Julia Morning Glory

There was no way that my brother Dennis, could have known when he recently posted the pictures of his heavenly blue morning glories -- that the center light that shone through on each one, was exactly what it was like, knowing Julia Morning Glory. She had that same kind of Tsa-la-gi (pronounced Jah la gee) light, at the heart, and center of her being.

Julia Morning Glory and I first laid eyes on each other in the darkness of the parking lot, while we all awaited boarding of a military bus at Lackland AFB, Texas in 1967. Along with about one hundred other women, we were bound for an unannounced destination. Just minutes before, at two o'clock in the morning, we had been marched across the base, toting every belonging allowed in our duffel bags. It was no easy fete, considering we were ordered to be in full dress uniforms for travel, which meant hat, purse, gloves, stockings, and high-heeled pumps.

Once on the bus, I chose a seat by myself and was somewhat happy when no one sat by me. Soon, there was a ruckus at the back of the bus. Before I could even imagine what was happening, there she was, angrily sliding into the empty seat beside me.

Jeering back at her tormentors, she was an instant total immersion lesson in teaching me new swear words, that no one will ever find in the English or Spanish dictionaries. I slid as far away in my seat as I could from her, while trying to steal a glance at this new comrade in angered arms. I was startled when I heard her say:

"What are you looking at white girl? Ain't you ever seen a Cherokee Indian before? Are you afraid I'm going to scalp you ---- you should be. I might, if you act like the @#$% in the back of the bus."

I started to answer back, stumbling on unthought-out words, "I . . . . . I. . . ummm . . . I'm not as white as I look, maybe."

"Either you are white, or you are not. Which is it? There is no maybe."

OK, so painting myself into conversational corners was something I was clearly good at even at a young age. Lacking an answer that didn't require a lengthy explanation, I shrugged and tried to pretended I didn't hear her question. Resting my head on the windowsill, I played possum.

She thrust a tin of unfamiliar seeds in my face, testing me, she whispered:

"You want some? My name is Julia Morning Glory. Wake me up when you get up enough gumption to tell me your name," she growled, turned her face away from me, and closed her own eyes.

I had not clue where we were headed or how long it would take to get there, but right at that moment, the coward that I was, determined my safest bet was to sleep or pretend to sleep till we were ordered off the bus.

Eight hours later we arrived at Keesler Air Force Base, in Biloxi, Mississippi, where twelve of us were ordered off the bus. Fresh out of boot camp, Airman after Airman's names were called. Certain I was bound for a better destination, I was relieved when my unhappy companion's name was called, only to have my spirits crushed in the next moment, when I heard my own name.

Two women were assigned to each room in the dilapidated WWII barracks they brought us to. You guessed it -- Julia Morning Glory was my designated roomie. This was outrageously hilarious to her for some reason.

She didn't have much in her duffel bag besides what the Air Force issued to her, other than that old cookie tin of seeds. She kept offering to me, but I kept declining, thinking them looking most unappetizing. She said they helped her escape the "hell hole of a @#$% world she'd been born into." Looked a lot like just a bunch of blackened sunflower seeds to me.

The next morning, and for every morning thereafter, I awoke to Julia Morning Glory with her tarnished tin of seeds sitting in the window singing her own rendition of:

"We n' de ya ho, We n' de ya ho, We n' de ya, We n' de ya Ho ho ho ho, He ya ho, He ya ho, Ya ya ya"

Julia Morning Glory was one of those people who possessed an intelligence you can't learn in school and won't find in books. It went way beyond so-called street smarts. I believe those of her kind have an inborn "instinct" that the rest of us have somehow lost.

Yet, I've also observed that those blessed with her innate intelligence and curiosity, also often have somehow traded away their ability to understand and cope with a world not-of-their-choosing. She was no exception.

Wherever Julia Morning Glory went, trouble followed. As roommates, she led me down many a path I would have not followed, had I seen what her trail blazing outcome was to be. Granted, in my youthfulness, I was naive and didn't often think things though.

She liked to sleep in and getting up before daylight to stand for inspection, when classes didn't start until 10:00 a.m. was the bane of her existence. She was smart enough to realize that no one was taking attendance, just walking into each room and checking the barracks for stragglers and slackers.

Each room had a row of metal closets (really large lockers) big enough to sleep in. Julia Morning Glory rigged our closets to appear to be locked, complete with padlock, when in reality they weren't. So each morning, in the locker she went (with her tin box of seeds) and an extra pillow. No one missed her.

After about two weeks, I found myself joining her on some mornings. It was there, that as the mornings sleepily ticked by, that I would often see why Julia Morning Glory gave off an illusion of being tough as nails, when she truly was a wounded dove.

Lightly banging her corroded tin box against the metal wall separating our closets, she said loud enough for anyone to hear, "Do you want some?"

I whispered back, "No, you keep offering, but I'm not a squirrel. . . . Stop asking me that and stop banging on the wall! Do want someone to find us?"

Ignoring me she implored, "Do you hear other people's voices in your head? Sometimes I think I hear the sadness of my mother, when she said not to forget our ways like she did. But then, I remember she walks with the bison in the valley of the night, her head held high above the fog. I am looking for her face, but all I can see is the Thunder Bird who gave me to her under the dust of many hooves, all choking away her beauty. I hate him, and he makes me hate me."

Not following and thinking she must be sleep talking, I asked: "Who do you hate? I'm not sure I understand."

She banged her tin shadow again on the metal divider just to annoy me, and blasted me with, "Sometimes you are just as dumb as the rest of them! My uncles said the Thunder Bird fled Indian territory with his tribe 'kuna' yeli sti-di' (claw scratch like), when our tribe found out what he did to their wounded scared little rabbit. He made me an outcast of outcasts, as well as an Indian. I'm only part of them with eyes as green as grass."

I could hear her open her tin of phantasms and the muffled tears of a little girl lost. Mired in her frustration in my lack of understanding, she soon pulled the foggy blanket of self-preservation, around her voice until it was lost in the distant visions she'd tried to share with me.

With just two weeks of leave, Julia Morning Glory and I snaked by Greyhound bus back to the Cherokee nation, through cemeteries and wide spots along over six hundred miles of rural roads. I traveled with my pre-conceived ideas of what it would be like to stay in Tas-la-gi land, she journeyed with occasional handfuls of darkened hard piths from her tin of security.

A sun beaten clapboard squared box, with corrugated tin roof and every window glass broken, was "home" to Julia Morning Glory. You found it three miles back from any paved road, which we walked without flashlight in the dark star strewn sky to visit her grandmother,Indulala (Moon Light).

Besides her elderly grandmother, the house held six other adults and eight children, all under the age of seven. Inside, there was but one unfinished room, bare to the rafters unless you counted blankets that partitioned off the various beds. Wire clothes hangers hung on walls, with wrinkled hand wrung clothes and stained cotton diapers dangling off them. Aside from the beds, only a wood fed stove that served as both cooking and heating stood in the center.

Upon our arrival, the sleeping household, only paused from their slumbers long enough to clear one squeaking metal springed bed devoid of sweaty children, to be scattered among the other beds. Not one word was spoken to us.

We awoke to the rancid perfume of cornbread soaked in frying squirrel grease, being prepared by the toothless Indulala.

The old woman, In a sharp demanding voice,"Juhi! Juhi! Su na le i wa ga lv di yv (Flower! Flower! Morning Glory) -- You wake up now!

Sleepy-eyed, we both sat up and gawked incoherently at the sun drenched room, light streaming from every nook and cranny where the clapboard construction failed to convene at all seams. Just about everyone else was up and gone, save the four little giggly toddlers pointing at us from under a nearby bed and the old woman.

After Julia Morning Glory snagged her tin box from under her pillow, we stepped outside to hand pump water into a horse trough -- catching water in our hands to wash the grime of bus, dirt road, and gritty bed sheets the best we could.

Everywhere you looked there were carcasses. The bodies of rotted out discarded furniture, half burned and soiled mattresses, piles of empty food cans, mountains of booze bottles, and rusted into-the-ground shells of dead vehicles were scattered about the moonscape of the field surrounding the house. The yard was a depressing vast ocean of various shades of brown.

Julia Morning Glory sniffed the stench of the air and laughed out loud, as we watched rats jumping from one pile to another.

Laughing at the look on my face, "You are the only white looking friend I've ever brought home to meet the family. Guess you know why now. Let me show you where to find the out-house."

Down a well-worn narrow path among weeds as high as my knees, we walked up a little man-made hill. Just as the hill trail peaked, was the sight of a shocking full bloom sea of heavenly blue morning glories that stretched out as far as one could see. They even covered the leaning tower of an out-house.

In the years that followed, I grew to know that Julia Morning Glory was struggling to find forgiveness for even having been born. I never knew her to be without that old time pitted tin and it's contents. If you would have asked her, the one thing she wanted was to find acceptance in the arms of the warrior she felt certain was waiting for her. He would take her away to a place where she would find truth and wisdom.

She thought she found him in a man named Bruce, a red-headed Irish Catholic from Floral Park, New York. For a while, she had all that she longed for. A big family and two children that cemented her into their close-knit bosom of a family, a place where she finally felt safe.

The first time he was sent on a tour of Vietnam, she was the dutiful squaw waiting for her warrior back home. The second time he went back to Vietnam, an anonymous "friend" mailed her the pictures of the Vietnamese girlfriend and children he'd fathered on his previous tour.  The rat from within also made real sure she knew that he had "volunteered" to go back to Vietnam.

When the Red Cross brought him home on forced emergency leave of tour, he found the trashed home they once shared, dog shit under the bed, a dead puppy in the backyard, rotted clothes in the washer, and his two other toddler aged children crying for their mother in the care of an overwhelmed teenaged babysitter who hadn't seen her in three weeks.

When I found her, she was not only strapped in a straight jacket, but was held in bed by a posey restraint in a guarded room of an Oklahoma mental ward. Toothless Indulala was with me when we both wept at the sight of a dying hollow-eyed shell of a flower that had withered on life's cruel vine.

Now some say, Julia Morning Glory died from a broken heart. Indulala said it was because Maheo had become deaf and could not hear Julia Morning Glory's pleads. The doctors said it was in part, years of abuse at the hands of the contents of her tin of seeds, alcohol, and other drugs. The permanent damage to her brain was irreversible, and her body simply shut down. At the autopsy, they noted her brain looked like Swiss cheese.

Julia Morning Glory certainly had her ghosts and never in this life time did she find her true and faithful warrior waiting along the Cherokee River. She never found the truth that was waiting inside her own soul. Indulala said truth cannot be found in a cookie tin box of seeds and I believe her.

Julia Morning Glory was only half Cherokee, although in the face of most others, she denied any other heritage than pure Cherokee. She'd been born on the reservation at Tahlequah, Oklahoma -- to her teenaged alcoholic mother, who had traded sex for Thunder Bird wine with a bored white high-school football team captain from a nearby town.

Two weeks before she was born, her blond-headed father was found near the edge of town with his throat slit and the Cherokee word "u yo I" written on the paper pinned to his shirt. One little three letter word translated in English to "bad"  -- apparently said it all. They never did find out who killed him.

Scattered through the rather dry plains that front the Rocky Mountains from Texas to Montana is found a remarkable Bush Morning Glory (Ipomcea).

Its branching stems form a clustering bush two or three feet across about the top of an enormous root as thick as a man leg when found in the wild. It is often quite as long, sometimes weighing as much as twenty-five pounds.

This root seems to store water that enables the plant to remain vigourous during the hot dry summer. The leaves, too, differ from those of the common morning glory, for they are four or five incles long and very slender, but the flowers are of the familar funnel shape, often three inches long, delicately shaded with attractive purple and pink.