I Dreamt I Was in Heaven_The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  “We ask that you write to some of your friends in Washington,” said Brown, “in the Congress, in the higher courts…” Parker cringed at that term, “higher courts” and hurried to interrupt again.

  “I can certainly do that,” he said. “However, my entreaties may be less than influential. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made suggestions and requests of Washington only to be told by some functionary that they—not I—know best what is right for this Territory, despite the fact that I, alone, have borne the burden of justice here for over 20 years and singly brought the seeds and trappings of civilization…” He checked himself before he spoke recklessly. He did not need to further douse the embers of his career through public intemperance—regardless of how well deserved.

  “What can we do?” The voice was so unexpected and matter-of-fact, Parker jumped. It was the heretofore-silent Buck, challenging Parker’s self-involvement as well as his evasions. Again, Buck’s eyes held him.

  “Well,” Parker hemmed and hesitated, “I suppose… continue to do what you’ve been doing. Appeal to all of the Indian authorities in Washington who will give you a hearing. Of course,” he smiled, “I will appeal to any who will still listen to an old man.”

  “And what will that do?” Buck asked, unamused.

  ‘Nothing,’ would have been the only honest answer and the one Parker longed for the courage to give.

  “We can hope for the best,” Parker replied.

  As furiously as Buck’s eyes had seized him, they abandoned him and returned to their middle distance.

  Subtly acknowledging that decorum had been punctured, Chief Brown rose and thanked the Judge for his time and the actions he would take on their behalf. The Judge extended his hand and Chief Brown shook it. As the Judge reached to shake Buck’s hand, he balked at feeling young and needful, like a boy seeking an elder’s approval.

  “It may not be what we want,” Parker said as he earnestly pumped Buck’s hand, “but perhaps we can mold the changes more to our liking.”

  “In our own time, perhaps we could,” Buck replied. “But the United States is in a rush.”

  ~

  To mitigate that rush, to ease his own relegation to the past, John Buck kept mementos. He would call his young son Rufus to him as he pulled the objects from the wall, ready to do his duty to pass the memories along; and every time he intended to speak from his heart, telling his boy what his history, his people’s stories, and the relics on his wall had meant to him. Not just stories, not just the ‘who’ and the ‘when’ but conveying the soul and the feeling, the sense of why their losses meant so much.

  John Buck would sit in a chair and eye the prizes, rubbing his rough hand gently on the bowl, and the necklace, and the piece of wood with small holes in it. He was surprised that Rufus liked this one the most. John Buck would blow through it and make tuneful whistles.

  “It was part of a musical instrument,” Buck explained to his son. “It belonged to a half-white man my father knew who fought in the Creek wars. He’d play this huge thing—these ‘bagpipes’ he called ‘em—as warriors headed into battle. My father said they wailed like a ghost, like screaming and war cries.”

  Each time, he wanted to go on. He wanted to tell the story of his people with all of the passion, love and fury that he felt deep down inside him. But he could not. He could not speak the words. They choked him. The words he had to use, they acted like bile and he grew physically ill; and one word, with its infinite permutations (“lost” “loss” “gone”), sounded like bells clanging deafeningly in his head.

  “Lost.”

  So John Buck told brief, disjointed stories, and then put the mysteriously sacred objects of triumph and memory back on their hangers, back on their shelves, and simply walked away.

  Rufus would sit and ogle them long after. His father said they would one day be his. The memories would be his. He longed to invest them with the same near mystical import he gleaned from his father’s face and silence, the profound melancholy and ancient hurt that they obviously held, the key to which his father—for lack of desire or will, or due to Rufus’ own lack of worthiness—the key to which his father never shared. As the boy grew older, his father no longer called him for these sessions. But Rufus occasionally found him communing with his relics. Rufus would sit near his father, unacknowledged, and silently watch.

  Years later, in 1894, John Buck took 16 year-old Rufus to Tahlequah to see the government pay out money to the neighboring Cherokee. The tribe had sold their land to the United States, but instead of the tribe getting the money, each Cherokee man and woman would get $265.70. His father couldn’t believe it. The tribe would get nothing. He told Rufus he expected the same to happen to the Creeks. Rufus figured his father wanted to see what it was like.

  Rufus looked forward to the trip. He imagined solitude and the road working wonders between him and his father. There would be nothing to do but talk. He imagined finally learning about his father’s life and his father’s father’s. He imagined becoming a proud son and a source of pride.

  Though the trip began in silence, he kept high hopes.

  “Cherokee Bill’s a Cherokee,” Rufus said, priming the pump. “I bet he’ll come to get the money. I been readin’ about him.”

  His father did not respond. Eyes fixed on the road, he paid no mind to the hot sun, to the blanched grass that stretched to the foothills or to the oak trees that dotted them. A wake of buzzards circled nearby; something big was dead. Rufus scrambled for topics that might engage his father.

  “How come Ma didn’t come?” he asked, though he hadn’t wanted her to. His father did not answer.

  Before the trip, Rufus had asked his mother, “How come Pa don’t talk no more?” She’d chastised him with, “You lucky you got him. I didn’t have a Daddy. What are you complainin’ about?”

  “If you didn’t have a Daddy,” Rufus replied, “does that mean I’m like Jesus?” She slapped him and never told him why. He never asked her about Jesus again.

  Over time, in bits and pieces, he learned more about his mother’s past than he knew about his father’s: that her mother had been a Negro slave of the Lower Creeks back in Georgia, before the Creeks were forced to relocate to the Indian Territories. These Creeks did not treat black slaves the way white folks did. He learned that the Lower Creeks treated slaves like regular people. Didn’t beat them; sometimes even married them. But when the Creeks got marched to the Territories, a white man bought his grandma. After that, it was all blood and screaming as a white man’s slave. As such, she heard crying and moaning for days on end to the point she thought she’d lose her mind. She could have killed the grieving mothers and widows, the whipped and the maimed, just to silence the inescapable, audible proof that she lived amidst such bottomless pain.

  When she found a suitable man, she took months convincing him to run away with her, knowing full well that they would probably die, or wind up whipped or mutilated, but she didn’t care. It shocked her, but she didn’t care. It had never occurred to her that she would laughingly die and consider her own death vengeance against her killer. That’s because she had never been owned like this.

  So they ran. They ran toward Indian Territory where Negroes lived free. Her man got caught so that she could go on. She never knew what happened to him. She refused to think about it. She made it to the Indian Territory, and there she died giving birth to a girl six months later—giving birth to Rufus Buck’s mother. So his mother had no parents. The Creeks raised her. Eventually, she married one. The Creeks told her what had happened to her mother and hers before. Their peoples’ wounds were linked and the Creeks considered it their duty tell her about them. They explained how her mother had lived among them and the distinctions between being a Lower Creek slave and a white man’s. But despite their protestations, the slaveries were not distinct to Iona Buck. If her mother had never been a Creek slave—if the Creeks had not owned her and sold her, the whites never would have gotten their hands on he
r. Rufus’ mother had been conceived within a crime and raised among, and grateful to a people that some part of her still considered criminals—a conundrum like a tumor inside her, large enough to cause discomfort, but small enough to grow accustomed to—not worth the pain and risk of removal.

  “There ain’t nothin’ you can do,” she told Rufus when he asked about his father. “These Creeks keep tryin’, but your father knows better.” She paused a moment, watching the chickens meander and peck as she scattered feed. “White folks want what they want,” she said to no one in particular. “They get what they get.”

  “Ain’t you gonna say nothin’?” Rufus finally blurted at his father on the road to Tahlequah.

  “I’m done talkin’,” his father said.

  They rode for eight more hours in silence. The wagon’s creak, the snorting horses, the summer stillness, that’s all Rufus heard.

  They camped that night and he dreamed that angels came in song and sound and gently took him up to heaven. It looked a lot like home, but felt more beautiful than the home he knew, or any he’d ever imagined.

  When his father woke him, it was already hot. The night had never cooled. They climbed on the wagon and in the span of a couple of hours, saw more people than they had seen during the whole trip. By the middle of the morning, they were just two among a moving crowd larger and more epic than any Rufus had ever seen. All these men and women, all these horses and wagons with one single purpose, with one destination… how sweet the goal must be to lure so many… Surely a promised land... Sweat blackened men’s collars and shirts while many slid increasingly filthy sleeves and handkerchiefs across their faces. Dust thrown up everywhere by all the wagons and horses slogging slowly forward. Every kind of person, mule, buggy and conveyance crammed up together and eagerly crawling their way into Tahlequah.

  John Buck had imagined what he would see there—a funereal scene in which the Cherokee took slips of paper in exchange for their future and their past. On faces he thought he’d see a sadness bone deep, something that touched him to his soul and thus let him truly understand whatever it was that had silenced him, and understanding, let him articulate and pass to his son what had been lost instead of suffering this mute rot of anger and want and fear inside him. He imagined an eerie silence, none daring refuse such money but all acknowledging the death of tribal ways that its taking represented. Maybe he just wanted permission to stop hoping. He imagined tear-stained dollars as the Cherokee marched back to their homes, both richer and less than they had been when they arrived.

  At first it was a trickle. John and Rufus Buck came upon and passed a few wagons, some Indians on foot, a few on horseback, and then more, and then still more. Soon, the road was like a cattle drive of people. Most looked Cherokee, but some looked like white men; you didn’t have to be all Cherokee to get the money. Badge-wearing white, colored, and Indian Marshals rode swiftly through the crowds, their rifles aloft, hustling people out of their way. Closer to Tahlequah, occasional white men in suits stood on the sides of the road in groups of two or three, commenting on the living diorama that passed before them as if it were a grand parade. Must have been Indian bureau men, John thought, surveying the tangible results of their work. Wheels broke and people labored in the road to fix them as the crowds coursed around them like water around a rock. Pissing men dotted the roadsides like statuary. Medicine wagons hollered about a cure for this or that and others screamed that they had whiskey—all kinds of whiskey. Whiskey was illegal in Indian Territory, but nobody cared that day. One wagon passed by full of jugglers with painted faces and acrobats in tights. Another passed dripping with whores all dolled up and beckoning every man who looked. It was like the carnival had come to town. This is what John Buck had come to see—how it was done; how yet another piece of you falls away in exchange for handfuls of nothing.

  He had wanted Rufus to see it. He didn’t know why, not specifically. There was no lesson he could articulate that he wanted the boy to learn. There wasn’t any practical reason why he should have come. But the boy had to… absorb. He had to befriend what was dying for the Cherokee, hold its hand and listen to its deathbed ramblings, and then learn to exist in the void of what was left when it happened to the Creeks, as John Buck knew it would. John had no idea what that meant or how to do it, but he had seen and thought too much of one way of living to change now, and it was killing him. Maybe it wasn’t too late for his son.

  Buck remembered the day back in 1893—the precursor to this spectacle, another of his pointless treks of witness: 100,000 white men stood, sat on horseback and rode in wagons, sweating in the heat and epic dust of the Cherokee Strip to race for 42,000 plots of land. The land belonged to the Cherokee, and the United States first used it to settle friendly Indians; and then the cattlemen wanted it for grazing, so eventually the government bought it to feed its voracious appetite for the earth itself. In exchange for this land, the government would pay money—not to the Cherokee tribe as a whole, as traditional and right dictated, but to each individual member—every man and every woman. To Buck, that was like buying a house and splitting the money evenly between the man, his wife, and each child and telling them all to go their separate ways. It was the end of the tribe as their collective soul. It was one of many endings. So in ’93, John Buck watched as they shot off a gun and the unimaginable throng of white men, women, and children all scrambled for their piece of Cherokee heaven, for which each Cherokee man, woman and child would later be paid $265.70. There were more would-be white settlers than there were potential homesteads. Most got nothing. At the end of the day, John Buck rode among them as they lay exhausted with the dust stuck to their sunburnt, sweaty white faces. He watched as they wept in the dirt at not being fast enough, hungry enough, maybe just not white enough to get a piece of Cherokee land.

  And here, today, one year later, each Cherokee lined up to receive his little bit of the payment for the tribe’s land so valiantly raced for one year earlier. Each one. $265.70. If you could prove you had some Cherokee in you, you got the money, but you had to go to Tahlequah in Cherokee country to collect it. John Buck went to see it happen to the Cherokee, knowing that a similar day would come for the Creeks.

  Off in the distance, rifle stocks stuck up in the air like trees. A little forest of them, all protecting the millions getting handed out, $265.70 at a time. There were lines and lines of people waiting for it. Others lined up to take it from them. Whiskey peddlers swarmed like flies. Gamblers set up tables right out in the open. Men and women no sooner got the money in hand than they went off to drink it and lose it at cards. John Buck stopped the wagon and watched from the back of the crowd. Some emerged from the thick of it, counting their bills when waiting debt collectors swooped in to take it from them. One woman fought like hell. “This is Cherokee money!” she yelled, kicking and swinging at the two men who pried her fingers open to take the crushed cash. A fiddler played while some white folks danced in the middle of the crowd. One man and woman walked free of the throng looking so sad, like they had just buried something—looking like John had expected all of them look. But most didn’t. The whole plain was like a funeral hidden behind a festival, something cheerless hiding in a saloon. John never once looked at his son sitting beside him. He was so amazed and appalled at what he saw himself that he barely thought of Rufus.

  Buck lifted the reins and clicked his tongue. The horse woke up and pulled the wagon, this time against all the people still streaming into Tahlequah for their $265.70.

  John Buck swore that it was the last lacerating piece of State theater he would force himself to witness. Rufus never uttered a sound. They rode home in silence. What happened was never mentioned between them.

  3

  “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or the
ir eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey;”

  - Charles Darwin

  “The Origin of Species”

  On the day of his expulsion from the Wealaka Mission School for Indian Children, Rufus hid lurid pamphlets on spectacular crimes and criminals inside of his Bible. He had long reveled in the pamphlets’ florid imaginings of the whisky peddlers, bank robbers and cattle thieves for which Indian Territory was famous. The Indian and Negro outlaws were as renowned as any. “The very sight of the ruthless red Indian in all of his Godlessness,” he read, “causes women to shriek, and grown men to flee for the safety of numbers with which to beat back the barbarisms he gleefully inflicts. Torture, scalping, and ravishment of women are the arrows in his heathenish quiver, and he shoots them straight and true.”

  Rufus had not known.

  He excelled at reading at the Mission School owned by Sam Brown, the mixed-blood Chief of the Euchee Indians. At Brown’s behest, S.P. Callahan managed the school as superintendent and chief instructor. He brought an impressive eastern pedigree—Yale University some said with little more evidence than the splendid, shiny black suit he always wore. Each day he paced the room full of black and brown faces caressing the long words rolling off of his tongue, silently, yet persistently acknowledging his superiority to all of his surroundings and taking shameless pride in his ability to elevate them—if not to his level then at least to a level at which intercourse with them would not demean him.

  He taught the Bible, and his Indian students grew stronger and more disciplined through the endless repetitions, forced recitations and appropriate punishment for insufficient deference. He forbad the speaking of Creek or any other Indian language. His black riding stick stood at the ready to beat any student caught doing so—in class or on the playground—or committing any other of the myriad infractions that reinforced the savagery of their natural state and surroundings and undid his noble work of civilizing them.