Growing Up Native American (30 page)

Back then, there wudn't no doctors—school trained white doctors I mean—around here like there is now. Some of the plantations started hiring doctors a little later on, but when I first come over here there wudn't none. The closest white doctor I knowed anything about was over at Delta City and he was a half-blind old drunk who was just as apt to saw you in two as to cut your britches leg off if you was to go see him to have him do something about your bad leg. They tell a story about how he doctored a cow with a whole mess of calomel when he got called out to somebody's house one time. I don't remember whose house and whose cow it was. The story goes that when that doctor got there and asked where the patient was, the man whose house he was at said, “She's on back there in that-ter back room, Doc,” and so when the doc went on back he made a wrong turn or something and instead of going into the bedroom he winded up at a kind of lean-to shed they had there—a milk stall I 'spect it was—that was built on the back of the house. “She,” so the doc must of thought, was the white-face cow they had tied back there and not the man's wife who was in the bedroom the whole time. Well, the doc guessed that the cow's belly was a little too swole up so he dosed her up real good with some calomel. They say that for a whole week that cow shit like a tied coon. And they also say that he never did git around to doctoring that sick woman.

So there was no doctors to speak of in these parts. Not unless
a person wanted to go to a cow-doctoring old drunk over on the river at Delta City and that about twelve miles away. That, or travel sixty mile by train to Pine Bluff, but even then to go by train to Pine Bluff, you would of had to go clear out to Monticello to catch the train. Or if a boat was handy, and I guess this would of been the most likely thing to do, you could go down and then cross the river to Greenville where two or three school trained white doctors was. But folks around here in them days wudn't likely to do things that way. They was all-white, colored, Indian—pretty hard-working folks, farmers and loggers and hunters and fishermen, folks not known to have much in the way of cash on them or a whole lot of time on their hands for traveling. So when it come to patching up torn-up bodies and dosing whooping cough and such-like, why they had to make do with what they had. My two aunts was Indian medicine-makers, taught by their own aunt who was, so I been told, a full-blood Deer Clan Cherokee woman who come into these parts from the old country back east when the government started pushing Indians off of their lands, and they knowed a heap about doctoring and so folks just naturally come to them for help.

Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was Cherokee. Well, they was and they wudn't. What I mean is their mama was Cherokee, Deer Clan, like that older medicine-maker sister of hers whose name I never knowed except that I remember that an older cousin of mine sometime just called her Deer Woman and that she was a Sendforth. Their granddaddy, Aunt Minnie's and Aunt Velma's, was an Indian who somehow got his name listed on the government enrolling census as Sendforth because I 'spect he likely considered hisself and his family too as them that was sent forth from their homeland. Anyhow, that's where my name come from. My granddaddy, the son of the Sendforth I'm talking about, he changed it to Sandford, and according to Uncle Andrew, it was my mama who spelled it Sanford, dropping one of the “d's.” I guess maybe I'm expected to change it up some too, since it seems like that's what the tradition calls for. Only I won't. I'm satisfied with it just the way it is. Always remember this: we ain't the people our granddaddies and grand
mas was. I know that real good and so I guess I just don't have the gumption to change my name any like they done.

As I done said, Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma's daddy was old Alluk Thompson. He was a Chickasaw man from Mississippi and he come into these parts about the time Arkansas become a territory, settling down first at Bonaparte, then over at Simms Bayou, and then finally over here. Now Bonaparte, in case you don't know it, was a pretty good-sized river town back then, like Delta City is now, only even bigger, and it was knowed far and wide for its saloons and bawdy houses and gambling dens. It was kind of like the way the south side of Pine Bluff is these days, except that it would of made Pine Bluff look like a Sunday School class if the two was to be put upside each other and looked at. Bonaparte is long gone. When I was still just a little-bitty squirt, it was washed away. I can still remember when it happened. There come a big flood and it was entirely washed off the face of the land. All its buildings and streets and stores and pest-houses and filth and meanness was swept clean away by the Mississippi. I 'spect Bonaparte might be found somewheres down in the Gulf of Mexico now, may-ored over and sheriffed over by big catfishes talking Mexican. Wouldn't faze me a bit to hear it.

Now, old Alluk's wife died while they was still living in Bonaparte, a long time before the flood come, and when she did, he come up and moved to Simms Bayou where there was other Indian folks living, taking with him when he moved Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma, who was just little girls then, and a whole passel of assorted kinfolks. Old Alluk stayed at Simms Bayou just about a year, long enough to sell off his holdings in and around Bonaparte. Then he up and moved over here, buying this section when there wudn't no more than a handful of people in the whole township. That old aunt come with them, too, and she was by that time a kind of substitute mama to Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma as well as their medicine teacher. The story goes that she hated old Alluk like rat poison, but that she come along on the move to help bring up the girls and Uncle Andrew, too, who was just a little-bitty kid then, and even then she wouldn't live in the same house with him. She lived off by
herself in the woods a ways and, as I heard it, would never set foot in Alluk's house as long as he was around and would never talk nothing but Cherokee to them girls and Uncle Andrew, or for that matter to other folks neither when she even bothered to talk to other people at all. I can just barely remember that older aunt, who I calculate would of been my great-great aunt. She was always a shadowy person to me, just like my memory of her is now, and I remember her as the oldest person I think I ever seen or even knowed about. So even if Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was almost half-Chickasaw as well as being half-Cherokee, they was really more Cherokee in their ways because of that older aunt's influence on them. That woman just straight out took them girls away from their daddy, but like some older folks was in the habit of saying when I was a boy, that had been the best thing that could of happened to them. There had been some talk, all a long, long time before I was even borned, that my aunts had been wayward and wild some before they moved away from Bonaparte and Simms Bayou and come over here, especially with that white-trash element there was around at Bonaparte. Whatever the story was, that old aunt took over care of them and brung them up proper in a good Indian way. She, who had spent just about all her whole life taking care of them or some other Thompson or other kin and never getting married to nobody, just like her nieces in their time would never wed nobody either, left her impression on them girls just as sure and certain as a candle mold does when you go and pour a dab of hot wax on it.

…because I believe that all this forever afterwards will be the key to who you going to be and what you make out of yourself to be. It ain't no real never-mind at all whether you stay living around here the rest of your life, or whether you move off to somewheres else. You this place and this place is you. Don't ever forgit it, son.

A
ccording to Choctaw and Cherokee traditions, rivers are sacred, living beings with destinies of their own. In this personal essay, Louis Owens remembers his father, a man who knew rivers and their secret hiding places deep within the earth. Owens shares his childhood memories of California's Salinas River, whose presence captured his imagination
.

Louis Owens, of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish ancestry, is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His novel
The Sharpest Sight
is also set in the Salinas Valley. He has recently published a critical work entitled
Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel.

 

F
OR A WHILE, WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, MY FATHER WAS A WATER
witch. He took us with him sometimes, my older brother and me, and we walked those burned-up central California ranches, wherever there was a low spot that a crop-and-cattle desperate rancher could associate with a dream of wetness. The dusty windmills with their tin blades like pale flowers would be turning tiredly or just creaking windward now and then, and the ranch dogs—always long-haired, brown and black with friendly eyes—would sweep their tails around from a respectful distance. The ranches, scattered near places like Creston, Pozo, San Miguel, and San Ardo, stretched across burnt gold hills, the little ranch houses bent into themselves beneath a few dried up cottonwoods or sycamores, some white oaks if the rancher's grand-
father had settled early enough to choose his spot. Usually there would be kids, three or four ranging from diapers to hotrod pickups, and like the friendly ranch dogs they'd keep their distance. The cattle would hang close to the fences, eyeing the house and gray barn. In the sky, red-tailed hawks wheeled against a washed-out sun while ground squirrels whistled warnings from the grain stubble.

He'd walk, steps measured as if the earth demanded measure, the willow fork held in both hands before him pointed at the ground like some kind of offering. We'd follow a few yards behind with measured paces. And nearly always the wand would finally tremble, dip and dance toward the dead wild oats, and he would stop to drive a stick into the ground or pile a few rock-dry clods in a cairn.

A displaced Mississippi Choctaw, half-breed, squat and reddish, blind in one eye, he'd spit tobacco juice at the stick or cairn and turn back toward the house, feeling maybe the stirring of Yazoo mud from the river of his birth as if the water he never merely discovered, but drew all that way from a darker, damper world. Within a few days he'd be back with his boss and they'd drill a well at the spot he'd marked. Not once did the water fail, but always it was hidden and secret, for that was the way of water in our part of California.

When I think now of growing up in that country, the southern end of the Salinas Valley, a single mountain range from the ocean, I remember first the great hidden water, the Salinas River which ran out of the Santa Lucias and disappeared where the coastal mountains bent inland near San Luis Obispo. Dammed at its headwaters into a large reservoir where we caught bluegill and catfish, the river never had a chance. Past the spillway gorge, it sank into itself and became the largest subterranean river on the continent, a half-mile-wide swath of brush and sand and cottonwoods with a current you could feel down there beneath your feet when you hunted the river bottom, as if a water witch yourself, you swayed at every step toward the stream below.

We lived first in withdrawn canyons in the Santa Lucias, miles up dirt roads into the creases of the Coast Range where we kids squirmed through buck brush and plotted long hunts to the
ocean. But there were no trails and the manzanita would turn us back with what we thought must be the scent of the sea in our nostrils. Rattlesnakes, bears and mountain lions lived back there. And stories of mythic wild boars drifted down from ranches to the north. In the spring the hills would shine with new grass and the dry creeks would run for a few brief weeks. We'd hike across a ridge to ride wild horses belonging to a man who never knew that the kids rode them. In summer the grasses burned brown and the clumps of live oaks on the hillsides formed dark places in the distance.

Later we lived down in the valley on the caving banks of the river. At six and eight years we had hunted with slingshots in the mountains, but at ten and twelve we owned rifles, .22s, and we stalked the dry river brush for quail and cottontails and the little brush rabbits that, like the pack rats, were everywhere. Now and then a deer would break ahead of us, crashing thickets like the bear himself. Great horned owls lived there and called in drumming voices, vague warnings of death somewhere. From the river bottom we pinged .22 slugs off new farm equipment gliding past on the flatcars of the Southern Pacific.

Once in a while, we'd return to Mississippi, as if my father's mixed blood sought a balance never found. Seven kids, a dog or two, canvas water bags swaying from fender and radiator, we drove into what I remember as the darkness of the Natchez Trace. In our two-room Mississippi cabin, daddy longlegs crawled across the tar papered walls, and cotton fields surged close on three sides. Across the rutted road through a tangle of tree, brush, and vine, fragrant of rot and death, was the Yazoo River, a thick current cutting us off from the swamps that boomed and cracked all night from the other shore.

From the Yazoo we must have learned to feel water as a presence, a constant, a secret source of both dream and nightmare, perhaps as my father's Choctaw ancestors had. I remember it as I remember night. Always we'd return to California after a few months, as much as a year. And it would be an emergence, for the Salinas was a daylight world of hot, white sand and bone-dry brush, where in the fall, red and gold leaves covered the sand, and frost made silver lines from earth to sky. Here, death and decay seemed unrelated things. And here, I
imagined the water as a clear, cold stream through white sand beneath my feet.

Only in the winter did the Salinas change. When the rains came pounding down out of the Coast Range, the river would rise from its bed to become a half-mile-wide terror, sweeping away chicken coops and misplaced barns; whatever had crept too near. Tricked each year into death, steelhead trout would dash upstream from the ocean, and almost immediately the flooding river would recede to a thin stream at the heart of the dry bed, then a few pools marked by the tracks of coons, then only sand again and the tails and bones of big fish.

When I think of growing up in California, I think always of the river. It seemed then that all life referred to the one hundred and twenty miles of sand and brush that twisted its way northward, an upside-down, backwards river that emptied into the Pacific near Monterey, a place I didn't see till I was grown. As teenagers, my brother and I bought our own rifles, a .30-.30 and an ought-six, and we followed our father into the Coast Range after deer and wild boar. We acquired shotguns and walked the high coastal ridges for bandtail pigeon. We drove to fish the headwaters of the Nacimiento and San Antonio rivers. And from every ridge top we saw, if not the river itself, then the long, slow course of the valley it had carved, the Salinas. Far across were the rolling Gabilan Mountains, more hawk hills than mountains, and on the valley bottom, ranches made squares of green and gold with flashing windmills and tin roofs.

After school and during summers we worked on the ranches, hoeing sugar beets, building fences, bucking hay, working cattle (dehorning, castrating, branding, ear-clipping, innoculating, all in what must have seemed a single horrific moment for the bawling calf). We'd cross the river to drive at dawn through the dry country watching the clumps of live oak separate from the graying hillsides. Moving shadows would become deer that drifted from dark to dark. Years later, coming home from another state, I would time my drive so that I reached that country at daybreak to watch the oaks rise out of night and to smell the damp dead grasses.

Snaking its way down through our little town was a creek. Dipping out of the Coast Range, sliding past chicken farms and
country stores, it pooled in long, shadowed clefts beneath the shoulders of hills and dug its own miniature canyon as it passed by the high school, beneath U.S. 101, around the flanks of the county hospital and on to the river where it gathered in a final welling before sinking into the sand. Enroute it picked up the sweat and stink of a small town, the flotsam and jetsam of stunted aspirations, and along its course in tree shadow and root tangle, under cutbank and log, it hid small, dark trout we caught with hook and handline. From the creek came also steelhead trapped by a vanished river, and great blimp-bellied suckers which hunkered close to the bottom, even a single outraged bull-head which I returned to its solitary pool. At the place where the chicken-processing plant disgorged a yellow stream into the creek, the trout grew fat and sluggish, easily caught. We learned every shading and wrinkle of the creek, not knowing then that it was on the edge already, its years numbered. I more than anyone, fisher of tainted trout, kept what I thought of as a pact with the dying creek: as long as the water flows and the grass grows.

Up on Pine Mountain, not so much looming as leaning over the town of my younger years, a well-kept cemetery casts a wide shadow. From this cemetery, one fine summer evening, a local youth exhumed his grandmother to drive about town with her draped across the hood of his car, an act so shocking no punishment could be brought to bear. Later, when I asked him why, he looked at me in wonder. “Didn't you ever want to do that?” he asked. That fall, after a bitter football loss, members of the high-school letterman's club kidnapped a bus full of rooters from a rival school, holding them briefly at gunpoint with threats of execution. The summer before, an acquaintance of mine had stolen a small plane and dive-bombed the town's hamburger stand with empty beer bottles. The town laughed. Later, he caught a Greyhound bus to Oregon, bought a shotgun in a small town, and killed himself. It was that kind of place also. Stagnant between Coast Range and river, the town, too, had subterranean currents, a hot-in-summer, cold-in-winter kind of submerged violence that rippled the surface again and again. Desires to exhume and punish grew strong. Escape was just around a corner.

Behind the cemetery, deep in a wrinkle of the mountain, was an older burial ground, the town's original graveyard, tumbled and hidden in long grasses and falling oaks. Parting the gray oat stalks to read the ancient stone, I felt back then as astonished as a Japanese soldier must have when he first heard the words of a Navajo code talker. Here was a language that pricked through time, millenia perhaps, with painful familiarity but one that remained inexorably remote.

A year ago, I drove back to the house nine of us had lived in on the banks of the river. The house was gone, and behind the empty lot the river had changed. Where there had been a wilderness of brush and cottonwoods was now only a wide, empty channel gleaming like bone. Alfalfa fields swept coolly up from the opposite bank toward a modern ranch house. “Flood control” someone in the new Denny's restaurant told me later that afternoon. “Cleaned her out clear to San Miguel,” he said.