The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “My husband helps my father write and read the letters that pass between him and the good people in the East called Quakers. They try to provide the tools and the teachers for which my father asks, because the government does not do well at filling its promises, but the Quakers do. And so my husband sends to them many letters that he often writes.

  “My husband remembers you from far back in the days when you lived near us as Tuck Horse’s daughter. He remembers seeing your red hair, like his. He never did know you were from Quakers. He never did know what your little-girl name was from your white family.”

  “That is so. I never did speak it, nor did my father or mother.”

  “This night,” Sweet Breeze said, “he was surprised to hear that you came from Quakers. He asked me to inquire from you whether you remember your Quaker name from before.”

  Maconakwa hugged her arms across her belly, suddenly feeling a chill. “Does he say why he wishes to know?”

  “He believes that when he writes to them, if he wrote your name to them, then your Quaker family might come to know where you are and you could be with them again.”

  Maconakwa remembered what her parents had said about selling names. It seemed as if that was what Wells wanted to do. She said, “Why does he want me to be with those people instead of our Miami People?”

  “When the chiefs went to ask peace from General Wayne, they were told to bring in all the white captives they had. Somehow that did not happen to you.”

  Maconakwa nodded. “Your husband went back to his wapsi people and was made important by them, but still he gets to remain with the Miami People who loved him and raised him as one of their own. That is all good, for him. But I, if I went back to my Quaker people, I would not get to remain with the Miami People.”

  Sweet Breeze’s eyes widened, then she looked down, hiding some strong feeling that was showing in her eyes. She said, “Then I should tell him you do not remember the Quaker name you had?”

  “Sister, that would be good for you to say.”

  Maconakwa was at Fort Wayne again three moons later, but this time she was not on furniture, but sitting comfortably on a fur robe on the ground, with her baby boy Waweah, Round One, suckling her. He had been named that because one of the first things he had looked at when his eyes opened was the full round moon in the sky. His name-sign made her remember Neepah, named for Grandmother Moon herself. Maconakwa was in the commons near the fort feeding Round One when she first saw the three Quaker farmer teachers who had come to Fort Wayne from the East. She was here this day because her husband had come to sell two mares.

  Rain was drizzling down, and she had hooded her head and covered her baby with the edge of her woolen shawl. She looked long and carefully at the three men. In their broad-brimmed black hats and black coats and gray trousers, they looked as if they had stepped out of her earliest memories. They were indeed Quakers, and they looked just as she remembered her brothers, though older.

  She tried to stay unnoticed, watching them talk to Little Turtle and some of the Miami elders, and her heart ached with a yearning even while it was shrinking with a fear.

  She wanted to ask them if their name was “Slocum,” and felt certain they would say yes. Surely these were her own brothers, whom she had not seen in almost thirty summers. Maybe they were the ones who had been at Niagara. She gazed at them from under her blanket hood so intently that she was sure they must feel it, and then one turned his head and looked straight at her, from less than ten paces away. At once she ducked her head down over the nursing baby boy and hoped to look like just any Indian woman, her heart racing with a fear that they would recognize her. She was not sure she wanted them to recognize her, at least not yet.

  But they looked so good, so kind. They were straight and strong, as she thought she remembered her father and brothers had been, but didn’t have the hard and arrogant look that wapsi soldiers and traders had. She thought these were men she could trust, whether they were truly her brothers or not.

  She wanted to know whether they were her brothers, but she did not want Little Turtle or Wells or Sweet Breeze or anyone to point her out to them and say, “That red-hair woman there was one of your Quaker people.”

  And so she realized that while they were here, until she decided what to do about them, she would have a very narrow path to walk and would have to be almost invisible. A time would come when she would know what to do. It would be hard to wait till then.

  If indeed these three Quaker men are my brothers, she thought, they have come to live among my Miami People now. If so, I could, like Wild Potato William Wells, be with my true birth people and yet not have to leave the people who have my red heart!

  She held Round One snug to her bosom and wondered if he could sense the confusion of delight and dread stirring her heart.

  You could grow up with Quaker uncles, Round One, she thought. Imagine our two peoples eating and laughing together in peace and trust!

  Maconakwa had come to believe there was no more beautiful place than the site of her husband’s village. Every morning when she bathed and prayed at sunrise on the bank of the Mississinewa Sipu, she marveled at the work of the Creator.

  The village of which The Awl was chief was one of three Miami towns near the Mississinewa’s mouth at the Wabash. It was more than two days’ travel downstream from Fort Wayne, far from the white men and the trading crowds. It was known to travelers as Kakipsah’s Town, the town of the Deaf Man. Sometimes traders and travelers presumed that his name was Deaf Man, and he let that be, and as time went on he let himself be called Deaf Man. It amused him. “I never knew why I was named The Awl,” he would say. “I do know I am a deaf man.”

  “It does not please me to hear them call you Deaf Man,” Maconakwa protested once.

  “Eh! It does not displease me because I cannot hear it.” Then he laughed.

  Some Miamis had been living at the mouth of the Mississinewa Sipu since the first Town Destroyer attacked Kekionga—more than ten years—and they knew it was a good place, where no one would have to go hungry if left in peace, and here they did hope to be left in peace, at least for a while. Here was rich, dark, deep soil; here was a clear spring that flowed strong all the year. The river was narrow, flowing green between great trees whose high branches arched over and met above, then through marshlands and cornfields and garden clearings.

  In The Awl’s village lived about two hundred families. They were the people of his mother, who had been wife of the preceding chief. Taking in refugees and the orphans of refugees, and some half-French, or métis, men and women with their children, the village had grown from a few dozen lodges to its present size. Deaf Man’s village had The Awl’s large corral made of posts and rails, and the chief helped other families of the village to establish lines of good horses. A few families had come bringing white men’s cattle, and the stupid, harsh-voiced tame birds called chickens, but most still lived in the old manner. They planted the Sacred Sisters in hillocks in the bottomlands, and they hunted, fished, and foraged. The river yielded huge fish that could be easily speared in the clear water by gigs or arrows, or trapped in nets and weirs, or even seized right out from under the riverbank tree roots by hand, with enough patience. There were plenty of deer and wild turkeys and a few black bears to hunt for meat and fat, countless flocks of waterfowl in the nearby marshes for meat and eggs, big turtles everywhere, with their delicious flesh and their useful shells. Boys and young men trapped the many kinds of small riverine animals for their meat to eat and pelts to trade.

  Even if there had been no crops or game, the people could have foraged enough nuts, acorns, berries, and roots from the woods and marshes to keep themselves alive. Here the Creator had put plenty of everything a people could need. The only worry was that the wapsituk would eventually come and want this place.

  Sometimes Maconakwa could almost forget white men for days at a time, here beside this bountiful river, but as they were always coming from the East, their shadow
preceded them and troubled the morning prayer. And she thought of the Quaker teachers upriver.

  Then one day early in summer a messenger came with blazing eyes and a tongue stuttering with the fearsome thrill of the story he brought.

  It was the story of a miracle that had happened, and a prophecy of the end of white men’s power. Maconakwa listened to the messenger with chills running down her back. Her husband summoned all the people to hear what had happened.

  It had happened in a village of renegade Shawnees beside the Wapihani Sipu, the White River, two days’ travel south. A terrible man who had long been an addict of spirit water, as well as a liar and a molester of women, a dirty and repulsive man called Loud Noise, had been struck dead in his lodge while lighting his pipe.

  Then, as the family of Loud Noise was preparing to bury him, he came back from the Other Side World. He had seen Kohkumthena, Our Grandmother, as the Shawnees called the Creator of Life. She had changed him into a great prophet.

  Our Grandmother had told him exactly what must be done to take power out of the hands of the wapsituk and return this whole land to the red people so that everything would be right as it had been before the whites ever came. Our Grandmother had renamed that man Tenskwatawa, He Who Opens the Door, and ordered him to lead all the tribes through the Open Door into a new time of purity and strength. By that Open Door the red people would become so strong and united that the wapsituk would have to slink back eastward and take their boats back to their original home beyond the Sunrise Water. The messenger trembled and his eyes glittered as he said:

  “This man called He Who Opens the Door, who before had always muttered so drunkenly that hardly anyone could understand him, now shines with holy light, and will not take a sip of spirit water, and speaks with such clarity and power and strength that his voice is like a beam of sunlight coming down through dark clouds. He has come when our peoples have lost heart. Come and see him and hear him, and then you will believe.”

  “Who is that man? And where on the Wapihani Sipu is he to be found?” The Awl asked.

  “He is of the Kispoko Sept of the Shawnee, son of a Shawnee war chief long dead. His family has been marked by signs; he was one of a triple birth.” The people gasped at that. Even twins were rare; no one here had ever known of triplets. The messenger went on: “His older brother was born under a shooting star and was named for it: Tecumseh.”

  “We have heard of Tecumseh. Did he not lead the scouts when Little Turtle defeated the big army at the head of the Wabash Sipu?”

  “That is the one. Now those brothers have left the Wapihani Sipu and they have bravely gone back into their homeland to build a holy town, back inside the boundary made by General Wayne.”

  Inside those boundaries! That was a boldness both inspiring and frightening. Maconakwa imagined the trouble that could cause with the whites, but it was stirring, to think of red men going back to their homelands. She saw flashes of fierce pride in her husband’s eyes and the eyes of listeners in the Council.

  “Where in that country?” The Awl asked.

  “At the very ruins of Wayne’s fort called Greene Ville, where that treaty was. Think of that!”

  “E heh!” The Awl breathed. But after the messenger was gone, he wore a troubled frown. “This will sound very bad to Little Turtle. It pushes the other way against everything our sakima tries to do.”

  And, Maconakwa thought, against the Quaker teachers too.

  In the heat of summer, Maconakwa sat in Council with the people of her husband’s town. Most of the talk was of two things that surely would be affecting their lives.

  The village Council Lodge had been built with a peaked roof and log walls like white men’s buildings, with a smoke hole in the roof, where silvery daylight beamed down through high cobwebs and cedar smoke from the Council fire in the center of the room.

  After the pipe was passed, The Awl said to his people: “We begin this Council with something on either hand.

  “Our sakima wants his people to learn to live like whites, for there is less and less land to hunt in. We would have to learn money, and the care of tame animals. Men would make fences and plow the ground. Women would learn to make cloth. Little Turtle has put the Quakers’ farming school half a day’s walk below the forks of the Wabash Sipu, not close to any of our towns, so no chief will be jealous or take advantage of another. I will ask some families from this village to go and study the ways there, so we may learn whether it is a good thing. Some things we already know are good: no spirit water is allowed there. And unlike the missionaries, those Quakers do not mock our spirit beliefs or try to change anyone to their own. But,” he added, “with white men matters, one must go and see for oneself whether they are as they are said to be.

  “What we have on our other hand is that Shawnee man who goes straight to the Giver of Life and gets instructions about how the red peoples must live. People from all nations go to his holy town to hear those instructions. They will not be easy either. He says we must throw away everything the white men have brought, by having nothing to do with white men, by returning to the ways of our ancestors. Even to hunting with bow instead of gun, to making fire without a steel spark striker, to cooking without iron pots, to sewing without steel needles, to cutting without iron axes.” The murmuring of the people made plain how hard it would be to give up those things that made daily life easier. Most of the hunters had grown up with guns in their hands and did not even have the skills to hunt with bows anymore.

  “That Prophet,” The Awl went on, “would forbid the marriage of red people and white people. I am only one of several in just this little town who are already thus married. We already have children of mixed blood. What are such of us to do? We must go and learn what the Prophet demands. If he said I must give up this wife, how could I follow him?”

  Maconakwa’s heart felt squeezed down by dread as she heard that.

  “So you understand,” he said to his people, “this on one hand draws us one way, to walk close with the white man. This on the other hand draws us the other way, to walk away from him. That which lies on either hand could bring us peace or could bring us death. We are going toward a forked road. Which way we choose to go will cause the good or the evil with which our children and grandchildren forever will have to live.”

  The silence and the grimness were as deep as anything Maconakwa had ever known in a Council.

  “I, Shapahcahnah, The Awl, need the wisdom of my people. Pray for guidance. Listen to what your ancestors may whisper to you. Tell me what they put in your hearts.

  “All our People will have to do this. And, like creeks flowing into a river, all our wisdom must flow to our sakitna, so that he may lead us according to wishes of the ancestors.”

  E heh, Maconakwa thought. But then will Little Turtle heed the wisdom of the Old Ones or the wishes of the wapsituk?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  June 16, 1806

  Prophet’s Town, Greene Ville, Ohio

  Maconakwa had never been among so many people, nor had she ever known a crowd so still, so awed.

  She sat in the plaza of the Prophet’s Town beside her husband and her daughter, with her baby son, Round One, suckling her breast. They were waiting for a miracle that had been promised.

  They were waiting for the sun to go out.

  There were hundreds of strangers here, from tribes and distant nations she had only heard of, some nations that had been enemies to each other for generations. Yet all now seemed to be one reverent, beating heart with one yearning, one fear: that the sun would go dark by the Prophet’s command.

  The Prophet had sent his warning far and wide: that if the rightful occupants of this land were to regain their former greatness and peace, there must be no doubters, and that when they saw him turn off the sun, there would be nobody who could doubt him, except perhaps witches. This day was probably the most important day in the whole long story of the red people.

  Come to my holy town and see me do it, he
had sent word by messengers, and thousands had come, some traveling many days. Doubtless even those who had stayed away, because they scoffed or because they couldn’t travel so far, were watching the sun climb to the peak of heaven on this mild day.

  Among the hundreds here in this great holy town waiting and watching, most were believers, already inspired by the thrilling words and flutelike voice of the Prophet, ready to renounce the white man’s tricks and poisons and goods, ready to follow the spiritual path of the Ancestors as he prescribed it for them. Many others were here who yearned but doubted, and had come hoping to see it proven because they so wanted to believe.

  But still others were of a third kind: those who thought the Shawnee Prophet was a liar and a pretender, and had come to see him fail, as surely a man must who would try to command the sun. Maconakwa had heard some such mockers whispering and scoffing in the town. Among those scoffers were people who had known the Prophet when he was merely Lalawethika, the Loud Noise, a mean and disgusting one-eyed drunkard from the Kispoko Sept of the Shawnee. They snickered at the notion that such a deceiver could have become suddenly a sober and exalted spiritual guide for the peoples. That, they said, would be as much a miracle as the sun winking out.

  Also among those who had come hoping to see the Prophet fail were his enemies, or spies sent by his enemies. There were many of those. Maconakwa and her husband, The Awl, known here as Deaf Man, had just recognized a square-faced, pockmarked tall man in a ruffled blue calico shirt and silk turban, picking his way carefully through the crowd of seated families with no expression on his face. He was a seldom-sober Fort Wayne Indian who made his living by doing whatever William Wells wanted done. The Awl pointed his chin at him and murmured to Maconakwa, “There slinks a dog who will carry back to Captain Wells whatever he thinks he wants to hear. If the sun goes dark he will say a cloud came under it.” People nearby heard his remark because, with his deafness, even his murmurs were louder than he knew, and they looked to see whom he was looking at, though they were really not much interested in anything but the impending miracle.