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| ISBN-13: | 9781569763629 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1989 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 303 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Advise & Dissent
Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate
By James G. Abourezk
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 1989 James G. AbourezkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-362-9
CHAPTER 1
"Rosebud"
The Abourezk dynasty, as it were, had its American beginnings in Wood, South Dakota, seventeen miles southeast of White River, the Mellette County seat. Wood, which today has a population of no more than one hundred people, was the ultimate destination of my father, Beshara Abu Rizk, (who later Anglicized his name to Charles Thomas Abourezk), when he emigrated here from Lebanon in 1898. Mellette County was still part of the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in those days, before the federal government, in another act of largesse and accommodation to whites, opened it up for white settlement in 1911. Today, Mellette, Todd, Gregory, and Tripp Counties are collectively known as the "Rosebud."
When I had a little free time after I came to Washington, I went to the National Archives to locate Charlie's immigration card in the microfilm records. The few entries on the card told a fascinating story. He was accompanied by a thirty-four-year-old brother, Elias, and Elias's wife and two children. The immigration card for Uncle Elias indicated that he had lived in America for five years, from 1892 to 1897, and had returned to Lebanon to bring over more of his family. Elias must have lived a long and extremely productive life, because when I told his daughter — my cousin — Sylvia Sophiea, who lives in Flint, Michigan, about the family Elias brought with him, she nearly had a seizure. "My God," she exclaimed, "he must have been married three times." Sylvia knew of two marriages — the one to her mother and the other to the mother of Albert and Josephine Abourezk, but the family in Lebanon came as a complete surprise.
Charlie crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Bordeaux and landed in New York with $42.50 in his pocket, telling the immigration officer that he was on his way to live with four older brothers in "Cattsburg," South Dakota. There is no Cattsburg in South Dakota, but the word "Cattsburg" was obviously what the immigration officer heard when Charlie struggled to say "Gettysburg, South Dakota," which is where he ended his journey. Moreover, he had only two brothers, Michael and Elias, and, to further correct the record, he was the eldest in the family.
Charlie did a lot of different things to survive in turn-of-the-century South Dakota. He homesteaded, sold snow cones during the land rush in Gregory, South Dakota, and peddled spices, linens, and other notions from a pack on his back throughout the Indian reservation. A number of years ago an old Indian, Bob Moran, who lived south of Wood, told me that he still remembered my father walking through that part of the country peddling, on occasion staying overnight with Moran at his cabin, then walking on to the next human habitation in the morning.
Charlie finally decided to return to Lebanon to find a wife. Back in the village of Kfeir, which today is just a few kilometers from Israel's northern border, he sought out and married my mother, Juliana "Lena" Mickel, then an eighteen-year-old distant cousin. (One imagines that most everyone in that small village was somehow related.) My older sister, Helen, and my older brother, Chick, were born, in that order, after which Charlie decided to leave Lebanon again, telling my mother that he would send for the family when he got the money.
Charlie's economic position slowly improved after his return from Lebanon. From walking peddler, he moved up to riding a horse as soon as he could afford it, then to a buggy, and finally, in 1913 after his return from Lebanon, he opened his first store in Wood. In 1920, the year my mother finally arrived in South Dakota with Chick and Helen, he opened a second store in Mission, Todd County, which is twenty miles south of Wood, very near the Nebraska border.
I was born in the family home in Wood, which started out as a one- room house, but by the time of my birth it had grown into a thirteen- room, two-story rambler, each room built on as needed over the years by my father. I was born in the house, because by the year of my birth in 1931, there was no hospital. My mother was attended by a midwife, there being no doctor available at the time.
Before World War II broke out, it seemed that, except for the grinding poverty in which people found themselves, Wood's most critical problems centered on preventing drunks from burning mattresses in the city jail and trying to keep enough gravel on Main Street so that it could be navigated during the rains that came infrequently. When you hear of the semi-arid West, think of Wood, the most semi-arid of them all. For those who lived off the land it was strictly hardscrabble farming, trying to make do with very little rainfall, with no rivers nearby from which to irrigate, even if the farmers had been able to afford it. One of my most powerful remaining memories from the 1930s is the sight of an endless number of giant tumbleweeds, or "Russian thistles" as they were sometimes called, rolling across the prairie and down Main Street. Tumbleweeds grew in the pastures to a height of three or four feet, quickly dried out, and then were pulled up by the strong South Dakota winds to roll on and on, stopping only when they caught on a fence. They are today a symbol for me of the pervasive harshness of the weather on the Great Plains, the inescapable poverty that resulted from the lack of rainfall, and the inability to stop the wind from blowing, eternally carrying its cargo of dust into both homes and nostrils.
Living conditions for Indians around Wood were worse than for whites, except that the government managed to get food to them part of the time. At best, Indian homes were plain small shacks, made from either logs or sheets of tin. At worst, they were white canvas tents that simply could not keep out the bitter winter cold. One family — Ed Stranger Horse's — for some reason is burned into my memory. They lived in a canvas, army-style tent for as long as I can remember. Ed was quite old when I was a child, and what I remember most about him were his periodic wintertime trips from the tent to my father's store to buy one or two items, all he had money for, struggling desperately to keep warm in the thin jacket that was his only barrier against the cold. I remember that his eyes perpetually watered and his nose continually ran, much like that of a small child who had been in the cold too long. My father gave him credit whenever he needed food and had no money.
Until 1953, it was illegal to sell Indians alcoholic beverages. The federal law prohibiting the sale of liquor to "hostiles" dated from the time when white traders took unfair economic advantage of Indians after plying them with booze. It appeared to me to be a self-defeating law. The poverty that afflicted Indians, combined with the psychological defeatism that the white occupation imposed on them, created a class of Indian alcoholics desperate to escape their condition. The law never stopped Indians who wanted to drink from drinking, yet it often dangerously forced them to drink anything they could get their hands on. Because vanilla and lemon extracts contained alcohol, they were, in our store, bigselling items to Indians. Several white bootleggers made a living selling illegal wine and whiskey to Indians. Occasionally, the ingestion of wood alcohol would either kill or blind someone who couldn't get his hands on ordinary booze.
Both Indians and whites scraped to stay above the poverty line, trying to keep warm by picking up coal along the railroad track and by cutting wood along the creek east of town. I don't remember our family ever being short of food or fuel, so I never felt the sting of poverty as did much of Wood's population. Neither did I have an appreciation of how badly we whites treated the Indians. I grew up believing it was permissible, even heroic, to ridicule the Indians of Wood. Most of them, like Ed Stranger Horse, tried to stay out of everyone's way, there being no profit in finding oneself on the receiving end of a white's misdirected anger. The most visible Indians were the public drunks, those for whom alcoholism was a shield of armor. Until I left the reservation, I never understood the damage my own racism was doing as I joined the community in its uniformly bad treatment of Indians. I scoffed at Indians who would spend what little money they had on sweet rolls and cold cuts, taking them from the store to their cars to feed small children waiting there. The antics of Indian winos were the staple of our running jokes. We had no sympathy and very little mercy for those less fortunate than we. I belittled Indians until I left the reservation and attended college, where a friend, Peggy Goodart, figuratively slapped me in the face one day, forcing me to realize how destructive my attitudes were.
The flatness of southern Mellette County was broken only occasionally by a butte protruding here or there out of the prairie's expanse. In a way that makes one think of California as two states, South Dakota is sliced in half by the Missouri River, its two parts called West River and East River. The Missouri was created a few millennia ago by the western edge of a glacier that left in its path wonderfully fertile soil east of the river, and to the west, where it did not flow, hardpan prairie. The extreme western part of the state is blessed, however, with the gently rising Black Hills, spectacular granite mountains whose name comes from the black hue created by the massive stands of Ponderosa Pine that blanket the mountains. Just east of the Black Hills are the multicolored Badlands, fossil-filled lumps of red, yellow, and purple clay exposed by erosion over the centuries. But the rest of the West River country is mostly plain, flat grassland.
There is an interesting difference in political outlook between South Dakotans from the West River and those from the East River. For whatever reason, the flat, rich farmland east of the Missouri has created a more liberal kind of voter, one who does not shun government programs, whether for farms or for social needs. West of the Missouri, where there is a greater concentration of cattle and sheep ranches, is the base for all sorts of right-wing political movements, from the Posse Comitatus to the John Birch Society. But there is also a streak of antiauthoritarian radicalism in the West that the East cannot match. I once held a town meeting in the isolated sheep-ranching country of the West River and listened in amazement as a rancher rose to his feet to ask when we were going to get enough gumption to overthrow the federal government. Other ranchers exist out there — not many, however — who preach socialism for the masses. One of the great liberals of America, ninety-year-old Homer Ayres, a retired rancher, still writes lucidly about the sorry state of the nation's politics.
South Dakota has a relatively brief, but interesting frontier history. In 1876, Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head while playing poker in Deadwood, a mining town in the northern Black Hills. Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang robbed their first bank in Belle Fourche, just north of the Black Hills, and General Custer's place in history was established when he led an expedition to the Black Hills in 1874 and discovered gold. The gold rush that he precipitated led directly to the government's violation of its 1868 treaty with the Indians. The treaty, which promised that the Sioux would be left alone on lands conceded to them, was broken so that white gold-seekers could enter Indiancountry. When pressure from the gold hustlers was more than the Grant Administration could withstand, the president sent out a team of negotiators to try to revise the treaty with the Indians. When the Indians refused, Ulysses S. Grant ordered the army to round them up and drive them onto reservations. When Custer, among other army commanders, proceeded to carry out the order, it resulted in the Custer massacre in 1876, prompting the Sioux Indian intellectual, Vine De Loria, Jr., to announce to the white man a century later that, "Custer died for your sins."
I never really knew why Charlie settled in South Dakota. Today it's a most pleasant place to live, with its beautiful, sometimes spectacular mountain scenery in the west and along the river banks, and its peaceful, rolling farmland in the east. Cold winters are now much easier to take with modern technology's new ways to keep warm. But in 1898 there was none of that, making it all the more puzzling when one tries to fathom why people from Norway, Germany, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Ireland — and Lebanon — settled there rather than in, say, San Diego or San Francisco. Its character as a settler society has derived from those people who gathered from all parts of Europe and the Middle East — people escaping from poverty, from forced military conscription, from religious intolerance, from whatever it was that brought them to America. Life in South Dakota was always a marginal one for these exiles from the older civilizations overseas, but it was much less marginal than the life they lived in the old country, wherever that might have been. There was, of course, nothing romantic about their existence on the edge, but there is a great deal that is admirable about it.
By the time Charlie made enough money to bring the family over from Lebanon, World War I had intervened. Because Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, there was no communication between the United States and the village. Charlie tried to send Lena money, but it never arrived, leaving her no choice but to raise the children by herself, keeping them in line by threatening them with punishment by the Turkish army, which was enough to make anyone behave. The Turkish army in those days was not at all reluctant to confiscate food from Lebanese peasants to feed itself. My mother's memory of constant near-starvation in Kfeir contained for her enough vividly remembered trauma to prevent her from ever wanting to return for a visit. When asked, she would simply say, "I don't want to go."
The only story that I ever heard my father tell about the old days was one describing Lena's arrival in Wood. Beyond that he refused to discuss the past, choosing to speak only of life in South Dakota and America. I took his attitude, in later years, to mean that there was nothing he wanted to remember about the old days. Whatever family history of the old country I had heard came from my mother, or from my sister Helen.
Charlie delighted, however, in telling of the welcome the Sioux Indians gave to my mother and siblings when they arrived. Because they liked my father, the Indians decided to stage a powwow in honor of the family's reunion, dressing in full costume and war paint. When my mother came out of the house to see what the fuss was about, she saw what she perceived to be hostile Indians about to do her in. She scooped up her children and locked herself in the house until Charlie convinced her that it was safe to come out.
Charlie was a 260-pound, one-man threshing crew when it came to eating. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lena spent most of her time cooking meals for him, as many as six a day. He was so gregarious that whenever a traveling salesman came through Wood, he would drag the poor fellow from the store, across the street to the house for a meal. They were usually drummers with such names as O. C. "Pop" Castor, who sold wholesale groceries for the Ulry-Talbert Company, and Put Putnam, the Portis hat salesman, who passed out business cards identifying himself as "Everlastinglyatit Put." Offering such Lebanese hospitality not only allowed Charlie to show his generosity, but it worked as an excuse for him to eat one more meal during the day.
Charlie remained a big man, even in his sixties and seventies when I knew him (he was sixty years old when I was born). By then he had lost most of his hair and all of his teeth. He was still quite tall, but after decades of ingesting Lena's splendid butter and olive oil-based cooking, he had managed to construct a magnificent stomach. I think he overate at every meal, at least when I was present. Each time he did he would curse himself with his trademark broken-English profanity, a delightfully accented, "Gotdam me! Gotdam me, I ate too Gotdam much," a signal to Lena that she had cooked another great meal, causing her to turn away to smile to herself.
The empty lot across the street from the house today contains only a concrete foundation, the sole remnant of the old movie theater, another of my father's enterprises. It was one from which I greatly benefited, because a requirement of every lease agreementthat he signed with the various movie exhibitors who were tenants was my unhindered passage, without charge, into any movie shown.
About a hundred feet or so east of the theater is my father's original store building, now boarded up and crumbling. In its glory days it was known as C. ABOUREZK MERCANTILE, which Charlie owned from 1913 until he gave it to my adopted brother and blood cousin, Albert Abourezk, upon his discharge from the army in 1946. After Cousin Abie died prematurely from spleen cancer, the city fathers of Wood bought the building and converted it into a combination on-sale bar and off-sale liquor store. The city liquor store was then moved into the building.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Advise & Dissent by James G. Abourezk. Copyright © 1989 James G. Abourezk. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword Jim Hightower,Introduction,
1. "Rosebud",
2. My Life as a Sailor,
3. College,
4. Shoot All the Lawyers First,
5. Getting Political,
6. Running for the Senate,
7. Advise and Dissent,
8. Filibuster,
9. Somebody Out There Hates Me,
10. The Crazy Horse Cafe,
11. My Trip to the "Evil Empire" and Other Unforgettable Junkets,
12. Starting Over,
13. Easy Come, Easy Go,
Acknowledgments,