Page 61 of The River Is Waiting

How many times had I suggested we get a dog for the twins to grow up with? But oh, no. They’re too young for a dog. What if he bit one of them? Then Evan the Great bringshisdog over and she’s all yeah-rah-rah dogs! I’m suddenly aware that I’ve been biting the skin around my thumbnail and that it’s bleeding.

“So he’s what? Ten years younger than you?”

“Nine, actually. Why?”

“Nothing really. I just—”

The phone cuts off, which is probably a good thing. My point, Emily, is that he’s too fucking young for you if that’s where this is heading. I bangthe phone back on the cradle and walk toward our cell. My thumb feels sore and it’s still bleeding a little. Do I need to be worried about this guy? He services cars, charms little kids, even has a dog who doesn’t bite.… I wonder whether she’s told him about our situation—me being in prison and why. He’d better not be getting any ideas about the coast being clear. If he is, she’d better set him straight. No divorce for the rest of my time in here, she said. Or is that magical thinking, too?

“Door!” I call down the corridor. It pops and I enter our cell.

“Talk to your wife?” Manny asks. “How’s she doing?”

“Good question,” I tell him. “You got any small Band-Aids? I cut my thumb.”

Later, after lights-out, I can’t stop imagining him and Maisie playing with his dog. The three of them sharing a pizza at Tony’s. Him sticking around after she puts Maisie to bed. The two of them having wine and one thing leads to another.…

But what’s the point of working myself up? God, I miss her so much. Talking to her on the phone helps, but it makes it harder, too. And the times she’s visited me, it’s fucked-up having to hug her across a fucking table for a couple of seconds. I miss touching her, miss her touching me.… When the crew had lunch break the other day, I overheard Spence talking to Tito about how he and his girlfriend sometimes do phone sex when they talk. She gets him hot and bothered for ten minutes, then he goes back to his cell, finishes what she started, and gets a great night’s sleep. There’s no way Emily would do something like that—especially since I told her the goon squad can listen in on our conversations.…

I think back to that first summer when we couldn’t get enough of it. When we were so hungry for each other’s bodies that we fucked whenever and wherever we could, living in the moment without a clue about where this might be going. And when we were living out in California, too. Sometimes we’d make love twice in the same day. And then she got that call from her mother about her cancer. We drove back east and that was that.

In my dream tonight, she and I are on one of those mansion tours. Iput my finger to my lips, take her by the hand, and we sneak away from the others. Wandering through an upstairs hallway, she’s afraid we might get caught but I’m aroused. At the end of the hall, there’s an unlocked bedroom. We go in, undress, and fall together on the bed. I kiss her breasts, her nipples, pass my fingers and then my tongue against her wetness. She’s ready, I’m ready. When I mount her, she guides me inside and I move in and out of her, slowly at first, then faster, then slow again, then so fast that I’m right at the edge and…

I wake up ejaculating. Reach down and touch my stuff. I can’t remember the last time I had a wet dream.

It’s pouring out and it’s supposed to last all day, so work gets canceled. Manny’s got another migraine, his third since we’ve been cellies. I’ve learned from the other two times that there’s nothing I can do for him other than not make noise. I’d take a nap but it’s only midmorning and I’m not tired. I guess I’ll read.

Slim pickings, though: one of my aunt Nancy’s Holy Roller books orNative American Genocide:The U.S. Government’s Systematic Efforts to Eradicate Indigenous Populations.I’ve renewed that one three different times now without even cracking it open. I’m not sure why I’ve been resisting it. But now that I know Solomon’s part Wequonnoc, it gives me a little extra incentive to read what it says. Not that I think it can provide any answers to why he’s so messed up, but at least I might be able to get a little historical context. What’s that saying? The past is prologue? Well, whether it is or isn’t, who could have predicted that that messed-up kid would shoot those defenseless dogs and wind up here?

I settle in as quietly as I can and openNative American Genocide.It says one of the authors, Dr. Aurora Eubanks, is a professor emerita of anthropology at Spelman College. “My fight for racial justice was activated on March the seventh, 1965, during the ‘Bloody Sunday’ march to Alabama’s state capital. In the company of my parents, I was clubbed bya white police officer as we attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. I was twelve years old.”

The coauthor, Malinda Bravebird, describes herself as a naturopathic doctor, a writer and podcast host, and the Medicine Woman of the resurgent Wequonnoc Nation. “My ancestry is Indigenous, African, and Irish; of these three, my identity as a ninth-generation First Nation woman is the strongest. I am currently researching the discrepancies between Native American and European concepts about humans’ relationship with the land. Guided by my totem animal, the blue heron, I practice stillness and patient observation as I investigate the deeper truths that are revealed to us in the natural world.”

Her mention of the blue heron sends a shiver through me. Takes me back to that bird on the rock in the river that was staring me down as I tried to decide whether I should try to get my blood test results tossed or turn myself in. As much as I hate prison life, I’ve never felt that I was dealt an injustice when I had to come here.

The book says the original inhabitants of what later became known as North America arrived from Asia via a land bridge that existed between what is now Alaska and southern Siberia, and that by the time western Europeans landed on the shores of what they misnamed the “New World,” the continent had been inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous people. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, it says, an estimated seventy thousand to a hundred thousand First Nation people lived in what is now southern New England.

I skim the parts about the importance of the rivers, riverbanks, and the Atlantic’s coastal shores in sustaining the Native communities, but slow down when I read about a battle between two brothers who belonged to the most powerful of the area’s tribes, the Wequonnoc.

Following the death of Chief Matwau, his eldest son, Achak, was installed as the Wequonnoc Nation’s new sachem, to the disgruntlement of Achak’s younger brother, Samuel, whose skills as a warrior, a hunter, and a negotiator were considered superior. A group of about seventy warriorsand their families who were loyal to Samuel split from the tribe with him. Calling themselves the Shetucket, they became the sworn enemies of the larger and more powerful parent tribe.

Same old same old, I think, all the way back to Cain and Abel. Growing up, I always wanted a brother, but maybe I was better off as an only child.… I feel a sudden pang thinking about Maisie, a twin who, because of me, is now an only child, too. I’ve read that her conscious memories of her brother will fade away, but what about her subconscious memories? Does she feel Niko’s loss without being able to understand what it is? Does she remember him in some deep-seated way? There’s no way to answer these questions, so I tell myself to get back to my book.

It says the influx of Europeans seeking religious freedom, known as the Great Puritan Migration, took place between 1620 and 1640. The new arrivals believed in the concept of God-given white supremacy, which they backed up with the power of the flintlock, the musket, and the blunderbuss. Was that the start of it? America’s love affair with the almighty gun that’s alive and well today?

The authors zero in on the Connecticut Colony, a splinter group from the Massachusetts Bay congregation, who began claiming land that the Wequonnoc tribe had hunted, fished, and cultivated for hundreds of years. The Colonists declared war on the tribe, aiming to annihilate them. To that end, they enlisted the help of the smaller Shetucket tribe, whose leader, Chief Samuel, calculated that there was more to be gained by aligning themselves with these “pale strangers” than by resisting them. Trained and armed with muskets, thirty Shetucket warriors joined ninety British soldiers in a surprise early morning attack on the fortified Wequonnoc village. They set fire to the community’s wigwams and shot many of the tribesmen and women attempting to escape.

The leader of the Wequonnoc genocide was Captain John Woodruff, a British army officer who had crossed the Atlantic during the Great Puritan Migration. In the days that followed, Woodruff’s men hunted down, captured, and enslaved many of the tribespeople who had escaped.Wequonnoc women and girls were forced into service as domestics in the homes of British settlers in the Connecticut Colony. To guard against reprisals or revolts, the colonists shipped Wequonnoc men and boys to the West Indies, where they were exchanged for African slaves who were brought north to serve masters in New England.

So slavery didn’t just happen in the American South during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It began in New England as soon as white Christian settlers arrived. According to what I’m reading, these settlers thought of Native people as “savages” closer to animals in the wild than to women and men of Christian faith—this despite the reality that, like them, Indigenous tribes had a rich culture, a religion of their own, and a well-established language. The bottom line was that there was profit to be made, not only from the seizure of Indigenous land but also from the capture and selling of Native people or, later, by sequestering them on reservations.

I think about some of the shit I see here at Yates. The ratio of Black and Brown prisoners to Caucasians; the white supremacist assholes who try to recruit other whites for the race war they’re sure is coming; the length of Lester Wiggins’s sentence. Before they sent me here, I was aware that Blacks got a raw deal in the criminal justice system. That was something I knew but didn’t think too much about. Now it’s something I’m starting to feel. And it doesn’t feel good.

Eubanks and Bravebird’s book points out that, by the nineteenth century, as Wequonnoc descendants assimilated into white or Black families, the Connecticut Historical Society honored John Woodruff by commissioning and installing a bronze statue of him on what had once been the sacred burial ground of the Wequonnoc Nation. And that during the twentieth century’s Great Depression, the WPA funded the building of a four-lane road that, upon completion in 1949, was dedicated as the John Woodruff Parkway.

How many hundreds of times had I driven on the Woodruff Parkway without ever knowing or caring who John Woodruff had been? He’dorchestrated a mass murder, enslaved the survivors, stolen Indian land with bullshit treaties he knew would hold up in white men’s courts. That made him a hero? They parked a statue of him on top of the buried bones of his victims? Named a four-lane road after him? Jesus Christ.

In school they taught us thatwewere the good guys—the descendants of brave freedom seekers who had crossed the Atlantic and established their claim to the “New World.”Land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.But weweren’tthe good guys. That was just propaganda. I recall what Javier said when he checked out this book for me: that “the man” likes to rewrite history because the truth makes him look bad. And he’s right. To us white victors had gone the spoilsandthe right to flip the narrative.

---