Roxy Gordon Showcase TV Interview (1998)
1. |
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Crazy Horse never died.
Crazy Horse never died.
He's alive.
The whiteman came to Crazy Horse's home
and wanted buried resources there to run
their whitemen's world, but Crazy Horse said no.
Crazy Horse said, "What lies beneath this
Black Hills soil is our own."
So the whitemen called Crazy Horse
and his people pagans, said they
practiced dangerous religions,
said they wore funny things on
their heads. The whitemen said,
"You can't stop us; God is on our side;
it says so in the Bible. You are few
and you are ignorant. We are many and
we are civilized."
So Crazy Horse's people
took to terrorism.
They killed isolated whitemen;
they scalped and disemboweled them.
Other tribes said, "He's a madman."
The Crows helped to chase him.
And Crazy Horse took hostages.
The whitemen back in Washington said,
"Crazy Horse is crazy." They said,
"Don't he see we're the real God's chosen,
picked to be the future, picked to save
the world?"
They said, "In God's name, we will show him.
We will teach that pagan devil."
So they mounted up an expedition
to go and kill the pagan devil.
And at its head rode General Custer.
At its head rode General Custer.
They sent General Custer.
And Crazy Horse never died.
Crazy Horse never died.
He's alive.
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2. |
Junked Cars
02:17
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I spent my mysterious childhood
hunting human sign
over miles and miles
of empty
Texas West.
I hunted rusted tin cups and
broken bottles where adobe houses
melted and where dryland farmers'
deserted shacks moaned low in
summers' winds.
I spent my lonesome childhood
hunting rusted human sign
over miles and miles
of the empty West.
I treasured rusted old tin cans
and purpled broken bottles
where dugouts had collapsed
in drywash creekbeds
and where empty limestone
ranch houses stared out
blind from broken windows.
Junked cars were beautiful to me then
because they had once lived themselves
of human living beings.
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3. |
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The idea came from prairie dogs.
Prairie dog towns used to stretch
all over West Texas. Prairie dogs
are funny little animals that stand
on the dirt mounds by their burrows
and bark like the devil when
something threatens.
Prairie dogs have no real defense but to
head underground
(just like human beings)
and even then, they are likely to
be followed, dug out and
eaten (just like human beings).
Prairie dogs seem
born mainly to furnish nourishment.
Living life as a living target,
living life waiting for
the ferret
living life waiting for
the fox
living life waiting for
the coyote
living life waiting for
the hawk
living life waiting for
the white man--
running always, offering
a moving target,
fighting like the devil
to stay alive,
but keeping others alive
by dying.
Prairie dogs are an endangered
species now, except up on the
high northern plains and
the ranchers up there would
like to see them that way.
But we expect they'll survive--
in name and in fact. Because
the world still needs those who
die
for the survival
of the races.
And then on the other hand,
there are those moving targets
that move so fast
they just never get caught.
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4. |
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They hide all their women before I arrive.
They know somebody coming is still alive.
They take all their pleasures up their nose.
From just above their sinuses down, they are generally
froze.
It ain't what you see, it's what you smell
that gives you the sense to keep out of jail.
It ain't what you see, it's what you smell
that gives you the sense to keep out of jail.
Well I flew in tonight and I'm holding again,
landed in a city where I got these friends.
Gonna look up the men with ice in their soul,
cowboy boots on their feet and a whole lot of money up
their nose.
I take their money, then I take the chance.
They pay their fiddler while their women dance.
They're out on the street and they're dealing all night;
me, I got time before the morning flight.
They use their noses to put their minds out of gear;
I use mine to know when to get out of here.
It ain't what you see, it's what you smell
that gives you the sense to keep out of jail
It ain't what you see, it's what you smell
that gives you the sense to keep out of jail.
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5. |
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I used to know an Indian girl up north
on the northern plains.
I'm sorry that I don't know her anymore.
She'd just come home from boarding school,
just turned nineteen,
so all she wanted then most was more.
So they men that she stayed with were not
the gentlest kind.
I saw her walk the roads with swollen eyes.
She'd come to my door in the darker hours of night,
asking drunk for help while she cried.
Sometimes she spoke to me, she'd ask without words;
she would offer herself for my caress
And her hair it was black shiney, her skin
was brown and soft.
I ached for the fullness of her breasts.
But I had another woman and I never said a word.
I kept all I wanted to myself.
So she came to spit at me, came to call
my name with fire,
offered actually to fight me with her fists.
And, my God, I loved her then; I looked
behind her brown eyes,
I saw a nation that's gone born again.
I saw lean and screaming riders race for buffalo.
I saw a hundred-thousand free and haughty men.
Now that I don't live on the plains anymore,
I haven't seen her, but I heard that she tried
to kill herself one morning in the house where she stays
with a drinker from some southwestern tribe.
And, God I loved her then, I looked behind her brown eyes,
I saw a nation that's gone born again.
And I saw a woman, who always wanted more.
And I wish to God she'd found that kind of man.
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6. |
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It's an early cool morning; springtime in Texas, in the
year nineteen hundred and one.
Birds start in the trees.
A big black horse by the fence gently grazes.
The woman in the house is by her bed on her knees
and her eyes are dry.
Neighbors bring dishes; the fire makes ashes.
Women bake biscuits while men on the front porch
talk quietly and glance at the black horse grazing.
And the woman by her bed
on her knees,
keeps praying.
Her eyes are dry like her mama's eyes
twenty years ago when they brought her uncle
in from the river naked and scalped by Comanches.
She prays by her bed like her mama prayed.
And her eyes are dry.
Her face is brown and wrinkled like cowhide;
she's lived by the cows and helped calves borning.
She's ridden all day in the West Texas sunshine;
the dust and wind has brought tears to her eyes.
But now with death,
her eyes are dry.
Out in New Mexico,
the door is opening on a bright cool morning.
The man with one arm takes a deep breath
five-hundred miles from the house in Texas,
where his sister prays by her bed
and his black horse grazes.
One arm's gone, shot off, the other is bound.
His scaffold is stark against Clayton, New Mexico's sky.
The Texas train robber is about to die,
while his sister back in Texas prays.
Her uncles and kinfolk prayed every Sunday,
sang hymns at church, Baptist and unsmiling,
prayed over meals and buried their people,
buried their dead and murdered the killers,
and hardly ever cried.
Her religion's not for crying;
her religion's for living and praying
not for the dead but to get through the dying
one more death, so she prays all day.
She prays all day.
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7. |
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There's a desert between Hollywood and home.
When nighttime comes, I'll
be on the desert and gone.
I laughed last night at the Rainbow Bar and Grill,
at the people there and their strange ideas
of what it means to be alive,
of how to live on the western edge,
of how they live on their ocean's ledge.
The desert night will be clear and long
and as I drive it, I'll be sorry I'm gone.
Not because of this city or because of their sea--
the only edge I live on is inside of me.
So when I find somebody who's willing to stand
with me on my own ledge, on my own shifting sand,
then I don't care much about anybody else,
other people's edges or their sense of themselves.
For all I care LA could be right in the middle
of Tennessee.
When you're there, lady, I hate to leave.
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8. |
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It wasn't that those old Indians
had such bad immigration laws.
It's just that you
European wetbacks came
in such vast numbers,
the Sioux and Comanche border patrol
couldn't keep up.
And even after you've overrun them
and taken their jobs and stolen everything
you could steal,
still, they'll let you stay.
It ain't you, you see, illegal aliens,
that the American contingents don't want.
It's that baggage you slipped through customs--
send it back; you can stay.
Send back your capitalism.
Capitalism kills and steals.
Ask virtually every imperialized human being
in the whole suffering world about that.
Send back your communism.
Communism kills and steals.
Ask the Kirghiz of Afghanistan.
Ask the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua.
Send back all your green-frog-skin materialism.
Money kills and steals.
Your green dollars have worked the working class
to death for generations and stolen from them
the possibility of life lived like human beings
are supposed to live.
Ask the water and the air what
grief your green dollars have wrought.
Ask the cut, bleeding, poisoned earth.
Send back your Christianity.
Christianity kills and steals.
Ask every Indian who ever
ran into a Spanish priest.
Ask the uncounted dead of your own
holy wars.
Send back your Judaism.
Judaism kills and steals.
Ask the Palestinians;
ask the Lebanese.
Why did you smuggle all that stuff
in, anyway?
Things had been going along pretty well
here for thirty- or forty-thousand years.
Why didn't you try to earn American
ways and American realities?
If you liked your European isms and anitys
so much, why didn't you stay in Europe with them?
You want to be an American,
then be an American.
Love it or leave it.
Any gringo born in America
is as native American
as Crazy Horse.
Why the hell don't
you act like it?
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9. |
The Texas Indian
03:26
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Come all you, Texians,
Whoever you may be.
I’ll tell to you some troubles
that happened to me.
I’ve been dead a long time
so my name I will not tell.
But I was a Texas Indian--
so I do not wish you well.
At the age of 17
I joined a Comanche band.
We rode from the Palo Duro
down to the Rio Grande.
Our leader Black Eyes told us,
“When the Rangers come in sight,
see to your medicine;
I’m sure we’ll have a fight.”
I saw the Rangers coming.
I heard them give a shout.
My feelings at that moment
no white man could know about.
I saw the flashes from their guns;
their bullets came quite near.
My heart was high within me;
my war song came out clear.
I thought of my old mother,
with tears to me she’d said,
“You must go and fight the white man;
and make sure that he is dead.”
She said, “You must be brave,
and protect our native land.
Drive these white skin thieves from Texas.
Ride well with Black Eyes’ band.”
I saw the smoke ascending;
It seemed to reach the sky.
I thought at that moment,
my time had come to die.
The Rangers kept on coming;
Black Eyes led us on.
“Remember men,” he shouted,
“We are fighting for our home.”
We fought them full nine hours
before the fight was o’er.
The like of dead and wounded
I’ve never seen before.
Five of Black Eyes band
crossed to the other side.
We had six more that were wounded
and barely could they ride.
Perhaps you have a mother,
likewise a sister, too--
and maybe a woman to
weep and mourn for you.
If that be your situation,
and although you’d like to roam,
remember with your coming,
you are stealing our home.
And we’ll protect it well,
our families and our land,
so your hair might well hang
from the lances of our band.
You’d best hitch up your old wagons
and go back to Tennessee.
Or better yet, find a ship,
and head east across the sea.
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10. |
Why Do I Miss Someone?
03:27
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Why do I miss someone when you are right here?
What kind of river can catch my dry tears?
What muddy river flowing down through the years
will carry me away from my confusion and fears?
I've had me some times a wiser man would have
left behind.
I've followed winding roads to see what I could find.
And I found me times that I could leave behind,
never going, always coming toward one more good time.
Well, lady, throw your dishes, but please don't cry.
If I'm gone tomorrow, I'll try to tell you why.
I've always liked hellos, I've never said goodbye.
But tonight it's still a tossup; I just can't decide.
If there's a God, maybe He can understand
the torture of decision in an undecided man.
Indecision's come upon me like the river once again.
My leaving you'll get over; indecision is the sin.
Why do I miss someone when you are right here?
What kind of river can catch my dry tears?
What muddy river flowing down through the years
will carry me away from my confusion and fears?
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Roxy Gordon Dallas, Texas
Roxy Gordon (First Coyote Boy, or Tu Gah Juk Juk Ka Na Hok Sheena) (1945–2000) was a Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, artist, activist, and musician.
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