Jentz: It was tremendously healing for the community. It closed the circle. There’s a thirty-minute piece I did for PBS called Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate, which really speaks to this issue. Because the community really needed it brought to resolution. For them it was like the day President Kennedy was shot. It was their flashbulb memory. They remembered where they were and what they were doing when they heard about it. They had a profound sense of unease that this crime had never been resolved and that the perpetrator was still in their midst.
When I interviewed people—and I wanted to interview them just by knocking on the door so I could see their reactions and get their stories, but many times that wasn’t possible. At any rate, it was like a thunderbolt hit them when I told them who I was. I was like a ghost come back to life. It was electric. All these memories and emotions would come flooding up out of them. That’s how I was able to piece together the story and write the book.
The MOON: I’m sorry; this is emotional for me because we all walk around acting as if we’re separate individuals and what happens to someone else doesn’t necessarily affect us, but it’s not the case. We are affected. We are connected. We just pretend like we’re not so that we can keep functioning.
Jentz: Yes, and that’s the lesson I learned from this experience. We are all connected. One of the chapters in my book is “Not Mine Alone,” meaning the story is not mine alone because it belongs to all the people who were touched by it. Everyone had a little piece of the story to share. So I’d begin by telling them my part, and they’d respond by telling me their part: where they were; what they were doing; how it affected them. Together, we pieced this trauma together in a way that was healing.
I’ve learned that traumatic memory gets stored in the brain differently than other memories. When a trauma occurs, it isn’t stored in a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It gets stored in fragments, like shards of broken glass. So one of the things that is profoundly healing for everyone to do is to put those fragments together into a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, so you can tell the story of it. You can incorporate it and begin to make sense of it. I was able to do that by going back to Cline Falls and hearing all the other pieces of the story. And the people of Cline Falls were able to heal by having me come back and tell my part of the story. So by everyone telling their piece of the story, a very long book was written! (Laughs)
There were three nurses who were instrumental in recreating this story, too. One was the nurse who cared for my roommate in the hospital; another was the nurse who cared for me; and the third worked with the two of them.
When I finally met the third nurse, which was years after I’d started the investigation, she told me, “I don’t know if I can see your arm.” Because her shard of memory was my arm, which had been all hacked up. So we had a nice long conversation, at the end of which she asked me, “Can I see your arm?”
I showed it to her, and it’s completely healed. Seeing that was profoundly healing for her. She was able to “re-member” the event differently now. That’s what re-membering can do.
There were so many profound things that happened as a result of me going back to talk to the people. This story brought out the depths in people, which I think is the gift that trauma is capable of giving us—if we’re willing to revisit it and not push it away.
The MOON: I remember reading about the crime when it happened, and remember having to consciously reconsider my behavior “Is it not safe for two women even to go camping without protection? Is the world that unsafe?” So I think that many women were and will be relieved to know that the attack didn’t stop you. That you survived and reclaimed yourself.
Jentz: Yes. That’s been my experience. Right now I’m working on a murder that happened to the Lakota people—the 1980 murder of Candace Rough Surface, who was beaten, raped, and shot to death by two white boys—and because it’s not my trauma, it’s harder for me to get to the depths that I know are waiting there. I’m not Native, either, although oddly enough, it’s easier for me to talk to the Native people than to talk to the German-Russian descendants, who are my ancestral people. The Europeans clam right up. They don’t want to talk about it; they don’t even want to think about it. They want it not to exist, whereas the Native people have some cultural capacity for dealing with trauma.
What happened to Candace, what happened to the land, and what happened to the Lakota people in general is a multi-layered story of trauma—all of which happened in the place where I was born, South Dakota. It’s interesting that my earliest memories include this sense of trauma, which had happened to the land and the people way before it happened to Candace. I’m finding out that it’s harder to be the writer and journalist trying to get to the bottom of the trauma in South Dakota than it was to be the Ghost of Cline Falls writing about my own trauma. Plus, that identity gave me a certain entrée into the psyches of the people of Cline Falls because we had a trauma in common.
The MOON: I could see that the Native community would be more willing to talk to you because telling their story represents an opportunity for healing and justice, or at least acknowledgement. But when you approach the Europeans, you’re just digging up trouble, rooting around in the past; stirring the pot. Why don’t you let sleeping dogs lie?
No comments yet.