Poetics and Politics

I am an old woman now, like any other, except for what I am going to tell you. You want to know about me, don't you? OK, then.

When my son was a young, man, when he thought of nothing but what he could do with that thing he thinks makes him a man, I pulled a tiny rabbit with the tail of a crow from the center of his chest. I used my flint piece. I cut him open, the same way the white doctors use a knife. Call it surgery. I caught that rabbit by the ears, between my thumbs, and pulled up. The entire room of people heard it squealing for its life, which I would end. And Alfred, my husband, when he was giving his hop-picking money to the Catholics in Santa Rosa and everything else to Old Lady Hatcher, I danced sixteen nights and sang every song I knew and some I didn't so he would live. A part of me wanted him to die, given what he put me through in those days. I admit it. But that's the part I put aside for this business. My medicine is good. I danced and sang until that jealous spook Sam Toms quit, until his curse, which came each night in the form of a great blue light, faded into nothing outside our back door.

I won those fights. I won all my fights, which is why I am still sitting here today.

I say fight, but it might make more sense if I say game. It is like gambling, a crapshoot. Every time I stand to sing doctoring songs, when these hands locate the pain in a person's body, the game is on. I gamble with my life.

It's not like in the white-man books you read about us Indians. It's not me. I do not have the power. These hands and the songs are power. They are what I use in the game, my weapons against the odds. I must outwit my opponent. If something goes wrong, if the disease gets the upper hand, it would finish me, leave me a mumbling old hag with death my only prospect. So I use the songs. The words charm. They put the disease in the patient's body to sleep, make the disease forgetful. Then the hands move like pieces of metal to a magnet.