OCR Text |
Show in my father's house/ 158 rattle of snakes. The desolate, dusty hills were nothing like our Wasatch Mountains. There was-a constant trembling in my stomach, and I imagined that I had been adopted. When I asked my mother about it, she shook her head and said, "Do you say such things to hurt me?" One day in the heat of July, my mother and brothers and I walked four dusty miles to the Owyhee River. Several people swam in a reservoir below a beaver dam, dark-skinned people like those we had seen in Mexico, but with flatter, rounder features. I ran into the water and began splashing with the children. My mother called me to her. "Play here by me." "But I want to play with the kids." "No." "Why not?" She was silent for a long time. Finally, she said, "According to the scriptures, dark skin is a curse for doing evil." I watched the Indian children, remembering the Book of Mormon story about the rebellious people who were cursed with a dark skin so that the light-skinned people, "the children of God" would not be attracted to them. Would the Lord who heard my prayers put a curse on little children? I thought of the Mexican children, how happy and clean the rich ones seemed. Only the poor children seemed filthy, the way the story had said. One of the splashing Indian children cried out, holding up a cut foot. His blood was red, like mine. |