Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [66]
Gundi rests her weight on one sandal, a little uncertainly. “Then I will leave you and go make a pot of raspberry tea. When I come back you have to tell me what is so important and terrible that you have to prove with identification you’re Mr. Jax Thibodeaux.” She pronounces it correctly, “Tee-ba-doe,” the first person in years to do so, but Jax tries not to be too grateful; it may just be an accident on Gundi’s part, a result of being foreign-born.
When she’s gone, he slits one end of the envelope and sees the same seal on the letter inside, Cherokee Nation, an eight-pointed star inside a wreath of leaves.
Dear Jax,
I’m glad I met you in Tucson. I feel you’re a person with careful thoughts and a kind spirit. I want to tell you frankly that I’m worried about Turtle. I’ve spoken with Andy Rainbelt, a social psychiatrist who works with Cherokee children, and he authorized me to write on behalf of our Social Welfare Department. It’s premature to take legal action yet, he says, but it’s extremely important for Taylor to be in contact with the Nation; there are things she needs to know. I trust you’ll get this information to her.
It’s difficult, I know, for non-Native people to understand the value of belonging to a tribe, but I know you care about problems Turtle will face on her own. I appeal to you on those grounds. Adopted Native kids always have problems in adolescence when they’re raised without an Indian identity. They’ve gone to school with white kids, sat down to dinner every night with white parents and siblings, and created themselves in the image of the family mirror. If you ask them what they think about Indians, they’ll recall Westerns on TV or doing Hiawatha as a school play. They think Indians are history.
If these kids could stay forever inside the protection of the adoptive family, they’d be fine. But when they reach high school there’s enormous pressure against dating white peers. They hear ugly names connected with their racial identity. If you think this kind of prejudice among teenagers is a thing of the past, think again. What these kids find is that they have no sense of themselves as Native Americans, but live in a society that won’t let them go on being white, either. Not past childhood.
My boss thinks I’m crazy to pursue this case, but I have to tell you something. I used to have a brother named Gabriel. We grew up wearing each other’s jeans and keeping each other’s secrets and taking turns when our uncle asked, “Who made this mischief?” Gabe was my ayehli, my other wing. When I was ten, our mother was hospitalized with alcoholism and other problems. Social workers disposed of our family: my older brothers went with Dad, who did construction in Adair County. I stayed with my Uncle Ledger. And Gabe was adopted by a family in Texas. No one has ever told me why it was done this way. I assume they thought my dad could handle grown, income-earning sons, but not Gabe and me. As for Gabe, probably the social workers knew a couple who wanted a little boy—something as simple as that. He wrote me letters on fringe-edged paper torn out of his ring-bound school notebooks. I still have them. Texas was hot and smelled like fish. His new parents told him not to say he was Indian at school, or they would treat him like a Mexican. He asked me, “Is it bad to be Mexican?”
They put him into the Mexican classrooms anyway; his parents were bigots of the most innocent kind, never realizing that skin color talks louder than any kid’s words. He failed in school because the teachers spoke to him in Spanish, which he didn’t understand. The Mexican kids beat him up because he didn’t wear baggy black pants and walk with his hands in his pockets. When we were thirteen he wrote to tell me his new Mom had closed the bedroom door and sat on the foot of his bed and said quietly he was letting his new family down.
When he was fifteen, he was accessory to an armed robbery in Corpus Christi. Now I only know where he is when he’s in prison.
You said, the night we met, that I was only capable