The summer of Pocahontas
The summer the movie Pocahontas came out, a lawyer-man’s white female law partner went crazy after seeing the film at the Cineplex in a wealthy suburb in Northern California.
In an unrelated incident, a white woman aborted the fetus she carried. While another white woman (who also worked at the lawyer-man’s law firm) protested at the abortion clinic near the movie theater where the woman-partner went mad.
When his partner flipped her lid, the also white lawyer-man started staying late at the office, talking on a listerserv to his orthodox Jewish man friends.
What is the kabbalah? he said.
The distant men whispered back in sparkling green letters: Secrets.
Sacred secrets that reveal the shekinah – the divine feminine presence.
So the lawyer-man phoned the asylum where the female partner lay babbling about Indians and whites, and the absolute necessity of miscegenation.
Tell me the secret he said. But she asked only for directions to the nearest reservation.
That was the summer when the pipes of 7 houses in the same cul de sac of the suburb just mentioned burst at the very same moment.
That same summer the woman in the insane asylum saw John Smith come in through the window. She jumped out to safety. Never to be seen again.
In a possibly related incident the woman, who’d had the abortion went to see Pocahontas at the Cineplex to relieve her guilt. In line, she met a boy with long black hair and they sat side by side as he slid his hands up her skirt right there at the movie theater – with so many suburban children asking in whispers where the Indians had gone–
I am an explorer, she whispered in the darkness. And you are my desperate discovery.
I am part Cherokee, he said.
Although mostly, I am German.
Outside the theater, the third woman picketed with a sign she could not read. At his law firm, the lawyer man typed more green queries.
Meanwhile in a certainly related incident, the sprinklers in his empty house went off, trying and failing to extinguish the fire that had finally grown within him at the office, as he typed and typed waiting for the answers which would heal the sick, and restore the living, and which would bring back all the lost tribes from their most secret places.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer Writing (Un) Real 