The ghosts of Whiteclay
digg it!
Facebook
del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit
They have homes. They have families who will take them in. But still, on any given day, several dozen Lakota drink in the dust of Whiteclay. At night, they haunt the streets, caught up in something unforeseen.
BY COLLEEN KENNEY | Lincoln Journal Star
WHITECLAY — It woke her around 3 a.m. in the garage of the empty brick house. It surrounded her, pressed on her chest.
It needed something.
Chunli, it said. Cigarette.
She remembers sitting up and looking around in the dark. Her boyfriend and some friends lay beside her under the blanket, sleeping off the night’s malt liquor.
They had made their bed a few hours before on the floor of the garage, surrounded by crumpled cans of Hurricane and Camo, cigarette butts and dirty clothes.
The thing spoke without a sound.
Chunli.
Her hands shook as she reached under her shirt and lifted her bra. She fished out a half-smoked butt, lit it, took a few drags and turned it around to offer it up to the darkness.
Maybe it’s Crying Woman, she thought. Most everybody who stays here sees her, wrapped in a shawl, walking Nebraska 87 through town. Maybe it’s one of the Old Ones. Maybe it’s someone who died in a wreck or a drunken fight — Indians die all the time in this town where they sell malt liquor.
She shook her boyfriend.
Let’s get out of here.
She felt the thing watch them go.
Months later, there’s still fear in Patchi Black Elk’s eyes as she tells the story, her voice little louder than a whisper.
Patchi is short and skinny, a bird of a woman. She smiles a lot. Teeth are missing. She’s 44. She looks decades older.
Her right arm is scarred from crashing through a sister’s apartment window when she was drunk. Don’t take the arm off, the sister begged the doctors. She’ll kill herself if you do.
“Now I’m just killing myself with alcohol,” Patchi says, laughing.
She wanted to go home to her kids, to their duplex in Pine Ridge, the night the thing woke her. But she knew if she crossed the border to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and stretched out on a mattress next to one of them, cooked them breakfast the next morning and played with them in the afternoon, her mother and brothers and sister could force her into treatment.
She needed to hold her kids, she says. But she needed to hold something else more.
After fleeing the brick house, she and her boyfriend walked Nebraska 87, two more ghosts looking for rest. They ended up on a concrete slab beside one of the town’s beer stores.
v v v
It growled.
The little girl sat up and looked around in the dark. The mattress was on the floor, surrounded by dirty clothes.
She walked down the hall. Daddy was drinking with friends. She found a square of instant Ramen noodles in the cupboard, ripped open the foil pouch and sprinkled the chicken seasoning on top. She ate it like a sandwich. It was crunchy.
She returned to her mattress and tried to sleep. She couldn’t. The mattress was ugly. It had holes and was old and smelly.
It didn’t have Mommy.
She knew Mommy was sleeping somewhere in Whiteclay and that tomorrow, she’d probably be there begging for money.
It growled again.
Jessica Black Elk, Patchi’s youngest daughter, remembers walking back to the kitchen and filling the rest of her tummy with water.
v v v
The fun begins when the beer stores open.
A car pulls up, usually a cousin or friend. In this town, just south of the reservation, it seems everybody knows one another.
“I’m going to make a hit,” Patchi says to her boyfriend, Babe Eagle Louse, this evening in early June, then walks over to the car and asks people inside for change. For a sandwich. A tampon. Food for her kids.
Sometimes she’s just straight, says her throat is dry and she needs another Hurricane.
She and her friends hang outside the town’s beer stores like this one, the Jumping Eagle Inn, a blue metal building with gang graffiti on the side.
Stuart Kozal, the owner, comes out now and then and tells them they know they can’t drink here. He makes them dump their Hurricane and Camo cans into a big metal barrel.
“It’s skunk beer anyway,” Patchi jokes with him, and people on the concrete slab laugh. They like Stuart.
There are the regulars who sit here like Patchi and Babe, a soft-spoken, likeable 37-year-old. Babe doesn’t get crazy drunk and fight. And he protects Patchi, who sometimes does. Her brother, who sits on the tribal council, gives him a little money now and then to look after her here.
But he’d do it anyway, he says. He loves her.
There’s Seth Gibbons, a tall, skinny Vietnam vet who walks here from Manderson, about 25 miles north. He wrecked his car a few years back and hasn’t been quite the same since.
He’s quiet. Always seems to have a little grin under his mustache. Always has a chunli for Patchi and Babe and all his other friends when they ask.
There’s Seth’s good friend John Red Shirt, “mayor of Whiteclay,” a Lakota version of Santa Claus who says he’s descended from Crazy Horse.
Sometimes when he stands here in Whiteclay, he burns sage. He holds it in front of his face and lets it soak into his gray beard and dusty clothes and lungs.
Sage, he says, protects you from evil.
There’s Meldwin Two Bulls, son of a former police chief. There’s Clifford Grass, whose son is the best athlete at Pine Ridge High.
Other people sit here for a few days and then go back to life on the rez. Maybe they got fired. Or their woman kicked them out. Or they’re living in a van in a casino parking lot with their babies. Or a friend got raped.
Darrell and Wanda Walking are here tonight. She sits on his lap, an arm around his neck, laughing with Patchi and the others and listening to Clifford Grass talk about the ghosts that float through Whiteclay at night.
The Crying Woman. The little boy in a striped shirt who bounces a ball on Nebraska 87, then disappears. The voices.
Around 3 a.m., he says, dogs bark at the heels of something unseen.
“I hear them at night and there’s no place to get cover,” he says. “This is a sad place.”
“No it’s not,” Wanda says, suddenly sober. “Everywhere on the reservation is a sad place. There’s so much damn alcohol on the reservation.”
Darrell can’t find work as a truck driver, she says, and that’s a sad place when you have six kids to feed. If you want to see another sad place, she says, go to their trailer along Cheyenne Creek.
The windows are busted, the doors are broken.
Their kids begged them not to come here tonight, she says, but lately, something’s been pulling her.
“I do not want my kids to do this s—t.”
A car pulls up. Patchi goes over to make a hit. The fun begins again.
v v v
Chris Black Elk, Patchi’s 13-year-old son, hears this a lot: Your mom is just a drunk.
“I tell them to shut the hell up.”
Chris has been asking his aunt if he can attend a boarding school he heard about in Chamberlain, S.D.
He’s tired of the teasing.
v v v
Clifton Red Feather unbuttons his shirt to show the tattoo covering his chest like war paint.
L-a-k-o-t-a, it says across the top. W-a-r-r-i-o-r, it says beneath.
He puffs his chest out. Then the warrior laughs, in a way that seems to hug Patchi and everyone else here, and they laugh with him.
It’s a hot day in early June, about noon. They sit in the shade of a wooden awning across the street from the Jumping Eagle Inn.
At 32, Clifton is one of the few people here who still looks his age. He says that’s because he spent much of his 20s in Lincoln.
His first time at the Nebraska State Penitentiary was for second-degree assault, the second for burglarizing a liquor store.
He got treatment for alcoholism in prison, he says. He took part in sweat lodges. He prayed.
He stands to pray now, and Patchi and a few other people put their cans down and gather around.
“Tunkushila Wakantanka … Tatetopa … unchimaka … apeto kile uwshiuapo.”
Grandfather Great Spirit … four directions … Grandmother … This day, have pity on us.
His parents drank, he says. He changed the babies’ diapers and made sure the little ones got to school. Most of his five brothers have been to prison, too.
He’s been staying with an aunt in Wounded Knee. When he comes home to visit family, he falls hard.
Clifton has bought booze in this town many times. Last night, for the first time, he slept here.
He points to the empty brick house. Over there, he says. With eight other people, not enough dirty blankets to go around, dried excrement on the walls.
“I’m no warrior. I’m just weak. Everybody you see here drinking is weak. Go deeper into the rez and you’ll see men you’d probably fall in love with they’re so handsome, men who don’t drink. You’ll see the spirituality, the beautiful side of us.
“Alcohol runs most of us, but it doesn’t run all of us.”
Clifton laughs.
“My humble tongue is getting weak.”
He throws an arm around a woman holding a Hurricane.
“Shot maku!”
Give me a drink!
v v v
Patchi’s sister Arlette Janis has custody of Chris, 11-year-old R.C., 9-year-old Jessica and 5-year-old Kenny. Grandma has 10-year-old Carrie.
Arlette’s duplex in Pine Ridge is full of people: her son and his family and now Jessica and Kenny. So Chris and R.C. live in Patchi’s duplex just down the block with a 21-year-old cousin.
Arlette walks there now with the younger kids to check on the boys.
The walls have big holes. From drunken fights, she says. The ceiling just got painted. It was brown from all the smoking.
When Patchi had custody, Arlette hated to come down here and see how the kids were living.
The final straw was when Kenny told her one of his daddy’s friends had thrown him against a wall for not getting ready for kindergarten on time.
v v v
They call this ground north of town Camp Justice.
On June 8, 1999, the bodies of Ron Hard Heart and Wally Black Elk Jr. were dumped in the deep ditch by the side of the road.
Wally Black Elk was a brother of Ben Black Elk, Patchi’s ex-husband. The two men had been drinking in Whiteclay. Their killers haven’t been caught.
Until they are, the dead men’s friends and brothers sit here when they can, in this ditch on the north edge of Whiteclay.
They sleep on a mattress in a makeshift shanty. They pray for their brothers, for justice, at a sacred circle of cedar poles they built around an altar. The altar includes a buffalo skull Native inmates sent from the penitentiary in Lincoln after hearing about the deaths.
Loren Black Elk and some friends sit here this morning. While they wait for justice, they drink. Loren was Wilson’s brother, too.
“When I seen my brother laying there in a body bag, it was bad.”
Their great-grandfather was the brother of the great Lakota holy man Black Elk, he explains, made famous by Nebraska author John G. Neihardt. Neihardt interviewed Black Elk when he was an old man at his log home near Manderson.
Black Elk said the sacred hoop of the people was broken in 1890 during the slaughter at Wounded Knee, less than 20 miles to the northeast.
From a ridge on his horse, Black Elk says in the book, he witnessed the slaughter. He saw cavalrymen shooting into a gulch of stunted pines at women and children.
Take courage, he told the men with him. These are our relatives. We will try to get them back.
Then they sang:
A thunder being nation I am, I have said.
A thunder being nation I am, I have said.
You shall live.
You shall live.
You shall live.
You shall live.
They charged, and the cavalry retreated. They led their people out. They found a baby near the head of the gulch. Black Elk wrapped it in a shawl.
It lived.
Black Elk had a prophecy: The Sacred Hoop of his people could be mended in the Seventh Generation. If it is not, the Lakota race will die.
Many people on the reservation feel this generation of Lakota kids is the Seventh. Loren Black Elk isn’t so sure.
Kids today don’t know Black Elk, he says. They don’t read his book, don’t speak Lakota. They just want to listen to rap and wear gang colors. Get in fights. Get drunk.
“The Seventh Generation — my Grandpa Black Elk, he talked about it. The Seventh Generation. The Seventh Generation.
“But there ain’t no way out for us.”
v v v
Patchi’s sister is sick with diabetes, but she hasn’t given up. She hasn’t given up on Patchi, either.
“I tell her, ‘Look what you’re bringing down on your kids. You’re bringing down their lives.’
“I know she can be stronger than that. I don’t know why the hell she gave up.”
Look at Jessica, Arlette says, pulling the 9-year-old next to her own granddaughter who is just 6, but about an inch taller.
They’re both in the first grade.
v v v
John Red Shirt drinks Hurricanes.
Unlike his good friend, Seth Gibbons, the quiet Vietnam vet, he doesn’t touch Camo Silvers. John has been trying to get Seth to cut back on those.
No, Seth will say with that little grin under his moustache.
Anheuser-Busch makes Hurricane, which has an alcohol content of 6 percent, compared with 4 percent in a regular can of Bud.
In Whiteclay, a 24-ounce can costs $1.50.
So does a can of Camo Silver — the kind Patchi’s boyfriend Babe says really makes you crazy. He tries to keep her from drinking so much Camo. It has an alcohol content of 9 percent.
The Whiteclay people like malt liquor. It’s cheap and gets them drunk quicker. If they can’t bum the change to buy it, they sometimes walk to the dump north of town and hunt for cans the cops have confiscated.
The cops pour out the beer, but sometimes a little is left. Sometimes they’ll find a full can.
Sometimes, they drink Lysol.
In July, a strange thing happens. John and Seth are drinking in the garage of the empty brick house. A young man walks in. It’s a hot day. They wondered why he’s wearing a hood. They can’t see his face.
It spooks them so much they leave.
They walk up the block — and there’s the young man again, leaning against a beer store. Still can’t see his face.
Watch out, a medicine man warns them. He’s coming for one of you.
v v v
Her hair was thin and filled with bugs. It’s growing in now, looks healthy.
Jessica Black Elk looks up. She wears a pink jacket. She brushes bangs from her face to show a big smile.
“When I was born my mom was drinking and that went in my stomach and that’s why I came out drunk.”
v v v
It’s early August, powwow time.
John Red Shirt lies on his side this afternoon, passed out on the concrete by the new thrift store. Flies go in and out of the can of Hurricane beside him.
Patchi walks over, inspects John’s face to make sure he’s not looking, dumps what’s left of his can into hers, then sets his back down.
The night before, about 9:30, John was sitting on an old couch outside the thrift store. His good friend walked by, and John offered him a Hurricane.
No, thanks, Seth said, with that grin under his moustache. I’ve got my own.
He held up a brown paper sack full of Camo.
John remembers watching his friend walk toward the empty brick house.
v v v
The little Black Elk kids feel sad for their mother.
Not Chris. He’s mad at her.
He runs to the hall closet in the duplex and returns with two yellowed, stained papers with words from the holy man Black Elk, their ancestor.
Carrie takes it from him and reads.
“…Here I stand, and the tree is withered. Again, I recall the great vision you gave me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. …”
“That’s his prayer,” Chris says softly. “I read it much times. It reminds me of Black Elk.
“I think about if he’s still alive — it’d be fun.”
v v v
A blue car pulls into the parking lot near the Jumping Eagle Inn.
“There’s a hit right there,” Patchi says to Babe. It’s her cousin George Janis.
She bends to the open window. Her right cheek is bruised, from a fight the other night with some women.
“Did I tell you what Mom said to me the other day? Mom’s crazy. She was down here. I was like, ‘Is this my mom I’m seeing in Whiteclay?’ She says she wants me in treatment.”
She laughs.
“She ends up giving me two dollars and says, ‘Here’s another nail for your ruff box. They can put it in your coffin.’”
Her cousin gives her some coins.
“What are they saying about the guy found dead up here this morning?” he asks.
Probably just the alcohol, she says.
This morning, she tells the cousin, she and Babe needed chunli real bad, so they headed for the empty brick house.
They arrived as the ambulance did.
They saw their friend on the stairs near the front door, eyes rolled back, blood everywhere, two full cans of Camo at his side.
The quiet Vietnam veteran’s funeral is a few days later in Manderson.
They bury Seth Gibbons on a hill overlooking Wounded Knee Creek, in a grave down just a few rows from the holy man Black Elk.
v v v
R.C. was digging in the back yard one evening in August, looking for nails to build a house for his dog Buffalo.
He remembers looking up when he heard women screaming. Across the street from the duplex, a young man was stabbing another man.
“Mike really stabbed him up.”
Chris saw it, too.
It’s October now, early evening. Some of the Black Elk kids stand at the makeshift memorial in the grass where the man died.
They look down at the plastic flowers, the notes from the young man’s friends and the unopened cans of soda pop and beer — probably the things he liked, Carrie explains.
There’s a blood-stained T-shirt.
It’s time for dinner. The kids walk up the street, heading to their aunt’s house. Their voices are excited as they talk about what they want to be for Halloween.
v v v
The moon is full.
Patchi and Babe stand outside the Jumping Eagle Inn, wearing coats as they make hits. The nights are growing cold.
It’s been bad here lately, Babe says. More fights than usual. Yesterday, a young man named J.J. started swinging a bat at people. They turned it on him and now he’s in the hospital with a cracked skull.
There’s a new kind of beer in town, he says. One of the trucks started bringing it in last week. It’s making things really crazy.
Its alcohol content is 10 percent — stronger even than Camo.
“It’s a black can with just these green eyes on it. Whew. It’s kind of spooky. Like it’s watching you.”
He shudders.
“It’s called Evil Eye,” he says, lowering his voice. “And it’s going to kill a lot of Lakota people up here.”
Post Your Comment
Standards and RulesYour posted comment will appear after it has been approved.
Frequently asked questions about story commenting.