A young woman stood and put more wood on the fire. As she sat back down, the man next to her patted her ass and she giggled.
I turned again to walk away. I faced the moonlight, the walls of the canyon, the vast open plains beyond. I faced the freedom to take my leave and return to my own life, but what was that life? Chloe was dead having never known freedom. Mo and Sedge also dead. I had traveled around Texas, and I had seen what white men were still doing to black men. Even if I made it out of Texas alive, what lay beyond it? I turned again and looked at the people gathered around the fire, the families, the children, the women, the men, the elders, the village. I did not know what sort of life I could make in the white world, and I would never know, for that night I wheeled away from it and walked back toward the fire. As I came up two men moved aside, not the two I had sat between before, but two others making a space for me, and I sat down and in this way I joined the Comanche Indians.
You will want to know, I am sure, what I thought lay ahead. It is not as though I reasoned it through while sitting in the canyon in the moonlight, watching my captors around the fire dine on Mo’s slaughtered mule. Nor did I know what would be expected of me should I become part of the tribe. But this seemed to be what was being offered and I took it.
I have thought about it quite a bit since, and I believe that what I felt at that moment might have been akin to power, or at least to the potential of power, and this was not something I had ever felt at any other time in my life.
Perhaps I had enjoyed killing Holmes more than I have admitted to you. He was, after all, Master Wilson’s loyal underling, and for that, did he not deserve to die? It felt good to hold his scalp in my hand, to wrap my fingers into his hair, to let his blood drip onto my leggings.
I cannot say for certain what the tribe saw in me, but they needed warriors. They needed brave men, and I had shown this quality. But a brave man must also be a man willing to help protect the tribe, a man willing to hunt and bring home the buffalo, a man willing to fight the soldiers, a man willing to raid the settlements, to steal horses and cattle and mules, to kill white men, to kidnap women and children. A man who would not mind running a knife around the skull of another human being and popping his scalp off. I became such a man as this.
THE NEXT MORNING my Indian woke me by nudging his foot into my ribs. When I opened my eyes I found him standing above me, a leather bag strapped across his chest and a pistol stuck in his belt. He motioned for me to follow him. Outside his horse was already saddled, and his shield propped nearby. He picked up the shield, grabbed the horse’s reins, and began walking.
It was early. There was scant light, but already cookfires were smoking and tipi flaps propped open. Men sat on a blanket outside one lodge, throwing what looked like dice. Two dogs growled and fought over a bone from last night’s mule. Three boys chased one another, each with a quiver of toy arrows on his back and a bow slung across his shoulder.
A woman who was scraping a hide looked up and smiled at me, nodding an acknowledgment before bending back to her work. An old man came up to me. His chest was shriveled and hairless. He touched my wounded shoulder and said something, and then stepped aside. We passed a group of young women carrying bladders of water from the creek, and they looked at me and leaned into each other and giggled.
The man I followed paid these people no mind. We waded across the river, and through the herd of horses. I had never seen so many horses, and as we plowed through them I looked for Spring Dance or Cups, but among such a large herd I could not pick them out.
I looked up at the canyon walls as we walked. It was a deep canyon. I would learn later that the Mexicans we traded with called it Palo Duro. In 1868, the year of my capture, your soldiers had not yet seen it, and for the Comanche it was a place of absolute safety. I felt a sense of peace and contentment there. I cannot say why. After all, I still did not know my fate with these people, and a man with a pistol in his belt was leading me to a place I was uncertain of. Even so, I took a deep breath of the cool morning air and let the spirit of the Palo Duro settle over me. The sun now peeked over the rim and shredded into rays that fell in stripes across the canyon floor.
The Indian stopped. We were in a large scruffy field, away from the village and the herd. He let loose of his horse’s reins and it wandered off to graze. He then pulled the pistol from his belt and handed it to me, holding it by the barrel. He pulled the bag off his shoulder and opened it, showing me a stock of bullets and dropping the bag on the ground at my feet.
He turned and walked several paces away before turning to face me again. He held up his shield and made motions with his index finger and thumb, shaping them like a gun. His thumb went down. “Pow,” he said. He lifted his shield and nodded. “Pow,” he said again. And then he held the shield in front of him.
Was I to shoot at him? I looked at the gun, and back at the Indian, and shook my head no.
He nodded slowly and made the gesture with his finger and thumb again.
I raised the pistol, and pointed it at him, and then let it drop.
He shook his head, made a string of sounds I could not understand, and then made the gesture again with his fingers. “Pow,” he said.
I raised the gun and pointed it at him. He nodded, and spread his legs a bit apart, and held the shield up to his chest. I squeezed the trigger, but at the last minute lifted the gun so that the bullet went above him. He frowned, came to me quickly, and smacked me across the cheek. Then he returned to his position.
I raised the gun, took aim, and fired. The Indian, I would later learn his name was Thin Knife, quickly moved the shield. The bullet pinged off it and bounced into the grass. He nodded at me again, and held his shield up. I squeezed the trigger, and again he deflected the bullet. I shot at him until the chamber was empty.
While I reloaded, he caught his horse and mounted and indicated that I should shoot at him as he rode. I did so. He moved masterfully. The bullets thumped into his shield and bounced off into the grass, some of them reflecting the sunlight and falling like little stars.
I fired the last bullet and he rode back to me. He dismounted and held out his hand for the gun. I passed it to him. He looked me in the eye and smiled and handed me the shield.
This was the way of the Comanche. They did not teach gently. There was no theory or discussion, no diagrams drawn in the dirt. To learn to use a shield effectively I must be shot at. I would succeed or I would die. It was as simple as that.
I succeeded. At first I thought I needed to see the bullet in order to deflect it, and of course I was worried, for can a bullet fired from a gun be seen? I was to learn though, that so much depends not on the eyes, but on the instincts, and perhaps on magic.
I have spoken of power, but I have not spoken of magic. I do not believe in prayer and incantations as much as I am told I should, but magic is what I felt as I rode Thin Knife’s horse across the field that morning. The horse was fast, and responsive, moving this way and that with only the slightest prod. The shield felt as though it was telling me what to do, rather than the other way around. The shield felt alive in my hand, like a snake, as I lifted it to meet each bullet.
As we returned to the village Thin Knife reached over and patted me on the back and said something. Something friendly, I thought, delivered with a grin and an approving nod of his head.
I was given the bed where I stayed that first night.
I was given clothes and food.
I was given Mo’s haversack as my own once again, empty of its contents now.
And I was given my name. Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo. Twist Rope. Named after the little noose I wore now next to Chloe’s button.
A week after my arrival in the canyon I saw vultures circling in the air. Perhaps they were circling the body of Holmes. Already my fight with him seemed a long ways back. I lay in my bed at night and looked at the stars through the smoke vent in the lodge. I watched the moon closely, for it, and the hair on my face, was my only connection to the pa
ssing of time. And then it was just the moon, for as soon as my beard began to grow back, I was thrown to the ground and sat on, while once again every hair on my face was tweezed out.
Thin Knife seemed to have adopted me, and I shared his lodge with his family: his wives Feather Horse and Crawls Along and their children, a son named Salt, a daughter named Elk Water, and another daughter named Fall Up.
It took me some time to discern who was mother to whom, but at last I worked it out that Crawls Along had given birth to Salt, and Feather Horse, who was Thin Knife’s first wife, had given birth to Elk Water and Fall Up. I would estimate that at the time of my capture, Salt was about three years old, while Elk Water was nearly seven, and Fall Up about five.
Thin Knife was a short man, although not as short as Mo had been, and muscular, with an angled face and dark matted hair. He had hit me over the head with the butt of my rifle, had participated in slinging me between two poles and placing a rock on my back, had watched as the women piled tinder at my feet. He had bet on me in the fight against Holmes. And he bet on me still. Every day that he was not otherwise occupied, he gave me a lesson in survival and skill.
I do not wish to make my assimilation into the tribe seem easy. It was not easy. It was not quick. It took time for many in the tribe to trust me. It took time to become the warrior I am today. It took time to learn the ways of my new family, the customs, the food, the culture, the language. But I was immersed. There was no leaving. There was no turning back. I had made my choice when I turned away from escape into the plains, and instead had sat in the space made for me around the communal fire. I knew that I had made this choice, and I lived with it.
Assimilate or die. Merge or separate. Learn or perish.
Thin Knife and his friends, upon finding out that I could not swim, tied a rope around my middle and threw me into the deep part of a river. At the point of nearly drowning, they hauled me out, smacked the water out of my lungs, and threw me in again. After five times, I had figured out how to swim.
I learned to use a bow and arrow. I learned to use them well, with deadly accuracy, and with either hand, just as I learned to fire a rifle with either hand. I learned to hang on to a horse galloping at full speed, by one leg slung across its back, my body hanging down, pressed against the horse’s side so that its body provided cover in battle. I learned to ride up close to the enemy this way and to shoot an arrow or a gun from beneath the horse’s neck. I learned to do this without breaking speed. Eventually I learned to go days, weeks if necessary, without food, and I learned to find water in places where it seemed there was none.
It was the Comanche way of life to move, to leave one place for another. We often moved camp. There were many reasons to do this. Our horses were in need of fresh grass. We followed the buffalo during hunting season. We had favorite places to stay during certain seasons. We knew where we could get wild plums or grapes. We went to trading parties with Mexicans and with other tribes. We broke camp and disappeared after a raid. Sometimes a chief simply said it was time to go, and so we went. It took me some time to understand all this.
I had been with the tribe almost four moons when I went on my first raid. Thin Knife led the raid. I had learned enough of the language to know that he said it was time for me to prove myself, and that if I did not do so, there might be trouble for me. We were no longer camped in Palo Duro and were now out on the plains. We rode a long ways. It took many days to reach the group of cabins along the Llano River in Hill Country. It was daylight when we rode in. Down below were a cabin and a barn and three children in a wheat field chasing birds from the crop.
We stopped, and Thin Knife told me to stay behind. I was sure that the group I stayed with was watching me closely. I was sure I was being tested, that Thin Knife wanted to know if I would remain loyal to the tribe or break for the white settlement. I would have been killed had I tried to leave, but that is not why I stayed. I stayed because the Indians offered me something that had never been offered to me before. Here I could become a warrior, and a man of means, while down there, in that valley of white people I could never even be a man.
I sat on my horse and watched as Thin Knife’s group wove their way down the hill. The vegetation sometimes hid them from view, and then they would appear again, and then disappear behind some scruff of growth. The children in the wheat field stopped and watched the riders approach. And then they ran and the Indians bore down on them. Two riders leaned over and scooped two of the children up. The third child dove into a thicket. The group looked for him, but before they could find him a man came out of the cabin and fired his rifle and Thin Knife raised his own rifle and shot the man. He rode quickly to him and scalped him and mounted his horse.
From there we rode to another cabin. I was left, along with another man, in charge of guarding the children. The boy was placed on the back of my companion’s horse, and the girl on the back of mine. Her hands were placed around my middle and I clamped my arms down on them so that she could not move, the same way Thin Knife had once clamped down on my arms.
Off in the distance I watched as Thin Knife and the others entered the cabin. It seemed to be empty. They pulled a mattress out and ripped it open, and the feathers filling the air reminded me of Sweetmore, and of shooting my gun into Master Wilson’s bed.
The cabin was set on fire. Five horses were stolen. We rode on. Two more raids on little farms and ranches, the cabins burned, one more scalp taken, a total of twenty horses stolen, all done within just a few hours.
We rode hard away from there. We put many miles between us and the white men who would surely come after us. We went through the hardest part of the country, where water was scarce. We confused our trail by doubling back on it, and we rode through the night. When we finally stopped, we did not build a fire. One of the men in our party had killed an antelope, and we ate it raw.
The girl we had captured, who shared my saddle, stayed quiet during our ride. She did not shiver or cry. She did not squirm to get loose. She would make, I thought, a good Indian.
How could I, you will want to know, I, a former slave who understood the experience of being separated from my parents, feel nothing for this child or any of the other children I lifted onto my saddle and carried away from their homes?
To this question I answer with a question of my own. Did the white man not understand what he was doing before selling children away from their parents? Did he not rip babies out of mothers’ arms and pull crying, clinging toddlers away from their skirts? How convenient the memory of a white man is, and how inconvenient you wish mine to be. If we did not trade them, the children we took would become Comanche, while the children you took would always be slaves.
I, too, became Comanche. I did as the Comanche did. I ate what they ate, and I starved when they starved. I moved when the camp moved. I learned the language. I learned the signs we used with other tribes whose language we did not share. I learned to track the movement of animals and enemies. I learned to locate a buffalo herd, the tahseewo by the steam cloud of its collective breath on the plains.
WE RODE from Texas into Colorado. Utah. New Mexico. Mexico. Kansas. Arkansas. Arizona. Nebraska. And we rode into what you call Indian Territory, that too-small squeeze of government land you had set aside for so many tribes to be held, and contained, and given rations at your agencies. We were not held or contained. We did not receive your rations. Our land was large and open, and we rode hard and far and often, and these are but some of the states and territories that I know we visited. The truth is we rode so much and pulled up camp so often and made so many raids that most of the time I did not know exactly where we were.
I remember rivers and mountains and prairies and plains. Salt licks and bee caves. Quicksand and dry lakes. Canyons and caprock and limestone ridges. I remember the black smoke of burning cabins, the squeal of pigs as we killed them, a brave dog filled with arrows, feathers filling the air as we dragged out and cut open bedding, for this was the way of a raid. Burn,
destroy, kill. To this day I cannot see a feather floating in the wind without being reminded of it.
We met trading parties of Mexicans, and we swapped horses and sometimes captives for metal and cooking pots and blankets. And then we went to another place and made camp there, and we filed the metal into points and made arrows and lances, and then we raided again. If the soldiers chased us, we vanished. Sometimes we retreated across the Red River onto the government land where the agencies were, for at that time there was a policy forbidding the soldiers to follow us there, and we knew this, and we made good use of it.
By winter I had three scalps decorating my shield, the one belonging to Holmes and two others from men I had killed during two different raids. Thin Knife trained me well. He had seen, I suppose, that I could be counted on, that I would kill and take scalps, and that I would ride back into fire to pick up the wounded.
Thin Knife was generous with me. He gave me the buffalo hide with which to make my shield. He showed me how to crumple paper from stolen books and cram it between the two layers of hide to make the shield even more impervious to bullets. He let me take and keep a fine bow and quiver of arrows belonging to a Blackfoot he had killed, a warrior from a band that had raided into our territory. He shared his food with me, and I played with his children.
In a game of gambling with a man named Beetle, the man who had drawn his knife across my throat, I won back my horse, Spring Dance, and with Spring Dance I rode into more raids, and stole more horses, and in this way I became a man of some means.
I was never a wealthy man. I did not own hundreds of horses as some men did. I was never a chief or a leader or a medicine man. I was merely who I was. A good warrior, and that seemed enough to me.
The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Page 25