Every Step You Take

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Book: Read Every Step You Take for Free Online
Authors: Jock Soto
unchaperoned life I led as a young boy alone in New York, and then of my innocent and naive mother setting off to live on her own in Philadelphia at age seventeen—I’m sure the two of us were equally clueless when it came to sex or anything else that adult life might entail. The similarities between Mom’s life and mine were comforting—we might not have had as much time together here on Earth as we would have liked, but we had a lot more in common than I had ever suspected. And though I had dreaded opening my mother’s computer, I found that I loved hearing her voice again and cherished all the new images I now had of her when she was just a young girl. I felt I was learning much about her, and about myself at the same time. It reminded me of a comment my fellow NYCB dancer Lourdes Lopez once made after meeting Mom: “When you meet the mother,” Lourdes said, “you understand the man.”
    When I compared my mother’s early childhood and my own, I was struck by the strange circles of irony that can stack up in life. When my mother was a toddler, her father broke with tradition and taught his little daughter the Navajo hoop dance, a ritual that was traditionally performed only by men and boys. Grandpa Bud taught his little daughter a dance that was meant only for boys, and then years later Mom taught the dance to me—her little boy, who was in some ways more like a little girl. I was also struck by how my mother and I, though our lives had started on the same reservation and our experiences were only one slim generation apart, could have such different attitudes and responses to the world around us. I thought about an “encounter” with a snake I had had as a young boy one hot desert afternoon, when Kiko and I and my mother’s brother and youngest sister, Orlando and Rochelle (Shelley), who were about our age, had hiked to a distant mesa where we liked to go whooping and sliding down the dusty, dry gullies. It was not much of an encounter really—in fact, the three of them simply mentioned to me that they had seen a snake along the way—but that was enough for me. I ran all the way home, screaming and laughing at the same time, tears streaming down my face at the thought of my close call.
    But my mother had real encounters with rattlesnakes in the desert, and she never ran home screaming. Quite the contrary: “My mother prepared us for such encounters by tying a small pouch of an herb that is used to keep snakes at bay to the bottom of our skirts,” she explains in one of her stories. Figuring they were protected from any possible harm, she and her sister Alice took turns jumping back and forth over a snake—“until we got tired or we tired the snake.” I thought about how my mother used to send me pouches of magic healing herbs whenever I was injured as a dancer, and how I would dutifully tuck them into my backpack and carry them around with me everywhere. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine there existed a pouch of any substance that could ever, under any circumstances, have induced me to casually jump back and forth over a rattlesnake. Was this because I was a misfit as a Navajo from the very beginning—just not made of genuine Native American–brave material? Or was it because the traditional Native ways had fallen off so much by the time I grew up? I wasn’t sure why, but reading my mother’s stories about her childhood awakened feelings of regret and remorse at having “lost” my original culture—I felt haunted by a phantom way of life that was my road not taken.
    For years I had heard people talking about the laws of circular motion as applied to dance, but as I looked backward I seemed to be discovering the laws of circular motion as applied to family and life in general. I wanted to take all the new information I was gathering and break it down into beats, which is the language I understand best, to

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