I would like to thank the many followers and others who graciously comment on my stories and send emails. I try to put something in each story to please as many as possible, but like the old Ricky Nelson song says, "you can't please everyone, so you have to please yourself."
There are no ten-inch dicks, triple F breasts or instant debauchery in this story. It has a slow start and builds gradually, if you're looking for a quick stroke story this isn't it. Though the story is about a black girl and an American Indian it is meant to be a romance/first time story and not an IR story. Hopefully, the powers that be will see it as such. The word nazi's will pick apart terminologies and references to different cultures, but then that's what they do best. This is a three-part story with all three parts finished and edited, they will be released a week apart. I trust you'll enjoy the journey.
Three Bears part one
It was another Friday night with me sitting at the far end of Gleason's Grocery Store parking lot eating salted in the shell peanuts throwing the shucks into a bucket on the passenger side floor. The "cool" kids of our small Appalachian town all drove trucks jacked up with big tires and names like Ram or Silverado with 3" tailpipes that spewed large clouds of black stinking diesel exhaust. Driving my late granddads hand me down 1961 Dodge pickup with a slant six instantly excluded me from that crowd.
Being Native American, or American Indian, whichever you prefer, and not a part of the local white or black culture I was considered as 'one of those hill people'. Which lent to me sitting on the upper end of the lot away from those guys, which kept me from getting into fights and hurting other people. I wasn't there to hang out with or hurt anyone, I was there to watch Hannah Johnson walk from the store to her car after her shift was done. Only in my dreams did I think the adult version of Hannah would ever speak to me or consider accepting an invitation to do something with me. For you see, we lived in different worlds.
Our town may call itself integrated, reality was a bit different, it was still as racially divided as it had ever been, just a bit more subtle. Oh sure, folks got along and worked together, but where they lived was another ball game altogether. The west half of town was nearly all black homes whereas the east side was nearly all white, the majority of homes on both sides of town were well-kept and modern. There was a third class of citizens that neither black nor white people tended to associate with. People like me who lived back in the hills, not off the grid, but close.
The ones people made snide remarks about family trees having no branches, all of us were supposedly uneducated worthless mooches living off the backs of others collecting welfare checks every month. To be sure there were some exactly like what I've described, however, the majority of those people living in the woods simply wanted to avoid all the noise and hubbub of town. There were no politics or drama where I lived, most of us were too far apart to care what the closest neighbor was or wasn't doing.
Then there were people like me who are even more despised. The original owners of the land, the Native Americans, my ancestry is Shawnee. Though tribes were rounded up and shipped to Oklahoma in the 1800's, some returned to re-settle in their beloved woods. Such was my great-great grandfather Black Hoof, a great Shawnee warrior chief. Though the bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to change Indian names, very few accepted them. To the best of their ability they maintained their Shawnee names, culture and ways. Of all the tribes in North America, the Shawnee have maintained and taught their language and culture to a greater degree than the rest.
My grandfather told me many stories as I grew, he had the facial features of a proud American Indian you might find on a long-ago postcard, my facial features were quite similar to his. Government officials claim there is no animosity toward indigenous people, but it still exists, as I learned when I first attended school. Having a full-blooded Shawnee mother and a half white/half Indian father didn't help things either. I was in a scuffle of some sort nearly every school day, it always had something to do with me being poor and an Indian. Or as most kids called me, a worthless half breed.
I first met Hannah when I was six years old. There were no school busses for kids who lived in the hills, if we were going to get to school, we walked. Though my folks were poor, mama saved enough money selling eggs and doing other odd jobs for people to buy a few school clothes at the thrift store and register me. She could read and write some but had only a rudimentary understanding of arithmetic. It wasn't because she was stupid, in fact she was quite smart in her own ways. Being dyslexic made learning for her extremely difficult, school systems being what they were then, she kept getting bumped to the next grade even though she was failing miserably. She left school at 16 feeling defeated and useless.
She met my old man a year later, they married, and I was born eight months after they'd said I do. My dad was a stereotypical redneck drunk, a worthless good for nothing waste of humanity who blamed everyone but himself for his miserable existence. His only redeeming quality is that he held a job at the local sawmill doing basic labor. The owner made sure my mom got half his pay every week which was just enough to keep us afloat and pay the real estate taxes each year. He drank the rest of his pay, I never saw him hit mama, but I hated him just the same. I remember the day mom came home all smiles as she hugged me.
"Three Bears, I done got you signed up in that school yonder, over by Punkin Holler. You gonna learn to do numbers and everthin."
Three weeks later at the age of seven I set out with a peanut butter sandwich in a brown bag and a few pencils in a backpack that had been thrown out because a strap was broken. Mama picked it up off the roadside, sewed the strap back on and I was on my way, trudging the three miles to school on my own. I was about a half mile from the school when I encountered a young black girl walking with an older woman. I would later find out it was her grandma. The older woman stopped and looked at me.
"You by yo'sef boy?" She asked.
"Yes'm, I live yonder by Crandall Ridge."
Holding the girl's hand tight she made a face, "Mmm, hmm, I be Granny Grace, you hill folks always was a hardy bunch but you cain't be trudgin round by yo'sef, come walk wit me an Hannah. I be a-waitin to walk wich you young-un's when school be done."
My first day of school was a pisser, my tribal name is Three bears, my English name is Jace. They couldn't decide what to call me. The Weeks boy calling me a stinkin injun during recess brought about my first school yard fight. It would not be my last by any stretch of the imagination. I was sent home early that day, the Weeks boy said I had started the fight. With a scuffed up face I met Granny Grace and Hannah the next morning where I had encountered them the previous day. As we walked Granny asked a few more questions.
"Wat happen yo face bo?"
"Got in a fight with a kid that called me a stinkin injun."
She grabbed me by the ear and made me look up, "Listen boy, you don't go fightin wit dem no count white boys. Lotsa otha kids hang out wit, neva mind dem boys. Dey git you kicked outa school."
I took her words to heart, "Yes'm."
"Wat yo mama name?"
"Mary Beth ma'am."
