Running Barefoot by Amy Harmon

I’ve never really liked Josie Jo very much. It’s kind of silly and babyish,” I said wistfully.
    “What name would you rather have?” Samuel actually looked interested in my response.
    “Well... my mom really wanted us to all have ‘J’ names. I guess it was her way of binding us together, kind of like your family. So maybe I could just pretend it’s Josephine and everyone can still call me Josie for short. Josephine is so much more dramatic and ladylike.”
    “Alright. From now on, I will refer to you as Lady Josephine,” Samuel said with the faintest of smiles.
    “No.... how about I just make it my secret Navajo name and only you and I will know it,” I said, conspiratorially.
    “You are the furthest thing from a Navajo ...” Samuel scoffed.
    “Well, what if a beautiful Navajo woman had adopted me when I was just a baby? Would she have given me a Navajo name? Even if I had blonde hair and blue eyes?”
    Samuel stared at me for a minute, frowning. “I really don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve never known a Navajo who adopted a white baby. I’m the closest thing most Navajo get to a white baby.”Samuel’s countenance darkened. “Luckily, every Navajo child that is born belongs to his mother’s clan, so I am a Navajo, no matter who my father was.”
    “Did you ever know your father?” I asked quietly, not liking that I might make him angry, but not fearing it either.
    “I was six years old when he died. I remember things about him ... he called me Sam Sam, and he was tall and kind of quiet. I remember my life before he died and then after he died when we went to the Indian Reservation. I hadn’t lived on the reservation before. It was very different than the little apartment we’d been living in. I spoke Navajo because my mother had spoken it to me exclusively. I spoke English too, which made school easier when I started at the school on the reservation. My mother never talked much about my father after he died.”
    “Do you think it made her sad?” I ventured, thinking about my own mother’s death and how hard it had been for my dad to say her name for the longest time.
    “Maybe. But it was more about tradition than anything. The Navajo believe that the only thing that is left behind when a person dies is the bad or the negative parts of their spirit. They call it
chidi
and when you talk about the dead it invites the
chidi.
So . . . we never talked about him much. I know she loved him and missed him. When I was really young, she read to me from the bible that myDad had given her. I think it made her feel close to him without talking about him. She became a Christian when she married my dad, but within a year or so after his death she rejected it. She has become very angry and bitter. She didn’t know how to live off the reservation without my dad, and when he died, she went back, re-married, and I’m sure she’ll never leave.”
    “I don’t know what I would do if I could never talk about my mother...” I whispered. “Talking about her helps me remember her. It makes me feel close to her.”
    “Your mother died?” Samuel’s voice rose in surprise.
    “Yes.” I was a little stunned that he didn’t know. I had just assumed that he knew what his grandparents knew. “She died the summer before third grade. I was almost nine years old.” I shrugged a little, “I guess I’m just lucky I had her for that long. I remember lots of things about her. Like the way she smelled, the way she covered her mouth when she laughed, the way she said “Josie Jo, to and fro” when she pushed me on the swing.”
    “Why are you lucky you had her that long? I think that makes you unlucky. She died and you don’t have a mother.” Samuel’s face was stormy and his lips tightened a little as he waited for me to respond.
    “But I did have her for those nine years, and she loved me, and I loved her. Look at people like Heathcliffe. He had no mother
and
no father.”
    “Yeah, I guess he had a