Nine February 1968
NINE
On a bone-chilling day in February, over a table of textbooks and potato chips, Susan and I, despite me being only twelve years old, decided we were going to go to college together and studied more than we ever had, with the realities of impending adulthood still a few years away.
Susan had become obsessed with the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, so there was no room in her future for men—“just yet,” she said.
So, in our conversations about the future, I left John out.
In my mind, he was there, but around the kitchen table doing homework and when we were at school sitting on the bleachers eating lunch, I didn’t mention him.
Susan and I had become friends thanks to her mother, who occasionally stopped by our house after dark to buy tea to help with something Kiju called “women’s troubles.
” Susan came with her once, just after we’d started elementary school.
She was my first friend who wasn’t either from the few small houses around ours or one of the ones who came with their parents in the fall.
“You an Indian?” she asked on her first visit to my house, looking around our small home, taking in all the things she would never find in her own home—ash baskets for collecting vegetables from the garden, braids of sweetgrass hung over the door.
“Half, I think.”
“You think? Don’t you know?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
An adult would never have been so bold, and this is one of the things I still admire in children, their unchecked curiosity.
“I don’t have a father.”
“Sure you do. Everyone does.”
Susan’s mother lowered her voice and glanced over her shoulder, trying to listen in on the conversation, so I lowered my voice too.
“I don’t know who he is,” I whispered, then shrugged.
Susan’s mother turned and walked quickly toward us. She took Susan by the hand and escorted her out the door, thanking Kiju and chastising Susan for asking questions she had no business asking.
If Susan felt that me being Indian and fatherless were reasons not to be friends with me, she never said so. When we started school a few weeks later, she sat beside me, and we quickly became inseparable.
“My grandfather married an Indian woman after my grandmother died. Mom said that he was as happy as a clam.” This, to Susan, meant we shared something. What that was, I was never really sure, but it made us friends.
Susan had long, dark hair and skin darker than mine.
“From the Greek side of my family,” she told me.
In our little part of the world, having dark skin from her Greek family was mysterious and interesting.
Indian dark and African dark were a different story altogether, seeming to hold something more sinister.
I still wandered among the pickers, looking for new faces, for anyone who might resemble me, no matter how vaguely.
A new family would arrive, maybe fair skinned and freckled, and I would offer to help to hold their baby, to read with a child, to stir the stew.
I would ask them about a Maggie, the potential of a long-lost photo.
But I never found what I was looking for, and I would love to say that the older I got, the easier it got, but it didn’t.
To acknowledge my status as an orphan—and not only an orphan but one with an unknown father—was a ghost that loomed large.
The rest of the year it was easy to push my parentage out of my mind, but in October, when everyone gathered, the issue was front and centre.
My desire to belong to someone took up all my thoughts and most of my time.
When I got a little older, my mind turned to other things at that time of year.
I found myself looking forward to John’s arrival, scanning the cars and trucks as they pulled up, waiting for him.
That year, his father and younger brother were there, but he wasn’t.
I asked his father why he wasn’t there and he said John’s mother wanted him to stay in school.
He’d had a hard year, so she decided to stay home with him. I walked away disappointed.
I was a teenager now, but I was still a child, particularly when it came to my feelings.
As I walked back to the house, I let my mind wander, making something out of nothing.
By the time I reached the door to the house, I had convinced myself that John didn’t come because he didn’t like me anymore.
Maybe I had put too much stock in our letters, in the kiss on the cheek at New Year’s.
I felt like a silly girl and moped around the house for the rest of the evening.
That night I dreamt of John, and in the morning my feelings were tempered, not gone but a little less intense.
Then Kiju got sad and my own emotions, valid or not, took a back seat.
It was a Saturday morning when Kiju came into the kitchen, a pronounced frown on her face.
“Something wrong, Kiju?”
“I heard another family chose to have their baby in the hospital.”
“Oh.”
She sounded hurt but busied herself setting the table for breakfast. She didn’t cry like the first time, but sighed a heavy sigh, full of loss.
“They’re still there, I guess. They keep the mother and the babies for a week, you know, away from family. Don’t even let the mothers give milk from the breast. I just can’t understand it.”
“It’s winter,” I said, hoping this weak excuse would soothe her worried heart, even though I knew that babies were born under the tree in winter. Kiju ignored me.
“We haven’t had a baby all year, Aliet.” She sat down, the weight of sadness taken out on the thin legs of a very old kitchen chair.
“I’m sure there’ll be more babies under the tree.”
She didn’t say anything as I placed a cup of tea on the small table beside her chair. That morning, I cooked us breakfast.
“Maybe I should chat with them. Reassure them,” she said as she scooped a spoonful of oatmeal into her mouth.
“It might help. Everyone trusts you, Kiju.”
“I don’t know, Aliet. They are starting to believe those white doctors instead of me. I fear they are starting to see me as a silly old woman trying to hold on to the past. But it’s more than that.”
I buttered a piece of toast and waited for her to continue.
“We’ve lost so much, I just can’t imagine this.
Bringing our babies into the world in their way.
Starting them off on their journey in such a cold manner.
If we don’t hold on, if they don’t know their stories, how will they go out into the world?
Lost, that’s how, disconnected.” She paused to take a breath.
“I’ve heard that the mother isn’t even permitted to keep the birth sac.
They throw it into a fire. It’s so wrong, Aliet, it just breaks my heart.
Those children need to know their roots, need to know that there is always a place where they are loved and welcomed.
These doctors are stealing our ways and giving us lost children. ”
“I’m so sorry, Kiju.” I was still unsure how to comfort her, so I offered advice instead. “Maybe you should go talk to people, just like you said. Start with the folks who live here and maybe they will talk to their families. Tell them what’s happening. Tell them you are worried.”
She was quiet, considering my words. “Maybe.”
After breakfast, the dishes done, Kiju put on her boots and jacket and headed next door. I followed close behind. We knocked on the door and listened to the murmur of voices on the other side. Mrs. Jeremy opened the door.
“Well, look who’s here. Come in, come in.”
We took off our jackets and boots and followed her into the kitchen.
Before we had the opportunity to refuse, she had put water on the stove for tea.
I remember admiring the telephone that hung on the wall, a modern amenity that Kiju had yet to allow.
Mrs. Jeremy set out a plate of store-bought cookies and sat at the table across from us, her cigarette squeezed between her fingers.
“What brings you two to my door on a cold day like this?”
Kiju took a breath before starting. “I wanted to talk to you about the birthing tree and our women. Apparently, they are choosing to give birth in hospitals now without even considering the traditional ways.”
“I know. My own girl gave birth last year in one. She said that they offer pain relief. You don’t have to experience the pain.” She flicked the ash from the tip of her cigarette into the glass ashtray and I winced as some of the smoke made its way toward me.
“But those medicines, they steal your memory. How can you tell your own child their birth story if you can’t remember it yourself?
How will they know where they came from, who they came from?
” Kiju’s voice was distraught, her face drawn.
“And you sleep through the most beautiful . . .” She stammered.
“And the lights, and the noise, so harsh on the ears of a newborn. And they steal the cord, the birth sac.”
“Superstition is what they told my girl when I asked to keep them. She tried to explain that it needs to be buried to remind children of their roots. But they made her feel silly, like she was a child, so she let them take it.” She looked sad.
Kiju reached over and held her hand. There was no admonishment, no advice, only comfort.
Anita, Mrs. Jeremy’s daughter, who was a few years older than me, walked into the room and nodded to us as she got herself a glass of juice. She listened in on the conversation but didn’t take a seat.
“But we need to move forward, like the white folks. We don’t want to be left behind,” Anita said. “They already think we are slow and behind the times.”
Kiju sat up straighter and let go of Mrs. Jeremy’s hand, her own hands balled into tiny little fists in her lap. “Does it matter what they think? We can’t always listen to them. Haven’t you seen the damage they’ve already done?” Kiju asked.
“But that was so long ago. Things are better now.”
“Better?”
“Yeah, better than before.”