Anyone with the experience will tell you that growing up on a reservation is tough. It wasn't much better in the seventies and eighties than is is today, for many reasons. If Cecile Readleaf had known that the rest of the world was tougher, meaner, and angrier than Pine Ridge, South Dakota, she might not have ever left, or at least, not run as far.
Of Lakota heritage, Cecile didn't delve much into her background as a child. She mostly brushed it off, focusing on friends rather than family. Her father, George, was heavily affected by the Vietnam War, and slipped into a bottle to soothe his woes. The effect it had on his family – wife Isabelle and two daughters, Cecile and Jennifer – was enough to make his eldest stay as far away as she could. As soon as she had her high school diploma in hand, Cecile ran. Her dreams of making it big in the music industry and being able to rescue her sister and mother from their verbally and physically abusive father with the millions of dollars she'd get when she signed a record deal would not be achieved in western South Dakota. No, Cecile had to go to New York City.
The trouble is that there are thousands of young people just like Cecile who saw the Big Apple as a shining light compared to their humdrum lives. In reality, this beacon of culture and opportunity might as well have been as bright as a sooty oil lamp running low on fuel – and just as smelly as one using a cruder version of the stuff. Cecile's dreams were smothered, but not smashed. She worked as a bartender in an attempt to get into the nightclub scene and make the rounds at the various Open Mic nights, but a small town girl in a big city is like a moth flitting rather close to a fire – getting burned in some way or another is inevitable.
Cecile's “burning” came in the form of Jack Ewing, a smooth-talking young man from Brooklyn. All it took to seduce Cecile into his arms was a smile and the hint that he might have some friends in the biz she could slip a demo tape to. After that, Cecile's life became a blur of people and parities, though the smudgy nature of it all was helped along quite a bit by alcohol. There were plenty of times where Cecile tried to break it off with the leech that was Jack Ewing and jump onto the sober-only wagon, but there were just as many times where Cecile was swooned off of it again and back into the throws of a fast-paced and hazy New York life.
Like it did for so many others, all of that changed with the Bomb.
Cecile's Jersey apartment was in the resulting cone, and if it weren't for a concerned neighbor, she'd have never gotten out of bed to join the fallout's fleeing masses. With naught but her pajamas, coat, and sneakers, Cecile, like so many others, soon found herself without a home. Unlike many others, she has still yet to find one. Having worked at a college bar that was destroyed by the bomb itself rather than its wake, Cecile soon found herself without a job or any resources with which to get one.
Cecile has took to singing on the streets with a guitar she found in a dumpster and slowly pieced into working order. Most of her songs were covers, but she occasionally played a riff or two of her own writing, though she rarely sang any lyrics to these more mysterious melodies.
Late on the evening of January 24, 2009, or perhaps in the early morning of the 25th, Cecile was taken from her shelter in Prospect Park in Brooklyn to an unknown location. The circumstances surrounding her death are vague, and where her remains ended up is a mystery.
