They talked of real, historical people, their chiefs and their champions, of actual events, of the time when their young men lived only for war, of their battles against their blood enemies the Senecas, the Shawnees, the Creeks, and while in their present-day powerlessness they thrilled to the tales of their former ferocity, yet they counted their blessings in being free from the fear of the war whoop in the night, the scalping knife, torture and death at the stake. Their pride in their one-time bloodthirstiness was tempered with shame, for they had been taught, both man and boy, to believe that this was not bravery but barbarity.
If there were gaps in the telling of the story, there were also gaps in the listening. For it was a nightlong lament, a dirge, and even the eyewash of owl-feather-water was not proof against the old man’s unbroken, low monotone, the darkness, the heat, the flickering flames, the cross-legged immobility relieved only by getting up stiff-kneed from time to time to add sticks to the fire, and the boy often dozed off despite himself. These lapses from attentiveness he laid to the white blood in his veins.
At break of day the fire was banked and, carrying their clothes, the man and the boy strode through the woodlot down to the river, both of them glistening with sweat as though they had already bathed. At the water’s edge they offered up to the Great Spirit a prayer of thanksgiving for the new day. After bathing, they stood in the risen sun to dry themselves. Then they dressed, wrapping their turbans around their heads, slipping on their beaded moccasins, and returned through the woods, along the edge of the fields and past the barns and the slave quarters to the house.
Always before, until this year, there would have been cordwood for the coming winter stacked between standing trees and mounds of yellow sawdust on the sites where it had been sawed to fireplace length. The cotton fields that stretched out of sight would ordinarily have looked two feet deep in snow at this time of year; now they bore the stubble of last year’s crop, brown stalks and empty bolls.
The slave quarters had stood vacant since spring.
“I am not freeing you,” their master told them that day when he had them assemble. “Rather, I am letting you go. To the head of each family, and to each of you single men and women, I am giving this paper, stating that you belong to me, David Ferguson, of this place and of the Cherokee Nation West. That way no man may seize and claim you as his. You too are God’s children. May He watch over you one and all.”
The floor-to-ceiling windows were shuttered now and the house was beginning to need painting. Only beginning, for it was always painted every fifth year and was now overdue just one. The coat of white that it would have been given last summer would have been the tenth.
But for the kitchen, the downstairs had been stripped, the furnishings, accumulated over those fifty years, sold for a hundredth part of their worth, hauled away by the wagonload. Gone from the hallway were the marble-topped pier table with the ormolu mounts and the tall, ornately framed pier glass that hung above it. The caned Recamier settee, the many-branched sconce, the life-size Venetian blackamoor in his ruff collar and doublet: gone. The floorboards were bare where the long Turkey-red runner had stretched.
In the library the books remained in their places on the shelves. Of these Grandfather was determined to take with them as many as possible, for there would be none where they were going. But the deep armchairs, the leather-topped tables, the carved mahogany sofas, the paintings, the patterned carpet, so soft underfoot: all gone.
A coat of dust upon the floor where once had lain an Aubusson, where once had sat sideboards with rosewood veneers figured like flames, marble-topped gueridons upheld by kneed legs with paws, capped with rams’ heads, a many-paned cabinet—Noquisi’s particular joy—containing the collection of colorful porcelain figurines: harlequins, dwarfs, mythological and biblical characters, old-world shepherds and shepherdesses, an orchestra of musical monkeys, the mantelpiece garniture of delftware vases, the bronze clock with its statue of General Washington—a coat of dust with nothing but bare floorboards to lie upon was the only thing furnishing the drawing room now. Before long all would be gone: house and land, barns, sheds, cabins—the domain of its new owner, the white man holding the winning ticket in the Georgia State lottery for this piece of property of the dispossessed and deported Cherokees.
August 9, 1807. It was with this date in the collective diary of The People that Agiduda located the origin of the current and ongoing state of affairs that began the story still unfolding, its final chapter still remaining to be written.
It was not for having stomped his pregnant wife to death that on this day Doublehead, petty chieftain of the Chicamauga towns, was brought to justice. Nor was it for having massacred the thirteen women and children of a family of white settlers named Cavett. That first act was a private, family affair, to be settled between the chief and his late wife’s menfolks; the second was, or had become so through the influence of white men’s notions, an excess to be frowned upon—what Doublehead had done to wind up that day with a tomahawk buried in his skull so solidly that, to get it out, his killer had to set foot on his brow and tug with both hands, was to commit what to the Cherokees was the capital crime. Their only crime at the time, for this was the year before they had formed a government and decreed a uniform code of law.
The day before, August 8, all day long Doublehead’s appointed executioners had waited for him in McIntosh’s, the tavern in Hiwassee Town on Hiwassee River. His canoe was beached there. He himself was off at a ball game and there he had been detained. After the game was decided, liquor had flowed, and, full of it, a brave named Bone-polisher had picked a quarrel with Doublehead. Fueled by firewater, words grew heated and Bone-polisher was provoked into calling Double-head to his face what everybody was calling him behind his back, a traitor. Doublehead drew his pistol and shot the man on the spot. He died, but not from the gunshot wound, and not before chopping off with his tomahawk one of Doublehead’s thumbs. With his good hand, using his pistol as a club, Doublehead beat the man’s brains out.
At McIntosh’s tavern in Hiwassee Town still waiting for him when Doublehead came in that evening were The Ridge—since become Major Ridge, one of the nation’s two principal men and the leader of one of the two factions into which it was now riven—and his deputies, an Indian named Saunders and another named Rogers, the latter of whom, years later and in another country, would figure again in this tale of destinies entwined. At point-blank range The Ridge shot Doublehead full in the face and left him for dead on the tavern floor. However, with a severed thumb, a shattered jaw and a bullet lodged in his neck, Doublehead managed to take refuge in a barn loft. There at dawn on the following day, August 9, The Ridge and his posse, now including vengeful relatives of the late Bone-polisher, tracked him down. Battered as he was, he was still full of fight and he went at his assailants with pistol and dirk and then with bare knuckles. After being shot again, this time through the hips, he was tomahawked. For good measure, his head was then pounded to a pulp with a spade. So died Doublehead, and so would die any and all Cherokees guilty of his crime, selling tribal land without tribal consent.
Murder being the wanton killing of a human being, the death of Doublehead would have gone no more noticed by the white authorities than that of any other head of game had it not been that he was their kind of Indian, one who could be bribed into selling tribal land, and so The Ridge might have gotten into trouble over the affair. This was prevented by the tribe’s declaring itself a sovereign nation with powers to treat on a footing of equality with other governments, and making Doublehead’s punishment the law of the land, that particular statute framed by The Ridge himself. Georgia was enraged. Not for the hapless Doublehead, but at the uppityness of a band of savages in declaring themselves a nation within the boundaries of the state.
The boy and his grandfather would find breakfast waiting for them. His grandmother kept out of sight. After eating the boy went to bed. He was tired and his eyes smarted, yet for a long time he lay awake, goi
ng over in his mind the stories of the night. He felt himself to have been present at each scene, to have been a participant in each event. As much as the features of his face, these stories were a part of him, his birthright. As with the clothes handed down in families, he was now of a size to fill them out. When he was wakened for their next session, the sun had set and twilight was coming on.
Inside the asi the boy fanned the embers of last night’s fire with a turkey wing and fed it wood. They stripped. Being a man now taught him a new awareness of his body, and seeing his grandfather’s an intimation of its destiny. He would remember throughout all the many years until it came to pass wondering whether his would one day be so wrinkled. That would be in far-off Texas, where he would scratch his grandson and bathe with him in the waters of that red river that he had once seen redder with blood.
1814. If only! Ai! If only they had done this! Ai! If only they hadn’t done that! If only! Agiduda was sick of hearing it. It made his ears want to throw up. “If only” was not just a lament too late, it was an admission of foolishness, of lack of foresight—even of hindsight! If only they had realized that in fomenting the Indians’ petty and pointless intertribal wars the whites were exploiting them for their own gain, leaving it to them to exterminate themselves. If only they had realized they were Indians, all of them. Not Cherokees and Creeks and Chickasaws and Choctaws and Seminoles but Indians—brothers not just beneath but on the skin. In numbers was strength. What we needed, we Cherokees, each and every one of us, was cousins, able-bodied cousins—cousins by the dozens. But without seed grain does not grow. Ai! If only our grandparents had bred more!
If only in that year of 1814, on that day at Horseshoe Bend, Junuluska, the Cherokee chief, had seized his chance to kill that viper Andrew Jackson instead of saving the day for him! There was an act to cause the bitterest of regrets. To have killed men whom he mistakenly thought to be his enemies in the service and for the glory of one whom he mistakenly thought to be his friend. More than Jackson’s day, Junuluska saved his life by tomahawking the Creek poised to kill him. If he had known that Jackson would one day drive the Cherokees from their homes, he would have killed him himself there that day on the Horseshoe, said Junuluska.
There at Horseshoe Bend, allied with the Americans against Britain’s allies, the Creeks, there where none of them had any business being, were some seven hundred Cherokee warriors, including the one who would distinguish himself the most, the one without a drop of the blood in his veins but no less, maybe more, of a Cherokee for all that, whose career as a man of destiny, for all its later ups and downs, was to have its dazzling debut in the bravery and bloodshed of that day: Kalunah: The Raven, sometimes Ootsetee Ardeetahskee: The Big Drunk—best known as Sam Houston. Fighting alongside him that day, his future father-in-law. Not the first one, nor yet the third one, but the intervening one, the red one: John Rogers, one of The Ridge’s deputies in the execution of the traitor Doublehead.
Then newly commissioned in the United States Army (he would thereafter take his service rank as his given name) Major Ridge was there that day. Who among the fighting Cherokees was not there? John Lowrey, Gideon Morgan, George Fields, John Drew, George Guest (when not known as Sequoyah), Richard Brown, George Hicks—Cherokees to a man, every mother’s son of them, their peculiar names notwithstanding, and all were on the battle roll. Even the least likely of the lot was there, little Johnny Ross. Least likely of armed warriors, that was to say—though more of a fighter than the rest all put together. Passive resistance would be this one man’s brainchild, and by his genius at waging it he would almost succeed (he still had not given up the fight, even this late in the day when all seemed lost) in defeating an enemy of overwhelming might and unscrupulous ruthlessness, meanwhile restraining by his persuasiveness (though obliged to speak to them through an interpreter, so little of the red red blood did he have in him) one of the most warlike people ever known and one now provoked beyond human endurance.
The battle plan that day was for a slaughter. For the taking of prisoners provision was not made. The thousand defenders were besieged in their compound. Flight could be in one direction only, by water, and there on the bluff overlooking the river sharpshooters lay in wait to pick them off. Though the odds against them were two to one, the Creeks in their stockade held out all afternoon against cannon and musket fire, and might have held out longer but for the example set by Sam Houston, who, though at that hour severely wounded by an arrow in his thigh, led the charge of his Cherokees to the walls and over them, where, in the mopping-up, he was shot twice in the right arm. He was twenty-one by less than a month.
Out of that thousand, one hundred-odd was the outside number of those reckoned to have escaped with their lives. To the last man, the rest, asking for none, knowing that none would be accorded them, were accorded no quarter.
By the next morning’s light a detail was sent out to count the dead. The sight they saw should have assured them that they need have no fear of being charged with inflating the size of their victory. However, to forestall any innuendo that a single one of their fallen foes had been counted more times than one, the precaution was taken of cutting off its nose as each body was counted. Five hundred and fifty noses was the tally. Meanwhile, until the process of decomposition bloated them and floated them to the surface, the number of those potshot in the river as they tried to swim to safety could not so precisely be stated. Conservative in this as they had been conscientious in their count of those on the ground, they estimated it at just around 350. The Indians, as was their wont, scalped the dead bodies; the whites, as was theirs, flayed them in strips for leather to make themselves souvenir belts and bridle reins of Creekskin.
It was his victory at Horseshoe Bend that first brought Jackson to national attention, that set him on the road that would lead to the White House, to the Cherokees’ woe. That it was also then and there that their best friend, Sam Houston, first came to Jackson’s favorable notice, leading to his lasting patronage, would avail them nothing. On the question of Indian removal the two men did not differ, they agreed, albeit for opposite reasons, Jackson because he wanted to get rid of them, Houston because he wanted them.
The true casualty figure at Horseshoe Bend was forty thousand: men, women and children, the entire Creek and Cherokee nations, might-have-been allies against their common enemy. If there be such a thing as justice in this world, then of what was about to befall them The People had brought much upon themselves.
But first, from out of a chronicle of ever-deepening darkness, a blaze of brilliance. 1821. Already inclined that way by their tribal bond, the Cherokees were unified into a single soul by the public demonstration (out of the mouths of babes, this one Sequoyah’s six-year-old daughter) of his alphabet. They were like Adam first opening his eyes upon the newly created world, finding his tongue and giving names to all that it contained.
At a stroke, Cherokee utterances, theretofore as perishable as the breath they were borne upon, were thenceforth and forever fixed, transmissible, infinitely reproducible, and the living and the dead and the yet unborn could communicate with one another at global distances and across the unopposable onrush of time.
The Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Creeks had sold out, the Seminoles had fought in the field, or rather in the everglades, the Cherokees had fought to save themselves in the white man’s courts and to transform themselves in his school-houses. Told that their way of life was not good, they had changed it. Led by those of their own with a foot in each of the two worlds, the mixed-bloods like the Rosses, the Fergusons, they evolved overnight in their bid for acceptance. This was just what those who wanted their land did not want. In the eyes of the outside world it refuted the charge that they were unregenerate savages, subhuman, varmints—even, or perhaps especially, those the most white—as though the ermine were to be told, “You are a weasel. That black tip of your tail gives you away.”
Education was nothing new for well-to-do mixed-blood families like the
Fergusons. To prepare him for the College of William and Mary, Agiduda’s early schooling had been acquired at an academy in Philadelphia. Noquisi’s father, Abel, had been taught at home by a succession of live-in tutors. But the mission schools were open to all, to the children of the most backward, the poorest, the darkest-skinned. Universal education would break down class barriers and be another tribal bond.
Then came the summer day when the village was roused from its early afternoon torpor by the roll of a snare drum and the shrilling of a fife. What people saw from their doorways was a squad of the Georgia Guard marching down the main street. There were five of them, one, an officer, on horseback, one driving a wagon, and three—the musicians—on foot. The measure they marched to befitted a firing squad. It was their second visit. The outcome of the first, some months ago, was widely known, and this one had been expected in consequence ever since. Though they went in dread and suspense, every inhabitant of the village, bewitched as the children of Hamelin, turned out to follow them up the street to the parsonage.
The minister had heard them coming and stood waiting outside his garden gate. His wife looked on from the front porch. The squad halted ostentatiously, the music stopped, the officer dismounted.
“Henry Wentworth?” he demanded.
“Your servant, sir,” said the minister.
“By the authority invested in me I arrest you, Henry Wentworth, for the high crime of treason against the sovereign state of Georgia.”
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