Love and Fireflies
My cousin Debbie and I are both mixed-bloods; American Indian born and raised.
When we were teenagers, I wanted to look like her. Especially on that summer day in 1966.
While I held in my stomach, wearing a one piece, she ate fry bread wearing that brown string bikini, tan skinned and thin, like a Pocahontas Barbie.
It was as if Debbie had one long leg in each world that summer, as if she were climbing out of childhood and stepping into womanhood.
She leaned over and whispered that Richard Rustywire asked her to go steady. I had my eye on Johnny Drinkingwater.
Later that afternoon, after we left the public pool, known as the Plunge, Debbie and some of the others went in to town, while I went back to auntie's house and sat on the porch swing, reading, waiting for a cool breeze and the moon to rise. The fireflies came out, white beads of light, flashing off and on all over the yard. And it was the way I always wanted to remember a summer night—the night of fireflies and my first kiss.
While I was sitting on the porch reading, Donny came over. I’d had my eye on him all afternoon too. Donny he kissed me in the moonlight, behind Auntie’s clothesline, between the sheets. We stood barefoot, toes touching, arms entwined. His eyes searching mine, while his blond hair blew across my face. His voice cracked when he asked, “Is this the first time you’ve been kissed?"
As we stood together under a spirit sky, with purple violets blooming in my mind, I answered “No.” But I was thinking “Yes.” Because the kiss I gave to Johnny Drinkingwater didn't count after he lost interest in me, after he found out that I was an Indian girl.
In a sorrow-filled voice his sister said, “I don’t know why, but my brother only goes out with white girls.”
But her brother wasn’t white and I wasn’t white enough for him. Me—a high yellow mixed-blood girl, with olive skin so light.
So the way I saw it was that I was starting out again. And this time, this boy, wasn’t disappointed that I wasn't a white girl and he wasn't trying to have some kind of sexy Indian princess fantasy evening, all impressed by the fact that I was an Indian girl, which was something Debbie had to deal with all the time when she dated white boys. And... in that malachite moment Donny was just kissing ME.
For Donny
September 5, 1952 - June 12, 2008
Thank you for sweet memories in the summers of 1966--1968.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
