-
Red Vines: Lines for Deloria
- University of Arizona Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
95 Red Vines: Lines for Deloria Truck stop bucket offers red whips, miles worth of invert syrup—chew for the chaw-free, rich with red dye. In it for the long haul, we load up on licorice laces, punctuate our stories by bites placed in dramatic pauses. RED is a flavor of its own, sweet imitation of nothing known in nature. Black whips, the ones we favor, seem extinct in truck stops. RED it is. RED for joy riding. GOD after all is RED and has been long before 1969, when Custer Died for Your Sins and the universe came alive and chokecherry trees became your relations. Red vines for journey. Road trip with whips and sisters who whip me into shape, need it or not. We could skip the licorice ropes, do without or Double Dutch with them. In this bucket, there’s enough red rope to string us all together , like relatives fed from the same rich vein. We mistake what looks like a dead eagle for a dead eagle and turn a U to find it is a goose. But not before we swap Red Vines for tobacco, jump out on the shoulder. Poor goose. Who’s to say we shouldn’t honor you? Still we leave you, roadside, road-killed and toothsome to buzzards, our other relatives. The road divides for a boat-shaped rest area. There are five points to the Lakota Worldview. Point one: The Universe is Alive. Red berries near the rest stop attract us. We of the chokecherry. Women of the Chokecherry. We of the tree Deloria gives agency. Chokecherries choose us. Who doesn’t know this? Some berries listen. Some lead. For sure we know we find berries when berries want to be found. Uncommon flavor, the chokecherry. Tastes like mouth: hot, red, sharp, dark. Sweetened now, most often, to a tolerable syrup. But on the road we like it redblack and tart. God is RED-dark, sharp—a mouth. 96 Snap the licorice, measure the miles in vines. Stay awake. Not for the flavor, for the snap. Pass some back. If only we could say what it is we taste . . . What is the flavor? Ineffability? If the universe were alive, these vines would taste of chokecherry. Taste of the fruit we picked at the rest stop, of the three yogurt cups we filled up, of the Auntie Tree with Agency. But none of us think that at the time. We just motor along snapping licorice and chatting. She speaks her flavor through the air, the alive air of the universe and of the speeding vehicle, so we all say at once, hey, RED VINES TASTE OF CHOKECHERRY. Because suddenly, and ever after, they do. ...