Geography of Self

©by Trace Taylor (2015)

I came from dirty mixed blood. I’ve been hungry my whole life. All I ever knew was hard. Then I met Cara… I waited at noon for the lunch bell. She’d come from across the field where I waited by the wild honeysuckle that hung from a cypress tree. She came from etiquette. She was soft. Her whiteness flushed every time I got near. At ten, life without her was unimagined, until my mamma asked me, “Does Cara know you’re not a boy?”

Gary J. Gates’ 2011 study of How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, shows “an estimated 0.3% of adults (in the United States) are transgender” (1). I am a boy. I am a girl. At times, I am neither, and I am never all the one and much less the predominantly viewed-as-weaker. Do not call me Miss and excuse it as southern etiquette, “That’s just how I was raised.” It’s foil on my teeth, a civil right for all the times I’ve heard it. Mr., Mrs., Miss., nothing fit. Where are the boxes on the forms for me? Am I this or am I that, and if I am neither or both because both is not allowed, skip to the end. I do not exist. 1920 saw the right of females to vote signed into law. My two states were among the last six to lift their thumbs, but to vote, you had to be a boy, or you had to be a girl.

“Texas saw a jump from 39 hate crimes based on anti-gay bias in 2010 to 49 … in 2011” (Hate Crime Statistics 2011 n.p.). Both Texas and Louisiana, even now, harbor an infestation of dragons and while “black Americans have typically been the Klan’s primary target, it also has attacked … gays and lesbians (and transgendered)”(Ku Klux Klan n.p.). Today, “the (Southern Poverty Law) Center estimates that there are (currently) between 5,000 and 8,000 Klan members” (Ku Klux Klan n.p.). This is much lower than in the 1960s, with an estimated membership as high as 50,000 (Ku Klux Klan n.p.). Some of these members are openly anti-anyone that is not them. Others conceal their bigotry and prejudice under the hood of ‘rights for whites’ (Ku Klux Klan n.p.). October 2011, four men stabbed a young gay man twice with a broken beer bottle then threw him onto a fire. They yelled epithets: “pussy-ass faggot, gay bitch, and cock-sucking punk” (Wright n.p.).In the valley of the white worm, having a vagina meant do what you’re told. Shut up, and spread ‘em. Neither Mamma nor me were having any of that. In 1972, I got Superman for Christmas instead of Barbie Doll. She got a divorce and a career.

In 1996, the leaders of a Georgia church decided “to disinter the body of a mixed race infant” buried in the church’s all-white cemetery (Sack n.p.). On the 1990 census almost ten million people marked their race as ‘other’(Cruz n.p.). I am white, dirty white, but mostly, I am dirty red. In the1960s, “the United States began to experience a biracial baby boom,” and though interracial marriages had finally been legalized, the majority of southern whites were slow to come around (Cruz n.p.). Mamma pounded and fired her red clay in a one-drop-rule kiln. She wanted me to be as hard as the stones she had carved herself from. She gave me an autographed copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull for my 8th birthday, and a trip to the old Cotton Mill Block.

Shanty shacks surrounded the scarred rusty cinderblock and brick cotton mill like a rotting picture frame, company dwellings with dirt floors and no glass in the windows, block after block of ghosts with dirty babies and dirty skin. Mamma had been born there, along with nine brothers and sisters. She spent her life trying to fill the hole that digging out leaves. My Blackfoot Pap-Paw picked cotton in the fields and kept the Mill grounds, while my half-blood Cherokee grandmother, Miss Beatrice, gave birth and cleaned. Only whites got to work inside the mill. Everybody else, old enough and young enough to walk, worked the earth all day in the gritty, sweltering heat.

To us kids, it was “Miss Beatrice” or the burn of a switch to the back of the legs, so much told in the naming of a thing. Grandmother was to Indian what ‘miss’ was to youth, and Beatrice was to a white Sunday dress in a bleach-scrubbed dingy whitewashed church, with a cross that said worship this. She traded in my Pap-Paw for God: a vile, devilishly handsome, five-foot-nine-inch, blue-eyed white man with a taste for little girls and money selling hooch to Indians. I did not think Miss Beatrice loved anything, until one day, when I was four, sitting on her big white porch, I saw her see a truck on the road hit her favorite dog. She went out to its still-beating heart and exposed red guts, knelt, and strangled the life from it. Disney is not to love what Beatrice was.

An “era of self-conscious reshaping of images of Indians… beginning in the 1960s,” and the newly formed AIM (American Indian Movement) began to address the racist treatment of Native Americans in film, media and the American culture. But it failed to address us. For my family, it was too late. We already hated ourselves and had no ties to either the Blackfoot or Cherokee Nations, though occasionally, we would visit my Great Grandmother. We had successfully integrated into the lowest of the American classes: poor mixed-bloods who saw themselves as white. I was told Pap-Paw returned to the reservation where he had died in a boundary ditch by the side of the road. He’d been struck by a passing car or truck that did not stop to see if he was alive. He lay in that ditch for two days before he gave it up. It was too bad Beatrice had not seen him from her rented, pretty white porch.

Pap-Paw was a quiet man. I heard him speak once, and only once. I was five. He had taken me on horseback to fish at a natural spring-fed rock quarry. There was a small herd of Buffalo grazing on the plain that we had to cross. He got down and reached to lift me from the horse’s back, and I was very small compared to a buffalo, so I said, “No. I’m scared.” He took hold of me, lifted me from the horse, and put me on the ground. He bent and told me with his hands on my shoulders, “This is the easy part.” He took my hand and led me and the horse through the meandering buffalo herd to the water’s edge. That’s all I recall him ever saying, and the words have stayed with me my whole life.

Mamma spoke in reds and whites, no in-betweens. It was “piss or get off the pot” with her. There were never any abstracts. She was always concrete and clear. No one got in her way or slowed her down. I kept up because offspring that survived were not slow or weighty. Survival was a costly thing. Polio, by the 1960s, had been nearly eradicated (History of Polio n.p.). There were a few stray cases, of which I was one. At night, when the pain grew unbearable, mamma sat up till morning, rubbing what relief she could into my tiny right leg from her hands. In exchange, during the day, I performed like all the other kids, though I was not. She accepted nothing less. If the wolf suspects a pup has a deficit, it does not invest. Mother chose to not strangle the life out of me, so she bore the weight of it. Love is rock-steady and strong, not weak or pliable or temporary. It does what it must and doesn’t waste valuable energy shedding tears over life not being fair. “It’s not fair, and whoever told you it was lied to your ass” (Mother).

According to the American Cancer Society, invasive epithelial ovarian cancer at stage 4 has an 18% survival rate (Survival Rates for Ovarian Cancer n.p.). It had been growing in Mamma’s womb since she was twelve or thirteen, since before I was born. How does a twenty six year old survive the removal of a basketball-sized mass of tumors and half of their intestines and half of their stomach and half of their pelvic wall and the rest of their life? They do not. They go in and out of comas then in and out of remission, all the while, in and out of oncology wards, until they die from ovarian cancer metastasized at the age of 53. The nurse put the little brown bottle in my hand and said I’d know what to do with it, and I did. One month went by, then two, then three, then a fourth but not a fifth. I come from a ghost with red bones under lightly freckled, brown, translucent skin. I thought of the dog, and I thought of Pap-Paw, “This is the easy part.”

Cara’s hip-hugger bellbottoms were new. Her nails were magic marker blue. Little gold diamond ear-studs sparkled at her earlobes in the lacy glinting sunlight of early afternoon. She loves me. She loves me not. I exhaled, and the words came spilling out and a second later, I wished that I could, somehow, take it all back, but it was too late. She was gone, no goodbye, just soft converse footprints trailing off through the grass back the way she’d come. I wanted to call after her, but what was the use. By the middle of the next week, she had a new boyfriend. I asked Mamma why she made me do it. “Love is hard,” was all she said.

 

Works Cited and Referenced

Centuries of Citizenship. “A Constitutional Timeline.” National Constitution Center. Constitution Center.org. 2012. Web.

Cruz, Barbara C. and Berson, Michael J. “Laws That Banned Mixed Marriages.” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. University of Southern Florida. Article. May, 2010. Web.

Everett, Dianna. “American Indian Movement.” Oklahoma State University. Oklahoma’s Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History. Article. 2010. Web.

Gates, Gary J. “How Many People are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered?” The Williams Institute, School of Law, University of California. April, 2011. Web.

“Hate Crime Statistics 2011.” Dallas Voice. Article. December 12, 2012. Web.

“History of Polio.” Polio Eradication Initiative. Polio eradication.org. Article. 2010. Web.

“Ku Klux Klan.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Intelligence Files. Journal. 2013. Web.

Sack, Kevin. “Title Unknown.” New York Times. Article. March 29, 1996. Web.

“Survival Rates for Ovarian Cancer by Stage.” American Cancer Society. 2013. Web.

“The Ku Klux Klan: Legacy of Hate.” Anti Defamation League Journal. 2013. Web.

Wilson, Pamela. “Native Americans.” Oxford Bibliographies. Journal. 2013. Web.

Wright, John. “Title Unknown.” Dallas Voice. Article. October 31, 2011. Web.

2011 “Hate Crime Statistics Report.” Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2011. Web.