Thrust: A Novel

My great-grandmother used to spit on the floor whenever anyone mentioned the Gold Rush. She said the Nisenan women were brutalized by Johann August Sutter — and then she’d spit on the ground twice, like the two Ts in his name. This man fled his country to avoid jail time, she said. He left his five children behind. He stole fifty thousand acres. He declared our homelands to be his property. He declared our women and children to be his property. We worked ourselves to death building and cooking and cleaning and helping to defend “his land” so that he would not kill us. He interfered with our tribal marriage customs. He took my sister and my cousin and other women to his bed. He liked to fuck women in clusters. He molested me as a girl. He molested my friends too, boys and girls alike. Those who did not want to have sex with him were considered enemies. Those who did not want to work with him were considered enemies. The Sacramento River carried our blood. We were fed leftover wheat bran from wooden troughs. No plates, no utensils. He ate on china. We slept in locked rooms with no beds. He beat us. Some of us he killed. Others he traded with local ranchers. Sold our labor like we were livestock. One year, after a measles epidemic killed most of us on Sutter’s Ranch — she’d spit again — he built a sawmill. Sutter’s Mill is where the Gold Rush started. Of course, we already knew there was gold in the rivers and hills. That’s where it lived and breathed. We didn’t know what they would do with it, with us, with the land. This man’s brutality made a chapter in our story that branched off in many directions, taking our children and ancestors with it. Then she’d stare at the floor where she’d spit, as if something might grow there. My great-grandmother lived to be one hundred years old, but her body was bent with sorrow and rage. Today, the only Nisenan who work here in the Sierra Nevada valley work at low-wage jobs. In the 1950s my father taught us how to stay quiet. He said, Never trust the government. They come and steal children. They did it to my brother. So learn to be quiet or you’ll get killed. My father made a turtle shell rattle on a deer hoof; I have it to this day. My mother made necklaces of abalone shells. My sister has expertise in watertight basket weaving, using redbud, bracken fern, willow. Still, some of the people I know are losing language… My great-grandmother told me that, when we speak or sing or dance, the trees and water and animals understand. I still know some words and songs. I work at a diner as a line cook. My daughter is a scientist. My daughter was just accepted for an internship at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She wants to be an astrophysicist. She says, Dad, gold was forged during a violent burst when two orbiting neutron stars collided. Neutron star mergers account for all of the gold in the universe. I listen to her.

Apple

Cruces 2

What if our labor could help our arms and legs and bodies to understand that our worth might go beyond money? What if we labored together with other bodies toward a single purpose: to build this woman’s body into the sky, so that she could show our secrets to god?

I have never felt homesick. Instead, I feel hope-sick.

Because, you see, her body had other secrets underneath the weight of her. I remember when John Joseph told us that there were Lenape Nation bodies and sacred artifacts on Bedloe and Ellis Islands. Someday, he said, people would dig there and find prehistoric objects — iron, pipes, clay pots, coins — that belonged to his Lenape ancestors. It bothered him, that we labored on top of the bones of his ancestors. Sometimes, when we weren’t working, he just stood and stared at the dirt. It bothered us too, Endora and David and I — we felt like we were desecrating a grave — but we all kept working, to build her on that land, and our labor bound us to one another. After he told us that, though, from time to time some of us whispered tiny prayers toward the dirt.

I first met John Joseph at the boardinghouse, when we both showed up at the front desk looking for a place to stay. The man in charge said he had a room that slept four people, nothing fancy, just solid shelter for laborers. I looked at John Joseph’s hair, black to the middle of his back. He looked at the discolorations on my face. This silent exchange seemed to work like language; we took the room. Endora and David joined us not long after.