A Quality of Light
My second novel, A Quality of Light, examines the roots of friendship and loyalty against the harsh hand of racism and cultural displacement. It's the story of Joshua Kane and Johnny Gebhardt, one white, the other native, and how they come together as boys and years later as men. It tells the story of how being Indian is not a thing you can say defintively that you have achieved. Rather, you become by degree and it's the strength gained in the journey that offers wisom when you pause to rest and reflect. It's about the power of memory and how one shining one, one particular quality of light, can save us.
Excerpt
We are born into a world of light. Every motion of our lives, every memory, is colored by the degree of its intensity or shaded by the weight of its absence. I believe the happy times are lit by an ebullient incandescence - the pure white light of joy - and that the sadder times are bathed in swatches of purple, moving into pearl gray. When we find ourselves standing against the hushed palette of evening, searching the sky for one singular band of light, we're filtering the spectrum of our lives. We're looking through the magic prism of memory, letting our comforts, questions or woundings lead us - emotional voyageurs portaging a need called yearning. Because it's not the memories themselves we seek to reclaim, but rather the opportunity to surround ourselves with the quality of light that lives there.
The muted grays of storm clouds breaking might take you back to the hollowness you found in a long good-bye. The electric blue in a morning horizon might awaken in you again that melancholic ache you carried when you discovered love. Or you lay on a hillside in the high sky heat of summer, the red behind your eyelids making you so warm and safe and peaceful, it's like the scarlet a part of you remembers through the skin of your mother's belly when you, your life and the universe was all fluid, warmth and motion.
The qualities of light are endless and our entire lives are immersed in them. That's why we go back. That's why we use the gift of memory to sift through it all, seeking answers in the people, places and things we inhabited once, hoping we might find there a single quality of light that defines us.
My name is Joshua Kane. I am an Ojibway and the word that brought me to light was Indian. It was carried on the reed-thin shoulders of a boy who lived most of his life in darkness but who shone with the mantle of a hero. I became an indian because of Johnny Gebhardt. When he walked into my life in the early spring of 1965, my life was sheltered, peaceful, predictable - and white. My parents, Ezra and Martha Kane, had adopted me at birth and I was raised in the staunch Protestant tradition perpetuated in the furrow and fallow of the farmlands they sprang from. It's a sad irony that my mother would be barren given the fertile soil which nurtured her creation. Still, it was the same measure of love that spawned my adoption as would have gone into the immaculate joining of seed to womb in my parents' marriage bed. I know this today as surely as I know that the earth is Mother to us all and we come out upon her breast to learn the motions of the dance that connects us. The cosmic dance driven by the music we learn to hear through the soles of our feet.
We lived on my grandfather's farm outside a small southwestern Ontario town called Mildmay. Our friends and neighbors bore names like Hohnstein, Dietz, Schultz and Schumacher, with a smattering of Ringles, Conroys and Leach. In that rich tradition of hereditary farms, the idea of family was more important than its definition, and I was accepted, quite simply, as Joshua Kane because that's all I had ever been. That I was the only brown face in Kane family pictures was never questioned. I was born and I lived as a Kane. My parents had never kept the truth from me and I'd known about my tribal blood from the moment I could understand. They told me of my mother's inability to conceive and how they felt the need for the love that they felt for each other to be rendered more completely through a child. The Ontario Children's Aid Society had directed them to a very young Indian girl who was pregnant and had no means of raising a child. They told me that they wanted to bring into their lives someone who would be theirs from as close to the beginning of life as possible. Someone whose history could begin and end with them.
