used on the streets the same way a middle-class white kid might say dude, buddy, or homeboy. When José finished the word with the hard r in this case, however, I knew it meant something else altogether. This was racial, hateful, and ugly.
I made a feeble attempt to admonish him: “The color of his skin had nothing to do with it.” But the words sounded absurd in the face of his rage, and José turned away dismissively.
Just two weeks before the demoralizing revelation in the maternity ward, José had asked me to curtail the late-night calls for help. “Look,” he murmured with gentle authority during one of the last such exchanges, “we’re winding down around here. Just got the boy to bed, and I have to work in the morning.” Joan and her first child had moved into José’s basement apartment in Henry Sibley Manor, the notorious housing projects off West 7th Street in Saint Paul. He was planning to marry her and adopt the two-year-old as his son.
José emerged from the Vital Records office minutes later, gripping his birth certificate. He slumped onto the passenger seat and folded the paper, then placed it inside an envelope containing his family members’ tribal documents and a blank family tree.
We drove to a taqueria and ordered burritos. I filled in the empty branches on the family tree while José scratched his head and recalled what he knew of his family’s story.
His grandparents, his mother, and her five sisters were from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. José spent his early years in Chicago, where the family had settled in the early seventies as part of a government relocation program. His father was a Puerto Rican gang member, a Dragon Disciple, who died from a cocaine overdose when José was 15 years old, the same year I met him at The Circle.
José’s mother met his father on the streets of Chicago’s West Side. José learned at a very young age not to mess with her. “My mom used to do armed robberies for the Latin Queens,” he once told me. “She was homicidal, bro.” Unlike many of his cousins, who endured painful initiations as teens, José was born into gang life.
In the early eighties, José’s family migrated north to Saint Paul in an effort to escape the violence that was spiraling out of control in Chicago. It was a time when many men of his father’s generation were claimed by violence, drugs, alcohol, and the criminal justice system.
By the time he was a freshman in high school, José was doing his best to feed his six brothers and sisters. He bought his first eight-ball of crack (3.5 grams) at 14, and started selling it on the streets of Saint Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, which was known in those days as Cracktown.
José squirted red sauce from packets onto his tortilla, then switched the subject from his family history to a budding scheme to murder Joan and Sonic. I assumed he meant it, and intended to keep him under wing until his sleep-deprived delirium subsided. Grinding his teeth and gazing out at the cars passing on Snelling Avenue, he added, “I think I’m going to fucking explode if I don’t cry. I haven’t been able to since my dad died. I just wish I could cry.”
I shuttled José to my bank to get his documents notarized, then across town to the post office at the airport. I drove slowly and took the long way, down Shepherd Road, along the high bluffs of the Mississippi River Gorge, and across the bridge connecting Saint Paul to Minneapolis at Historic Fort Snelling, a US Army post originally constructed in the 1830s. As we crossed the bridge, I looked down to the glistening intersection of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers at Pike Island, the very spot where Eric Sevareid and Walter Port had set out on their epic journey to Hudson Bay on June 17, 1930. This area, known to the Dakota as Bdote, is a sacred site, the setting for one of their creation stories.
I had long thought of that opening in the forest canopy as a secret passageway out of my life. Since discovering Canoeing with the Cree in college, I had dreamed of replicating the 2250-mile route. As they often did when I drove across that span, the specters of Sevareid and Port swung their 18-foot canvas canoe around the tip of Pike Island and headed into the languorous current of the Minnesota River. I imagined myself down there with them now, in the stern of the Sans Souci, paddling so hard the ache began to drain from my chest.
Lost in this reverie, I almost veered off the bridge. José barely flinched, raising an eyebrow under the cocked rim of his black-on-black Minnesota Twins cap.
I had never mentioned Sevareid and Port’s journey to José. I suppose I didn’t think he would be interested in the exploits of a couple of white kids. Nor did I see him as the kind of guy who would undertake a canoe expedition. And in any case, it all seemed trivial compared to what he was going through.
I called José’s attention to the river bottoms beneath Fort Snelling, pointing out the swamp that once contained a concentration camp where more than 1700 of his Dakota ancestors—men, women, and children—spent the miserable winter of 1862–1863. Over the course of that one harsh season, some 300 Dakota died from malnutrition, disease, and exposure.
It had always bothered me that this ghastly chapter in Minnesota’s history is not noted in Sevareid’s account, even though he and Port launched their expedition from that blood-stained plot beneath Fort Snelling only a few decades after the atrocities took place. Now, José seemed astounded to learn that his people’s nightmare had taken place in the shadow of the historic fort he had visited on school field trips.
“I ain’t gonna lie, dawg,” he said earnestly, “that’s some fucked-up shit.”
Later that day, around midnight, fatigue overtook rage. José’s eyes rolled like greased marbles under swollen lids as we sat in the living room of my apartment. My kids were with their mother that night, freeing me to smoke weed while he downed Coronas.
Eventually I showed José to my bedroom, gave him one of my antianxiety pills, and demanded the Chinese fighting knives he carried in his waistband.
He handed them over reluctantly.
“Gotsta have those knives, bro,” he said, following me into the kitchen. “I ain’t about to walk the streets without them.”
When I questioned his need to bring the weapons to bed, he replied flatly, “Sometimes I gotsta back some motherfuckers off.”
I assured him I would double-check the locks, and provide protection while he slept. He hovered nearby as I set the ornate chrome blades in the cupboard above the sink. Then we both crashed.
I awoke on the couch just before dawn. I lay listening to the thump of my heart, feeling my blood pulse like acid through my body. I flipped on the light in the bathroom. My cheeks were lined and my eyes subsumed in puffy sockets. In the past four months I had lost 25 pounds, and I looked as if I had aged five years.
I lay back down and stayed there, excruciatingly aware of the crescent moon slicing the jagged rooftops across the street until sunrise. It was then that I heard José tiptoe down the stairs. He paused at the edge of the couch, seemingly surprised to find my eyes open. He complained that he hadn’t slept, then went to the kitchen cupboard, jammed the Chinese fighting knives into the waistband of his jeans, and headed for the front door.
I knew José was lying when he claimed he was “funna bus it home, back to the crib to get a clean ’fit.” Even after a terrible night, his Enyce shirt was nicely pressed, and his jeans still held the pleats he had ironed in the day before.
I insisted on driving him home.
As we glided silently to Sibley Manor, it was increasingly clear to me that José was about to make a life-altering mistake. When we arrived outside his building, he tried to slip away quickly. “Alright then, dawg,” he said, pulling the door handle.
“Are you coming back?” I asked.
He pulled his leg inside, clicked the door shut, and spoke with surprising directness. “The people I’m from, we use violence to settle things. It’s just the way it is. What we know.”
I threw his logic back at him. “You’re not crazy if you know you’re crazy. You don’t have to do that. You can forgive Joan.”
José paused, then admitted