Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story by Jewel Page A

traditional Hawaiian dance and music. I noticed how the voices of the singers often cracked, similar to the crack employed when you yodel. The Hawaiian version was much more melodic, more similar to what I would call a Swiss style of yodeling,whereas German is more rapid. On the bus ride home one day some kids were practicing, and I began to visit with them about their singing. I showed them how I could yodel. Before I knew it, one of the local girls told the whole bus to “Shut up and listen ta da haole girl yodel!” And yodel I did. The whole busload of brutes turned to me and I yodeled for all I was worth. From that day on, anywhere I went on campus, I heard, “Hey, dere’s dat haole girl who can do dat ting wit her voice, check it!” And like some organ-grinder monkey, I yodeled on the spot. In hallways, classrooms, on bus rides. I didn’t complain; it was way better than nearly being beaten up every day.

nine
    my own ladder
    A fter that first semester, my money came in and I got a ticket to Alaska. The plan was for me to go live with my mom and brothers in Anchorage. When I left for Hawaii, my dad had moved off the homestead again, staying with a string of girlfriends, and I never had a place to stay. I learned early on to farm myself out, sleeping on a girlfriend’s couch, sometimes with my aunt Mossy, helping her run a bed-and-breakfast on her ranch. I ran hay equipment in the summer and sang for money. But my dad was always in control and we fought horribly. I was so excited to finally live with my mother. I got on the plane in sunny Hawaii and got off in gloomy, dark Anchorage, where it was ten below zero. Snow was piled high and the sun set around 4 p.m. My mother lived in a seedy part of town, called Bar Alley, in a small pink house sandwiched on a block between the infamous Chilkoot Charlie’s bar and project housing.
    My mom and her boyfriend-slash-business partner had converted the front room into a showroom for glasswork. The back had a small kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, where my brothers and I slept. My mom sleptdownstairs in her studio, a basement with a workbench full of sheets of stained glass, soldering tools, a sandblasting booth for etching, and a small bed in the corner. We would go to an alternative school around the corner, called Steller, that had a reputation for being the place where social rejects who couldn’t make it in regular public school were sent. All the kids there had a story. Some were openly gay, some were pregnant teens, some were failing out of other schools. It was full of individual oddballs, and I felt much more at home, even after transferring in halfway through the year. I fell in with a group of kids from the projects. Dionne was half Aleut and half African-American. She looked Polynesian somehow, with exotic almond eyes that were the deepest brown they shone like a watery midnight peering back at you. Bethany was full-blooded Athabascan. She was tall and slender, with the grace of her culture. Her mother came to school occasionally, and had the traditional facial tattoos of her tribe. Dutima and Kalindy were twins, half East Indian and half French Canadian, and they modeled in their free time away from school for catalogs and the like. They were tall, with eyes the color of the brightest yellow gold that were set off by skin that was creamy olive. They introduced me to Garrett, whose dad was black and mom was white, yet he hated all other white people. He was very reluctant about becoming friends. On the fringes of our circle were Sam and Tyrone, who were Cripps (yes, the Cripps and Bloods made it to Anchorage). I heard that both have since been killed in gang-related violence.
    Dionne and I became the closest, and by the end of the year I was staying at her house more often than my own. Her mother, Eleanor, became a sort of surrogate mother and the three of us did a lot together. Eleanor was a full-blooded Aleut (Alaska native), and as a child had lost her right