American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  In the north he hoped to protect that heritage, even if to do so meant hiding it for a time.

  By the time Long Canoe was missed, the rest of his kinsmen assumed that he too had died that night, or perhaps had fled west. His close friends shook their heads in bewilderment. Long Canoe had never expressed a desire to go west. His distant cousin Major Ridge thought he might have hidden himself in the mountains. But as the months passed and Long Canoe never returned to his seat on the Cherokee council, gradually the others assumed he was either dead or had joined the Old Settlers in the west.

  What had happened to the boy likewise remained a question no one could answer.

  After they were found to be missing and never returned, no one ever knew that aging Nanye’hi had, with the help of her daughter Katy Harlan, braved one more arduous journey to the top of the sacred mountain. What was her mission she never even told Katy. But when she emerged from the cave behind the waterfall, leaning on her trusted walking stick, a knowing smile spread across her lips which said more than she ever told another soul.

  She could die in peace. The legacy would go on. Where destiny would take the rings, even her prophetic vision could not tell. But she was at peace. Long Canoe had been faithful to his charge. The Great Spirit would watch over them now.

  Long Canoe was never heard from again. The suddenness with which he had vanished was forever after shrouded in mystery. The few who in later years came to know of his whereabouts, and even visited him from time to time, never divulged his secret. Most assumed that he had followed the Old Settlers west. In after years, however, when contact between eastern and western Cherokees was reestablished, there was no trace of his arrival among the western Cherokee.

  Thus the mystery of his disappearance grew into legend.

  In a small brick boarding school in New England the headmaster was concluding his final arrangements for a new pupil.

  The boy said little as his uncle spoke with the man. He sensed that his past lay behind him and that his future was here. But at twelve, even the stoicism of his race could not prevent his being intimidated at sight of his future home.

  The headmaster rang a bell. His assistant appeared and took the lad to his classroom to introduce him to his teacher and fellow students. When the two men were alone, the discussion continued.

  “How long will the boy be with us?” asked the headmaster.

  “I will leave you enough to cover two years’ expenses,” said the traveler from the south. “At that point I will assess his progress.”

  “How will I contact you?”

  “You will not be able to for a while. I will be in touch with you. I will be relocating myself. It is best for the boy to remain ignorant of my whereabouts for a time. He must learn to make a place for himself here.”

  “As you wish, sir,” said the headmaster, a little skeptically. “But if the boy’s tuition is not paid I will have no choice but to turn him out—”

  “Do not worry, my friend. The boy’s expenses will be paid in full. Money does not happen to be one of our problems. But the boy is in no little danger, as am I—”

  The expression of concern on the headmaster’s face registered clearly enough that he wondered if he had made a mistake by admitting the new student.

  “Have no worries,” said his strange visitor. “The danger I speak of is far away. Much farther than you can imagine. Not a trace of it will follow him here. We have traveled a great distance. Our movements are untraceable. But if his true identity were to become known to the wrong people, or my whereabouts discovered, there could be consequences. The boy must not know where I am. For the present he must be cut off from his roots. There is much danger. That is why I have brought him to you. It is for his own safety. I do not know what the future holds for me. Eventually he may contact me through you. I am sorry to be secretive, but it is for the boy’s best. I ask you to trust me. I will reveal more in time.”

  The headmaster nodded, apparently satisfied.

  “One more thing I would ask,” added the boy’s uncle. “Please watch him closely for a time. He has suffered a terrible shock with the loss of his parents. His need of love will be great. He is alone in the world. Even I as his closest relation cannot be near without endangering him.”

  “My wife and I will do all we can for him.”

  “He is a good boy, intelligent, quick to learn. He will adapt.”

  “I will be sure he receives all he needs.”

  “I am more grateful than I can say for your kindness. I will contact you when I can. Now… will you take me to him? I would have a few final words alone before I depart.”

  The man who now changed his name for a second time in his life, taking again to himself his father’s English surname, left the wintry skies of New England where he had studied at Dartmouth years earlier, and traveled south again. He used a portion of his gold to purchase a fertile track of land suitable for many purposes, and settled in the heart of Virginia. The tract was only some sixty acres, whose rocky ground and thin topsoil had never attracted a buyer. But its location, several small but choice fields, and two or three extensive caves beneath the northern ridge, would suit his purposes perfectly.

  Within a few short years, the ground had become profitable, verdant, and was the envy of every plantation owner for miles around.

  Young Swift Horse, nephew of Long Canoe, grew into manhood. Gradually the events of his early life faded into the mists of memory along with his Cherokee name. None of his fellows ever suspected the true origins of his bloodline, nor did he himself pay much heed to events occurring within the nation of his heritage. Old chiefs were dying and with them an ancient way of life slowly passed into history. He was one of the new breed who thoroughly integrated into the modern life of New England America.

  Two

  The westering sun sank slowly behind a tree-lined ridge. In a remote region of the North Carolina mountains known as Winding Creek the hot afternoon seemed endless. Four women counted out the slow hours in a little log cabin where they were gathered to help in the birth of the newest child of the Cherokee Wolf Clan. The oldest woman was herself a matriarch of the clan. Her once dark hair gleamed with the silver of many winters that had come and gone since she was first laid in her mother Nanye’hi’s arms. The birth she was attending now was for the child of her own daughter Ailcey.

  It had been a difficult birth. The young mother had been laboring since dawn but the child seemed little closer to entering the world than when she began. Some of the women spoke in concerned whispers. But Katy Harlan, as she was called, knew that the child would survive. She had seen a white doe on the ridge the previous night. She knew that it signified the arrival of peace and prosperity to the clan.

  Cata’quin placed a cool cloth on the young mother’s forehead and squeezed her sweaty hand.

  “Courage, Ailcey. The child is almost here.”

  The mother opened her mouth but a pang seized her. The words became instead a cry of pain.

  Two women hurried with rags and hot water from the kettle. The taller of them, a young black woman in her early twenties, crushed some herbs into the steaming water to freshen the air. She understood the anguish in the eyes of the young mother. She had given birth to a child of her own a few months before. She and her husband were black slaves on the Harlan farm. She had grown up with Ailcey like a sister. She leaned over the bed.

  “Miz Ailcey, you’s most dere,” she said softly. “I ken see a little head now.”

  As she spoke the young mother made a final desperate effort. Eight or ten minutes later the thin wail of a newborn greeted her ears as she dropped back in complete exhaustion.

  Grandmother Katy Harlan took the baby in her arms and presented it to its mother.

  “You have a daughter!” Katy announced proudly. “This one is a special child, Ailcey.” Her eyes took on a faraway look as she gazed down on the tiny red face of her granddaughter. “She will have a long and eventful life. She will travel far from her
home if my eyes do not deceive me and she will make peace between many people before the end. Perhaps she will even wear the ring of my mother the Ghigua.”

  Katy touched the gold ring on her right hand and then smiled as she saw how large it looked next to the tiny curled fists of the newborn.

  “What you gwine call her, Miz Ailcey?” asked her black friend.

  With the sound of her legendary ancestor still faintly in her ears, she replied.

  “Chigua,” whispered the mother, then closed her eyes.

  When Chigua’s birth was announced in the village there was great rejoicing. But the happiness of the clan was brief. The toll of the birth had been too great for the mother and young Ailcey’s strength was too far gone. She could not recover and steadily weakened. Within a week she was gone. Little Chigua had lost her mother.

  The family held council and came to a quick decision. The newborn would need a mother’s milk for many months. The obvious choice for a wet nurse was the young black slave Sudina Magodan who had attended the birth. Her own child was but three months of age.

  Thus little Chigua, descendant of the legendary Cherokee chief Moytoy, suckled and then grew up with Sudina’s children, descendants of the youngest son of an ancient forgotten African chief called Tungal whose son Magoda, known as Moses, had lived during the time of Moytoy the elder.

  Young Chigua, great-granddaughter of the Nanye’hi Ward the legendary Ghigua, was three when she first remembered hearing Sudina telling one of her older children of the five rivers of her native land.

  “Look at dat han’er yers, chil,” whispered Sudina softly, unaware that Chigua was listening as intently as her own five-year-old daughter. “Dem’s da lines ob doze five ol’ ribers dat da ol’ king from da ol’ country tol’ his chilluns ’bout. Doze be da five ribers er freedom dat our people once knew, an’ dat dey’s gwine know agin one day. Dey say da blood er kings is inside us, chil’, an’ dat we’ll gib birth ter kings one day agin. So don’ you neber fergit ter look at dat han’er yers an’ doze lines ob da five ribers, cuz dey’ll tell you who you is, an’ where you cums from.”

  Though her own race would in time ingrain into her consciousness its own legends from the old books of her ancient past, this slice of history from the black race with which she shared her youngest years also became so deeply part of her from constant repetition in her hearing that all her life Chigua could not look at her hand without silently wondering if she too might somehow be distantly connected not only to Moytoy but also to the ancient chieftain of the blacks whose name time had forgotten.

  Three

  An adventurous aristocratic Frenchman decided to seek for himself a new life in the New World where land was cheap and opportunity unlimited. Twenty-four-year-old Jacques LeFleure sailed in 1798 to the island of Jamaica, where he used a portion of a sizeable inheritance to purchase a sugar plantation. Behind him in France he left a wife, also of high breeding and aristocratic blood, and baby daughter. It took LeFleure about a year to get the plantation and home in order and suitable for the style of living to which they were accustomed. Then he sent for his family. Accompanying Madame LeFleure as lady’s maid and governess to the child was a young statuesque French Negro girl of sixteen. Like her mistress, Calantha Billaud was well-educated and spoke three languages and also commanded a reading knowledge of Latin. She possessed enough of an adventuresome spirit to find the prospect of travel to the New World exciting and full of challenge.

  Over the next several years the plantation prospered. LeFleure and Madame LeFleure had two sons and another daughter. Though black, Miss Billaud was treated as an equal member of the family. LeFleure, already wealthy before arriving in Jamaica, refused to own another human being. He did not operate his plantation with the use of slaves, but employed freedmen, white and native, and paid them a fair wage. He grew to become a respected member of the Jamaican community.

  When the two LeFleure sons reached seventeen and eighteen, they were sent to the mainland of the United States to study at the University of Georgia. While they were away, Madame LeFleure took ill with a fever and died. The sons came home briefly for the funeral, then returned to their studies on the mainland. There they learned the agricultural methods of the great southern plantations, with an eye to introducing cotton to their father’s enterprise. They also became intrigued with the dependency of the South’s cotton economy on slavery. By the end of their schooling they had thoroughly adapted themselves to the peculiar institution of slavery their father despised. This change in outlook, however, they thought it best not to divulge to him.

  In the next two years following his wife’s death, while his sons were still away, Jacques LeFleure came to realize how attached he had become to his wife’s maid and friend, Miss Billaud. The grieving Frenchman, wealthy but now lonely, one daughter grown and married, his two sons away, began to haunt the classroom where Miss Billaud continued to tutor his youngest daughter, now in her teen years, watching and listening to every word that fell from the enchanting black lips. He began inviting the governess, now a majestic and stately black woman of regal beauty and thirty-nine years, to walk with him in his expansive gardens when the days’ lessons were done. Their conversations grew gradually more relaxed. Intimidated somewhat at first, in time Miss Billaud grew comfortable with the man’s gentleness, kindness, and humor. Laughter gradually accompanied their time together and slowly the sun returned to the countenance and heart of Jacques LeFleure.

  Though LeFleure was nine years senior to his governess, before long they were nearly inseparable. The two were married in 1824. A son was born to them in 1825 whom they called Sydney.

  Upon completion of their studies, the two sons, now in their twenties, returned to help their father on the plantation and to institute some of the changes they had planned. Now older and having grown accustomed to the feelings toward the Negro in the American South, whatever fondness they might once have felt for their childhood governess had disappeared. In their minds they had forgotten how very black she was. The sight of her on their father’s arm, speaking in cultured French as if she was his equal, was enough to turn their stomachs. In many ways, though they still treated him with the respect of his station, they had become thorough sons of the American South, and despised their father for what he had done.

  As for the half-black child of their father’s unbelievable marriage, he was nothing but a bastard in their eyes, certainly not the half brother to which the blood in his veins testified. They hated him and lost no opportunity to treat the poor youngster with cruelty and contempt behind their father’s back.

  Calantha did her best, however, in the occasionally unpleasant circumstances, to bring up her son in the culture and refinement of a Jamaican plantation atmosphere. She taught him the classics, stories from the Bible, and to read and write, in addition to French and Latin, Spanish and English. The boy’s aging father Jacques doted on his tan-skinned young son and gave him every advantage that his wealth afforded him. His older grown sons resented the boy all the more bitterly, seeing him lavished with privileges they had forgotten that they too had enjoyed.

  Four

  On a fateful night of 1833, two young Virginians—in their mid-twenties, both unmarried, both presumed inheritors of wealth and consequently in little haste to grow into responsible manhood—stumbled on a plot that would change their lives forever.

  They had been drinking heavily and would have been an embarrassment to their respective fathers in such condition. Their drunkenness may have heightened their sense of drama at what they saw, though it also made recalling the strange nighttime images difficult in the days that followed.

  Four men, strangers to the region, rode with stealthy step, as if they had shod their horses in the silent moccasins of their forebears, through the moonless night toward the only dwelling for miles, a small farmhouse that sat roughly between the homes of the two drunken watchers. That they had nearly passed out beside the road, accounted for the riders coming so clos
e that they nearly stumbled over them, yet never saw them.

  “Who are they?” said one of the youths with slurred speech as he sat up.

  “Keep your voice down!” replied the other in a loud whisper. “I don’t know who they are. But I intend to find out.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Follow them. Come on,” he said, climbing with some difficulty to his feet. “They’re heading toward the ridge. We can get there on foot.”

  “Wait for me,” said the first, stumbling with difficulty after his friend.

  “You’re drunk!”

  “And you’re not?”

  “At least I can keep my feet beneath me.”

  It was the younger of the two by a year who now led the way through the night across a cultivated field, reducing by about half the distance to the house. By the time they reached them, the dogs were occupied on the other side of the home greeting the four riders and their horses.

  “Look at them!” said one of the youths as the light from a welcoming lantern fell upon the riders. “They’re—”

  “Keep your voice down, I tell you!” interrupted his friend. “I can see well enough what they are.”

  The two crept toward the house, where they collapsed under an open window and waited.

  The peculiarities of the farmer who led his guests inside were well-known. Everyone suspected that his real name was so long and impossible to pronounce that he had changed it upon his arrival here. Rumors abounded concerning his ethnic origins. But he had earned the respect of most of his neighbors. Had the man suspected that the words of the four who had come all this way with worrisome tales from the south were being overheard, he would have urged greater discretion in their speech, or would have spoken to them in their native tongue. But he did not know it. Therefore much was revealed that the four riders had come so far to keep secret. Each of the four was well-known. How they had all managed to slip away unnoticed was little short of a miracle. Though he had been gone fourteen years, and the three younger of his visitors had been but boys at the time, he recognized them all instantly. They were Kahnungdatlageh, his son Skahtlelohskee, Degodoga, and his brother Kilakeena—all now known as Major Ridge, John Ridge, Stand Watie, and Elias Boudinot.