From the Rockies to The Windy City

By Ali Anthony Bell

Adult Auto-biographical Fiction
A young white American boy, the son of a preacher, experiences an enormous culture shock when his family moves from the Blackfeet Native American Reservation at the foot of the Rocky Mountains to join a religious sect in the inner-city Black ghetto on the West Side of Chicago in 1969. The main message of the story is that every single life experience is necessary to make us the unique individuals we are. The story is set between 1964, when the boy is 4 years old, and covers 13 years, until 1977, when he finally breaks free of the religious sect and flies on his own wings. Based on real events in the author's life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ali Anthony Bell
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005622886

Ali Anthony Bell

"I believe in every person's potential to develop in any field, and I believe in Morocco's ambition to become the link between Africa and the rest of the world. To do this, Morocco needs the English language, and this has become my reason and purpose: to help individuals to improve their communication skills in English, and in this way, to also help Morocco."Ali Anthony BellAli Anthony Bell has been teaching English in Morocco since 2010. An American expat, he left the USA in 1983 for Paris. He discovered his passion and vocation as a teacher at 50 years of age in Morocco, after having spent more than 20 years in Sales and Marketing in France. He taught English to High-Intermediate and Advanced level students at EHTP in 2013/2014, as well as at HEM and The American University of Leadership, where he also taught Sales and Marketing.

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Most of the fictitious events in this novel are based on real events in the author’s life. Some names and identifying features have been changed to protect the identity of certain parties. References to real people or real places are used fictitiously. Certain names, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination.

Two of the chapters of this novel were originally published as short stories at Reedsy Prompts: Chapter 5 – The World Turned Upside-Down was submitted on September 5, 2020 for Contest #58 in response to: Write a story about someone feeling powerless....Chapter 12 – On the Lam was submitted on November 17, 2020 for Contest #68 in response to: Start your story with someone admitting a secret and end it with someone telling a lie.... Acknowledgement to Reedsy.com for providing the 2 prompts that inspired the above cited chapters.

Book design by Ali Anthony Bell.

First e-book edition 2020 Published by Ali Anthony Bell at Smashwords Inc.

ISBN: 9781005622886 (e-book edition)

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Casablanca, Morocco

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From the Rockies

to

The Windy City

Ali Anthony Bell

Chapter 1

Kristucky – Little Beaver

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You. Dr. Seuss

While my life’s journey started out in relative peace and calm, a trial by fire disrupted that carefree time when I was 9. It was a trial that would last for 8 years. I’m 60 years old now, and I’ve known several upheavals in my life in different countries. Meanwhile, the biggest culture shock I ever experienced happened in my own country when I was just a child. I would hold a grudge against my father most of my life afterwards, finally making peace with him when I was 52, six months before he died.

I was born on March 8, 1960, in a little town called Cut Bank, named after a creek, where we children would play, in the State of Montana, also known as Big Sky Country, at the Eastern foot of the Rocky Mountains and very close to the Canadian Border. Cut Bank wasn’t my hometown; it was the closest town where there was a hospital where my mother could do her childbearing. There was a hospital in Browning, my hometown, but it was only for the indigenous people of the Blackfeet Reservation where the town was located. Browning, named after the rifle maker, was even smaller than Cut Bank, with a population of some 1500 souls. My father and mother had moved there from Texas before my birth because my Father was a Methodist Minister (preacher) and he had been assigned to the Reservation. Every Sunday he held 3 services, the first one high in the Rockies, in a village called Babb, the second one in Browning, and a third one to the Southeast, on Badger Creek, in a place we called Apistotoke which is the Blackfeet name for the Great Spirit, the Creator.

I was born a fraternal twin, but me and my twin brother both caught pneumonia at birth, and my brother Timothy Joel died 16 days later, March 24th. My Christian given name was Anthony Edward, but my nickname, at least for my family and the white population, was Tony Ted. I had an older brother James Edwin Jr., Jim Ed, and in 1963, our younger brother Benjamin Noel, Ben was born. On top of these given names, all three of us had Blackfeet given names as well. Jim was Nah-tay-yah, meaning Bobcat, Ben’s name was Ah-pen-ah-pi-poh-kai, Child of the Rising Sun, and my name was Kristucky or Little Beaver. All of the Blackfeet on the Rez used these names, so I was just as used to hearing Kristucky as Tony Ted. In fact, these names were for children, because in the Blackfeet tribe, as for many of the Native Americans, a person’s name changes after going through a rite of passage into adulthood called a Vision Quest. This ritual is based on the spiritual idea that the entire universe and all the natural objects within it have souls or spirits. The Vision Quest is only for boys becoming men and is not practiced for women. The basic steps are these: after a ritual cleansing in a sweat lodge, the boy would wash with cold water and then go into the wilderness for three days of consecutive fasting, during which time he would seek his vision, which then would be interpreted by a medicine man to give him his adult name. We three boys didn’t know or care about any of this (it’s just for information), and we all would leave the Reservation long before we would have come of age to go through the ritual.

As a young child, I refused to wear shoes because they hurt my feet, so my parents let me wear hand-made Blackfeet moccasins almost all of the time. They’re very comfortable, like a second skin. My earliest memories are from when I was 4. There was a big celebration for the Montana State Centennial, and my father dressed with a top-hat like 1864. He was very tall and lanky, standing 6’7 (2m) tall; and he grew a beard for the occasion, which, because of our family background, looked like a typical Irish leprechaun’s beard. The whole effect was a very close image to that of Abraham Lincoln. I already loved painting and coloring, and I still have a black crayon drawing and a painted portrait I did of my father in 1964, both the beard and the top-hat impressed me. Funny thing; I painted a horizon line and a frame around the portrait".

These items I got back as an adult with other things from the Rez, they had been stored in a trunk from 1969 to 1983.

I used to dance for the tourists every summer with the Blackfeet kids dressed in a buck-skin outfit for Indian Days. One little pale-faced blue-eyed strawberry blond kid with all the little brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired ones. For the kids, boys have their hair in three braids, one down the back and one on each side, and the girls have two braids.

We had a black and white television for a while, until the summer of ’65 when we moved to a new house Dad had built about a mile outside of town, on the road that led West towards the mountains. He had built a new house with doors high enough so that he didn’t have to duck his head every time he went through one. Before the move, we lived in a two-story parsonage across the street from a typical small white wooden church building with a cross on top of the belltower. There was a small brass commemorial plaque next to the front door for my twin brother Timothy that we saw every time we entered. We usually went to the church in town until after the move.

All I can remember from the television in ’64 was a show called "Broken Arrow. It was supposed to show how the good Indians broke their arrow in a sign of peace. Anyway, I loved playing bow and arrows. We had a storybook about William Tell too, and that made them even more interesting. We didn’t watch TV much, and it disappeared with the move. Oh yes, I remember a few other things, the show I Love Lucy, and I also remember seeing tap dancing on TV and wanting to be a tap dancer. My favorite game was to play house with Biz (Elizabeth), the pretty blond girl across the street. She had a playhouse in her yard, and we played mommy and daddy or queen and king. It was much more interesting to me than the boys’ games. There’s always a lot of snow in Montana in the winter, and we used to get a bowl and go outside and fill it. Mom would put in milk, brown sugar and a little bit of vanilla extract, and we had what we called snow ice-cream. The winter of ’64 there was an exceptional amount of snow. My father couldn’t do the Christmas services because of a snowstorm, so we did our own candlelight service in the house. That Christmas I got my favorite shirt, it was a sky-blue cowboy shirt with pearly snap buttons and two rearing embroidered horses facing each other, one over each of the front pockets. Most of our clothes mom made herself on her Singer, so store-bought clothes were special. That Christmas night taps" magically appeared on my shoes. Also, that same Christmas my brother Jim, who had just turned 6, got a chemistry set from Santa, and I tried it out early in the morning before anyone else was out of bed, pouring and mixing chemicals in the test tubes. Luckily, I didn’t do any harm. I think that I kind of spoiled his Christmas though.

There was a Gambles grocery store within easy walking distance of the house with lots of candy and toys, and we boys always got $1 in the mail with our Birthday cards from each of our grandparents ($2). We were allowed to buy (almost) whatever we wanted. As we were very close to the Canadian border, Canadian money, both bills and coins, circulated freely and at the same value as US money. There were two coins that were real treasure for me. One was the US Indian head nickel (5cents) which was pretty rare, and the other, which I loved, and that wasn’t rare for us, was the Canadian nickel, because it had a Queen Elizabeth (like my friend Biz) on the front side and a beaver on the backside (like Kristucky).

My mom always read us stories, and after my 5th Birthday, she started teaching me how to read. This was