Stolen Life Page 10

  Cecilia committed herself in the summer of 1971. “A lot of Mom died with Earl,” Yvonne says to me, and wonders aloud what the file of the psychiatrist who counselled her would reveal. “Mom never talks about that, or her early school days. As a matter of fact, she hardly talks about any past at all. She always wanted to be perfect for her kids, and she just won’t talk about her past. She may get wild when she drinks and then she’ll face anyone down, and she’ll yell something rough at them, but she’s lived her life as if being tough and strong is the essence of all that’s needed. And despite everything that’s happened, she still has this childlike idea that if she tries to forget, if she hides something long enough, somehow everyone will forget it.”

  Forget it. That’s the main lesson the Delmas Roman Catholic School taught Cecilia and other Native children during the Depression, when the RCMP came on the reserves with the legal right to seize them from their parents and force them into residential schools. And in fact, during the thirties, Cecilia said her parents were so desperately poor they felt they had to give up all their seven kids, from Josephine to Rita, because in school they’d at least get enough food to survive. So their bodies survived their poverty, sometimes abused but somehow alive, but what happened inside their hearts, their heads?

  Clarence also shows me a black-and-white snapshot taken of Cecilia in Delmas School. There is a lattice-work wall behind her and she is perhaps eleven or twelve, a slender girl facing slightly away from the camera. A tall woman who may be a nun stands slightly behind and against her. The picture cuts away the left half of the woman’s body, and her face, but her arm is draped around Cecilia’s neck and over her right shoulder; her clenched hand holds a crucifix tight against Cecilia’s chest. It is clear: Roman Catholicism was too deeply fixed in Cecilia for her ever to reject it completely.

  At Delmas the Cree children prayed several times a day and worked long hours for their food. They learned the basics of reading and writing—Cecilia said she was at a Grade Two level after seven years of school—and were drilled, often beaten, into good Catholic behaviour. You must be content with whatever happens; forget your pain, you have no pain only sins, pray, confess your dirtiness and sin of being pagan, when you’re dead heaven will be wonderful.

  “No wonder Native women become barflies.” Yvonne speaks sadly, from her own experience. “Where else can you go for momentary relief? In this I see a strange pattern between Mom and myself, me finally running from the United States to Canada—to the Indian streets of Winnipeg—and she, running from residential school in Canada, found an empty rez, went looking for her parents, and got stuck in Great Falls. She learned survival from the really tough Indians in Montana. I was my mother thirty years later.”

  I try to bring her back to her original subject: Cecilia in psychiatric care after Earl’s death. And she shifts instantly, as sharp as all her memories are. In details they can be as precise as a photograph.

  “We drove to see her every day. Dad always took a few of us along in the logging truck. She’d just sit there, head hanging, or propped up in her hand as if it might drop on the floor if she didn’t, not saying a word to any of us. Sometimes she would suddenly break down, like a dam of tears breaking, but mostly she looked as if she was somewhere far away: her eyes wouldn’t focus on us. Dad would say, ‘It’s hard, it’s so hard—but we’ve got the other kids, they need you,’ but even that didn’t seem to affect her.

  “When I went there,” Yvonne says, “I sat and watched her, so different from the mother I knew. She wouldn’t look back at me, but I caught something in her eye when she glanced past us, as if we were the cause for something, and sometimes when we walked in she would break down worse. She later had a tiny handgun, a derringer with a shiny pearl handle, that could just fit into a hand. She had that by her bed in the house, we all knew but no one dared go near it. I remember several times when Dad wrestled with her for it. She swore out loud she was going to shoot the Butte cops. Once in a while at the hospital she would hug us, but I didn’t think then that she loved me. Looking back, the hardest thing was: Mom and Dad would never talk to us about anything; not even to themselves. They’d cry, but they’d never talk, especially to me. We never tried to talk anything over.”

  Clarence now says Cecilia was in Warm Springs only a few days, though Yvonne remembers it as much longer. “Then one day,” she continues, “we drove to the hospital again along the twisty road around the mountain and up the valley where the Anaconda Smelter smokestacks—where Mom once worked—stick up against the mountains. Mom actually looked at us, and suddenly she stood up and said, ‘Let’s get outa here.’ She got her clothes and went to the desk, checked herself out, and came home with us.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Uh-huh. I think she’d learned whatever she wanted to, there. She never went near that hospital again—except when they sent Leon there, later, for examination—and she was a different person. My mother’s body came out of that mental hospital, but I think the better parts of her nature died with Earl; she now wanted action, justice. I don’t know, she refuses to speak about this, but I think she denied all personal feelings at that point: what she wanted was to save her remaining six kids. Even before this she’d hauled us to her family on the reserve in Saskatchewan when she thought we were too badly threatened in crooked Butte, and now she knew trying to be accepted in the White world of Montana was useless. There were only two things she wanted: to make her remaining kids more Indian so we’d stay alive, and to seek some form of justice against those who killed Earl.”

  Through the winter of 1971–72, when Yvonne was in Grade Four after having basically failed Grade Three but received a “Social Promotion” following the trauma of Earl’s death, the family was desperately poor. Clarence’s veteran’s and disability pensions were too meagre for the large family, and Cecilia worked part-time as a cook and dishwasher, but even that wasn’t enough; they needed the supplement of State Welfare. And people around the Welfare office—it was upstairs in the courthouse, which made it worse—always had plenty to say about lazy, drunk Indians; attitudes were so ugly that if you weren’t careful you could get into a fist fight with the Welfare person you’d have to see to register for assistance. And Cecilia wasn’t one to back down from racial confrontation, much less so now than when Clarence first brought her to his apartment in Butte in 1950 and then discovered the landlord refused to accept the next month’s rent from him. “ ‘I don’t want you in my building’ is what the bastard said”—as if money wasn’t the same colour for everyone—it was slim, beautiful Cecilia who was the wrong colour. Now, in the winter of 1972, with the original news story of Earl’s suicide in jail seemingly confirmed by the coroner’s report, it seemed the racist world of Butte was stronger than ever. A drunk Indian whom the police said was a drug pusher: many found it convenient to believe that.

  People demanded of Cecilia, “Why don’t you work?”

  And she’d respond. “I’ve got two jobs on a woman’s pay and it still isn’t enough for six kids and a husband who broke his back in the mines!”

  “So get a better job.”

  “Get me some training, I’ll do it.”

  “What job you want?” the Welfare people said.

  “Anything,” and she looked at those smug Whites with their White jobs and she tossed their challenge right back: “I want to drive a truck in the pit.”

  The best-paying worker job in town. She knew the mine had run an ad for applications and she threw that in their spiteful faces. And the totally unexpected happened: she applied and she was one of eleven people accepted for driver training—the first, and only, woman recruit. With pride Clarence gives me a copy of the 11 June 1972 Montana Standard—“I’ve got two more”—when it ran a half-page feature on her, complete with four pictures: Cecilia in hard hat and hornrimmed safety glasses standing with her male instructors beside a massive Berkeley Pit truck loaded with one hundred tons of rock, its broad tire half again as tall as she
; Cecilia behind the steering wheel, leaning out of the cab.

  Her one comment quoted in the paper “was confident and candid. ‘There’s been nothin’ to scare me so far,’ she said.”

  On 1 July 1972, she graduated to a regular shift of pit driving and full pay; Clarence still keeps the certificate she received in his cardboard box of family documents. Yvonne remembers her mother driving a smaller pit truck down the street in one of the Butte Independence Day parades. She had always been proud of her Indian-long, rich black hair, but she cut that in mourning when Earl died; now her short hair fit exactly under her necessary working helmet. It almost seemed as if Cecilia had settled down to become silent and accepting. But no; she was working on her own agenda. Within two months she bought a new full-size 1972 navy sedan, a Cadillac.

  When did this happen? How?

  Minnie and Kathy get beat up the most—is this after Earl’s death?—and Karen is older, she goes to a paid Catholic school; and I’m strong, and they think I’m crazy because of the way I talk and look, and I can run fast. But Kathy is petite and very pretty, skin such a dark tan and hair so black. I am behind the KXLF television and radio station on Montana Street and I’ve been playing hookey—the school has a hot-lunch program, but I just go without—between the bright steel lines of the railroad and finding glistening stones, but now school time is over and I’m headed home, I’m threading my way behind the buildings on Montana. I never walk on the sidewalk, out in the open is too dangerous. And across the street and between buildings I get a glimpse of Kathy walking down the opposite alley. She’s wearing the beautiful dress Mom bought her yesterday and she holds her books close to her chest. She glances over her shoulder as she walks fast. Something is wrong, I know there’s trouble when a Johnson walks alone, and then I see boys running up the sidewalk on Montana; and through a missing piece of picket fence I see Kathy run behind an abandoned building, and then another crowd of boys runs across there too, chasing after her.

  I dodge around a building to the street and see the first crowd of boys blocking the entrance to the alley. They won’t let Kathy get out onto Montana, where a passing adult might stop it, though Butte’s full of look-the-other-way people. The second gang is chasing her up the alley towards them, and I have to help her. I run towards her, through and between some old buildings, where the street boys can’t see me, but I know they have her cornered: she’s blocked between the two gangs in the narrow alley. How can I reach her? I dash across the street and try to scramble through an abandoned house, but I can’t make it, it’s boarded up, and I see a piece of two-by-four with some long spikes sticking out of it. I grab that and come out and sprint into the alley after the boys.

  They’ve got her surrounded, they’ve already torn the skirt of her new dress away and they’re laughing and screeching; her leotards are stripped down and her panties are ripped and they point and scream about that and then they tear them completely off, laughing and hooting. Kathy disappears, she is shrieking as they beat and grab at her; some of the bigger guys crowding around are opening their pants. They are clawing at her, hands everywhere as she screams, and two of them leap up above the crowd; they are trying to jump on top of her.

  They’re all so excited, watching and grabbing, I shove in between them and I hit the guy on top of Kathy as hard as I can with the plank. He falls over. Lucky thing I had the spikes backwards or he’d have been paralysed for ever; I hammer his butt and tailbone. I yell at them all around me, Who’s next?

  They push and shove back, staring at me. The guy I hit squirms around on the ground, groaning. I tell Kathy to get up and stand behind me, backed against a wall, and she does. We’re in as good a position as we’ll get, and I lift the plank high, spikes pointed out this time. I can nail at least one or two before they get at me.

  Come on, come on!

  And they scatter. Giving each other shoulder shoves, laughing as if they were brave and couldn’t care less, yelling names, trying to swear like men, the stupid little shits.

  Kathy sinks down against the wall, sobbing. I help her pull her leotards back on, and her torn panties, but she has to hold the skirt wrapped around her, it’s completely ripped apart. It’s bright daylight, we have to bend and sneak between houses, down alleys, no one must see us.

  When did this happen? We tell Mom we’ve been jumped and she storms to school. There is a face-off in the principal’s office, and the police arrive to escort her out. Or does she hit the principal, clobber him somehow to give him a taste of his own medicine before the police break them up? How did it happen?

  It seems to me that Cecilia’s grandmother, Flora Baptiste Bear’s mother, whose name beyond “Kohkum” no one seems to know—or perhaps will not tell me, Cree personal names always being a private and possibly spiritual matter—could well have been Earth Woman, Big Bear’s youngest daughter. Historian Hugh Dempsey tells me that certainly her great age would make that possible. Clarence says she was 113 years old when she died, that’s what they told him at her funeral at Red Pheasant in 1976, and from his bottomless box he digs a picture of her lying in her coffin. Yvonne’s grandpa John and grandma Flora Bear stand beside it, a regal Cree couple indeed.

  No wonder then that when, as Clarence tells me, in 1971 Cecilia contacted Russell Means of the American Indian Movement about the death of her son while in the custody of the Butte police, Means sent an AIM man to Montana to investigate.

  Yvonne remembers her great-grandmother, Grandma Flora’s mother, a little. She lived with Cecilia’s cousin and her family on Red Pheasant and she smoked a pipe, wore a long dress with long sleeves, bound her legs in traditional wrap-arounds over moccasins, and always wore a kerchief, either tied back around her braided hair, or under her chin and hiding her face, whenever anyone visited. She never sat in a chair, always on a blanket on the floor. When a White man arrived, she always disappeared. Sometimes when Yvonne awakes in the morning she finds herself thinking of those two ancient women from her childhood. She knows her great-grandmother told stories about when she first saw a White man, talked about blue eyes, yellow hair, long knives. Apparently she called all Whites “palefaces.” But the two spoke only Cree, not a word of English mixed with it, and even then Great-Grandma always seemed frightened, somehow afraid some White person would hear them and understand. Perhaps they both feared the White-supremacy movement, which was always powerful in Butte, whether it exposed itself as the vigilantes or just plain racial hatred in a land where individual violence is easily accepted—Butte rumour had it that no Montana jury would ever convict a person for killing someone who threatened you on your own property—and where the push for individual (read: individual White) rights was especially pronounced after the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

  Yvonne wonders now what those two ancient women had experienced, what she might have learned if only she had understood Cree. It was obvious that her maternal grandmothers thought of the world of White power in which they were forced to live as nothing but dangerous.

  And Earl’s death simply proved them right. Great-Grandma was well over a hundred and could no longer travel, but Grandma Flora came to Butte for the funeral with Grandpa John: she was sixty years old, wearing her usual ground-length black dress that hid even her moccasins, contemplating the dead face of her handsome twenty-year-old grandson. There could be no question for her: Whites—certainly the way of the Whites—had killed him.

  In 1971, having lost their thirteen-room “White House” mansion after the nine-month miners’ strike in 1968, the Johnsons were living at 410 South Jackson Street. South Jackson was cut into the flank of Butte Mountain, and 410 was on the lower side of the street; on the other side the houses were built above eight-foot walls and could be reached only by narrow stairs cut into the cliff retained by cement or rock walls.

  “Those houses towered over us,” Yvonne writes to me in a letter, “all the more reason for the Whites up there to look down on us. The Smith family lived across from us, and above. Their father
was a cowboy who rode the rodeo circuit, and their two kids were our age. At first we got on all right, until one day my little brother Perry wouldn’t do what Shirley Smith wanted and she slapped him so hard she left her handprint on his bare back. Perry showed Leon, who went over and slapped Shirley’s face. She yelled, ‘Daddy, the Indian hit me!’ and the fight was on. It lasted as long as we lived there, and sometimes the cops were called; they’d have their friends over and view us Natives from their high perch. It was mostly yelling. Once Shirley, who was as old as Leon, got us all going, and Auntie Josephine came out and yelled so hard her false teeth came out and she had to push them back in before she could continue. It got worse after Earl died, and one day Dad got into it.

  “He was usually pretty laid back about neighbours. ‘A bunch of yap traps, let ’em kick up the dust,’ he’d say to us, but finally I think he got tired of the racket and of us telling him how we were beat up. Because the attacks on us carried over into the school yard, the cop kids who all knew us said they were glad our brother was a good Indian now, he was a druggie anyway. We started to get scrawled notes at home, threatening; they even got to Mom because now they knew she was not only Indian but also a foreign Canadian one.

  “ ‘Go home!’ they hollered at her, and she’d yell right back, ‘This is my home, and all my ancestors’. You go home, yellow-hair Custers!’

  “Which just made it worse for us, because Dad was as blue-eyed and curly-yellow-haired as anyone could be—so us dark kids were obviously bastards or some kind of unnatural freaks. A fat man living on the corner called us ‘Speckles!’ because we all had different skin tones, and I felt everyone pointed especially at me, my scarred lips and difficult speech.