by Susan Cooper
“Yes,” I say. “Those things, perhaps.”
She says, “You gave me those dreams?”
“You dream my memories, I believe.”
She holds up the axe head. “And this?” she says. “Does this belong to you?”
“It was mine. It belonged to my father, and to his father before him. It was buried on this land, in a place that we called a memory hole.”
“A long time ago,” she says. “When it still had a handle.”
“Of course. The day I was born, my father came to this island and tied twin stems of a bitternut hickory tree around that axe, to grow together as one and become its handle. And so they did, and it was my tomahawk, as it had been for my father’s father.”
Rachel sighs. “And used in war, to fight the invaders.”
“Not by me.”
But as I say that, I know that it would have been, if I had lived. Unless I had become someone like John.
“Was this your land?”
“The land belongs to no one. The land is.”
“Ah,” says Rachel ruefully, “that’s where we went wrong from the start, isn’t it.”
She slides down off the table. Pan still cowers beneath it, silent. “My dog is afraid of you,” she says.
“But you’re not afraid. Not now.”
“You don’t seem frightening. You seem sad. And . . . tired.”
Oh, I am tired beyond belief. Tired of the memories.
“You will see me only until the sun comes up,” I say, as much to the dog as to her.
Rachel glances out at the marsh. “So . . . the times between night and day, the times between tides. The Celts knew about those too. The hesitations in time, when it doesn’t rule everything. Like the moments that we paint.”
She looks down at the axe head, and runs her fingers over it again.
She says, “I’m trying to take care of this piece of land, Little Hawk. I’ll do my best.”
Something about the tilt of her head reminds me of Suncatcher again.
I say suddenly, “Are you Wampanoag?”
She shrugs. She says, “There are all kinds of tribes in me, most of them from across the ocean. And I don’t belong to any of them. If human beings weren’t so big on belonging to groups, I don’t believe they’d fight wars.”
“But you would fight for this piece of land, if someone tried to take it away from you.”
Rachel smiles at me. “Like you said, the land belongs to no one. The land is.”
It’s like Leaping Turtle throwing a ball back to me, when we were boys. I smile back at her.
The sky is growing brighter.
Rachel sits there for a long moment, looking at the axe head. Suddenly she puts it down on the table and strides over to the group of trees in pots, left by Gabe. She comes back with a small tree in one hand and a spade in the other.
She looks at me. “Is this axe head a sacred object?” she says.
“No. It is my tomahawk.”
“I think we should give your tomahawk back to the land, Little Hawk,” she says.
“It has been buried for a long time,” I say.
“But this time we free it from the memories,” Rachel says. “We plant a tree with it, to grow for tomorrow. This tree.”
It is the bitternut hickory.
As the first blaze of the sun comes up out of the sea, the first light out of the east, she slams the spade into the ground and begins to dig.
In the end, all it takes is one small action, by one person. One at a time.
Time breaks open around me, and all at once there is more light than a hundred suns, more light than I have ever seen.
From somewhere out over the salt marsh there is the faint cry of an osprey, the fish hawk.
Rachel looks for me, but I am no longer there.
She says softly, “Fly in peace, Little Hawk.”
And I am gone to my long home at last, set free, flying high, high beyond the world. High, high, into mystery.
TIMELINE
When the English and the Europeans first came to North America, there were more than a thousand tribes of proud, deep-rooted, and sometimes warring indigenous people all over the continent. On the east coast the white settlers multiplied, and started to push the Native Americans to the west. Complicated battles were fought for land, involving the French as well as the English and the tribes, until the wars of 1776 and 1812 separated the white settlers of this land from Britain forever, as Americans. After that, the conflicts over land use were between these new Americans and the indigenous Americans whom they called Indians.
In 1804 Congress passed an act allowing President Thomas Jefferson to exchange any Indian lands east of the Mississippi for land west of the river.
In 1807 Jefferson wrote to his secretary of war, “If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down til that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.”
In 1814 the Creeks were defeated in Alabama by Andrew Jackson, and the Americans acquired more than 20 million acres of Creek land.
Andrew Jackson wrote to President James Monroe in 1817, “I have long viewed treaties with the Indians an absurdity not to be reconciled to the principles of our government.”
In 1825 President Madison told Congress that removing Indian tribes from all the states was “of very high importance to our union” because “. . . it is impossible to incorporate them, in such masses, in any form whatever, into our system. . . .”
In 1830, urged by Jackson (now president), Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the forced removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River.
The designated Indian Territory stretched from the north of Texas to the north of Nebraska.
In 1838, on the “Trail of Tears,” the Cherokee were forced by 7,000 US troops to leave their homes and belongings and walk to northeast Oklahoma. Out of 15,000, more than 4,000 died of exposure and famine on the march.
The other tribes listed in the Act were also forced to leave, but the Seminoles refused, and for seven years they fought a US army that outnumbered them ten to one. Many were killed on both sides. No peace treaty was ever signed, and though some Seminoles went west, others fled into the Florida Everglades and stayed there.
During Jackson’s presidency, more than 45,000 Indians were relocated to the west, and the US acquired 100 million acres of Indian land.
The treaty ending the Mexican-American War in 1848 gave the United States New Mexico and Arizona, whose boundaries included the ancestral lands of the Navajo. In 1864 about 9,000 Navajo were forced into “The Long Walk” of 300 miles to a 40-square-mile reservation called the Bosque Redondo. The survivors were allowed to return four years later to an area one-tenth the size of their former land.
In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln approved the Minnesota hanging of 38 Dakota Indians summarily convicted of murder and rape, after a bloody war sparked by the government’s failure to honor the terms of a land-sale treaty. Lincoln had reduced the total of death sentences from 303, but it was still the biggest mass hanging in the history of the United States. All Dakotas were forced to leave their homes in the state.
In 1875, 1,500 Apache and Yavapai were made to walk 180 miles, in winter, from the Rio Verde Indian reserve to internment on the San Carlos reservation; many died on the way. When 200 returned 25 years later, they found their land occupied by white settlers.
In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, under which every Native American family was offered ownership of 160 acres of tribal land to farm or—after 25 years—to sell. It was intended to Americanize the Indians, and it made their traditional way of life impossible.
In 1889 the western Indian Territory was reduced to an area the size of present-day Oklahoma. A year later it lost half its land when the Oklahoma Territory was formed, and in 1907 it was incorporated into the State of Oklahoma, and disappeared.
The whites’ hunger for land reached the Plains Indians, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, through gold prospectors, buffalo hunters, and the spread of the railways. The Sioux were forced into reservations, in spite of a victory over General Custer and the US cavalry at Little Bighorn, and US troops massacred hundreds of Sioux, including women and children, at Wounded Knee in 1890.
In 1911 a “wild man” emerged from the countryside near Oroville, California: thin, frightened, and naked but for a piece of canvas round his shoulders. He was the last living member of the Yahi, the only California tribe to have escaped total extermination by the whites, and the anthropologists who became his friends called him Ishi, which in his language means “man.” He had been living much as all indigenous Americans lived before the whites came. Until he died in 1916, he lived and worked in the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco, where you may still hear his recorded voice telling a story. He was the last “wild” Indian in North America.
In 1924 the US gave all Native Americans the right to citizenship and a vote (54 years after African Americans, four years after women of any race). Since this right was still governed by state law, however, many could not vote until 1948.
By the time the Dawes Act was repealed in 1934, Native Americans had higher rates of alcoholism, illiteracy, poverty, and suicide than any other ethnic group in the US. Generations of children had been forced to speak only English in government schools, and today tribes are fighting for immersion programs to keep their languages alive. By the 2010 Census, the nation’s population of “American Indians and Alaska Natives, including those of more than one race,” made up 1.7 percent of the total population.
The Mayflower brought its 102 white passengers to the land of the Native Americans on November 11, 1620.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Seven years ago I built a house on Little Hawk’s island. It is not possible to live here without listening to the land, and to its past, and so I found myself writing this book.
The story is a work of the imagination: not a historical novel, but a fantasy set within a historical background. John Wakeley and Little Hawk and their families are fictional, and so are their connections with Roger Williams and Yellow Feather (Ousamequin, known to his English contemporaries by his title as grand sachem of the Wampanoag Nation, Massasoit). These latter two were of course real people, and after reading all the seventeenth-century sources I have tried, with respect, to put into their mouths words that they might have said.
The historical background is, I hope, accurate, though my story doesn’t detail the years between the death of Wamsutta/Alexander in 1662 and the start of King Philip’s War in 1675. The only major liberty I’ve taken is in copying for John Wakeley the whipping inflicted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the Baptist Obadiah Holmes in 1651. The Colony also whipped several other Baptists of whom they disapproved, and some years later they hanged three Quakers.
I owe a great deal to the overall portrait of this book’s period in Nathaniel Philbrick’s wonderful Mayflower (Viking Penguin, 2006). And you can find a fascinating collection of extracts from contemporary sources put together by Nathaniel and Thomas Philbrick in The Mayflower Papers: Selected Writings of Colonial New England (Penguin, 2007).
The Pokanoket tribal website is at www.pokanoket.us and the most detailed Wampanoag site is at www.mashpeewampanoagtribe.com.
What did Little Hawk’s language sound like? In the seventeenth century, all the tribes of southern New England spoke closely related languages of what is called “the Eastern Algonquian subfamily,” and you can see some of their sounds written down in Wood’s Vocabulary of Massachusett, a booklet in the American Language Reprint series that’s listed (along with forty other tribal language booklets) at www.evolpub.com. For a few of the spoken words, watch Anne Makepeace’s remarkable film We Still Live Here: s Nutayuneân, which tells the story of the Wampanoag linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird and her determination to revive her tribe’s lost language. If it’s not in your library, you can find it at www.MakepeaceProductions.com and the language project itself at www.wlrp.org.
And if you were intrigued by my mention of the last “wild” Indian in North America, you can read about him in Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber (University of California Press, 1961). Ms. Kroeber was married to Ishi’s anthropologist friend Professor Alfred Kroeber, and we owe them both a huge extra debt; they were the parents of Ursula Le Guin.
SUSAN COOPER is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement. Her classic five-book fantasy sequence, The Dark Is Rising, won the Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor and has sold millions of copies worldwide. She is also the author of Victory, a Booklist Top Ten Historical Fiction for Youth book and a Washington Post Top Ten for Children novel; King of Shadows, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book; The Boggart; Seaward; and many other acclaimed novels for young readers. She lives in Massachusetts, and you can visit her online at TheLostLand.com.
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Simon & Schuster, New York
Meet the author, watch videos, and get extras at
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ALSO BY
SUSAN COOPER
Green Boy
Seaward
Victory
The Boggart
The Boggart and the Monster
King of Shadows
The Magician’s Boy
Silver Cow
and
The Dark Is Rising Sequence:
Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark Is Rising
Greenwitch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree
MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS † An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division † 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 † www.SimonandSchuster.com † This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. † Copyright © 2013 by Susan Cooper † All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. † MARGARET K. MCELDERRY BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. † The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. † Jacket illustration copyright © 2013 by Alejandro Colucci † The text for this book is set in Palatino LT. † Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data † Cooper, Susan, 1935- † Ghost Hawk / Susan Cooper.—1st ed. † p. cm. † Summary: At the end of a winter-long journey into manhood, Little Hawk returns to find his village decimated by a white man’s plague and soon, despite a fresh start, Little Hawk dies violently but his spirit remains trapped, seeing how his world changes. † ISBN 978-1-4424-8141-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4424-8143-5 (eBook) [1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Wampanoag Indians—Fiction. 3. Indians of North America—Massachusetts—Fiction. 4. Ghosts—Fiction. 5. Survival—Fiction. 6. Massachusetts—History—New Plymouth, 1620-1691—Fiction.] I. Title. † PZ7.C7878Gho 2013 † [Fic]—dc23 2012039892
Contents
Epigraph
Part One: Freezing Moon
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Two: Planting Moon
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Cha
pter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Three: Burning Moon
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Four: Ripening Moon
Chapter One
Timeline
Author’s Note
About Susan Cooper