Virginia

My heart is happiest in the desert. The beautiful landscape is just the beginning of the reasoning behind my love affair. The majesty of a Saguaro cactus and the intoxicating smell of sage in the rain also make the short list. When I got back to the desert after spending a year in the tropical weather of southern China, the dry heat seemed to wrap itself around me like a favorite

 broken-in jacket. My love of the desert goes generations deep. We are from here. According to Navajo legends, we were created here. According to my parents, I literally was created here. Gross. While I was in China, I didn’t just miss cacti and green chile. I missed my roots. I missed the force that pulls me deep into the earth- the one that allows me to fly through the clouds without floating into orbit. And I was hit with the sickening realization that I didn’t know my roots as intimately as I wanted to. I hadn’t fully explored the part of me that is buried deep under layers of sand and rich clay. So I did something about it. My college roommate, Natalie and I made a drive from Phoenix to Kayenta, Arizona, a small town in the heart of the Navajo Reservation. There, we met my parents and Virginia, my dad’s aunt. I had with me a notebook, a pen, and a drive to learn as much as I could about Blackwater history. Here is Virginia’s story.

Our small café table was filled to capacity and littered with crumpled, empty packets of sugar and Sweet n’ Low. Five coffee cups left trails of steam as we lifted them to our lips in-between questions and answers. Spirits were high. This was the first time I had seen my father since Christmas the previous year. It was the first time I’d seen my mother since our Beijing adventure a month prior. And it was the first time I’d seen Virginia since I was a little girl. Virginia had no problem talking about her life. Like my dad, she does

The man, the myth, the legend

not harbor the common Navajo trait of introversion. Stories flowed out of her- a babbling creek of precious information that I scribbled down vigorously in my burlap journal.

“looks like dad” I noted. As I studied them, I noticed that they have the same face shape and those same mean brows that lift high as they put hot coffee delicately to their lips. Virginia is my grandfather’s sister. She is somewhere around the age of 70 and has short salt and pepper curls on her head and beautiful Navajo turquoise jewelry adorning her neck, wrists, and fingers. She is quick to laugh and before she says something funny, she has an ornery look on her face, as if she holds an important secret that she may or may not disclose. Her story began in a hogan (the octagon-shaped traditional Navajo dwelling that always faces east, toward the gods) in Utah. Virginia is the youngest of 7 siblings, one of which died at birth. She never knew her father and her mother died when Virginia was just 4 years old. For days before her death, Virginia's mother had been complaining of a pain in the back of her neck, but the nearest hospital was in Flagstaff, hours away by horse. One day the pain was terrible, and young Virginia was sent to play outside. When she came back in, her mother was unconscious on the floor.

“Get up, mom! Get up!” Virginia cried. But she didn’t get up. When Virginia’s older sisters arrived, they took her away from her mother’s body and transported her to Flagstaff. Virginia cried every day and watched the sun. Her mother always came home when the sun was at a certain spot in the sky. The sun rose and fell, but her mother didn’t come. Virginia’s sisters didn’t tell her that her mother had died because they thought that she was too young to understand. As Virginia watched the sun in Flagstaff, her sisters were busy closing up the hogan in Utah. It is Navajo tradition to abandon a hogan where someone has left this world for the next. The body stays inside and nobody is ever to go there again. Not long after Virginia’s mother died,

my desert

she started seeing shadows on the walls. Her mother’s unrest, she thought. She believed that the devil came to sit on her bed each night. She would throw something at the darkness and it would disappear. This was a very unbalanced time for the family of orphans.

Eventually, Virginia was sent to the Chemewa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. She stayed there for five years, only going back to the Navajo Reservation when it was absolutely necessary. After five years at the boarding school, she was sent to work at a hospital in Tacoma, Washington for two years. There, she learned to cook, and soon took a job in Colorado Spring, CO at a psychiatric hospital. She didn’t like it there. The patients who weren’t allowed to use silverware or have Styrofoam on their meal trays frightened her. Virginia bounced around to various jobs including a stint in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She loved it there. Currently, she lives back at home in Kayenta, Arizona. She spends her time attending Christian revivals and taking care of her oldest living sister, Betti. Despite, or possibly because of, the rocky beginning to Virginia’s life, she has become a strong, spunky, and independent woman.

After speaking to Virginia for over an hour, we left the café with excitement in our bellies. I had gold in my notebook and caffeine in my system. Virginia jumped into the red Subaru with my parents and my dog, Kai. Natalie and I jumped back into her 4Runner. We got back on the main road and took a left, pointing ourselves north toward Utah. As much as I loved hearing Virginia’s perspective, she is not who I came for. Virginia was about to play a very important role- the role of a translator for Betti, another one of my father’s aunts. She is a 93-year-old weaver who only speaks Navajo and lives deep on the ‘rural rez’ near Douglas Mesa, Utah. As we drove, my excitement built. Finally, I saw a clear sign that my life was on the right track:

“Welcome to Utah”

to be continued...