I: Grandmother Undantva (Oona) Whitekiller

A History of My Mother in Three Parts.
Part I: Earlier Generations

by Tommy George

My Grandmother Oona at age 18, circa 1913

I have grandparents whom I never met, nor even heard of until I was in my 40's. The revelation came in the early 1990's, when my mother, in the spirit of the times, loosened up about the particulars of her mixed-race heritage. Mom had been seen as a purely white individual for half a century by then. It took a bit of doing, but the hastened process of documentation caused by World War II pushed her to passing, and she looked white. She certainly had very few happy memories of her Cherokee childhood.

Treasure Trove of Toilette Reading Rolled Up

Click Upon the Picture for a Preview Manuscript Copy of Millennial Humours, an anthology of many of the writers you encounter at "Shut Up and Say Something." Great bathroom reading!

The Two-Legged Creature Most Feared by Black Cats

by Tommy George

Friday, June 13, 2020. I long tried to make friends with a big black tom-cat that roams the farm town of Allison, Iowa. The animal and I never did share anything beyond a single, brief transaction, the outcome of which guarantees that our friendship now shall never be. Superstition has sprung up between me and Big Black Tom like prison walls that will not come tumbling down any time soon. Any hope of this was killed by the accidental connection between us: exchanged glimpses of the soul that lasted less than a second, but carved dangerous pits in both our minds.

Soulmate or Cellmate?

by Tommy George

Waverly, Iowa. New Years Eve, 2020.  Like most wishes flowing from the romantic heart, the soulmate is yet another emotional delusion that arises when orgasmic sex mixes it up with cool vanity and declares it has found something larger than love or a single life.

Fatherless Fields

by Tommy George

Do not remove the ancient landmark, nor enter the fields of the fatherless: For their Redeemer is mighty; He will plead their cause against you. Proverbs 23:10-11

In fatherless fields, men struggle for their reason
If winnowed there by birth or circumstance
To dwell among the chaff a barren season
Perhaps to die, perhaps to kill a man.

Each soul must learn patience in fatherless fields:
In its words, no cause of action to belie;
in demeanor, no blunted ax to grind,
no apostasy from the wonted God
Who serves every just cause in its due time.

II. Sula Whitekiller Enters the World in 1915

by Tommy George

Part II. A History of My Mother in Three Parts. 

Left to her own devices, Grandmother Oona elected to remain living alone in the old wooden house, the walls of which exuded salt inside the home. When the wind blew, the outside world turned to a turbulent moonscape, tiny grains stinging Crudestruck for a menial's wage. The marooned Cherokee maiden by her final teenage year had become an accomplished pianist with mind and fine hands to match, consumed by the passionate dexterity required by the music of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin, great European composers.

 

She sometimes lamented of her dark skin tone, for the world was far larger than her young experience, and filled with conflicting words and meanings, stated intent and far different experience. The one principle she had avowed unequivocally was to remain chaste--and not die of rotten sex gone into the blood and the brain, and then blown out the ears, as had been her mother's end, so piteously weeping blood. The solitary maiden resisted for months the animals pawings at her door--young red men, not yet braves but clearly not boys--pleading to be let into her house. 

III. Sula Whitekiller Overcomes Racism the Old-Fashioned Way: Passing

Part III. A History of My Mother in Three Parts. 

By Tommy George

8-year-old Sula Whitekiller

Even as a child, my mixed race mother felt herself a dislocated person--she was half Cherokee, half Irish, but looked lily white. Early on, she vowed to remake her world. It would require silence and cunning for the child Sula Whitekiller to resist the hopelessness overtaking Native Americans of the 1920's. She was born on the Cherokee settlement land of her forebearers and wanted nothing more than to be a different person, somewhere else. Her grandmother (my great-grandmother) had managed to get away from the Cherokee settlement by joining up with a Wild West show, but she returned after a dissolute decade of bad acting to make an even worse exit from life, her teeth turned black and her person suffering from tertiary syphilis at the age of 40.

My mom's extended history says something about the mutability of race and caste, poverty and power, and their relation to human will. It also supports an idea I always detested, that everybody is where they are supposed to be at any given time. By extension, that means that you and I may yet have miles to go before ending up to our necks in some predestined mess, either to overcome and triumph or let ourselves get sucked under and die. Worse, it may take a lifetime of horrific accidence to get there.