No Resting Place

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by William Humphrey


  Among the parties brought in later in the day were some who had known the man. He had lived alone, unmarried, and having lost all his family. When this information became known, the feeling was intensified that, belonging to nobody, he belonged to them all. They were his family. He was mourned through the night as by his blood kin.

  In the morning the soldiers came again to remove the body. The sergeant levied two young prisoners to dig the grave. It was the dead man’s clan members who protested this barbaric treatment. It was to the Reverend Mackenzie that they appealed. He went to see the commandant.

  He went in anger, prepared to hate the man for his cruelty; he returned from his interview despising him for his sense of superiority. He had not known, the commandant said, that these people cared about such niceties. If they wanted the body buried in a coffin, and had somebody in there capable of making one, why, they were welcome as far as he was concerned. He would supply the lumber and the necessary tools.

  There was somebody. Every poor Indian farmer was his own carpenter, but the better-off hired their building done for them, and these two were professionals. So boards were brought in and hammers and nails, saws and tri-squares, and, under the skilled hands of the two of them, a coffin soon took shape. The grave was dug outside the wall. The Reverend Mackenzie officiated while one member of the kinless man’s clan, under armed guard, was allowed to represent them all.

  That there is strength in numbers is true at times, the very opposite of the truth at other times. Few things in life are more gladdening than a large congregation of relatives, friends and neighbors when the occasion is one to rejoice over, but every additional face at a funeral is one more to grieve with, grieve over. To celebrate a victory, the more the merrier, but in surrender and defeat numbers magnify the loss. The Cherokees were to be removed to the last one, and they were packed inside the concentration camps to await the capture of that last one. The day’s catch swelled their universal groan of despair. Though each prolonged their discomfort, they cheered on every one who eluded capture.

  Some seventeen thousand were to be rounded up. To do the job seven thousand troops were employed. Of these, three thousand were regular army men, four thousand were volunteers. The regulars did their job out of duty, the volunteers out of zeal. How you got to the stockade, with what, and in what condition on your arrival, depended much upon which of the two it had been your luck to fall into the hands of.

  In his orders to his troops, their commander, General Scott, told them that they were to carry out this operation as humanely as possible. There was to be no maltreatment of their captives—not even any abusive language. Special consideration and kindness was to be accorded infants, the elderly, the feeble-minded and women in a “helpless condition.” These orders were generally obeyed by the regulars, generally flouted by the volunteers.

  And so the captives arrived at the camp by ways and in states as various as the colors of their skins, which ranged from purest white through all the shades of red to deepest black. Some came on foot, with nothing to transport but themselves, some on horseback, some in wagons piled with possessions, some with a train of slaves—the captives of captives—self-propelled possessions—bearing family heirlooms on their backs. Some were brought in with bruises from gun butts, cuts from bayonets, welts from whips. In the camp they told one another their stories, for these belonged now to a common fund, a collective indictment, like bringing them to the communal New Year bonfire. They had been surrounded and taken by armed soldiers while seated at table, while milking the cow, carding wool, nursing the baby. They had been taken in their privies, while bathing in the creek. Women were taken while visiting friends, not allowed to rejoin their families, children with playmates separated from their parents. The white rabble that followed the soldiers were looting their cabins even as they themselves were driven from the door. They had looked back to see them in flames. The urge to bear witness, to have their wrongs on record, overcame reticence, modesty. Girls told of having been raped by an entire platoon. Husbands, fathers, sons and brothers had watched helplessly while wives, daughters, mothers and sisters were sodomized.

  They were like a shoal of fish caught in a net. Instantly all privacy was lost. By day they sat on the ground beside one another, by night they slept there beside one another. Whatever a person did was done in sight of all. In sight, sound, smell, almost in touch of all. A people fanatical in their cleanliness, habituated from birth to a daily bath, whatever the weather, they were disgusted and depressed by the dirtiness they began at once to feel.

  The problem of the latrines arose immediately. A platoon of soldiers was needed to enforce order because of the disturbance caused by their daily emptying. Not in the doing of the job—once under way it was done with all possible speed so as to get it over with—but in the drafting of the crew. Some of the young men had to be whipped into submission. Some had to be whipped to the point that they were barely able afterwards to do it.

  The scheme devised to overcome this unpleasantness by the corporal in charge of the detail seemed at first to be a cruelty but was soon seen to be, in fact, a kindness. He compiled a list of the eligible men and from it each morning he read aloud the names of the day’s detail. No able-bodied man was exempted. What seemed originally a wish to degrade and humiliate them one and all was not what it seemed. When all were untouchables, none was. When this was understood, the men cooperated. Stripped to their breechclouts, the crew did their foul job, accompanied the loaded carts outside, emptied and scrubbed them, then went, under armed guard, to the riverbank where they washed themselves with pails of water. They were not envied, to be sure, but instead of being despised and shunned, as they had feared, they were appreciated and respected. The day came when a man whose name had been mistakenly passed over stood forth and volunteered for the duty.

  The routine of life inside the compound was quickly established; there was little option in it. You staked out a position for yourself on the ground. There you sat. You got up to go for a drink or go to the latrine and you came back to your spot and sat. As there was continual shifting about, you might find that somebody had appropriated your place. Not that it mattered. Except for near the wall, which you could lean against, and where there was shade for a while each day, one spot was the same as another. Even those with places against the wall abandoned them out of restlessness.

  In the night you got up to relieve yourself, stepping over sleeping bodies on the way, sometimes stepping on them, and afterwards you could not find your way back to your place in the dark. In the depth of night—between the snores—the cries arising out of nightmares—the wailing of wakeful infants—you heard the sound of the sentries’ footsteps patrolling the perimeters of the walls. Despite them, a few young men leapt over. Most were caught and brought back at once, some gave themselves up after days of starving in the woods, a few made good their escapes—at least, they were never seen again.

  Growing from this inanimation, and from their dejection, a pall of listlessness settled upon them. The sameness of the hours made the days interminable. The sameness of the days made them meaningless; without events to differentiate them one from another they ran together in the mind, confused the memory. There were outbursts of momentary madness caused by the inactivity and the tedium, and the person had to be restrained. The women bore up better; it was the idle men who broke. Stunned, almost stupefied, the women squatted, silent, or else emitting in chorus a low wordless hum of lamentation. The children drew in the dirt. The men gambled with their fingers. They soon lost interest, then sat dozing, hunched like birds roosting along a limb. Some stoked their pipes and smoked without stop. Whiskey was smuggled into the camp and sold to the prisoners by the soldiers; drunks, sprawled on the ground, grunted in their sodden sleep like dogs whimpering in their dreams. Just as did an animal confined in a cage, you stirred, opened your eyes and looked blinkingly around you, saw others in your same condition, and relapsed into torpor. To the old Amos Smith, recollectin
g his youth, the ordeal that had since come to be known as “The Trail of Tears,” terrible as that had been, began as a relief from the mindless stagnation of those months in the concentration camp.

  For, months it was. Not for all of them, but for all but a few.

  The first contingent of emigrants departed on a day in June that was like a day in August—hottest in living memory. They were of a manageable number—some three hundred-odd. Beef cattle, hogs, chickens to be slaughtered and consumed on the way, and other provisions; wagons, oxen and draught horses, and fodder for them; drinking water to be found for no more than they were would present no insuperable problems. All was orderly. There were sorrowful leave-takings between those going and those forced by illness to stay behind, but even the anguish of separation was tempered by gladness that their loved ones were escaping from the camp.

  Before reports could get back on the progress of that first group others set out from the various concentration camps. All wound up stalled together on the east bank of the Tennessee River. This they were to have navigated by steamer and flatboat to the place where they would disembark and proceed overland; now, as army officers experienced in the transportation of people in numbers ought to have been able to foresee, the yearlong drought had lowered the water level so that the river was too shallow to be navigated. The land was parched, a desert. Oxen and horses keeled over in their traces. Before the sun rose to evaporate it, people licked dew from the leaves of trees. Their numbers now were not manageable. They soon exhausted their provisions, their fodder. Afraid of contagion, farmers and storekeepers fled from their procurement agents. For epidemic diseases had broken out among them, including the most dreaded one of all, cholera, and word of this spread like the plague itself. The stifling heat rose daily to new highs.

  When word of this state of things got back, the government in Washington charitably acceeded to Ross’s request that further emigration be postponed until the advent of the cool season. Through the rest of June, therefore, through all of July and August and into September, the Cherokees would stay where they were. Actually it was October before they left.

  Meanwhile more prisoners were crammed inside the compound daily as the squads of soldiers combed the countryside in their search-and-seize operation. The condition of these worsened with each batch. Last-ditch holdouts, hiding in the woods, in caves, moving only under cover of darkness, living on roots, on the bark and the sap of trees, forced to search for drinking water, they were brought in too weakened to flee further, or had been forced to give themselves up. Among the crowded masses body lice, nits, ringworm became universal. Inside the stockade, with people bunched together like a bed of maggots, it was as though the rays of the sun had been gathered by a lens and focused upon that spot. Life there became a foretaste of hell.

  Dysentery flared like spontaneous combustion, fanned into flames. That there might be latrines for use while others were being cleaned, more were built. The stench of them never lifted. Victims elbowed one another as they squatted over the trench—only to have to return momentarily. They might have been able to laugh in their tormentors’ faces as their fingers were lopped off one by one, but dysentery destroyed all defenses by destroying all dignity. They writhed on the ground and groaned like animals in their pain and their punctured pride. Desiccated by loss of body fluid, unable to eat, they grew emaciated and jaundiced.

  So numerous did the deaths become that the two coffinmakers worked full-time in the shed they were allowed to erect against a section of the wall, taking advantage of periods when demand was slow to stack up an inventory for busier times to come. They made them in two sizes, adult and child. The sound of their sawing and planing and hammering was daylong. Everybody else being idle, they never wanted for watchers. They were envied for having something to busy themselves with.

  Survivors of the dead, if there were any male ones, and their friends, served as pallbearers—members of their clans when there were none. Others, including strangers to the deceased, volunteered to be gravediggers; it was an opportunity to get outside the walls for a little while. Only a little while, because the graves were kept shallow, the diggers’ guards being unwilling to stand for long in the heat and glare of the sun. There was much inattentiveness at these graveside services, as the prisoners, waiting for, or waiting out, Noquisi’s translation, gazed off longingly at the distant woods. The Reverend Mackenzie officiated.

  Between Christianizing the living and interring the dead, administering the communion of the sick and the dying and conducting classes in the catechism, the Reverend Mackenzie and his young acolyte were kept busy. The Reverend Mackenzie had hopes that the boy might get the call to holy orders. He knew much of the prayer book by heart, could have performed the called-for offices without assistance from his elder.

  The Reverend Mackenzie had reappeared in the camp on the second day, and he would continue to appear there daily throughout their stay, doing God’s work, dispensing what solace he could. There was much in the official line for him to do even before the deaths began. The misery of life inside the stockade and fear of the future converted many of the as-yet unconverted. In all this it was Amos Ferguson who interpreted for him. Thus in his duties at both baptisms and funerals the boy was allowed outside the gates more often even than the gravediggers.

  The baptisms were done in the nearby river, the convert marched there and back under armed guard. Their procession made the Reverend Mackenzie think of the Christianized Roman slaves, and he likened the stockade to the Colosseum in which they were martyred. It no longer bothered his conscience to practice baptism by total immersion now that he knew it was not the rite of the Baptist Church but rather the Cherokee tradition of “going to water.” What did bother his conscience was the feeling that in his missionary zeal and out of his longing to give comfort he might have overstepped his commission by allowing simple minds to infer that God had made them promises. He knew that the expectation of deliverance from earthly oppression was not the proper aim in embracing the faith, but he knew it was the aim of many who came to him, and that to preach otherwise to them would be to perplex, discourage and possibly dissuade them. These people were so desperate for a glimmer of hope! Their oppression was so great, their cause so right—perhaps if he could convert them all, to the last one, if they were to speak to God with a single, concerted voice, then He would hear and heed. It was as though he himself had said to John Ross, “That petition you took to President Van Buren—let me try it on my Great White Father.” Yet he would have dreaded that, as the President had treated Ross, God might refuse to see him. He writes of his sorrowful sense of God’s disinterestedness when, while pronouncing his benediction upon a man whose nose he was pinching shut and whom he had just raised from under the water, he saw one of the guards cross himself.

  Among the Reverend Mackenzie’s camp-inmate converts were a young half-breed couple. The husband’s name was Inali: Black Fox, the wife’s name was Kanama: Butterfly. They were from South Carolina, had been caught in the roundup here while on a visit with friends. Kanama was expecting her first child any day now. She was little more than a child herself, but if she was frightened at what lay in store for her she never let it be seen. Those among whom she found herself had much to be frightened of, and they did not have what she had to be glad of.

  The older woman, herself a mother, who slept on the ground beside Kanama coached her in what she was to do when her time came, and this woman took it upon herself to make the necessary arrangements. Thus on the morning when Kanama’s water broke, the coffinmakers vacated their shed, which was then curtained with blankets lent by their owners. Taking with her a length of rope, a knife and a piece of string, a pail of water and a scrap of cloth, Kanama went into her labor room. The rope, in this instance suspended from a roof beam instead of the usual tree limb, would be looped under her arms for her to strain against while squatting.

  Customarily it would have been some older woman relative of Kanama’s, but as she had
none of them here, it was her neighbor-sleeper who sat now outside the curtain and chanted the traditional charm. Amos translated it for the Reverend Mackenzie.

  Little man, come out! Hurry! A bow and arrows are waiting for you. Hurry! Come out!

  Little woman, come out! Hurry! A corn sifter is waiting for you. Hurry! Come out!

  It was early morning when Kanama entered the curtained shed. No sound was heard from her until the sun had passed over the compound from one side of it to the other. Long before that time activity had ceased. A hush had fallen that deepened as silence lasted behind the curtain. Sufferers from dysentery too sick to suppress their groans were removed as far as possible from the shed, placed near the latrines for speedy access thereto. Children left off their games, talk stopped, all attended with mounting expectancy. The future father sat with his head on his arms. More and more infrequently, as though growing discouraged, the woman chanted the charm, which appeared to have lost its old-time power. Meanwhile, although the women disapproved, fearing it might invite a curse and bring the child on impaired in some way, or even stillborn, such was the men’s love of gambling, greater than ever now because of the boredom of confinement, they made bets on the baby’s sex and on just when it would be born. Those gamblers who had picked losing times settled their debts with the winners as the hours passed.

  Except for infants and little children, everyone fasted through the day. In this there was nothing traditional—a birth under these circumstances was a novelty to all; the fasting was spontaneous. An hour before time for the serving of the midday meal, and again an hour before time for the serving of the evening meal, word was relayed to the commissary that no food was to be prepared. Which of them it was who had taken it upon themselves to issue the order, nobody knew; but all concurred in its appropriateness.

 

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