Shell Shaker

by LeAnne Howe

  She looks at Borden and suddenly a sense of forboding comes over her. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1991

  Adair Billy shuffles down the dormant halls of LaHarve and Hennepin in a pair of lime green flip-flops, wearing a worn-out sweat suit. She carries a cup of chicory coffee and the Times-Picayune. It’s early, 5:30 A.M. In two hours, the prosperous securities investment firm will be hopping with anticipation of the stock market’s activity.

  Adair’s co-workers say they can set their clocks by her Monday through Friday ritual. She arrives at work, 5:15 A.M. Makes coffee. Picks up her messages. Checks last night’s buy or sell orders for accuracy. Changes out of her flip-flops into shoes. By 7:00, she’s read the local paper, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters News Service, and other industry reports, and is prepared to comment on where the market will open.

  She likes being predictable. People know what to expect from her—what makes her angry, what she wants. Her clients trust her to manipulate profits for them based on tax advantages. Marriages. Divorces. Retirement. She either talks them into investing a wad of money into the S&P 500, or cautions them against being too greedy.

  “You’ve been in the market long enough to know you’ve been handed a bonanza.”

  “This is no time to gamble. Invest in stocks slowly.”

  “Cash in some chips now, especially since you’re over sixty and can sell without tax consequences.”

  “Balance is everything.”

  At thirty-eight, Adair Billy has the world in her pocketbook. Baby brokers, the first-year boys at LaHarve and Hennepin, call her the “Wall Street Shaman.” When men at parties rush to her side with lighters and pencil-thin cigarettes, she understands what they want. They hope she’ll impart some new market strategy to them, offered up in exchange for flattery and attention. Occasionally she sleeps with them. The bedroom questions are always the same. “What funds do you find extremely attractive?” “In my situation would you hold or sell?” “Do you have confidence in the economy to hold off recession long enough to...blah, blah, blah?”

  She joined the firm in New Orleans after finishing her M.B.A. at Southern Methodist University in 1977. The securities business suited her—as the middle daughter in the family, she is in some ways the most independent. Good training for a broker. She cut her teeth selling municipals. In 1983, she began buying large blocks of junk bonds from a California firm and selling them to institutional clients. At that time the bonds were earning much higher yields than treasuries. Her strategy was the old cliché “risk versus reward.” Junk bonds were risky because if a corporation defaulted on its debt, the bonds were worthless.

  Adair made her reputation in 1985 when she abruptly pulled all her clients out of the junk market even though the default rates were low. When the story broke that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating junk bond king Michael Milken and stock manipulator Ivan F. Boesky for insider trading, junk bonds plummeted. Her clients made hefty profits, while those who’d stayed with Milken and Boesky lost their shirts. Because Wall Street is very superstitious, people believed she had the ability to predict the future. They assumed it was her Native upbringing. In this case, they were right. A voice woke her up in the middle of the night and said, “Milken and Boesky are underwater.” While she knew they weren’t literally drowning, she understood the warning. Move as far away from them as possible. When the scandals broke, she played it cool and allowed her firm to tout her as an industry guru. If people wanted to think she was prophetic, that she had Indian spiritual powers, so be it. Just as long as she didn’t become like so many others on Wall Street. Predatory.

  Besides, she does hear voices. The hard part is determining whether or not they are talking to her.

  Sunrise.

  It invariably happens in the same way, but Adair takes a moment each morning to watch. From her eleventh-floor office it gives halo and weight to objects. Buildings and rooftops vibrate as light skims over them. It was bred into her that the first seconds of sunlight carry messages from Hashtali to her people.

  Across the city is the ancient river, the Mississippi. Being at the earth’s edge is where Adair feels most alive. She can’t imagine living anywhere else but New Orleans, where so much Choctaw history occurred. Yet there remains no trace of her people. Amazingly, nothing.

  The town was laid out in the elbow of the river, an outpost of the Old World, in 1718. She imagines how the shifting power struggles influenced its birth. First there were the Indians who pushed flat boats down river to trade, then came the French with their sailing corvettes, followed by the Spanish, whose ships sank when they tried to penetrate the mouth of the Mississippi. Waves of immigrants from all over the world would come later.

  During the humid summer months she sometimes takes the six-minute walk from her office on Poydras Street to the French Quarter, where the air reeks of rum mingled with the blunt smells of the Mississippi. Two-and-a-half centuries ago, New Orleans probably looked very much as it does now, the streets full of beggars and traders. The homeless of Europe.

  Frequently she visits the area where Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, made his residence. She’s read all the local articles written about him in the Times-Picayune that appear during Mardi Gras. He was born in Canada in 1680, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, the twelfth child of Charles Le Moyne, the Sieur de Longueuil of Quebec. At age eleven Jean Baptiste was invested with the title of “Sieur de Bienville.” He followed his older brothers into the navy, Pierre d’Iberville and De Serigny, who were proving to the world that the Canadians were indomitable coureurs de bois. At seventeen, Bienville was made a garde-marin, midshipman, and served with his brother d’Iberville in military exploits against the English at Hudson Bay in 1697. After the war, d’Iberville brought Bienville south to establish a colony in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In 1699, the two brothers set foot on what is now Ocean Springs, Mississippi, near Biloxi. This became France’s toehold in Louisiana.

  A local librarian told Adair that Bienville had the finest house in the French Quarter. His residence would have been bounded by the Customs House, Chartes, Decatur, and Bienville Streets. It was a two-story with an attic and six large doors on the first floor, all opening to the outside wraparound porch. A hotel really. In her mind she sees the house. It is well-built, with upright joists filled with mortar between the interstices. The exterior would have been whitewashed with slack lime, the interior wainscoted. In the upstairs there were large windows but because there wasn’t enough glass, the frames were enclosed with very thin linen, admitting as much light as glass.

  Bienville built the large house to entertain Choctaws. That much is acknowledged, even by white historians. It was a calculated move on his part; by hosting Choctaws for several weeks every March, the French governor was insuring the safety of his colony. Choctaws would protect the French against the English, and other tribes in the region. Her people traded their muscle for French commodities: hatchets, knives, cooking pots, vermilion face paint, fine Belgium wool, and the ever-popular French musket.

  Adair tells herself she’s following a tradition established by her ancestors. After all, Indians were the first commodity traders of the New World. She does much the same by providing a communications network that brings people together who want to exchange one thing for another: pork bellies, cotton futures, computer company shares, technology stocks, or U.S. treasuries. Maybe she’s her ancestors toehold in New Orleans, the one to re-establish a Choctaw power base. Yet to even think about herself in those terms goes against her home training. “Never think too much of yourself.” “If you have a special gift, others must be the ones to point this out.” Her mother’s words repeated so often they burned into her subconscious. To shake off her arrogance, Adair studies the accomplishments of her ancestors.

  In 1700, Choctaw commodity traders could hand off a portion of their shares of Fr
ench goods to other tribes eager to get in on the action. Their trading partners would swap the goods, and the system reproduced itself all over the Lower Mississippi Valley. French goods were low risk, high liquidity. If the Choctaws got mixed up in a war, they could rely on their trading partners for support. Just like England and America do today.

  Market sense, that’s what her people had long before there was a Wall Street with its “low risk, high liquidity” jargon. Mabilia, Mobile, was the trade jargon of her people. It’s Choctaw for slick.

  Adair takes a long drag from a cigarette, then notes the clock on her desk. Time to get dressed before trading begins. She walks over to her office bureau and pulls out a black suit and matching men’s oxfords, carefully removing a dry-cleaning tag from her gunmetal gray blouse. She slips one leg into the straight-legged pants, then the other. Men always notice a beautiful woman, so she began dressing like a man. It was her way of making them trust her. As she buttons her jacket, she wonders why historians, including her sister, focused on Indian warfare, instead of Indian commerce.

  In 1982, she’d flown back to Oklahoma to hear Auda lecture on Choctaw history, shortly after Auda’s book was published. The Oklahoma Historical Society had touted Auda as the first Choctaw academic to write on the tribe’s early interactions with the French. Adair had hoped the lecture would focus on the Choctaw’s legacy of commerce, but it wasn’t to be. When the hands shot up around the auditorium for questions, Adair was startled. She’d forgotten how angry whites can become when their own history is used against them.

  “I thought only the Cherokees walked the Trail of Tears.”

  “The Choctaws were the first tribe to be removed from our ancient homelands. Our people walked all the way from the Lower Mississippi Valley to Oklahoma with very little to eat or drink. The road to the promised land was terrible. Dead horses and their dead riders littered the way. Dead women lay in the road with babies dried to their breasts, tranquil, as if napping. A sacred compost for scavengers.”

  “So how many died?”

  “Four thousand.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Four thousand Choctaws.”

  “The total number of Indians?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Ouch. But how do you know that for sure?”

  “Andrew Jackson’s government took a census before and after.”

  “Census takers make mistakes.”

  “Yes, ma’am, exactly right, it could have been more.”

  “Or less, especially since we know how scarcely populated America was before contact.”

  “...”

  “You seem irritated...”

  “...”

  “American Indians didn’t invent the wheel. Let’s face facts, they hadn’t a written language, nor a concept of money.”

  “It has nothing to do with how densely populated a country is, otherwise India would be the most highly developed nation on earth.”

  Adair raised her hand to take issue with the woman’s last comment, but Auda ignored her.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” her sister began. “Off and on during the early years of the eighteenth century, the French-supporting Choctaws fought the English-supporting Chickasaws. Each tribe adopted a foreign tribe. It’s similar to the peculiar way white Americans adopt foreign children today. They want to give the child a better life. The parent cares for, and protects, the child. This is no doubt love but, ultimately, they want to make the foreign child ‘American,’ a persona of the parent. During the eighteenth century, hundreds and hundreds of Indians died in the effort to acculturate their foreign adoptees. Some years the Chickasaw and Choctaws only burned each other’s corn. Other times, they seized each other’s pack trains. Winter raids took place when the ground was covered with dry leaves and Choctaw warriors had to have enough patience to remove them one by one with their toes. There is a battlefield, I can show you, where more than a thousand Choctaw, Chickasaw, English, and French died.

  “When our enemies began killing our beloved men, it was the Choctaw women who whirled their tongues like hatchets and took up the fight that day. They pulled red water and fire from their menstruating bodies and smeared it across their chests. Even the seasoned English soldiers who carried muskets and powder horns dropped their weapons and ran back into the swamps. They couldn’t fight bullet-proof blood.”

  Auda paused solemnly. “The earth still gives up little mementos from this battle, a fragment of ax blade, pottery shards, splinters of flint from a war club. It was our women who chased down the traitors within our midst, but for what? To protect disagreeable foreigners, the new Americans, who would one day have the gall to explain our history to us.”

  Auda looked directly at her interrogator. “I only have one question for you. How would you know whether America was sparsely populated at contact, unless that was the propaganda you’d been taught in the colonizer’s schools?”

  There was an audible gasp at that last remark. Adair winced. Even she knew it was considered poor form to insult a paying audience. Auda should have stopped long before the menstrual blood story. White women have never known what to do with their blood. She could see them turning the image over in their minds trying to figure out what it all meant.

  Until that evening, Adair hadn’t realized how much of a cultural agitator her sister had become. When Auda compared the removal of all American Indians in the Southeast to the removal of Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem, the audience hissed. A staff member from the Oklahoma Historical Society quickly stepped onstage to try to rescue the situation. He thanked Auda for her talk and announced that copies of her book could be purchased in the lobby. The applause was paltry. No appeal could have helped.

  Adair could tell the staff member was Indian, but what tribe was anyone’s guess; there are sixty-six Indian Nations in Oklahoma. He guided Auda to the reception in the foyer; everyone was wearing forced smiles. For a long while, Adair studied the two Indians, her sister and the man. They were surrounded by New Agers, academics, and Oklahoma City’s business elite. She liked the looks of the Indian, the way he presented himself to crowd of Historical Society patrons, proud but not haughty. He had serious, pleasant eyes that occasionally glanced in her direction. His broad smile and long brown hair pulled into a ponytail meant, to her, that he felt secure enough to mingle easily with whites while still keeping certain Indian traditions. At last she acknowledged him with a friendly look, then she untied the red scarf knotted at her neck and stepped outside to take in some fresh air.

  When it happens for the first time, it’s like discovering you’ve been speaking with a borrowed tongue. You think the words are yours but, in fact, they’re someone else’s. Long before humans learned to clothe their feelings in words, love was a rhythm that two people shared. Once in sync, it was not ever necessary to ever speak of it. Rarely do Indians say “love” to a partner the way whites do. It is a rhythm they feel continuously, unto death.

  She stepped back inside the building and found him leaning casually against a wall, observing her sister in an argument with another woman. Although he was keeping his face as impassive as possible, he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the show her sister was providing. What could have happened in the last twenty minutes? She pushed her way through the crowd. The atmosphere was hot with tension. What was her sister thinking? Didn’t Auda realize that she’d already made most of the Oklahomans uncomfortable, talking about women’s periods and blood revenge?

  “Miss Billy, let her alone,” said a voice from the crowd.

  “Thank you,” replied the woman, “I hope all of you will bear witness to this outrage.”

  Auda was not only holding her book, but a large plastic cup of whiskey. Adair’s color rose; why did the stereotype have to be Indians and alcohol? Why couldn’t it be Indians and race cars, or Indians and chocolate wafers?

  “Adair, not a moment too soon,” said Auda, steadying herself. “I’ve been seized.”

  “How much o
f that have you had?” whispered Adair, pointing to her drink.

  “Couldn’t say, I started before my lecture,” thundered Auda. “But if she thinks I’m one of those perverse William Faulkner Indians, a mute character of the Southern literati, she has another think coming.” She turned back to the woman in question. “Listen ma’am, my sister here is a fighter, and she won’t take guff off you like I will.”

  Auda’s adversary was boxy like a Cadillac, in her mid-sixties, and upholstered cover to cover in fine imported leather. She wore a large diamond ring that refracted light around the room, making Auda say cruel things about Tinker Bell being raised from the dead.

  “C’mon,” whispered Adair, “let’s get out of here.”

  The woman inhaled herself to a full five feet tall. “It’s the Marxists what’s started it,” she said to the others. “American professors were never like this until the Marxists took over education. A respectable woman can’t even defend her own heritage. Imagine her comparing Israel’s struggles against the Palestinians to the fascists.”

  “Good grief. Let that poor woman alone, Auda. She’s probably somebody’s grandmother,” said Adair.

  “I am,” said the woman. “I got four grandchildren in Brooklyn, all studying summers on a kibbutz in Israel. Plus I got another grandchild who is a Seneca Indian and lives on the reservation. Lady, we’re a multicultural family, so you better watch out who you’re calling a whining Zionist!”

  The crowd was turning into something of a mob. Adair was about the drag her sister out of the lobby when he intervened again. “Excuse me, Miss Billy, but you’re wanted on the phone.”

  Up close, Adair remembers thinking that his skin looked as if it had been polished by layers of chestnut varnish. Much later that evening, she would learn that he worked part-time at the Historical Society. The rest of the week he was occupied in law school. When he offered Auda his arm he looked completely relaxed, as if he had nothing better to do than to escort her wherever she wanted to go.