The Tao of Nookomis Page 3
Grandma Nooko, I notice you haven’t mentioned your adoptive father much at all. What was he like?
He was a rotten son of a bitch, she said.
And … ? I pried. After all, I’m a mixed-blood Ojibwe and have enough of that pushy white blood in me to ask.
Nooko just sat there for what seemed like the longest time, and I could tell she really didn’t want to say anything. And it got so quiet the cheap Walmart clock on the wall was the only sound in the room. And my Nooko, I don’t know, I didn’t want to have her talk about anything that might upset her, and I could see she was visibly upset, so I just took one of her hands while her other hand fetched a handkerchief from the nightgown she was wearing, and she wiped moisture that had gathered just under her nose.
Grandma, I’m so sorry. Please, let’s just talk about something else.
But then she just said it.
He used to come to my room.
Great-grandma, please. I’m so sorry. Please. I’m so sorry to have brought it up and to upset you like this.
But she just looked me in the eyes, and I could tell she was resolute.
No, she said. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to know what that son of a bitch did to me. I wanted you to know that when I finally got the nerve to tell my Mother Zozed that she stood by me. She told him to pack his things. And he left. And we never saw him again. And I am so forever grateful to her for believing me, for rescuing me from that.
My head lay resting on her lap by then, and I was crying, of course. And Nooko was stroking my hair like she would always do when I was upset. Comforting me. And I realize now, of course, that it should have been the other way around.
I suppose when I die and cross that river, that son of a bitch might be there waiting for me, as well. I suppose I’ve thought about what I might say to him, you know?
I carried all of this, I don’t know, anger and resentment toward him for so many years, for such a long time. And finally I had to just let it go, to forgive myself.
Nooko. What do you mean forgive yourself? Forgive yourself for what? You were just a little girl. You were the victim.
I had to finally forgive myself. Forgive myself for all of those years of anger and resentment because I allowed what he did to me to fester in me for all of those years, and I carried all of that and in doing so, it controlled me. Do you understand, do you see? I had to let it all go. It was the only way I could move on. And when I did it was like this terrible burden was lifted from me.
And none of that is to say that every once in a while anger and resentment don’t creep inside my thoughts whenever I think back to those terrible, terrible times.
Sometimes it’s good just to give it a voice.
That son of a bitch.
Nooko went on to tell me that she not only had to forgive herself, but she also had to forgive him. Me, I didn’t get that. I didn’t think I could do that. Not ever. Not for anything like that. Me, I would have wanted to hunt him down and cut off his penis with a dull, rusty knife and shoved it down his throat until he choked on it. Me, I think there are some things that are not forgivable.
F--- that tao forgiveness shit.
Somehow after she told me that we managed to move on to other things. Sometimes that is the only thing that can be done—move on. She told me about living in New York. I still can’t believe she lived there. I never thought she left Bresette Hill (a neighborhood in Red Cliff village) her entire adult life.
I did. I left Bresette Hill for two years and went to New York. This is how it happened. Like I mentioned a bit earlier, I was good at sewing, and Mother Zozed taught me all she knew. By the time I was in high school, I was designing and making my own clothes. And I had some talent with art as well—pencil, charcoal, and watercolors. In high school, when there was a banner or poster that needed to be designed, I was the one the art teacher recruited to design and draw it. So in my senior year of school my home economics teacher pulled me aside and told me that there was a way to combine my ability to design and make clothing with my art. She had a sister who worked in the fashion industry in New York who would very much like to take on an apprentice, and wanted a local girl from her hometown. And I have to tell you, when she said that I was thrilled beyond belief.
When I told my mother about it that night, I wasn’t sure what she was thinking straight away because she got really quiet. Then Mother Zozed came and sat by me, and I remember she took my hand and talked real soft, and I could tell she was real proud of me.
“My Genevieve,” she said, “when you first came into this home many years ago, I was afraid. I think I feared that out of the blue someone from the agency would come knocking on the door and say they made a mistake, and that they were taking you away. And for years I feared that, and I think I would have died if it ever had happened. Your journey here so many years ago was filled with such heartache and I just didn’t want to see you hurt anymore. I, for one, will have trouble letting you go. I know, however, that you need to go out into the world sometime.”
So in late summer of 1938, in the heart of the Great Depression, with the blessings of my mother and a loan from my home economics teacher for fare, I boarded a train from Ashland bound for Milwaukee, then on to Chicago and then New York. And when I arrived at Penn Station in New York I was met by Miss Elsie Simms, my teacher’s sister, who took me on a tour of the city via the subway and sidewalks, and then to her small apartment in Chelsea, where I was provided a cot in her sitting room and made to promise I would find part-time work to help pay the rent and contribute to groceries.
Although most of the leading designers of the day came out of Paris, New York was still a top fashion design mecca. Elsie Simms, my mentor, worked for McCall’s, the leading pattern design company in its day, designing dresses for everyday people and everyday wear. As her apprentice, I got to work side by side with her throughout the entire design phase, from idea to sketches, to assisting at selecting pattern materials—cloth, closures, buttons, thread—we might suggest to the higher-ups. Everything the company did was designed and made in-house before it ever made it to the pattern stage and the catalog books. For my work I received a very small apprenticeship wage, nothing really to write home about, not even close enough to live on. But what an amazing opportunity it was! And, I was in New York.
I didn’t have much in terms of spare time during the workweek, but during the few breaks I had, and the rare day off, I began the search to find out about my Irish family. There were things I needed to know, the empty spaces in my heart to fill, that really had nothing to do with my adoptive mother. I will always love her deeply, and I know she would have approved of what I was doing by looking for information on my birth parents, as well my brother.
Just the mere thought that maybe they were there still in the city, the constant wondering about my past, was like the missing pieces of a puzzle.
And it’s quite a story, but eventually the Catholic Aid Society released what they knew about my family.
So that’s what I know, and I guess it’s enough for now. I’ll tell you the rest but it better be soon, before I cross that river.
She pointed in the direction of the vast Ojibwe sky, the Path of Souls (Milky Way), and to the northern lights, who are the spirits of all of our ancestors dancing in the spirit world, in a place where there is only happiness.
Of course I didn’t last forever in New York.
After I’d been there for nearly two years, I got a letter from one of my aunties that my mother had become very ill. There used to be a lot of flu and things like that back then, and we didn’t have all the medicines you see nowadays. Anyway, she said I should come home, before it was too late.
So that’s what I did. I gave up all of that, what I had, what I was doing out there and came home. And I never went back. My mother got better eventually, and she lived for many more years, and I’d like to think it was because I was there for her, nursing her.
But you gave up so much, Grandma Nook
o. I mean, New York, the fashion industry. You gave all of that up and you came back here.
I did. It wasn’t easy, I suppose. Even now sometimes I think about the what ifs. And my Mother Zozed, who I loved so dearly, I have to admit that I felt some resentment that I came back here. Maybe I would have stayed out there if she hadn’t gotten ill. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, you know, one very few people are given. I felt guilty for even having ever thought that way. How could I have felt that toward someone who gave me so much, who sacrificed so much for me?
Yin and yang, shadow and light, it’s always going on inside us. And which one wins?
Which do we allow to win?
In the end, though, by coming back I used the skills I acquired in New York to design all kinds of outfits, the beadwork with all its colors and designs, the moccasins.
And I was able to actually use all the other knowledge I’d acquired from my mother—the language, stories. I was active in the lodge (traditional ceremonies) until just a few years ago. If I had stayed in New York, I would never have been able to use any of that. Who in New York would I have been able to speak Ojibwe with? Who would want to know about making outfits? Who would wear my moccasins? Where would I have been able to attend ceremonies?
I suppose that somewhere way deep down inside I still sometimes wonder how my life may have been different if I had stayed there. It’s natural to think that way. I suppose, even now after all these years, there is still some regret. It’s natural to feel that way.
That is what life is.
In the end, though, I returned here. This land had become my home. I missed my people and this place too much.
AFTER THAT DAY I stopped more often to visit Grandma Nooko to hear her story. It is a beautiful story, sacred in every way. Even now when I share it I hold that asemaa, tobacco, in my hand as I recall it.
Grandma Nooko walked on almost a year ago. By then, of course, we had shared all of our secret stories. I have a whole collection of sons of bitches that she, even in death, is teaching me to forgive. And before she passed, she gave me her copy of the book Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, given to her by her teacher.
I’ve dog-eared that sucker like a mad woman.
The path gets lighter that way.
This past spring I made a journey east for her, for a great-grandmother known for making beautiful Ojibwe dance outfits and beadwork, for all of her dreams of what was and could have been, for the lands she left. In New York, I went to the mass burial site where nearly a million immigrants, the Irish and other poor, homeless, stillborn, or former prisoners lie buried on Hart Island, where I recited a prayer bequest of my great-grandmother in the language of her adopted people, the Ojibwe. And then I journeyed on further east to County Clare in Ireland, where I walked the roads and fields of Nooko’s Irish ancestors, and where I again put that sacred asemaa to aki, our mother earth, and recited the same prayer, which I now share with you:
Gichi Manidoo
daga
wiidookawishin weweni
ji naanaagadawendamaan
ji
odaapinamaan
iniw ge-gashkitoosiwaan
ji
aanjisidooyaan
ji
de-apiichide’ eyaan
ji
aanjisidooyaan
ge-gashkitooyaan
ji
-de-apiichinibwaakaayaan
ji
gikendamaan
ono
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Sara’s Song
I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately, Sara. In my dreams we are both children again, walking home from that Catholic mission school where we were reminded we were sinners and heathens who would surely go to hell if we didn’t change our ways. You in a worn print dress your mother found in the back room of the church, in the boxes of free clothes. Me in my bib overalls and hook boots with broken and tied-together laces. That’s how I remember things, Sara. You will always be perfect to me. I don’t want to remember you drunk and smelling of other lovers. I don’t want to remember you like that.
I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. You’ve been gone for years now. But I know there are times when your memory comes to sit beside me.
My life is filled with everyday things that sometimes jolt my memory back to other times, other chapters in my story. At no particular place or time of day, a certain movement of clouds or wind will take me back to the times we would walk into your house, where your mother sat darning socks in the kitchen. In my memory there was a wind causing yellowed lace curtains to sway and dance to her songs. I remember you had her gift of music. And for just a moment when I’m thinking these things, there will be a longing. Or I will be walking down the street and suddenly become immersed by the smells of a certain perfume you would wear, and I will be reminded of your warm and gentle voice. I will smile slightly, and if I’m with someone they might ask me about my smile, and I will say it’s nothing special. But it will be. There are other times when I will want to see you and touch you and be with you so much I will be overcome with longing. Maybe I will be out driving alone and a song on the radio will gently touch me on the shoulder. I may have to pull over to the side of the road, my hands will go to my face, and I will again grieve as if it were the first day of my grieving. At times like that it is as though your memory has come to sit beside me, to hold my hand, to remind me the past and present are one and the same.
This is one of those times.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS can sometimes intuitively sense when even small things are amiss with the other, and they find ways to provide support in difficult times in subtle and indirect ways. So when Eddie pulled his old pickup truck into the Andrews’ yard, he sensed there was something wrong. There was a manner in his brother’s movement about the yard, the way he would work for short bursts, then stop and look off in the distance. There was a look in his eyes that could not hide his disappointment about something, and a meandering tone in his voice. He had recognized these things about his brother for many years.
He remembered back to a particular winter when they were little boys, and they had gone snow sledding with their cousins. Their grandfather had made them a toboggan from a long piece of sheet metal, and it was recognized as the fastest sled on the rez. It was faster then the car hoods that other rez kids used as sleds, much faster than the slickest piece of cardboard. Their metal toboggan easily outdistanced the town kids’ storebought ones. So a particular day when they went sledding down the steepest hill in Red Cliff and made a direct hit on the only poplar tree in the way, they hit it faster and harder than anyone had ever hit it before. Five little rez kids went flying in all directions, their handmade wool mittens and charity winter boots filled with snow. Clods of snow collected on the knitted scarves their grandmothers had made for them, and snow jammed up their tattered and dirty army surplus winter coats. And when everything cleared and they began picking themselves up, Eddie noticed his brother remained motionless on the ground.
“We better get him home, “ one of his cousins had said. So four little rez kids loaded their cousin and brother up on a toboggan, which now would forever wear a dent in commemoration of that day, and began pulling him home. Halfway up another hill on their way home, Eddie noticed a stir in his brother and motioned for the others to stop. The injured little boy slowly opened his eyes and reached out his hand to his older brother. There was a certain look in his eyes, one of fear and love and pain, and Eddie said to him, “Are you going to be all right?”
“Uh-huh.”
And the love he had for his little brother would show in other difficult life times. As the years passed and they found themselves grieving the passing of family members, their grandparents and mother and father and aunties and uncles, and cousins, Eddie would always find ways to seek out his brother, to visit him, and sit with him. At times like this he would ente
r his brother’s house early in the morning to make him coffee and bring it over to him when he arose for the day. If his brother was working on his car or boat, he would pick up a tool and begin helping him with a repair. Always there would be talking between them just above a whisper, and light laughter, but for the most part there was little said. So many Indian people are that way. And they would glance into each other’s eyes to acknowledge that one was there to be there for the other and the unspoken understanding would be, “Are you going to be all right?”
“Uh-huh.”
So it was that day Eddie went to visit his brother. He moved in his quiet way, picking up his brother’s net boxes and putting them in the shed. When the work was done, they sat on the porch, and Eddie pulled out a pocketknife and began whittling away at a stick of wood.
“Did you see Ronnie last night over on Madeline Island?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He got in trouble over there.”
“That’s too bad.”
Enough said.
It wasn’t as if this was the first time Eddie had heard of his nephew’s bad behavior. He remembered just the past winter when Ronnie had beat the hell out of some white kid for some stupid nothing reason. This was just after Eddie had spoken to Ronnie’s class, where he had been telling the students, especially Ronnie, how as people we need to live a certain way, a gentle way, and how we need to be respectful. These ways of living and being meant so much to Eddie that whenever he spoke to groups about these things, his voice would always crack with emotion.
“Listen to me,” he would say. He would speak from the heart.
He remembered Ronnie sitting in that classroom, respectful and looking proud of his uncle, and occasionally nodding his head in acknowledgment and agreement. Then he remembered hearing that after the talk his nephew seemed to forget everything that had been said. And now his nephew had been drinking, just after hearing his uncle talk to him and the other young people about the importance of knowing their history, and about living a certain way. He remembered being so proud just last night when Ronnie had handed him some tobacco, feeling this was just another reminder that his nephew knew the importance of giving back, of thanking and acknowledging elders and people who know traditional ways.