A Thousand Moons

The music of birds. I guess everything comes from that, the dances of simple country folk, the old songs that both cure and trouble the hearts of listeners.

I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me.

my mother had shown me how to shuck off fear and have the courage of a thousand moons.

You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.

We were nothing to them. I think now of the great value we put on what we were and I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind.

It had more darkness in it than any daylight could unpick.

John Cole, the keel of my boat. Thomas the oars and the sails.

Work like that drives nearly every other thought away and there was the usual strange solace of numbers in spite of all.

It was all the one. Where John Cole abided, there was to be found Thomas with his simple heart. Their love was the first commandment of my world - Thou shalt hope to love like them. We have all to meet many souls and hearts along the way - we are obliged to - we must pray we can encounter one or two Thomases and John Coles on that journey. Then we can say life was worth the living and love was worth the gamble.

guess I had no choice in the matter. Once your mother is taken from you you can’t ever catch up with her again. You can’t cry out ‘Wait for me’ when the winds turn cold under a wolf moon and she has walked far ahead of you across the grasses searching for wood.

Else what was happening was, I was going to be beaten up every time I was in town. It was English kept me from that. Some straggly farmhand might look at you and see the dark skin and the black hair and think that gave him a right to knock you down and kick you. No one saying boo to him for that. No sheriff or deputy neither.

Whitemen in the main just see slaves and Indians. They don’t see the single souls. How all are emperors to those that love them.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Life, Liberty.

What the deer feels in the second she sees the hunter with his gun I seemed to feel for long stretches of hours and days. I was poised for flight like any creature might be but where I was to flee I didn’t know.

You have to try to shore up the levee when the flood races down. Even with your bare hands.

She was trying to wash the violence off of him.

A human person finds a little medicine in another’s sadness. So I found. But it’s not so strange because the world is mysterious anyhow.

In there, she said, humanity was a book without a cover.

But we only have one path across the mire of remembrance in general.

Trouble always comes and no use wishing it didn’t. Thing is, to get through it – and out the other side. If there is another side.

You have got to remember how dangerous the world is and that here is a mighty patch of danger and you have got to live through it.

Then his face opened again like that spot in the woods touched suddenly by stray sunlight.

Sometimes we are so foolish in our thoughts that even fools would baulk at what we are thinking.

No kindness and no cruelty in white-eye America was ever done without a piece of paper somewhere tipped in. Even an Indian girl like me bobbed up to look like a clean-faced boy knew that. All my people had been killed clean to the letter of the law, I did not doubt. Not our law, but our law was just words on the wind.

He smiled at me with his barn-wide smile. I knew he didn’t think I was a cur of an Indian, not at all. He knew what I was.

It wasn’t a crime to beat an Indian, not at all.

If you can own nothing, he owned it.