by Jock Soto
For Mom’s sake, and for our own, we will prove that we can still be a family.
Courage and Comfort on the Go
IN MY EARLY years with my family I spent much of my time not just moving from home to home but actually living in a home that moved. Recreational vehicles (RVs), campers, motor homes, trailers—we roamed all through the Southwest, and at the end of each day, to cap our wandering with something that made us feel cozy and homey, we would prepare and eat a wonderful meal.
I think one of the reasons RV meals are always so fun to prepare and taste so good is because they demand a special resourcefulness on the part of the cook. Limited space, limited burners, a makeshift supply of utensils and pots and pans—the inventive chef welcomes all of the challenges that come with on-the-road cooking. One of my favorite meals whenever we traveled was a recipe for pork chops my mother had learned from my father’s mother. I still find it such a comforting meal, so simple and inexpensive—and I have discovered it is just as satisfying when cooked in a stationary home.
In my version of Mom’s pork chops, I have added poblano peppers, because I love them, and a dash of cumin or curry. The pork chops are also good without these extras. Sometimes if Luis is working late and I want to take the edge off my solitude, I put on my pajamas, make myself a big ol’ margarita, and cook two of these chops. I serve myself in a large bowl, wrap up in a blanket, and—with the dogs at my feet sniffing the goodness—dive in. Try it and don’t feel guilty. We all deserve it!
Mama Jo’s Pork Chops with Onions, Tomatoes, and Poblano Peppers
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SERVES 4
2 large Spanish onions, diced
3 poblano peppers, seeded and diced
5 cloves garlic, chopped
8 boneless pork chops (about 1½ inches thick)
Goya Adobo seasoning
About 5 tablespoons olive oil
Salt
1 16-ounce can chopped tomatoes
1 cup chicken stock
1 package of Sazón (available in the international-food section of most grocery stores)
Pepper
Dash of cumin or curry powder (optional)
Peel and dice the onions, and seed and dice the poblanos. Set the onions and peppers aside. Chop the garlic and set aside.
Place the pork chops in a large bowl. Season them generously with Goya Adobo and about 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Set the seasoned chops aside.
Heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large heavy skillet on high heat. When it is nice and hot, sear the chops on both sides (about 3 to 5 minutes per side depending on the thickness, and in batches if necessary). Do not overcook or the chops will be like bricks! Set the seared chops aside on a plate to rest, leaving the heat on under the pan. Drain any excess oil from the pan, leaving about a tablespoon.
Add your diced onions and poblano peppers to the pan and sauté for about 5 minutes, salting them a little so they sweat. If you need more liquid, pour in a little chicken stock. Add the chopped garlic and sauté for about a minute. Pour in your canned tomatoes and chicken stock. Bring the sauce to a boil, and then reduce the heat to medium.
Now you can add the Sazón, salt and pepper to your taste, and cumin or curry if you like. Cover and let everything simmer for about 20 minutes, so all the flavors marry. Put your chops back in and cook for about 5 minutes, covered. Then turn the chops over and cook for about 5 more minutes. I can’t stand my chops hard—there is nothing worse than a chop so tough you need a chain saw to cut it—so I sometimes take one out and slice the center. If the juices run a little pink I know I can turn the stove off and let everything sit, covered, for a few minutes.
This recipe will feed four generously—or six to eight if you have light feeders—and can be served with yellow rice and beans or with plain white rice.
CHAPTER THREE
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Fearful Symmetries
When you meet the mother, you understand the man.
—LOURDES LOPEZ, FORMER NYCB PRINCIPAL DANCER
When I came back to New York after my mother’s memorial I brought only two of her possessions with me: her red bathrobe and her computer. I hung the bathrobe in a closet, pulling it out only occasionally for a quick sad sniff, and I stashed the computer way back in the darkest corner of the closet. During the last weeks of her life, Mom kept asking for her computer, even though she could no longer use her hands to type. I knew that in the past couple years she had been writing something that was important to her, stories about herself and about our family history. I knew she would want me to read whatever she had written. But I did not feel ready for this yet, and the sight of her abandoned computer made me sad.
During those first weeks back in New York I felt the way I am sure many people feel after the death of a parent: empty and numb. I was determined to move forward, and I was grateful to be able to throw myself into my teaching duties at the School of American Ballet and my cooking duties as a part-time caterer and my life with Luis and our two dogs, Tristan and Bandit. But as the days passed, a series of strange, almost hallucinatory flashes from my past began to ambush me in the most unlikely places. The subway, for instance, seemed to be a particularly fertile zone where almost anything could happen.
“Never whistle in the dark,” the pneumatic doors whispered to me as they opened at a station stop. “It will bring the bears,” they added as they closed. Then a vision of my mother would come to me, smiling and laughing, sitting somewhere at dusk, surrounded by tall pine trees, the index finger of one hand across her lips and her other hand reaching out to cover mine. “Never whistle in the dark, Jock… It will bring the bears.”
Never whistle in the dark. And never point at the sun or at a rainbow—it is disrespectful. Be gentle with your food—the animals and plants have sacrificed themselves to feed you. Never walk in front of your elders. Listen, watch, and learn by example. Keep quiet. Enter the traditional eightsided Navajo hogan through the east-facing door, and always move counterclockwise, around the hearth, to exit. All sorts of cryptic phrases and forgotten lessons, random shards from a life I had once lived, began to volunteer themselves at the oddest times. A tense memory I hadn’t thought of in years—a moment when Kiko and I were hurried out of my grandparents’ smoke-filled hogan by our mother when a visiting cousin fell to the ground with a river of strange words flowing from her mouth—returned to me with such ferocity as I was riding my bicycle home from Lincoln Center one evening that I had to dismount and lean, shaking, against a tree.
Old, forgotten smells returned to me, too. The yeasty smell of the seemingly infinite number of loaves of bread my grandmother Rachel baked in the clay oven outside my grandparents’ shack, and the pungent, almost comforting smell of Grandma Rachel’s whiskey breath as she said something to me in passing. The mouthwatering aroma of Navajo Fry Bread, a delicious, if not nutritious, treat that Kiko and I used to cook and sell at rodeos and powwows, operating our own little concession booth right alongside my parents’ kachina doll and pottery booth. On certain days, when the wind and atmosphere were right, I thought I detected in the concrete canyons of New York the moist green promise of distant rain that used to come wafting to me over the hot desert from some lucky wet canyon miles and miles away.
These memories and sensations had not visited me for years. Was my mother sending them to me to remind me of the world I left behind when I had moved to New York? Was this her way of prodding me to make good on my promise to understand and honor our family history? Just in case, I decided I should write down everything I could remember from my mother’s informal “heritage” sessions late in her life—but as it turned out, I had not retained much. I knew that the Navajo tribe called themselves Dineh, meaning “the people,” and that they were a seminomadic people with a matrilineal society, so all property was passed down through the female line of a clan. Our clan was called To’Adheedliinii, which translates as “water flowing together” (hence the title for the documentary about me), and our relat
ives have always migrated between two homelands—one in the Chinle Valley area of the reservation and another at a higher elevation about ten or fifteen miles away. The oldest relative my mother could personally remember was my great-great-grandmother Ason Dijole, who lived to be 101 years old and whose name translates as “Round Woman” (an unfortunate name for the forebearer of a ballet dancer, I always thought). A tribal characteristic my mother had mentioned to me repeatedly—and on several occasions demonstrated quite dramatically with her own behavior—was that the Navajo are an extremely superstitious people.
Presumably my mother had recorded all of this family information and more on the computer that I had buried in solitary confinement in the back of my closet. But during those first few weeks after her death, whenever I thought about the laptop, I experienced a huge spasm of guilt, guilt laced with fear. I knew I should read whatever my mother had been writing, but I also felt that to do so would be like crossing a boundary between this world and the next—a reaction that, I suppose, exposes my own genetic Navajo susceptibility to superstition. I always feel a little awkward when I try to explain this, but for as long as I can remember I have been sensitive to the presence of spirits.
As a child I became aware of a particular ghostlike presence, a woman, who came into my room at night and stood near me, and sometimes even sat at the edge of my bed. When I complained to my mother about my uninvited visitor, she followed the advice of our family medicine man on the reservation and began administering sacred cornmeal—sprinkling it around the doors and windows of my room, and placing a little pinch of it under my tongue—to try to drive the ghost away. This often seemed to work for a while, but for years the ghost woman always came back. It was only when I was in my late thirties, in fact, after my mother arranged a ritual exorcism for me on the reservation, that I finally felt rid of the spirit who had been following me around for so many years. My ghost was finally gone, but now so was my mother. If I strayed across the boundary between this world and the next, whom might I encounter? And if some ghost began to stalk me again, who would help me this time?
On the day I finally worked up the nerve to pull my mother’s laptop out of the closet, like any superstitious Navajo worth his salt, I was shaking with a bad case of nerves. As I pressed the power button and listened to the machine begin to whir and click, I began to hyperventilate. But half an hour later, after immersing myself in my mother’s files, I felt calmer than I had in weeks. It was as if Mom’s clear, strong voice was speaking to me again, and patiently explaining thoughts and feelings I had been wrestling with since her death, but had been unable to articulate for myself.
One never really gets to know one’s parents. I for one spent most of my life knowing I had parents, but not realizing their sacrifices, their worth and their love.
These were the opening sentences of a document titled “Mama Jo’s History,” in which Mom recounted her own early-childhood and teenage years. If my mother’s opening words were true for most people, they were at least triply true for me. I had separated from my parents and started living on my own in New York at age fourteen.
Our parents try giving us a history of where we have come from. Do we listen? Of course not. It’s only when we get to be our parents’ age that all of a sudden we start asking why we are what we are.
With her next few sentences, Mom nailed me again. I always tried to listen when my mother talked about our family and our heritage, but the truth is, I also, on some level, always put invisible fingers in my ears. I was in voluntary exile. I had made the decision to leave the reservation and the life there long ago, and it made me feel nervous—and guilty—to be reminded of that life. As I began to read the files on my mother’s laptop, my nervousness and guilt began to evaporate, and for the first time the world Mom had been trying to tell me about for so long suddenly began to come alive. I saw my great-great-grandmother Ason Dijole on one of her marathon walks, as my mother had often described her, striding across the desert with a walking stick in her hand, a colorful bandanna tied around her head, and her face rubbed red with a mixture of mutton tallow and ochre to protect it from the hot desert sun. I watched my grandma Rachel, whom I remembered as a quiet, stout old woman in velvet skirts, kick up her heels in the new persona of a fun-loving stand-up comic who was constantly laughing and cracking jokes. When she waxed the wooden floors of the elementary schoolhouse on the reservation, Grandma Rachel liked to play old 78 records on a hand-crank gramophone and dance and sing as she worked. After she had finished applying the wax, she would place her two little daughters—my mother and my aunt Alice—on a blanket and then whirl her delighted and squealing freight around the floor, “to bring out the shine.”
My grandpa Bud also came to life, as a man of imposing stature with a lean face, long braided hair, and a tender heart. Admired for the enormous juicy tomatoes he grew in his carefully irrigated fields, Grandpa Bud was also famous as an accomplished drummer and singer who traveled throughout the West with his wife and their pack of little girls, performing Native songs and dances under the stage name of Laughing Boy. By the time my mother was four years old she was performing with my grandfather, using her own stage name of Redwing, dancing a number of ceremonial Native dances, but most notably the hoop dance—a ritual dance that traditionally was performed only by men and boys.
I was surprised to discover what a big role dancing had played in Mom’s life. I knew that Grandpa Bud had taught her the hoop dance when she was very little, just as she later had taught it to me, and I knew that Mom—again, just like me—had performed at rodeos and Native American celebrations all around the West. But I was surprised to learn that my grandpa Bud also taught Mom the fox-trot and some waltzes, and the Charleston, and that he would partner her in performances of these at big barn dances. “Can you see my dad doing the Charleston?” Mom asks. “Navajo men didn’t usually display that type of behavior. I believe he was way ahead of his time.”
It was refreshing to learn that these relatives of mine, who always looked so distant and somber in all our family photographs, had actually had a little fun every now and then. And I was startled by how happy and fresh and innocent Mom’s early childhood sounded. She described weeks spent in the wilderness herding sheep and goats, and long meandering misadventures on horseback—in fact, every day seemed to be taken by her as an opportunity for low-grade mischief and spontaneous outdoor adventure.
By the time Mom started high school, however, shadows started to fall across the jolly playing field of her youth. As a teenager during the last part of the boarding school era for Native Americans, when a federal policy of “assimilation” made it mandatory for Indian children to attend governmentrun schools that would impose Western traditions and “turn Indians into Americans,” Mom had to travel two hours to Gallup, New Mexico, where she lived in a high school dormitory that housed children from all over the reservation. During the summers she would return to her family, and to a busy schedule of performing at powwows and rodeos—but the back-and-forth was clearly confusing to her, and her descriptions of life on the reservation grew less and less euphoric. Her parents, she explains, had begun binge-drinking. “When their checks came in the first of the month they could be gone a couple of days or for a week at a time. I did not enjoy going home for holidays, nor summer vacations…”
By this time my vivacious but completely innocent mother had begun to attract suitors, and in her amusing descriptions of each she never fails to comment on his ability to dance. Most didn’t make the grade, but there was one tall, blond, and blue-eyed young man named Jack—a highway construction worker from Colorado—who seemed to have come close. Jack would show up at my grandparents’ farm and literally carry Mom out of the house to the car, and then drive her to the middle of the reservation where they would turn up the car radio and dance the night away under the desert moon. “Boy, could Jack dance!” my mother comments. Jack loved watching my mother perform the hoop dance, and when she turned sixteen he offered my
grandparents “five beautiful horses” for my mother’s hand in marriage. “Of course my dad said no, because I was going to go to college,” my mother writes.
That was always the plan, for my mother to go to college, and by the time she graduated from high school my mother had a definite idea of where she wanted to go. “I took the scholarship that took me farthest away from home,” she says. In the summer of 1961, at age seventeen, she caught a train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to attend nursing school. The trip to Philadelphia was the first train ride of her life and proved to be a miserable journey—she was sickened by all the cigarette smoke around her and bewildered when she had to change trains in Chicago. When she arrived in Philadelphia, she sat around the station for a long time, unsure of what to do next. When she finally called the school, whoever answered gave her the address and told her to catch a taxi. “I learned real fast that you do for yourself,” Mom concludes.
This last phrase of Mom’s haunted me after I read it. It had been under different circumstances, and to a very different place, but I too had decided at a young age to move far away from my home in the Arizona desert. And I too had learned real fast that you do for yourself. I thought of the feral and unchaperoned life I led as a young boy alone in New York, and then of my innocent and naive mother setting off to live on her own in Philadelphia at age seventeen—I’m sure the two of us were equally clueless when it came to sex or anything else that adult life might entail. The similarities between Mom’s life and mine were comforting—we might not have had as much time together here on Earth as we would have liked, but we had a lot more in common than I had ever suspected. And though I had dreaded opening my mother’s computer, I found that I loved hearing her voice again and cherished all the new images I now had of her when she was just a young girl. I felt I was learning much about her, and about myself at the same time. It reminded me of a comment my fellow NYCB dancer Lourdes Lopez once made after meeting Mom: “When you meet the mother,” Lourdes said, “you understand the man.”
