House of Purple Cedar
Page 25
We gathered in the church and sang, shape-note singing of a sweet old hymn, brought by the Methodists but now sung by two hundred Choctaws. Over and over we sang, till the Methodist skin flaked away and the dark red Choctaw clay hummed with sound. Every board of our little church vibrated with the music till our words filled the building and the sky as well.
Come all who love the Lord
And lift your voices high
We’re marching to Immanuel’s call,
We’re marching to Immanuel’s call,
So dance around the throne,
So dance around the throne.
We’re marching to Zion,
Beautiful, beautiful Zion,
We’re marching upward to Zion,
The beautiful city of God.
We stared at the man nailed to the wall behind the pulpit. Brother Willis sang. We all sang. The cross was painted on the wall. The man’s clothes were nailed to the wall, and his eyes pleaded with us to relieve his pain. He writhed until we all knew his suffering, his tormented mind that would not set him free. Nailed to the cross of his own skin, of his own deeds, and longing to be free.
I squinted my eyes and tried so hard to see his face, but with every breath his cheeks rose and swelled.
I thought of all the suffering ones I had known. I thought of Mrs. Hardwicke and the cruelties she endured. I thought of Sarah McCurtain and the children she had lost. I remembered seeing my Amafo lying on the railroad platform, lifeless as a dried rabbit hide. Lillie Chukma held in the outstretched arms of her mother.
I stared into the face of the man nailed to the wall, but it was unrecognizable in the rising and sucking of the cheeks and nostrils.
We sang and stared, all of us, longing to see the face of the Suffering One. Then Pokoni came. The door to the church opened and my grandmother came, walking down the aisle. With one step she was the panther. With the next she was my Pokoni on the day she died.
She crept and walked and still we sang. With a nod to Reverend Willis, she circled the pulpit to kneel before the writhing one. The panther left forever and it was only my grandmother, my Pokoni, my tender Pokoni, my beautiful grandmother of my Amafo’s eyes, younger and younger she grew, till I saw her as a little girl, fast and darting everywhere she went, running while others walked, her hands gripped a cat, stroked a dog, patted a birthing momma cow, touched my grandfather on the arm, kissed his lips, held her baby, my mother, older by the moment, till there she stood, surrounded by her grandchildren, finally lying sweet and blissful on the kitchen floor, covered in a quilt of yellowing gardenias, there she lay.
Now she stood before the one nailed to the cross.
The echoes of the hymn rang and shook the boards of the church, the ceiling, walls, and floor, before settling into a quiet and holy living moment. Only then, with the settling, did I know.
How could I not have known before the name of the one who suffered so before us? Now we all knew. My Pokoni returned to help us see. She touched his feet and he lifted his head to her. My Pokoni and the Suffering One, Robert Efram Hardwicke, staring at each other.
I trembled in disbelief at the blasphemy, the mockery, of his presence, that he should even be here on this most holy of all days. Knowing what he did, knowing how he lived his life, I can never forgive him. Pokoni turned to us and spoke.
“It is not for you to judge. That’s for the Lord to do. He must face the Lord on Judgement Day and own up to the deeds that he has done. And if he wants the Lord’s forgiveness, he must ask for it.”
He stared at her as she spoke, and when she finished he lifted his face to look at us, the congregation of the church he so defiled. On these very steps he attacked the daughter of the preacher, Brother Willis. His eyes scanned the crowd.
He is looking for her, I thought. She was the cause of his downfall.
He closed his eyes and bowed his head in shame. I wrestled with forgiveness, knowing now the suffering of his dark life.
“No!” I shouted. “In the name of Lillie Chukma, no!”
I caught the scent of gardenias and Pokoni whispered in my ear.
“It is not for you to judge,” she said. “Remember, he was a small one once, a weak and helpless one. To see him always as the standing over one, the mean-eyed one, the cruel-fisted one, is not to know. Knowing is different. Knowing is this.
“He threw the blows because he caught the blows. To think we put an end to him by slaying him is not to know, for we must kill the father and the father and the father yet before him, till wrapped in the blood-soaked cloth of all the killing, drowning in the blood of all the killing, we stand before the Tree, the first Tree, and wrapped around the Tree we find the father in us all, the unslayable one, the serpent. Nor gun, nor knife, nor stone can ever touch the living serpent.
“But something can, and it lies dormant too, within us all. It is the heaviest of all to wield, it falls so clumsily, so foreign to our thinking. Knowing is this. Forgiveness slays the serpent. It withers in the Light.”
Acknowledgments
One chilly winter night in 1998, I was driving through the Choctaw Nation seeking Helen Harris, a friend I’d met at a conference. The roads were icy and dangerous, but I finally found her home. Her husband graciously retired and left us sitting by the fire. She told me of a similar night, years past, when her mother drove a horse-drawn wagon through the icy dark, as she and her brother curled beneath a blanket. She whispered of the panther that followed them and suggested it was a protector. Thus began a fifteen-year journey that led to Skullyville.
I would like to thank my friend and fellow Choctaw, Greg Rodgers, who carried books, boards, and slung paint on the Purple walls through the final years of constructing this Cedar House. We drove thousands of miles and crossed so many graveyards we now have a large circle of friends who are residents—from Boggy Depot to Skullyville—and we both became writers in the process. Yakoke to Choctaws Helen Harris, Charley Jones, Reverend Bertram Bobb, Jay McAlvain, Judy Allen, Lisa Reed, Lee Francis, Leroy Sealey, Tony Byars, Buck Wade and Lizzie Carney, who all have left their footprints in this novel. A grateful bow to Mississippi Choctaws Estelline Tubby and Archie Mingo, and to members of the Choctaw Alliance of Oklahoma City—Stella Long, Catfish Bryant, and his brothers Kenny and Billy Bryant.
And to Choctaw Freedman Levester McKeeson, who lived near Skullyville and knew many of its secrets. To the library staff of Spiro and the many townspeople who shared their knowledge of the times, thank you.
Yakoke to writers LeAnne Howe, Louis Owens, Rilla Askew, poet Jim Barnes, researchers and writers H.B. Cushman, Angie Debo, Dan Littlefield, Clara Sue Kidwell, Dan Birchfield, Donna Akers, Tom Mould, Arthus DeRosier, Devon Mihesuah and—may they forever feel a glow of gratitude from Choctaws everywhere—John Swanton and Cyrus Byington. Doc Moore, my tri-book co-author, Lisa Eister, Susan Feller, Mary Gay Ducey and Dr. Michael Flanigan, my OU writing instructor, have shared valuable insights.
Respectful nods to fellow University of Oklahoma writers, Les Hanna and Phil Morgan. The support of Choctaw Councilmen, now and for the past twenty years, is gratefully appreciated. Chief Gregory Pyle and Assistant Chief Gary Batton provide the most powerful leadership the Choctaw people have ever known.
The folks at Cinco Puntos have earned a Choctaw name, Okla Ahoshonti—Cloud People—because they float above.
Tim Tingle
Tim Tingle is an Oklahoma Choctaw and an award-winning author. His great-great grandfather, John Carnes, walked the Trail of Tears in 1835, and his paternal grandmother attended a series of rigorous Indian boarding schools in the early 1900s. Responding to a scarcity of Choctaw lore, Tingle initiated a search for historical and personal narrative accounts in the early 1990s.
In 1992, Tingle began mentoring with Choctaw storyteller Charley Jones. Tim retraced the Trail of Tears to Choctaw homelands in Mississippi and began recording stories of tribal elders. His family experiences and these interviews with fellow Choctaws in Texas, Alabama, Mississipp
i and Oklahoma—over two hundred hours and counting—are the basis of his most important writings.
Tingle received his master’s degree in English Literature, with a focus on American Indian studies, at the University of Oklahoma in 2003. While teaching freshmen writing courses and completing his thesis, “Choctaw Oral Literature,” Tingle wrote his first book, Walking the Choctaw Road. It was selected by both Oklahoma and Alaska as Book of the Year in the “One Book, One State” program, and is now studied at universities across the United States and abroad.
Every Labor Day, Tingle shares a Choctaw narrative before Chief Gregory Pyle’s State of the Nation Address, a gathering that attracts over ninety thousand tribal members and friends. In June of 2011, Tingle spoke at the Library of Congress and presented his first performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. From 2011 to the present, he has been a featured author at “Choctaw Days,” a celebration honoring the Oklahoma Choctaws at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Tingle is the author of ten books, including Walking the Choctaw Road, Saltypie (Cinco Puntos Press), How I Became a Ghost (Roadrunner Press), and Danny Blackgoat, Navajo Prisoner (7th Generation). His first children’s book, Crossing Bok Chitto (Cinco Puntos Press), was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review. It garnered over twenty state and national awards, including Best Children’s Book from the American Indian Library Association.
House of Purple Cedar was fifteen years in the crafting. Filled with hope in the most tragic of circumstances, House of Purple Cedar is Tingle’s testament to Choctaw elders who continue to watch over the well-being of the Choctaw Nation and its people.
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Table of Contents
A Note Before the Reckoning
Fire and Ice
Reverend Willis & the Boys
First and Final Days at New Hope Academy
The Burning of New Hope
The Funeral and Efram Bobb
Spiro Town
Amafo's Spiderweb Eye
Night Gathering
Colonel Mingo
Jezebel Jezzy
Mingo and Hardwicke's Men
Goode Kitchen and Strong Women
Sunday Morning
Serpent of Brass
Stationmaster John
Leggy Maggie and Friends
How Things Came To Be
Terrance Lowell
Snakes and Spiders
The Fist of Darkness
Hardwicke and the Agent
Dead by the Hand
Samuel the Night Walker
Escape in Broad Daylight
Maggie and Terrance
Maggie the Wolf
Sam Anatubby
Wake-Up Call for Hardwicke
Pokoni and Amafo
Slow Like the River
The Day My Pokoni Almost Died
Amafo Alone
Spinning Wheel of Spiro
Roberta Jean
Koi Chitto Comes to Life
Vengeance Is Mine
Brother Willis Preaches
Empty Prayers
Bill Gibbons to the Train
The Friendly Color
News for Ona Mae
Amafo Comes to Life
Dark Resurrection
Hardwicke in Texas
Homecoming
Empty House
The McCurtain Children
Rendering the Sow
Panther in the Dark
Koi Chitto on the Prowl
Amafo and Pokoni
Final Reckoning
Somebody Looking to Die
Circle of Buried Secrets
Train Comes to Spiro
Pokini's Whisperings
Acknowledgments
Tim Tingle
More Great Fiction from Cinco Puntos Press