Crazy Brave: A Memoir

The epigraph describes the south as the direction of release and notes, “Birds migrate south for winter” (134). It is the direction of flowers, fire, and creativity. It is an “eternal transformation.”

When Harjo lived in Tahlequah, she would reflect on her situation, wondering why she walked away from her dreams and let her people down. Her ancestors scold her in her mind for giving up on her ambitions. In Tulsa, she is becoming frustrated and bored with her situation, living for survival with a husband who cannot grow up. Her husband agrees with her, and they move back to Santa Fe to revive their earlier artistic dreams.

In Santa Fe, things remain the same, and Harjo gets a job pumping gas in a miniskirt at a local gas station. She finds a love letter from her husband to the babysitter and leaves him. Later she realizes this betrayal set her free. She then goes to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to study pre-med and then studio art, taking her son with her. Her ex-husband does not let her adopt her stepdaughter. Meanwhile, her brother Boyd is banished from her stepfather’s house and comes to live with her. When she writes to her mother venting about her stepfather’s abuse, he banishes her from their house.

American Indian peoples had begun to organize, especially at the university, inspired by the civil rights movement led by black Americans. Indians, however, wanted to maintain their own tribal identities rather than become full Americans. Feminism was rising at the same time. Harjo participates in the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and the Kiva Club, fighting for American Indian rights.

One of the NIYC leaders, a confident womanizer, flirts with Harjo and recites poetry to her on the phone the next morning. She begins a relationship with the poet, and they move in together. He drinks excessively, and eventually he hits her and becomes self-destructive. One night he starts a bar fight, and he nearly explodes their house with the gas stove and a cigarette the next morning. Harjo remembers her father’s alcoholism, and her friends struggle to convince her to leave him. She makes excuses for him.

One night when he drunkenly wanders naked into a motel pool, she feels their daughter for the first time inside her and realizes she is pregnant. She has just had a dream of a daughter who wanted to be born, and she names her daughter Rainy Dawn. She begins painting again and connects with her grandmother, who died before she was born and was a painter. She feels her ancestors within her, warriors like Osceola, who refused to surrender to the United States government. She recognizes herself and other Indian women as modern warriors, sacrificing for the well-being of their people.

She panics while returning from the university one day, having an intense feeling that she will die, which her daughter’s father ignores. This feeling continues for months. A psychic native woman confirms her suspicions that she is in danger. One night she has a vision of a story of a shaman on a Pacific island who heals by singing and dancing. Harjo realizes she “must become the poem, the music, and the dancer” (154).

Harjo begins to write poetry and realizes she must leave the father of her child. She has violent dreams about him. She finally makes him move out. Weeks later he returns drunk, and she has two friends with her for protection. He bangs on the door, screams, and cuts the electrical wires to the house. He kicks in the window and crawls in the house as the police show up. This time she does not take him back or help him out of jail. She realizes why she has put up with the abuse for so long, but now she breaks the cycle. She helps her friends whose partners were beating them, using her own house as a safe house. She notes that in the context of the fight for justice for American Indian nations, native women experiencing abuse at the hands of their alcoholic husbands have nowhere to go and feel they have no right to fight for their own safety. They are not supposed to talk about it.

She continues to party and drink, and eventually her knowing makes her realize that she can either continue down that path or take a better path. She advances in the university and begins publishing her poetry in the student magazine, but her panic attacks continue. She has a dream in which the monster that has been chasing her all her life catches her, but then it disappears, and she is free. She wakes and writes a poem in which she releases her “beautiful and terrible fear” (161). She realizes she creates the fear, and it is up to her to release it and free herself. The spirit of poetry comes to her and gives her the gift of language of the sacred.