Worked on, Sooty In The Field. Also started a new novel, One Red Indian - based on the life of my friend in Montana. She's been asking me to work on it for years, and today, I just got the motivation. I didn't want to write anymore books - only screenplays. But I see more people reading a book like this, than the rights to a screenplay being bought. So...... here's an excerpt:
Chapter 1
I was made aware of life at a very early age. From the time I was 4 years old, my mother and I traveled from pillow to post. My mother was a brown skin Lakota Sioux from the Wolf Point Reservation in Wolf Point, Montana. She loved whiskey. When the lack of money deprived her from getting whiskey, she loved men. And the more men she loved, the more whiskey she could get. The more whiskey she could get, the more children she conceived.
I was the youngest – living. There were many after me that did not survive my mother’s self-induced abortions. At age five, I remember her throwing herself down a flight of stairs to get rid of a child from a man she had met at the tavern. His name was Oliver. He was a Black man with huge craters on his face. He was tall, about 6’ 5”, thin and dressed quite well. He was not my mother’s boyfriend or anything like that. They’d meet at the tavern, he’d buy her whiskey and before the night was over, they’d go into the bathroom for an hour or so. I know. I was there.
When the tavern closed for the evening, my mother had to find a place for us to spend the night. If she was extremely drunk, we slept in an old garage on 73rd and Jeffery. If a man had whiskey stashed at his house, we’d spend the night with him. Most of the time, we stayed with Jessie and Bill, a Black couple who lived on 79th and Evans. Jessie was a drinker like my mother. She was loud and rowdy. A fight at the tavern caused someone to throw a beer bottle at her face and knocked out her right eye. She had a prosthesis, but you could tell it was fake because it never moved. But that missing eye didn’t slow Jessie down one bit. When her song came on, Claudine by Gladys Knight & the Pips, she’d pull me to the middle of the tavern floor and we’d dance like there was no tomorrow. It was from Jessie that I learned to dance like the Black children on the Southside of Chicago.
