Whiskey Tender

Out of 22 students in Taffa’s new second-grade classroom, she was one of three Indigenous children. Taffa didn’t like Cherie, a Ute girl, from the moment she met her, but Robert, a Navajo boy, interested her. When she told her father about him, he reminded her to call him Diné; he had learned from his Navajo coworkers that this was their original tribal name. One day in class, a boy called Billy was solving math problems on the blackboard. When the teacher became impatient, Billy began hyperventilating, turning white and then blue. The teacher panicked, but Robert ran to the class bins, found a brown paper sack, and held it over Billy’s mouth until his breathing normalized.

Taffa admired Robert’s confidence on the softball field, but in class, she was “embarrassed” by him. He struggled with reading aloud, and Taffa felt that this undermined her mission to prove to her teacher that “Indian kids were smart” (101). Her father told them that they “had to exceed expectations if [they] wanted to rise above [their] circumstances” (101). Some of her classmates lived in houses that were “fancier than anything [Taffa had] ever seen” (101), and she noticed how her teacher treated these children differently. She was determined to win her teacher over, and she could out-read most children in her class. However, after Robert saved Billy, she worried that he would become the teacher’s “favorite Native student” (102). When she told her father about the incident, he told her that Robert had “more street smarts” and that “full-blood kids” were “spunky” (102). There was an “admiration” in his voice that bothered Taffa, partly because she agreed that the “full-blood kids” she knew were “cool and capable” (102).

There were other forces contributing to the “tension” that Taffa felt at school and home. A few months before the Jacksons moved to Farmington, three white teenagers had tortured and killed three Navajo men. Despite the brutal nature of the crime, the boys were tried as minors and given light sentences. Protesters gathered for seven weekends in a row until the city stopped issuing permits, claiming that the marchers would interfere with the upcoming annual sheriff’s posse parade. The protestors showed up anyway, and the police responded with teargas, inciting a riot. Farmington became known across the country as “the Selma, Alabama, of the Southwest” (104). Lorraine and Edmond were privately panicked. Although Taffa didn’t know about the racial unrest in Farmington, she sensed her parents’ fear and understood that Farmington was “haunted.”

The day after Robert saved Billy, Taffa did so well reading in class that her teacher asked her and another girl to recite the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at an event commemorating revolutionary battles. Taffa was proud and excited. Outside at recess, she watched Robert play kickball until a girl called Nicole came to sit beside her. They played together until they saw an Indigenous couple walking past the school. Taffa could tell that they’d been drinking, but they were “jolly” and greeted her. Before she could say anything else, her teacher snatched her away, shouting at the couple to leave her alone. As they went back inside, Nicole muttered about “drunk Indians.” Taffa was confused. The couple reminded her of her aunts and uncles and “seemed fine,” but she realized that her teacher saw them as “dangerous” (108). She remembered the commentator during the baseball game calling the protesters “animals” and felt “embarrassed,” not knowing that “this slur said more about mainstream society than it did about [Indigenous people]” (108). Her resolve to make her teacher respect her and become an “anomaly” doubled.

The next day, Edmond brought home a beautiful purebred Dalmatian, Sadie, that he was dog-sitting. Taffa, who desperately wanted a dog, played with Sadie nonstop. When her sisters complained that Sadie was “ugly,” Taffa scoffed at how they knew nothing about the dog’s “lineage and class” (109). She wasn’t “a mutt” like Taffa and her sisters, and she was even allowed in the house “because she was well behaved and special” (109), unlike the dogs that Taffa had known on the reservation.

The next week, Taffa’s class was abuzz at learning that they would be in a class play called “From Colony to Country, America.” Each student was assigned “an Early American role” (110); Robert would play the “Indian,” but Taffa would wear a gold crown representing England. Another girl, Julie, would play America and wear a red, white, and blue headband. As their teacher announced this to the class, Robert met Taffa’s eyes, and she didn’t understand “why he was frowning with disappointment” (111). When she rushed home to share the news with Sadie, she discovered that her father had taken the dog back to her owner. The following week, Nicole asked Taffa about her part in the play, announcing that her grandmother, who was also a teacher at Sacred Heart, “said it doesn’t make any sense for an Indian to wear that crown” (112).

The night of the play, Taffa recited her line loudly, as she had been taught. Afterward, Robert’s father shook hands with Edmond, who congratulated Robert on his role as a “farmer.” As the family left, Taffa saw Robert’s father talking to his son. He seemed “angry,” and Taffa worried that Robert was in trouble for mumbling his lines. She often got the feeling that Robert was “wiser” than her, as if “he had been initiated into the adult world with a secret code [she] still didn’t have” (114).

That weekend, Sadie escaped from her owner and showed up at the Jacksons’ house 30 miles away. Taffa knew that they couldn’t keep the dog, but she took Sadie’s return as “a sign that [she] was as noble as [the dog]” (114). Sadie knew that Taffa “had the beauty and talent to rise above [her] half-breed status” and “do great things” (114).

In third grade, Taffa’s teacher announced that her class would sing at a funeral mass. Most of the children had never been to a funeral before, but their teacher said they shouldn’t be sheltered from death. She told them about her little sister, who burned to death when they were young. While many of the children began to cry, Taffa didn’t. At first, she was proud of her composure, but when she noticed her teacher looking at her, she worried that she revealed “the Native side of [her]” (116), showing her teacher that she was different from her classmates.

On the day of the funeral, Taffa worked hard to follow the Sisters’ rules and prove that she “was devoted and trying to conquer” her “feral side” (117). When it was her turn to take Communion, she watched the dead man’s widow shaking with repressed sobs until she noticed one of the Sisters “frowning” at her. Back in her pew, Taffa “prayed to be worthy, respectable, and clean” (119).

The next week, the Jacksons received news that Edmond’s brother, Johnny, and his wife had drowned after their car flipped off the bridge that connected Yuma to the reservation. The family packed up and headed home. They missed the first part of the ceremony, in which the family burned all of Uncle Johnny’s possessions, but they arrived in time for mass and the second part of the keruk funeral ceremony. The priest sent them on their way “grimly” after mass, and the family made their way to the tribal cemetery, where the Cry House and cremation grounds were located. Johnny and his wife’s “waterlogged” bodies were laid out in the Cry House, and the family spent the day with the bodies.

Later, men danced and sang in Quechan, and women accompanied them, holding bundles of clothes representing each deceased member of the family. Late in the night, the people who were not as close to the deceased cried loudly in unison to help the others with their grief. The ceremony would continue all night, but eventually, Lorraine decided that it was time for the children to go to bed and led them off despite their complaints. Taffa knew that her mother was “challenged” by Edmond’s traditions, but she didn’t understand why. She felt more connected to her father’s customs, which seemed “more meaningful” than Lorraine’s, and she worried that her mother “resented the fact [that she] loved his customs more” (125).

Early the next morning, the bodies were placed on the funeral pyre alongside gifts from the mourners. The pyre was lit, and everyone returned to the house. That night, the family gathered at Uncle Gene’s house. Aunt Vi said that Johnny should have left the reservation, but Edmond didn’t believe that it would have made a difference. Taffa didn’t understand the specifics of her personal and communal history, but she intuited that Johnny and Gene saw their poverty and life on the reservation “as an act of resistance” (126).

When Taffa returned to school, her teacher made her stand in front of the class and explain what happened to her uncle. It was an attempt “to elicit shame,” and Taffa felt like crying, but she kept it inside because she had learned that “the howling was beautiful” and felt that her teacher “did not deserve to see” (127).

For fourth grade, Taffa was assigned Mrs. Toronto, her classmate Nicole’s grandmother. Mrs. Toronto had a reputation for being strict, but she wasn’t a nun, and Taffa thought she might be less “moralizing.” However, it soon became clear that Mrs. Toronto’s “brand of racism was even worse than the nun’s proselytizing suspicions” (129). When she accused Taffa of cheating on a math test, she realized that the teacher wanted to see her fail. She worried about how her parents would react, as they counted on their daughters to show the world that they “weren’t loser Indians” (136).

Over the weekend, Taffa became so nervous about the grade that she made herself sick. When her mother finally asked what was wrong, she couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth. Instead, she told her about an incident the year before when a Mexican girl in her class had been spanked in front of everyone after being caught in the playground tunnel with a boy. The girl was so upset by the punishment that she wet herself. Lorraine soothed her daughter, assuring her that “[o]nly the worst kids get paddled like that,” but Taffa was frustrated that her mother “[blamed] the girl instead of [her] puritanical teacher” (138).

Monday included parent-teacher conferences at Sacred Heart, and Taffa waited for her mother with her father and sisters at their favorite diner. As they waited, a Navajo woman approached them, selling jewelry. She spoke to them in Diné and didn’t give up when Edmond spoke English back. Taffa noticed how her father was sometimes “awkward” around “more traditional Navajos” (130). The Navajo reservation was large and “imposing” with its lively culture and numerous traditions. Edmond’s Quechan ancestors were “simpler.” In part driven by the tribe’s emphasis on the icama dreams, the tribe had little interest in material possessions or maintaining oral histories, but this lack of visible tradition sometimes made Edmond feel “diminished by Navajo culture” (132). When the waitress began to suspect that the jewelry vendor was bothering Edmond and signaled to her manager, he quickly changed his mind about buying her jewelry and assured the manager that nothing was wrong.

Lorraine arrived, furious. She had grown up poor and dependent on the charity of Catholic nuns, and defending her daughter in the parent-teacher conference felt like “losing progress.” Edmond was angry because he felt that they “had sacrificed everything” to give their children better opportunities, but Lorraine was upset because she feared that Taffa’s “dark skin and lies might drag [them] down and reflect poorly on the family” (141). Taffa began to understand that her mother “had an inferiority complex with whites like Dad did with Navajos,” and she “donned both versions of this oppression,” making her “nervous” and unsure of where she truly belonged (141).

During the summers, Edmond coached his daughters’ tee ball and softball teams. The Jacksons had dominated the baseball field for generations, and Taffa felt proud of her family’s “tough reputation.” However, she hated the pressure of playing. The family had bought a new home, and Lorraine’s mother, Grandma Mary, came to stay with Annie and Kathy, Lorraine’s youngest sisters. Kathy had a Hispanic boyfriend and referred to herself as Chicana. Soon, Taffa realized that her aunt Kathy was pregnant; she was staying with the Jacksons to avoid the scandal of being an unmarried Catholic mother in Yuma.

Meanwhile, Joan was graduating eighth grade, and the nuns announced that Sacred Heart was closing its high school due to a lack of funds. Lorraine and Edmond were among the parents who gathered to protest the decision. They were determined not to send their daughters to public school, but the best the nuns could do was recommend a Catholic boarding school in Cañon City, Colorado. Taffa was frightened by “the idea of a fragmented family” (150), but her father insisted on maintaining “a focus on learning and an obsession with mainstream schools” (150). Edmond’s grandmother Ethel’s aunt, Sarah, was ostracized from the family for performing under the stage name “Indian Princess” in the 1800s, but she used her earnings to open a school for Paiute children. Her school operated for only two years, and Sarah “died just as poor and discouraged as any other Native person working for change in her generation” (151), but she instilled the importance of education in her family. Taffa didn’t know then about her aunt Sarah’s story, and her parents’ insistence on education made her feel as if they “were trying to live vicariously through [their children]” (152).

In one of her doctor’s visits, Aunt Kathy learned that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. She was induced and gave birth to a stillborn baby boy. Kathy was devastated; she believed that her baby couldn’t go to heaven because he hadn’t been baptized. Taffa felt for the first time a “righteous anger toward the Church” (156). The baby was buried in Farmington, and Kathy went back to Yuma with Grandma Mary.

Meanwhile, Joan’s departure date was looming. Upset that her sister was leaving, Taffa decided to get back at her parents by throwing her softball game. Once the team started losing and Edmond realized what was happening, Taffa shouted at him that he was mad because she wasn’t as good of a softball player as Joan. To her surprise, he agreed to let her quit, and Taffa never played softball again.