And so, some out of fear, some out of faith in their powerful new god, some out of trust in their Tsan Usdi and a lastminute miracle of his, some out of pride, some out of apathy, some dejection, some defiance, some simply out of old age and its listlessness, its indifference to the future, the Cherokees hung on; even as the last day dawned the stockades awaiting them still stood all but empty. And as long as a single one of them held out, Agiduda would hold out with him. As long as a single one was forced to go on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back, nothing to eat but army rations, nothing to sleep under but the blanket he was issued, so he would go. The captain must be the last to leave the sinking ship, and in the lifeboat must share the fare of all.
You waited for them to come to your cell and lead you away. Instead of getting in a late sleep and thus shortening your hours of consciousness, you woke early. You could not sit still. All that you were seeing you were seeing for perhaps the last time, and you found yourself picking up and fondling the familiar objects that surrounded you, and weeping over them. The clock seemed to have broken. It was only a moment ago that you had looked at it, and yet it said now that an hour had passed. One of your precious last few hours, and you had lost it. Better not to look. But of course you looked, and now it was long since, yet the clock said it was only minutes—that much more time to have to get through. As the day passed and nothing happened, you oscillated between a hope that at the eleventh hour you had been given a stay of execution, a reprieve, and the dread that you were being toyed with, that this forlorn hope was your captors’ ultimate cruelty: to make you long for release through their coming for you, and even thanking them for putting an end to your harrowing suspense. That night you went to bed certain that tomorrow would be the day that today was to have been, and they would come down upon you all the more ferociously for having been balked in their original plan.
On the following morning the resolution with which you had faced yesterday had to be marshaled afresh. Under cover of darkness hope had stolen back to tease and torment you. Meanwhile there was no knowing what was happening. If anybody knew, he was lying low. The whole world was. It seemed to be holding its breath. No news spread. You could only wait and wonder. And speculate. Tsan Usdi had won from Congress a temporary injunction, a permanent revocation. President Van Buren had dropped dead, been assassinated, impeached. Protest riots in the northern cities had spread into insurrection. The army of troops sent to round up the Indians had mutinied. The British had landed. God’s pent-up wrath had been loosed in earthquakes, floods, cyclones. The Cherokees, some at least, maybe many of the young braves, had rebelled against Ross’s passive resistance and gone on the warpath.
Surrounded and besieged as you had been for so long, called upon time and again to surrender and go into captivity, your cause written off, a part of you still stubbornly held out, kept its confidence that reinforcements would arrive in the nick of time, the worst would not come to pass. It was inadmissible, unthinkable. It would be like one of those hellfire-and-brimstone millenarian preachers prophesying the end of the world, and the day for it came and went like other days and the world was the same as ever.
But where now were the Creeks and the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Seminoles? Where indeed? Where were the Abnakis, the Apalachees, the Biloxis, the Catawbas, the Chickahominees, the Delawares, the Mohicans, the Munsees, the Nanticokes, the Narragansetts, the Natchez, the Pequots, the Penacooks, the Powhatans, the Susquehannas, the Winnebagoes?
Listening for a loud convulsion, you heard the hush that had fallen. The leaves and the blades of grass, the earth underfoot, no longer spoke. The familiar spirits had departed from the Cherokee homeland. You had lived to see and feel the misery foretold of old. Your feet were turned toward the west, never again to turn around.
One thing you must do, painful as the prospect was, by way of preparing for the end, was to pay a last visit to the graves of your kin. It was a long time now since the Fergusons had visited theirs, one reason being that to do so they would have to trespass on their unneighborly neighbor Mr. Blodgett’s land, another that they dreaded a reproach from those spirits for abandoning them, leaving them to strangers, a separation which to the ancestor-worshipping Cherokees was the worst wrench of all in this forced removal from their homeland. Now such a pilgrimage could be put off no longer. And so, on one of the last of those last days, Agiduda, Grandmother and Noquisi, pausing on the way to pick wildflowers for offerings, went down to that back section of their former property where, in a grove of ancient oaks, lay the family cemetery containing all the Fergusons who had died in the New World, stretching back in time over a century.
What they found, scattered on the ground, were their skulls and bones, coffin lids and rotted cerements, mounds of more or less freshly dug earth beside each grave, the cavities filled with rainwater. In search of ornaments buried with the dead, Mr. O. J. Blodgett had mined his gold mine.
Their knees buckled and all three sank to the ground amid the flowers that had fallen from their fingers. Agiduda quickly covered the boy’s eyes with his hand and turned his head aside from the scene—though even as an old man himself, telling the story to his grandson, he could still make vivid the glimpse he had had of it.
“Now I want to go from here,” Agiduda said. “Forever. At once. We will pack the wagon. Then we will go to the stockade and give ourselves up.”
However, that was not to be. Agiduda was spared the consequences of his lapse from self-abnegation. No Cherokee would go west in greater deprivation than he. The bill of sale for the homeplace produced by its new owner, Mr. O. J. Blodgett, who appeared early the next morning in the company of the soldiers detailed to capture the Fergusons, stipulated that he had bought the land, the house and all that it contained. There was Agiduda’s signature on the agreement, forged by someone with access to the genuine article, dated and witnessed. The cost of that document, with its official ribbons and seals, must have been considerable. The Fergusons knew where the money had come from. Grandmother knew now where her missing ham had gone, who the fox was that had stolen her chickens and the rat her stores, who had gathered the eggs and milked the cow before her in the dark of the morning.
Mr. Blodgett had learned just in time of his neighbor’s race. To Agiduda in parting he said, “Well, Chief, you sure fooled me. I took you to be a man like me.” He said it admiringly and expected it to be taken as a compliment, for fooling him he felt to be a rare feat, and to be taken for somebody like himself to be everything any man could want.
“A curse on you,” said the old man. “May you be haunted by the spirits of all my ancestors. May you go unburied for birds to pick your bones.”
In token of his contempt Agiduda spat on the ground at the man’s feet. The gesture petrified the boy. For a Cherokee to do that was unheard of. To Noquisi it signified that his grandfather had spat out his soul because it had come to taste foul in his mouth in a world where the air must be shared with people such as this one.
They were marched down the lane and around the bend. There the six soldiers mounted their horses that had been left behind in order that the house might be taken by stealth and surprise. Then they were marched down to the main road. There they halted and waited, for what they were not told.
Presently there came down the road a troupe of some forty people with a dozen soldiers riding guard over them. Side by side, four and six abreast they marched, some with walking staffs, some who had readied themselves for this eventuality with packs on their backs, others with small household objects in their hands, a silver spoon, a china cup, a doll—whatever could be snatched up for a keepsake as they were driven from their homes. Mothers carried babies, fathers rode little children on their shoulders, pulled others along by the hand. On army remounts and caisson mules rode old men and women too feeble to keep up on foot, a man with one leg, an idiot girl enjoying her ride and the company of the crowd. Several more mounts, for other handicapped people yet to be rounded up, were in rese
rve, led on halters by a soldier muleteer. A sick woman was being carried in a litter by two of her three sons in turn while the off-duty one shielded her eyes from the glare with a roofing shingle. Thoroughness was the aim of the army’s operation. No Cherokee was to be overlooked, whatever his or her age or condition; from those in the cradle to those with one foot in the grave, all were to be cleared out. The sight of Agiduda drew from them a universal groan. The Fergusons were ordered to fall in and the troupe proceeded down the road.
They had lost—if they had ever possessed it—the stolidity attributed to them. There was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. Among them as they marched there was no talk. All were experiencing the same shock and numbness. While they had been driven from their separate homes and might each have had a different story to tell about what he or she had been doing at the moment of the soldiers’ surprise appearance, all divergences among them had been canceled by the common fate that had swept them up and hurled them together. They had been reduced to cells of a single body, with a single purpose and destination, like a column of ants on the march. Meanwhile, Indian fortitude and Indian pride imposed silence upon them. It ought also to have forbidden them letting their captors see and enjoy their dispiritedness, but this was too great for them to dissemble. It was to give them an outlet for their desolation that Agiduda sang:
“Naquasdvquo Gatisgani”
The soldiers tensed, rising in their stirrups, twisting about in their saddles, raising their rifles. To quiet their fears that the unintelligible words were a signal to revolt disguised as music, Agiduda quickly, loudly, to the same tune, sang:
“Just as I am, without one plea”
The entire column of marchers took it up, some singing in Cherokee and some in English:
“Tsagigvaqualisgasdodv”
“But that thy blood was shed for me”
“Alesgiyanisgv Tsisa”
“And that thou bid’st me come to thee”
“Wigvlutsi! Wigvlutsi!”
“O, Lamb of God, I come! I come!”
And although the hymn’s mournful measure was woefully out of step with the pace they were made by their guards to maintain, they sang it thus in round-song, one tongue answering the other, as they trudged along. The effect was that of a funeral march.
Waiting at every crossroads to join the column were others rounded up in the countryside, in bands large and small, overseen by their mounted guards. Rather than finding strength in numbers, their despair was deepened by these additions to their ranks. It seemed that none of them had eluded the dragnet. They were being eradicated. After a long lifetime as Amos Smith, Noquisi would still remember his feeling of shame—for the defeated and despised learn from their oppressors to despise themselves.
The day was rapidly heating up and the march beginning to take its toll upon the people. All had trekked along the main road for miles and, before that, many of them had trekked for miles more. Now they were weary, hot, dusty, dry, footsore. Children were growing querulous, balky. The old folks were straggling, falling behind.
Upon the soldiers too the march was taking its toll. The pains the people were enduring at their hands irritated them by arousing in them a fellow feeling which they were forbidden to feel. It created disturbing likenesses between Indians and themselves. This warring upon civilians, upon old men, women and children, was a distasteful assignment for men trained to engage other men in armed combat. It shamed them, and shame in combination with power turned them cruel and petty. Impatient to get the business over with, to return to barracks and go off duty, they were annoyed by any laggardness.
In the band of captives waiting at one crossroads was a lone man who fell in step alongside Noquisi. He was the biggest man the boy had ever seen. No doubt it was his size that first singled him out for the special attentions of one of his captors, a soldier who pestered him with the persistency of a deerfly. A victim so imposing was a provocation. But it was not this alone that irked the soldier. The man’s bearing was another goad. Not that he was defiant, sullen; he was anything but that. He was provokingly unprovokable, composed. He seemed to be present in body but elsewhere in spirit. He seemed to be walking in his sleep. This detachment from the scene was what irked the soldier. He wanted the man to experience what he was undergoing, perhaps because what he himself was experiencing was distasteful to him.
The big man was dark-skinned, broad-faced, heavy-featured. His hair was plaited in long greased braids. His buckskin shirt and trousers were frayed and stained. He seemed so out of place as to suggest that he had been found up some remote mountainside or down some distant cove where he had never seen a white man, never heard English spoken. But that was no excuse for not obeying an order so simple it did not need to be spoken: March! And step lively!
The step of none of them was very lively now that their shoes were full of water from fording a creek. The first to arrive at the ford, those at the head of the column, had sat themselves on the bank to take off their shoes and their moccasins, roll up their trousers. It was then that the whips were brought into use. In among the people the soldiers charged, lashing their backs, driving them into the water. “Just as you are!” one shouted derisively, and another added, “Without one plea!”
Once the unspoken inhibition against them had been broken, the whips remained in use. Each soldier was afraid of being thought soft by his comrades and suspected of harboring feelings of sympathy with those animals in human form. They galloped up and down the line wielding their whips and urging the marchers on with the shouts and curses of cattle drivers. “Hi! Hi! Get along there! Hump yourselves, damn you!” Their cruelty fed upon itself; more of the same was the way to dilute and excuse what had gone before. Exposed by his position on the outside of the column, the big man was lashed time and again by the one soldier.
Whenever this happened the man would slowly raise his head and regard his tormentor with a face as blank of expression as that of an ox for the plowman. After a moment there appeared on it a look of mild wonder, as though he were unable to connect so bold an act with the creature that met his gaze. Then, turning to Noquisi, the man gave a little smile. With this smile he seemed to wish to convey two things. First, “He didn’t hurt me,” and second, “It’s what we must expect of them, isn’t it, sonny? It’s their nature.”
For the rest of his long life, whatever his name, Noquisi would repent of his not responding to that smile. It was meant to reassure him, quiet his fears, lend him courage, as was the man’s handclasp, proffered when the smile failed of its intention. The boy had not returned the smile, he had rejected the hand. If only he had held on to it! There was nothing personal in this rejection. But to a Cherokee there was no greater dishonor than to receive a blow and not return it, and to the boy the big man, now as impotent as the shorn and blinded Samson, was the embodiment of their people’s humiliation and helplessness. He was ashamed of him and ashamed for him.
Thus it was that when they came to the fork in the road where they were commanded to turn, the man, with no hand to guide him, went the wrong way. He had gone some twenty feet when that soldier shot and killed him for attempting to escape. No last words did he have for those who got to him before he died, only the wordless babble of the congenital deaf-mute.
At first sight of their concentration camp (this but one of twenty-three like it), Agiduda was struck by a sense of having been there before. It looked like one of the old-time Indian camps. They too would have had their tepees as the soldiers had their tents. A corral for the horses. To take refuge in when attacked, they would have had a stockade like this one of logs sharpened to a point on top. They would have chosen just such a tract of treeless, flat prairie land so that the approach of an enemy could be detected from afar. Here, however, it had been done so that any prisoner who succeeded in leaping over the wall could be seen by the sentries long before he reached the distant woods. Now as the column halted at the gates, on one of which was written TLA and on the other YIDAYOJADANVSI, the bar
was lifted, they were swung open, and the people entered the pen that was to be their home for the next twenty days. The packhorse bearing the deaf-mute’s body brought up the rear.
Once they were inside, there was a rush for the water barrels with their metal dippers and for the latrines. These needs attended to, they looked around them at the high walls, and relatives and friends fell weeping into one another’s arms and sobbing mothers clasped their sobbing children to them. Then some sat while others distended themselves on the ground to rest their aching bodies. Only the young men did not weep. To them, accustomed to the freedom of all outdoors, brothers to the birds, to the wild animals of the woods, being caged inside the compound was a blow to their pride that amounted to a loss of manhood. Wild animals they worshipped, domestic animals, introduced among them by the white man, they despised; now they found themselves penned, collared, their wings clipped. They despised their condition, and would have avoided one another for shame, but that they were confined and there was no place to hide.
Throughout the rest of the day the gates were opened from time to time to admit more parties of captives. Families separated in the roundup were reunited. First they wept with joy at finding one another, then they wept with sorrow at finding one another here.
All, even the frightened children, were drawn for a look at the deaf-mute’s body, lying in the shade of the wall where it had been unloaded from the packhorse. A detail of soldiers was sent shortly after it was put there to remove and bury it, but the sergeant in command was prevailed upon to leave it overnight in order that all might mourn for the man. This commenced after they had been fed their rations of salt pork and cornmeal mush: a low, high-pitched wail, much like the distant howling of a pack of wolves.
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