Laisvė takes the object. She puts it in her mouth; it tastes of blood or copper. She can see through the motherbody, see straight through to the fish behind. The motherbody smiles. The smile goes into Laisvė’s body, first into her feet, up her shins and knees, into her thighs and hips where the smile pools for a bit, then up her belly and chest and shoulders and neck, until the mother’s smile has become the daughter’s. Laisvė feels whole again.
“I love you,” the mother says, “my love will always be in your body.”
Laisvė considers how crying underwater isn’t anything. Or how crying underwater is just tears going back to their origins.
“Listen, my beloved,” the mother says, “this is not the last time you will enter the water in your life. Do you understand?”
Laisvė nods, and for a moment, her floating underwater hair entwines with the mother’s floating hair. Tendriling.
“This time, you were given a coin. The coin will help you to move your father. He needs it more than he has any idea. His grief is killing him, and it endangers others. There is a man named Joseph who can help, at least a little. You need to find Joseph — he is in the past, and then also in the present. The next time, you will swim to a woman — she is larger than life — and help her to save a multitude of children by moving them toward an aurora, a new dawn.
“Then, finally, you will look for your someone-like-a-brother. The boy you find may have a fever in him; he might seem as if he will kill you, but I promise you, my beautiful water girl, my seal, he will not kill you. It’s the world that pulls boys away from their possible becomings. Remember: you can’t save anyone. Not me, not your brother, not your father, not the world. You can only move objects and people and stories around in time. Rearrangements. Like rebuilding meaning from falling-apart pieces.”
Laisvė tries to run to this mother, but the mother turns entirely to water.
Then the whale returns and gently lifts Laisvė toward the surface of the sea. She hears a giant crashing sound, like a wave or the hull of a boat ramming into something, and the water bubbles around her and some force wrenches her upward — back to the surface, back to the save-a-life boat, her shivering father sobbing, her bundled-up infant brother wailing, the mother gone to water forever.
After that, she knew not to be afraid to go to water, because time slips and moves forward and backward, just as objects and stories do. She knew something new, about moving pieces around. She knew something new, about death and becoming.
Ethnography 1
My great-grandmother used to spit on the floor whenever anyone mentioned the Gold Rush. She said the Nisenan women were brutalized by Johann August Sutter — and then she’d spit on the ground twice, like the two Ts in his name. This man fled his country to avoid jail time, she said. He left his five children behind. He stole fifty thousand acres. He declared our homelands to be his property. He declared our women and children to be his property. We worked ourselves to death building and cooking and cleaning and helping to defend “his land” so that he would not kill us. He interfered with our tribal marriage customs. He took my sister and my cousin and other women to his bed. He liked to fuck women in clusters. He molested me as a girl. He molested my friends too, boys and girls alike. Those who did not want to have sex with him were considered enemies. Those who did not want to work with him were considered enemies. The Sacramento River carried our blood. We were fed leftover wheat bran from wooden troughs. No plates, no utensils. He ate on china. We slept in locked rooms with no beds. He beat us. Some of us he killed. Others he traded with local ranchers. Sold our labor like we were livestock. One year, after a measles epidemic killed most of us on Sutter’s Ranch — she’d spit again — he built a sawmill. Sutter’s Mill is where the Gold Rush started. Of course, we already knew there was gold in the rivers and hills. That’s where it lived and breathed. We didn’t know what they would do with it, with us, with the land. This man’s brutality made a chapter in our story that branched off in many directions, taking our children and ancestors with it. Then she’d stare at the floor where she’d spit, as if something might grow there. My great-grandmother lived to be one hundred years old, but her body was bent with sorrow and rage. Today, the only Nisenan who work here in the Sierra Nevada valley work at low-wage jobs. In the 1950s my father taught us how to stay quiet. He said, Never trust the government. They come and steal children. They did it to my brother. So learn to be quiet or you’ll get killed. My father made a turtle shell rattle on a deer hoof; I have it to this day. My mother made necklaces of abalone shells. My sister has expertise in watertight basket weaving, using redbud, bracken fern, willow. Still, some of the people I know are losing language… My great-grandmother told me that, when we speak or sing or dance, the trees and water and animals understand. I still know some words and songs. I work at a diner as a line cook. My daughter is a scientist. My daughter was just accepted for an internship at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She wants to be an astrophysicist. She says, Dad, gold was forged during a violent burst when two orbiting neutron stars collided. Neutron star mergers account for all of the gold in the universe. I listen to her.
Apple
Cruces 2
What if our labor could help our arms and legs and bodies to understand that our worth might go beyond money? What if we labored together with other bodies toward a single purpose: to build this woman’s body into the sky, so that she could show our secrets to god?
I have never felt homesick. Instead, I feel hope-sick.
Because, you see, her body had other secrets underneath the weight of her. I remember when John Joseph told us that there were Lenape Nation bodies and sacred artifacts on Bedloe and Ellis Islands. Someday, he said, people would dig there and find prehistoric objects — iron, pipes, clay pots, coins — that belonged to his Lenape ancestors. It bothered him, that we labored on top of the bones of his ancestors. Sometimes, when we weren’t working, he just stood and stared at the dirt. It bothered us too, Endora and David and I — we felt like we were desecrating a grave — but we all kept working, to build her on that land, and our labor bound us to one another. After he told us that, though, from time to time some of us whispered tiny prayers toward the dirt.
I first met John Joseph at the boardinghouse, when we both showed up at the front desk looking for a place to stay. The man in charge said he had a room that slept four people, nothing fancy, just solid shelter for laborers. I looked at John Joseph’s hair, black to the middle of his back. He looked at the discolorations on my face. This silent exchange seemed to work like language; we took the room. Endora and David joined us not long after.
Years later, John Joseph and I were both hired to work on another project, a monument to Indians to be built on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. I liked the idea; the two of us liked working together, and I thought our statue would be pleased to have a companion. The new statue was to be an American Indian warrior — similar in scale to the woman we built, but reaching even higher into the air. Any oceangoing ship on its way into the city would see the monument well before the woman we built. Thirty-two chiefs attended the ground-breaking ceremony, including Red Hawk, from the Oglala Lakota, and Two Moons, the Cheyenne chief, both of whom had fought the army at Little Bighorn and elsewhere. Two Moons had even been one of the models for the buffalo nickel.