Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  I never minded living with them even if I did have to do a right fair amount of fetching and toting for them—as Uncle Andrew one time said about it—and never got to be around any kids my own age. Except for some corn, Uncle Achan and them didn’t farm any. They had some horses and hogs, but like us when I lived with Uncle Andrew, they let their stock run loose in the woods until they needed them. Uncle Achan and my other uncles just hunted and fished mostly, just like our granddaddy Jed used to do. Of course, Jed was directly descended from them and he had the same kinds of ways they had.

  I stayed with them for two years and I learned a lot about fishing and hunting. I also learned most of my American from them because I couldn’t talk it very good when I was littler and living with Grandma and Grandpa Sanford. Grandpa Sanford talked Cherokee to me and to Grandma too. She learned it during all them years she lived with Grandpa. Uncle Andrew used to come over there from time to time to see how us all was doing. Mainly, though, I think he came just to see me. Finally, one time when he come over, he talked to Uncle Achan and Aunt Gustine about me coming back over here and going to school. Why I was pert-near twelve years old and wouldn’t of knowed anything about schooling even if it was to of snuck up on me and bit me in the butt. Uncle Andrew told about how his daughter Letty was learning to read and write real good and that I ought to learn it too. Me, I was all for it. He said they had a surveyor feller with the new railroad that was running by Coldstream who was teaching the younguns thereabouts their ABCs and stuff. Said the man wanted to git out of railroad work because he hated traveling around and that he wanted to set up a full-scale school at Coldstream. So, anyway, it was decided by Uncle Achan and Aunt Gustine and Uncle Andrew and them other Lamley uncles that I ought to come over here and live with Uncle Andrew and Aunt Elvira and learn my ABCs with my cousins and the other kids. And that was how I come to live over here and here I been ever since.

  Well, that schooling part went okay for a few months and then that surveyor feller, Mr. Bailey, was up and transferred out by the railroad to somewhere else and that was the end of my schooling. But at least I had my ABCs by then and could read a smidgin and figure some figures and from then on out I went on and learned more by my own self after I growed up.

  That great-big cypress over there, where the bayou starts to turn this way? Well, up that rise from it, that’s where Uncle Andrew’s house used to be, and from where we’re sitting now you couldn’t of seen it in them days for all the trees. That house was pretty big even for them days. It was log-built with four rooms connected by a dog-trot to four more rooms. It had a wide front porch and a little bitty back porch and the whole thing was set high up on cypress blocks and covered on the outside with cypress shingles. There was a lot of out buildings too, a barn, a cow shed, a corncrib, and a pigpen. Now you can’t hardly see a single sign of none of it, for shore none of the oak and gumball trees that covered the whole place. But if you look close from here, you can see a couple of apple trees that’s gone wild mixed in that thicket that runs alongside that ditch going into the bayou. That’s all that’s left of the fruit orchard Uncle Andrew had in his backyard. One time about ten years ago, I walked around up there, looking at the plowed ground, and I picked up a handful of them old-timey square nails. They was all bent and eat up with rust and not good for nothing anymore. But I still got them in a coffee can that I keep on my bedstand.

  Now this bayou here, I spent many a day in there when I was little, getting my tail end wet frogging after crawdads and shiners, and when I got bigger I trapped and fished and hunted all up and down it, clean down to Muddy. I have took many a coon and possum and rabbit out of them bayou woods and snagged many a bass and cat and buffalo with my trapboxes and trotlines. Now you look out there and what do you see? Nothing but a handful of cypress and a soybean field that stays too damp most of the year-round for that fool Eustace Tanner to get much more than a sorry crop out of. That Tanner. He’s a sight. Like most of his kin, he’s a man that’s so stingy and selfish and shifty that he has to lock his tools up every night so he won’t steal them off of hisself. It was all a sight better when it was all bayou woods down there.

  Uncle Andrew was looked on as our chief around here when I was a boy, but we never called him that. I mean we never made a point of just flat out calling him chief. He just was. He was your great-great granddaddy, and he wudn’t actually my uncle at all. What he was, he was a cousin. But I called him uncle all the same and even sort of looked up to him like the daddy I never had. He farmed quite a bit of cotton and corn and had some livestock that run wild in the woods until we needed some beef or ham or a horse to ride. People used to say that he was better at farming than most of the white farmers around here even, and you might not believe it but that’s saying something for shore since it’s been my notice that white people always act like they invented farming and things like that. Uncle Andrew was married to Elvira Squirrel, who was Quapaw Indian and close kin to Lamley and Tyrell folks. Uncle Andrew, as you know, was close to being a full-blood Indian hisself. He was almost half-Chickasaw and full half-Cherokee.im and Aunt Elvira had two girls. There was Letty, who was eight when I came over here to live with them, and there was Marandy, who was already a grown woman and married and with a family of her own. Marandy and her husband lived further off down the bayou a ways, but still in yelling distance of our house. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Elvira had a boy too, I think I heard one time, but he died when he was little and so I never knowed him.

  This was all Thompson land that Uncle Andrew farmed. It belonged to his and Aunt Minnie’s and Aunt Velma’s daddy, and they say that just before he died, he—old Alluk, their daddy—put it all in Uncle Andrew’s name because in them days women couldn’t hold title to land. Matter of fact, Indians wudn’t suppose to neither. I heard it told that old Alluk got around that prejudice by his out and out oneryness and by out-whiting the whites. He donated money to both the Coldstream Baptist Church and the Coldstream Cumberland Presbyterian one that has long since gone out of business, and he never even set foot in neither one of them. This was before the Methodist one come along that Aunt Elvira and Marandy joined up with. Old Alluk bought this section sometime back in the 1840’s and moved here from Bonaparte. It was after he died and Uncle Andrew and Aunt Elvira got married and started their family that all the assorted Squirrel and Tyrell kin started moving in over here.

  But even if all the outside folks counted Uncle Andrew as our leader, it was really my two aunts, Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma, who was the real head of our folks. Since Arkansas law in them days had it that no woman—not even two women together—could own land in their own name, it was all in Uncle Andrew’s name. Them aunts was old women even when I was a boy and they lived off down hereabouts on the bayou, off to theirselves. Two old-maid aunts they was, always good to me and passable pleasant to most other folks around here, but still at the same time they kept off by theirselves mostly. When I first came over here to live, they was medicine women and they did midwifing and stuff like that for all the folks around here. Over at Simms Bayou, Aunt Gustine and Uncle Achan was medicine people too, but they wudn’t educated to it like Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was. And that wasn’t all. Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was makers of spells and fixers of bones, what they used to call “putter-inners” and “taker-outers.” This meant they was in a special kind of class as healers and was looked up to by mostly everybody around. And it wudn’t just our folks that come to them for doctoring either. Sometimes white folks and niggers come to see them, too, when they needed help.

  Back then, there wudn’t no doctors—school trained white doctors I mean—around here like there is now. Some of the plantations started hiring doctors a little later on, but when I first come over here there wudn’t none. The closest white doctor I knowed anything about was over at Delta City and he was a half-blind old drunk who was just as apt to saw you in two as to cut your britches leg off if you was to go see him to have him do something about your bad leg. They tell a st
ory about how he doctored a cow with a whole mess of calomel when he got called out to somebody’s house one time. I don’t remember whose house and whose cow it was. The story goes that when that doctor got there and asked where the patient was, the man whose house he was at said, “She’s on back there in that-ter back room, Doc,” and so when the doc went on back he made a wrong turn or something and instead of going into the bedroom he winded up at a kind of lean-to shed they had there—a milk stall I ’spect it was—that was built on the back of the house. “She,” so the doc must of thought, was the white-face cow they had tied back there and not the man’s wife who was in the bedroom the whole time. Well, the doc guessed that the cow’s belly was a little too swole up so he dosed her up real good with some calomel. They say that for a whole week that cow shit like a tied coon. And they also say that he never did git around to doctoring that sick woman.

  So there was no doctors to speak of in these parts. Not unless a person wanted to go to a cow-doctoring old drunk over on the river at Delta City and that about twelve miles away. That, or travel sixty mile by train to Pine Bluff, but even then to go by train to Pine Bluff, you would of had to go clear out to Monticello to catch the train. Or if a boat was handy, and I guess this would of been the most likely thing to do, you could go down and then cross the river to Greenville where two or three school trained white doctors was. But folks around here in them days wudn’t likely to do things that way. They was all-white, colored, Indian—pretty hard-working folks, farmers and loggers and hunters and fishermen, folks not known to have much in the way of cash on them or a whole lot of time on their hands for traveling. So when it come to patching up torn-up bodies and dosing whooping cough and such-like, why they had to make do with what they had. My two aunts was Indian medicine-makers, taught by their own aunt who was, so I been told, a full-blood Deer Clan Cherokee woman who come into these parts from the old country back east when the government started pushing Indians off of their lands, and they knowed a heap about doctoring and so folks just naturally come to them for help.

  Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was Cherokee. Well, they was and they wudn’t. What I mean is their mama was Cherokee, Deer Clan, like that older medicine-maker sister of hers whose name I never knowed except that I remember that an older cousin of mine sometime just called her Deer Woman and that she was a Sendforth. Their granddaddy, Aunt Minnie’s and Aunt Velma’s, was an Indian who somehow got his name listed on the government enrolling census as Sendforth because I ’spect he likely considered hisself and his family too as them that was sent forth from their homeland. Anyhow, that’s where my name come from. My granddaddy, the son of the Sendforth I’m talking about, he changed it to Sandford, and according to Uncle Andrew, it was my mama who spelled it Sanford, dropping one of the “d’s.” I guess maybe I’m expected to change it up some too, since it seems like that’s what the tradition calls for. Only I won’t. I’m satisfied with it just the way it is. Always remember this: we ain’t the people our granddaddies and grandmas was. I know that real good and so I guess I just don’t have the gumption to change my name any like they done.

  As I done said, Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma’s daddy was old Alluk Thompson. He was a Chickasaw man from Mississippi and he come into these parts about the time Arkansas become a territory, settling down first at Bonaparte, then over at Simms Bayou, and then finally over here. Now Bonaparte, in case you don’t know it, was a pretty good-sized river town back then, like Delta City is now, only even bigger, and it was knowed far and wide for its saloons and bawdy houses and gambling dens. It was kind of like the way the south side of Pine Bluff is these days, except that it would of made Pine Bluff look like a Sunday School class if the two was to be put upside each other and looked at. Bonaparte is long gone. When I was still just a little-bitty squirt, it was washed away. I can still remember when it happened. There come a big flood and it was entirely washed off the face of the land. All its buildings and streets and stores and pest-houses and filth and meanness was swept clean away by the Mississippi. I ’spect Bonaparte might be found somewheres down in the Gulf of Mexico now, may-ored over and sheriffed over by big catfishes talking Mexican. Wouldn’t faze me a bit to hear it.

  Now, old Alluk’s wife died while they was still living in Bonaparte, a long time before the flood come, and when she did, he come up and moved to Simms Bayou where there was other Indian folks living, taking with him when he moved Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma, who was just little girls then, and a whole passel of assorted kinfolks. Old Alluk stayed at Simms Bayou just about a year, long enough to sell off his holdings in and around Bonaparte. Then he up and moved over here, buying this section when there wudn’t no more than a handful of people in the whole township. That old aunt come with them, too, and she was by that time a kind of substitute mama to Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma as well as their medicine teacher. The story goes that she hated old Alluk like rat poison, but that she come along on the move to help bring up the girls and Uncle Andrew, too, who was just a little-bitty kid then, and even then she wouldn’t live in the same house with him. She lived off by herself in the woods a ways and, as I heard it, would never set foot in Alluk’s house as long as he was around and would never talk nothing but Cherokee to them girls and Uncle Andrew, or for that matter to other folks neither when she even bothered to talk to other people at all. I can just barely remember that older aunt, who I calculate would of been my great-great aunt. She was always a shadowy person to me, just like my memory of her is now, and I remember her as the oldest person I think I ever seen or even knowed about. So even if Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was almost half-Chickasaw as well as being half-Cherokee, they was really more Cherokee in their ways because of that older aunt’s influence on them. That woman just straight out took them girls away from their daddy, but like some older folks was in the habit of saying when I was a boy, that had been the best thing that could of happened to them. There had been some talk, all a long, long time before I was even borned, that my aunts had been wayward and wild some before they moved away from Bonaparte and Simms Bayou and come over here, especially with that white-trash element there was around at Bonaparte. Whatever the story was, that old aunt took over care of them and brung them up proper in a good Indian way. She, who had spent just about all her whole life taking care of them or some other Thompson or other kin and never getting married to nobody, just like her nieces in their time would never wed nobody either, left her impression on them girls just as sure and certain as a candle mold does when you go and pour a dab of hot wax on it.

  …because I believe that all this forever afterwards will be the key to who you going to be and what you make out of yourself to be. It ain’t no real never-mind at all whether you stay living around here the rest of your life, or whether you move off to somewheres else. You this place and this place is you. Don’t ever forgit it, son.

  WATER WITCH

  Louis Owens

  According to Choctaw and Cherokee traditions, rivers are sacred, living beings with destinies of their own. In this personal essay, Louis Owens remembers his father, a man who knew rivers and their secret hiding places deep within the earth. Owens shares his childhood memories of California’s Salinas River, whose presence captured his imagination.

  Louis Owens, of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish ancestry, is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His novel The Sharpest Sight is also set in the Salinas Valley. He has recently published a critical work entitled Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel.

  FOR A WHILE, WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, MY FATHER WAS A WATER witch. He took us with him sometimes, my older brother and me, and we walked those burned-up central California ranches, wherever there was a low spot that a crop-and-cattle desperate rancher could associate with a dream of wetness. The dusty windmills with their tin blades like pale flowers would be turning tiredly or just creaking windward now and then, and the ranch dogs—always long-haired, brown and black with friendly eyes—would sweep th
eir tails around from a respectful distance. The ranches, scattered near places like Creston, Pozo, San Miguel, and San Ardo, stretched across burnt gold hills, the little ranch houses bent into themselves beneath a few dried up cottonwoods or sycamores, some white oaks if the rancher’s grand-father had settled early enough to choose his spot. Usually there would be kids, three or four ranging from diapers to hotrod pickups, and like the friendly ranch dogs they’d keep their distance. The cattle would hang close to the fences, eyeing the house and gray barn. In the sky, red-tailed hawks wheeled against a washed-out sun while ground squirrels whistled warnings from the grain stubble.

  He’d walk, steps measured as if the earth demanded measure, the willow fork held in both hands before him pointed at the ground like some kind of offering. We’d follow a few yards behind with measured paces. And nearly always the wand would finally tremble, dip and dance toward the dead wild oats, and he would stop to drive a stick into the ground or pile a few rock-dry clods in a cairn.

  A displaced Mississippi Choctaw, half-breed, squat and reddish, blind in one eye, he’d spit tobacco juice at the stick or cairn and turn back toward the house, feeling maybe the stirring of Yazoo mud from the river of his birth as if the water he never merely discovered, but drew all that way from a darker, damper world. Within a few days he’d be back with his boss and they’d drill a well at the spot he’d marked. Not once did the water fail, but always it was hidden and secret, for that was the way of water in our part of California.

  When I think now of growing up in that country, the southern end of the Salinas Valley, a single mountain range from the ocean, I remember first the great hidden water, the Salinas River which ran out of the Santa Lucias and disappeared where the coastal mountains bent inland near San Luis Obispo. Dammed at its headwaters into a large reservoir where we caught bluegill and catfish, the river never had a chance. Past the spillway gorge, it sank into itself and became the largest subterranean river on the continent, a half-mile-wide swath of brush and sand and cottonwoods with a current you could feel down there beneath your feet when you hunted the river bottom, as if a water witch yourself, you swayed at every step toward the stream below.