Jon Lurie

Canoeing with Jose


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was impressed with the piece. José was writing in the language of hip-hop. He had a clear sense of intended audience. And he was good with metaphor.

      There were some glaring factual errors that I hoped to take up with him, but in the meantime, the verbal battery went on. “You gotsta have street cred ta fuck with my shit. Man, they’d tear your punk ass up on the mothafuckin’ block.”

      “You little bitch,” I interjected. “I was listening to rap music while you were still shitting your diapers.” I was genuinely irritated, but I was also taking a calculated risk. When I lived on the Rosebud Reservation I had worked part-time as a substitute teacher, and I quickly learned that one way to win the respect of a streetwise teen was to get in his face.

      Occasionally, though, the strategy backfired.

      José wasn’t laughing. He jumped out of his chair and stood over me, butterfly knife resting at his hip. “You calling me a little bitch?’

      “That’s right,” I said. “Professionals understand that editing is part of the business.”

      “You little bitch,” José hissed back at me. He put his hands on a long aluminum cabinet that stood against the wall by the door, then lowered his head and went silent.

      The sudden hush worried me, and I took a more conciliatory tack.

      “Come over here and sit down,” I said. “Let me show you how a few small changes could improve your article.” I scrolled down a page on the iBook. “In the final paragraph, where you say Ice-T was in NWA? He was never in NWA. You must have been thinking of Ice Cube.”

      José pushed off the cabinet and clapped like a boxer doing push-ups.

      “And here, where you list the names of the rappers who have been murdered: Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, and Biggie Smalls? That’s not right. It’s true they were murdered, but Biggie Smalls and Notorious B.I.G. were the same guy.”

      José’s cheeks went scarlet, and he squealed in falsetto, “Whaaat?”

      “Fact checking–”

      “Whaaat?” he sang out again, then bounced his backside off the aluminum cabinet. It rocked against the wall and tilted forward. The doors swung open and office supplies crashed to the floor.

      “What the fuck,” José yelped, dancing out of the way. He tripped on a cardboard box, stumbled over a chair, and fell to the floor, surrounded by ink pads, manila envelopes, and computer cords.

      He ignored my help, pushed himself to his knees, and rifled through the debris.

      His knife was missing, replaced in his right hand by a long eagle-feather ink stamp he had uncovered among the office supplies. A group project from days gone by, the stamp was made from a rectangle of rough-edged steel. I saw beside it a shallow ink pad encased in tin.

      “Let’s do those changes you came up with, dawg. But hit me with this first.” José rubbed the rectangular stamp in black ink and handed it to me.

      “Hit me!” He slapped his sinewy left shoulder, flexing. “Do it!”

      I took a breath and jabbed the stamp home. When I pulled back, an eagle-feather tattoo appeared near the top of José’s shoulder.

      “Now you, dawg,” he giggled, smothering the stamp in ink.

      I rolled up my sleeve and flexed.

      José took three giant steps backward. “Hang on. I’m gonna do this.”

      He ran at me, the stamp cocked above his head, and brought it down on my shoulder, the sharp corner piercing my flesh.

      I doubled over in pain. “What the hell!”

      I pulled tentatively at the gash on my shoulder. My eagle feather was smeared, the black ink mingling with bright blood. It hurt, but I also felt relief as a red stream wound down my arm.

      José beamed at his handiwork, and after a second of hesitation, we laughed together like maniacs.

       FORT SNELLING SPECTERS

      In the spring of 2006, several years after my initial encounter with José, I was in a very bad way. I had recently lost my wife of 13 years to a divorce, a young friend to brain cancer, and my beloved Maman to the inevitable march of time. The sick cinema in my head played a continuous loop of rage and self-pity. I had begun crying late the previous year, and I couldn’t stop.

      I was ashamed that my four kids had to see me in such a wretched state, but even as I resolved to get a grip—seeing therapists, exhausting friendships, and self-medicating—I remained prisoner to a vicious depression. And when panic attacked late at night, I often called José, who had become a trusted friend.

      “Bro,” I would groan, feigning a laugh, “I’m mentally ill.”

      Our roles had reversed. In the early stages of our friendship, I had fielded the late-night calls. José called me from a juvenile detention center after he was arrested for stealing cars. He called to ask if he could borrow money when his grandmother’s supply of heating oil was cut off in the winter, and when he needed to be bailed out of jail after smashing a liquor bottle over the head of his mother’s abusive boyfriend. And he called when he was expelled from high school for engaging in gang activity.

      “You’re not mentally ill,” José would reply. “If you were, you wouldn’t be able to laugh about it.”

      Regardless of the wisdom of this assertion, I couldn’t overcome the crippling pain that wretched spring. And then one night I received a phone call around 3:00 a.m.

      I didn’t get the details immediately—José was frantic, talking a mile a minute—but later I put together what had happened. José had been at Regions Hospital, where his girlfriend, Joan, was giving birth. Joan is Anishinaabe, and José is Lakota and Puerto Rican. When the baby was born black, José was the last person in the room to realize he couldn’t possibly be the father. After he cut the umbilical cord, a nurse grabbed his wrist and snipped off the hospital bracelet. No one in the delivery room had the compassion to stop him as he ran out in a state of shock, determined to murder the crack dealer who had likely impregnated Joan.

      I immediately agreed to take José in. Neither of us slept that first night, but we were out the door by 9:00 a.m. It was a bleak morning in early April, and we drove the labyrinth of one-way streets in downtown Saint Paul, a pair of zombies looking for the Ramsey County Vital Records office.

      José’s grandmother had charged him with filing a series of documents enjoining their Mahpiya Zi (Yellow Cloud) clan to a lawsuit related to the US-Dakota War of 1862. There were casino fortunes at stake for Dakota people who could prove their ancestors’ loyalty to the United States during the war. And so a century and a half after the Dakota were rounded up by Colonel Henry Sibley’s army, imprisoned at Fort Snelling, loaded onto Mississippi steamboats in Saint Paul, and forcibly exiled from Minnesota, José had until midnight to register a claim.

      Contrary to the gist of the documents, however, José’s great-grandfather could hardly be called a loyalist. In fact, he was among the 38 Dakota men hanged along the banks of the Minnesota River for defending his people. José knew his family’s claim to loyalty was fraudulent and he was disgusted by it. But he also understood their desire for reparations. After all, the Dakota had been treated unjustly for generations.

      “My great-grandfather was convicted of killing white settlers, so hell no, we ain’t loyal. I’d rather have my history than some bullshit casino money. But the rest of the family don’t give a fuck,” he sniffed.

      I pulled to the curb outside the building that housed the Vital Records office. José stepped out of the car and blazed a Cool Menthol in the raw morning air. He looked at me through the window opening. “I’m gonna kill that fucking whore and that nigger crackhead.”

      I was used to José throwing the term “nigga” around. Where