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didn’t use carved gravestones but flat pieces of sandstone or slate or black lava stones. I seem to remember the remains of a few wooden crosses scattered about.
    She hadn’t brought flowers to Juana in a while, but then that year, for some reason, she decided to do it. Grandma Lillie took a little while to get her bearings among the piles of stones and small dunes of sand that shifted in the graveyard with every wind. Then she located the five dark lava stones the size of cantaloupes that marked Juana’s grave. I helped Grandma Lillie clear away the tumbleweeds tangled with other debris, and she talked about old Juana while we worked.
    Juana had been captured by Mexican slave-catchers when she was just a little girl. Years later when Lincoln freed the slaves, it was already too late for poor Juana—thirty years or more had passed and she no longer spoke the Navajo language, and she did not know where she had been stolen from. Grandma Lillie gave me the impression Juana came to work for their family when she was an adult after Lincoln’s proclamation because she had no place to go.
    Grandma Lillie said Juana was the one who really mothered them, not Great Grandma Helen. In her eighties, old Juana raised my grandma Lillie and all her sisters and brothers because Great Grandma Helen followed the practices of the wealthy Mexican women at the time, which meant she took to her bedroom as soon as she was pregnant, and did not leave her bedroom again until two months after the birth. Grandma Lillie had eleven sisters and brothers and two who did not survive—so Great Grandma Helen seldom left her bedroom. It was Juana who cared for them while their mother awaited another birth. Juana bathed them and fed them, Juana rocked them and held them when they were sick or scared, not their mother. Juana was in her eighties by the time Grandma Lillie was born.
    I remember my great grandma Helen vividly; she always wore a long black cardigan over her dress, and she rolled her own cigarettes from a bag of tobacco as she gossiped in Spanish with my grandma and her sisters Lorena and Marie. I don’t remember her greeting us or hugging us; she hardly seemed to notice us great grandchildren. She was so different from our beloved great grandma A’mooh that we children were a little afraid of her.
    Great Grandma Helen was born to Josephine Romero whose mother was a Luna, one of the founding families of Los Lunas, New Mexico. The Romeros were another founding family. Josephine Romero had married a Whittington, the son of an English merchant who married a daughter of the Chavez family.
    Grandma Lillie always called her grandmother Josephine Romero “Grandma Whip” because she wore a black braided leather belt around her waist which she could remove quickly to use as a whip for naughty children. My father remembers Grandma Whip too. He said they called her Grandma Whip because as children, whenever they visited her, the first thing she did when they came into the house was to warn them not to touch anything in her house by saying “Grandma whip! Grandma whip if you touch!”
    The whippings that were part of child-rearing in Grandma Lillie’s family included my father, and finally my sisters and me. The whippings were a legacy from Grandma Whip and her family.
    In 2006, I was asked to write a foreword to a book about a corrido or ballad that was composed in 1882 in the Mexican community of Cubero, near Laguna. The corrido is about a Mexican woman, Placida Romero, whose husband was killed and she and her baby kidnapped by a band of Apache raiders.
    It is likely the Apaches chose the Cubero area deliberately because Cubero had long been the site of slave markets. Placida Romero was taken back to Chihuahua by the Apache warriors where she was held for forty-nine days and so badly mistreated that the Apache women felt sorry for the Mexican woman and gave her clothing, food and even a burro to aid her