Category: Angela Grey

When asked, is it Waubay, SD, Watertown, SD, or Brooklyn, NY: to which do I belong?

Since I spent a great deal of my childhood moving around, sometimes three times in one school year, I don’t really know what to respond when asked about my hometown. I was born in Webster, some eleven miles off the reservation, and lived in reservation adjacent Waubay. There were times we lived south of downtown at the end of Main in Waubay, which is where I lived after I was born. Then there was the bee infested house just off Main. Other than that, it was on the reservation at Enemy Swim, where we lived with Grandma, Aunt Chubby, and Uncle Jonas, plus the cousins, my grandma, and aunt raised. Then there was the school year living with just my mom and siblings at Enemy Swim.

Or there were the times we lived with my Puerto Rican stepfather, who claimed he was Filipino sometimes, Italian or Sicilian at still other times. I think that’s where I learned my masquerading from. He did it well. Oh, there were even times when he was Native American and had an ancestral chief, anything but Puerto Rican. He had defamatory words for them. His birth certificate read otherwise. But I digress… Although one can learn a lot about me from my elaborations. As to where I got my fiction writing skills. He portrayed himself and ourselves as many things to get what he wanted, which is, in large part, why we moved around so much. He tired quickly of the Brooklyn grind despite wanting to hail from there. He was born in the Bronx.

We weren’t in Brooklyn celebrating the nation’s Bicentennial watching replicas of Columbus’ ships sail up the Hudson, playing at Coney Island, visiting the Statue of Liberty, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, the museums and libraries, or simply walking along the path to take in the Verrazano Bridge at sunsets for extended amounts of time. Since he’d make it so that we traveled back to South Dakota, where his hunting skills were outshined by my mother’s, much to his dismay. We’d move from town to town on his whims, often living with Grandma, his coworker friend Van, or the government’s dole.

None of those residences last more than a year and, like I said, were far too often multiple times a year because he found it completely normal to bail out on the rent only to let it catch up with them and land us on the street. The amounts of time in my childhood were pretty much equal were it be Brooklyn or South Dakota.

So, where should I answer when asked where is my hometown? Or shall I toss another wrench into the works and venture to say, Bismarck, ND, where I lived for a whopping two years straight, split only between two residences?  However, there were two lengthy hospitals stays in that mix, so I can’t really claim it was a consecutive stay. That place was a shock to my system for numerous reasons, which I’ll delve into further and later.