Charlie became somewhat hardened from being in prison. When he was released, he was uncertain of what to do, had little money, and continued to live with the challenging obligation his grandmother had given to him. He soon drifted from Indian bar to Indian bar and perpetuated on the outside the lonely existence he had inside the prison. However, his mind always returned to his last moments with his dying grandmother. As a survivor of the earth’s rape and of society’s injustice, he with the name of the hawk one night bit his lip as his heart searched for answers in his life. The blood from his lip stained his wool shirt but provided a clear vision of justice. Charlie Red Tail knew what had to be done. He lifted his hands to the sky and prayed to the Great Spirit for wisdom and how to handle the bitterness in his heart. Charlie wanted to believe the Great Spirit would answer him, as it had when the steel door finally swung open and he walked free of the false accusation of the white man.
Charlie learned in prison of helpful contacts in the world of crime and gained a certain mindset for dispensing revenge for the many wrongs his people suffered. Thus, when he left the white man’s hell-hole, he had fixed firmly in his mind what needed to be done to fulfill his grandmother’s vision. When the “steel door” opened, Charlie Red Tail had a plan.
Now, in this time of freedom, Charlie Red Tail could again hear blasting in his ears the bone-chilling slam of the steel door to a cell at the maximum-security prison that forced him as an innocent, naïve boy of eighteen into the sad, threatening world of prison life and starkly fearsome inhabitants. He paused for some time in deep thought, his heart full of grief and hatred for what had been taken from him. As he stood at the dam, forlorn and looking to the Great Spirit, Charlie Red Tail relived the injustice done to him in the supremacist white man’s court when he was sentenced to four years in white man’s prison for the crime of rape, a crime he did not commit, but of which he was convicted on the false testimony and lies of a ranching family who lived near the reservation.
The young Lakota Indian stuffed away the past wrongs, at least for now, and focused on the task at hand. It was July 5th, 1985. The twenty-four-year-old stood at the foot of the earthen dam on the historically life-giving river and cried. He dug until he was finished, placed the leather pouch given him by his grandmother just before drawing her last breath, and carefully put back the disturbed black dirt. Black dirt stands for death, and a black stone, stands for revenge, according to his learning. He placed a black obsidian stone on the black dirt at the foot of the dam.
