12 Houses
by Yolanda Bonnell
There was always a sense of floating. Or running. Never touching the ground.
My personality was shaped by constantly having to adapt to new surroundings as I grew. I learned social skills to survive. Not fitting in was social death.
So youthfully dramatic.
1.
The Old House is where I was born. It was my Grandparents’ one-bedroom home on Fort William First Nation Indian reservation. There was no crib for me at first, just a dresser drawer full of blankets. Vines would find their way in through cracks. I can still see all of the pots and Tupperware placed to catch the leaks in the roof when it rained. Fly traps hung from the ceiling. Chipped paint. Creaky wooden cupboards. There was no bathtub. This house probably should have been condemned.
I spent the first three years of my life there. Even though I was incredibly young, I have clear and vivid memories of it. The feeling of being in that house. The safety and love I was surrounded with.
My Papa’s chair. My cousins. My Aunties.
The tones of warm browns and reds.
The blue phone. The long curtains.
Even if it was falling apart.
They tore down The Old House. I remember riding my bike through the skeletal remains of it.
The square pit of foundation was turned into a strawberry garden for many years by my Papa. Now, it sits overgrown and probably teeming with garter snakes.
The new house went up right next to the old one.
It was pink. And bigger.
And actually had a bathroom.
With a whole tub.
2.
Somewhere in between The Old House and The Pink House, I started school. I remember my first day.
A white blouse.
Black vest.
A matching tie and pleated skirt.
A whole K-Mart outfit.
I made my first friend because we were wearing the same clothes. I learned how to make the colour grey. I loved the water table. I had never seen so many different toys in my life.
My mom. A single mother to two small Native daughters. In the earliest days, we were raised by our whole family. Again, somewhere between The Old House and The Pink House and the school toys, my mother met the man who would become our stepfather.
Adapting to him would take years. I’m still adapting.
We were going to do this thing called moving.
Which I only understood as being removed from my Grandparents.
“Dear God,
please don’t take my Grandparents away
until I understand about death”
I had lost my Great Gramma around this time. My memories of her bounce around from sitting on her lap while she told me stories to being snuck into the hospital to see her as she was dying.
Her skin looked translucent.
My understanding of death was limited. I knew I would never see her again and that was pretty much it. But there was more I couldn’t grasp. The deep fear of never seeing my Grandparents again hit me in the chest in a way I never thought anything could at that time. We were whisked about an hour away to Red Rock, Ontario to stay with our Step-Grandmother.
3.
This new Grandmother was very kind with a soft German accent. She made peanut butter toast and chocolate milk in a way no one else ever has to this day. The house smelled of must. Lamps with giant plastic dangly jewels. Paisley. Bare lightbulb baths. There was a library. A room full of German books. I loved flipping through them, even if I couldn’t understand them.
We slept in the attic. All four of us. It was another incredibly old house on a dirt road right next to the train tracks. The entire house would rattle every time a train came by. The clattering from the glass echoed through the whole place.
4.
My parents finally found a house for us to live in on our own.
The Yellow House.
With tulips growing in the front yard.
They married. We went back to the rez for the wedding. I was the flower girl. Everything happened so fast. It was like being caught up in a windstorm.
Floating.
Even with this new house.
It didn’t feel like touching down.
It felt like—
It was just the beginning.
The wind was just starting to lift me up and turn me around.
Eventually, we moved back to the rez, but that’s not where we stayed. We often ended up back at my Grandparents’ house. When we needed a place to stay in between.
Or run to...
5.
The Red Brick House. Stood tall. Peeling paint insides.
A cupboard that needed a wooden spoon to hold it shut. I had a neighborhood friend—a white girl who cornered me in my bedroom and whipped me with licorice. I didn’t know how to fight back yet.
I was beginning to experience violence at home in a way I didn’t know existed.
Not from licorice—
But from our new father.
The fights started after they were married. And they just. Kept. Escalating.
Loud bangs
Like gunshots
Shots
Table drops
Was she pushed?
Or thrown?
I’ve never known
And the wind blew harder.
Get the stroller
Dress the baby
Pack your stuff
We’re going to Gramma’s
St. Ann’s became my home base for school. I would leave and return. Leave and return. But I started there.
I met my childhood sweetheart in that first-grade classroom. He became one of my best friends. Him and a girl who I later found out is Métis. Our teacher was strict—she may have been a nun in the past. The last residential school had not yet closed, but catholic schools were no longer run by nuns and priests. But that didn’t mean they weren’t still hiring them.
I remember her spanking one of the boys. In her rocking chair. Grey bun high on her head. Not a hair out of place as she whacked him. I peed my pink jogging pants during oh canada. Because she wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom.
Shame,
Which had become familiar at this point,
Settled in my young bones.
6.
We moved to a low-income housing apartment complex called Winston Hall. It was originally built for female aircraft workers during the second World War but was converted to apartments afterwards. I had this blonde friend I would ride bikes with. Him and I used to take off, leaving my young sister behind, pedalling to catch up. We used to catch grasshoppers. We named one Casey and had a funeral for him when he died. A tiny headstone and rocks encircled his little grave. We decorated it with dandelions. Bright yellow. We tried to sing “Amazing Grace” but couldn’t remember all of the words. So, we just kept repeating
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound...
Amazing Grace, how—
My Mother had a third daughter.
Three femmes
Three of cups
Three Aquarius babies.
Water children in the winds. And my Mother, herself an Aquarius. The water changes, moves and adapts and pushes through. And that’s what we’ve always done. My Mother had a third daughter and she brought a light to my heart I hadn’t felt before.
There we were. The five of us in a two-bedroom apartment. My second sister and I had bunk beds; the youngest in a crib in our parents’ room. She kept crawling out of the crib. It didn’t matter what they did. She would find her way out.
I don’t know how to describe the violence.
But to say that I saw too much.
And felt too much.
It was—
I rode my bike too far. I tried to get a drink of juice in the middle of the night. I made a joke out of a swear word they said all the time. We were being too loud.
I was tiny. I was a thumbtack. We were small, tiny thumbtacks. There was a “licking stick.” And there were belts. And then there was the witnessing.
The choking.
And the—
Get the stroller
Dress the babies
Hold your sister’s hand
We’re going to Gramma’s
We’d do the forty-minute walk across the swing bridge. Down the road to my Grandparents. And then we’d go back, again and again.
One time, before we left, my Mother needed toilet paper—probably because she was crying, but we were already out in the hall. She told me to knock on the door and get a roll from him.
“And don’t call him Dad!”
He threw the roll at me and slammed the door.
But they made up. Like always. He’d come to my Grandparents’. They would talk it out.
And we would “start new.”
I caught double pneumonia at one point and was in the hospital for weeks. Highly contagious. Scared that I was going to die. I wasn’t sure if the violence at home compared to the loneliness I felt while isolated in a hospital room. But I recovered. And was able to finally go home. The next thing I knew, we were moving out to the country to live with another family.
7.
My sister and I were now sharing a room with a boy. He was a year older than me. We’d listen to Dr. Hook and sing along terribly. He made me laugh and I liked him a lot. The closest thing I had to a brother at the time.
His cousin though. Was a girl my age. With her, our games of playing house. Included kissing with tongues. With the door shut. Knowing that nobody was supposed to know. I was terrified that people would know. But I tried not to think too much about what it meant at that time. I would be twelve years old when I’m told—
“bisexuality doesn’t exist”
And I just continue to live in a state of confusion.
8.
Beendigen.
Means come inside in Anishininaabemowin.
It’s also the name of a Native women’s crisis agency. Somehow, we ended up in their shelter and stayed for a period of time during the spring. There was a communal kitchen, dining and living room area. The bedrooms were separate, but there were communal bathrooms. The rooms didn’t lock so some of the other kids would come in and steal our stuff. My sister and I would just go take it back.
I remember an older Native girl, probably eighteen or so, who was there. We used to watch music videos together. She was pretty and had big dark hair. And had the hots for Johnny Depp. The centre had a strict curfew. If you were out past a certain time, you would be locked out and on your own. She went out a lot. And sometimes I would stay up late and wait for her.
One night she just didn’t come back. Another impactful ghost lost in my memory of people I’ve encountered.
My mom. Started sneaking off. To see him again. So, we also had to leave. Our parents told us. That we were moving to Winnipeg, Manitoba for a “new beginning.”
I cried for the first half of the drive.
Listening to my Bryan Adams mixed tape,
As I left my friends and family behind.
Once more.
9.
The Saigon Centre was another large apartment complex in Winnipeg. Its residents were primarily Vietnamese and Chinese. My (step) Auntie married a Vietnamese man and had five beautiful children.
Five of us.
Seven of them.
In one apartment.
Us four girls slept sideways on the beds in the one room. I had to get used to the city sounds. Loud buses. Horns honking. Cars rushing by constantly. I was used to the bush. The country. A train maybe. The place was always chaotic. Screaming kids. Drunk adults.
My littlest sister got her hand caught in an elevator door. The sweet lady that lived across from us put some salve on it and the bruising went away almost immediately.
We all went to the school across the street. Fourth grade. This school had round tables. I sat across from another cute blonde boy. Everyone else said my laugh was too loud.
I was too loud.
But he loved my laugh.
It might have been the nicest thing said to me at that time.
10.
Home street. Was twenty minutes away from the centre. We had the main floor and basement of an old house. The basement was terrifying.
An old ringer washer.
Dark dripping walls.
Exposed pipes.
Bad energy.
We put a sheet up to separate the scary part from the other rooms. Still, I decided to move my bedroom downstairs to the playroom. I never had my own room before. I started keeping a diary, which my sister would steal and read. And the blonde boy rode his bike over to see me a few times. It was a cute little romance. But one day, he just stopped coming and I never saw him again.
Another ghost.
For the first time we were put in a public school that was down the street from us. I had never seen such diversity. I made friends with a group of girls and one girl pulled me aside. She was brown like me. She wore cool clothes, had a boyfriend in the sixth grade and two older brothers. Raised by a single mother. She was funny and tough. It was the first time I felt a deep kinship with another femme that wasn’t my family. An Indigenous femme. We would walk to and from school together. I learned a lot from her.
By the end of October my parents said we were moving back. We were most likely being evicted. I was used to the heartbreak by that point. I knew that nothing was permanent. Ever.
I was allowed to spend our last night at her place. I have this image of us listening to Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last.” She’s standing on her bed with her face through a hole in her bedsheet. The rest of the sheet draped around her. She’s lip syncing to the song—
Sometimes the snow comes down in June
Sometimes the sun goes round the moon
And I’m laughing. And I want to cry.
Looking up at her face. Because I know.
I’ll never see her again.
I hide the tears from her.
We say we’re going to keep in touch. We’re going to write letters.
My stepdad picks me up and we leave. I don’t hear from her again.
Isn’t this world a crazy place?
Another ghost. And of course, our “new start” didn’t go as planned. We were never really safe.
Dress the kids
Pack your stuff
We’re going to Gramma’s
We still spent summers there. No matter where we were, we always came back to our Grandparents. Or we would stay for weeks or months before finding a new place.
By the end of the year, for fifth grade alone, I had been in three different schools.
Two different provinces.
Three different homes.
11.
The new place was across town from the rez. It was night when we pulled up to the townhouse. Our new neighbor was working on his car in the driveway with his young son—another blonde boy who looked about my age. It felt cinematic. I got out of the van and we locked eyes immediately. The boy next door thing was an actual reality.
Wentworth Crescent was also in another low-income area of town. A series of townhouses in rows and crescents.
My room. Pink lace curtains.
The radio putting me to sleep.
Jennie Garth and Jason Priestley on my walls.
I knew I had to do the make friends thing all over again. But something was also starting to happen inside of me. Sadness started creeping up. In a way I hadn’t felt before.
It was deep. And it made me want to run.
I was eleven and it was starting to feel like being alive was really hard. I wrote goodbye notes that I know my mom found but threw away. I don’t know if she read them or not.
This blond boy liked me, but I think it was only in secret. Kissing under a blanket while the fireworks went off. We went to a dance together and he ditched me for a pretty white girl and didn’t talk to me all night. I cried in the bathroom. Me and my pink parachute pants and crop top curled up next to the toilet. I didn’t talk to him for weeks.
Two girls came up to me at school one day and said they wanted to be friends. They told me stories about a third girlfriend of theirs who used to go to their school. She was a Native badass, the way they described her. But her family moved to Fort Francis.
“She slapped the French teacher!”
This girl was a legend!
I had big shoes to fill.
The three of us became close. I wanted to fit in. It came from a deep need to ensure that my school environment was a safe space. Even if it wasn’t all the time.
I was made fun of for being brown. For being poor. For having thick eyebrows. For plucking those eyebrows. And, as I filled out, I was bullied intensely for being fat. But if the cool girls were grabbing me first, I was ok. I think I was trying to figure out the subtle art of still being myself and being what they wanted me to be.
A balancing act.
And at home, the fighting and yelling was constant. Trying to keep up with my stepfather’s moods was exhausting. I spent our last night in the townhouse sleeping on the living room floor among empty pizza boxes. Everything else was in the new house.
We were going back to the rez.
12.
After eight years of everywhere,
We finally came home.
We had our own house on what would be called the Back Street. Nestled in a corner. Right in front of the mountain. Nothing but bush in our backyard. Families of bears would walk through, making the dogs bark.
My first day of sixth grade. Back at St. Ann’s again. I walk into the classroom and my teacher asks:
“Who here knows Yolanda?”
A bunch of hands shoot up. It was a joke by that point. How many times I was in and out of the school. I was embarrassed to be the kid who always left and came back.
Not too long after I arrived, a new girl was being introduced. She stood at the front of the class.
Native. Pretty. Strong looking. The teacher said she had just moved back from Fort Frances.
It was her. The legendary friend.
We bonded over our love of mushroom soup, Jonathan Brandis, The Power Rangers. Her family was from my reserve. We were similar and we became best friends. I had many by that point. These strong connections to so many people for so many reasons.
The house on the Back Street was the longest house we stayed in. We spent six years there.
And it kept escalating.
The violence. The fights. The yelling.
The silence was worse.
Pack your stuff
Get your coats on
We’re going to Gramma’s
I started standing up for myself. Might have been all the time I spent with other strong kwe. But it also meant taking more hits—
There are spots on my body
In my body
Where for a long time
I felt his knee
Or his palm
Or his foot
Extensions of his own body inflicting pain on mine
There are spots in my body where I hold what my eyes and ears ingested
The pain of my mother
And sisters
There was a lot of horror in that ever-changing windstorm I was living in. We all survived it. Got out of it. At different times. And we’re still all adapting to the
Healing.
The not healing.
The thriving.
The struggling.
The despair.
The trauma.
Love.
Home was—
My grandparents. My aunties. And cousins.
Home was sleeping on the couch that my Papa made up for me in just the right way. Home was toast and tea. And climbing the tree in the backyard. And gooseberries and crab apples. It was hearing the pow wow drums from the mountain in the backyard. Watching the stars. Weiner roasts. Berry picking.
Home is with my sisters.
And my mom.
I always held it with me. The Old House. And the teachings I received from it. And my family.
Even if I couldn’t see them at the time They were always there.
Tethering me to the land and to that sense of—
Home.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Photo by Bliss Thompson
Yolanda Bonnell (She/They) is a Bi/Queer 2 Spirit Anishinaabe-Ojibwe, South Asian mixed performer, playwright, and multidisciplinary creator/educator. Originally from Fort William First Nation in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Superior Robinson Treaty territory), her arts practice is now based in Tkarón:to. She is Co-artistic leader of manidoons collective, that she runs with Michif (Métis) artist, Cole Alvis. In February 2020, Yolanda’s four-time Dora nominated solo show bug was remounted at Theatre Passe Muraille while the published book was shortlisted for a Governor General Literary Award. Yolanda was the Indigenous artist recipient of the Jayu Arts for Human Rights Award for her work and won the PGC Tom Hendry Drama Award for her play, My Sister’s Rage. Yolanda has taught at schools like York University and Sheridan College and proudly bases her practice in land-based creation, drawing on energy and inspiration from the earth and her ancestors. @Yolanda_Bonnell on Twitter, @yobiwankenobe on Instagram.