Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [128]
Alice laughs. “Sounds like some high-class people.”
“It’s no joke. We had the highest literacy rate in the whole country.”
“It’s pretty, that writing.” Alice can nearly taste the mysterious curled letters that kept their silence on the crumbling newspaper she saw. “Is it hard to read it?”
“They say it isn’t, but I never learned. Don’t tell anybody. It pisses me off that Uncle Ledger never taught me.”
“You’re bringing down the literacy rate.”
“Yeah, I told him that. Although it’s kind of down around our ankles now.”
“What happened? If you don’t mind my asking. I mean no offense, but Sugar showed me all the fancy old capitol buildings and stuff, and I was thinking it looked like a hurricane hit this place since then.”
Annawake snorts. “Hurricane Yonega.”
“You can’t blame every bad thing on white people,” Alice says softly.
“Nineteen-ought-two, the railroad came in,” Annawake replies, just as quietly. “Gee Dick and his band played for a stomp dance on the courthouse lawn, to celebrate the arrival of the first train. The first white folks stepped off the train and started poking around and probably couldn’t believe they’d given us such a beautiful piece of real estate. No ugly telephone lines. Within four years, our tribal government was dissolved by federal order. The U.S. government started the Indian boarding schools, dividing up families, selling off land. You tell me, who do we blame?”
“I don’t know. The times. Ignorance. The notion people always seem to get, that they know what’s best for somebody else. At least that part’s over, they’re not moving you out anymore.”
“No, now they just try to take our kids.”
Alice feels stabbed. “Turtle was practically left for dead,” she says. “My daughter saved her from starving in a parking lot, or worse. I’d think you might be grateful.”
“I’m grateful that she’s alive. But I’m not happy about the circumstances.”
“Maybe you and me are just going to have to be enemies,” Alice says.
“I don’t think so. But I want you to understand how deep these feelings run. For this whole century, right up until 1978 when we got the Indian Child Welfare Act, social workers would come in here with no understanding of how our families worked. They would see a child who’d been left with someone outside the nuclear family, and they would call that neglect. To us, that is an insane rationale. We don’t distinguish between father, uncle, mother, grandmother. We don’t think of ourselves as having extended families. We look at you guys and think you have contracted families.”
“That’s true,” Alice says, thinking of her empty address book. She can’t deny it. It struck her back in Kentucky, when she wanted to leave Harland but couldn’t think where else home might be.
“We couldn’t understand why they were taking us apart. My brother Gabe, going to a man and woman in Texas when we had a whole family here. I’ve seen babies carried off with no more thought than you’d give a bag of brown sugar you picked up at the market. Just a nice little prize for some family. The Mormon families love our kids, because they think we’re the lost tribe of Israel. Little pagan babies to raise up and escort you into heaven!”
Annawake’s eyes are streaming tears. She looks up at the darkening sky. “These were our kids,” she tells Alice, and the sky. “Thousands of them. We’ve lost more than a quarter of our living children.”
There is a whole fleet of yellow wasps floating on the water now. A breeze too slight for Alice to feel causes them all to slide across the surface along the same diagonal. One by one, they lift off into the air.
Annawake wipes her face with the back of her wrist, and looks at Alice. “I concede your point that Turtle was abandoned. She wasn’t stolen, she was lost and found. It’s not the first time an Indian parent has given a child away, I have to admit that to you. There’s a real important case, Choctaw vs. Holyfield, where that happened. But the way our law looks at it is, the mother or father doesn’t have that