Grandma Jessie said my mother gave away a baby and immediately conceived me, perhaps as a way to try to forget the baby boy she couldn’t keep. Of course she never forgot the baby boy and grieved all her life. She’d already arranged the adoption before she met my father. My father wanted to raise the child as his, but my mother believed in the prevailing notion of the time — that in such situations, adoption was best. For my mother adoption was the worst, and the pain helped keep her drinking all her life.
My mother never talked about it until she was in her sixties, and her old flame, the father of the baby boy, located her in Gallup. They tried to contact their son through a national organization for adoptees. She told me they filed their names and information with the organization but no one ever replied. The old flame rekindled for a while then sputtered out. My mother never again mentioned the old flame or the boy she gave up for adoption.
Sometimes I think about him, the boy, my lost half brother. He haunted my mother, and by extension, he haunted my sisters and me. Somewhere I have notes from when I tried to calculate the approximate time of his birth. First I count back from my birthday, March 5, 1948. (March 5th was my mother’s birthday too.) Then I count back nine months more; she and my father went to Denver for the birth. I think about the Viet Nam War and all the young men who died there. Maybe that’s what happened to my brother I never knew; maybe that’s why he never made contact with my mother or his father.
My sister Wendy liked to dress dolls and play with little dishes. I wanted to have four legs and be able to run free in the hills as a deer or as a horse. For a long time I wished I wasn’t a human being. Whenever I ran, I pretended I was a deer or a wild horse.
I talked to myself, and made up stories about myself and imaginary animals and people. I did the talking for each character. I was always “myself” as I made up the story, but I felt different from the little girl I became around the adults or other children. I preferred to play by myself. I was annoyed when other children or adults interrupted my imaginary worlds.
I seldom played with dolls or toy dishes because I was interested in the world outside the house. During my first four years, my playmates were two large dogs, a yellow dog, Bozo, and Blackie. My mother told me Blackie was the only one with me when I was about four months old and lightning struck the house during a summer storm. My parents and grandparents were working in my grandfather’s store a short distance away.
I remember following the two dogs around the yard while they ignored me and carried on with their dog business — which was to attend and sometimes to eat from their large collection of buried bones. They made visits to the places the bones were buried to make sure none were stolen or exposed. When the bones were ready to eat, I used to watch the dogs dig enthusiastically, their noses smudged with dirt, and how they savored the rotting morsels they recovered from the ground. The dogs and I could not leave the yard, but it was a large enclosure about a quarter of an acre in size and included shade trees, outbuildings and storage areas for old lumber.
I was happy to play by myself. As I got a little older I liked to venture out of the yard. At first I went a short distance to some stacks of sandstone that were salvaged from a collapsed structure and intended for a house that was never built. A stray mother cat had hidden her kittens there in the crevices between the stones. I used to sit patiently on the sandy ground by the stacks of stone, to wait for the cat. She was yellow-striped, her yellow a little darker than the sandstone. I called her “Coonie.” She was skittish but sometimes allowed me to pet her. When her kittens were old enough to begin to emerge, I was disappointed at how shy and wild they were. I had to wait a very long time and sit very still before the kittens would peek out from the rocks. When I was finally able to grab hold of one it hissed and scratched me until I let it go and it fled to the safety of the rocks. I never tried to catch one again.
Before my sister Wendy was born my parents moved out of my grandparents’ place to the old house across the road where my father was born. I saw an old photograph of Old Laguna from the 1870s, and the only building below the village was that old house we grew up in. The mud and stone structure was older than my great grandfather’s adobe house or the old train depot building of frame stucco across the road where Grandpa Hank and Grandma Lillie had turned the old train lobby into a living room and bedroom.
Until I started kindergarten when I was five, I spent most of my time trying to escape the yard to get to the village where the older kids were, the kids who stopped to talk to me at the fence on their way home after school. They told me about all sorts of wonderful things I could not see because the Marmons kept their little children in yards, corralled like goats.
I was the goat that climbed over the fence and took off. Marcelina Thompson, our neighbor, found me walking by her house and knew my parents didn’t want me loose. So Marcelina took me home; I cried and fought her all the way. I still remember what compelled me to climb over the fence: the kids told me there were dancers who ate wood as part of their dance, and I wanted to see this. I was three.
One Christmas when I was in the second grade, my classmate Evangeline drew my name at school, and she gave me a lovely silver bracelet and ring with a honey brown stone. It seemed like such a generous gift at the time. Years later my mother told me that before Grandpa Hank met Grandma Lillie, Grandpa Hank had been married in the traditional way to a beautiful young Laguna woman who was related to Evangeline, but she died with Grandpa Hank’s child during the birth.
Sometimes I felt Grandma Lillie was overshadowed by something. Was it the dead woman and child?
When adults talked, I listened while the other children went off to play. I realize now I was moved by the undercurrents of tension I sensed between the Pueblo and non-Pueblo members of my extended family. From a young age I was fascinated with how the different sides of the family talked about the other. I always felt such anguish when one side of the family said something mean about the other branches of the family. I understood all of them in their ways, and I loved all of them and felt they loved me in their ways. For a long time I wondered why they did not see themselves as I did and love each other. Of course I was a young child then and did not yet understand the injustice that fueled the undercurrents between the Marmons, the other family branches, and the rest of the Pueblo.
By the fifth grade I began to understand how the inequalities and injustice generated an impersonal anger, which sometimes got aimed at me because my paternal great grandfather was a white man. But I also knew that to other white men my great grandfather was a “squaw man” who set himself apart from other white men when he married my great grandmother.
During the time my father served as Laguna Tribal Treasurer in the middle 1950s the Pueblo of Laguna Tribe filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. I remember when they took depositions for the case at the Federal Court in Albuquerque. My father carried piles of manila folders with him to the hearing. Millions of acres of Laguna Pueblo land had been taken by the Federal Government in the early 1900s for national forest and public land.
The Pueblo hired archeologists and anthropologists to testify to Laguna’s ancient, continuous occupancy and use of the land at issue. After all the intrusions, theft and trouble that anthropologists had previously caused at Laguna, finally the people got some satisfaction out of anthropology.