Jordan McClements is an educational training specialist at Delaware Technical Community College’s Terry Campus in Dover.
It’s Indigenous Peoples Day on Oct. 12.
Now, imagine that you had survived heroin but not passing. You sat in the brightly lit spectacle, the red and yellow and blue and white lights of the Bojangles you sat in with your aging White grandfather, who you had betrayed. Your grandfather, in his crew cut, still taking care of you, the Indian boy who didn’t understand himself. You woke up every day and didn’t know who you were. You were a different person everywhere you went. Your camouflage, your chameleon control of language and your acting ability outnumbered your peers on and off the stage. You thought of shaving your head to portray a studio executive who is Jewish at Delaware State University for “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.” You passed as White, so you were the studio executive. You lived the role, becoming its skin.
“No wonder you put heroin into your arms,” you thought. You only listened to music with heroin in it. You wanted to see the edge and go beyond your father in every way, not just education.
Well, this is where you threw it away to. Alone now, walking down the concrete and asphalt strip between cypress trees lined like the outline of your memories’ dream. No one could save you from the demons you were exorcising from heroin. You weren’t medicated enough, and you didn’t know it. You didn’t know you were Indian. You believed their lie that you weren’t red enough. All of them. You knew only what they had told you at Dover Behavioral Health or where you had positioned yourself. You couldn’t tell the difference.
You were a straight-A student, who half the time lived with your dad on the weekend in the trailer park and were now sniffing coke and heroin with your cousin and now shooting heroin and can’t afford coke and dying now. And Dad saves you from heroin and coke and your cousin by drinking gin and beating the demon on the sweating, gin-soaked couch, drinking first 50% gin and 50% tonic, then 75%-25%, then 100% gin. And lights out, unless you slug a fourth pint of gin before you pass out, watching “True Detective” to going to Lafayette because of “A Confederacy of Dunces,” and now, you’re here in the swamp, and now, it’s time to drink because you’re afraid of everyone and everything.
And you get the degree and keep drinking till you move to Chicago and ruin your chances of anything by drinking because you’re scared. And, on Muh Mum McClements’ deathbed, she gave you her Bible, but she did not ever tell you, “Jesus will save you, Jordy,” her Indian grandson she loved and teased for having curly Indian hair and being Dee’s son. Now, you’re not going to lose your voice to be objective; you are writing to help people, like Muh Mum told you, and you lose everything going for you, except your voice, and you drown in addiction again. But you pull off the dead skin of the White junkie to tell them you are native Alaskan, Native American and White on both sides. And you are not passing, and you’re alive. You have kept your voice when every institution was trying to deny your existence. And here you are now, on Indigenous Peoples Day, saying, “I would rather have my Native voice and say what I couldn’t. We are Turtle Island. We have been here, and we will always be here. I am somebody. I am a proud Indian. And you should be, too.”
I chose to erase myself through addiction, as an erasure of passing. That’s the quiet part out loud. Passing isn’t upward mobility. It ends in needle marks in your arms forever and being haunted by the ghost of your passing cousin, who told you he couldn’t quit. I carry his cross, which is small, with gold inscribing his name, Lee. His death date, November 2019. His ashes sit inside the cross that Muh Mum McClements gave me on her deathbed, when she told me, “Never stop writing, Jordy.”
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
