Kathy Little Bird (24 page)

“And you still think of your first love, what was his name, Abram?”

“And he still thinks of me, even though he’s probably married to a nice Mennonite girl and has half a dozen kids. You see, we traded shadows.”

The evening couldn’t break up until we sang some of the Austrian folk songs he had taught my mother:

“Here’s one you don’t know.” And I launched into a Cree song. I sang it to the end with its strange dissonant wailings and its patter sections, its listening and its telling, its questions and its answers.

My father sat in amazement. He’d never heard anything like it. “It washes over you like wind, like rain,” he blurted out.

I hugged him. “Yes, that’s it. Oh Be Joyful’s father, my grandfather, would have said you have the soul of a Cree.”

When the weekend was ended we were a father and daughter who had found each other. We parted with promises to get together. I would work on Mac to get a gig in New York. “Don’t worry about it,” my father said, “I’ll be back in the
new year. In the meantime I’m going to give myself the pleasure of buying up all your albums, and any singles I can find.”

He phoned me later in the week to say he had become a fan. “I love your voice, Kathy. It’s filled with warmth and longing. It made me realize I don’t know you yet.” We settled on two weeks from now for his next visit.

That night I dreamed of my sister. Her life was so formal: boarding school, the right clothes, the proper friends. She was so protected. Yet I, who grew up hit or miss, was the one who lived, and Elizabeth the one to die. How odd the world was, and no one, not Catholic priest or Indian shaman, could tell the why of things.

A
PHONE
call from Jim Gentle. I knew his voice instantly. And how well he knew me; he knew his name would be on the list of calls I didn’t receive. And it would have been, except through some Freudian oversight I never did tell Trimble, and she patched him through.

The moment I heard him, time telescoped. It wasn’t a year ago we’d made love on his half-collapsed futon, it was yesterday.

“Before you hang up,” he said, “this is a 911 call.”

“Oh?”

“Ever hear of Wounded Knee?”

“What?”

“That’s what I thought. Ever hear of the Trail of Broken Treaties?”

“I think I’ll hang up now.”

“No, please. This is serious. In 1890 Red Cloud affixed his thumbprint to the Fort Laramie Treaty. Except, except this call isn’t about him.”

“Gentle, you’re not making sense.”

“I told you it’s a 911 call.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m in trouble. I got into a brawl with the police. Nothing serious, just my motorcycle against theirs. They threw me in the slammer, where I spent New Year’s making good resolutions. That’s why I’m calling, actually. When I got out, a friend gave me some high-grade stuff. I’m sitting here looking at it. Looking at it and not taking it. I’ve been clean ever since we broke up, I swear it. But now I’m going to need a little help. Will you come over, Kathy?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you would.”

“No.”

There was a long pause. Had he hung up?

Then, “Billy Strayhorn would have come.”

“I thought
you
were Billy Strayhorn.”

“They were like one person. Kathy, I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.”

“Flush it down the toilet. What’s the address?”

I banged the phone down. Calling myself an idiot I threw on a coat, jammed my feet into galoshes, and grabbed an umbrella. The wind turned it inside out.

What was I doing? Over is over. But when he met me at the door and pulled me to him, heart to heart, I felt I belonged there.

I drew back. I was here in response to a 911 call. “Well, let’s see what needs to be done.” I sat down with him and got him through the night.

The next night we had sex and the next. It was warm and wonderful and I allowed myself to hope. So did Gentle.

“What was that business about Wounded Knee? Is that for real?”

As Gentle told it, there were two Wounded Knees. In 1890 it was the site at which a Pauite prophet, Wovoda, proclaimed that white men would disappear and the buffalo return, if the rites and rituals of the Ghost Dance were faithfully performed. At this messianic promise, the Indians fell into a self-induced hypnotic state. They danced without food or drink. They danced until their feet bled. They danced until they fell. The government, fearing the ecstatic cult and the fanaticism it bred, sent in the Seventh Cavalry.

The Indians were greatly outnumbered and surrendered. But there was a skirmish and Sitting Bull was killed while being arrested. This led to several hundred Sioux fleeing the reservation and hiding in the Badlands. They were pursued and surrounded as they camped at Wounded Knee.

The Indians again surrendered. But as they were being disarmed, a young brave refused to give over his new rifle. The trooper tried to take it from him, it discharged, and the trooper fell dead. That did it.

Machine guns fired into the disarmed Indians. A hundred and fifty-four died there, including forty-four women and sixteen children. They weren’t buried until the following spring,
when weather permitted and the army returned to clean up the mess.

“Well, that was the Wounded Knee massacre that took place in December of 1890. The second Wounded Knee occured six years ago—February 27, 1973—when two hundred members of AIM, the American Indian Movement, took the present hamlet of Wounded Knee by force and occupied it. Their leaders, Russell Means and Dennis Banks, vowed to stay until the United States threw out the government-appointed tribal leaders, who ran the res like a penal colony. They further demanded a judicial review of all Indian treaties and an impartial commission to investigate government treatment of Indians.”

“Where did all this happen? Where is Wounded Knee?”

“South Dakota. It’s a tiny place on the edge of the Pine Wood Indian Reservation.”

“So how did it end up?”

“With a reign of terror. A seventy-one-day siege by federal marshals, who surrounded them and let no food in. It was pathetic. Hunger versus resolution…with hunger winning.”

“It’s all so sad. I suppose the land was worthless anyway?”

Gentle laughed. “That’s what the U.S. government thought initially when they ceded it to the Indians. It was for sure no good for farming. But here’s the catch. As it turned out, the Good Lord deposited something far more valuable than gold—uranium—in the Black Hills.

“Naturally, the government wanted to remove the Indians and start mining. Congress, falling into step, passed legislation
aimed at getting the Indians off welfare and integrating them into urban life. To most people, this seemed a laudable goal, and the ancient treaty was abrogated. To nudge the Indians to leave, their welfare checks were cut. When they began to starve, the Indians themselves brought the matter before a federal judge, who ruled in their favor, saying, ‘The waters of justice have been polluted.’”

“That’s good. The ruling was in their favor.”

“The
ruling
was, but nothing happened. The mining goes on. That’s what we’re giving this concert for—to reinstate the Fort Laramie Treaty. I thought of you immediately. Would you,” Gentle finished up, “donate your time, be one of the headline singers?”

“Could I sing my Cree songs?”

In answer Gentle swung me off my feet and polkaed around the room to the triumphant strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. “I do believe you are waking to this great world around you. Yes, I do believe it.”

On top of everything I was doing, Gentle and I took our plans out of cold storage. I was to write and sing my indigenous material. An Indian repertoire was certainly appropriate for a benefit seeking the restoration of Indian land. Jim would get it together. As for me, the sheer thrill of working on the pieces I had dreamed of doing for so long kept me going, allowed me to do without sleep, kept me on my feet.

I had to call my father and postpone our get-together by a week.

“I’m heading a delegation to Mexico City and I’m leaving
that Sunday. But if I can make decent connections from Nashville, I’ll leave from there.”

“Would you! It’s just that I have an opportunity to sing my Cree songs. You know what that means to me.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll work it out.”

Half-truths must be what the road to purgatory is lined with. Or was it Loki, once again, who lured me into it?

Because when we got together, I had to tell my father that the Cree songs were for a benefit.

And when he asked more specifically about the benefit, it came out that Jim was organizing it.

“Jim Gentle? The one on drugs? You’re back with him?”

“He’s been clean for a year. And when he was tempted to go back on them he called me, and I was able to help him. He fought it off. He’ll be okay now.”

“I wish you could hear yourself, Kathy. For God’s sake, don’t get in too deep with this person.”

“I don’t know what you mean, too deep. But I’ll tell you this about me, I don’t do things by halves. It’s all the way with me. I’m back with him, and we’re going to bring this concert off together. I know everyone at the Ole Opry, and I’ll help him recruit other headliners.”

“Kathy, can’t you see he is using you? You want to sing your Cree songs…but he has his own agenda. He’s a dangerous man.”

“How can you make such a judgment? You don’t even know him.”

“I’m looking out for your welfare, Kathy.”

“Are you? Don’t you think the father bit is somewhat overdone? Like maybe thirty years too late?”

“You’re quite right, I haven’t earned the right to criticize.” He stood up. “Well, I’ve an early flight in the morning.”

A few awkward words on both sides, and he was gone. I knew I’d fought not only with my father, but with myself. He was probably right and I was probably wrong. I didn’t care. I was betting on Gentle.

T
O
get a feel for the background, Jim sat me down and had me tell him every scrap of conversation I’d ever had with Elk Woman about music. He took copious notes and drew black boxes around sections he thought particularly valuable, such as when Elk Woman compared Cree singing with pop and rock. “White people listen with half an ear to music, while doing something else. With us, when the spirits give you a song, you pay attention.”

Gentle ploughed into research, taking the phone off the hook to study. When I saw him next he was primed with prairie and Northwest Indian cultures. “Instead of being crafted note by note and bar by bar, their songs come in a vision, all at once.”

“Yes, yes. That’s how it is with me too.”

“Their word for ‘singing’ means musical sounds. Even drumming is a kind of singing. In American and European music, the drums beat out the rhythm, which the voices follow. Not in Indian music; there drum and voice can beat to totally different pulses.”

“Yes, that’s true of words, too. Indian music goes for ideas that can’t be put into words. Like what you feel when you’re desperately lonely, or someone dies that shouldn’t—like my sister Elizabeth.”

“Do you know how to put a scream into words?” he asked. “Because that’s what you’ll have to do, Little Bird. Turn this whole rotten life into music, the way First Nation people do.”

“I can do it. I know I can. Still, for an American audience, I’ll have to throw in a few words—or they’ll walk. Another thing I remember about Indian music, the silences. Toward the end of the wildest celebration or the sweetest love song—sudden silence! Then crescendo to the climax.” I leaped up and dragged him into a howling and a growling Indian-style dance.

There was special joy in working so closely with another human being. I realized I had come to look on this benefit Jim was organizing as a contribution, a public service, which no one else was doing: not the politicians, not the newspapers or TV, only a few churches and us, the music community. We were a voice for the underdog, for the victims, for those who got caught in the machinery and ground up.

An unexpected plus was the many fine musicians Gentle assembled. Their willingness to give of their time and their talent to help regain treaty land was very touching to me. Not an Indian among them, but they felt injustice. And they wanted to stand up for what was right. They were willing to sing and play for people who had no way of speaking out for themselves.

And who were these performers? Professionals. Many of
them big names. We got together, never all at once, but as we could, and everyone ran through their numbers, which Gentle tried to put into some sort of framework and make into a show. His first thought was to hold it outdoors at Wounded Knee itself. But there was no way the Bureau of Indian Affairs would let us into a reservation. The state of South Dakota was a different matter, however. There were several little towns in the vicinity, under the same northern sky and awe-inspiring Black Hills. Jim found a natural amphitheater belonging to a defunct gold-mining operation, whose absentee owner was happy to rent it for a day and get his name in the papers.