Sail of Tears

(pg. 3) Barbara Lucille, their daughter and my mother, was born in California in 1937. At 16 she married a traveling flimflam man, bore me at 19 and divorced at 20. She took me to Ohio where we lived with her parents, my grandmother performing many of the day-to-day chores of raising me until my mid-teens. Barbara also bore another son, Scott, in 1967.

In 1969 she graduated from Ohio State University and began teaching at the junior high level. In 1970-71 all five of us lived in Crownpoint, New Mexico while she taught at a federal boarding school for Navajos, but after a year she was asked to resign because of excessive absences. We then moved to the Coachella Valley, where for a number of years she taught in the mostly Latino public schools.

In the early 1970's our family received some Creek judgment money from the federal treaty settlement, and I think it was around this time that my mother started investigating the family genealogy in a serious way. Eventually a series of nervous breakdowns and financial reverses ended her teaching career, and she was finally diagnosed as manic-depressive -- which explained a great deal about her life to date.

In the 1980's she began developing a spiritual practice, including Native American spirituality, and was eventually able to control her condition without the aid of medicines. When she discovered that she had advanced breast cancer, she elected to forgo the painful treatments needed to stop it, believing the quality of her life to be more important than its length.

When she died in 1994 at the age of 56, her friends, my brother and I held a medicine wheel for her in San Diego, and then friends released her ashes in the mountains near Sedona, Arizona. Unbeknownst to me, she had applied for tribal citizenship some months earlier. Years later I found her Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizenship card among her personal effects. It was dated the month after her death.

Barbara teaching at the federal boarding school in Crownpoint, New Mexico.