New Writing

Pardo—Searching for a name
           
Pardo was a 12th century Portuguese word often used for darker races, sometimes it meant earth-colored, sometimes it meant an in-between color, sometimes it meant gray.

For my mother, Dolores, on the first anniversary of her death.

Gracias Archelina Sportsman.
There was a name of distinction,
many syllables full of life
and she was. Named in gratitude
for her father Archibald, the horse trainer.
He was a mythology, except his mundane death
a kick from the hoof of one he was paid
to bend to the saddle. The horse and he—now bound
together in the story his daughter tells me
when I’m a girl who’s been taught
all Indians are dead.

But not the Ioway, whose name might mean dust or
might mean gray. The Ioway are here
if only in his grateful daughter and
the earth she has carried through the corn fields
past the burial mounds to me.

And here in that name, Sportsman,
called for his training of horses that can kill. 
This makes him real;
opens the eyes of the Indians in my head.
Now I understand why horses frighten me—
restless hooves, untamed muscle, huge equine eyes
full of mistrust. Will I be looking for retribution
among them or the great great grandfather I’ve lost?

Gracias Archelina Sportsman, small, not healthy it seemed
and losing her father so young they married her off
to another Indian, half a nation away.
And when he died, leaving her the one
Ioway in Massasoit territory
where she was told
all the Indian nations were dead
or at the very least there had been
too many to be named.

From Gracias the memory of horses faded
like ink from paper
until the time came for her
to tell me the story.

Lydia Sportsman Morandus, her daughter. 
There’s a name. 
Her father, from Massasoit territories,
contrived that last from syllables that seemed right to him. 
It was a novelty to have a name no one else did.
Made up or not. 
Only two in the phone book in all of Massachusetts—
mother and daughter—light of two nations.
And the name Lydia called after one of the sisters,
or daughters or nieces who sat by the side of a sachem.

As Gracias was solemn Lydia sparkled.
As Gracias toiled, relentless and solid, Lydia danced
and sang. She was the tall, red one on the end of
the chorus line among the black. The Black ones,
paradoxically fair, testifying to the mixture
required of entertainers. Mulatto, mestizo, pardo,
No darker need apply.

With the distance between Ioway and footlights,
even with the years that grew between her
and the corn, between her and the horses
Lydia kept her name always
and her skin, earthly copper heated from within,
repeated the story to me.

Dolores Morandus Minor LeClaire. 
There’s a name that begins with sorrow. Dolores, child of Lydia,
my mother. Although she discovered early:
the burden of a darker daughter was too much for her.

As Gracias and Lydia were fire, warm as a hearth
and the stories told around them, Dolores was forever
a girl not to be encumbered. She was an infectious laugh
ringing in a room with too little furniture,
no blankets or chairs. No place
for a small child to hold on.

But in the end she was the one
to pick up the trail of her father.
Through the sand dunes and grasses
she sifted and surfed, clicking
on the strands of information while she still had sight,
then touching and talking to those with the stories.
She was the one who yearned for that history
to fill the empty room inside of her. She pulled,
hand over hand, scaling the side of a mountain
on a fragile thread until she found the name
that was hers.
There in New England earth,
in the dust of history
among the faded writing on government paperwork,
she found the Indians who are not dead. 

They saw her and the corn fields left behind,
her and her grandfather with his ropes
and hooves. They saw her
and the women that came before.
And taking away her sorrow, they named her:
Has No Horses,

Has No Horses
not because she was poor and blind
but in honor of her laugh
Has No Horses because
she had no need to go to people
they would come to her.

Say her name out loud and hear her laughter
almost as warm as a story,
big and round, full of textures and past.
It may be the one I’ll remember now that
the women, my small nation,
are all gone.

And my name is still to come