A Memoir by Brook McBride

I have been reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, and recently I came across a passage that stopped me.

Nao, the young Japanese girl at the center of the story, is being bullied terribly at school. She compares the children surrounding her to a pack of hyenas closing in on an animal separated from the herd. And she notices something about the one who finally attacks.

It isn't always the biggest.

Sometimes it is the one who is “small and quick and mean.”

I knew that feeling.

Not the particulars of Nao's experience. Not its brutality. But something in her description reached across more than fifty years and found the frightened little boy I had been in Wagner, South Dakota.

I remembered what it felt like to know someone was waiting for you.

I remembered looking for another way home.

I remembered crossing railroad tracks on my bicycle and feeling my heartbeat rise and my stomach drop because I knew there might be kids waiting on the other side.

And I remembered being small.

I was probably in the fourth grade when my family moved to Wagner.

I was the new kid, trying to figure out where I fit. Wagner was different from the places I had known before. It sat within the boundaries of the old Yankton Sioux Reservation, and even as a child I understood that there were lines running through that little town.

White and Native.

Us and them.

Some of those lines were spoken out loud.

Others you just learned.

Almost immediately, a Native American boy about my size attached himself to me. I can't remember his name anymore. I remember his longer hair. I remember that he wasn't some huge kid towering over me.

He was a kid.

So was I.

And I was afraid of him.

One day at recess he told me he was going to beat me up after school.

So when the bell rang, I didn't go home.

My mother was a teacher at the school, and I found my way to her classroom. I asked whether she needed some help. I cleaned erasers. I helped with a bulletin board. I found whatever little jobs a fourth grader could find to make himself useful until it was time to walk home with Mom.

It worked.

So I did it again the next day.

And maybe the next.

Finally Mom said something like, “Brook, I really don't have anything else for you to do. I think you just need to go home after school.”

I don't remember her asking why I suddenly had become so interested in cleaning erasers.

So I went.

And he was waiting for me.

Luckily, fear made me fast.

I ran the couple of blocks home as hard as I could and beat him there.

That went on for several days. I don't remember exactly how it ended. Somewhere in there I think he finally caught me and popped me in the mouth hard enough to loosen a tooth.

Maybe that was the end of it.

Memory is strange that way. Some things disappear completely. Other moments remain fifty years later with the fear still attached to them.

South of the Tracks

Not long after that I took over an afternoon paper route for the Daily Republic. Twenty-six papers or so, as I remember it.

Part of the route went south of the railroad tracks.

That mattered.

South of the tracks was where many of the Native families lived, including a newer housing project. The boy who gave me the route took me around once and warned me about that part of town.

Be careful out there.

There were kids.

There were dogs.

There could be trouble.

I'm sure by the time I made my first solo trip across those tracks, my imagination had done half the work for them.

I can still remember approaching the railroad tracks on my bicycle.

My heartbeat went up.

My stomach went down.

I crossed.

In those days you didn't throw a newspaper from the street. You rode up to each house, got off your bike, and put the paper by the door. So I couldn't just race through.

When I reached the housing project, four or five Native kids were waiting.

They had apples.

Not big apples. Little ones.

But there were plenty of them.

They pelted me as I rode through, yelling and laughing, and I finished that part of my route as quickly as I could.

I went home crying.

But I had twenty-six papers to deliver again the next afternoon.

So I developed a plan.

I would run my route backward.

If they were waiting for the paper boy to come from one direction, I would surprise them by entering the housing project from the other side.

I remember feeling pretty clever about it.

Until I turned my head to see whether anybody was following me.

When I looked forward again, there they were.

One of the boys grabbed my handlebars.

I thought, Here it comes.

Instead, he looked at me and said:

“You play basketball?”

I said yes.

“We need another player.”

There was a hoop nearby. Not much of one, as I remember it.

But we played.

I was small for my age. And standing there among those Native boys, I was the only white kid on the court.

Luckily for me, I was also a pretty good basketball player.

I hit my first shot.

And somehow, just like that, I was in.

I don't know what test I passed that afternoon. Maybe there wasn't a test at all. Maybe they were simply kids who needed another kid to make the teams even.

But something changed.

I had crossed the tracks frightened of them.

Then we played basketball.

Jimmy

There were other experiences that weren't resolved so easily.

One Halloween I was out with some new friends. I was wearing one of those cheap plastic Halloween costumes kids wore back then.

A Native kid named Jimmy Weddell jumped us.

Everybody knew Jimmy.

Everybody was afraid of Jimmy.

He had a knife. He took our candy. Then he took the knife and ran it down the leg of my costume, slicing the plastic.

He didn't cut me.

But I was terrified.

I remember running home, jumping over shrubs, crying.

And then something happened that may have stayed with me almost as much as Jimmy's knife.

My parents didn't believe me.

Mom and Dad were sympathetic to the Native community. Maybe the story sounded too fantastic. Maybe they couldn't imagine it happening the way I described it. Whatever the reason, I remember feeling as though they simply dismissed it.

But I knew what had happened.

For years afterward, Jimmy Weddell occupied a simple place in my memory.

He was one of the bad guys.

Only life has a way of complicating the stories we tell ourselves about who the bad guys are.

Many years later I came across a book called Dakota Warrior, written by the Italian journalist Gloria Mattioni about James R. Weddell.

Jimmy.

My Jimmy.

The kid with the knife had become the subject of a book.

And suddenly I was reading his story from the other side.

Mattioni had met Weddell while he was serving a long prison sentence. She became convinced that he had been wrongfully convicted and spent years investigating his case and advocating for his release.

But the book did something else to me.

It introduced me to a Jimmy Weddell I had never known.

There was racism. There was poverty. There was the long history of what had happened to the Yankton people and to Native people across South Dakota. There was political activism and the struggle over the Black Hills. There were prisons and escapes and anger and violence.

None of that made the knife disappear.

The frightened little boy inside me still knew what had happened that Halloween.

But now there was another story alongside mine.

Jimmy Weddell wasn't born on earth so that he could become the villain in Brook McBride's childhood.

He had his own story.

And I had never known it.

Greg

Maybe I should have.

Because there had been another Native man in my childhood whose story crossed directly into my family's.

His name was Greg Zephier.

Greg was part of the Eagle Warrior Society and the local American Indian Movement. In March of 1975, Greg and others occupied the Yankton Sioux Industries pork-processing plant in Wagner.

I remember Greg coming to our house.

My father, Robert McBride, was the Methodist minister in town, and Dad knew Greg.

The first takeover was carefully planned. As I understand it now, the Eagle Warrior Society wanted to call attention to Native grievances while avoiding bloodshed.

But outside the plant there were white people who were angry too.

Some of them were armed.

And my father somehow found himself moving between those worlds.

Our family stories have Dad taking food into the plant and possibly helping get guns out. I don't know anymore which details belong to documented history and which have been shaped by fifty years of McBride family storytelling.

But I know this much:

My father was trying to keep people from killing one another.

Then, less than two months later, the plant was occupied again.

This time Jimmy Weddell was among the younger men involved.

My memory of that second takeover is different. Angrier. More volatile. It fit easily into the story I already carried about Jimmy Weddell.

Dangerous.

Criminal.

Trouble.

It would take me years to realize that even those words can look different depending upon which side of the railroad tracks you are standing on.

Orlando

And then there was Orlando.

Orlando used to come to our door.

Usually he was drunk. Usually he needed something. Money, perhaps, or some other kind of help. My father was a softhearted Methodist minister, so Orlando knew that the parsonage was a door where he could knock.

Dad would usually help him somehow.

But he rarely invited him inside.

Then my sister Rachel died.

She died that summer in a car accident.

Rachel was riding in the back seat of a Volkswagen Bug with two of my other sisters. One was driving and the other was in the front seat. They lost track of where they were on the road, nearly hit a bridge, pulled the car too sharply, and it rolled.

Somehow Rachel was thrown from the back of the car.

She died.

There are tragedies that bring a family together.

And there are tragedies that, at least for a while, seem to pull everyone apart.

There was so much guilt.

My sisters carried it.

Mom carried it.

Dad carried it.

We all carried something.

And then Christmas came.

We loved Christmas in the McBride house.

Christmas Eve was Mom and Dad's anniversary. Dad was a pastor, so there was the Christmas Eve worship service we dearly loved. Then we would come home.

There was oyster stew.

Dad loved oyster stew. He was Irish. The rest of us couldn't stand the smell of the stuff, but we loved the little oyster crackers that went with it.

And then there was Dad's present for Mom.

That was part of Christmas Eve too.

Dad always surprised her with something wonderful. Sometimes it was something he had made. I remember beautiful pieces of furniture.

One year he somehow hid a mattress underneath their bed for about half a year without Mom discovering it.

We kids loved waiting to see what Dad had come up with.

Except that Christmas.

That Christmas, Dad forgot.

He didn't have a present for Mom.

In another year it might have become one more McBride family story we laughed about.

That year nobody was laughing.

Mom was hurt.

Dad was hurting.

Everyone was hurting.

And instead of making Dad his beloved oyster stew, Mom made potato soup.

Even we kids understood what that meant.

There were originally ten of us in our family.

That Christmas there were nine.

We sat around the table.

And there was Rachel's empty chair.

She was everywhere that night precisely because she wasn't there.

Then someone knocked on the door.

Dad snapped.

“Damn it! Who in the world would knock on my door at this time?”

I almost never heard my father swear.

But this wasn't Reverend Robert McBride answering the door.

This was a father whose daughter was dead.

A husband whose wife was angry with him.

A man who had given whatever he had to give at the Christmas Eve service and had come home empty.

Can't they tell I'm hurting?

Dad opened the door.

It was Orlando.

Of all people.

Orlando.

But something was different.

He was sober.

Dad's demeanor changed.

And this time he invited Orlando into our home.

Orlando looked at my father and said something like,

“Reverend, I know you're hurting. I know your family is grieving. I just wanted to come and say a prayer for you.”

He hadn't come asking for something.

He had come carrying something.

A family that had spent years seeing Orlando as the one who needed help suddenly discovered that we were the needy ones.

And Orlando had brought what we needed.

We stood together in a circle.

Nine of us now.

And Orlando.

I remember him praying first in his Lakota language and then in English.

I don't remember the words anymore.

I remember something else.

As Orlando prayed, I noticed that Mom and Dad weren't holding hands.

There was a little space between them.

Even standing in that prayer circle, they were still angry.

And then, out of the lower corner of my eye, I saw my mother's hand move.

She reached across the space.

And touched my father's hand.

That was it.

Somehow, even as a boy, I knew.

We were going to make it.

Crossing the Tracks

I am 65 years old now.

And I find myself thinking again about that little boy on the bicycle.

He was afraid to cross the tracks.

I don't want to shame him for that.

Some of the things he feared were real.

He really was bullied.

He really did get hit.

The apples really did come flying.

Jimmy really did have a knife.

But the little boy couldn't possibly see everything from his bicycle.

He couldn't see the history that had created the geography of his town.

He couldn't understand why Native families and white families could inhabit the same little South Dakota community and experience it so differently.

He didn't know the generations of dispossession, poverty, racism, broken promises and cultural destruction that preceded his little paper route.

And he certainly couldn't know that one day he would open a book and discover that one of the villains from his childhood had been carrying a story of his own.

I know more of that story now.

Native history is no longer simply the history of people who lived south of the tracks in Wagner.

Madison, the mother of two of my grandchildren, carries First Nations ancestry from Canada.

What I once understood so easily as us and them has, across the generations, become part of us.

But perhaps it always was.

Because when I look back now, I see all these Native people moving through my childhood.

The boy who wanted to beat me up.

The kids with the apples.

The boys who needed one more basketball player.

Jimmy Weddell and his knife.

Greg Zephier sitting in our home.

My father moving between Native activists and angry white men, trying in his imperfect way to keep people from hurting one another.

And Orlando.

Especially Orlando.

It has taken me most of a lifetime to understand that I didn't simply grow up on one side of the railroad tracks and eventually learn something about the people who lived on the other.

We were already part of one another's stories.

Sometimes painfully.

Sometimes violently.

Sometimes beautifully.

Maybe that is why Nao's frightened walk to school opened all of this in me.

I knew something of that child.

The child who doesn't want to arrive.

The child looking for another route.

The child wondering whether there is some safer way through.

More than fifty years ago, I thought I had discovered a clever way to get through the Native housing project.

I would reverse my paper route.

I would come at it from the other direction.

It didn't work.

They were waiting for me anyway.

A boy grabbed my handlebars.

And then he asked:

“You play basketball?”

Perhaps I have been answering that question ever since.

Because the tracks were real.

So were the apples.

So was Jimmy's knife.

So was my fear.

And so were the anger, injustice and history that a little white boy riding his bicycle couldn't possibly understand.

I don't think growing older requires me to decide which of those things was real.

They were all real.

But that isn't the last Native story I remember from Wagner.

The last one I keep coming back to happened on Christmas Eve.

Our family was broken.

The pastor had nothing left to give.

And there was a knock at the door.

The man we were accustomed to thinking of as needy had come because he knew that this time we were the ones in need.

Orlando came into our house.

He stood in our broken circle.

And he prayed.

Maybe he was the shepherd in my Christmas story.

He came to the lowest place in our family's life carrying no present, no money, no bottle.

Only a prayer.

And while Orlando prayed, across one small empty space in a broken circle, my mother's hand reached for my father's.

And crossed it.

Resources & Further Reading

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

This is where this particular journey of remembering began. Ozeki's story of Nao - a young person experiencing bullying, isolation and the terrible longing not to arrive where she is going - unexpectedly carried me back to my own childhood in Wagner. The circumstances are very different. But something about that frightened child looking for another way through opened a door in my memory.

Gloria Mattioni, Dakota Warrior: The Story of James R. Weddell

Mattioni tells the story of James “Jimmy” Weddell from a perspective radically different from the one I knew as a child in Wagner. Reading it many years later forced me to reconsider the simple categories through which I had understood Jimmy as a boy.

Joshua Garrett-Davis, “The Red Power Movement and the Yankton Sioux Industries Pork Processing Plant Takeovers of 1975,” South Dakota History, Vol. 36, No. 2.

A valuable historical account of the two 1975 pork-plant occupations in Wagner. The article places the events within the Red Power movement and the racial and political tensions of the time. Of special importance to me, it includes recollections from my father, the Rev. Robert McBride, concerning Greg Zephier, the Eagle Warrior Society and the possibility of armed confrontation between Native activists and local white residents.

The WoLakota Project - Yankton Sioux Industries educational materials

The WoLakota Project provides educational resources for understanding South Dakota history through the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings. Its material on Yankton Sioux Industries is especially helpful for distinguishing the two separate 1975 occupations and understanding them within a larger Indigenous historical context.

A Note About Memory

I have tried to distinguish between documented history and what I remember as a child or what has been passed down in my family. Some details - particularly my father's actions during the first pork-plant occupation and my memories of the people involved - may have changed through decades of retelling.

I don't think that diminishes the importance of remembering.

If anything, it is part of what this essay is about.

We carry stories for years believing we understand them.

Then we read another person's account, encounter another history, or simply grow old enough to look again.

And sometimes we discover that there was another side of the tracks all along.