Eagle Song

Chapter 1 : She’:kon

Hey, Chief, going home to your teepee?” Danny Bigtree clenched his fists but kept walking. The November wind was cold against his face. It blew his long black hair over his eyes. He thought again of cutting it short.

If he asked his mother to cut his hair, she might look at him in that way she had. She wouldn’t tell him no, though. Even though her eyes might question his decision, he knew she would cut it if he asked. But he knew, too, that even with short hair he’d still be noticed. The other boys would still say things like that. That’s how it always was here in Brooklyn. Especially if you were different.

It would do no good to say, as he had once said to them back in September, “I’m not a chief. We’re Iroquois and we never lived in teepees. We lived in longhouses a long time ago, and now I live in an apartment building.” They’d just laugh again. Then Tyrone and Brad would ask him where his war pony was.

None of the boys followed him. They went back to their basketball game. Danny stopped at the corner and looked back to watch them play. He wasn’t really interested in basketball, but the way they played it almost looked like fun. Some of them were really good, especially Tyrone. While Danny watched, Tyrone bounced the ball, cut around two of the other boys, jumped up and threw the ball in a high long arc. It swished down through the basket.

Brad, Tyrone’s best friend, came over and the two boys slapped their palms together in a high five. Danny sighed. He’d never played much basketball on the reservation. Lacrosse was his game. But nobody here played lacrosse.

Danny found himself thinking again of what it had been like up at Akwesasne. The wide St. Lawrence River. He knew it was so polluted from the factories on the Canadian side that no one could fish in it anymore, but in his memory it was beautiful. Akwesasne. Fields and woods to play in. Lots of other Indian kids who looked and talked the way he did. Akwesasne. The name was so much better than “Brooklyn.” Akwesasne meant “The Place Where the Partridge Drums.” He didn’t know what Brooklyn meant.

There had been plenty of reasons to leave Akwesasne, though. No jobs was one. It was because of the lack of employment that men like his dad traveled all over the country to do ironwork. When his mom had finished her social work degree and been offered the job at the American Indian Community House in Manhattan, she hadn’t hesitated. It would be a better life, she’d promised. So far, for Danny, it hadn’t been.

He went down into the subway entrance, and when he was on the train, he closed his eyes. That way he wouldn’t know if anyone was looking at him. If he kept his eyes closed long enough, he could imagine himself riding on the back of an eagle that would take him away from Brooklyn. It would take him away from schools and tenements and people who made fun of him because he wasn’t the same as them. It would take him to a place where there were other people like him and his parents, a far away place. If he closed his eyes long enough, the roar of the rumbling wheels would become the sound of the waters of the St. Lawrence River going over the stones, the squeaking of the metal of the car would become the songs of birds.

But he couldn’t keep his eyes closed too long. If he fell asleep, he might go right by his stop again the way he did last week. Then he wouldn’t be able to get home before his mother. She would go to Mrs. Fisher’s apartment to pick him up, and he wouldn’t be there. His mother wouldn’t say anything to him if he came home late, but he’d be able to tell from the look in her eyes that she had been worried.

She already worried enough about Dad and the dangerous work he did every day, fifty stories or more above the earth. Danny didn’t want to add to her worries. So he let the sounds of the birds and the clear river flow away from him.

—————

“Careful there, you’re going to break his ribs,” boomed a voice as deep and familiar as the beat of a drum.

Richard Bigtree came out of the bathroom, still drying his own long hair. That hair was as crow-black as Danny’s except for the places it was flecked with white on his temples. Danny’s father was bare-chested and built like a bear. His body was as strong and as round as the trunk of a big pine tree.

Danny’s mother dropped him, and Danny ran over to hug his father.

“She’:kon,” his dad said, speaking the Mohawk word
of greeting, the word for peace.

“She’:kon,” Danny answered, a little catch in his voice as he said it.

“You know why Iroquois men always listen to the women, Son?” his dad said, his arm around Danny.

“No, Dad, why?” Danny said, going along with the
joke.

“It isn’t just that they are usually wiser than the men,” his dad said. Then he paused again. Danny’s turn.

“It isn’t, Dad?”

“And it isn’t just that the women own the households and choose the chiefs.”

“It isn’t, Dad?”

“No. You know what it is, Dancing Eagle, my son?”

Danny almost laughed then. Whenever his dad talked that way, his face deadpan, his voice imitating a Holly wood Indian, it was time for the punch line. Danny knew what to say next.

“No, my father, what is it?”

“We Iroquois men always listen to the women because if we don’t, they will beat us up! Look out, here comes one now!”

Danny’s mother grabbed his dad, pushed him back onto the floor, and began to tickle him.

“Help me, my son,” his dad cried in a high, funny voice.

Danny jumped in to help. Somehow it ended up with both his mother and his father tickling him. Then, when he had laughed so much it started to hurt, the three of them just stayed there on the floor, their arms around each other.

It’s so much fun when Dad is here, Danny thought. Mom doesn’t seem so tired when she comes home after work. Why can’t it be like this all the time?

But he knew his father’s job would take him away. again, for weeks and weeks. He knew, too, that he would be back in school tomorrow. Back in that school where no one else was like him, where he had no friends and no one noticed him except to make fun of him.

______________________________

Chapter 2: Gustoweh

As he did his homework on the small dining room table, Danny listened to his mother and father talking in the kitchen.

“You’ll only be home for the week?” his mother’s voice said.

“Crew’s going to Pittsburgh,” his father’s voice answered. “It’s the Mohawk warrior tradition, Sal. You know, we men go out hunting while the women stay home and take care of the really important things.”

“I don’t feel like being teased tonight, Rick.”
His mother’s voice had become serious. Danny realized how much noise his pencil was making as he scratched it across the paper. He stopped writing and listened harder. But now he could no longer understand what his parents were saying. They were talking in Indian. He had never learned enough Mohawk to understand more than a word or two when people who were really fluent in the language were talking it fast. Even back in the Akwesasne Mohawk School where he used to go, people mostly talked English, except in the Native Culture class. His parents had always intended to send him to a school where Mohawk was spoken a lot of the time-like the Freedom School up on the rez. But then they’d moved to Brooklyn.

As Danny listened closely, though, he heard words that he understood. One of them was his name. His mother said it first and then his father said it, as if he was catching on to something. They didn’t say much more in Mohawk, only a few sentences. Then there was a silence.

“Danny,” his mother called to him, “clear off the table now so we can set it for dinner.”