The Birthing Tree

On a bone-chilling day in February, over a table of textbooks and potato chips, Susan and I, despite me being only twelve years old, decided we were going to go to college together and studied more than we ever had, with the realities of impending adulthood still a few years away. Susan had become obsessed with the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, so there was no room in her future for men—“just yet,” she said. So, in our conversations about the future, I left John out.

In my mind, he was there, but around the kitchen table doing homework and when we were at school sitting on the bleachers eating lunch, I didn’t mention him. Susan and I had become friends thanks to her mother, who occasionally stopped by our house after dark to buy tea to help with something Kiju called “women’s troubles.” Susan came with her once, just after we’d started elementary school. She was my first friend who wasn’t either from the few small houses around ours or one of the ones who came with their parents in the fall.

An adult would never have been so bold, and this is one of the things I still admire in children, their unchecked curiosity. Susan’s mother lowered her voice and glanced over her shoulder, trying to listen in on the conversation, so I lowered my voice too. Susan’s mother turned and walked quickly toward us.

She took Susan by the hand and escorted her out the door, thanking Kiju and chastising Susan for asking questions she had no business asking. If Susan felt that me being Indian and fatherless were reasons not to be friends with me, she never said so. When we started school a few weeks later, she sat beside me, and we quickly became inseparable.

Mom said that he was as happy as a clam.” This, to Susan, meant we shared something. What that was, I was never really sure, but it made us friends. Susan had long, dark hair and skin darker than mine.

In our little part of the world, having dark skin from her Greek family was mysterious and interesting. Indian dark and African dark were a different story altogether, seeming to hold something more sinister. I still wandered among the pickers, looking for new faces, for anyone who might resemble me, no matter how vaguely.