy,” and then waited for the day when her lies wouldn’t satisfy my questions anymore. I was twelve or thirteen when she told me at last who he was—who I was—and concocted fantastical stories of his disappearance and whereabouts aimed at definitively killing him off. He’d returned to Mexico, joined the Mexican Mafia, or had permanent amnesia triggered by a brick my mother landed on his head during his “getaway.”

  My imagination tried making him a flesh-and-blood person with a feel, a scent, a voice, a laugh. (In my imagination, my father’s laugh is generous and honeyed.) That man never rose from my animating table. Candido dissolved into blank, empty space, like a desert sky drained of its intense blues and pinks, or an ocean horizon stripped of water. My father was like God: an unseen life-giving entity whose existence I had to accept on faith.

  My mother wasn’t interested in believing in things you couldn’t see, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t eager to see if others would believe in what they couldn’t see. A manufactured identity is nothing new in Los Angeles. For every starlet who changes her name or her breast size, there are a hundred undocumented workers who assimilate their way into the city, unnoticed, to construct their own versions of the American Dream. In my mother’s dream, she saw no reason that just because we were born Mexican we’d need to live as Mexicans.

  I was three years old when my life as Brando Kelly Ulloa, the son of a “good-for-nothing wetback,” ended. My life as Brando Skyhorse, the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, had just begun.

  2

  “T

  hat is your father,” my mother said, pointing at Paul “Skyhorse” Durant through a thick pane of glass.

  Inside a heavy-security courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, my mother introduced me to a rowdy group of Paul Skyhorse’s supporters as his four-year-old son. My “father,” a giant with a long mane of hair, looked at us in the gallery and, with a confused grin, waved a shackled hand.

  Who was this man? Had my mother conjured him out of her imagination? I didn’t understand why he was in cuffs or behind a sheet of glass like a mannequin. I didn’t want to hold his hand, climb up in his arms, or have him come home with us. What I liked was his pale blue fringed shirt with tassels like those on the end of a bicycle’s handlebars. Would his fringes blow in the wind, I wondered, if he ran until he was free?

  • • •

  In the mid-1970s, there were a number of disenfranchised groups in every darker shade of the rainbow that trafficked in rage, looking for power and justice. In 1974 Durant, a twenty-nine-year-old Chippewa Indian, along with Richard “Mohawk” Billings, were accused of the brutal robbery and murder of a taxi driver in Ventura County. In the wake of the 1973 Wounded Knee uprising, in which armed members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized control of the area near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for over two months, Skyhorse and Mohawk, both AIM members, took on the aura of political prisoners. There were celebrity advocates, bright red Free Mohawk & Skyhorse bumper stickers, and extensive media coverage. The trial, which began in June 1977 and at the time was the longest in California history, ended with Skyhorse’s and Mohawk’s acquittals almost a year later.

  My mother followed the trial closely and ingratiated herself to Durant by writing him “fan girl” letters that included pictures of herself: a lean, fierce, beautiful woman with flowing waist-length hair. She was as easy a sale to Durant as she was to others. Later, at a Skyhorse-Mohawk Legal Defense Fund meeting held in a damp wood-paneled community center that smelled of burning Styrofoam, my mother introduced herself to AIM cofounder Dennis Banks as one of Paul Skyhorse’s wives and me as his child.

  “Glad you’re here, Sister Skyhorse,” he said. “Your son’s going to be a proud chief someday with that name.”

  There was, of course, the matter of Durant’s actual family: his second wife and his children. Convict groupies aren’t uncommon, but my mother must have known that posing us as Durant’s wife and child could lead others to ask questions. So she found—or created—in another prison two thousand miles away a second Paul Skyhorse. That man was the Paul Skyhorse that became my father.

  Two different men.

  Two different incarcerated American Indians.

  Two different Paul Skyhorses.

  If this sounds confusing, I believed these two Paul Skyhorses were the same man until I began writing this book.

  At least it’s never boring.

  • • •

  My own Paul Skyhorse’s history begins with a prison record.

  Five days before my birth in 1973, Paul Martin Henry Johnson, a six-foot-four-inch twenty-nine-year-old Indian with dark saddle-leather skin and waist-length hair, was indicted for armed robbery, along with two others, by a grand jury in the county of McLean, Illinois. They were after a Stevens 16-gauge pump shotgun, a Browning 12-gauge automatic shotgun, a Greenfield .22 caliber automatic rifle, a .357 Security Six revolver, and nine hundred dollars in cash. The guns were, in the different stories my mother told, for robbing banks to fund the American Indian Movement or to be used in the commission of an AIM-related “political statement.” Paul Johnson’s robbery occurred on May 8, 1973, the same day the headline-grabbing seventy-one-day AIM-controlled siege of Wounded Knee ended. Johnson said he’d spent some time at Wounded Knee during the standoff and claimed he had the shrapnel in his brain to prove it.

  Paul Johnson was sentenced on April 10, 1974, to serve seven and a half years to twenty-two and a half years in an Illinois state penitentiary. Sometime during his incarceration, he came into contact with my mother, probably though a classified ad in the back-to-the-land magazine The Mother Earth News. When I was older, I’d help write my mother’s personal ads and sorted through the slush pile of polite, randy, and desperate replies, but as a four-year–old, I was still too young to ghost her classifieds. What caught Paul’s eye might have been simple: “Young single Indian mother searching for a good Indian father and devoted husband.” To weed out any playboys she would have listed father first.

  Paul Johnson’s letters came once or twice a week on canary yellow legal-size paper, written in a doctor’s scrawl pulled tight at both ends and snapped back into prose. The pages had a ridged, tactile feel, the words branded into the paper. A thick, many-paged letter was filled with questions or promises. A thin, single-sheet letter came with sticky, blood-smeared twenty-dollar bills “earned” by shaking down or beating up fellow convicts.

  Each letter was signed, “May the Great Spirit Guide You.”

  Here in these pages were most likely outlines for the transformation of both father and son Skyhorse. Paul “adopted” me as his own child, though what that legally entailed, with him behind bars, was unclear. There was no conversation in which my mother declared Paul Skyhorse my new, official father, because—a fact she was probably counting on—I didn’t remember the old one. So thorough was my brain wipe of Candido that I still have no memory of being called by any name other than Brando Skyhorse Johnson.

  Neither did anyone else. When my mother, now a full-blood Indian named Running Deer, enrolled me in kindergarten at Logan Street Elementary School in the fall of 1978 (the same school she’d attended as a girl twenty years earlier), I was presented as Brando Skyhorse, “Paul Skyhorse’s” son. Because the Los Angeles Skyhorse Durant–Mohawk Billings trial had ended three months earlier and was fresh in the city’s consciousness, there was a legitimate concern voiced that the media might swarm upon the school. So my mother offered a compromise: Johnson would be added to protect my identity from both teachers and the outside world.

  Her
story was accepted at its word. Why wouldn’t it be? Even I had no idea that “Johnson” had been Paul Martin Henry’s surname in prison.

  My mother then encouraged Logan’s vice principal, Judith Newman, to lobby the federal government for funds due public schools that have Native American students enrolled. Mrs. Newman sent away the paperwork and by the end of the year had received special funds for the education of Brando Skyhorse Johnson, American Indian.

  (Mrs. Newman told me the above in 2010. “I had no idea all of you were Mexican,” she admitted. “Your mother was very convincing.”)

  Perhaps adopting a new name for Paul was just as simple as adopting an abandoned child. Thundercloud Indian Affairs, a Union, New Jersey, newsletter “dedicated to communication with all Indian people and others of like mind,” published a poem written by “Paul Sky Horse Johnson” from PO Box 100 in Vienna, Illinois. (Durant was in Los Angeles, on trial for murder.) Was Sky Horse (also spelled Skyhorse), as he said later, a family name he’d been stripped of, replaced with Johnson when he entered the “white” educational system because it was forbidden for Indian children to enroll with their original names? Or had my mother written about her activism on Paul Skyhorse Durant’s behalf and encouraged Johnson to adopt Skyhorse’s name in jail, blending together two different people to create the new identities that she wanted for herself, her son, and her future husband? The newsletter was sent to “Maria B. Johnson”—my mother now a “wife” to an Indian but not yet a Skyhorse.

  That Christmas, I sat for a picture on the lap of a boozy theme park Santa and emerged on the back of that photo as Brando Skyhorse. Photos of me already in our albums were “revised,” with my mother’s hand crossing out Ulloa in pen or with Wite-Out, making my father Candido my “uncle Candy,” and then inking my Indian name in its place. Even my first name wavered between Brandan and Brando until I was three. These white Kodak print backgrounds were my mother’s first draft of me, working out my story and who I was. One black-and-white photo of me at age three had written in Paul’s hand, “Our son and little chief Sky Horse.” Had my mother sent him this photo, asked him to sign the back without dating it, and then return it to her for me to discover it when I was old enough? What other explanation makes sense?