Geronimo's bones : a memoir of my brother and me

Book

Geronimo's bones : a memoir of my brother and me / Nasdijj.

Nasdijj. (Author).

Summary:

In Geronimo's Bones, award-winning pseudo-Native American 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.

Record details

ISBN: 0345453913
ISBN: 9780345453914
Physical Description: xi, 299 pages ; 24 cm
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: New York : Ballantine Books, 2004.

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note:: And a tin can of worms : Nasdijj introduces Tso, his younger brother by a year -- This is the story I have to tell : Nasdijj describes his father -- I am in blood : Nasdijj describes the transient migrant life, and picking cherries with the Chippewa -- The freak show was a serious business to me : The life of a carnival -- To walk in beauty when it came to the cowboy who was my dad was an enormous contradiction : The cowboy could not make his living as a cowboy -- In the summer of 1963, my younger brother and I stole a corvette : The brothers go west -- The first car I ever stole : In which Nasdijj explains why borrowing a car is not stealing a car -- We were there : The brothers do not attend school but work as pickers in migrant camps -- I had grown scattered like a scarecrow : The brothers meet Ronnie Spectacular -- There were no roads on the way to Sa's Hogan : Nasdijj introduces his Navajo grandmother, who raises sheep on the side of an extinct volcano -- Traveling west is like following the sun : The three car thieves drive the Corvette to California -- It was a pilgrimage : Visit to Geronimo's grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma -- A dust storm blew through Texas : The police in a small Texas town release the car thieves -- The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a perverse radio emission appearing to have a truly diffuse origin : Camping in Chaco, Ronnie Spectacular changes her name to Dancer -- We took Dancer to the gravel pits : Grandma Sa has died -- In 1963, the desert blacktop to Los Angeles unfolded like a quivering, silver apparition : Three car thieves meet Carmella, Queen of the Desert -- In the beginning it was not at all what I expected : The brothers sell pumpkins in Half-Moon Bay -- We rode sticks and brooms for horses : Nasdijj works three jobs so he can support his brother, who is still in school -- I should have known : Nasdijj confronts the image of his abusive father -- We had always known our father was a coyote : The coyote teaches forgiveness if you can learn the lesson -- That night you and daddy buried that dead baby in the sugarcane : Remembering smuggling the Mexicans across the Rio Grande -- Geronimo's moon lit the desert : Survival in Glen Canyon -- I had been shot : Nasdijj's children move him to the woods.