The Letters My Mother Never Delivered

Four beds with her name on them. While she was in my house being told that nothing came in the mail.

August 1988. She asks whether Winona is getting the letters at all. It is the first time she doubts the mechanism instead of the child.

October 1988. She writes to my mother.

It is the only one in the box addressed to Mrs. Joyce Pruitt instead of to Winona, and it is four lines long, and it is polite. She says she does not want to cause any trouble. She says she understands Mrs. Pruitt is doing a hard job. She asks her please, if the letters are not being given to her daughter, to just tell her daughter that her mother writes to her every week. She says she does not have to give her the letters. She only has to tell her.

That envelope was sealed too.

The last one is dated the fourth of February, 1989, three months after the bed was stripped, and it is one sentence, and the sentence is: I am still here.

The Line My Mother Wrote In Her Own Hand

At the bottom of the box, under the last of the envelopes, folded in thirds, was a carbon copy of a county form.

It was a placement and relative search worksheet, the flimsy yellow copy, dated the twenty second of September 1987, eleven days after Winona came to our house. My mother’s signature is at the bottom, in the handwriting I have seen on forty years of birthday cards.

There is a line on that form for identified extended family. My mother wrote: none located.

There is a box to check for notification of the child’s tribe. My mother left it blank.

And there is a line at the bottom for additional notes, and in that line, in my mother’s hand, in the same ballpoint she used to sign it, are the words: no interested relatives.

That form was folded in a shoebox on top of a letter that lists a grandmother, two aunts, four beds, a two bedroom apartment, a job at a school kitchen with hours that ended before the school bus, and a return address with a telephone number written underneath it.

My mother did not forge anything. I want to be precise, because I spent a week wanting there to be a forged document, wanting some criminal artifact I could carry into an office and hand to somebody. There is nothing like that. There is no fake signature and no altered date and nothing a handwriting expert would ever be called about.

There is a woman who wrote no interested relatives on a form, and then filed the interested relatives in a shoebox in her closet for thirty nine years.

I went and read about the law after that, because I am not a lawyer and I did not know what the blank checkbox meant. I am going to put down only what I am sure of. There is a federal law called the Indian Child Welfare Act. It was passed in 1978. Among other things, it requires that a child’s tribe be notified, and it puts the child’s own extended family first in line for placement, ahead of strangers.

1978. Nine years before my mother sat at our kitchen table with that yellow form.

It was not a new law she had never heard of. It was the law the whole time. It was the specific law for the specific child in her spare bed, and there is a blank box on a page in my house where somebody was supposed to make a phone call.