American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  He was tired and hungry and was looking forward to one more restful night before setting off for the South. Sensing evil afoot, he dismounted and crept silently toward the voices.

  “Let’s just kill him when he gets back,” said one. “He’s only an Indian. We’ll beat the truth out of him.”

  “You’re crazy,” replied the other. “I’m no murderer.”

  “Then we’ll burn him out, burn his house down.”

  It was obvious the two had been drinking. This time, however, instead of producing sleep, the alcohol had produced anger.

  “What good would that do? We don’t even know where the gold is.”

  “We’ll find it!” shouted the other, raving recklessly. “Now give me that paper!”

  “I’m not going to let you do anything stupid. I should never have even shown it to you. We can’t make any sense of it anyway.”

  “Give it to me, I tell you!”

  “This whole thing was a mistake. I’m going home. We’ll talk about it when you’re not so drunk.”

  Brown heard the sound of horse hooves over the rocky ground. But they did not go far before the voices erupted in violent argument again.

  “You’re not going anywhere until you give it to me! It’s ours… that gold is ours. If you don’t want your half, then I’ll take it. You’re not going to ruin this for me!”

  A sound followed… a fall from a horse… a thud and grunt, followed by shouts and threats… scuffling, high words, fists, more shouts. Then another fall… a cry… at last silence.

  Brown listened intently, trying to make out what had happened. With the stealth of his ancestors, he crept closer, then peered over the ledge just in time to witness the final wickedness of treachery. He stole back out of sight.

  After a minute or two he heard footsteps scuffling over rocks. A few seconds later a horse galloped away. The moment he was alone Brown scrambled down the incline to see what could be done. But he was too late to help. He knew the look of death well enough.

  Most of the night he lay sleepless in his house, which he had found ransacked, no fire in the hearth to betray that he was here, debating with himself what to do. But this was not his fight. He could not prevent what had happened. He could only hope the truth would come out without him. A higher calling rested with him and he could not delay. After a lengthy silence, his own destiny beckoned.

  When Clifford Davidson’s blood-spattered body was found on Harper’s Peak it seemed likely that a fall off his horse was responsible for the vicious wound on the side of his head.

  The smoke which had risen from Brown’s chimney for fourteen successive winters was seen in the Virginia sky no more. Though speculation about his absence hovered in the area for some time, gradually it too, like the smoke that was no more, drifted away on the currents of the wind and was heard little more of as the years turned the strange man who had occupied the hilly region into little more than a vague memory.

  In his grief it was not for two or three years when Grantham Davidson’s mind happened to recall it, and then realized he had not seen the small mysterious paper of Brown’s in all that time. He went through his safe where he knew he had put it, but found nothing. He searched high and low through his entire office but still did not uncover it, and never knew what became of it.

  In time it became known that Brown had sold his land, for an undisclosed sum, to Grantham Davidson. Some in the neighborhood hinted at irregularities. But Davidson possessed the deed, and the courts saw no evidence to force him to relinquish it.

  Six

  By 1838 all Cherokee who remained on their traditional lands in Georgia and the Carolinas were to be removed to the Oklahoma Territory. Those who had not complied with the government’s order voluntarily would be rounded up by force and sent to camps where they would await their time to be herded west.

  Young Chigua Eaglefeather and her aging grandfather, along with her sister, were among the many who formed the long train of wagons, carts, and walkers who set out from Fort Campbell on the long journey to the Oklahoma Territory which would come to be known as the Trail of Tears.

  “Grandfather, why do some of the soldiers look so sad?” she asked as they went. “It is our people who are being driven from our homelands.”

  “Everyone knows that what is happening is wrong,” he answered. “Everyone except their chiefs in Washington who have ordered us away from the land of our fathers.”

  Many traveled with the Cherokee as they headed out over the mountains. There were French trappers, Scottish scouts, English adventurers, suppliers, whites married to Cherokees who refused to leave their families, and a few doctors who had been ordered along by the army.

  After traveling for several weeks, nine-year-old Chigua and her older sister had become good friends with the army private named Burnett who was kind to the Indian families. They spoke to him in Cherokee, which he could speak nearly as well as they. To pass the time Burnett taught them some French words he had learned from a Frenchman when trapping in the wilds of the South as a young man. Young Chigua was intrigued with the strange-sounding language that Private Burnett called French. She liked the feel of the words on her tongue. She learned quickly, and with the help of one of the Frenchmen who was along, soon she and Burnett were carrying on brief conversations in French as they walked along.

  “Why are you not like the others who speak to us like animals?” Chigua asked, speaking in her own tongue.

  “Because I believe all people are God’s children,” replied Burnett, also in Cherokee. “Just because God wanted to make his children different colors, why should we treat anyone differently because of it.”

  One day as the train paused for its midday stop, one of the soldiers sent Chigua and her sister and several other girls into the woods to gather firewood. They knew that to disobey would invite the whip, and so, though exhausted, they did as he said.

  Unknown either to the Cherokee or their army captors, almost from the beginning of the long drive west, the weary steps of the displaced Cherokee and the plodding hooves of three thousand horses had been silently and invisibly dogged by a renegade band of Seminoles. The fate of the other southeast tribes had been sealed long before this last dying gasp of native culture now being ground beneath the wagon wheels of a cruel trail of Cherokee tears. Many other tribes had been uprooted and stomped out before this. Those that remained in small groups and clans and war parties survived however they could. In these years of discontent, they had seen the rise and profitability of the slave trade throughout the South and had learned to exploit it. Though the white man was their enemy, they were not above taking his money. Runaway blacks were their preferred stock-in-trade. But they would capture and sell their own kind, too, when it suited them. Tribes had always enslaved their enemies. Now they realized that white plantation owners would pay cash money for muscular men, and for any women who could make babies who would grow into muscular men.

  So like the beasts of prey who dog a herd of elk to isolate one or two that lag behind or stray too far from the rest, the band of Seminoles who had been following the wagons for three days now saw the five girls leave the camp in the direction of the woods. They waited patiently until the girls were inside the cover of the trees and out of sight. Then with marvelous stealth, they snatched, bound, and gagged them without the escape of a peep of noise. Within minutes the raiding party and its captives was two miles away.

  When his two granddaughters and the other girls did not return, the old man called Eaglefeather wandered from the camp in the direction of the woods. His shouts in the direction he had last seen them brought no answer. They did, however, succeed in arousing the notice of one of the guards, a certain Lieutenant Benjamin McDonal. He turned his horse in the direction of the sound and galloped toward Chigua’s grandfather.

  “Hey, old man, where do you think you’re going?” he shouted as he rode up.

  “Our daughters went for wood, sir,” he answered. “My own and three other girls. T
hey have not come back.”

  “What’s that to me? Get back to the wagons!”

  “I must find them.”

  “I gave you an order, old man. We’re ready to pull out.”

  “I cannot leave them out there,” persisted the grandfather, taking another step or two toward the woods. “We have to find them.”

  Angered by now, McDonal pulled his horse whip with its tiny wire tip from his saddle and let fly a vicious lash that ripped half an inch of skin off the bare back of the Indian.

  The man screamed out in pain and fell to his knees as McDonal jumped off his horse. The poor man could not hide from a second lash, then a third.

  The sound of galloping hooves interrupted the torment. As McDonal raised his whip for a fourth blow, he suddenly felt it wrested from his hand from behind.

  In a white fury, he spun around to see a blue-clad member of his own detail staring down from his saddle, holding the whip he had grabbed from his commander’s hand. The man threw down the whip at McDonal’s feet.

  “You fool, Burnett!” he shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Stopping you from killing this poor man, Lieutenant,” replied Burnett.

  “You’re just a private, I could have you court martialed for what you’ve done.”

  “Perhaps, sir. But I won’t let you kill a defenseless old man.”

  “The savage defied my order.”

  “His name is Eaglefeather. He is honored among his people.”

  “What kind of ridiculous name is that! It means nothing. I told him we were pulling out and to return to his wagon.”

  Burnett dismounted, walked forward, and stooped down beside Chigua’s grandfather.

  “The daughters, sir,” the man said feebly, wincing in pain. “You know them for you have been kind to them.”

  “Yes, I know them—young Chigua and Betsy. What about them?”

  “They were sent with three others for wood, sir. They have not returned.”

  Burnett turned to McDonal.

  “It’s true, Lieutenant,” he said. “I heard Ensign Bullock send them off an hour ago.”

  “What’s that to me, Private!” spat McDonal, stooping to retrieve his whip. “We are about to leave and can’t hold up the entire train for a few girls who wandered off. Now stand aside, Private! And you get up, old man, and get back to the wagon!”

  Another sudden crack of his whip found the Cherokee’s shoulder. The private jumped to his feet and stood to face his superior officer. The next sting of the whip caught Burnett in the face and drew blood from a gash across his cheek. The normally even-tempered young man was at last fully aroused. He leapt to one side to avoid the next blow, even as his hand grabbed the small tomahawk he had worn on his belt for years. A minute later McDonal lay senseless on his back, his head bleeding from two deft whacks from the blunt end of the small hatchet. In truth, he was lucky to be alive. Any Indian wielding the same instrument would have cleft his skull in two.

  The shouting brought half a dozen others to the scene, including Captain McClellan on his mount. Already the wagons had started to move behind them. Whatever this was about it had to be wrapped up quickly.

  McClellan looked about hurriedly, saw one of his lieutenants laying on the ground with a private standing over him with what looked like an Indian tomahawk.

  “Put this man under arrest,” he said to the men who had accompanied him to the scene. “Then get this Indian who is doubtless responsible for the whole thing back to his wagon. I’ll get to the bottom of it later.”

  As he galloped off, Burnett’s hands were bound behind him and he was led away. The last thing he saw as he glanced back was the poor old Cherokee man, tears streaming down his brown wrinkled face, wailing and calling for the Cherokee daughters in the direction of the wood, while two of McClellan’s men dragged him back toward the wagons.

  No one saw any of the five missing girls again. Neither did any doubt their fate. For girls so young to survive in the wilds would be impossible.

  Two hours later, the train had moved on, and the site was quiet and desolate. All that remained were a few dried splotches in the dust where an old man’s tears had fallen to the ground as he lamented the loss of the two girls he loved with all his heart.

  Seven

  Jacques LeFleure died suddenly in 1842 at the age of 68. His two older sons immediately seized control of his Jamaican estate. Though LeFleure’s will left control of his affairs in the hands of his wife, now 59, for her lifetime, and equal shares beyond that to all five of his children, his white sons vowed that neither their black stepmother nor her bastard son, Sydney, now 17, would see one cent of their father’s fortune.

  Secretly they made their plans.

  On Sydney’s eighteenth birthday his stepbrothers marched into the parlor where Sydney and Calantha were sharing a quiet celebration together. Following close behind were four surly looking men, recently hired by the LeFleure sons. The expressions that met Sydney and his mother said clearly enough that evil was afoot.

  “David… Pierre… what are you doing?” said the young men’s stepmother.

  “Insuring what is ours,” replied David, the eldest.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are taking control of the plantation.”

  “But your father left the plantation to all of us!”

  “Yes, and we are taking it. Get them out of here!”

  First to the astonishment, then the protestations, and finally the horror of Sydney and his mother, the strangers proceeded to bind them with rope, drag them from the house, and heave them into a waiting cart as if they had been two sacks of grain, while Sydney’s stepbrothers looked on with cool approval.

  The cart rumbled away. All the rights, privileges, wealth, culture, breeding, and legal status of Calantha and Sydney LeFleure vanished as dust beneath its wheels. From the only home Sydney had ever known, and what had been Calantha’s for more than forty years, mother and son were borne away into the slavery that had already become hell’s curse upon this New World across the sea from the France from which their lineage had come.

  Some four hours later the cart stopped at a nearby port town. One of the men walked around to the back, reached in and dragged Calantha out and onto her feet. Her hands were still bound.

  “Sydney!” she screamed as he yanked at her and pulled her away.

  Sydney scrambled out of the cart to follow. But a terrible whack from the fist of one of the men laid him flat on the dirt beside it. He struggled to his feet, lips and nose streaming blood.

  “Mother!” he cried, stumbling forward.

  “Sydney,” she said again, though her voice was now failing, overwhelmed in sobs she could not control. She twisted from the man’s grasp and cast a final forlorn look back at her son. “Sydney… Sydney!” she wailed softly through her tears, “Je t’aime… God be with you… Je t’aime.”

  A rude hand grabbed her and twisted her away, ripping the corner of her elegant dress off at the shoulder, then shoved her stumbling along the walkway as she wept uncontrollably.

  Once more Sydney made a vain attempt to follow. But another great blow fell on the side of his head, and he knew no more.

  Sydney LeFleure awoke in the black fetid hold of a French slave ship bound for the coast of Florida, where the French had been doing a vigorous slave trade for years. The next weeks passed as the blur of a dark nightmare.

  As Joseph of old was sold into Egypt’s slavery by his own flesh and kin, there to be purified and tested for the destiny that awaited him, so was the young Jamaican Sydney LeFleure handed over to the taskmaster of a new and cruel Egypt of the American South, to see what the refiner’s fire could likewise make of him.

  By the time he had been sold to a Florida plantation owner, the blistering welts across his back and shoulders testified to lessons cruelly learned, that it would do him no good to protest, to try to explain that it was all a mistake, that he was educated and free, that he was the son of
a white landowner and aristocrat, that he was even himself legal owner of a portion of a Jamaican sugar plantation. Every protest earned him fresh welts atop those still oozing from previous attempts to reason with his captors. Slowly he learned the invaluable first lesson of slavery—silent compliance.

  Sydney learned, too, that to speak with intelligence angered his white overseers. He modified his speech to mimic the Negro dialect of the slaves around him, and in other ways used his intelligence to make the hideous captivity more tolerable. But in his heart of hearts, he never forgot who he was or where he had come from. He had come of French and Negro stock. He was a native Jamaican. But now, for better or worse, he was an “American.” He vowed one day to be free again, no matter how long it took to realize that dream. One day he would be a free American.

  Unfortunately, long years of slavery yet lay in his future, though of more varied kinds than he could have anticipated.

  A roving band of Seminoles raided the plantation where Sydney LeFleure had just begun to learn what was expected of him sufficiently for his wounds to heal. At sight of the bare-chested Indians, the two white overseers scrambled for their rifles. But they lay dead in the field seconds later, and the eight blacks that had been their charge were bound and spirited away to be sold yet again, either to some native tribe or to another plantation owner.

  Several nights later, after much travel, Sydney found himself alone in a Seminole encampment. Selling the other blacks, his Indian captors were fascinated by Sydney’s moderate features, mannerisms, and unusual inflection of voice. What they would do with him, Sydney didn’t know, but they seemed considering some means to increase his value at the slave auction. Or perhaps they merely intended to make him their own slave.

  Months went by. Sydney found himself worked hard but in general treated well enough. He was not the only slave being held in the Florida wilderness by the Seminole band that had captured him, though all the rest were Indians from other tribes and spoke in tongues he could not understand. He did as he was told, said little, and waited and watched to see what he could learn.