Ribbons and Whiskey

Red.

The blood was still wet on her thighs when they took her newborn son because “those redskin deadbeats don’t know how to raise children”. She didn’t even get to hold him.

Then they wrapped him in white linen and gave him to the colonizers who couldn’t make their own babies, because nothing is more exotic than an indigenous person in their own country.

White.

The christening gown he wore when they baptized him, the first of many steps they would take to ensure his cultural identity would never be influenced by the people he came from.

Later, they taught him that you always want to be the cowboy when you play Cowboys and Indians, but none of the other kids would let him. He wasn’t white enough. He learned to despise his brown skin.

Brown.

His eyes, the eyes that look just like hers. Not the blue of his white parents’ eyes. Not green eyes like the pretty blonde girl who laughed at him when he asked her to the school dance.

His eyes were the red-brown of the sun-baked earth on the reservation where his true mother cried salted tears every night. Tears that stained the beat-up old mattress that lay on the floor of the beat-up old yellow schoolbus she called home.

Yellow.

The cheap whiskey in the plastic bottle that he became so familiar with when he realized he’d been thrust into a world that had no place for him.

He had no identity outside the one that had been manufactured for him, and it fit like a pair of shoes that were four sizes too small. He took a sip for every second of every minute that he felt alone.

Black.

The tear-streaked ashes on her cheeks and the shorn hair on the dirt outside the door of her yellow shoolbus home. They’d returned her stolen son upon his death, because his colonizer parents finally realized they hadn’t done him any favors by killing the Indian inside him.

She let her black tears flow freely when she finally held him for the first time. She stroked his black hair and sang him a song about blue skies. She made him a bed in the red-brown dirt, and laid him to rest in a black ribbon shirt with red, white, and yellow ribbons.