FATHER FIGURES

I wish I had memories of my dad; I really do. Everyone on the reservation who remembers him tells me that Roy William Harper, Sr. was a wonderful man and a cheerful, caring father. "Belican Nez," or "The Tall American" is what they called him, and I hear he was quite a guy. When an inferno broke out near the Tachini band reservation on the Navajo Nation, my dad saved as many people's lives as he could. Eventually, he lost his own life in that fire, trying desperately to make sure everyone had been rescued. No trace of him was ever found. I wasn't even two years old. Thankfully, one of the people he had saved was Brave Bow, the tribal hataali (medicine man); he said my dad threw him over his shoulder as easily as a sack of leaves and rushed him to safety through the flames, without a care for his own life. The next morning, after most of the fires were out, I was found sleeping on a nearby hillside, unaware of my tragic loss. Brave Bow cradled me in his arms and carried me home with him. He wanted to honor my father for having been so courageous and took me in to protect and nurture me, eventually training me as an archer, just as he had been trained as a child. He always said he was keeping my father's legacy alive...in me.

Artwork by Rik Mays/1998

I grew up strong and happy, for the most part, on the reservation, not really able to identify with being a white kid growing up as a Din?© kid; I love the people, the land and the wide-open skies of Northeastern Arizona. In my heart, I was one of the tribe, the same as the other kids, but not everyone accepted me in that way. On the verge of being a teenager, I was an orphan being raised by an old man who to me seemed to be forever young; meanwhile, Brave Bow was becoming more and more ill and secretly knew he was dying. The tribal elders wanted me gone, and I was told that I would soon have to leave the only home I'd ever known; my heart was broken and I became instantly confused and frightened. Brave Bow, worried about my future, looked for someone to take me in.
Who would have believed he'd pick my hero---The Green Arrow?! WOW!

The Green Arrow was the coolest thing I had ever seen! A big, blonde, brash, movie matinee idol type of guy with a bright, winning smile---he was really something else! Brave Bow didn't like him at first; he said it was disrespectful to my father's memory to be so ga-ga over another man. I thought of Green Arrow as my fantasy father; when Brave Bow told me about his memories of my dad, in my mind's eye I saw the dashing Green Arrow.

Brave Bow, without my knowledge, contacted Green Arrow and asked if he would come out to Arizona to judge the archery competition held during the annual Rodeo Days. Secretly, he hoped that he could convince the Emerald Archer to take me on as his sidekick, providing me with a new home as the ward of multi-millionaire Oliver Queen. Brave Bow didn't know about Ollie's secret identity or his money, of course; all that was important to him was that I find a guardian who would continue to nuture my skills with bow and arrow, and no one could do that better than Ollie.

After sabotaging my loadstone arrows at the archery competition (to protect my future heroic/private identity), I was able to prove to Ollie that I was the "Little Sure Shot" I'd been touted to be when I used my homemade arrows to shoot out the tires of some crooks who had robbed our reservation's souvenir shop. Having proven myself to my new mentor, I moved to Star City and into the lavishly furnished, stately Queen Mansion. That was quite a change for a poor kid from the Arizona desert who had never had much of anything in the way of worldly possessions.

Back home, I was lucky if I ever had more than one or two shirts to wear or even a decent pair of shoes. As the ward of a rich and frivolous heir to a fortune, Ollie gave me everything---financial independence and an internationally-known heroic identity---everything but what I really needed...a constant and caring father figure. On the surface, I went along with it all and took everything in stride...but I was, unknown to my friends, lonely, confused, suffering from feelings of abandonment...and seriously addicted to drugs by the age of fourteen. And Ollie? He was madly in love with Dinah Lance (Black Canary), having a grand time playing Errol Flynn, addicted to his own wanderlust and oblivious to my shaky state of mind and lack of self-esteem.

Ollie lost all of his money due to paying too much attention to his alter ego and too little attention to business. Honestly, the man couldn't keep his mind on anything for five seconds! How could he manage to run a multi-national corporation, several charities, numerous sidelines, a heroic partnership AND care for a troubled teenager? He couldn't...and he didn't. Though we still lived together in that rat-trap, tenement flat he moved us into, it was more like a bachelor apartment for me and a pit stop for Ollie. I saw him once every few weeks, whenever he would return from roaming around the country trying to "find himself." Meanwhile, I toughed it out alone. When he found out about my drug addiction, he threw me out; that was the first of several wake-up calls for me, and thankfully I soon turned my life around, at first just to spite him but later because I knew I'd made a mess of things. We reconciled...eventually, and I've forgiven Ollie for his treatment of me. I know that silly ol' coot tried...sort of...and I still think of him as the father I wish he really had been to me. He's always been one hell of an amazing, bigger-than-life guy.
I couldn't be happier that now we have a chance to be together again!


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