My Pocahontas
I honestly believed my mother was Native American. My brothers and I were proud of that.
She was also a very discreet and secretive mystery in our
constantly questioning lives. When we’d
ask about her childhood and early life, she was often evasive and cautious to
cover her answers with the frosting of anecdote rather than actual
answers. But in our minds we fantasized
another truth.
"How’d you get that scar by your right eye? Why is your nose bent and different than
ours? Why do you turn so much darker in
the sun while we just burn?"
“Dog bite.” “Thrown
baseball bat.” “Dunno, just do.”
She was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and I knew just enough
about the Trail of Tears to believe my mother was definitely Cherokee. My younger brother believed more romantically
she was Apache and hopefully had carbines stored somewhere in a wall in the
basement. Whatever, we agreed that was
no dog bite. More likely from some ceremony of bravery,
self-administered before a snapping fire against a purple sky.
Our extended family helped fuel our belief. They whispered to us when we were tightly
pajamed in bed, “Just so you know, your Mother is a half-breed, you know.”
“Really?” But they mistook the excitement in our mouthing
voices for horror, not the ecstatic hope that Mom was something wild and
beautiful and filled with a history of freedom and boundlessness.
“Yes, really. And that’s just the beginning, I’m afraid.”
My mother and father eloped in 1946, just like Elizabeth
Warren’s parents did over a decade earlier in 1932. My father, having returned from a war which murdered
his sleep for the rest of his life, blind-dated a dark-haired woman in
Virginia, then returned to his Indiana home and dawdled one week before he left
smitten back to Virginia to beg another chance. Another chance forever.
His family and uncles and aunts never forgave him.
Unfortunately, we haven’t changed much since that
time long ago when I suffered the hushed comments of my relatives. In the Chicago Tribune, John Kaas described
his glee at Senator Elizabeth Warren’s reluctance to undergo a DNA test to
reveal whether or not she had any American Native DNA present in her
genes. Senator Warren, like my brothers
and our family, fell prey to the allure of our family’s apparent narration and
little scientific substance except for the manufactured tales of the unaccepting family. “Isn’t it delicious that Fauxcahontas, aka Sen. Elizabeth Warren
— the liberal Massachusetts Democrat toying with a 2020 presidential run — is
refusing to take a DNA test to finally prove whether her self-serving claims of
Cherokee heritage are true?
Actually,
watching Warren squirm and Chuck Todd all but flagellate himself for having to
ask about the DNA test on “Meet the Press” was more than delicious.”
Chickasha is in Grady County southwest of Oklahoma City, and
my mother’s orphanage is no longer in operation, but in the early 1930’s it was
populated by the unwanted offspring of Mexican laborers and Native Americans,
as well as some Whites. She was only
three and her adopters chose her and my Uncle Jack, a darkly handsome Mexican
boy nearly three years her elder.
And it was just the beginning, I’m afraid. Whenever the “family” arrived, my mother
stayed present but retreated into a distant and perfunctory person who smiled
little and talked less. I remember her receiving a gift for Christmas: a long,
sharply honed butcher knife with two carefully cut notches in its handle. Everyone laughed at this inside joke, but my
mother’s mouth played a faint twist as if suppressing an unwanted memory.
When Trump derided Warren once more, using his usual
pejorative word Pocahontas to describe her for the Native American Code
Talkers of World War Two standing before
him, I was more than staggered. I was catapulted back to my own childhood bed,
in my pajamas, listening to one part of the family whose susurrus of whispers
derided another’s skin, another’s color, another’s refusal to accept and my own
mother.
As a result, I embraced multi-ethnicity without knowing what
it was; instead, just a seething resentment for those who would dismiss my
mother with a judgmental and derogatory description: half-breed, Indian, Red, squaw. And if and when they visited and came to tuck
us in, I gorged my antipathy waiting for them to finish the Lord’s Prayer with
some breathy, disdainful comment about my mother.
Yet, like Senator Warren, I was without any real proof, just
a desire to know she was special and her blood was coursing through my veins
with all the history and significance my small life lacked.
Now, science has trumped the lure of romantic family
lore. No longer believe in your
responsibility to your great-great grandmother’s legend. Check the DNA stream.
Kaas calls Senator Warren Fauxcahontas. Inversely, as mean-spirited as anything I
ever heard hushed to me while I drifted to sleep.
In the end of his sad diatribe, Kaas reminds us all that we
are just and more importantly all Americans.
But in this respect, he would reaffirm what his column already purports:
that those honored code talkers can be insulted by an ignorant man in power
(momentarily), that the honored memories of a family’s past responsibilities
and beliefs are worthless unless
scientifically provable, that the Democrats’ politics of race and gender are
nothing compared to what we have now, and it’s just acceptable now to make fun of a
politician interested in the lives of those without advocacy.
My mother died some ten years ago, and I wrote to the
District Judge of Grady County for the records of her birth. After determining that there would be no one
left alive to argue against such a release, I was provided her records. She was white and a ward of the state of
Oklahoma. White.
As if that ever mattered.
