The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

by Nancy Peacock

  I went into council often and I did not like what was being said. But I could not fight it. I could not argue against it. None of us liked it, and none of us could think of an alternative. We had few lodges left to us and no winter supplies. In order to survive the winter, we must move onto government land. We must move in closer to the agency. We must take the handouts, the rations offered in order not to starve.

  I LOOK OUT the window now and see that you are arriving for my hanging, wagons and buggies and four-in-hands parked at the edges of the street. I watch your women unload baskets of food and cloths to spread on the ground. I see your men heading off to the saloon for a drink. I see your children climbing out of the backs of the wagons, all scrubbed and cleaned and excited.

  You have arrived early to jostle each other for a good seat. I lean my face as close to my barred window as I can, and I look up the street to see my gallows and the crowd of people in front of it, the colorful patchwork spread of cloths and quilts on the ground, the women’s skirts fanned out like flowers on a vine. There are many of you wanting a clear view of my execution. Good. You will be the first to smell the shit my body is bound to release as I drop through the hatch.

  I watch a man setting up a table across the street, a board spanning two barrels. He props a crudely painted sign in front. “Sooveneers,” I see painted there. A larger sign proclaims, “Membrences of Mrs. Joseph Wilson. The Most Tragik Figer of the Fronteer.” He begins to lay out his wares. I look away. I cannot watch.

  Beneath my window, a group of children gather. They gaze up at the bars, hoping for a glimpse of the wild nigger Indian. I am looking right at them but they do not see me, for the angle of light is not behind me, and I am dark skinned, and besides this, it is the way of the Comanche to see but not be seen.

  One of the boys nudges his friend with his elbow. Then he starts up a little chant, and soon they have all taken it up, and they stand there, with their earnest little faces tilted up as if they are singing me a Christmas carol.

  Persimmon Wilson, Twisty Rope

  Your last meal is in the poke

  Watermelon, corn bread, sweet potato pie

  Today’s the day you’re going to die

  I open my mouth and take a deep breath. I breathe all the air I can into my lungs, and I let out a war whoop. They scream and scatter. The whole street becomes quiet. Jack comes into the hallway outside my cell and tells me to stop that shit. I am frightening innocent children, he says.

  I look at the jailhouse clock behind him. It is ten. I hang at twelve.

  I look out the window again. A woman is comforting the boy who started the chant. He leans into her dress and cries and she looks up and glares at my cell. Across the street the store is doing a brisk business. The saloon is packed, I am sure. Already the man selling souvenirs has people standing in line.

  I must speed along now. I must not pause to reflect on what it means to die, for it does not matter what it means, nor has it ever mattered. What matters is Chloe. What matters is this story that I must leave behind.

  We moved our camp to Cache Creek on agency land. There was no other choice. Chloe and Crawls Along managed to cobble together a tipi from salvaged lodge poles and bits of covering they pieced together. We moved in with Thin Knife’s family, as did Crawls Along’s sister, Cocklebur.

  Each week a party of our men rode in on ration day and brought back to us the stringy beef, which we divided among the tribe. We dug a few roots, but there was little to eat that winter, and we watched as our children and women lost weight, their complexions becoming dim, their eyes dull.

  I worried about Chloe and the baby she carried, not just because of our lack of food and warm buffalo robes and decent lodging, but also because the soldiers might come to our camp and see Chloe as a captured white woman. And if this were to happen, they would take her away from me. To prevent it I darkened her skin with pecan hulls.

  The agent, we called him Bald Head, soon made it clear that he would not release our women and children until we had returned all our white captives, as well as any horses stolen from the military. We did not even know where our captured women and children were being held, but at this news the tribe became divided.

  There were those among us who looked on our white Indians as the answer to the return of their loved ones. But others thought that the white Indians who had lived with us deserved more loyalty than this. And besides, the young boys who had been captured and had lived with us for a long time, Backecacho, Cachoco, Toppish, and others, were not willing to go. I spoke with Backecacho, and I know that the idea of leaving us, of returning to white society terrified him, just as it terrified Nakuhakeetuh.

  She would not leave my side, nor would I leave hers, for I saw in some of the people’s eyes that Chloe was a catch now, a bargaining chip, and a route to getting a mother or a sister or a child back. There was much talk among the tribe, much debate among the men, and in the end it was decided. We would take one or two of our white Indians and some horses to the agency, and our relatives would be released. We could see no other way.

  Backecacho and Cachoco were the two boys taken in. We told them to allow this for the tribe. We told them to escape once the captives were returned to us. Before he left, Backecacho told me he would return to his life with us. Take care of my horses, he said. He would see me again. He never returned. I never saw him again. None of our people were released. Two more young warriors, white Indians, were taken in. And still our women and children were not released.

  During all this Chloe shook with terror. She spoke of it every night to Crawls Along and Thin Knife and Cocklebur and me. “I have nothing to return to,” she said. “Return to where? Drunken Bride? Those people? I never had a husband there. Here I have a husband. I never had friends there. Here I have friends. I never had a home there. Here I have a home.”

  Thin Knife told me that on that first trip into the agency when Backecacho and Cachoco were taken in, Bald Head asked about Mrs. Joseph Wilson. Thin Knife and the others shook their heads. They did not know the name, they said.

  “The woman taken on the raid in Drunken Bride,” Bald Head replied. “Her husband was killed.”

  “Ah,” Horseback answered him. “That woman died.”

  “And where is her body?”

  “I do not know. But she died. It was somewhere along the trail. She was not strong.”

  “How did she die?”

  They looked at each other and shrugged. “I do not know what killed her,” Horseback answered. “She was not strong.”

  I wonder now what it must have felt like to Backecacho and Cachoco to listen to this talk, to know that they were being sacrificed while Nakuhakeetuh was being protected. It is to their credit that they said nothing. And it is to Thin Knife’s credit that he never considered turning my wife in to the agency, in the hopes of the return of Feather Horse and Elk Water. I felt no fear inside his lodge. Chloe and Crawls Along and Cocklebur worked together to cook what food the agency provisions allowed, and to take care of Salt and Fall Up. Often I saw Crawls Along and Cocklebur flanking Chloe, holding their hands to her belly to feel our child kick.

  I do not know why Bald Head did not press harder for information regarding Mrs. Joseph Wilson. Perhaps he believed what Horseback told him, or perhaps he did not really care, for surely the parents of the young boys who stood before him now had written more letters asking for help in finding their children than anyone in Drunken Bride had ever written about Chloe. It would not be until later that you would make a martyr of her, and give her this mantle of “the most tragic figure of the frontier.”

  We wintered over at Cache Creek, on the government land. It was a nasty and putrid place, the water contaminated by Fort Sill, which was upstream from us. All the same, we would not move any closer to the agency. Nor could we go out onto the plains, for we would starve. Our women and children were not returned to us. They were being held, we learned, at Fort Concho, not at Fort Sill where the agency was.
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br />   It was here that a comet appeared, bright in the night sky. It was here that a Quahadi medicine man named Isa-tai predicted that the comet would disappear in five days’ time, which it did. But while that comet still hung in the sky, Chloe gave birth to our son. I named him Mohats Tahtseenoop, Bright Star, and the black circle was painted over the door of the tipi we shared with Thin Knife’s family, to show that a warrior had been born.

  There are no words to say what it is like to hold one’s own child. He was a brown little baby. He slept between Chloe and me, and I woke sometimes in the middle of the night to hear Bright Star suckling and Chloe cooing to him. In spite of the conditions of our lives, our diet of stringy beef instead of the tahseewo we had hunted and prepared for the winter, the stinking creek we camped beside, the shame I felt at having turned in our young white warriors for nothing, in spite of all this, I had never been more in love, more amazed at the miracle of Chloe lying beside me with our child. The skin around her nipple returned to its pale color where Bright Star’s suckling licked away the pecan-hull dye, and to me that color of Chloe’s true skin represented our eventual freedom.

  We would leave this place. We all knew it. We needed only to endure this winter along Cache Creek on the government land and get our captured women and children back, and this we did. The women and children were returned to us the next summer. Such a joyous reunion you cannot imagine. The women making their li-li-li-li-li sounds. Thin Knife and Feather Horse and Elk Water reunited at last. It was not a quiet night in our camp. We built a fire and celebrated. There was still little to eat, but we ate it communally, and we shared our stories. We had all been captives that winter, those caught by the soldiers and held at Fort Concho, and those forced onto the government land below Fort Sill. But we would no longer be captives. We packed up the next day and rode out to the plains, where we belonged, and we started anew.

  There was a locust infestation that summer. It was my last year out on the plains, and it is this that allows me to count back and come up with your measurement of years. 1873. All summer long the locusts chewed at the plants, while all summer long we raided and stole more horses and mules. We ate the mules, and in the fall we rode beyond the locusts, looking for the collective breath cloud of a herd of tahseewo. It was not easy. Your buffalo hunters arrived that year. There were not many yet, only a few brave and greedy souls, but we saw what even one white hunter could do. We saw a field of bloated carcasses, only the skin taken, all the meat spoiled, millions of flies buzzing around.

  We found another herd and killed some. Our women skinned and tanned the hides, and sewed them into tipi covers. We searched out lodge poles and peeled them and let them season. The women built scaffolding and cut the meat into thin strips and hung it to dry for the winter. Slowly we built back up, but we could not keep far out of our minds the sight of the slaughtered buffalo, the bodies rotting in the sun.

  These were the things of our lives now. As I write this story I can feel the gathering cloud of our demise. It feels so obvious now, it is remarkable that I did not feel it then. Again, I wish that I could write only of Nakuhakeetuh’s and my joy over the birth of our son. I wish that I could write only of bliss, of building another lodge, of making another toy bow and toy arrows for Bright Star, of watching Nakuhakeetuh sew another quiver, of seeing these things hanging in the lodge beside my own bow and quiver of arrows. But there was no time for this. All our work must be toward survival, and Chloe and I were never to have our own tipi again.

  But we had robes to wrap up in, and the tribe had more lodges, and we had meat for the winter, or so we thought. We did not, it turned out, have enough for that particular winter. The winter of ’73, ’74 was a winter that no one on the plains is likely to ever forget. It was worse than the winter with Mo and Sedge in the little bunkhouse on the Traveling S Ranch.

  One after another, blizzards bore down and howled through our village. Our horses suffered and some froze to death. Some of the old and sick in our band died of the cold. A few children died.

  It seemed that each day found us huddled inside the tipi. Chloe and me, Thin Knife and Crawls Along and Feather Horse and the children, and Cocklebur, who stayed and became Thin Knife’s third wife. We listened to the wind howl, sometimes for hours. The sound of it whining and scouring through the camp, thumping itself against the tipi walls, letting up and starting again was enough to drive a man to madness. The blizzards went on and on, one after another. And after a blizzard had ceased, a fearful quiet fell across us as we listened for the sounds of someone having died, the wail of a daughter or a wife, or the thudding footsteps of a runner as he went through the village to alert the relatives. Sometimes Bright Star cried as if he, a little baby, could feel the loss before we even knew of it. Or perhaps he was just hungry and cold.

  And what can I tell you of Chloe during this time? That she was cold. That she shivered with Bright Star in her arms, under a buffalo robe. That she was hungry. That she lost weight. That her breasts ceased to produce milk for our child.

  He slept between us, Chloe’s arm wrapped tightly around him, and Bright Star holding on to my finger. I remember so well his little fist, his little fingers and nails, the look in his big brown eyes when I held him. I remember so well waking in the night to the feel of my son desperately sucking on my finger, as if it were a nipple.

  I have since read in your newspaper that the blizzards lasted until April 1874, so you can imagine that there was plenty of time that winter and plenty of hungry anger with which to make talk against the white man. We had heard that we were not the only Indians who were starving. It was even worse for the agency Indians, for they did not hunt as we did, and you did not provide the promised food. Many raiding parties left the government land to get what they could for their families, and they stopped sometimes in our village and told us how it was for them at the agency, how they were always told to wait. Wait while their women and children starved.

  And we told them our own news: two new towns that had sprung up close to Drunken Bride, new ranches with the cattle eating up all the good grazing, and buffalo hunters that had arrived the previous fall.

  We all knew, agency Indians and free Indians alike, that your hunters had killed so many buffalo above the Canadian River that the herds would no longer migrate there. We all knew that you would be coming down into our lands to take the buffalo. It was all happening so fast, settlers and railroads and towns and buffalo hunters. We talked angrily in our tipis that winter while the blizzards swarmed around us. We agreed that the buffalo hunters must be stopped. If, come summer, for surely summer would come, we could get all the tribes of the southern plains together we might stand a chance, and to this end, when the blizzards finally ended we held a sun dance.

  We were not sun dancers. That was Kiowa medicine, but Isa-tai, the medicine man, said we needed something to bring us together, and he invited all the bands of the Comanche to join us. Isa-tai and a charismatic young warrior named Quanah spoke at the sun dance of war against the whites. We smoked the pipe. If a man took the pipe, he was with us; if he refused, it meant that he did not want to fight. I took the pipe. I would take the pipe again if it were offered to me.

  We talked it over and decided that our first target would be the place you call Adobe Walls, the supply station for buffalo hunters that had materialized that spring. And once we had murdered all the buffalo hunters and merchants there, we would ride out and attack everywhere at once, all the hated Texans, all the white people who wanted only to see us die.

  We called for other tribes to join us: the Kiowa, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Apache, the Kataka. As we rode through the plains toward Adobe Walls, smaller parties of Indians merged and joined with us, and our numbers swelled to hundreds. Isa-tai told us that our medicine was strong, but he lied.

  We did not surprise a sleeping camp, as Isa-tai told us we would. We did not kill the many white men he had promised. We took only two scalps. Upon our attack the people in the supply camp hol
ed up in several sod houses, and they punched holes through the walls, and they shot at us with guns that we had not seen before, guns that were powerful and frightening and could fire long distances, and we were hit, and many of us died. Isa-tai’s medicine was no good. Isa-tai’s yellow paint that bullets could not penetrate was no good. His horse, also painted yellow, was shot out from under him from a long ways off. Quanah was hit, the bullet creasing his skin between neck and shoulder, bleeding little but leaving his arm paralyzed for several hours.

  I cannot describe to you the helplessness I felt as we finally gave up that fight and rode away, for in riding away we were leaving behind many of our dead. We could not reach them without being killed ourselves. This had been proven, as some of the dead were men who had tried to retrieve the bodies of their brothers. Our anger over our defeat surged through our ranks, and the party divided and we spread out and struck blindly against any whites we ran across. Wagon trains and settlements and farms and buffalo hunters. We killed more brutally than we ever had before, and then we returned to our village and reported our failure at Adobe Walls.

  That night I covered my head with a buffalo robe to block out the sound of the widows’ wailing. Chloe wrapped her arms around me and rocked me as if I were a child. The next morning I could not hide from seeing these women with their arms and faces and breasts slashed, their bloodstained dresses, and from knowing that I was among those warriors who had failed to protect my brothers, who had failed, even, to bring the bodies home.

  Chloe told me again and again that it was not my fault. She spoke in Comanche, reminding me of all that we had been through. She told me that I had been the only strength she had at Sweetmore. She told me that I had given her comfort there. She reminded me that I could have escaped with Henry and Sup, but had instead boarded the boat to Texas to be with her.