Whiskey Tender

Edmond Jackson was Taffa’s father. He was born in December 1941, the same day that Hitler declared war against the United States, in the Laguna Colony in Winslow, Arizona. His father worked on the railroad, but the family soon moved back to Yuma, and Edmond grew up on the reservation. After an accident caused Edmond’s father to lose his arm and fall into a depression, Edmond’s older brother, Gene, became a father figure for Edmond and his younger siblings. Edmond and his siblings weren’t entirely Yuma; their mother was Laguna Pueblo, and their paternal grandmother was Shoshone Paiute. They didn’t learn to speak Yuma, and like Taffa, they grew up feeling like they didn’t “fit in” on the reservation. Gene encouraged his brothers to fight to prove their toughness to the full-blooded Yuma men who saw them as lesser.

Growing up, Edmond was in and out of trouble. At 16, he was arrested for manslaughter after he lost control of his car and crashed into the river, where a friend drowned. He spent 18 months in prison and got in trouble again shortly after getting out. He turned his life around, and by the time Taffa was in preschool, he suffered from nightmares that “marked the final throes of the long spiritual crisis […] [that] many Native men go through to defeat their anger and create an identity they can live with in peace” (26).

When Edmond was a young man, leaving the reservation was considered “a betrayal.” Many Indigenous men in Edmond’s generation believed that “poverty was an expression of Indianness itself, and they tried to out-Indian each other by resisting regular jobs” (44). Their poverty and refusal to conform to mainstream American ideals of success was “an act of resistance” and solidarity (126). Edmond, however, encouraged by his wife, “chose to be an individual” (6). He wasn’t afraid to sacrifice tradition in the name of success and ensuring a better life for his family. He was sometimes criticized for his determination by the Navajos he worked with at the power plant and even by Taffa, who accused him of abandoning his culture, but Edmond refused to apologize, believing that his success paved the way for other Indigenous people to do the same.

Despite his commitment to living a mainstream life, leaving the reservation behind was a sacrifice for Edmond. He missed his family and his culture and felt out of place in Farmington. Taffa noticed him “trying to re-create the reservation in small yet obvious ways” (91), and he pressured his children to succeed to make the sacrifice worth it. Because of his connection to his Indigenous roots, Taffa felt closer to her father. He was her “hero” and the one she always felt she could trust and confide in, and her interest in reviving their culture, in turn, helped Edmond reconnect to his own heritage.

Lorraine Lopez Herrera was Edmond’s wife and Taffa’s mother. Lorraine’s mother was “a strict Catholic lady who […] believed birth control was a mortal sin” (30), making Lorraine the eldest of 15 children. She grew up in Yuma in a life that was “incredibly small,” attending mass, going to school, and caring for her numerous siblings. Her family was dependent on Catholic charity, and Lorraine dropped out of high school to get a job and free herself of her parents’ household. She met Edmond and quickly fell in love. Even though they didn’t seem to “fit” together because of her light skin, Lorraine and Edmond had a lot in common. Both came from poor families with numerous children, they had been discouraged from speaking their family language in favor of English, and they grew up with fathers who “were sometimes negligent” (31).

However, where Edmond’s Indigenous roots were a key component of his identity, Lorraine remained completely silent about hers. Despite her “light-skinned beauty,” many Indigenous people “expected her to be a fluent descendant of their tribe” because of her features (34). Lorraine was descended from genízaros in New Mexico, formerly enslaved Indigenous people who adopted Spanish names and customs and “sought to forget their cultural losses” (33). Lorraine never once admitted to this history and encouraged her children to grow up and live life as white Americans. Taffa often accused her mother of being ashamed of her Indigenous roots, but she also admits that it is possible that Lorraine didn’t know about her genízaros ancestors.

Nevertheless, Lorraine’s strict Catholicism and the way she “pretended to be white” drove Taffa and her mother further apart (206). Taffa saw her mother as being “terrified of complexity” and using her religion “to flatten the enormity of the sky, of the universe, out of fear” (205, 207). As she longed for a deeper connection to her Indigenous roots, she saw her mother as an obstacle to this goal. However, Taffa eventually came to see how Lorraine was responsible for the family’s survival. She “took her ancestral loss and turned it into a desire for more” (44). She “knew exactly what it would cost to get [them] out” of poverty on the reservation and never stopped pushing her family to do better (44). Taffa came to realize that Lorraine’s faith was the thing that gave her strength, and she regretted the “condescending” way she often behaved toward her mother.