Listen Here (53 page)

from
Southern Humanities Review
(1982)

What was he looking for
my Father, with his flashlight,
padding up and down the hall,
opening the cellar door
to shine the beam
down the long stairs?

I never heard the noise
that roused him from his bed.

I remember only the sudden light
on the bedroom wall,
how it swept across my face
and my brother's, for love.

Even now in the dark house
I awaken to his flare,
when the moon escapes
from behind a cloud,
breaking against the ceiling.

from
Southern Humanities Review
(1985)

Where the road slices
through Needle Gorge
animals of stone
root out of the cliff

Their snouts, heads, shoulders
bulge from red clay
as if to catch the scent of
ancient water

Eons piled upon eons
this is the only place
where the mountain lion
will lie with the lamb

Stacked together,
the buffalo, wild boar,
oxen, the goat
with its grassy beard—

Did they all stop
before they reached
the saving water of the river,
caught in their final breath?

from
Negative Capability
(1984)

The mountains are barren
in the season
you would have been born,

their useless bellies push
against Christmas sky.

It is the month of children
like those on the doctor's
bulletin board
in the room where he put me,

the one time I lay
in that room,

his affirmation
attached to my
long night of losing.

A difficult way to daylight
it seems. I find it months later,
kneading dough for a seasonal bread,
the first I have ever made,
awaiting its rise in the oven.

(August 24, 1952–)

Poet and fiction writer Marijo Moore is of eastern Cherokee, Irish, and Dutch ancestry. She grew up in western Tennessee and says about her childhood, “I grew up in an alcoholic home with a white stepfather who did not like the idea that I had Indian blood. Reading was my only escape as I grew older, and of course, this fueled my love of writing.” Her first poem was published when she was sixteen. Her goal as a writer, she explains, is to “make use of all I have survived to give strength and hope to others.”

She attended Tennessee State University in Nashville and earned the equivalent of a B.A. in Literature from Lancashire Polytechnic in Preston, England, in 1987.

A self-employed writer, she lives in Candler, North Carolina, where she has formed rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING, a company committed to publishing the writing of Native Americans. She encourages other American Indians to write because, she says, “it is time we begin writing our own literature so that we will not be stereotyped to death.”

She was nominated Writer of the Year in Poetry by Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers (1997) and was named North Carolina Distinguished Woman of the Year (1998) by the Department of Administration, Council for Women, in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has served on the board of the North Carolina Writers' Network, on the Speaker's Bureau and on the board of the North Carolina Humanities Council, and as the project director for the 1997 North Carolina Native American Literary Heritage Conference. In 2000,
Native Peoples
magazine named her as one of the top five American Indian writers of the new century.

Her work has appeared in such publications as
Indian Artist, Indigenous Woman, Native Women in the Arts, Voices From Home: An Anthology of North Carolina Prose
, and
National Geographic.
She has edited a collection of writings by North Carolina American Indians,
Feeding the Ancient Fires
(1999). She is also editor of
Genocide of the Mind: A Collection of Essays by Urban Indians
(2003).

Fiction:
Red Woman with Backward Eyes and Other Stories
(2001).
Poetry:
Desert Quarter
(2000),
Spirit Voices of Bones
(1997),
Tree Quarter
(1997),
Crow Quarter
(1996).
Fiction and poetry:
Returning to the Homeland—Cherokee Poetry and Short Stories
(1995).

Jennifer Hicks, “Profile: MariJo Moore, Survive and Follow Your Heart,”
http://www.minorities-jb.com/native/marijo9.html

from
Spirit Voices of Bones
(1997)

Story is a
woman. Not
long, not short. A
woman with body of
carved petroglyph
tongue of red memories
eyes of dark insight
ears of drummed
legends

hair
of
ageless ceremony falling onto
her skirt of history woven, tradition colored, many
gathered. Stranded myth beads float over her
breasts like crows float over timeless time.
Scavenging

connecting words
old and new
told and retold
sung and shouted
whispered and chanted
reflecting mirrors in front
scraping medicines from behind.

Listen          children!

Story is        a woman.

 Not long,       not short.

  A woman.     Respect her.

from
Spirit Voices of Bones
(1997)

This was the night
all the people sang together.

This was the night
all the people dreamed together.

This was the night
all the people danced together.

This was the night
all the people prayed together.

This was the night
all the people began to heal.

from
Spirit Voices of Bones
(1997)

Usv' tsigesvgi
nigata yvwi duninogisv.

Usv' tsigesvgi
nigata yvwi anasgitskvgi.

Usv' tsigesvgi
nigata yvwi analskvgi.

Usv' tsigesvgi
nigata yvwi anadadolistihvgi.

Usv' tsigesvgi
nigata yvwi anadaleni unidiwisga.

Eastern Cherokee translation
“Solidarity in the Night”

from
Red Woman with Backward Eyes and Other Stories
(2001)

It was rumored that Addy May Birdsong would sneak into your house, touch your forehead with her fingers while you were sleeping, and change the course of your dreams. I had heard this rumor for the first time when I was about thirteen. Lydia Rattler, who sat next to me in Home Room, told me this because she had heard that Addy May was related to me.

“So what?” I had said back to her. “Everybody's related to everybody here.” I had never liked Lydia much because she had ugly teeth that stuck way out and because she wanted to gossip all the time like an old woman. But she sat next to me that whole school year and I learned to endure her gossip, if not her buck teeth.

When I had asked my mama about the rumor, she said that lots of things were said about Addy May because she was different than most.

“What do you mean, different?” I asked in total sincerity. It seemed to me that almost every adult I knew back then had some sort of strangeness about them—mostly caused from alcohol, or from running out of it.

“Well,” my mama had said thoughtfully as she scratched her chin the way she often did when she was trying to explain something in terms that she thought I might understand, “Cousin Addy May just has a way of stirring people up. She looks all the way into their souls with those black-pitted eyes of hers and it makes people wonder if she knows what they've been up to.” I had to agree with the part about the black-pitted eyes. They reminded me of a tunnel a train had just gone through.

“But you don't pay any mind to what you hear about her. She's your cousin and she's had a hard life, harder than most on this reservation, and so she deserves to be a little stranger than most if she wants.”

I forgot about my “stranger than most” Cousin Addy May and all the rumors about her until one night it was so hot I was having trouble sleeping and decided to crawl out the bedroom window to get some fresh air. I was careful not to wake my younger twin sisters. Course I loved them with all my heart, but they could be quite bothersome when I wanted some time alone.

The night air was so cool and refreshing I pulled my braids on top of my head and let it touch the back of my neck. It made me feel really good, so I decided to take a walk down the road that led up the mountain to our house. The two other families who lived on the road were at least two miles away, so I felt like I had the road all to myself. I had walked for about ten minutes, staring up at the stars and the full moon, feeling proud that I was so brave to be out by myself that late at night, when I saw Addy May standing there in the middle of the road with the moon shining down on her head like a flashlight. Her hair was long and loose, not braided as usual, and I remember thinking that it looked like a thick, black waterfall flowing down her skinny back. I was totally shocked to see someone standing there in the middle of the night and grateful that she hadn't heard me coming down the road.

She had her back to me, so I stepped into the darkness of the brush beside the road so I could watch her. She was wearing a long cotton skirt that was probably dark blue but looked purple in the moonlight, and a shawl of many colors was draped loosely around her thin shoulders. I watched quietly as she swayed her body back and forth, waving both hands above her head. The more I watched her, the faster my heart beat. And when she started singing, I felt like it would bust right out of my chest. Her voice was beautiful, high pitched and full of rich guttural tones. Over and over she sang her song, swaying there in the moonlight. I could hear her words distinctly:

“First I was woman
then I was mother
now I am woman again.”

Mesmerized by her presence and her voice, I had no idea what her song was about, but I knew the words came from way down deep inside her. From the same place my moon time had begun flowing several months back when mama had told me that I had become a woman. Addy May's words came from the connecting source to the earth that every woman has inside her, and my stomach burned way down deep in that spot as I listened.

I must have stood there in the brush for at least half an hour, watching her, listening to her singing, and feeling my heart trying to jump up into my throat. Then something happened that I never would have believed if someone else had told me about it. There were two female spirits come down from the sky and stood right next to Addy May's swaying body. One was real old and the other a young girl just a little older than me. With quick, jerky movements, they began to dance around Addy May, looking kind of like the white curling smoke that dances around a red hot fire, and chanting in Cherokee. I couldn't understand all of what they were saying because I don't speak my native language proper, but I heard a few words I could recognize and realized the gist of their song had to do with sorrow and grief.

As I stood there, squinting my eyes trying to figure out what was in the bundles each spirit woman carried in her arms, and muster up enough courage to stay and see what would happen next, Addy May turned and looked directly at me. I swear she looked directly at me and smiled right into my eyes, never missing a beat to her swaying or a word to her song. When she did that, I ran back home as fast as I could and didn't tell a soul what I had seen than night. Not even my mama. As a matter of fact, I kind of forgot about the incident for a while because my thoughts were on other things. Mostly my new boyfriend, Roger. That is until I heard from Lydia Rattler that Addy May had been arrested for stealing a baby boy.

She had gone into John and Amanda Wolfe's house late one night and taken their baby right from his crib. The baby hadn't cried or made any noise or anything, so the parents didn't know he was missing until his mama woke up the next morning and went to check on him. He was only six months old but he was big for his age. I had seen him in front of the Spirits on the River with his mama the week before Addy May stole him. Amanda had gone in there to apply for a job and asked me and my cousin Lenny, who happened to be walking by at the time, to hold him for her while she went in the restaurant to get an application. It was really curious to me that I had actually held that same baby in my arms just a week before Addy May stole him.

She hadn't tried to hide him or anything, and that's why they found out so quick that she had him. She had just taken him home with her, and when Mavis Rose had passed by Addy May's house on her way to the Tribal Offices as she did every weekday morning, she had seen Addy May sitting there on her front porch in an old rocking chair, holding him. Mavis said later that she thought it was kind of odd, Addy May sitting there on her front porch with a baby and all, but didn't know how odd until she arrived at work and was told that the Wolfe baby was missing. Of course she told all of them at the Tribal Offices what she had seen and they called the Wolfes who had Addy May arrested. The baby wasn't hurt or anything, so the Wolfes didn't press it. The authorities let Addy May go after a good talking to because they didn't know what else to do with her, I guess.

Mama said she probably needed some kind of professional help 'cause she had never got over the death of her two babies who had burned to death that past winter. One was a girl, about a year-and-a-half old, and the other a boy, six-months old. Her old mobile home had caught fire because of bad wiring or something, and she hadn't been able to save them.

I cried after my mama told me that story. I cried like I had never cried for anybody before because I felt close to Addy May somehow. So I went to visit her about a week after that. I just stopped by her house on my way home from school one day to tell her I was her cousin and just to see how she was doing. She didn't talk much, just nodded her head a little, and gave me some water from her well to drink. I can still taste that water now, all fresh and cool and sweet from that dipper gourd she used. I stayed for about an hour I guess, just sitting there on her front porch with her, not talking. And that was OK with me 'cause I felt like I just needed to be there for her. She never mentioned that night I had seen her in the road, swaying and singing, but I knew she knew. And I knew she knew that I cared about her.

I didn't go back to visit her again, but I did see her at different times, walking around, mumbling to herself. She got real crazy after the Wolfe baby incident and people just kind of left her alone and made up more rumors about her to entertain themselves. She wasn't a real threat to anybody, and the Crowe Sisters who lived down the road from her always made sure she had something to eat.

I guess I just grew up and forgot about her for several years. There were my two kids and a husband to worry over, and I hadn't thought about her for a while until Mama told me that Addy May had died. She had gotten the flu or pneumonia or something, and passed to spirit in her sleep one night.

“She's probably better off,” Mama had said. I quietly agreed 'cause deep inside I knew that Addy May was with those two spirits who understood the song she was singing that night there in the middle of the road. The night she was swaying and singing in the moonlight, and I stood in the darkness of the brush, quietly watching and listening.