"You only are free when you realize you belong no place — 

      you belong every place.

The price is high. The reward is great." 

Maya Angelou

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                           

 

                                 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                      PROLOGUE                                                                                   

                                                    London, England

                                                          Summer, 1907

 

         I woke up chilled to the bone. The stone walls of the Hammersmith Infirmary don’t admit heat, which is beneficial if you’re in Rome during August but not here in London. I’ll ask a nurse to bring me a hot water bottle.

         When I first moved to England, I felt alone in a strange place. But I was used to starting over in new places. I did know a few people. My great patron, the Marquis de Bute, went to our Lord in 1900, the year I came here to live, but some of his friends still wanted religious sculptures and statuettes. And I had my faith, which meant I was never truly alone. 

         The sisters who nurse the patients here at the infirmary are my friends. I considered taking vows myself, but I was too independent to live by anyone’s rules. Instead, I’ve lived in a comfortable brick boarding house near their convent since the turn of the new century. I offered my services at St. Mary’s orphanage, next to the convent, and I taught crafts to the children—beading, embroidery, and basket making. For much of my life, I felt sorry for myself, a motherless child. But here I’ve learned how healing it is to be a mother of sorts to other children.

         I knew the best thing to do when feeling alone was to keep busy. In exchange, I was permitted to the use of a spacious basement where I could do my work. I enjoyed a busy, productive life for several years.

         I had to give up the orphanage when I got sick. I’ve been sick for a long time now. Bright’s disease—my kidneys are failing. The end isn’t far away, I know, because the smell of sage and the sorrowful sound of flute music come to me.

 

                                                             

                                                       CHAPTER ONE

 

 

          Auntie Ahmeek played a mournful tune on the winter day when Mama died. 

         My world disappeared like the water my older brother Sunrise poured on hot rocks to help Mama sweat out her sickness in our winter lodge. We’d used every variety of medicine that we knew. Auntie Ahmeek had fed Mama a broth of fish heads and had her sip ladles of the four-herb Tea of Life. We’d held tobacco while Auntie Shinge Obe blew smoke from her pipe in the four directions to ask the Great Spirit to make her well. Yet our medicine was not helping. 

         I sat next to Mama, cooling her face with water, while Sunrise sat across from me, holding her hand. Although she lay on a bed of thick bear furs and was covered with still more furs, Mama was flushed and shivering, and her skin was turning the color of a blackberry.  

         The aunties had warned me to watch for this, so I knew it was bad. I felt a scream coming up my throat, but I pinched my lips together and swallowed the sound before I called out, “Her rash is turning dark!”  

         Shing Obe put down her pipe. “She has the white man’s sickness.”

         Ahmeek set aside her flute. “I am out of breath,” she said, but I could see that she had stopped playing because she was crying. So Sunrise and I took turns singing the songs for curing sickness. 

         I felt for my bag, which Mama had helped me make the winter before. 

         A heavy snow lay thick over everything in creation that day, but inside the winter lodge, Mama and I were cozy near the fire as she showed me how to embroider the deerskin that would become a bandolier bag for Pahpah. After gathering porcupine quills and soaking them, we had boiled them with the heads of goldenrods, blackberries, and raspberries to create different colored quills. The hardest part was pulling each quill through my teeth until it was soft enough to thread into a still-sharp quill that could pierce the deerskin and embroider a decoration. I created a design of leaves and berries, to Mama’s approval. 

         “Geget chiwohningeyz!” Mama exclaimed. “When you make something beautiful, it is your gift to the Great Spirit.” I gave a solemn nod, understanding that I was as divine a creator as was the Great Spirit.  

         I reached inside my bag and pulled out the medicine bundle I made, with herbs tied to the bird Pahpah had helped me carve. “This will help her fly above the sickness,” I said, as I tucked the bundle in with Mama under the furs.

         Now Mama began to moan. She turned to her side and vomited into a bark bowl. Shing Obe managed to hold both Mama and the bowl as she spoke to me. “Wildfire, before we are born, we choose our parents, and also how we will die. It may be that this is the end your mother has chosen, to die surrounded by those who love her.”

         “No!  She would never choose to leave me!” 

         Shing Obe lowered Mama’s head to her to her bed and covered her with the furs again. “You must leave the lodge,” she told us. This meant that Shing Obe intended to perform the secret midewiwin medicine ritual that would help my mother prepare for her death. 

         I leaned close to Mama’s ear. “Please stay,” I begged. “I have only ten years, and I still need you!” Mama’s eyes fluttered, and for an instant she saw me. The love in that look burned as bright and hot as my name—Wildfire. Her lips moved, and I put my ear to her mouth to listen. “My love stays—listen for it,” Mama rasped. Those were the last words my mother said to me.

         During the days of mourning, I tried to make myself dream about Mama. I wanted to see where she was and to learn how I could join her. All of Mama’s possessions were burned because they carried the small pox, so at night, I held Pahpah’s bandolier bag to my chest each night and remembered when she taught me how to make it. But it didn’t help me see her. 

         She was gone.

         Too soon, it was time for the funeral ceremony. Drums vibrated through my body, and chants rattled in my head. Mama lay wrapped in birch bark, on a bed of cedar boughs. Although the aunties stood behind my brother and me with their arms enfolding us, it felt as though the ground had disappeared beneath my feet, and I was falling through endless sky. I clung tighter to Sunrise. At nineteen, he was as tall as Pahpah had been, and his tensed jaw showed me that he was feeling the responsibility of being the man of the family now. But he wasn’t my father. If only Pahpah were here! He would catch me in his strong arms and hold me tight against his broad chest.

         All of us combed our hair over our faces and wore our clothing backwards, the Ojibwe customs for mourners. The song we sang was a white man’s hymn, because we liked the tune, but we translated the words into Ojibwe. “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; the night is dark, and I am far from home,” became Man o su dush, Kin wayaseyaziym Sagin Kenshin.

         When it was time to lower her body into a shallow grave carved from the frozen earth, I wondered that the small bundle wrapped in birch bark could be my mother. It was terrifying to realize that Mama was gone and would not come back. She felt very far away, as if she had already flown west, to the next world. Gaagige Minawaanigoziwining—the land of everlasting happiness. As the members of our clan and neighboring Iroquois passed by, tossing in berries, tobacco, and wild rice for her journey, I stroked my long, silky hair, pretending that it was Mama’s.  

         That night, it was only the aunties, Sunrise, and me seated around the fire in our winter lodge. Shadows from firelight jumped on the walls, creating pictures that moved like visions.

         “And your Pahpah only dead a year,” quavered Ahmeek.

         “I had a dream last night,” began Shing Obe. “A spirit told me that it is time to move into the city.” All of us looked up, alarmed. My auntie went on, “Our way of life is ending. Uncle Namekaa’s family and ours will soon be forced to live on a reservation.”

         I knew that our people were scarce in this region, that our clan had long ago come from Ontario, in the north country, trying to escape the white man’s disease. Here, we were surrounded by white people who farmed the land around the nearby city they called Albany, and by the Iroquois, a warring tribe who left us in peace, unthreatened by our small number. My older brother, Sunrise, was restless, a rover. He explored Albany and visited the Iroquois. But I was happy here, where I belonged. These few people, this small place… 

         “But the white man’s church schools take in dark-skinned children,” Auntie Shing Obe continued. “If Sunrise and Wildfire go to such a school, they may begin to make their way in the world of the pale strangers.” 

         My brother jumped up like a trapped coyote ready to attack as he growled, “I won’t go to the white man’s school! I want to go out West to make my way.” He reached into the bandolier bag that Mama had made for him and pulled out a newspaper. Pahpah had taught Sunrise to read English, and in turn, he was helping me to learn my letters. I could read the headline from across the room: Gold in Sierra Nevadas. The paper was old and tattered. How long had my brother been thinking about leaving us? 

         “There is gold everywhere in California—in the rocks, in the rivers. If the white man can find it, think how easy it will be for me to find.”

         There was a shocked silence. The aunties must have realized that at his age, Sunrise was too old for school, old enough to be married and starting his own family if there had been young women to choose from in what was left of our band. But the idea of him going away was unthinkable.   

         Shing Obe nodded after she considered my brother’s words. Then she spoke. “There is nothing here for an Ojibwe hunter. You are a man now. If the Great Spirit tells you that this is your path, you must take it. 

         “I will take my father’s name, Samuel Lewis, in the white world.”

         “Yes,” Shing Obe. “It is right for you to be known by his name.”

         Strange feelings came over me as Sunrise and Shing Obe spoke, a tightness in my stomach and heat in my face. I wanted to hit and kick at everything around me. It was the first time in my life that I could remember being angry. I had lost Pahpah and Mama. Was I to lose my brother, too? No one was thinking about me at all. “I want to go with you!” I cried. Sunrise sat down next to me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. 

         “Not Wildfire, Shing Obe!” cried Auntie Ahmeek. “No, it is too dangerous with slave catchers all around.” She reached inside her tobacco pouch and tossed a handful of brown leaes into the fire for protection. 

         My brother had told me about the black men sheltered by his Iroquois friends being taken by white men with guns and fierce dogs—slave catchers. “Slaves have no choice but to stay with their owners. Those who try to escape are hunted down like deer.” He shook his head. “My spirit would die if I had to stay in one place.”

         Looking at my brother, I remembered how sad he had looked when he said that, his spirit as sorrowful as mine felt now. 

         Sunrise sat down before Auntie Shing Obe and spoke to her with respect. “I’ve heard about a town called Lewiston where they are friendly to people who look like us,” Sunrise assured the aunties.

         Ahmeek smiled. “Lewiston…like your name, Lewis. It is a sign.” 

         “It is the last stop on the Underground Railroad,” Sunrise added.

         I had a dim idea of what a railroad was. We could sometimes hear the Iron Horse huffing past in the distance. But I had never heard of a railroad that ran beneath the earth. My brother smiled when he saw my confused expression. 

         “Slaves who manage to escape run at night, from one secret spot to another, until they reach the Northern states,” he explained. “Lewiston is their last hiding place before they cross the water to Canada. Do you understand, Wildfire?”

         “Yes, Sunrise.”

         “I promised our sister that we would care for the girl until her fifteenth year,” said Auntie Shing Obe with finality. “And so we will.” I knew that it would useless to protest.

         As soon as the snows began to melt, Sunrise prepared to leave. On his last night with us in the winter lodge, we smoked and prayed for his protection. The next morning, he put his few belongings into his bag and was ready. The aunties went outside with him, but I lingered at the entrance of the lodge, too troubled to speak until he came back to me.

         “Wildfire, look.” Sunrise said, opening his bag. I saw that he had paper and pencils. He must have traded a skin for them at the general store in Albany. “I will write letters to you,” he promised.

         My heart jumped up, and I couldn’t help reaching for his arm. “How will they find me?”

         “When you move to the city, look for the sign that says Post Office. P-O-S-T-O-F-F-I-C-E. Inside, ask for letters addressed to the Lewis family.”

          I nodded, repeating these instructions to myself. My brother gave me a long, last hug. After Sunrise walked into the forest on the path that would take him to Albany, I remembered that I hadn’t asked when I would see him again.

         “Wait!” I called.

         But he had disappeared into the trees. Although I knew my brother must explore the world, his departure was like yet another death in my family, our already small number dwindling to just me and my dear aunties.