“Are you Indian?” asked the homeless men.
“No,” said my mother’s disciples. “But we know an amazing Indian woman named Estelle. Do you know her?”
“Where I come from, every Indian woman is named Estelle.”
Ha, ha! How can Indians laugh so much? How can they make so many jokes? I don’t know. Ask my mother!
My mother both loved and resented the attention she received from her white-women friends.
“How can these women become whole if they’re trying so hard to be wholly like me?” she asked me.
“I don’t know, Ma, I’m just a manual laborer.”
All that summer, I worked for my mother in the basements of Unitarian churches:
I folded and unfolded chairs and arranged them in sacred circles.
I brewed and poured coffee.
I lit cigarettes and dumped ashtrays.
I ran to the store for sandwiches and drinks.
I swept and mopped the floors.
I worked for free, but I worked for women who at first tolerated and then loved me. I was the son of their saint! In their lives away from my mother, these women were lawyers, doctors, teachers, parole officers, chefs, and social workers, but they turned into children in her presence. I resented their immaturity; I was supposed to be the immature one; I was the child!
Those women surrounded my mother and pushed me into the corners of the meeting rooms. These women competed with me for my mother’s attention, and they often won.
“What should I do, Estelle, what should I do?”
“I don’t know, Erin, what do you think you should do?”
Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.
“It makes me sound Zen,” she had said to me on the bus ride home after one of those meetings.
“How do you do it, Ma?” I asked. “These women are killing me. They want you to do everything for them.”
“No, they don’t. They just want somebody to listen.”
“Ma, they think you’re magic.”
“Don’t you think I’m magic?” she asked and laughed. Of course she wasn’t a magician. She was a mess! She failed parenting quizzes! She’d raised a son who would grow up to break the hearts of 67 percent of the women who’d loved him! How could a powerful woman raise a fragile man like that?
Q: How do you find out the true nature and character of a hero?
A: Ask his or her children.
Ask me about my mother’s relationship with her women’s group, and I’ll tell you my version of the truth. I was thirteen and should have been running the streets with other thirteen-year-old boys, not making sure there was one pitcher of ice water for Lucy and one pitcher of lukewarm water for Abigail. I was supposed to be engaged in rough play with a father. He was supposed to grab me by the hands and spin me around the room! He was supposed to be my helicopter, my dump truck, my race car, my dragon and my dragon killer! Where was my father, the bastard, and where was the good man who should have been vainly attempting to take my father’s place in my life? I was always hungry for paternity, but during the summer of 1976, a matriarchal woman starved me. With difficulty, I still loved my mother, but she found blind acceptance from her white friends.
NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: During that particular time period, I probably hated my mother more often than I loved her.
What is it about Indians that turns otherwise intelligent, interesting, and capable people into blithering idiots? I don’t think every white person I meet has the spiritual talents and service commitment of a Jesuit priest, but white folks often think we Indians are shamanic geniuses. Most Indians are only poor folks worried about paying the rent and the light bill, and they usually pray to win the damn lottery.
“White people!” my mother cursed on a daily basis, though her paternal grandfather was half white and her maternal grandmother was mostly white.
My mother went to college on scholarships funded by white people; she was a teaching assistant to a white professor; she borrowed money from white people who didn’t have much money to lend; our white landlord let us pay half rent for a whole year and never asked for the rest; my favorite baby-sitter was a white woman with red hair.
“White people!” My mother should have sung their praises; I should sing their praises! But we didn’t sing for them. Indians are not supposed to sing for white people. Does the antelope sing honor songs for the lion?
My mother the friend, benefactor, and beneficiary of white liberal women said these things about white liberals:
“Your average white liberal would die before she sat down to a raccoon and squirrel dinner with some illiterate shotgun-shack Arkansas white folks who believe the Good Lord is their one and only savior. But that same white liberal will happily eat fried SPAM and white bread with a Lakota Sioux shaman who never graduated high school, and give him a highly transcendent blow job after dinner.”
“White pacifist liberals in favor of gun control will race from their latest antiwar demonstration to rally for the American Indian Movement, a radical Indian organization that accomplished much of its mission through gunfire and threat of gunfire.”
“I’m not scared of the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the world. Jerry and Pat aren’t the ones crawling in and out of sweathouses and pontificating about how much they admire Indian culture. I’m scared of the white liberals who love Indians. I figure about 75 percent of white liberals who hang around Indians will eventually start believing they’re Indians, then start telling us Indians how to be Indian.”
“If you put an Indian on the poster, white liberals will flock to the meeting. For instance, I happen to believe that Leonard Peltier is a political prisoner. Leonard is in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He didn’t shoot and kill those two FBI agents back in Pine Ridge in ’75, but some Indian did. Think about it. Some Indian, or Indians, walked up to two men, two human beings, lying defenseless on the ground, already shot and wounded numerous times during a gunfight they might have started, but still, two human beings lying on the ground, critically wounded, unable to defend themselves. And some Indian who was not Leonard Peltier but was with Leonard Peltier stood over those two FBI men lying on the ground and shot them in their faces. Leonard is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, but I happen to believe his imprisonment is the natural result of picking up a gun in the first place. Those white liberals should change the name of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee to the Free Leonard by Finding the Indigenous Bastards Who Did It Committee.”
Despite my mother’s sarcasm and racism, most of her friends are liberal white women! And most of my friends are liberal white men! My mother and I are the hostages of colonial contradictions:
“Liberal white man, you can steal my land as long as you plant organic peas and carrots in the kidnapped soil!”
“Liberal white woman, you can practice my religion as long as you teach third grade at the co-op tribal school!”
I was engaged to a liberal white woman named Cynthia when I met and began the affair with the Crow Indian woman who would eventually marry me and mother our twin daughters, Charlotte and Emily (I’m a pretentious Indian who married a pretentious Indian!). How could I cheat on a woman I’d loved for years with another woman I’d fallen in love with during the course of one brief conversation? I don’t know. I made the choice to betray my girlfriend, and it turned out well (all three of us live better lives than we lived before), but I know it could have been otherwise. In our rage and pain, any one or combination of the three of us could have thrown a punch or grabbed a knife or pulled a trigger. Instead, after I’d separately cried to each woman about how much I loved the other, Cynthia and Mary went to lunch together and listened to each other’s stories. Over sandwiches and coffee, the betrayed and betrayer confessed their sins and forgave each other, or perhaps they only promised to try and forgive, and isn’t that the best we can do? But did they forgive me? I don’t know! They never told me! I never asked! How could they, the North and South Korea of my heart, conduct such a delicate negotiation without me? How could two women sign a peace treaty without me, the one-man army? I didn’t even matter; I wasn’t invited. I needed answers, so I ran to my mother.