July 9th, 2016 - Shonda Buchanan

Below is “Wolf Medicine” excerpted from Girl with the RedBlack Heart: One Woman’s Journey Through Trauma, Divorce & Loss to the American Indian Pow Wow Trail, Home & Black Joy 

Alex found me sitting with the other women about forty yards from the arbor.

“Hey,” he said, leaning down and fake kissing me on the cheek, brushing against my locs. His worn tobacco pouch and bear claw dangled from a string around his neck, silhouetting against the flames in the center of the arbor. I wanted to recoil from his nearness, but in public we’d developed a code. Public display of affection wouldn’t be repelled. Keep up the pretense. But me and Alex knew.

We. Were. Separated.

It was the summer of 2016, the first night of the Green Corn Dance in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Alex had admitted to cheating on me a few months earlier and I’d moved into another bedroom. We still lived in the same house because, like birds, it was hard to change our flight patterns. So, I’d reluctantly said yes to our annual summer trip to visit friends in Montana—when I’d wanted to stay home—but only if we drove separate cars. After Montana, I decided I’d  visit a friend who was teaching poetry in Albuquerque, and then I’d go home.

Alex was going to a ceremony in Oklahoma and called me on his way.

“My car broke down. Can you bring me some oil? I don’t have any money.”

Our whole marriage, he never had any money.

The only reason I’d rerouted my GPS to this little cradle of backwoods was out of sheer, dumb marital habit—we’d spent the last eight years of our lives breathing each other’s breath. Yet secretly, in the most shameful part of my heart, I still loved Alex. I wanted him to want me back. To apologize. To be the man I’d married.

“I’m going over there with the men.” Alex nodded toward the billowing clouds rising from what was now becoming a controlled bonfire spitting embers into the porous black sky. In the darkness, I saw how his favorite white t-shirt stretched over his hulking chest and shoulders, a bulkiness always contrasted by bony, muscular ebony legs sticking out of his black shorts.

“Okay,” I said dismissively. “I’ll be here.”

One eyebrow raised, Alex looked at me, then at the row of aunties bundled into our lawn chairs, legs wrapped in tribal blankets like human burritos, protecting ourselves from ticks and midnight chill. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but shrugged and walked off toward the arbor. His bulky figure slid into a thin dime, then disappeared into the shadowy figures slowing circling the raging bonfire.

The keening voices of the singers and Stomp dancers against the monotonous drumming began. A call and response song. Almost immediately, hypnotized by the sound, the scent of oily mosquito spray and crumbling wood, the sherbert flames feathering the air, I fell asleep.

But I could see everything: I saw deft shapes sliding out of the snapping amber, shadows leaping and leaning against tree trucks and the dancers, helping them dance. Something was happening, to me, around me, through me. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t form my thoughts. In this trance-dream, I felt as heavy as time.

It was as if someone had poured liquid gold into my body. As if a thousand feet were walking over my back, shoulders and neck, pushing me down into the chair. Stealing my voice. Maybe I’d crossed over and it was really the end of the old me, and this possession, this going in and out of consciousness, was the proof. Sleep and not asleep, I could feel everything and nothing.

Alex was probably so happy to be dancing among his nation, the Creek, because it had taken him three years to afford this trip, but in the trance, I had lost all anger and resentment. I’d lost the very thought of him, where the bones of Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee lay folded in those grounds.

The whole night while they danced, and as the crushed blue dawn crept over us, I woke up inside myself. I prayed for whoever had come from North Carolina on the trek, that long walk that killed thousands, maybe my mixed blood cousins too, who’d been forced there. Who’d died there. Who came back to life when we built our fires and sang our songs, bringing their old ways back to us new ones.

As birds began their morning chatter and the blue light creamed into lavender, fingering the grounds and trees, it ended. People pulled out snacks and water. We sat hunched over a wobbly picnic table with two silent women and a man, Joe, who’d been one of the unofficial parking lot attendants. Alex’s face was tired, saggy, but happy. He’d danced all night. We made small talk until Joe made a face when I told where I’d come from: Virginia to Montana, then New Mexico to Okmulgee and now, I was on my way back home.

“You’re a wolf. You’ve got Wolf Medicine,” he laughed, “because you drive like wolves run across these lands. They can run for hours and hours, and they mate for life.”

Not us.

Alex avoided my eyes. That day ten years ago, I wouldn’t admit that I wasn’t done with the marriage. Maybe he wasn’t either, and maybe we thought something would save us. But ten years later, I knew I would never have become who I was supposed to be in the smallest and largest parts of myself tied to a man who didn’t value my medicine. Who didn’t see the wolf in me. That loyalty.

That morning, we left in our separate cars. I felt the gazes of the aunties on us, all their questions in those looks, but they knew. Women always know.

And whoever I was a vessel for during that long, smoked night, or how many, I’ll never know. It was as if the ancestors had come to see who I was, who I belonged to. It was no longer Alex, that much was clear.

But I also think my ancestors wanted me to know my path with him was over.

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Award-winning educator and memoirist, Shonda Buchanan, is the author of Black Indian, and her newest poetry collection, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, which won the 2026 Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Book Award. Shonda has published in The Mississippi Review, TAB Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, LA Times Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today, Red Ink Journal, The International Review of African American Art and the Los Angeles Review of Books. An Associate Professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University and faculty in Alma College’s MFA Creative Writing Program, Shonda is compiling a collection of essays, Children of the Mixed Blood Trail, and a Black Lives Matter poetry collection, America’s Bloodflowers: Poems.