We Chicks have a treat to share with you to kick off Native American Heritage Month: a lovely post from Marcie Rendon, author of the Cash Blackbear crime novels–and listed in Oprah’s 2020 list of 31 Native American Authors to Read. Marcie’s also offering a giveaway to one lucky commenter: a half-hour Zoom chat! Take it away, Marcie…

IMAGINATION

by Marcie Rendon

Years ago I had three rambunctious, curious, adventure-seeking granddaughters spend the summer at my home in the city. About once a week, after playing outdoors, they would come home with fresh eggs in each small hand and tell me the neighbor lady the street over had chickens in her backyard and she gave them eggs to bring home to me. Busy with life, I had it in the back of my mind to go with them one day and thank the neighbor for her generosity, but never quite seemed to find the time.

Early one morning I heard a rooster crowing right next to my bedroom. I crawled from bed and looked out the window into my backyard. No rooster. Got up and got busy with the day. I had an errand to run and told the girls, who really were old enough to spend a half hour home alone, I would be back shortly.

Returning home, I pulled up in front of the house to see two grand-girls walking down the sidewalk with a rooster tucked under one of their arms. I asked, “Where’d you get that rooster?”

They smiled and said they ‘found’ it walking down the street.

A few minutes later a lady came rushing down the sidewalk. When she saw the girls with the rooster she exclaimed, “Oh, thank goodness you found my rooster. He must have got out of the yard somehow.” Turned out she was the lady who had been sending the girls home with eggs occasionally and I was able to thank her properly for her previous generosity.

The girls happily returned her rooster to her and we went about our day. That evening I went to put laundry in the washer in the basement. You already know what I found right?  A cardboard box with a plastic bowl with water and what looked to be chicken food pellets in another bowl. The bottom of the box had a layer of shredded paper with some chicken poop on it.  No wonder the rooster had sounded so close that morning!

The following morning we had the obligatory lecture about stealing, but to this day the girls tell their story about the rooster they brought home for grandma.

We are a family of stories. And we especially like the ones that have a dark side. We have one about the lifesize doll, Dr. Tom, that one grand was so afraid of, the group of them buried it in the backyard. There is the story about the ‘dead lady’s quilt’ that was found in an attic corner and legend developed about the woman who previously owned it and what might happen to whoever had to sleep with the blanket. There is another story about the stuffed blue monkey one grandson was terrified of. He was was told that it was given away. The same grandson unexpectedly threw a small cooler across the room when ten years later he opened it and discovered the blue monkey lodged inside. Each story grows each time it is told.

Sinister Graves started as an idea on a walk through an Idaho graveyard 15-20 years ago when I happened upon a family gravesite where all the infants died around two years of age. What the heck?! was my first thought and then the story grew.

It is this want of story, this capacity to build story, and my own overactive imagination, that feeds my mind and grows into the crime novels I write.

Readers and writers, where do your ideas began? Let Marcie know in the comments below–and be entered to win a half-hour Zoom author chat (if you’d like)! Winner will be announced on our Chicks on the Case Facebook page and also back here in the comments section of Marcie’s post on Wednesday, Nov. 8th.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

MARCIE RENDON is the author of the Cash Blackbear crime novels set in northern Minnesota. She is a mother, grandmother, poet, playwright, children’s book author and sometimes performance artist.  She is an enrolled citizen of the White Earth Ojibwe nation and was listed in Oprah’s 2020 list of 31 Native American Authors to Read. She was the first Native American woman chosen as Minnesota’s 2020 McKnight Distinguished Artist for her work and her advocacy on behalf of other artists around the state. She is known for her Cash Blackbear crime novels: Sinister Graves, Girl Gone Missing and Murder on the Red River (Soho Press). A stand-alone crime novel will be released by Ballantine Books in August 2024 titled Where They Last Saw Her. Her poetry book, Anishinaabe Songs for the New Millennium, will be published by UofM Press, Spring 2024. Marcie is also the author of a handful of children’s books. The next one to be released is Stitches of Tradition, (publisher Heartdrum, also in 2024). It is a sweet story about a grandmother who sews ribbon skirts for her granddaughter. Grandma grows shorter and granddaughter grows taller. 

Links:

marcierendon.com

https://www.instagram.com/marcierendon/

@MarcieRendon – (X/Twitter)

https://www.facebook.com/MarcieRendonMN/

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Set in 1970s Minnesota on the White Earth Reservation, this new mystery follows Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman, as she attempts to discover the truth about the disappearances of Native women and their newborns.
A snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymn written in English and Ojibwe.

Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old, tough-as-nails Ojibwe woman, sometimes uses her special abilities to help Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, with his investigations. When Cash sees the hymn, she knows her search for justice for this anonymous victim will lead her somewhere she hasn’t been in over a decade: the White Earth Reservation, a place she once called home.

When Cash happens upon two small graves in the yard of a rural, “speak-in-tongues kinda church,” she is pulled into the lives of the pastor and his wife while yet another Native woman turns up dead and her newborn is nowhere to be found.