COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, September 23, 2007 7:00 pm
PINE RIDGE, S.D. — She wore her only shoes, blue flip-flops, as she walked north on South Dakota 28.
She pushed her baby in his stroller. That and his favorite blanket were all she took when she left.
Where are you going?
For a walk, 17-year-old Toya Chase Alone remembers telling her boyfriend’s cousin.
She didn’t say she was walking away from Wounded Knee.
It was a hot August day. A few cars slowed, and the drivers looked over, as if they might offer a ride. But they moved on.
That’s OK, Toya remembers telling herself.
Her legs are strong. They can walk the six miles to Manderson and the three miles beyond, then up a rutted dirt lane to Grandma’s house. They can walk away from her boyfriend and his mother and all the drinking and fighting.
They can lead her to a better life.
She’s going to be a pediatrician. She’s going to get off the rez and go to med school and maybe even come back some day to this rugged valley of her ancestors.
She’s going to help kids here.
Moo! Moo!
She remembers her baby pointing at cows grazing in a field. She stopped the stroller and smiled down at Christopher James, more plump and healthy than any baby she’s seen on this reservation. He just had his first birthday.
Her heart pumped. Her lungs filled with air.
The eyes in the cars shouldn’t waste any pity on them.
Many babies she sees around here are pitiful. Many mothers drink and do drugs, even when they’re pregnant. A cousin has two deformed babies. One, a few months older than her Christopher James, can’t sit up. That cousin is happy because now she has two government disability checks coming in each month.
Toya pushed the stroller past abandoned cars and pickups, houses and trailers with broken windows. Stray dogs. Eight “why die?” signs — reminders along the road to mark spots where people died in car crashes.
She’s going to take it step by step: go back to high school because a high school diploma seems better than a GED, join the Job Corps, go to college and med school.
She got pregnant at 15 and dropped out of Pine Ridge High. She’d been living with her boyfriend, Christopher’s father, since, mostly with his people back in Wounded Knee.
I’m not going to ask you for help because I know you’re not going to help me. I’m just going to have to do it on my own.
He didn’t believe it. He left to sell crafts to tourists at the Wounded Knee monument — and much of the money will go to drinking binges with his mother and friends.
That’s why she got out the stroller.
She used to be able to tell him any secret. He used to chop wood when they were cold, hitch rides to town to buy diapers and supplies. He used to tell his people to not smoke and drink around the baby. Then, over time, even he started to do it. It’s like he’s giving up at 19.
Her baby deserves better. She had a birthday party for him just a few days before she walked away.
They’re going to be fine. They’ve taken the first step. And the second. And the 100th.
In a few months, her top teeth, jammed into her gums after a fight with her boyfriend’s mom, will be strong enough to eat regular food again. The wires will come off.
Toya’s thoughts drifted back to the fight. It happened when Christopher was 5 months old.
He has no crib — her boyfriend’s aunty hocked it for beer money. He’s sleeping with her and his dad, who’d been drinking with his mom again.
The boyfriend’s mom flops on the bed. Toya tells her to look out for the baby. His mom swings at her.
The punch misses and lands on the baby.
The boyfriend pulls her off his mom.
The mom kicks her so hard she falls into the metal frame of the bed, teeth-first.
Her thoughts drifted back to the fight she had with her boyfriend just that morning.
Can’t you change? People have to change. They can’t do this all their life — they can’t do nothing forever.
People tell Toya she has great warriors in her past, people with good medicine — Crazy Horse was one, they tell her. They tell her she’s the great-great-granddaughter of Black Elk, the Lakota holy man.
The land she walked through that August day, the rugged hills and high white buttes along Wounded Knee Creek, is the land where Black Elk once lived, maybe the most beautiful land on the rez. They tell her a Nebraska writer found Black Elk here and took down his vision in a book.
She hadn’t read it.
She wasn’t thinking of Black Elk as she walked through Manderson, past more homes with broken windows, past the little white church on the north edge of town, St. Agnes Catholic Church, where Black Elk was a catechist, past the cemetery on the hill where he’s buried.
She was thinking of another Black Elk, one who’s buried there, too, in a corner.
Mikyela Black Elk.
Her mom died when Toya was 5, in a car crash on Nebraska 87 between Rushville and Whiteclay. She had gone to buy beer. She was the most sober one so she drove, even though she didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.
Toya doesn’t remember much, but she remembers her smiling a lot. She remembers her mom loving her and her brother a lot. She remembers her leaving them alone to go drink.
She’ll always take care of her baby. And when she’s old, he can take care of her.
Farther up Highway 28, Christopher pointed at squirrels and horses and a rabbit.
She didn’t drink when she was pregnant. But she did after he was born. He started acting funny — acting dizzy, falling when he tried to walk.
She realized he was getting drunk, too, on breast milk.
She stopped.
She’s been praying a lot more than usual to her mom.
What should I do?
She has her answer now, she’s sure. She must protect him, be a good mom.
She must keep walking.