by Toni Jensen
VIII.
We stay through the spring. I apply and then interview for one other job, and the offer is made the same time as my boyfriend receives a job offer back in Lubbock. It seems like the best thing, like going home. Though many of my friends there, my company, already have left, it seems like the right choice still. I feel the weight beginning to lift as we plan and plot. We consider our options. There is nothing as good, perhaps, after a long year of feeling stuck, as having options.
My boyfriend walks the dogs and takes care of our daughter while I’m at work. He’s teaching himself how to cook delicious meals. We’re settling into being parents. I am not then thinking so often of the oversized giraffe, of how late my boyfriend came to bed that night once he put the bat down. I am thinking less and less of burning trees and the way the birds looked against the night sky.
We come to Pittsburgh with three dogs and leave with two. Jack has a series of strokes and passes away that spring. One of my last days as a Pittsburgher, I argue with people from Animal Control over the phone. Someone had reported our dogs for barking, saying they were left out all night, which was never true, not once.
The man on the phone wants me to license our dogs, all three, and when I say we’re leaving and when I say there are now only two dogs, he asks me to prove it. I tell him to feel free to drive to our neighborhood to count the dogs himself. I tell him to feel free to drive to our house in a few days’ time to see that we are, in fact, gone.
We’re on the phone more than an hour. I’m transferred and transferred to a series of increasingly angry men, and I grow angrier and angrier as man after man asks me to prove my dog is dead. I offer to send them a copy of the transaction from the veterinarian’s office, but they say that can be forged. That can be faked. It’s such a bizarre exchange that I expect someone to break out into laughter, to say, “I’m kidding,” to apologize. Not one of them apologizes. Not one is willing to come to our house to verify only two dogs remain. After learning our address, not one of them is willing to cross the line into our neighborhood.
Eventually, I outlast all the angry men. The last one, a mid-level manager, ends our conversation by saying he’ll delete all the tickets from the system if I’ll just stop talking. He ends our conversation by saying, “Don’t come back to Pittsburgh. You’re not welcome here.”
The last day, with the car packed, our daughter in her car seat, the dogs in the far back, my boyfriend rinses out the dog dishes in the yard. The car is running, and we had been all set to go when he remembers the dishes.
The sky is starting to turn—we’re leaving later than planned—and I’m trying to focus on small details like this instead of thinking about how I’ve just quit my first tenure-track job, about how happy this makes me but also how afraid.
I reach into the back to check on my daughter, and when I turn around, a group of teenage boys makes its way up the hill toward our house. It’s a nice spring day. Neighbors have been out on their porches or steps. Some are finishing up the last of the day’s yard work. One by one, as they, too, notice the group, they turn and head back into their houses and apartments. The doors shutter one by one by one like dominos falling.
It is taking my boyfriend a very long time.
The teens each wear a black bandanna tied around an arm, and they’re dressed in all black, except for their jeans.
I debate yelling at my boyfriend, but it seems unwise to call attention. The last of the neighbors are inside their homes. Some now are faces in their windows. Everyone but my boyfriend seems to know something is about to happen.
He finally makes his way to the car, taking his time putting the dog dishes away in the car.
“Drive,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“Just drive,” I say again with more force.
He makes a huffing noise with which I’m familiar. It’s meant to tell me I’m being ridiculous or a bitch or some combination of those two things.
The group is at the intersection by our house, is a few feet away, when my boyfriend stops huffing and puts the car into drive.
“Didn’t you see that?” I say.
“What?” he says again.
As we drive through and then away from Pittsburgh, I explain the neighbors, the shutting doors, the faces in the window.
He looks over at me and shakes his head like I’m crazy.
Later, back in Texas, any time someone asks about Pittsburgh, I will say what it was like, and he will say, “It was not that bad.” It will take years before it occurs to me that perhaps he really believes this—that he experienced a different year than I did.
In the weeks and months after our daughter was born, I went back to work full-time. He stayed home with our daughter. I’m not meaning to suggest this was or is an easy task—to the contrary. But while he watched, some of the birds, the migratory winter birds, began to take their leave, and the trees turned from brown to green, and the first yellow and blue spring flowers began to bud. He chatted with neighbors about their yards and lives. He and our daughter went to museums and restaurants. He strapped her to his back in an elaborate pack, a gift from his aunt, and walked the dogs and our girl up the steep hill to the overlook park. His body was being made stronger.
Mine did not have a chance toward recovery and would not for the next few years. Dr. Dubose had been correct—it was hard on my body, having a pregnancy and then a child so soon after meningitis. It was exponentially more difficult because of the going straight back to work, the lack of maternity leave, the lack of rest. It would take almost three years before I felt back in my body, back in myself.
My boyfriend experienced a different Pittsburgh because he spent less time there but also because he spent the time in a healthy body, with a brain that worked fully.
Still, I think about that day often, how he shook his head at me after huffing. How he was calm and slow-moving and displeased at what my face was doing. We had barely begun our life together, and I could feel the rift forming already, the separation. I could feel it in how ready I was to climb into the driver’s seat, to roll up the windows and drive myself on home without him.
There are so many ways to be under strain, under stress, in a place like Pittsburgh. My daughter lives, and so do I. When my mother comes to meet her granddaughter, she stays less than twenty-four hours. But she’s there, in our home, meeting her granddaughter.
Across town, James Stubbs’s mother visits her son’s grave. Across town, Joseph Hall’s mother visits her son through glass. There’s no touching. She doesn’t get to hold him. Neither mother gets to take home her son.
Later, I will learn that as we were leaving town that spring, three teens were convicted of the killing of teenager Keith Watts, Jr., not far from our house.
Watts’s grandmother, Wendy Watts, in the Post-Gazette, after the trial, said, “I don’t blame the parents, we raise our kids as best we can and then we put them out there. They have their own judgment, their own will.”
I don’t feel any fear or its cousin anger thinking about those teens on the hill that day, who must have been then right around the same age my daughter is now or just a little older. I wonder about their lives, I wonder about their mothers, about their mothers’ worry.
Pittsburgh is often called a “most livable” city—it made those lists then and makes them now. That spring, as we left, violence increased in our neighborhood and in nearby neighborhoods as retribution began both for Watts’s killing and for the sentencing of teens from a rival gang who shot him.
The birds in the trees as we leave that day are the kind called resident birds—ones that overwinter or that winter at home.
We spent a winter in Pittsburgh only to leave for the heat of a West Texas summer. We were not residents. We were not welcome back. But my daughter was born there, and she likes to tell me how wonde
rful it is, this place not really fixed in her memory.
“You were born there,” I say, “and that is a wonderful thing.”
Fracture and Song
I.
Of the nearly two hundred Arapaho and Cheyenne killed at the Sand Creek Massacre, two-thirds were women and children. I use the preposition “at,” not “in,” because those women and children were not “in” battle—they were at home; they were invaded at home. I say “at,” not “in,” because location matters. This location—Sand Creek—has become a contested space. Its history is as contested as it is important. To memorialize correctly, language matters. To remember lineage, both of people and of place, language and image matter. To place Sand Creek in a line of people and space that connects to today’s people, today’s spaces, and to work toward survivance, language and image together must matter.
The Sand Creek massacre occurred at the edge of the geologic formation now best known as the Niobrara Shale Play. At the time of the massacre, November 29, 1864, the Niobrara Shale was between 82 and 87 million years old. The formation sometimes also is called the Niobrara Chalk.
The most familiar image of the Sand Creek Massacre is not chalk but oil on canvas, Robert Lindneux’s 1936 History Colorado. The image is displayed in The Wall Street Journal’s article on Sand Creek and on the National Park Service website, for example. The latter is where the New York Times article on the 150th anniversary leads readers for more information on the massacre.
Lindneux’s painting offers a landscape that stuns: panoramic, row on row of teepees in taupe and tan against the brown of the ground, with the light blue water of the creek winding through the scene like ribbons, the clouding sky above a mix of both palettes. The details, though, the people. Soldiers in blue ride roans and chestnuts. The soldiers have their guns drawn, long, thin barrels out front—this seems like how it might have been. But they’re shooting, most often, at men. At Arapaho and Cheyenne men. Some hold guns pointed back at the soldiers, some lie fallen to the ground by the teepees or in the creek, facedown. Image and language—they matter.
II.
Two-thirds of the Arapaho and Cheyenne killed that day were women and children. In the painting, the women and children are few, not many, and they are standing or walking. They hold their children’s hands or carry them on their backs. It is easy to find them; they wear green and so are bright among the tans and blues.
Green is the color of growth, of spring, of hope. Two-thirds of the Arapaho and Cheyenne killed that day were women and children. Words matter. Images matter.
The women and children that day—wearing green, wearing brown, wearing blue, wearing all the colors—were not left to stand, were not left to play or work or see the beauty of their homes, their panoramic vistas, their land.
III.
A “shale play” is a formation of fine-grained sedimentary rock that also contains a notable amount of natural gas. In oil and gas terms, the Niobrara Shale Play is most often called “an emerging play” or “an exciting, new play” or “a young play.” It is an active play, producing natural gas through hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Water and sand and chemicals, millions of gallons, are forced down into the shale, the rock, to break it apart, to release the gas, which is then taken.
In October 1865, the Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledged the government’s blame for the Sand Creek Massacre. But the treaty also took Cheyenne and Arapaho rights to land titles in the state of Colorado. The language matters, and the actions do not speak, they shout.
IV.
What has happened since fracking began in June 1998 in the Barnett Shale of Texas, what is happening today across the country, is this continued shouting. The degradation and exploitation of Indigenous women and children continue through the force and power of history, through the force and power of this fracking industry.
Indigenous women and children are sold for sex to fracking camp workers; they are exchanged, they are bartered, they are trafficked; they are supply meeting demand. They are made to be goods on the land their families once inhabited, their own lands.
The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies, of our most vulnerable bodies—our women, our children.
In the Bakken Shale Play in the Dakotas, there has been a 30 percent increase of sex trafficking cases filed in the last three years. In April 2015, a coalition of Indigenous women filed a formal request for the United Nations to intercede on behalf of Indigenous women who are being trafficked for sex near fracking sites across the Great Plains.
The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.
In rural northern Pennsylvania, along the New York State border, sex trafficking around Marcellus Shale sites has grown so great, a local YWCA received a $500,000 federal grant to provide help to trafficked women and children, many of whom come from nearby reservations in New York. The organization Sing Our Rivers Red has taken its art exhibit to New York and to North Dakota and to most states across the country. They collect single earrings and display them on red backdrops to memorialize the missing and murdered Indigenous women.
The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.
V.
History is lived, in our lands and in our bodies. In this country, we bear the repetition of the words—the times “battle” is chosen over “massacre”—and the images, those women in green still whole, still standing. We repeat them whether they are true or false. We spin them until we are dizzy, until we fall to the ground.
But the ground receives us. Always. We practice survivance through language and image and memory. We protest, we draft petitions, we make art, we memorialize.
The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies. Images matter. Words matter. These lives matter. We understand that alongside every creek, every rock formation, every piece of land that was once and still is ours, there is crying, yes, there is blood on the bright green of the women’s dresses, but there also are our images, our words, ringing out like song.
How to Make a Trafficked Girl
I.
When the girl, the niece, is twelve, tell her she has a too-much body. She sweeps the floor, she does the dishes, she watches her younger siblings. To say “she watches,” to say, “siblings”—both are complications. Her father has many children with many women. To say “she watches” means she watches her father watching the girl children. She watches the boy children go to the movies with her father. She watches the door shutting behind them. She is invited to watch the children. She is not invited to watch the movie.
Give her a body. Just one. Tell her at twelve she got this body too early. Tell her at twelve her body is too much. Tell her at twelve her body is not enough.
Give her a father. Make him a musician almost twice the age of her mother. Have him father at least a dozen children whose ages range from five years old to fifty-two. Don’t call him a minor cult leader, of course, but his beliefs include the separation of his many families from their original families. His beliefs include how he should make all decisions. Make the girl move house to house, city to town to city. Make sure there are strangers invited to live in each house, each city, each town. Hang sheets in the windows and have the father say he thinks better in the dark. He makes better music in the dark.
Make the strangers into family. One of the strangers will be a woman, young, attractive, soon to be pregnant with this man’s child. All the women will beg on the street corners of the towns and cities for food, for money, for luck. Make them all have long hair and pleasing faces. Avoid having a neighbor of the original family spot the pretty women begging prettily. Avoid having it reported back. If this happens, when this happens, move, move, move. Another town, another house, no new phone number, no
way to reach in or out, no way for anyone from an original family to make contact.
One of the women will help with “the business.” The other will stay home. Make the girl’s mother the one who stays home. She is in charge of spiritual guidance. She keeps the candles lit. She keeps the crystals crystalling on the windowsills, on the corner altar, in between the spoons and forks in the utensil drawer.
Have the mother ask her original family for help, ask for money, on repeat. After the help is sent, have the mother cut off all contact. Provide no forwarding address or number. Have this happen at least twice yearly for more than a decade.
Ask the girl’s auntie to drive cross-country through a snowstorm to help pack for one of the moves. Make the girl still small, the brother not yet born but living still inside the mother, who is about to give birth. But never mind—there is packing to do. There is always packing.
The auntie drives a rear-wheel-drive car, a small car, a Chevy Chevette, which is reliable for how its engine will always start but perhaps is not the best car for winter roads. In the snowstorm, she drives fifteen to twenty-five miles per hour through most of the eastern part of Colorado, through the flatlands that once belonged to the Arapaho and the Jicarilla Apache. Mostly, now, the land belongs to white ranchers, who’ve filled it with cows and more cows. The snow falls onto the cows, onto their black-and-white backs, their broad heads and noses. The snow falls on car after truck after car lining the road’s narrow shoulder.
On the two-lane, a large SUV passes the auntie with his lights on bright, cutting so sharp through the thick, wet-falling snow. When she comes up over the next hill, the SUV has wrecked itself off the left side, off the sharp edge of the road. The SUV dangles, roadside, two wheels on, two off. There is no way to stop her car without it also becoming a dangling thing. She is sorry. She keeps driving.
