Read The Turquoise Ledge for Free Online Page B

one of those slave dealers who participated in the drunken public rapes of young Indian girls at the slave markets? His abuse was unbearable, so the three older girls poisoned their torturer.
    With the son of two prominent Los Lunas families dead at the hands of Indian “servants,” the local authorities could not afford delay. Copycats had to be discouraged immediately. The three young Navajo girls were hanged at once; only the youngest, Juana, was spared. Did other wealthy families of Los Lunas send their Indian “servants” to watch the hangings that day as a precaution? Did they make little Juana watch her sisters die? Did Juana understand then her last links to her family and people died with her sisters and there would be no reunion for her?
    From her poisoned brother, Grandma Whip inherited the only remaining Navajo child to be her “servant.” Poor Juana came to be part of the strange cruel family of Grandma Whip and her husband the Mexican with the English surname.
    Both my father and Grandma Lillie told me about the huge ring of keys Grandma Whip wore on the belt around her waist. Every door, every closet, every cabinet, cupboard and drawer in Grandma Whip’s house was locked at all times. When they visited and needed sugar for their coffee, Grandma Whip had to search among dozens of keys before she unlocked the cupboard with the sugar bowl. Grandma Lillie said all the locks and keys were because Grandma Whip didn’t want the servants to steal things, but maybe Grandma Whip wanted to make sure the rat poison stayed out of the sugar bowl.

CHAPTER 7
    M y mother’s ancestors weren’t as well known to her as my father’s ancestors were to him. My mother’s maternal great grandfather, Grandpa Wood, was born in what is now Kentucky during one of the violent removals of the Cherokees from their homelands in North Carolina and Georgia. It was his daughter, my mother’s grandma Goddard, who taught my mother that the black snake in the cellar was their friend. The Cherokees revered snakes before Christianity arrived. So my mother taught me to respect but not to fear snakes.
    Â 
    In my second year at the University of New Mexico, money was scarce. My elder son Robert was a baby then, and my husband Dick Chapman was in graduate school. I had good grades but in those days all the scholarship money there went to male athletes. The only scholastic scholarship available was one offered by the Daughters of the Confederacy. The financial aid counselor suggested I find out if I had any relatives who fought for the Confederacy. I asked my mother and she told me the Leslies, her ancestors, fought for the Confederacy. I got the scholarship for my high grade point average; it was two hundred dollars split between two semesters.
    The Leslie name goes back to Scotland and the Leslie clan. My mother said that her father, Grandpa Dan, had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan during the years he and Grandma Jessie lived in Georgia. My mother was very close to her father; they both wept easily and loved to drink. I remember Grandpa Dan with happiness until I got old enough to want to watch Hopalong Cassidy when Grandpa wanted to watch the Friday night boxing matches. The anger he directed at me that night so frightened me I did not feel the same about him ever again. Some years later when he died, I felt sorry for my mother’s loss and her sadness, but I didn’t feel sad; I was about six years old then.
    Later on when I was in high school in the 1960s, I tried to track down Grandpa Wood, and our Cherokee relatives; not all the Cherokees went to Oklahoma—some of the Wood family hid out in the mountains near Asheville. But in those days the Cherokees were poor with no casino money, and few records were kept of those who had been born or who died during the removals.
    Years before, when I was in grade school, our cousin Charlie Wood from western North Carolina worked for the Bureau of