Louisiana History Collection - Part 1

by Jennifer Blake

  Gradually the attack slowed. The shooting died away to a scattered shot here and there, then ceased altogether. The fort had held; the French had been beaten off. They were retreating back to their positions. A shout of jubilation went up, then another. Dazed men climbed down from the wall. They exchanged tales of moments of danger, of fear and of victory. They were amazed at the mechanical soldiering, at the French marching into the mouths of their guns, astonished that the French had launched an offensive against so impregnable a stronghold as the one they had built, but they were also proud that they had turned them back.

  The relief the Natchez felt was transformed into something near merriment. As the hours passed, turning into days with no renewal of the attack, the Indians inside the walls feasted, traded back and forth, and visited among each other as if the purpose of the gathering was purely social. Some of the younger men got drunk and chased each other naked through the village. Others organized a series of games, one a form of ball game where each of two teams tried to prevent the other from touching the house of the Great Sun with a ball made of stuffed leather. Another game, played with poles and a stone, was called chunkey. In it two men used stout sticks eight feet long and a round, flat stone an inch thick and three inches in diameter. One warrior rolled the stone and threw his stick at the same time, while the second warrior, standing ready, also threw his stick. The one whose stick landed touching the rock, or nearest to it, earned one point and also the right to throw the rock the next time. The competition was keen and there was some wagering, but not to excess.

  Outside the wall, the French regrouped. The days without fighting stretched into a week and still all was quiet. Reynaud, who spent much of his time on the wall, watched in grim silence, ignoring the games and trading, the feasting and visiting that went on behind him. The French were too quiet, he said, hardly firing a shot except to return fire against them or to cover themselves. Their energy was being used to dig trenches that would afford them protection from which to fire upon the fort or to make a surprise sally. Reynaud had also seen more heavy artillery being assembled and brought up to be set in place closer to the wall. It was inevitable that they would soon receive heavy fire.

  He was right. By the next morning, the guns had been brought to bear. The siege began again in earnest.

  16

  THE FIRST TREMENDOUS explosion of gunpowder and shot directed against the fort shocked the Natchez into silence. The children who cried were hushed; the women looked at each other with wide, frightened eyes; the men ran for the wall to look. Many reached it in time to reel back from the impact of the second barrage. But the thick wall they had spent so much time and labor building held. The logs trembled and dirt sifted between them; fires flared and had to be put out with jars of water passed hand to hand, but the palisade stood upright and solid, a strong barrier between them and the French. It was a tribute of no mean sort to Reynaud’s engineering skill and also to his ability as a leader of men.

  It was the noise that was demoralizing. The thunder of the concussions as the guns were fired shook the air and made the ground tremble. It rolled in upon them in waves along with the thick blue-black smoke that caught in their throats. It made the dogs cower and run in crazed circles and sent the children under the sleeping benches. At first the men and women flinched involuntarily, but gradually they became accustomed to the sound and treated it with apparent contempt, though they often turned to stare in the direction of the firing.

  The hardest thing for the Indians to understand was not the siege itself, but the fact that the French would fire upon the village while their own captive women and children were inside. What madmen were they to endanger them in such a way? If they had so little concern, then their attack was one of deepest blood vengeance and they would surely not stop until every Natchez were dead.

  It seemed so, indeed. Day after day the booming of the guns continued. A gray-black pall of smoke covered the sky. Fires broke out as pieces of shot caught in the cane-thatched roofs. The French gunners, finding the wall unbreachable, raised the elevation of the guns and began to fire into the stockade and at the house of the Great Sun on its small mound. Reynaud’s brother, fearing for the safety of his wives who were both now large with pregnancy, ordered his family down into the town, but he refused to leave his own house. The new small temple received a direct hit that caved in one wall. A guardian of the temple fire was killed and the other man on duty was wounded. It was feared that the eternal fire would go out, but the next set of guardians marched to take their places, tending the fire in defiance of the French guns.

  The nerves of everyone inside the fort grew taut. Tempers flared. Quarrels broke out over nothing. The crowded conditions, the slowly increasing dirt and stench, the gathering refuse and excrement of humans and animals, which could not be disposed of, were as intolerable to the Natchez as the bombardment. Flies buzzed everywhere. Buzzards circled overhead. Fleas hopped and jumped in every hut, infesting the bed furs. The levels of the water wells dropped as the women fought to stay clean and the water was used to wet down the thatch as well as put out the fires that started.

  The French women and children fared the same as the Indians, though their spirits were buoyed by the hope of rescue. They gathered together to pray at every spare moment, keeping to themselves as much as possible. There had been a time when it had seemed that they could possibly be assimilated into the tribe, but the presence of the French outside made them sharply aware of who they were and where they had come from, emphasizing the differences between them and the Natchez instead of the similarities. The Indians seemed to feel it also, for they were sharper with them and stricter than they had been since the early days of capture.

  A pair of field cannons taken from Fort Rosalie were mounted with great effort and finally brought into action. The first time they were fired created great panic among the French, who had not expected such retaliation. Unfortunately, the Indian warriors, in their enthusiasm, were too liberal in their use of powder. Late one afternoon, one of the pieces recoiled with such force that it broke its mounting and crashed to the ground, maiming half the gun crew. The barrel of the other overheated from the constant firing and, when swabbed out with water, cracked open. The first gun was remounted, but it fell silent within a few hours as the last of the powder and shot was used up. Further ransacking of the supplies brought from the village storehouse brought to light enough ammunition for another day, but that was all.

  Elise found the conditions of the siege as wearing as any. She had grown fond of Helene, but at the same time living in close quarters with her was a burden. She longed to be alone, without the constant need to be pleasant to the woman, to explain what was happening and quiet her alarms, to sympathize. The crying of the baby, which time and again dragged her from a tired sleep, was an irritant, especially since quiet for sleeping was so rare.

  She sometimes thought that if Helene had not been there Reynaud might have come to the hut more often. There was nothing to prove it, however. He was needed, in constant demand. When he managed to make it to the hut, it was to fall into a stupor of exhaustion. He liked to have her lie beside him even so; still, it seemed that the closeness they had known so briefly was fading. There were lines of fatigue in Reynaud’s face and he seldom stayed to talk once he awoke, but returned at once to his post. Sometimes he would hold her achingly tight or make love to her as if he feared it might be the last time. Bit by bit as the siege continued, she, too, became afraid that the passion and the joy were gone forever and that time was running out.

  Like the other Frenchwomen, Elise was made more aware of her nationality every day. It was not a conscious process, not her own choice; it simply happened. With the exception of Little Quail, the Indian women withdrew, treating her as they did the others. Feeling isolated, she responded in the same way. She spent more and more time with her own countrywomen, trying to see to it that they had their share of the food and water, that their injuries were treated and their b
urdens made less heavy. It was not easy, for they had the task of disposing of the refuse that littered the village: shoveling up the gnawed bones, vegetable scraps, and the dung; burying everything, as well as the animals killed by the scattered firing. They had to sweep up the torn and tattered clothing, the broken pottery. They also had to see to it that the rats, growing more fearless daily, did not get into the stores and that the dogs, going unfed, did not dig up the shallow-buried bodies of the dead. Lower than the Stinkards, they were watched and resented and scorned.

  Returning to the hut one day, Elise found Helene gone, though the baby lay asleep on a pallet of furs on the floor. Elise turned back to look for the woman. She found her near the gate. Helene was coming toward her, her face swollen and red-splotched with weeping, wet with her tears. Without a word, she went into Elise’s arms. Elise held her for a moment, then, when her own anxiety made it imperative, caught her arms, holding her from her.

  “Helene, what is it? Tell me!”

  The woman clenched her hands together, raising eyes that were drowned in pain, yet luminous with joy. “I saw him, Elise. I saw him.”

  “Who?”

  “Jean-Paul! He’s here. And I can’t bear it!”

  St. Amant, here. He had made it to Fort Saint Jean Baptiste then, with the others. Elise had not realized how worried she had been about them all until she felt the relief of knowing that he and Henri, and yes, even Pascal, were safe. St. Amant must have gone on to New Orleans and, learning of the expedition to the Natchez country, joined it.

  “Don’t you realize what this means?” she said, giving Helene a shake. “It means he cares for you, enough to come after you.”

  “But if he should be killed, what then? Reynaud has taught the Natchez to shoot too well. They defend every attempt to rush the gate and inflict such wounds, so much damage, so desperately do they fight. I’m so afraid, Elise, so afraid.”

  Elise stared at her, her lips pale and her eyes haunted. “We all are.”

  “You, too? But you seem so brave, so much in control of yourself.”

  Elise had thought that Helene might find her concern for Reynaud disgusting, a betrayal. Instead, it had aroused her compassion. She seemed to feel that Elise’s affair with the half-breed was no simple misalliance, but a tragedy. For herself and St. Amant she clung to hope, regardless of the circumstances, but for Elise’s relationship with Reynaud she had none. Some things by their very nature carried the seeds of their doom in their beginning, she said sorrowfully. This was one.

  Head lice appeared among the children, both Indian and French, and were fought by careful inspection and removal and drenches of steeped herbs. The dogs disappeared from the alleyways into the cooking pots. Then it rained for three days, washing refuse through the village, which ran into the wells, and afterward a fever broke out among the people spreading faster than a windswept fire. But it was the low levels of those wells and the swiftly emptying pots in the storehouse that caused the council to he held.

  Everyone in the village knew it. Elise attended with the rest but sat well out of hearing range. It seemed best not to draw too much attention to herself; the Natchez blamed the French women and children for causing the fever that had forced so many of their number to take to their benches, as they blamed them for so many diseases and with good reason. Elise wished that she could be close enough to hear Reynaud, for she knew he was to speak. But she depended on word of mouth, filtering back through the crowd, to tell her what was said.

  His voice, deep and rich as he spoke the flowing Natchez tongue with its many courtesies and sonorous phrasing, came to her. It struck a chord deep inside so that she listened to its timbre without thought for the meaning of the words, without trying to see him above the others. She had heard his voice in laughter and in passion and in love, and she would never forget the sound of it, never. How much she owed him and how little he had been repaid. But she had such memories as few women ever knew, such sweet, vital memories. She would hold them to her when she was old, taking them out one by one, holding them to the light to admire their flash and color. That first night on the trail when he had stood naked in the rain. The time she had seen him cast in silver with the moonlight on the bayou and had joined him there in the water. That evening of lavender-gray twilight when they had made love in the woods. The dusky afternoon when he had stolen her as his wife. A handful of memories. Her only regret was that there were not more.

  The speaker changed. An elderly man stood, shouting his rage, shaking his fist in the direction of the French. When he sat down, another rose, speaking in measured tones. When this man sat down in his turn, there was silence.

  Listening to the conversation around her, Elise understood that Reynaud had suggested they fight on, that the French were as bad off as they were. He said that the soldiers, many of whom were colonists with duties and obligations back in New Orleans, would soon grow tired of wasting powder and shot on a fortress they could not take. If they were patient, the French would send officers to talk of peace on Natchez terms. The elderly man who had spoken first had disagreed. He was enraged at the protracted siege, claiming that Reynaud would have the Natchez fight like the French instead of in their traditional way. He urged that they creep out at night and surround the French, killing them as they slept. The last man to speak disagreed with both. He feared that they would all die of disease and thirst where they were. The fever had weakened the warriors so that there were not enough fit to man the wall or to make a successful attack. He demanded that an embassy be sent to the French to sue for peace and arrange a meeting for the discussion of terms.

  The argument, shifting first one way, then another, continued far into the night. They could scarcely hold the wall for lack of able-bodied warriors, nor could they agree on an attack for the same reason. On the other hand, so vicious was the French offensive that it was feared they would slaughter a peace delegation before its members could speak. There were those who wanted to burn two of the Frenchwomen as a warning to the French of what would happen if they continued and also in retaliation for the Natchez who had been put to the stake by Governor Perier. The suggestion was shouted down, but the threat of it left an uneasy feeling in the air.

  At last Tattooed Arm got to her feet. She spoke with quiet conviction, finally putting forth a proposal that caused silence to descend.

  “What was it?” Elise leaned forward to ask Little Quail who was sitting a couple of rows in front of her.

  “The mother of the Great Sun has suggested that a Frenchwoman be sent to speak for us with the commandant of the French.”

  “Any such woman would be likely to tell the commandant to level the village.”

  “Most would do that,” Little Quail agreed. “Most, but not you, I think.”

  “No, but then it seems unlikely that the warriors of the Natchez would hide behind the skirts of a woman.”

  Little Quail frowned. “They would not look at it that way. The matter is delicate and also out of the ordinary. Who better than a woman, keeper of the peace and preserver of life, to represent them? A Frenchwoman who will come to no harm?”

  “Reynaud will not allow it.”

  “He must if it is the decision of the council. If this was a party of warriors away from the village, it would be different: his word would be supreme, even before that of the Great Sun. But here the fate of everyone must be decided and so the council will prevail.”

  The elders conferred among themselves. The Great Sun was consulted, then he motioned Reynaud to him. Finally a pronouncement was made. While it was being spoken, Reynaud stood scanning those gathered on the outskirts of the council. He moved toward Elise, threading his way, coming to her as if he had known where she was sitting all along. When he stopped before her, he reached down his hand to help her to her feet.

  “Come, my love,” he said, his eyes steel gray, mirroring the angry reluctance that gripped him. “You have been chosen.”

  When morning came, Tattooed Arm, Little Qu
ail, and Helene arrayed Elise in finest style. A gown of snuff brown velvet trimmed with lace and gold braid was brought from the storeroom for her use. Over it went a long cloak of woven swans-down, soft white with swirling designs of gold and red dyed in the soft and floating material. Her hair was braided and coiled on top of her head and held by shell combs. Necklaces of freshwater pearls were placed around her neck and earrings of gold purloined from the French were hung in her ears. No shoes could be found to fit her and so she wore her white wedding moccasins on her feet.

  In the little time left, Reynaud, the Great Sun, and Tattooed Arm coached her on what she was to say. From the top of the stockade a white cloth was waved as a sign of truce. Cane whistles shrilled. Drums beat. The narrow barricade at the fort’s opening was pulled aside.

  At the last minute, Reynaud blocked her way. His gaze moved over her as she stood so straight in her dignity before him. Her skin was touched lightly with gold from exposure to the sun these last weeks, but was flawless in its texture. Her hair shone in the first sunlight of the day; her amber-brown eyes were steady. She was beautiful in that moment, a woman of purpose and courage. He reached out to take her hand, carrying it to his lips.

  “I’m not sure I can let you go,” he said quietly.

  She met his eyes, searching their dark depths, noting the strain in his face and the exhaustion, noting also a burn across his shoulder where a brand from a blazing house he had been helping to extinguish had struck him. “I will return.”

  “Will you? What if the French won’t permit it?”

  “They must if they are to save the others.”

  “They might prefer to take them by force. There is that risk.”

  “The council has decided. I must go — for all of us, your people and mine.”