Talking Leaves

by Joseph Bruchac

  “What do you mean?”

  “You simply need to add this to the story. Add to it that our people did not understand how useful books and writing could be. They did not realize that books and writing could be used to make the white man more powerful and the Indian weaker.”

  I think about how much truth there is in my father’s words. Just last week the white missionary who wants to teach us how to read and write English told me something like that.

  “Through writing,” the missionary said, “words spoken long ago, when written down, will never be forgotten. We use our writing every day. We use it to make agreements with one another, to form alliances, to build great nations. Knowledge, like that in the sacred Bible can be passed from generation to generation. Such knowledge is power.”

  “Like you,” my father continues, looking down at his broad hands as he speaks, “I have always wanted to make things. I wanted to make things that were useful, things that were beautiful. I enjoyed trading, but it did not satisfy me. That is why I turned to drawing, to working with metals. People appreciated the things I made. And that pleased me. But I was also worried about everything happening around us. Our world was changing. And it was all because of the Aniyonega. We had to give up more and more of our land.

  “When they first came to our lands they were weak and there were few of them. We were many and strong. So we helped them, we gave them space to live, we traded with them. They brought useful things. Knives made of steel were better than those we used to make from stone and bone. Metal pots lasted longer and cooked even better than our pots of clay. The cotton and silk and wool fabrics made the best clothing we have ever seen. And the white man’s animals, the horses and cattle, the pigs and chickens, they were wonderful. Before long, every Tsalagi family was raising those animals.

  “Many of those white people, too, were good people, friends to us. Some even decided to become real human beings and joined our families. But then more whites came and they were not so kind. They did not want to help us or befriend us. They wanted our land and tried to push us out. That is when we began to fight them.

  “We were better warriors and we won many battles. But there were too many of them. Finally, there were so many of them that we realized we could not fight them with weapons. No matter how many we killed, there were always more of them. We had to give up more and more of our land.”

  My father lifts his chin and turns his head toward the north.

  “When I was a boy, much younger than you, the white soldiers came in and burned our towns. Thousands of homes were destroyed. All my mother and I could do was flee to the hills. I remember looking back and seeing the fire smoke rising where our home had been as my mother urged me to run faster.

  “Despite their great numbers, some of our Indian cousins thought they could still keep fighting the Ani-yonega. Tecumseh of the Shawnees and his brother the Prophet had a vision of driving out all the white people. They asked our warriors to join them in their big fight.

  “Tsunu’lahun’ski was the one who answered those envoys. ‘The whites are like leaves in the forest and stars in the sky,’ he said. ‘You may try to drive them into the sea, but without the aid of the Tsalagi. In peace we will seek a better way.’

  “So, since then, that is what we Principal People have done. We have tried to live in peace with the whites. And we have accepted many useful things from them.”

  My father smiles as looks over at the big gray cat still purring in my lap.

  “It was easy to understand how useful those things were. But some other things,” he says, the look on his face becoming serious again, “were not so easy to understand.”

  I have heard before many of the things my father just said. But hearing all of that history from his mouth has been different. He is not just telling the story, but leading up to something more. His words thus far have been like fitting the ground to plant. Like clearing away the stones and weeds from the earth before putting in the seeds.

  “I remember,” Sequoyah says, his voice slower, “the first time I saw white men use their talking leaves. I was out hunting with my cousin, Agili, the one who is now chief of your town.”

  My father looks off into the distance as if seeing someone there. “If it was not for his being my cousin,” he says, “I am not sure I would be safe here. The fact that he is now chief is one of the reasons I came back this time.” He pauses and places a hand on my shoulder. “And now I see that you are another of the reasons. Because of my work, I have neglected being your father. I hope to do better from now on.”

  I feel a warm glow inside me when he speaks those words. “Aho,” I say in a soft voice as he squeezes my shoulder.

  “Agili,” my father says, lifting his hand from my shoulder and gesturing toward the sunrise direction where our chief’s cabin is located on the other side of Willstown. “Agili, my cousin, my clan member, and my friend. He could already speak some English back then. That day as we were hunting, we came upon a campfire and a group of friendly white hunters. Agili introduced himself to them, speaking their language.

  “‘Hello, friend,’ he said. ‘I am George Lowrey and this is my cousin George Guess,’ he said, using our white man names. That made them even more friendly.

  “As we sat and talked with them, one of them, his name was Dee-kee, took out a small square object from his pack. It looked like a little box, but when he opened it up we realized that it was not a box at all. It was many sheets of flat white leaves sewn together. And on every leaf there were strange little markings.

  “Dee-kee put his finger on one of those leaves and began to speak.

  “‘Those talking leaves are telling him a story,’ Agili whispered to me. ‘When white men want to remember something, they make those little marks on those white leaves. Then when they look at those marks, the leaves talk the exact words back to them.’

  “I thought about those talking leaves for a long time. If the white men could do such a thing, I should be able to do it, too. That was when I first began to try to use markings to hold words. Back then, our people would often come to my store to get things and then pay me for them later. It was not easy to remember everything they got. I saw how being able to hold on to memories without having to remember them in my head would be useful to a storekeeper such as myself.

  “So I began making talking leaves of my own. I drew pictures of each of the people who traded with me on credit. Then beside their pictures I made marks to keep track of what they owed. I drew circles and lines that had different meanings for me. A big circle would mean a wagon wheel. A small circle would mean a cheese. A small thin line could stand for a needle while a big thick line could stand for an axle. A half circle was a horseshoe, while a curved line meant a scythe. It was all I could think about.

  “At night I lay awake trying to think of other shapes and signs that could stand for things I sold such as packages of buttons and bolts of cloth. A button could be a small circle. But what if some of those buttons were made of glass and were more expensive while others were made of bone and were cheaper? How could I draw the difference with a simple shape? And what if some of the bolts of cloth I sold were blue and more costly than the cloth that was white?

  “All of my circles and lines and other shapes helped, but I could not find a system that would work for everything. I grew more and more frustrated. Instead of paying attention to my customers, I spent my time trying to invent shapes that would stand for the items I sold while also being easy and quick to draw. Sometimes those who came to pick up things from my store would mutter under their breath about the way I was acting. Some would tap their heads and look at me with pity. Some looked worried and left without buying anything. I paid no attention to them. I had to figure out something. But I still did not know what that something was.

  “One night I went to visit my cousin Agili. We sat outside with some friends around a fire.


  “‘The Aniyonega have great magic,’ I said. ‘They can make leaves that talk.’

  “‘That is true,’ one of the men said. ‘We can never match them.’

  “‘No,’ I said. ‘That is not true. We can have our own talking leaves.’

  “‘Yes,’ Agili said, ‘Sequoyah is right. It is possible for us to learn to speak English. The missionaries can teach their writing to you, just as they taught it to me. They tell us English is much better than Tsalagi and I think they may be right. We need to forget Tsalagi and just use English. Then when we know English well enough, we can write as they do and make our own talking leaves.’

  “Agili thought he was agreeing with me, but he was not.

  “‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no! That is not what I mean. I do not want to give up our own language. I want to do this in Tsalagi.’

  “I did not want to give up our language for English. That is why, though I can understand some of the white man’s tongue, I have never truly learned to speak or write it. I love our beautiful language, the language of our grandparents, of our stories and songs. It is the language of the land itself, as musical as the singing of the birds and the wind in the trees. It seemed to me that if we forgot our language, we would forget how to be Tsalagi people. We would gain knowledge but lose ourselves. If we were to read and write, we needed to do it in our own way. English was too hard. Tsalagi is the language we talk in. It is the language we think in. We needed to be able to read and write Tsalagi. Then everyone in our nation would be able to learn it. With such reading and writing we could rebuild our nation and keep it strong. We would not have to rely on the white men to keep track of our dealings with them. We could send messages back and forth to one another. We could hold on to our histories and our stories and we would do so not in the language of our enemies, but in our own tongue and in our own way.

  “But back then, no one agreed with me. In fact, my friends looked at me as if I was insane.

  “‘Sequoyah, that is not possible,’ Agili said.

  “‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Look.’

  “Then I took a pin from my headcloth. I picked up a flat stone.

  “‘Watch,’ I said, ‘I will make a word.’ I scratched a picture of a bird with the pin. ‘You see,’ I said. ‘What is this?’

  “‘Tsisqua,’ one of my friends said.

  “‘Of course,’ I said. ‘See how easy it is!’

  “But Agili shook his head. ‘Cousin, what kind of bird? Buzzard? Hummingbird? And what is it doing? Is it flying? Is it eating? Is it a dead bird or is it alive? And what if it was a flock of birds? Would you draw all of them.’

  “They all laughed at that. And I had to agree. They were right. It was not as easy as just drawing pictures.

  “I said no more about it that night. I just sat there in silence next to that fire and listened as the talk turned to other things. Agili and my other friends thought I had given up on my foolish idea.”

  “This all happened many years ago. In the years that followed, many of our people did what my cousin Agili had done. They learned to read and write English.”

  My father looks at me. “You have, but that was not the way I chose. It was hard, but I did not give up. There had to be some way to make marks that could be understood as easily as white men understand English writing. Perhaps I could even find a way to make marks that would be easier to understand than the English way of writing. But I did not yet know how to do it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Going to War

  My father has been silent for longer than usual. The look on his face has changed. It is as if a cloud has come across it. Then he lets out a long sigh.

  “The Horseshoe,” he says.

  I do not understand. I lean forward. “You want me to get a horseshoe.”

  A brief smile moves across his lips. “No,” he says. “I have come to a trail that is hard for me to follow. It is hard to talk about. But you should know this darker path, a bloody path that led to war, because it is part of my story.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say because now I understand. My father is speaking of Horseshoe Bend, that place along the Tallapoosa River where the Cherokees fought by the side of the Aniyonega in a great battle against other Indians during what was called the Red Stick War. I have often wanted to hear about that, but none of my elders who fought there ever wanted to talk about it.

  My father pauses to tap out his pipe. He slips it into his pocket, his gaze and his memory reaching far away and looking back in time.

  I bite my lip and wait for his words. And when they finally come they do so as slowly as the first drops of water released by a bank of snow touched at last by the sun.

  “First I must tell you this story,” he says. “It is not a tale from ancient times. It was seven years ago, a dangerous time for all of our Indian nations here in the South. It was not just Tecumseh and his Shawnees who had visions of driving away the white men. Among our own people, a medicine dance took place at Utsanali. A Cherokee man—whose name is best forgotten—said he was a prophet and that he had been given a great vision by the Creator. All of the bad things that had come to us were caused by the white man. To change our fortune there was only one way to go. We had to stop using all of the things that came from the white man. Our Tsalagi people had to take off their white man’s clothing, burn their own houses and their own mills. They were told to burn their beds and chairs and tables—because we had no such things in the old days. They were told to abandon their beehives and their orchards, and kill their cats. Then they had to put on red paint and deerskin clothing and climb to the top of the highest mountain peaks to wait. A great flood would come with the full moon and wash into the sea all of the white people and the Indians who followed them.

  “Many of our people believed that false prophet. They did as he told them to do. They burned or just abandoned their homes. They made the long hard climb to those high places. But when the full moon came, there was no flood. Nor did one come the day after that. Finally, hungry and discouraged, the people returned sadly to what was left of their homes. Giving up those material things that came from the white people, things that had made their lives easier and better, had not helped them at all.”

  My father looks over at me, one eyebrow raised. He raises his eyes up as if to look at the turban wrapped around his head, looks down at the shirt he is wearing made of trade cloth, then looks over at me as if studying my own clothing.

  “Who made this clothing that we wear?”

  “The Aniyonega,” I reply.

  “Does wearing these clothes make us white men? Do we need to give them up to be who we are?”

  I see what he means. It is not what we wear or the things we use that make us Tsalagi. We can accept many things from the white people, make those things our own and still stay true to ourselves.

  “No,” I say.

  My father smiles. Then he continues his story.

  “Among the towns of the Muskogee Creeks who lived to the south of us along the Tallapoosa River, there were people who believed a similar sort of foolishness—just like those of our people who burned their own houses and killed their cats A prophet had risen up among them, too. That prophet also said they had to give up the things that came from the white men. However, that Muskogee prophet went even further. His vision was not one in which the white people would be washed away by a flood. Instead, he spoke of weapons and rivers of blood. He told his people that they had to kill all the white men or push back into the ocean.

  “The Upper Muskogee Creeks sent envoys to the Tsalagi, asking us to join them. But just as we had refused Tecumseh’s offer, our council turned them down. War against the Aniyonega would only lead to our own destruction. We had pledged to never again fight the white men and we would never break that pledge.

  “Not all of the Muskogee Creeks wanted war, either. Those in the Lower Creek towns kne
w that fighting against the white men would probably result in their own destruction. They said it was foolish to give up the useful new things that had been brought by the whites. The argument between the Upper and Lower Creeks became heated. Soon a war began between the Upper and Lower Creek nations. Indians were killing one another and many died.

  “The Upper Creeks were strong and they were winning that war against their brothers. They felt so powerful that they decided it was time to wipe out the white men who lived nearby. Led by their chief Weatherford, the Upper Creeks, who were now known as the Red Sticks, attacked the white fort on the Tensaw River, overwhelmed and destroyed it. Five hundred white soldiers and settlers died there. The only ones spared were a few people who were of Indian blood and some of the black slaves. It was a great victory for them. But the white men called it a massacre. And so it was in August of the year the white men call 1813 that they joined in the war as the allies of those Lower Creeks and their chief McIntosh.

  “That was when my cousin Agili and my friend Turtle Fields came to see me. It was clear from the packs they carried and the muskets they had with them that they were getting ready to set out somewhere.

  “‘The Ridge has sent out a call for men,’ Agili said.

  “‘Our chief Pathkiller asked him to do this,’ Turtle said.

  “‘Sharp Knife Jackson is leading the Tennessee Militia to war against the Red Stick Creeks. He is asking all the loyal Indians to join him,’ Agili said. ‘If we do so, then he will see what useful allies we are. He will surely show his friendship to us by supporting us when others of the Aniyonega try to take more of our land again.’

  “‘Those Red Sticks have already killed some of our Tsalagi people,’ Turtle said. ‘That is another reason for us to fight them.’

  “‘We will not be alone,’ Agili added, with real emotion in his voice, ‘There are Choctaws and Chickasaws and many of the loyal Creeks who are going to join Sharp Knife’s army. You must join us, cousin. This will be a good thing.’