Lakota Woman (24 page)

“Well,” Leonard told him, “Washington was a guy with short silk pants, a wig, and wooden teeth, who kept slaves. Then Columbus. He thought he had landed in India—only ten thousand miles off course. Then Custer—without us, you might have had him for a president. You ought to be grateful. You people elected a Nixon, an Agnew. I’m humble. I’m satisfied with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.”

“Well, what do you think of me?”

“I think you’re using me as a guinea pig.”

“Well, you’re some guinea pig, Crow Dog, I’ll tell you. I give up. You don’t need me.”

After that interview this shrink was always very nice to Leonard, wrote favorable reports about him, and helped us all he could.

Only twice during the one and a half years Leonard was in jail did he break down. The first time it happened in Lewisburg. He was standing in the yard near a group of inmates when it suddenly split up, revealing a prisoner whose throat had been slit from ear to ear with a shiv lying dead on the floor, almost decapitated. While Leonard was still shook up over this a man in a white coat, whom he took for a doctor, approached him, saying, “Crow Dog, your physical examination revealed brain damage. We have to lobotomize you. That’s what they did to that guy in the movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
That guy was like you.
Wouldn’t cooperate. Chief, your troubles are over. You’ll be a happy, acculturated veggie. This week they’ll take you to New York to perform the operation.” This man knew that Crow Dog would be taken to New York on his way to another prison. It was his way of playing a joke on Leonard. When Leonard was in fact taken to New York a few days later, he believed that the man had spoken the truth. I was in New York at that time to be as close to Lewisburg as possible. I could have taken a cab and been with him in fifteen minutes, but they would not allow me to see him. They let him phone. He was weeping. “They’re going to lobotomize me,” he said. “They’re going to take my mind away, take from me my medicine knowledge, make me into nothing.” Then he really broke down.

I talked to him the whole night through, trying to cheer him up. Richard and Jean Erdoes told him over the phone, “They can’t do this to you, they’d need special permission, including yours.” Leonard repeated over and over again, “You don’t know what it’s like to be in the penitentiary. They can do anything they like. They have that power. You just don’t know.” We were on the phone from eight o’clock in the evening until six in the morning. We were totally exhausted, physically and mentally. We had roused one lawyer from his bed in the middle of the night, and sometime the next day he found out that the whole lobotomy threat had been a hoax. The cruel joke backfired. When we made the story public there was a general outcry. Support for Leonard really began rolling as the National Council of Churches adopted his case, calling him a “persecuted and unjustly incarcerated religious leader.”

The second-worst day for Leonard was November 19, 1976, when the old Crow Dog home was completely burned to the ground under mysterious, or rather highly suspicious, circumstances. All during the 1970s numbers of homes of Indian civil rights leaders were destroyed by fires or fire bombings. Of the wonderful old picturesque Crow Dog place absolutely nothing was left except black ashes covering the bare ground. All the invaluable relics, sacred things, ancient treaties, and buckskin costumes perished in the flames. Leonard’s parents barely escaped with their lives. Many ceremonies, peyote meetings, yuwipi rituals, and giveaways had been held in that old house. Now it was gone—a piece of Indian history and heritage was no more.

Leonard took it very hard. He dictated a letter for us: “Is it right for me to be kept from my people, from my earth? The house of my mother and father has been burned down. This is where seven generations of Crow Dogs have lived. I am in the penitentiary and could not help my family save the house. I can only watch the iron bars. But even here, today, I can feel my grandfather’s heartbeat and hear the echo of the drum.”

They made life hard for him in so many ways. Things that make life easier for the ordinary con—TV, reading, playing cards—meant nothing to him. He was thrown entirely upon his own inner resources. Then there were the sheer distances they put between him and his family and friends. First they put him into Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, half a continent away from his Dakota home. So I moved to New York together with little Pedro to stay with friends. If I started out by car early in the morning on visiting days, I could see Leonard and still be back in New York by nightfall. The prison system decided to make it more difficult for me to visit my husband and transferred Leonard to Terre Haute, Indiana, exactly halfway between New York and Rosebud. Now, no matter where I stayed, I had to travel nine hundred miles to see him. Each time it cost several hundred dollars.

Though I felt lonely and lost without Leonard, weighed down by responsibilities I felt too weak and inexperienced to confront, I had a comparatively easy time. The nights were bad, but at least for an average of eighteen hours a day, I was kept too busy to brood. I traveled, I was in places I had never seen before, I composed leaflets, talked to lawyers, newspapermen, organization heads, made tapes, held speeches, and took care of my baby. It was now that I met and learned to like white people who were on our side. I made many friends: besides the Erdoes family, the Belafontes, the actor Rip Torn and his wife Geraldine Page, Dick Gregory, Brando, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the musicians David Amram and Charlie Morrow, the writer-editor Ed Sammis, the Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas, Ambassador Andy Young, Bishop Lou Walker, Ping and Carol Ferry who always supported Indian political prisoners, the Osage artist Jeffe Kimball, attorneys Bill Kunstler and Sandy Rosen, the filmmakers Mike Cuesta and David Baxter, who made a documentary about Leonard’s imprisonment. I learned a lot from these new friends, was exposed to new ideas and lifestyles. I enriched my vocabulary as my horizon expanded. I was stuffed with good food, strange and delicious, was given nice clothes, and was taken to shows and parties. There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep me so occupied that I had little time to feel sorry for myself. Most important, I had many shoulders to cry on. And always, wherever I was, I was visited by skins from many tribes who showed up in the most unlikely places.

Leonard survived through his spiritual power. Even in his cement cell with the steel bars, the bucket, and the naked light bulb which was kept burning all the time, he went on a vision quest. When he got to Terre Haute, as the bus stopped at the prison gate he heard an eagle-bone whistle. With it came a voice saying: “You hear me, you feel me, you see me, you know me. Hold on to your ancient ways and learn to bear the unbearable.” Leonard told me that he communicated with birds outside his window or in the yard. They seemed to him to be spirit messengers and they cheered him up. Once a crow perched on his windowsill and that made him feel good. He thought it was a Crow Dog spirit come to visit him. Another time it was a yellowhammer which to him represented the Peyote Church. During a parole hearing he saw two eagles through the window circling in the clouds and he took this for a good sign. He always felt the presence of the spirits, even when he was in the hole. “Tunkashila is watching over me,” he told me one time. “I have a hot line to the Great Spirit. I got a built-in amplifier for talking to Tunkashila.”

He enjoyed the respect and affection of his fellow prisoners. When he got into Leavenworth the whole tier of prisoners ran to the bars of their houses, banging against them, chanting rhythmically,
"Crow Dog, Crow Dog, Crow Dog!”
The whole tier was a wall of outstretched hands welcoming him. In Terre Haute a black fellow inmate made up a song about Leonard. He sang it to me over the phone, accompanying himself on his guitar. It was a typical black blues song. It was beautiful. Leonard got many letters. Indians often send him poems.

He made friends with black, white, and chicano inmates. He felt especially close to the lifers. He simply could not understand how a human being could be put in a cage for a lifetime. He told me during one of my visits to the jail, “I know how these lifers feel with nobody to support them. Some haven’t had a visit for years. They been here for ten, fifteen years. They don’t have any idea of what’s happening on the outside. Through their windows some of them can see the watchtowers with their sharpshooters, and maybe cars passing by on the distant highway, or a plane flying high in the sky. And that’s the limit of their world. They don’t even know whether their relatives still remember them, whether they’re even alive. Lifers are the living dead.”

In the spring of 1976 Leonard got a break: he was released for three months pending appeal. Rip Torn and Richard Erdoes drove us to Lewisburg to get him out. He was supposed to be released in the morning, but the hacks had their usual fun and games, taking all day with one nitpicking thing after another to delay his release. It was as if they could not bear to let him go. They even played their miserable little power games with us, the visitors, shouting down from their watchtower over a loudspeaker, “Put your car over there. No, ten yards to the right. No, put it over there on the left. No, back up forty feet. No, come forward. Now turn the car around . . .” and so on and on for a full hour. Rip has a fierce temper and I was afraid he was going to explode, but he managed to control himself though trembling with rage. When they finally released Leonard late in the afternoon they stipulated that he could not walk out. He had to be driven by the owner of the car. Nobody else could be in the car. Nobody was allowed to wait for him at the gate. Everybody, except Leonard and the driver, had to walk one mile and wait outside the prison perimeter.

So we waited, not letting all this pettiness bother us. Outside the prison grounds the hacks’ power ended. We found a nice spot by the road. There was a brook, grass, flowers, trees. I spread out Leonard’s sacred things—the pipe bag with Indian tobacco, the buffalo skull, the eagle wing. We had brought a fine young Lakota singer, Steve Emery, and when the car finally drove up and Leonard stepped out, Steve pounded the drum and sang an honoring song. Then he sang the AIM song as I draped my husband’s red-and-blue prayer shawl around his shoulder and put the red beret with the eagle feather on his head. Then we sat down in a circle and smoked the pipe. When we were ready to go, Erdoes asked, “Crow Dog, what do you want for dinner?”

Leonard surprised us by saying, “For months I have dreamed about good Chinese food.”

Erdoes found a phone booth and made a call to his wife, Jean. When we got to New York a feast awaited us, a table loaded with double-fried pork, Szechuan shredded beef, shrimps in lobster sauce, beef curry, Chinese dumplings, pork with snow peas, egg foo yong, Hunan spiced chicken. On the way to New York our car had hit a pheasant. Rip had picked it up saying, “This is good meat.” So, in addition to all this Oriental food, Rip cooked a gourmet pheasant dish for us. It was great. But after dinner Leonard could not relax. He was sleepless for nights. He paced the streets. When we made love he felt the hacks were watching us. When he did manage to sleep he had nightmares. He said, “Mentally I’m still in prison.”

Our friend the artist-writer Ed Sammis has a little house by a mill pond in Westport, Connecticut, a few hundred feet from Long Island Sound. He said, “Leonard, we’ve got to debrief you. You’ve got to get out into the country, smell some sea air.” So we all went to Ed’s house. He had a stuffed crow on one side of his mantelpiece and a stuffed toy dog on the other. In between was a handwritten sign:
WELCOME CROW DOG
. He must have gone to a lot of trouble to find that stuffed crow. Ed makes the best Bloody Marys in the world, and he is a good cook. He makes “steak outrageous,” “beans outrageous,” and “chicken outrageous,” meaning that he douses everything with large quantities of brandy. He had prepared a big dinner, but Leonard fell asleep after a few mouthfuls. He staggered over to a couch and fell upon it face down. He slept for thirty-six hours. Then we traveled home to Rosebud. It was a bittersweet homecoming. The old Crow Dog house was gone, but the small, red, jerry-built “poverty house” was still there, terribly run down from all the wear and tear. Leonard tried to start his former life as a medicine man all over again, but after three months we got a notice that Leonard’s appeal had been denied and that he had to go back to prison. With his acute sense of history Leonard surrendered himself at the courthouse in Dead wood, South Dakota, because it was at this same courthouse that his great-grandfather had surrendered himself in 1884.

So my husband was again dragged off in handcuffs for another year. We appealed to Judge Robert Merhige for a reduction of sentence to time served under Rule 35. Merhige was the judge who had sentenced Leonard in the phony assault-and-battery cases. He looked like a tiny, mean, gray-haired owl with a sharp beak. In the courtroom he had been a veritable tyrant and we had hated him. In his own court, at Richmond, Virginia, he was known as a fair and liberal judge. The government had picked him out of the blue and sent him to South Dakota to clear up all Indian cases in record time. I believe they picked him because Merhige knew absolutely nothing about conditions on the reservations. Probably he had never met an Indian before. During the trials the prosecution had made it impossible to develop the background to the case.

But now Merhige was receiving armloads of letters and petitions pleading for Leonard. Some of these letters came from clergymen, Indian tribal presidents, anthropologists, doctors, and teachers who knew Leonard and were familiar with conditions at Rosebud and Pine Ridge. Richard Erdoes even went to Merhige’s bishop, explaining Leonard’s ordeal and asking for a letter of support. Richard found the bishop, a genial Irishman, in undershirt and underpants soaking his bunions in a tub of hot water. An elderly housekeeper kept bringing teakettles of more hot water when the water in the tub cooled off. The good bishop listened and exclaimed, “Holy Moses, what are they doing to this poor man?” He instantly fired off a letter to the judge. Richard, who is an artist, had sent Merhige an illustrated letter, describing to him the background of the story which the prosecution had hidden from the court. The illustrations showed all the crazy things that had happened to Richard as nonlegal head of the defense team—groupies climbing naked into his motel bed, rednecks taking potshots at him, having to live on fry bread and dog soup. “Dear judge,” he wrote, “if you have no pity on Crow Dog, at least have pity on me.” He made the illustrations as good as he could, as if they had been a job for
Life
or
Saturday Evening Post.
When he told the lawyers about it, they were aghast. They told Richard that he had blown the case, that he had dared interfere with a sitting judge, that he could be held in contempt, go to jail. But nothing happened.