“I finally got my birth certificate.”
Even before we sat on the bench in that small glass waiting room, he told me that. As if even back then we knew this was the important issue, even back then we were trying to know.
“I’m a Soboba.”
We were still standing staring at each other. I could not believe my ears.
“I thought you were a Mojave?”
“Well, I knew I was from somewhere out there. Actually, I’m a La Chappa! You know, the La Chappas from Mesa Grande, but I was born in the Soboba Indian Hospital.”
This was too incredible. Helen Hunt Jackson wrote Ramona most primarily to save the Soboba people from the same plight as had happened to the Temecula and the San Pasqual people (whose leaders, the La Chappas, led them in flight of genocide up to Mesa Grande.) The whole time she was writing—“it racks me like a struggle with an outside power” she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the experience—she was waging her own private campaign to save the Sobobas. They were her favorite people, she says somewhere in the scholarship. Soboba is the village in the novel, is where the “real” Ramona and Alessandro are buried, just east of Hemet, under San Jacinto, the highest mountain in Southern California. The fact is, I’d never heard of Soboba until two years ago when I started the Ramona research, but Jackson gave money from the sale of the book to the Sobobas with which they founded the Indian hospital for all the twenty-six San Diego-Riverside County reservations, in which it turns out Ramon was born. Wow. It racks me like a struggle with an outside power.
“I never stopped loving you,” he said again when we finally found the bench. “I’ve thought of you every day of my life. I never forgot you.”
***
I gave him copies of everything. He had no idea that I was a writer, much less one that had written about him and put his photograph on the cover of a book and many other photos throughout The Reader publication (including a baby photo!). Though I wrote everything, including “Ramon/ Ramona,” the first story in The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (the second story I ever wrote as a “writer”, after the secret California Daughter, and consciously in the same style), believing that he was likely dead—everyone said so, and I had searched for him years to no avail—I still had not fictionalized a single thing. How glad I was of that now, handing him the books and magazines!
***
On the very weekend I found Ramon my mother made the decision to return to Ashland!
Ramon represented the past to my mother, a most painful (angry, jealous, confusing, daughter-negating) time in the past regarding me, a time she’d believed would never return. Besides the unspeakable story of me and Daddy from then, my mother was in exodus of her Indian heritage—she was boastful of that heritage but she did not want an Indian grandchild. Such a child through Albion-white me “wouldn’t be fair to the child,” she said once and then repeatedly about mixed marriages. One day, after we’d moved back to Ashland from Waldport, she announced out of the blue, “I had nothing to do with Ramon being kicked out of Ramona.”
“…Ramon and I have been intentionally separated,” it says in The Book of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. “His foster parents got him out of Ramona as a favor to my parents. Like Ramona and Alessandro. Like Romeo and Juliet.”
Perhaps my finding the “fictitious” Ramon put the weight of evidence for everything now on my side, that I am after all a credible witness, and so perhaps it felt fair to throw hers to Bridget’s. It will seem at times that she went back to Ashland to join forces with her against me. Maybe to go back to flowers, to mountains and the sun (and to the story of her ideal marriage), she bargained, “Bridget, please, if only you’ll let me come back, I’ll come back on your side.”
***
Reprinted by permission from the author.
Read more of this in Ensemble Anthology no. 1
