If you can’t fight them, join them.
It was fun. We kids ate, ran around in the yard in our pajamas.
My father would smile as his work fell away from him.
He pulled my mother to his lap.
I can still hear her laugh as she slid away to set the table with her girlfriends.
Later they’d turn the lights down and we’d all jitterbug and twist together.
REDBIRD dances.
My father would tell old stories. I liked the one best about his great-great-grandfather Monahwee and his favorite horse. He and his fast black horse could beat anyone in a race.
My great-great-grandfather always had the best horse, said my father. He was a sharp horse trader, and could even speak with horses in their own language.
And not only that, old Monahwee knew how to bend time.
What do you mean, bend time? I always asked.
Time is a being, like you and me.
No one pays much attention, until they’re sad, then time stops.
Or when they’re having fun running around in their pajamas and it is time to go to bed, there isn’t enough time.
His eyes would shine for me.
Monahwee made friends with time, shared tobacco with time. So when he got on his horse to race his beloved warrior friends, he had a little talk with time. Time said, “Get on my back and we’ll fly free.”
So, no matter how fast all the others raced, Monahwee and his horse arrived long before it was possible, little Redbird.
Those were the best times, said my father.
Those were the best times. And when my father and his friends were drinking, they were always followed by the worst times.
My truck is my horse, he laughed.
The only race I have is outrunning the Whiteman.
His friends laughed. My mother flinched. She knew he was winding up.
What happened to Monahwee, I asked?
My father told me to “open me another beer, honey.”
I liked thinking about the person of time.
I liked thinking about my father on the back of a horse, carried by the wings of time.
Don’t ever forget the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, said my father. Andrew Jackson’s forces killed almost everyone as we stood to protect our lands. Your grandfather Monahwee was shot seven times and still survived. And little Redbird, don’t forget. It was your mother’s people who sided against us at Horseshoe Bend!
My mother snatched me from my father’s lap to take me to bed.
I sneaked back through the dark hallway because my mother was beginning to sing.
She wanted to be a singer before she had all of us. Before she got married. Before she worked in the fields picking cotton and green beans.
When she sang, time stopped and held me close.
REDBIRD sings as MOTHER.
SONG: A LONG TIME AGO
IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO ON THE DANCE FLOOR
YOU HELD ME IN YOUR ARMS
THE WHOLE NIGHT LONG
HA YA YA YA YA HA YA YA YA YA
HA YA YA YA YA HA YA YA YA YA
YOU TOLD ME HOW MUCH YOU LOVED ME
MORE THAN THE SUN AND THE STARS
IN THE LONG TIME AGO
I LOVE YOU, BABY, NO MATTER WHERE TIME GOES.
Light night.
After my mother sang, she and my father fought.
Their friends scattered.
I tried to pull him off her, and he went crazy.
He threw me across the room into the wall.
What happened to the storytelling father? Where did the man go who made my mother laugh?
He kept swinging. I got away.
I hid under the table.
REDBIRD sings.
IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO
I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO
SCENE 4
REDBIRD: In my family’s blue-sky memory, we loved my father without question. We loved his laugh, his stories, his swinging us through the sky. We struggled with his fight, his jab, and his fear.
When I looked through my dreaming eyes, he was still a boy of four standing by his mother’s casket. She was Monahwee’s great-great-granddaughter. She liked to paint, blew saxophone in Indian territory and traveled about on Indian oil money. Still, grief from history grew in her lungs. She was dead of tuberculosis by her twenties. The grief had to go somewhere. We had no one left in our family who knew how to bury it. So it climbed onto her little boy’s back.
REDBIRD sings.
JA-GAY-YOU, JAH-GAY-YOU, AHHNEE, TSA-LA-GI
SCENE 5
Light bright day.
REDBIRD: “What should I do, Little Redbird?” my mother asked me when I was seven, as I watched her put on her makeup and uniform to get ready for work.
“He’s out with other women, chasing down their love medicine. The only time he comes home is to eat and put on clean clothes. Don’t ever fall in love, baby.”
The next Sunday morning I sat on my father’s lap in the back seat of the car, after we picked him up from jail. He smelled of old soap, whiskey, and sour perfume; he smelled of guilt.
“What should I do, Daddy?”
“I’m sorry, baby. And tell that beautiful mother of yours I’m sorry, too.”
He winked at my mother in the rearview mirror. She twisted the mirror so she couldn’t see him spy and plead.
“Sorry doesn’t get it this time, Daddy. I’m over you.”
I twisted in the raw pain between them. I tried to reason out the story: they are members of enemy tribes, one came from rich and one came from poor. One is dark; one is light. There is wrong, there is right. But there was no way through it.
SCENE 6
Light night.
REDBIRD: One night when my father was still out late, my spirit stepped out to look for him. At first I couldn’t see anything for the fog of alcohol across his path. I followed him to the bootlegger’s, the store, and to the bar.
Then I saw him driving off alone. Come back!
Then he was gone, through the forgetting holes.
“Spirit Helper, what’s the use in remembering all that? See all that dark out there? It’s dangerous. It’s raw stuff for black holes. They suck up everything: little girls, sad wives, men who promise you the moon and the stars.”
I can’t do this.
Spirit Helper reminded me, “This is your ceremony. If you stop now, you will give in to the evil.”
She sang me a song,