He’s named after me.”

I wondered how that could be, but I didn’t say so,

then he said, “Don’t you see the resemblance?”

I said, “Sort of,”

and he just snorted and bit off some tobacco

and started talking about the past,

but I wasn’t interested

and he said, “Go on then.

Take care of that picture,

you’ll need it someday.”

I was so happy to escape,

I kissed his wrinkled cheek

and didn’t even need to breathe

fresh air once I got out of there.

Now I look at the photograph

and try to feel something about it,

but I can’t and I can’t even claim

that being fifty-three has given me

some perspective on what John was doing

when he gave it to me.

“Must have been a whim of some kind,” says my mother.

“You know how old people are.”

Still it worries me sometimes

that I can’t find the reason,

can’t even find out what his brother’s name really was,

unless John wasn’t teasing me back then.

“I wonder if they were twins?”

“No, couldn’t have been.”

“John was older,” mother tells me

and, “He lived like a white man.”

I wonder what she means by that,

but when I ask her,

she just goes back to smoking her cigarette

and says, “Let the dead stay dead.

Anyway, I’m black and I’m proud.

I’m not an Indian anymore, if I ever was.”

But I remember when she used to dress

like a Navajo too and go to powwows

and all her friends were Indians, or part.

She married black men, except for my father,

but that’s another story

and I won’t bother with it now.

Like Queenie, I don’t have time.

I’m busy searching old census records,

land titles and such,

trying to reconstruct what was once

a living, breathing entity,

but now I realize was John’s sawdust.

As I sit in his room,

which is long empty,

because when he died, they burned all his things,

I wish he’d come back, so I could ask him

what it was like to be robbed of his birthright,

if that’s what it was.

But maybe he didn’t think of his land that way.

Maybe he thought he was just its caretaker.

I don’t know, but being so close to it all

makes me feel if I just call his name the right way,

he’ll lean down from heaven,

or wherever he is and say,

“That’s right, that’s it. Now go on and play.”

But I’m chewing on nothing but air and I know it

and my mother is saying how we’re Choctaws

and we’re better than these Arizona Indians

and I say, “I thought you were black,”

as she goes back to coughing just like John used to,