by Rudy Wiebe
For almost four years she has sent me the journals that I urged her to write—get everything, anything, into words, on paper, write it down, every memory, emotion, rage, laugh, pain—all of it, as it comes. And we have talked, face to face in the Prison for Women and for hours by telephone; we have exchanged letters; she has sent me boxes of notes and comments on legal documents, on trial transcripts. At the moment I cannot see her, but I know she will not have broken the spiritual boundary of the Healing Lodge; I know she is looking at the sky, the grass, the trees and hills and distant prairie, as I am; looking at Creation’s brightness through the darkness of the sweat lodge; looking inward. She has asked me to help her; I have promised her, “Yes”—though, foolishly, I had no idea what a difficult thing I was promising—and, for these years, we have struggled to tell her story so that she, so that I, so that some possible reader will understand. Something.
Why has she lived such a dreadful life, and why has she been so destructive to herself and those she loves? Why have they been so devastatingly destructive to her? How is it she became entangled in murder? What I already know of her life makes it almost too horrifically representative of what has happened to the Native people of North America; of what her ancestor Big Bear most feared about the ruinous White invasion that in his time overwhelmed him, that jailed him in Stony Mountain Prison in 1885 for treason-felony, that is, for “intending to levy war against the Queen, Her crown and dignity.” Sadly enough, that stone-and-steel fortress on top of its limestone extrusion in flat Manitoba had been completed in plenty of time to receive him.
That being said, at the same time Yvonne is as much White as Native. In fact, she and her family tried to live “White” throughout her childhood in the United States—she remains a born citizen of the United States, although through the Red Pheasant Reserve she has Indian status in Canada—but in Butte, Montana, she was “called down” as “Indian,” as “a dirty breed,” protected by few discernible laws. The White so-called law-enforcers destroyed her brother and became her worst abusers, until finally she had to flee to Canada for her life.
“My Native side sometimes hurt me,” she writes to me, “but it never came close to doing to me what the White side did. I became comfortable with my Native self, so that is where I chose to exist out of. And yes, I am happy being a ‘dirty Indian.’ ”
Yvonne finds growing strength in nothing the White half of her heritage gave her in the first fifteen years of her life, but rather in the spiritual and personal heritage of her Cree ancestors, particularly in her grandmother Flora Baptiste Bear, and most particularly in her extraordinary progenitor the Plains Cree chief Mistahi Muskwa. Her voice speaking to me echoes his: a sense of heritage, of self-awareness and knowledge, of suffering, of self-deprecating humour, a longing for vision and understanding.
But it is necessary to recognize, to understand that though Yvonne Johnson, in contrast to her historic great-great-grandfather, may be in a beautiful, natural place said by all the official brochures to be built for healing, where no stone walls or barbed-wire fences are anywhere visible, nevertheless she remains in prison.
The astonishing beauty of the Healing Lodge and landscape in which it is built have made me forget that; but I am reminded late in the afternoon of the second day of my visit in January 1996. I’ve signed out, and Yvonne and I are opposite the entrance desk, near the two sets of outside doors. She stops; I am slightly ahead of her, reaching for the door handle.
“Here,” she says. “I can’t go farther.”
I look at her and she gestures slightly with her hand and turns quickly—she told me the first time I met her in the stone prison in Kingston, “I’m not so good at saying goodbye. I just say ‘See you later’ “—and I recognize what she means by “here.”
And I turn too and go out, fast, out to the snowy huddle of cars near the stark poplars.
She never had to say that in Kingston; there, I was never lulled into comfortable blindness by sitting for two days in a high open lounge, by easy chairs, and laughter from shifting groups of women across a bright room, by loading our trays side by side with food from a buffet and eating and talking with others around a round table. In P4W even I could see the painted and repainted stone walls, the steel bars and doors, and now as I push through snow towards my car it seems suddenly that the whole weight of that oppressive fortress lands on me—despite Saskatchewan cold burning my face—and in my nostrils I am inside it again, the smell and the sound and what I discovered within myself to be the almost unendurable heft of it; I’m so happy I’m out, free and out, I sprint to my car. Even as I think of Yvonne having to walk back, I’m euphoric. I crank the engine and wheel around out of there. I will drive, drive!
On the Trans-Canada Highway, near Strathmore, Alberta, the blizzard begins to shiver the car. I ease through it into the edge of Calgary, gas up, make a phone call, and avoid the police patrolling Highway Two north to Edmonton. It’s only three hundred kilometres, with four lanes all the way—easy, I could drive it blind. And as I accelerate to cruise speed out of the valley of Nose Creek and up onto the prairie, momentarily the western wind from the mountains seems to wipe the snow away into clear, star-struck darkness. Nothing but darkness, here and there a farmyard light, a huddle of town, the occasional car lights approaching in the on-coming lanes. Then nothing opposite, the car humming, so contained and unperturbed, ominously nothing but darkness. And then slowly, softly it seems, the snow begins again, slanting through my short, narrow light in streaks, skating, swirling over the whitening pavement like the advance and foam of a running sea—boiling gusts, white waves, washing under, splashing over me. Gradually I catch up and become part of a single line of four cars accumulating behind a snowplough as it drags ridges out of the crunching drifts. I am counting stopped and stalled cars, pick-ups and multitrailer trucks caught in strange angles on shoulders and twirled into ditches, folded across medians by the screaming weight of the wind; I am following two red hazard lights blinking into whistling darkness and I am concentrated, intense. I can do this, this beautiful night blizzard; I can drive or stop if I want to, slide with the wind for the ditch and carefully ease, ease out of it, that heart-lurching slide, do anything; I can do it hunched around the steering wheel of my tough little car; and, peering into the shrieking blizzard, I am singing, very, very happy.
The snow slams at me everywhere, this world I was born into, and in the white darkness I see again the Cypress Hills as I left them behind, an immense herd of shot horses crumpled and heaped down dark on the horizon as I drove west, very fast into red sunset, towards the rising wall of storm clouds, into the cold, coming brilliance of prairie snow.
2
My Eyes Became My Voice
I’ve learned so much about myself, I can’t write it all, or fast enough, I can’t write it the way it should be said. It is sometimes easier to say thoughts than to write them because saying something is living it, feeling it, connecting with it again. No writing can capture that fully. In a way, speaking is alive, writing makes it become dead. What is written is not really a thought put to memory, as why remember what you can go back to and look up, if need be?
–Yvonne, Journal 9, 20 February 1994
THE FIRST TIME Yvonne Johnson and I meet to talk face to face is on Thursday, 10 June 1993, in a windowless room deep inside the limestone walls of the federal Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. The Psychology Department’s small interview room is crammed with a sofa and chairs, a coffee table, and tall, locked cupboards; Yvonne’s counsellor and her Elizabeth Fry Society advisor have arranged that we meet here without direct supervision.
“We can talk here,” Yvonne says, and adds lightly, ironically, “I think … it’s not supposed to be bugged. At least there’s nothing posted ‘This Area Is Subject to Monitoring,’ like everywhere else.”
Her words are slightly blurred, drawn out but intense—is it her Montana drawl or the exact physical control of breathing she must maintain in order
to speak, the lingering “s’s” she cannot say quite precisely because she was born with a bilateral cleft palate and lip?
When the barred door slid aside on the dark, sounding corridors and stairs of P4W and I saw her for the first time, it seemed that, despite our long telephone conversations, she was materializing out of prison blankness, that she was coming towards me contained in a kind of silence that would surely be indecipherable to me. But she strode without hesitation towards me in the small lobby between the electronic doors, a tall, slim woman with her face set in wary expectation, a bandanna holding back black hair hanging to her waist; dark skin; brown, almost black, eyes. And she reached her hand out; our right thumbs locked and our fingers brushed each other’s wrists, her right hand holding me at that slight distance of a careful, formal greeting. Then her left arm came up and hugged me almost without touching, a few pats of warmth on my back.
“Hi, I’m Yvonne,” she said, “but my family calls me Vonnie. You can call me anything …”—and she laughed a little—“except late for supper!”
Prison is a very tough place to meet; a woman and a man who’ve corresponded intensely but never seen each other, inside this stone place designed for lifetimes of confinement, where blurred shouts boom and echo along grey corridors and barred steel seems to be slamming continuously. Everything is so loud, controlled, balancing—no, teetering on an edge. No glance is merely a glance; it is a body search. The entire building seems to heave, Yvonne will tell me, breathing hard and blowing away the spirits of all the women it has sucked up.
But she makes camaraderie happen immediately between us, despite the female guard at the electronic doors peering at us, despite the two even larger guards who have brought her here from her cell; she starts it with her deliberate Montana drawl and flat, country joke.
Now we are alone, door closed, and we’re seated in easy chairs kitty-corner at the coffee table; she opens her bundle and lays out a small sweetgrass ceremony. When we and the room are cleansed, I give her my gift of cigarettes, she gives me a long braid of sweetgrass and three small red cloth pouches of the other sacred medicines—tobacco, cedar, sage—tied together with leather thongs. We sip coffee; at first we chat about easy things to find our balance, about the usual Canadian distances, weather, the long flight from Edmonton and the seemingly even longer highway trip from Toronto.
Then she places three thick notebooks on the low table—her journals—and explains how hard it is for her to write her thoughts; it would be so much easier, she thinks, to talk into a tape recorder. And I am rippling the pages of one hardcover book and then another, my eye running over words, dates, down pages of marvellous words fixed there for as long as paper and ink will endure, and I tell her again, please, as I have so often on the phone, tapes are so hard to order, so hopeless to organize or grasp because to find anything you have to listen to everything all over again, in sequence: if she wants to tell her story, her words must be on paper.
She of course knows this. She says she’s kept a journal since early May 1991, two weeks after they brought her to Kingston. And she likes writing in these hard black books, paper feels good, filling every line even if her spelling isn’t so hot, and we chuckle, feeling better with each other; though we remain very careful. We don’t know this yet, but in the next six years of working together we will never once have an argument.
And I listen to her low, quiet voice become steadily more flat, her warm, expressive face retreating into an apparent calm, almost expressionless. It must be a projection from within, perhaps a shield to protect herself from all I still have no comprehension of, as gradually, steadily she begins to speak with that amazing candour she will always give me about herself and her family, a taut personal quality which I do not yet know will continue without hesitation for hours.
“Everyone in my family is suffering, but we’re never responsible, no, never us—somebody else did something horrible, okay, but never us. If anything ever gets said, about what went on between us, it’s a slip of the lip when we’re drinking, and sure, that can turn into a drunken argument or a fight, no-holds-barred, and maybe even Mom will get pulled into it, if things are yelled and repeated. But we’re all partly drunk when it happens, and then we part ways for a while, and a long time later we’ll slowly drift together again, but if we do, it means we never speak about what happened, never. Pretend we don’t know, never admit anything, never look into anyone’s eyes more than a second—nothing happened. We just can’t pull it together to try to talk, about anything. My family has stayed together as much as it has by denial, shame, fear … all the other good stuff like that.”
She laughs without smiling, humourlessly. “Don’t talk, just play the duck.”
“Duck?”
“Sure, a duck swims on the water, it dives under, water rolls off its feathers. It’s never actually wet—so just float, dive and hide, come up, and let the shit roll off with all the rest of the crap that’s being thrown at you.
“But me, I’m tired of playing. The truth and reality of my life is in the existence I live now, in this prison with this sentence. I won’t be ashamed of what was done to me in my life any more. I accept my faults, I’ve learned to wear my own shame, but I refuse to wear anyone else’s—and I give back to my abusers the shame that is theirs and theirs alone. What I have done, what was done to me, that will never silence me again.”
“Yes,” I say, “yes—but it’ll be hard. There are so many people in your life, no story is ever only yours alone.”
She looks at me quick and straight. We are sitting on the Core Can Industries furniture, assembled by the several thousand men who are inmates in all the other federal stone prisons scattered around Kingston. Neither of us yet has a true conception of how difficult it will be to tell her story. After forty years of work at writing, I think I know a bit about making stories, but I don’t grasp the impossibilities of this one; not yet.
“Maybe not only my story—but it is mine. Others maybe won’t agree, but I want to tell my life the way I see it.” Yvonne continues more quietly, “Brother against sister, sister against sister, we fight, we shift from one clique to another of gossip and unspoken accusations. Once my sister Minnie said to me, ‘So you got fucked, huh! So forget it, you’ll get fucked again.’ But I can’t live like that.
“We won’t talk. And now that we four sisters all have kids, we just know we have to watch closer over them, protect them from what happened to us. And if anything should happen, well, we’ll run away and just act as if nothing happened—it’s all right, nothing happened! We all know it’s not right, it’s no family secret any more, and yet the denial goes on and on. I try to tell my sisters I’ve made a way for them to follow, I can take it, I’ve laid myself down like a bridge, all they have to do is walk over me. But their healing can’t be done by me; for them, it’s still just deny and run, that’s all.”
Yvonne pauses. For some time I have been staring at, but not really seeing, her beaded moccasins. They look so soft and delicately beautiful, to walk in them must feel like silk feathers.
“That’s a mystery to most of the world—why silence? why denial? But it’s no mystery to the abused.
“Predators and victims. That’s why my family drinks to excess. Drugs and booze suck up hopes, every little dream you have, as easy as opening your mouth and just lift your hand and pour it down. Abuse happens, and down it goes into you, down to hide in the mucky silence of drugs and booze. Living like we do, it’ll happen again, and again, and we take it. It just goes with the territory.”
She will tell me later, when I ask, that she sewed the moccasins herself, low, Cree-style. And I will see the superb, delicate drawing and sewing she does, the laced-together knee-high Apache boots she makes but does not wear with jeans. They, too, are as lovely as anything I’ve ever seen flickering on dancing feet in a powwow.
But now she tells me, grimly, “I never had any great plans about what I wanted to be when I grew up. My life got to be so minimal
, my only plan … I guess, stay alive. Though sometimes I can’t think of why I even wanted that. The cop who interviewed me yesterday said, ‘I can’t recall anything that young.’ I knew he was feeling me out, and I told him I can recall things before three, or even two. If I have a visual memory, I don’t doubt myself. I don’t doubt the houses I lived in, in Butte, Montana.”
Yvonne: I’m a baby, less than two, and I’ve been laid down for a nap. I’m looking through the bars of my crib, through the small square panes of the window, and there’s a bell-shaped window in the house next door. Years later my sister Kathy and I play hookey from school and we’re in an empty lot on busy Montana Street, just weeds wide open to the sky, and I feel it: I’ve been here; our first brick house stood here once. A sagging garage at the back is all that’s left on the lot, and there’s the name L-E-O-N painted on the door. My brother’s name, with the E backwards, the way he often wrote it.
I looked up then and yes, there was the bell-shaped window that got hid in my memories. And on the corner the gas station, still there, where the orange balls jumped around on the side of the pump when Dad gassed up. Leon once started a fire there, and another time the gas station had a fire on its own without Leon’s help.
That’s the first house I remember, red brick on Montana, Butte’s main street, coming wide and straight down the mountain through town, with shaft mines and frames sticking up all over between the houses and buildings. Parades come marching, down past the front of our house, and candy wrapped in paper scatters behind the booming bands. If I can get into the street I can pick it up and shove it into my mouth and let it melt, sweeter than sugar. The front steps give me slivers. I have to go down on my hands and knees backwards, I’m so little.
