Geronimo's bones
Subtitle: a memoir of my brother and me
By: Nasdijj
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 299
ISBN-13: 9780345453914
Subjects: Social conditions; Navajo Indians; Biography
Description: In Geronimo's Bones, award-winning author Nasdijj has written a love song to his brother, Tso-short for The Smarter One-and the powerful bond that sustained the two of them through the grim reality of their childhood. Filled with poetic intensity and unfiltered emotion, Geronimo's Bones is a visceral reading experience. Born to migrant parents-his father, a self proclaimed "cowboy" and his Navajo mother, tender-hearted and flawed Nasdijj, knew little of the conformity spreading across America in the 1950s. He was busy surviving the migrant camps in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, where despair and death were familiar faces. Nasdijj and Tso were boys racing trains and demons, whispering tales about Spider Woman, Sa, Geromino, and Coyote, the stories of their mother's people that they had heard at bedtime. Nasdijj writes: "Geronimo is a voice who comes to me at night, when all the other creatures are asleep and the universe belongs to us." After their mother's tragic death from alcohol, the young brothers were left in the care of their sometimes indifferent, often abusive, and occasionally loving father. Nasdijj and Tso rarely attended school, but they picked cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, peaches, beans, and artichokes. To escape this indentured servitude, Nasdijj and Tso eventually stole a car and ran away. Told in brilliant flashes of poetry, narrative, and song, Geronimo's Bones reveals a world that to this day remains hidden from most Americans. But Nasdijj's work derives its special power from his ability to capture the universal emotions that we all share: hate and love, loss and remembrance.
Table of contents: title: And a tin can of worms; title: This is the story I have to tell; title: I am in blood; title: The freak show was a serious business to me; title: To walk in beauty when it came to the cowboy who was my dad was an enormous contradiction; title: In the summer of 1963, my younger brother and I stole a corvette; title: The first car I ever stole; title: We were there; title: I had grown scattered like a scarecrow; title: There were no roads on the way to Sa's Hogan; title: Traveling west is like following the sun; title: It was a pilgrimage; title: A dust storm blew through Texas; title: The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a perverse radio emission appearing to have a truly diffuse origin; title: We took dancer to the gravel pits; title: In 1963, the desert blacktop to Los Angeles unfolded like a quivering, silver apparition; title: In the beginning it was not at all what I expected; title: We rode sticks and brooms for horses; title: I should have known; title: We had always known our father was a coyote; title: That night you and daddy buried that dead baby in the sugarcane; title: Geronimo's moon lit the desert; title: I had been shot.