Read Online Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog - Free Book Online Page B

caused it right there. She lost the baby. She could not get over mother’s attitude.
    My other sister, Sandra, when she was going to have her eldest boy, Jeff, my mother did the same thing to her, saying, “What the hell are you trying to do to me? I can’t hold up my head among my friends!” She was more concerned about her neighbors’ attitude than about us. Barb told her, “Mom, if you don’t want us around, if you are ashamed of your own grandchildren, then, okay, we’ll leave.”
    I understood how mom was feeling. She was wrapped up in a different culture altogether. We spoke a different language. Words did not mean to her what they meant to us. I felt sorry for her, but we were hurting each other. After Barbara lost her baby she brooded. It seemed as if in her mind she blamed mother for it, as if mother had willed that baby to die. It was irrational, but it was there all the same. Once mother told us after a particularly emotional confrontation, “If you ever need any help, don’t come to me!” Of course she did not mean it. She will stick up for us, always, but looking over her shoulder in case her friends should disapprove. To be able to hold up your head among what is called “the right kind of people,” that is important to her. She has a home, she has a car. She has TV and curtains at the windows. That’s where her head is. She is a good, hardworking woman, but she won’t go and find out what is really happening. For instance, a girl who worked with mother told her she couldn’t reach Barbara at work by phone. Immediately mom jumped to the conclusion that Barb had quit her job. So when my sister got home, she got on her case right away: “I just don’t give a damn about you kids! Quitting your job!” continuing in that vein.
    Barb just rang up her boss and handed the phone to mom, let her know from the horse’s mouth that she had not quit. Then she told mother: “Next time find out and make sure of the facts before you get on my case like that. And don’t be so concerned about jobs. There are more important things in life than punching a time clock.”
    There was that wall of misunderstanding between my mother and us, and I have to admit I did not help in breaking it down. I had little inclination to join the hang-around-the-fort Indians, so one day I just up and left, without saying good-bye. Joining up with other kids in patched Levi’s jackets and chokers, our long hair trailing behind us. We traveled and did not give a damn where to.
    One or two kids acted like a magnet. We formed groups. I traveled with ten of those new or sometimes old acquaintances in one car all summer long. We had our bedrolls and cooking utensils, and if we ran out of something the pros among us would go and rip off the food. Rip off whatever we needed. We just drifted from place to place, meeting new people, having a good time. Looking back, a lot was based on drinking and drugs. If you had a lot of dope you were everybody’s friend, everybody wanted to know you. If you had a car and good grass, then you were about one of the best guys anybody ever knew.
    It took me a while to see the emptiness underneath all this frenzied wandering. I liked pot. Barb was an acid freak. She told me she once dropped eight hits of LSD at a time. “It all depends on your mood, on your state of mind,” she told me. “If you have a stable mind, it’s going to be good. But if you are in a depressed mood, or your friend isn’t going to be able to handle it for you, then everything is distorted and you have a very hard time as that drug shakes you up.”
    Once Barb took some acid in a girl friend’s bedroom. There was a huge flag on the wall upside down. The Stars and Stripes hanging upside down used to be an international signal of distress. It was also the American Indian’s sign of distress. The Ghost Dancers used to wrap themselves in upside-down flags, dancing that way, crying for a vision until they fell down in a trance. When