The Gentle Art of Being a Pow-Wow Brat
The story of the first pow-wow I danced at, and an introduction to the poem “Marguerite.”
My parents split when I was about four.
I don’t remember the details, really. Just leaving notes around the house (scrawled in Crayon by chubby toddler fingers, backwards “R”s and all) saying “Stop fighting!” and “You’re being too loud!” I remember it was around Christmas, and that a few too many drinks probably wound up being the sack of bricks that broke the camel’s back.
Most of all, I remember waking up the next morning to my father gone and my mother red-eyed and sleepless, and going “Hallelujah! I can finally get some peace and quiet around here!” as I waded through ankle-deep drifts of wrapping paper and crumpled bows.
I didn’t blame myself for my parents’ divorce, the way a lot of kids do. My dad was only moving to East Meadow, all of twenty minutes away, so I had no real reason to worry about him disappearing. Besides, I was one of the lucky kids in that their split happened far too early for me to grasp the impact that it’d finally have. But this also meant that I was pretty malleable, a fact which both of them exploited liberally.
Mom would tell me stories about how he lied about his income so she was cheated out of child support (as though I knew what child support was), he would tell me that if she needed money, she should “get a real job.” Finally, realizing that relaying their backbiting wasn’t doing anything but pissing them off, I turned a deaf ear while things settled down.
The following summer, I think, is when things got hairy. And when I started to develop a personality both of them were at a loss to handle.
My dad fell in with a woman named Peggy Mitchell, his first “real” girlfriend after leaving my mom. Peggy was a Mohawk lady a little older than my mom, with a son my age. Jesse loved Ninja Turtles, had asthma, and had the flat-topped rattail haircut so many parents inflicted on their children in the 80s. The first time I met them was at a Pow-wow.
Pow-wows are almost exactly the opposite from a Renaissance Fair. Instead of overweight caucasian basement dwellers in period clothing, there are people from various American nations wearing traditional clothes that date back thousands of years. There’s jewelry for sale, toys, food, clothes, and dancing.
Oh, the dancing.
Jesse was a dancer. He got to go into the circle and have fun while I had to sit back at the stand and get eaten by mosquitoes. The first pow-wow I went to, my dad, Grandmother, and I just stayed for the day. I had fun, at first, which gradually dissolved into the kind of sulky, tired pouting that only an almost-five-year old girl is capable of, until we went back to my mom’s house and I was put down for a nap.
The next one, though… We were staying that time, and I was standing on a chair behind the front table at the stand, “helping” my dad make frybread as much as my chubby hands could and pretending I wasn’t jealous watching Jesse put on his dance clothes. His mom and I didn’t get along much, she was kind of short-tempered and I (courtesy of my mom) had a rebellious strek three miles wide. Still, even after she and I argued so often, even after she and my dad split up, even after Jesse’s heartbreaking and untimely death from an asthma attack only six years later, I owe her immensely for what she did that pow-wow.
Well, really, what she brought.
I was wiping flour on the sides of my jeans when I saw her carry it under the tarp covering the little Seminole-food-and-traditional-jewelry stand that Peggy, Sis, Sam, Ernie, and my dad worked. Green silk trimmed in blue and yellow ribbons, with a matching pair of leggings and a yellow and green shawl. My dad had a little leather belt decorated with silver disks that he’d made for me, and a hair ornament of bone beads and cowrie shells to hold back the unruly, sunburnt mess of waist-length brown hair I had, even then. Somehow we managed to get me cleaned up, dressed, and decorated, and Peggy took me out to dance for the first time.
I can’t tell you what that first dance was like, except that it was an even better way to spend a weekend than a box of Cocoa Puffs and six hours of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Peggy taught me to dance traditionally, and I watched the bigger girls and learned from them. If I was ever afraid of being lost or tripped up in the dancing circle, I don’t remember it. I was always a natural extrovert, and given this new way to meet the other kids who were always too busy dancing to play with me, it wasn’t long before I was slipping away from the stand to run amok for longer and longer periods of time.
I was also slipping away from my mom for longer periods of time, too. Even though my family is more Native American on her side, she denied it up and down. She used to warn me against going to pow-wows, telling me when I was as young as nine that if anything happened to me, she’d “knife-murder him and his mother.” She never went to a pow-wow, preferring to stay home and fret. I hated calling her to listen to her constant gloom and doom, so I’d only do so at three am, from diner pay phones, hedging my bets that she’d have finally fretted herself to sleep by then. Pow-wows were my escape from hearing her agonize over her divorce, money, her weight, and my two year old brother, why would I want to invite that in when I was having fun?
My dad never worried about me as much. My dad never worried about anything very much. My mom described him as a “consummate free spirit,” saying that he was the kind of guy that was tons of fun to hang out with, but not the kind you marry. He made sure I was fed and ready in time to go dance, but beyond that he very happily surrendered me to the gaggle of age four-to-ten-year-old children than ran buck-wild through the campgrounds of every pow-wow. We climbed trees, skinned knees, caught frogs, picked berries and flowers, played at being everything from Ninja Turtles to Transformers to herds of wild mustangs and packs of wolves. Fortunately, it didn’t matter whose kid you were, if you twisted an ankle or got a bug bite, sunburn, scrape, cut, blister, or splinter near someone else’s tent or stand, they’d patch you up, feed you, and return you to your rightful owners.
Plus we had the old ladies and couples with teenaged children to keep an eye on us… though there’s one lady who sticks out the most in my memory. Her name was Marguerite.
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