The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  The Long Warrior turned and as he did so he heard Creek Mary’s rich laughter. Her back was toward him and she was laughing at Opothle and Talasi the Runner, who were wrestling in the water. As he strode across the pebbles, he felt his whole body aching for her. She heard the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel, and turned to face him. Her mouth opened slightly, one hand flying up to cover it, her eyes brightening with recognition.

  “They told me you were dead!” she cried.

  “You could not wait until my bones were recovered before bedding with another man?” he shouted accusingly. “And he one of the Unegas. While I fight them you find one to build a house for you!”

  “Four hands are needed to build a house, Long Warrior, and he is a kind man. Could I rebuild my house alone, a woman with two children and no man?”

  8

  DANE WAS WATCHING THE horseman, still far away across the Montana plain, but closer than before. “He’s looking for something, all right. He could be that young Crow. If so, he’s looking for my granddaughter Amayi, although he would deny it if asked.”

  He turned back to face me. “I don’t want you to get the idea,” he said, “that the old Cherokees were not good fighters. They were as good as Mr. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, but I doubt if men like my grandfather and Qualla and the Stalking Turkey would have gone charging up that San Juan Hill in rank formation. It was not the nature of those old woods fighters to battle that way. Bullhead and Young Tassel-John Watts soon found that out. They should have known better.

  “When all the fighting was over, none of them believed they had lost their war to keep settlers out of Cherokee country. Scattered though the Cherokees were, they had drawn blood from the border militia, punished them so severely they did not bother them again for a long time. Settlement did not stop, of course. The white intruders kept on ‘winning the West’ by moving into lands of less stubborn tribes. Not until about the time I came into the world did the trouble start all over again for the Cherokees.” He stopped for a minute, his face turning somber, the wrinkles deepening around his mouth into a painful sadness.

  “Yes, every Cherokee and Creek warrior was his own commander, to fight or not to fight as he pleased, to leave the war when he pleased. Qualla and the Stalking Turkey were not so badly wounded they could not have continued fighting, but they chose to go home. My grandfather found them at Okelogee.”

  He saw them right after he walked angrily away from Creek Mary and went on to the council house. The pillars and rafters of that building were so heavy they had not burned, and only the roof and seats had been damaged. Several men were busily working on the repairs, and both Qualla and the Stalking Turkey were among them.

  Qualla saw the Long Warrior first. “Unginili!” he shouted. “My elder brother! Returned from the Land of the Dead!”

  They had indeed believed him dead. Someone had seen him fall in battle while crossing a mountain stream, had watched his body floating away in the rapids. “I was only fooling the Unegas,” the Long Warrior declared. “They were thick as quails along the banks of that stream.”

  “But I saw it all in a dream,” said the Stalking Turkey. “You were dead in the water.”

  “Your dream was not of the past,” replied the Long Warrior. “Perhaps of the future.”

  For the Long Warrior the reunion was not a joyous one. The men wanted to celebrate the return of their chief and his warriors with feasting and dancing, but he refused the honor. He would be spending some hours with Bear Killer, the adawehi, searching for a chant formula that might bring Creek Mary to her senses and rid them both of that red-bearded Scotsman, Hugh Crawford.

  After Bear Killer gave him two chants, the Long Warrior left Okelogee and walked the long distance to the Sleeping Woman, climbing to its highest point, the rounded head at the mountain’s north end. Facing in the direction of Okelogee, he sang the formulas four times.

  There was no moon that night and the town was quiet and very dark when he returned to spread his blanket in one corner of the unfinished council house. The council fire had not yet been started and frost was in the night air. He lay there begging sleep to come, but it would not. In the silence he could hear Mary’s life-filled laughter resounding in his head, and he thought that if he had to lose her, he could bear losing everything but that vibrant laughter.

  At last his eyes closed, but as sleep drifted down upon him, he heard a rustling sound at the entrance, the sound of a ghost dragging its burial robe across the hard-packed earthen floor. In the pitch blackness he could see nothing, but then he heard breathing and he knew that it was not a ghost. Someone else seeking shelter against the night air, he thought, and then a whisper came close and sharp to his ear: “Where are you, you old fool? I can smell you.”

  He flung out an arm, his fingers gripping a bearskin. Mary laughed softly, and then she and the bearskin were all around him. “I had no blanket to take my leave of the man Crawford,” she said. “Only this bearskin gift from the Long Warrior, my friend and companion.”

  “Sge!” he said. “Listen!” He remembered the chant formula given him by Bear Killer, and he repeated it four times:

  Your spittle, I take it, I eat it.

  Your body, I take it, I eat it.

  Your flesh, I take it, I eat it.

  Your heart, I take it, I eat it.

  Her long clean hair covered his face. “My spirit has come to rest at the edge of your body,” she whispered. “You are never to let go your hold upon it.”

  9

  “THE NEXT MORNING HUGH Crawford was gone from Okelogee,” Dane said, “so there was no need for the Long Warrior to use Bear Killer’s curse formula to send the Scotsman to the Darkening Land. Later they heard that he had crossed the Sleeping Woman to join a community of Scots immigrants who had settled around the old stockade built during the War of the Revolution. Some of these men stayed there after the war ended, marrying Cherokee girls from a village north of their encampment. Others went back to Scotland and then returned, bringing wives and families. A few bachelors like Hugh Crawford were on the lookout for Cherokee wives, and after losing Mary he found one over at Coosawatie. The later generations of Crawfords became an important family among the Cherokees, as did other half-blood descendants of the Scots—the McDonalds, Campbells, Rosses, Taylors, McIntoshes, Rogers, McBees, and many others whose names I have forgotten.

  “Although they built their cabins and cleared farms on Cherokee land, the Scots were never looked upon as intruders. The two races had a good deal in common, both being fierce and independent, loyal to clans, and suspicious of leaders claiming too much power. In the second generation their blood was mingled, and those half-bloods and quarter-bloods became the most Cherokee of all the Cherokees. My Uncle Opothle married one of the half-bloods, Suna-lee Rogers.

  “Grandmother Mary often said that the time between the return of my grandfather from his war and the wedding of Opothle passed more swiftly than all the other years of her life. She had her hands full with two growing boys, each completely different from the other. My father, Talasi the Runner, was given guidance by his ‘Uncle’ Qualla, who taught him how to hunt and fish, how to live wild in the woods. Like Qualla, my father was of the Wolf clan and he soon became a leader in clan games and ceremonies.

  “Opothle, on the other hand, was a puzzle to Qualla. Being Mary’s son, Opothle was also a Wolf, but he cared nothing for ballplay or hunting and fishing. For a while Qualla tried to train him to be an orator so that he might be Okelogee’s speaker at important councils, but Opothle was not interested in oratory either.

  “After one of the Rogers families settled a farm nearby Okelogee, Mr. John Rogers took a fancy to Opothle because he could read and write English well. Mary had taught him English, telling him that since the Cherokees were surrounded by the Unegas, they could better defend themselves if they knew the language of their enemies. However, she had never learned to do sums, and so Mr. Rogers decided to enlarge Opothle’s knowledge by showing him
how to add and subtract and multiply numbers.

  “For the remainder of his life, I think, Opothle loved numbers. As I’ve said, I did not know him until he was gray-bearded, but the thing I recollect best about Uncle Opothle was how he was always figuring on bits of paper. If there was no paper handy, he would use a slate or a smooth piece of wood, filling the surface with columns of numbers. Before he was twenty, he was in the trading business. With Mr. Rogers’s help, he started buying up deerskins and furs from Okelogee hunters who did not want to wait until the traders came over from Carolina, trading for less than the traders would later trade him, of course. In a short time Opothle was acting as local agent for the traders. Then he started stocking things to trade to the Cherokees—blankets and stroud cloth, ribbons and calico—and after the Cherokees began keeping milk cows like their Scots neighbors, he laid in a supply of cowbells. My father said that whenever he wanted to infuriate his older brother he would crawl through a hole in Mary’s corncrib—where Opothle kept his stores—and ring all the cowbells.

  “Yes, there was a great rivalry between the two brothers that lasted through their descendants. One of Opothle’s grandsons is living over at Pine Ridge now with the Sioux, a Christian preacher man he is, and when we exchange visits once a year we always have strong arguments about the differences between his God and my Maker of Breath. He was greatly disappointed when Amayi chose to be a medicine woman instead of a Christian missionary.” Dane laughed as he moved his chair so that he would stay in the slant of sunlight coming through the east window.

  “That rivalry perhaps was good for my father, Talasi the Runner. At first he resisted all of Mary’s efforts to teach him to read and write English. He had no time for such indoor nonsense; he was going to be a Cherokee hunter and warrior like his father; he was always traveling to Coosawatie or Oostanaula or some other town for ballplay. But when he began complaining that Opothle had a fine horse and he had none, Mary told him that if he wanted power equal to his brother he would have to learn to read and write. And so the Runner learned to read and write English.

  “One of my grandmother’s favorite stories was about Opothle’s courtship of Suna-lee Rogers. She said it was the longest courtship in all the history of the Cherokees and Creeks. ‘They could have given me ten grandchildren in all the years they spent courting,’ she would say. ‘Why could not Opothle find himself a Cherokee girl who would let him get her pregnant instead of that God-fearing half-blood Rogers girl? Why, all she wanted them to do was hold hands and whisper in each other’s ears when they could have been pleasuring themselves in bed and bringing me grandbabies.’

  “Of course the delay may have been Opothle’s will as much as Aunt Suna-lee’s. He wanted to be a man of property before starting a family, and he was. The wedding was a grand affair, the first Christian wedding in Okelogee.

  “Mary was willing to go halfway with the wedding plans, half Christian and half Cherokee, that is, but when she heard that the Rogers family was opposed to any ‘pagan’ ceremonies in the wedding of their daughter, she secretly rounded up about a dozen of her young women friends and planned a surprise wedding dance. She also kept prodding at Opothle to go out and kill a deer to bring to the wedding feast as proof of his ability to feed his forthcoming family, but Opothle pointed to his new house and his cribful of deerskins and trade goods and told her that if he needed venison he was rich enough to send someone else out to do the hunting. Mary finally did persuade Suna-lee to bring a fresh ear of corn to present to Opothle as evidence of her skill as a food raiser.

  “Much to Mary’s displeasure, the ceremony was held in the Rogers house, in a room so small that only the family members and closest friends of Opothle and Suna-lee could be present. A considerable number of the Rogers relatives and friends came over from the Scots community, bringing hams and beef and two fiddlers for their kind of dancing. As it was early summer, the Rogers family agreed to have the feasting on the ballplay yard adjoining the council house so that all the Cherokees might attend.

  “My father once told me that the most frightening time in all his young life was that wedding day. At the last moment, Opothle sought out the Runner and told him that the Presbyterian minister wanted him to be a member of the wedding party. ‘What do I have to do?’ the Runner asked. ‘The preacher says I must have a brother to wait on me,’ Opothle answered. ‘Wait on you!’ the Runner yelled out. ‘Can’t Suna-lee wait on you?’ All the Runner had to do, of course, was stand beside his brother while the preacher read from his Bible and joined Opothle to Suna-lee in holy matrimony. My father told me that all the time the ceremony was going on his legs trembled so, that he feared he might fall down in front of everybody.

  “He was frightened again by his own mother, Mary, during the feasting in the ballplay yard. Mary had been very quiet during the solemn occasion of the Presbyterian knot-tying, and by the time they all adjourned to the feasting place she was ready to celebrate. Alongside the brush arbor where the older people always sat to watch the ball games, the men had built rough tables, and they were piled high with boiled ears of fresh corn, venison, and the ham and beef brought by the Rogerses’ friends. Mary, the Long Warrior, Opothle, and the Runner sat with the Rogers family at a table of honor under the brush arbor. Mrs. Rogers had brought a large pot of tea which they offered to share, but Mary preferred black drink, made from dried holly leaves, as you know. Every once in a while she would reach in her deerskin bag and take out a bottle of rum, flavoring her black drink with it. She would always pass the bottle around the table, but none of the Rogers family members would take any. Pretty soon Mary was laughing and singing and offering to teach the Rogerses a Creek song. They tried, but the only one who could get the rhythm right was Mrs. Rogers, who was Cherokee.

  “About this time the two fiddlers who had come over from the other side of the Sleeping Woman were getting tuned up beside a leveled square of smooth hard ground in front of the arbor. Suddenly the older Rogers boy jumped up from the table, grabbed Opothle and Suna-lee, and pulled them out to the dancing place. Somebody handed Opothle a leather cushion, and the Rogerses and their friends formed a circle around him. It was called the Cushion Dance. They hopped and skipped to the fiddle music, and Opothle was supposed to stop the moving circle by dropping the cushion in front of his favored girl, who was Suna-lee, of course, and then some other boy would get the cushion and the dance would begin all over again.

  “Mary watched the fiddle-dancing for a while, and then reached across the table and caught one of the Runner’s wrists, squeezing it so hard that he almost cried out. ‘You, Talasi,’ she said in a rough voice, ‘have you set your eyes on a girl yet?’ He was tongue-tied. There was something in her questioning that truly frightened him. ‘Well, tell me, my little Talasi, who is she?’ He protested that he had not chosen a girl. ‘When you choose one,’ she said, looking as grim as a witch, ‘make certain she is full-blood. The blood of Creek Mary, the Beloved Woman, runs thin in Opothle and will run thinner in his paleskin children.’ She gripped his arm tighter. ‘When you choose a girl to make children for you, if she is not full-blood I will kill you!’ She saw him trembling then, and burst into laughter. Always after that he was a little bit afraid of his mother, and he never dared look twice at a half-blood girl.

  “If Mary realized that she had frightened her son she made no effort to ease his fear. After a while she yawned as though in great boredom from watching the fiddle dancers, and then excused herself from the table, leaving the Runner and the Long Warrior there by themselves.

  “A few minutes later the Runner was startled to hear the loud beat of a drum, the shrilling of a wind instrument, and the clatter of rattles. Wheeling round the corner of the arbor came a procession of young Cherokee girls in white dancing dresses, some with terrapin-shell rattles strapped to their legs, and carrying fans made of red-dyed cane. They were led by Qualla playing a flageolet and Mary beating a drum. Raising himself straight up on the bench, the Long Warrior gave out a loud gru
nt of astonishment. The Runner was frightened to see his mother beating the drum. Cherokee women did not march around beating drums. He thought she had gone mad.

  “Well, the fiddle dancers made way for the Cherokees, who formed a circle and started to dance around Qualla and his cane flageolet and Mary and her drum. Not to be outdone, the young men of the Cherokees rushed out and formed a circle around the shell-shaker girls, who pretended to hide their faces with their red fans. As this was a wedding celebration they naturally started to do the Snake Dance. The Rogerses and their white friends had never seen a Snake Dance, and it must have come as a shock to most of them. The Presbyterian preacher raised his arms and begged them to stop, but they were dancing so hard they neither saw nor heard him. The Long Warrior finally went out and stopped it.

  “Now, I never saw the Snake Dance but once, but I can tell you it is quite…ah…” Dane frowned, searching for a word.

  “Sensuous?” I suggested.

  He put on a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles and reached for the old dictionary under the window. After carefully laying the broken bindings aside, he thumbed the leaves until he found the word he was searching for. When he looked up at me through thick lenses, his closed lips were creased in a smile that was like a deeper wrinkle in the webwork of his face. “Erotic, I think, would be the word.”

  He slid his spectacles back in their case. “Words, words, words,” he said. “Grandmother Mary taught me the importance of words, showed me that the more words a man can form in his mouth the more complete a human being he is, the less like the savage beast he is. I have learned so many words, Cherokee, English, Creek, Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, a little of the French, but they are all going away from me. Even for English, I must use this crutch, this old dictionary, to bring them back to me.”