Crazy Brave: A Memoir

In the epigraph, Harjo describes the east as the direction of beginnings, where the sun rises and where living beings orient themselves for beginnings. Harjo notes that east is also the direction of Oklahoma, where lies the Creek Nation where she was born.

Harjo describes a pivotal moment as a toddler in the backseat of her father’s black Cadillac driving in Tulsa in blazing heat. Tulsa is a Creek Indian town established in the mid-1800s at the end of the Trail of Tears. She focuses on a line of music a jazz trumpeter plays on the radio and follows that sound “to the birth of sound” (17), leading her to grieve the failings of her parents and her own life. She considers this moment her “rite of passage into the world of humanity” (17), through jazz music. Harjo describes this place as the “ancestor realm,” and she refers to it as the spiritual realm in other parts of the book.

Her mother is half Cherokee, half Irish. Her father is from the Creek, or Mvskoke, Nation, the descendant of a tribal leader, but he has no living father or grandfather to guide him. Harjo remembers herself in the spiritual realm before she was born and that she was attracted to the world by her mother’s voice and singing. She was born already with the purpose and plan to bring stories, songs, and art into the world. We all have our purpose and our responsibility in this world, and in this way she is not special, Harjo writes.

Harjo reflects on the many voices she hears as she writes of those who want their stories told. Ancestors want to have their stories recognized and remembered. She remembers her great grandfather Henry Marcy Harjo, a Seminole who became wealthy through his ownership of an oilfield in Oklahoma, and Harjo’s grandmother Naomi Harjo, who was well-educated in art at Oklahoma City University. Her early death from tuberculosis when Harjo’s father was a small child left a lifelong sadness in him. She notes that such “gulfs of sadness” often lead people to short-term distractions (22), including drugs and alcohol. The oil money Harjo’s father received supported his love for fine cars, including his black Cadillac and Ford pickup.

Harjo describes witnessing from the spiritual realm her mother and father meeting at a dance hall, describing her mother as fire and her father as water. Because Harjo is born “to earth, of water and fire,” she is able “to enter and emerge from ancestor realms” (25). She translates these spiritual experiences through poetry. She notes the hardship of being born for the newborns themselves and describes her own birth as a fight, noting that she wanted out. She was dying and hooked to a ventilator after her birth. She notes that this is a theme in her life, a “struggle with transitions” (29), such as beginnings and endings. Her father died with the same “dying, gulping breaths” as she was born with (30).

When Harjo was a young child, her mother was a beautiful, vivacious woman who took care of Harjo and the house with grace and joy. Her father is described as more distant and mysterious, but mostly loving. She recounts a story in which her father returned drunk one night when she was a baby and threatened to kill her mother.

At four, Harjo was rushed to the hospital during the polio epidemic and had an excruciatingly painful spinal tap. She emphasizes the pain of her mother and father being ripped away as her protectors, replaced by unknown doctors and nurses. The test shows she does not have polio. She begins having a recurring dream of being dragged into the water by an alligator and becoming an alligator herself. She believes the alligators cured her of polio.

She describes helping her mother dress up in fine clothes for a party, noting the childlike awe and fascination with such things. Her father carries a flask of liquor. Harjo notes how fragile the beauty of her mother is, occasionally being ruined by the drunken violence of her father.

Harjo uses a dream of ancient Egypt as an illustration of her vibrant dream life. She states that she still feels “more awake in my dreaming life than I [do] in this corporeal reality” (45). Yet when she went to public school and began attending an evangelical church, she stopped traveling through “story realms.” Such imagination and vision, “especially in girls or women, was evil and most likely of the devil” (45-46). She recounts how the children in her kindergarten class would copy each other, until she asked them why, and then they began to copy her. For Harjo, it is different; “drawing [is] dreaming on paper” (48). She realizes that her imagination and attraction to art is different from everyone else.

She also begins to notice the oppression of women and girls in society by the Church, as she is forced to put on a shirt while playing outside with her brother at five years old, while her brother is not. This realization leads her to adopt a feminist outlook in her life and art, although she does not use the term “feminist” herself.

At school, she also learns to read and discovers books and poetry. For Harjo, poetry is “to disappear into many dream worlds” (50). Poetry helps Harjo cope with her parents’ divorce. Her father became too violent due to alcohol and cheated with too many women. Harjo “dove into the other realm” of poetry and stories to cope (51). She relives a comforting memory of herself on her father’s lap at a family party, counting the rhythm of his heartbeat. Then she relives her fear when her father was angry, because she was not brave.