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Just two weeks before the demoralizing revelation in the maternity ward, José had asked me to curtail the late-night calls for help. “Look,” he murmured with gentle authority during one of the last such exchanges, “we’re winding down around here. Just got the boy to bed, and I have to work in the morning.” Joan and her first child had moved into José’s basement apartment in Henry Sibley Manor, the notorious housing projects off West 7th Street in Saint Paul. He was planning to marry her and adopt the two-year-old as his son.

José emerged from the Vital Records office minutes later, gripping his birth certificate. He slumped onto the passenger seat and folded the paper, then placed it inside an envelope containing his family members’ tribal documents and a blank family tree.

We drove to a taqueria and ordered burritos. I filled in the empty branches on the family tree while José scratched his head and recalled what he knew of his family’s story.

His grandparents, his mother, and her five sisters were from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. José spent his early years in Chicago, where the family had settled in the early seventies as part of a government relocation program. His father was a Puerto Rican gang member, a Dragon Disciple, who died from a cocaine overdose when José was 15 years old, the same year I met him at The Circle.