The roses were much on my father’s mind just then. In fact, for the past several days they had allowed him no rest. They disturbed him waking and sleeping, mentally and physically: a steady prick to his conscience, a steady throb in his right forefinger from an infection following a prick by one of their thorns.
He had gone hunting in Red River Bottom. That was the roses’ territory; however, this was not their season. They would not bloom for yet another month. But it was impossible for my father ever to find himself in those woods at any time of year and not think of the roses, of the story of which they were so much a part, of which they were the sole surviving reminder, and it was this, of course, this old association in his mind, that made him imagine now that he smelled them. As real as real the scent was—and just as bitter. Such a sweet smell to everybody else—of all roses, one of the most fragrant; to him all the more bitter for their seeming sweetness. He had gone there to get away from all that saddened and disgusted him in the town: the preparations for the San Jacinto Day ceremonies—the bunting and the buncombe: all the more reason to imagine now that he smelled their bittersweet, their accusatory smell.
It was not solitude and silence that my father went to those woods in search of. To him they were populous, with a presence behind every tree trunk, and murmurous with a multitude of voices speaking in a Babel of tongues. The wind sighing in the tall pines: that was not the wind, that was the concerted, ceaseless sigh of a people persecuted, dispossessed, pursued, all but exterminated, forgotten. Quiet as a graveyard now, the woods had once echoed with a steady stream of humanity, most, but not all, of them on a one-way journey. The history books taught that the first American immigrants to Texas came in 1821. These were those Missourians, victims of the Panic of 1819, in search of a fresh start, for whom permission to found a colony had been won from the newly independent Mexican government by a former St. Louis banker, Moses Austin, who, however, died soon thereafter, bequeathing the completion of his mission to his son, Stephen F. But the Austin colonists were not pioneers, not the first immigrants. They entered and rode south through Texas over a well-traveled road, one that began where Texan began, on Red River—not a game trail but a man-made road, surely the first one in all the New World to be landscaped, beautified, a road bordered with roses that bloomed white streaked with red and by their fragrance fulfilled the colonists’ dream of entering a new Eden.
Everybody now thought they were wild roses. My father was one of the few people who knew they were not wild, not even native to Texas, but descendants of imported roses carefully, lovingly set along the margins of the state’s first highway, the one over which had come those founders, heroes and martyrs whom his son was being taught about in school, and, as that son was not being taught, over which had fled those who traced and blazed and cleared and decorated it—the ones who survived their massacre, that is. The roses had been in bloom then, and if the scent of them was bitter to my father now, when it was not even real but only in his mind, a product of the power of association, he could imagine how it must have seemed during that week when they were hounded out, hunted like wild animals the length of their own road, to those who had set them there.
The road lay so near to where my father stood that he could have sworn he smelled the roses although they could not possibly be in bloom yet. Lured by the promise of a new life in a new country, people had ridden over it coming from the states, from England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, people of every station and stripe, political refugees, utopians, cultists, speculators, failures, felons, soldiers of fortune, bankers and bankrupts, plain farmers, riffraff—the ordinary, the less than ordinary and the extraordinary. That very tree, that towering red oak now leafing out for yet another spring, had stood there when Davy Crockett, seeking a new life, had passed through here on his way to death at the Alamo, and Sam Houston, not yet two days ride from the wife he had left—the second one, the red one—having crossed his red Rubicon to found a red empire, and founding instead a redneck republic.
Again that scent assailed my father, so heady this time he could hardly believe that he only imagined it, unlikely as the alternative was. Never in all his many springs had he known one that forward. And yet as he crept nearer the old roadbed, drawn there by the chatter of a squirrel, it seemed to him that the scent hung still heavier on the air.
A bushy tail twitched high in the crotch of a tree. My father raised his rifle, took aim, drew a deep breath—then lowered his rifle and walked directly to the roadway, and found the roses in full, furious bloom.
It was unheard-of for them to bloom so early. Their doing so in this centennial year could only seem to my father a message sent to him, who alone could interpret it. It was as though the roses had been expressly forced so as to be out on this San Jacinto Day, reminders of a sordid betrayal connected with, yet forgotten amid, all the festivities, and an admonition to him to keep their meaning alive in me. Almost stifled by that scent, my father stood listening to the silence which for him was peopled by a host of spirits attending upon his decision to do his duty. But what was that? To whom did he owe it?
To disregard the roses’ prompting would be for my father to renege upon a lifelong pledge. It would be to forsake an entire people. It would be to disinherit me from my birthright. Yet which was preferable for getting through life, knowledge of the truth or peace of mind? My father could not decide that question for himself; who was he to decide it for somebody else? He knew that once peace of mind was lost there was no recovering it. I might begrudge his taking mine from me, and all for the sake of events that had happened a hundred years before my time.
And then maybe it might not disturb me, not even touch me. This was a possibility that struck my father now for the first time. Suppose he told me the story, to him so unforgettable, so unforgivable, and I was insensitive to it, indifferent to it? Suppose I said glibly, “Yes, it’s all very sad, but it was all a long, long time ago”? It was an old story even when he was told it; to me it might seem ancient history, far too remote from me for the people in it to be real.
Enough that he had had to know the story from my age on. Its poignancy undiminished by time, it would affect me the same as it had him. He could recall as though it were only yesterday his terror as he listened to it, his outrage, his indignation, above all, his feeling of helplessness. It had disaffected him from his country and his community, had given him a lasting disrespect for its laws, its leaders, and the dismay he had felt as a child on learning what lies history told, thereby calling into question every accepted truth, had colored his entire life, had kept him even into his old age a rebellious boy. Ought he not to spare his son that? As a southerner, I already had a separate history from that of most of my fellow countrymen—a history sad enough; did I need yet another one to alienate me even from my fellow aliens?
Thus did my father reach his decision to renounce his ghosts. To the injustice and neglect they had endured, he hardened himself to add this one: to bury them in lasting silence rather than spoil my simple joy, divide my loyalties and set me apart for life from those around me. Not even the prick that the roses inflicted upon him when he plucked one of them for a keepsake, not even the sight of his blood it drew, not even the reminder of that steady throb in his finger could undo his resolve.
Then came my announcement that in our town’s first San Jacinto Day pageant I was to play the part of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, and this was too much for my father.
It was first of all the story of a story. Of how, on another day, long ago, another boy, one just about my age, and another old man, one much older than my father, an old, old man, had made the trip he and I were now making. Over this same road they had ridden, only it was unpaved then, and they had traveled not by motorcar, there were few or none hereabouts in those times, but by horse and buggy. The boy held the reins, the old man told him where to turn. Told him that and little more. Where they were going and why, the boy did not know, little expected to be told, dared not ask. An indepe
ndent and solitary old man, this grandfather of his was. “Peculiar,” people said he was—a way of not saying that he cared nothing for the company of any of them. The same ones who said he was peculiar said the boy was peculiar too. In the old man’s taciturnity and aloofness the boy saw an indifference to the common run of people and the triviality of most topics of conversation that accorded with his own.
That day the boy had done as he was told to do, had harnessed the horse and hitched the buggy, had packed a lunch—“dinner” he would have called it—and had driven the old man out this way on a pilgrimage of some sort, a sentimental, probably last, journey to some spot with distant memories for him, memories he was not likely to share with anybody, much less with a stripling of a boy. The fact was, the boy’s age was an element in the old man’s intentions. Had he been much older than he was that day the boy would not have been told anything, for the old man held the belief, one that the boy, when he got to be my father, would hold, too, that after the age of discretion the world’s corruption soon set in and hardened the human heart, especially toward the trials and tribulations of people not your immediate own.
Endings are easily fixed upon but who can say when and where a story begins? The one I was about to be told: did it begin at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on a day in 1794 with the massacre by Indians of one William Scott and his party of five men? Or was it when, just weeks after the marriage, the up-and-coming governor of Tennessee and his young bride separated without explanation? Was it at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, on March 27, 1814, when Junuluska, chief of the Cherokees, saved the life of Andrew Jackson, only later to regret not having killed him himself, given that golden opportunity? (And I thought I knew history while my father knew only what he had learned from me!) Or did it all start with the birth in far-off Genoa of Christopher Columbus? Be that as it might, one thing was certain: it had all ended here on this spot on the banks of Red River on a day in July, 1839.
I looked about me. The W.P.A. was being employed that centennial year to put up monuments all over the place—in many instances to memorialize fairly inconsequential happenings; however, nothing marked this spot, notwithstanding my father’s contention that it was the scene of an event that changed the course of history. To me it seemed an unlikely-looking place for anything at all ever to have happened, much less back in the days when the country was only beginning to be settled. Out of the way now, it must have been even more of a solitude then: a barren stretch of river shoreline no different from any other except in being even lonelier, even more inaccessible. Instead of singling it out, time seemed to have detoured around it, leaving it to drowse undisturbed, undiscovered. Past it the sluggish water flowed no faster, no slower, no redder than elsewhere along its banks. To judge from the path we had taken to get there, or rather, the absence of any path, we were the first to make the trip in a long time. My father ventured that not since he was brought there as a boy had anybody come on purpose to visit the place, and this neglect of it seemed to confirm a feeling of his and to give him a sour sort of satisfaction.
On that day in 1839—July the thirtieth it was—the water had flowed redder here when four of a party of men trying to escape from Texas by swimming across to what was then called The Territory were shot and killed. Who were they? Their names were unknown even to their killers. They had been merely four of thousands like them; their distinction lay in their being the last of their kind: east Texas Indians. It was not even known which tribe, or tribes, these belonged to. The possibilities were many, for in Texas—Mexican Texas—the Indians had at last perceived where their hope for survival lay, had put aside their immemorial tribal enmities and formed a confederation, realizing the old forlorn hope of Pontiac, Joseph Brandt, Tecumseh, and for twenty years had lived in peace and brotherhood. A chapter in the history of not just Texas but of America had ended here on this unmarked spot where we stood. With the deaths of those four nameless and forgotten men had ended the long and terrible exodus of a people, as well as the dream of one ambitious man for an empire far vaster than the then United States.
My father had piqued my interest but he had also piqued my skepticism. Here was I, freshly crammed with Texas history, and here was he, on the eve of San Jacinto Day, about to launch into a tale known to him alone, which, before it was finished, was going to have to explain and defend this assertion of his, tossed off on our way out to this godforsaken place: that the battle had been won not by those 783 heroes of my textbooks but by over 1,800, led not by Sam Houston but by another man. Who was he? Somebody I had never heard of, nor any of my schoolteachers either. What had he done to win the battle? Nothing. He was, said my father, using a catchphrase going the rounds that year, the little man who wasn’t there.
With a wild rose in my buttonhole that my father had plucked and put there, I sat myself down beside the water where he had sat to listen to the same tale when he was a boy like me. Only he had not known that he was about to be told a tale. His first thought had been that the old man was about to die, that he had had himself brought to die on this spot. If he had, the old man then replied, it would have been for the second time. On this very spot, long ago, when he was the boy’s age, he had in the same instant both died and been reborn. Gazing across the red water to what even then was still not Oklahoma, still The Territory, the old man seemed to the boy to have quit this world and to belong already to the next one, to be silently in communication with it. When he broke the silence at last he seemed to be announcing in a tongue certainly not of this world his imminent departure from it, his imminent arrival on that other shore. To sounds—words, evidently—the like of which the boy had never heard before, the old man sang a hymn the tune to which the boy knew well. I knew it too. It was to the tune of “Amazing Grace” that, to my amazement, my father sang:
Unelanvhi Uwetsi
Igaguyvheyi
Hnaquotsosv Wiyulose
Igaguyvhonv
Asene Yiunetseyi
Iyuno Dulenv
Talinedv Tselutseli
Udvne Yunetsv
I forgot San Jacinto Day, forgot Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar and why for some reason I was not allowed to impersonate him, forgot myself. Actually, as the telling would show, the story was about all three.
Part Two
Where were the Indians?
Here (in Georgia) he (the Reverend Malcolm Mackenzie) was, come all the way from Scotland to save the Indians, but where were they?
Some people, even some theologians, believed otherwise, but the Reverend Mackenzie believed that Indians had souls. To him had come the call to save them. Previous missionaries had had to flee for their lives, but saved the Indians were going to be, come hell or high water. Assigned the task was a man of determination. He was the wrong man for the job, he knew this, and, mistrustful of himself, he was on the watch for the first sign of any faintheartedness of his.
It was not the tomahawk, the scalping knife, torture and death at the stake that the Reverend Mackenzie feared. For a man on his mission to Georgia in 1837 there were many things to fear, but those barbarities did not figure among them. Nobody need fear those things anymore. They belonged to a past not so very remote in actual calendar time, yet so much had things changed that already they seemed antediluvian. That he might deny his God and lose his soul to save his skin, this the Reverend Mackenzie did fear, but not that he might do so in order to save himself from the fiery stake while naked and painted savages whooped and stomped around it.
God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. Of that truth no more puzzling example could be adduced than His choice of Malcolm Mackenzie to save the souls of His Cherokee children. A younger son, destined from birth for the church, he was newly ordained, newly married, newly settled into his comfortable living in his pleasant parish when he chanced to read a newspaper account of the progress made by the Cherokees in pacifying and civilizing themselves, and of their persecution by the white people of the state of Georgia. On reading that their tribal governme
nt, a model of its kind, had been abolished and that they were subject to the laws of the state while denied all rights of citizenship, that they were forbidden even to testify in court against whites, the Reverend Mackenzie said, “Shocking.” This somewhere in the modernday, English-speaking world! On reading that they were forbidden to dig for the gold on their own land, and that this land, theirs from time immemorial, was being taken from them and redistributed to white settlers while they were forced to leave their ancestral home and move to a far west, as wild to them as to white men, he said again, this time more vehemently, “Shocking!” Then when he read that their missionaries had been expelled and the converts among them, of whom there were many, denied the right of religious assembly, this in a state professedly Christian, the Reverend Mackenzie said, “Now see here! We can’t have that!”
The Reverend Mackenzie read no further. Were it possible to unread something that one has read, he would have done so. Certainly, if he could have, he would have taken back those words of his. But he knew that they had been put into his mouth by a power who would not be gainsaid. He knew it was not by chance that he had read that account. He knew who the other party was to that “we” he had been made to pronounce.
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