Reservation Cowboy
A Lakota boy’s rite of passage in South Dakota
Which one are you, cowboy or Indian?
Any man can be a cowboy. But first you have to become a man.
The day is the fourth of July, Independence Day to some. “Nope,” Mom clarifies, “Firecracker Day.” On this Firecracker Day, the boy is sat in the kitchen in the morning, messing with his mom as she fits her cowboy hat to her head.
“This is my Fourth of July shirt,” Mom boasts, tugging the bottom corners of a yellow tee to show the face of a Native American man and his caption: “I loved America before it was called America.” Asked who the old man on the shirt is, the mother and son laugh to each other and mutter, “some ole Indun.” Then they slip on their cowboy boots and load their horses in the trailer, pack the saddles and halters.
For three years the boy hasn’t rodeoed, a sad span which sums to almost a quarter of his life. This national holiday may be just another day to the boy — albeit one in which he can light off his fireworks — but it’s actually more remarkable than that. He’s back …
Passengers
The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
always a slow alphabet of rain
speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
always these definite jails of light in the sky
at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
and a woman's turning—her languid flight of hair
traveling through frame after frame of memory
where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
to open its grace and incredible harm
over my life, and I will never die.
The Bunker
How Bibb County, Alabama, became home to one of the most horrifying accusations of child abuse in American history.
225 charges of rape, sodomy, human trafficking, and kidnapping have already been filed; as many as 28 perpetrators may be eventually be tried for sexually abusing children as young as 3.
But what really happened?
It happened in a forgotten place. The thick fog of a mid-August morning lingered atop the pines, drawing moisture from the tributaries feeding the Cahaba River as I turned onto Main Street from Bibb County Highway 1, the blue highway. Heading north towards the towns of Brent and Centreville, trees gave way to a Piggly Wiggly and a secondhand store just before the mayor’s office and Brent Baptist Church, where the town’s older, wealthier white residents worship. Behind the church, off Main Street, a side street leads to the Bibb Correctional Facility, inmate population 1,800.
Plantation Road is the main artery through Brent’s black neighborhood, which is labelled Zulu on maps but among locals is called “Zuzu.” The homes in Zuzu were built to house workers for the W.E. Belcher Lumber Company, which processed long and shortleaf pine at its mill on Plantation Road. The mill was the town’s largest …
