Free That Takes Ovaries! by Rivka Solomon Page A

tried-and-true “Rebecca.” Still, some of the sweetest moments for me are when I overhear my son calling me his “mom” to one of his friends or teachers. This act of naming makes it clear, as nothing else could, that Askia accepts and knows me unconditionally as one of his parents, one of the people who is there for him 24/7, no matter what. Feeling his confidence in me has helped me realize that despite my parents’ divorce and our frequent moves, I always knew they were there for me, too. And so, in parenting, I have finally healed some lingering resentment about my own unsettled childhood.
    Now that he’s eleven, Askia doesn’t always need to hear a story at night, but we still love to read together. Now we just have separate books! We lie in his moms’ big bed, me reading the
New Yorker
and him reading
Harry Potter.
If it’s close to bed-time, after a few minutes I can see the sleep entering his body; his breathing slows down and the book falls out of his hands. Before he falls too deep, I wake him up and walk him to his own bed for a tuck-in. After he is under the covers, I take his glasses off and kiss his forehead goodnight. I can’t help but be amazed that this beautiful child, so present, so right in front of me, is my own.
    rebecca walker ( www.rebeccawalker.com ) frequently speaks on college campuses about Third Wave feminism and multiracial identity. Her books include
To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism
(Anchor Books) and a memoir,
Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
(Riverhead Books). Once in a while, after Askia dozes off, Rebecca has been known to put down the
New Yorker
and read
Harry Potter
late into the night.

Returning Home

wilma mankiller
    In the mid-1970s, my two daughters, Felicia and Gina, and I were living in East Oakland, California. At the time I was working at the Native American Youth Center. We could not afford our own place, so we shared a house with another indigenous woman and her child. It was a tough neighborhood. When Felicia’s best friend, an eleven-year-old boy, killed himself, I knew it was time to return to my family land in Oklahoma.
    I had left my homeland in 1956, when I was ten. That was when my family experienced the pain of the United States government relocation. Our poverty had prompted the move. I recall hearing at that time that the relocation program was being offered as a wonderful opportunity for Indian families to get great jobs, obtain good educations for their kids, and, once and for all, leave poverty behind. In truth, the program gave the government the perfect chance to take Indian people away from their culture and land. The government methods had softened since the nineteenth century, but the end result was the same for native people. Instead of guns and bayonets, the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs used promotional brochures showing staged photographs of smiling Indians in “happy homes” in the big cities.
    I never liked the idea of our moving away. I can still remember hiding in a bedroom in our house, listening while my father, mother, and oldest brother talked in the adjoining room about the benefits and drawbacks of relocating our family. Finally, my parents chose San Francisco.
    Neon lights, flashily dressed prostitutes, broken glass on the streets, people sleeping in doorways, hard-faced men wandering around. The noises of the city, especially at night, were bewildering. We had left behind the sounds of roosters, dogs, coyotes, bobcats, owls, and crickets moving through the woods. Now we heard traffic. The police and ambulance sirens were the worst. That very first night in the big city, we were all huddledunder the covers. We had never heard sirens before. I thought it was some sort of wild creature screaming.
    The overt discrimination we encountered is what got to me the most. It became obvious that ethnic intolerance was a fact of life in California, even in the urbane and