by Toni Jensen
Why were you by yourself?
On a road like this, you are never alone. There is grass, there is sky, there is wind. See also: the answer on historical and cultural trauma. See also: Cypress Hills. See also: the everyday robins who are in formation now. See also: their ordinary, general-public bodies in riot.
What did you do, after?
You drove north and west and sat in rooms with friends, old and new. You hiked and ate good meals and talked about art. On a hike, one morning, you startled a rafter of turkeys. They flapped and squawked and strutted their necks. You laughed the laugh of one also startled. How they were in season did not come to mind till later. How your father hunted turkeys did not come to mind till later. You wrote things down. You began the work of stitching yourself back together. You did this on repeat until the parts hung together in some approximation of self. In Livingston, Montana, you made use of the car wash. You left the tall grass there.
Further questions should be directed toward: Proceed to the Route. Upon arrival, pick up loose roadside threads. Use them to stitch shut the asking mouths.
VI.
At Standing Rock, the days pass in rhythm. You sort box upon box of donation blankets and clothes. You walk a group of children from one camp to another so they can attend school.
The night before the first walk, it has rained hard and the dirt of the road has shifted to mud. The dirt or mud road runs alongside a field, which sits alongside the Cannonball River, which sits alongside and empties itself into the Missouri.
Over the field, a hawk rides a thermal, practicing efficiency. There on the road, in the mud, three Herefords block progress. The cow snorts to her calves, which are large enough to be ambulatory, young enough for the cow still to proffer protection. She places her body between you, the threat, and her calves. She stamps her hooves into the mud, and they stick in a way you imagine unsatisfactory.
In that letter to the Standing Rock tribal chairman, the Army Corps commander wrote that the people must disperse from camp, “due to the concern for public safety” and because “this land is leased to private persons for grazing and/or haying purposes.”
A cow holds public hooves whether stuck in mud or otherwise. A cow is not a concern to public safety, no matter the season. But what of these children? Are they considered public or private? If they don’t graze or hay, if they cannot be leased, what is their value, here on this road, in this, our America?
That day, there on the road, once the mother cow allows safe passage, you walk on. After school but before the return walk, the children and you gather with hundreds to listen to the tribal chairman speak of peace, to sit with elders to pray, to talk of peace.
On this day, it is still fall. Winter will arrive with the Army Corps’ words—no drilling under Lake Oahe, no pipeline under Lake Oahe. The oil company will counter, calling the pipeline “vital,” saying they “fully expect to complete construction of the pipeline without any additional rerouting in and around Lake Oahe.” The weather will counter with a blizzard. After the words and before the blizzard, there will be a celebration. A gathering of larks is called an exaltation. Even if it wasn’t so, you like to think of larks there, like to think of their song, there with the people in the snow, there, alongside the river.
Back in the fall, you walk the children home from school, there on the road. You cross the highway, the bridge, upon your return. This bridge lies due south of the Backwater Bridge of the water cannons or hoses. But this bridge, this day, holds a better view. The canoes have arrived from the Northwest tribes, the Salish tribes. They gather below the bridge on the water and cars slow alongside you to honk and wave. Through their windows, people offer real smiles.
That night, under the stars, fire-lit, the women from the Salish tribes dance and sing. Though you’ve been to a hundred powwows, easily, you’ve never seen this dance, never heard this song. You stand with your own arms resting on the shoulders of the schoolchildren, and the dancers, these women, move their arms in motions that do more than mimic water, that conjure it. Their voices are calm and strong, and they move through the gathering like quiet, like water, like something that will hold, something you can keep, even if only for this moment.
Songs Without Words
I.
When I am four years old, we live in a tall, white house with a slanting foundation and brick petunia beds out front. We’re three houses off Highway 71. I fall asleep summer nights, my window open to the whir and hiss of semis. There’s a curve on the highway, a sharp one that requires slowing to pass through Brayton, our town of 150 people. Every few nights I wake to the sound of a Jake brake, the pop-boom similar to that made by gunfire.
I know, because my father has explained it to me, that the sound comes from the semis, from a valve releasing pressure so the big trucks can make the curve, can slow enough to stay on the road. My father doesn’t often have the patience or inclination to answer my questions, my many, many questions. So I remember and hold dear his answer.
During daylight I ride my tricycle on the sidewalk and sometimes out into the street in front of our house. Over and over, I leave the cracked and bumpy sidewalk for the road. I ride around and around, preferring circles to straight lines, liking the feeling of cornering fast, of making the curve.
In a few more years, I’ll have thick, oversized glasses to correct my almost uncorrectable myopia. In a few more years, my long, brown hair will be cut into a perfect round bowl. But at four, I’m still free to ride and squint and throw my long hair side to side as I pedal.
My sister is not interested in my games, and we’re still a whole year away from when my best girlfriend moves to town. So I’m a solitary sidewalk rider.
The sidewalk is dirty, though, and sometimes I fall onto it if I’m not paying strict attention. Once, a flock of geese flies over during heavy fog and lands in the middle of this street before squawking and flapping toward the sidewalk. A grouping of smaller birds descends on the geese, pecking and tearing at their necks, diving and attacking until the geese are chased off, back beyond fog, into the sky.
According to Webster’s, the small birds’ behavior is called mobbing, with Webster’s fifth definition for mob as “a flock, drove, or herd of animals,” their first definition of the verb being “to crowd about and attack or annoy.” The noun form of the word enters the lexicon in 1688, the verb form in 1696. Our town won’t become a town till 1878, almost two hundred years later.
That day with the geese, I remember feeling wonder and awe, not annoyance, that these small birds could shift the larger ones. In the morning, when the fog had cleared, when I came out again to ride, I remember feeling a distinct revulsion for the leftover bird-shit mess.
I can’t say for certain whether this is when I take to the street, but I can say with certainty that I know, even this young, mine is behavior my mother won’t like. But my mother is busy, she works and cleans the house and works more, and also, my sister is sick a lot.
Growing up, I never want to be a mother because mothers have to work so hard—one job and then another job and then cooking, cleaning, bill paying, driving, yelling. Mothers are not treated well, either, by bosses or by people like fathers, and though they take care of everyone around them, nobody takes care of a mother.
On weekends during tax season and sometimes in the summer, our mother works a half or sometimes whole day at the law office where she’s the legal secretary. One Saturday, she arrives home earlier than usual to find me making my circles on the street in front of the house.
Her hands pull me from my tricycle toward the sidewalk, back to what she thinks is safety. She doesn’t know I do this all the time. She doesn’t know how much I love it, the stories I tell myself as I pedal.
“What are you doing?” she says. She’s wearing lipstick and her short brown hair is shiny, is perfect in its Dorothy Hamill–
style cut. But her face is scrunched. She holds me by the shoulders, and I do my best to shrug out of her grip, to face her.
“You could have been killed,” she says. “Don’t you know that?”
It’s true this time I’m closer to the highway than I’ve gone before. It’s true I was curving closer and closer, liking the sound of the highway noise, making it a part of my game.
“You could have been killed,” she says again.
“Well,” I say slowly and with a shrug, “you’d still have Maggie.”
“Don’t say that,” she says. She lets go of my shoulders then and looks across the street and all around like she’s wondering if anyone’s overheard, like maybe whatever’s wrong with me might be contagious.
I’m correct, though, of course, at the level of the factual. She would still have my sister.
And also, I’ve not been raised to think of myself separately from my sister, from my family. At Christmas, from my grandparents, we get matching presents—pajamas, for example, mine blue and my sister’s pink, but otherwise identical. On my sister’s birthday, if she gets a green sweater, I get a purple one and so on.
These grandparents are my father’s parents, Métis and a recent Danish immigrant. My grandmother had six boys, trying for a girl. My grandmother’s mother moved her family back and forth from Alberta to the States, divorcing and remarrying and divorcing her husband. My grandmother’s childhood featured these separations from her own sisters. My sister and I are her closest girl grandchildren.
My mother frets over the presents—it’s too much, I hear her tell my father. They don’t need presents on the other one’s birthday. They’ll get spoiled.
But we did need the presents. We needed to be reminded that we were not one over the other or one under the other. We needed to be reminded that we were together, that we were to take care of one another, that we were not easily made separate, that together, we were whole.
And, too, we needed the pajamas or socks or sweaters. They arrived at Christmas and at our birthdays, and though my sister could make a sweater last the year, I outgrew mine or made holes in it rolling down hills or snagging seams on stray tree branches. The extra one I received at her birthday helped me to have a spare. We were not the sort of children to receive presents throughout the year, and clothes were presents only.
Despite these repeated conversations with my father, neither my mother nor my father ever does shift my grandmother from her practice.
The look my mother gives me on my tricycle that day as I curve around the middle of the road, practicing my Jake brake, it clings to me in a different way than my favorite purple chenille sweater. It stays with me, this look, this shift toward shame, but it does not quite take root in the way my mother seemed to hope. It does not shift me toward valuing personal safety over the whole of our family. It does not shift me into thinking of myself that way, as a distinct, separate person.
Already, at four years old, I’ve learned the lessons from my grandmother and her family. They’d set for life my ideas about responsibility and belonging and what that means in the day-to-day. My mother’s look may have laid the seed of a sort of discontent, a sort of contagion, perhaps, but I stay warm in my sweater. I stay warm in the knowledge that there will be others arriving on my sister’s birthday, that if anything happens to me, my sister will wear my sweater and be warm and think of me.
II.
The small towns where I grew up, where my family settled, in the States, where my father still lives, are in Audubon County, Iowa. The hills there roll and roll, and the rivers cut through like snakes or ribbons, depending on the vantage point.
The county is named for John James Audubon of bird painting fame. His avian watercolors are legendary. It is less well known that he was born in what was then Saint-Domingue, what is now Haiti, on his father’s sugarcane plantation. The son of French naval officer and businessman Jean Audubon and Jeanne Rabin, a woman from the Congo who was Audubon’s chambermaid, his slave.
Audubon’s earlier biographies altogether skip his mother’s heritage and his father’s slave trading. More contemporary ones foreground both it and how he was born to parents who were unmarried—many times calling him Creole or a Creole bastard. The way the details are put forward, I suppose, is meant to titillate. But there’s nothing particularly unusual about a white-passing son passing for white for the rest of his life, gaining advantage from this passing. It is the history of many of us. It is the most American of histories.
The first use of the word Creole as a noun dates to 1697, the year after a mob of birds joins the lexicon. According to Webster’s, to be Creole is to be either “1: a person of European descent born especially in the West Indies or Spanish America, 2: a white person descended from early French or Spanish settlers of the U.S. Gulf states and preserving their speech and culture,” or “3: a person of mixed French or Spanish and black descent speaking a dialect of French or Spanish.”
As writer Georgina Dhillon notes, “In colonial societies in earlier times, definitions of ‘Creole’ seemed to be based more on what the word did not include rather than what it did.” All contemporary sources, though, cite cultural commonalities through land, food, religion, and music as ways of belonging, of being Creole today.
Though the word Métis doesn’t join the lexicon until 1816, at least according to Webster’s, it too first defines the people by the European concept of “mixing,” as “a person of mixed blood,” and adds, “especially, often capitalized: the offspring of an American Indian and a person of European ancestry.” Today Métis from different regions define the term distinctly, but all definitions include that a person’s ancestry, self-identification, and some form of connection to and/or acceptance by the people and land are necessary to be Métis.
From within, then, being Métis is about land and people and belonging.
For young John Audubon, his beginning set a sad trajectory toward his eventual belonging. His mother, Jeanne Rabin, died when he was only a few months old. His father, instead of the usual abandoning, took both young John James and a half sister with him back to France, where Audubon, Sr., already had a wife. The children both were then adopted by Audubon and his wife, Anne Moynet Audubon. This is perhaps the even less usual part.
John James would become famous for his drawings and paintings of the birds of North America, for his study of those birds. But he also would be known for his cruelty both to birds and to animals. According to Warren Perry’s profile of Audubon for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, “He killed thousands of birds and cruelly experimented on many animals, including catfish, a bald eagle, and his very own hunting dog. With friends, he buried a rat in a pot, its tail protruding from the dirt, and gave the complete ensemble to another friend, claiming it was a rare flower.”
Though illustrators in this time often killed the birds they drew, Audubon was rejected for these other cruelties by many illustrators and naturalists in North America. He was rejected in larger society, too, for his poverty, his inability to pay his debts. Both earned him censure and isolation. But he and his work found a home in England, where he still enjoyed popularity. And, of course, he was popular enough to become the namesake of the county where I’m from—a place where many men hunt birds and eat them, where many men work also to save the birds’ habitat and see no contradiction in these impulses.
John James Audubon died in 1851 of what some cite as “various illnesses” and others cite as dementia.
My father has spent his life walking the hills of Audubon County looking for birds—out of season, just to see them, and in season, hoping for a clear shot. My father was born in this place, and he’s lived most of his life there. One day in the near or distant future, he’ll die there, too, most likely also from complications related to dementia.
III.
The fall after I turn four
years old, I wear my first leotard and pale pink shoes to dance class and then, after, to the bar to pick up my father. Our class includes six girls and one boy, and together we learn to point our toes, to round and elongate our arms, to tuck in our butts when we plié. I have long brown hair that is straight at the top and wavy at the bottom. I’m sturdy and round-faced. I forget often to tuck in what teacher Marianne calls my derrière.
The dance class building abuts the bar where my father has a favorite stool, where my father waits in the late afternoon for class to end. Exira, Iowa, is a no-stoplight town, holding fewer than a thousand people but more than one bar. My family lives a few miles down Highway 71, still in Brayton. My mother is working, so my father is assigned the task of fetching and driving me home.
To be clear, my father is at this bar most afternoons or early evenings whether it’s dance class day or not. To be clear, at four years old, I know already my father is the sort of drinker who brings home either a jovial self or a monster. To be clear, there’s no trauma story here, in this moment—my father’s guns this day remain tucked away at home, way up on the high shelf.
The building housing the dance studio sits two stories tall with the studio on the second floor, tucked around back. The wide, almost square room holds big windows that frame the door. It holds music, mainly classical. It holds worn linoleum floors and teacher Marianne, who points her own toes with precision, who delivers her directions to us in a steady, strong voice. Teacher Marianne has the same sort of rare power and grace as my grandmother—no one shouts or shoves in a room either of them inhabits.
