The Tao of Raven by Ernestine Hayes
Author:Ernestine Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00
I might have been born without a father, a child of the beach, as some of the older ladies no doubt quickly reproached, out of wedlock, as the church preachers would have roundly judged, had my mother been disposed to sit in the pew and listen to their rebuke, but my mother was proud of her baby girl, and when my grandmother was home, cooking and cleaning and taking care of me, the baby she loved to call her first grandchild, she loved me as much as my mother did, and perhaps she loved me even more than that when she joined friends in the downtown bars and the cannery workers on the summer docks and bragged about her first grandchild. Everybody doted.
Only five or six years after I was born, my mother allowed herself to be forced to marry the youngest son of a local family, one associated by kinship ties dating back beyond memoryâthose old memories having been made dirty by new teachings and then wiped clean by new lawsâbut it only took a few weeks for her to realize her awful mistake and file for a divorce in the white manâs court and to assume the far more respectable practice of marking âDivorcedâ in the many boxes that demanded to know her marital status, her race, her nationality, her age, her education. She was determined to provide for her child a life that featured warmed rooms and a filled icebox, butterfly-blue dresses from the Sears catalog and a wrought-iron miniature woodstove from the hardware storeâs toy window, books and magazines from Juneau Drug, money for movies and record players and woolen winter coats and paisley scarves for me to tie under my chin. To that end, my mother learned to type and file and organize papers according to the white manâs alphabet, and she worked her way up from serving food in local restaurants and sliming fish in canneries to rag-mopping the halls of working-for-statehood lawyers to dusting the filing cabinets of territorial judges to finally, at long last, sitting at a desk that the prim, well-dressed first assistant to the second daily secretary of the principal attorney for one of the foremost men in the main committee of the constitutional convention said my mother could use in her new duties as helper to the junior file clerk. They were proud to hire an Alaska Native girl who knew how to file their important papers. My mother was proud to have a job helping white people advance their busy pursuits, a job that guaranteed a green-tinted paycheck that she could cash twice a month, on the fifteenth day and on the calendarâs last day, a job where she only had to report for work promptly at 8 a.m. on weekdays, a job where she was never asked to work at night, never on weekends, and almost never past white peopleâs dinnertime, which she had long ago learned was 6 p.m., according to their ever-present bald-faced clocks. Life was bound to be good from there on out.
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