In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  John said, “Her father was a Cherokee man, and he was in love with two sisters who were slaves. They were so beautiful he couldn’t pick one. So he loved them both.”

  Family legend: Catherine and her sister lived together in one slave dwelling. Henry Ely was a free man, not allowed onto the plantation, so he dug a tunnel from the forest at the boundary of the land and under the fence. He planned the tunnel to open up into the dirt floor of the cabin of the sisters. (Like a fairy tale of a prince and two princesses—the fairy tales we were all told of captive women and a man whose love might rescue them. But this was 1850s Tennessee.)

  Free men of color were often killed or forced out of the area by slaveowners or vigilantes. New laws made the very presence of men like Henry illegal. If Henry was Cherokee, his life was endangered by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Jackson wanted the west, and Tennessee was then part of the west. Manifest Destiny—painted landscapes with white angels wearing white garments hovered over the wagon trains of white settlers as they crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee. The indigenous peoples known as the Five Civilized Tribes, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole, were forcibly removed by American militia from Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, sent on the winter death march known as the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma Territory.

  Whoever Henry Ely was, he called Catherine his wife, and they had six children. (The names of her sister and the children of that sister, and whether they were fathered by Henry are unknown.)

  By the time her family disintegrated, when Fine was about five, Reconstruction meant violence, starvation, and murder for freedmen and freedwomen. The Freedmen’s Bureau made reports such as these, in 1866, in Murfreesboro, near the place where Henry and Catherine lived, where a “colored” man gave testimony:

  July 28, 1865: “Ben (col’d) says on the 29th of June, ‘Beverly Randolph beat my wife with his fists then caught her by the chin threw back her head pulled out his knife swore he would cut her throat’—(the woman was large with child at the time.)” Randolph was fined $50.

  The Freedmen’s Bureau reported further: “The freedmen are daily driven from their homes without a cent after having been induced to work the year with a promise of a share of the crop. Husbands are not permitted to claim their wives or parents their children, women have been struck to the ground and choked.”

  “A freedman living twelve miles south came in last night, covered with blood, with severe cuts on his head—his former master had beaten him with a heavy stick while his son-in-law stood by with a pistol, because the freedman had said that he intended to go and hunt up his children, whom he had not seen in four years.”

  This is the world Fine was born into.

  She had lived in a small cabin with her people. Then there was a wagon—she either rode or walked behind. Did she cry and scream, when she saw her siblings taken away? Or was she taken first? She went alone. She never saw again the brothers and sisters with

  Skin

  that looked like hers and now her life was filled with cruelty, especially at the hands of an elderly matriarch to whom emancipation meant nothing.

  John Sims’s voice still resonated with hurt when he talked about Fine: “She told me many stories about her life with the family that took her. Her food was scraps from the plates of the family, or whatever wild nuts, fruits, and berries she could find. Her clothes—castoffs from the family. She found that she could earn a little money by selling the wild blackberries that she picked (five cents a gallon). This little money she would save in hopes of buying a pair of shoes, but in spite of her efforts to find a safe hiding place, the family would find the money and take it away. Beatings came at the least little thing, from all members of the family, especially from the old woman, who was nearly bald and suffering from mouth cancer.”

  Fine wanted shoes. She wore rags, chopped wood, brought water from the well, and still the old woman beat her as if the beatings were the old woman’s work, the schedule and imprint of her former life. Maybe she had beaten children all her life, or maybe she chose to beat only this one child, who would not be subdued.

  Fine was in tatters and cold. She was hungry. Inside, she was a furious whirl of anger. She was skin

  and Bone

  in the yard: well and woodpile, field and house. The woodpile. The insatiable need for wood to cook and wash clothes and always more wood. Her bare feet. Her anger.

  One day there was a glint of metal on the ground.

  A bullet. All those bullets, balls of lead aimed at the heads of soldiers on both sides, and then freedmen and women, the countryside near Murfreesboro littered with bullets and cannonballs and bones and even unburied bodies. Decades of war and retribution. Hunting and killing of animals and humans.

  Fine put the bullet into the pocket of her apron. It was her talisman. She was about eleven years old. In her mind, having not a single human to help her, she was capable of murder. She didn’t know anything about gunpowder or firing pins. She only knew people died from bullets.

  John Sims said, “Grandma (we pronounced it Gramaw and still do) was out picking berries (she never went to school!) and came upon a cartridge lying by the side of the road. She thought it to be a weapon all by itself. With great care, she hid it away for just the right moment. One day while chopping wood for the family stoves, the old woman came out to watch her . . . Gramaw told her, ‘These wood chips flying and you liable to get hit!’ The old woman told her to shut up and get to work. Soon the opportune moment came. When the old woman was looking away, Gramaw took the bullet out of her apron pocket. With all her might, she threw it at the old woman’s head. It landed flush on the temple. A bloodcurdling scream from the old woman that could be heard all around the farm brought the rest of the family on the run. Gramaw told them she said to watch out for the wood chips, but she still got a beating, which was the least of her pain. The one weapon she thought would give her a taste of revenge was a bitter disappointment. How can it be? she wondered. I know it hit her. Why didn’t she die?”

  She had cheekbones like ledges of slate under her eyes, and black hair thick and long. She was thirteen. She wanted shoes. She headed to the blackberry thickets along the edges of the woods, picking buckets of berries to sell to people passing by in wagons. It was 1887. She met a young man by the roadside. Robert. He might have been seventeen or eighteen. Fine fell in love. (The word is always fell, not leaped or landed or rested or dived. Fell.) She ran away with him, and he took her to an old shack in the woods built for migrant workers. Soon she was pregnant.

  No one ever says whether the white family tried to find her, or how far she had gone to be with Robert. When she grew bigger with child, Robert left, but someone in the area helped Fine give birth to her first daughter, Jennie. The father was listed as Robert Hofford. Fine was listed as Fin Hofford.

  Shortly after, alone with the baby, Fine was up and about, picking cotton, picking and selling wild berries. Robert returned with the season, and left again, twice more. Fine gave birth to a son, Mack, and the following year, to another son, Floyd.

  Her husband never returned. She was maybe sixteen or seventeen.

  She lived in a series of migrant camps in the woods with three children. There was no way to survive, out in the wild between Murfreesboro and Nashville, where the landscape is full of mountains, hollows, creeks, forks, branches, and a vast area called the Barrens. The countryside had not recovered from the war, and the roads were full of people who had no work, no money, and no hope.

  She believed there was only one human who would help her. For three years, she picked crops and wild berries, sold whatever she could, wore rags and fed the children, until she’d saved enough for train tickets to Texas. She had heard her father, Henry Ely, had gone to Denton.

  Fine and the three children made it to Denton, which by 1900 was a city of five thousand people. She wandered the town, asking people about Henry Ely. No one knew anything about this man. The possibil
ities of what may have happened to a free man of color, whether he was Cherokee or part black, are endless. The Freedmen’s Bureau accounts of murder and kidnapping, of bodies dumped in rivers and woods, are only those of people who actually reported the crimes to government officials. The skeletons of freedmen and women were everywhere.

  She was overcome by everything, at the end of the first day. She and the children had not a single penny left, no food, and nowhere to sleep. She sat on a log near a piece of land just at the edge of town, crying.

  A man saw them from his farmhouse porch. She was sitting on the road below his land. His name was Zack Rawlings, or Zach Rollins, or several variations of those. He was fifty years old. She was maybe twenty-two. She was a beautiful young woman in desperate circumstances. He went outside to ask her whether she and the children needed a place to stay.

  She gathered up her children and followed Zack Rawlings inside. She had no idea of the violence that would ensue here—a continuation and catalyst that would change her life again.

  There is a single photograph of Fine, from the 1940s. Her cheekbones are high and wide, her hair curled carefully, her eyes large and brown, her lips held closed over her teeth. As a teenager, hearing these stories at my future husband’s house, in the driveway where her grandchildren were adults of immense physical presence, holding the ribs of pigs, talking about how she saved their lives, I imagined her as large and powerful. But she was slight and cautious. Watchful and intent. There was inside her a core of fury and independence and self-preservation, the genetic heritage of survival.

  McMinnville to Nashville, Tennessee, to Denton, Texas: 714 miles, not counting the miles walked from the woodpile and the well to the house of the woman who beat her, or the miles walked in the forest picking blackberries and selling them in pails along the road.

  3

  The Dance

  Ruby Triboulet, Colorado Prairie, 1921

  It’s the story we all heard, you three girls all saw in movies and on television and in songs, the fantasy and marriage: I fell in love with her the first time I laid eyes on her. The minute I saw her, there could never be another woman for me. Just one look, that’s all it took. I had to have her. I made sure no one else could have her.

  Romantic. It’s what we girls are given as true love—first sight, and no other suitors. When I finally heard the story of how Ruby Triboulet, my grandmother, met Robert Straight, my grandfather, I was fifty years old, the same age as she was when she died in Colorado. I had finally gone to visit my relatives in Nunn, on the prairie flatlands of northeast Colorado, near the borders of Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska, where the wind blows every day.

  In the small front room of a tiny house, night fell with absolute darkness as if a velvet blanket had dropped from the wide sky onto the dirt lanes of Nunn. There were only three hundred people left in town, down from fifteen hundred in the 1950s.

  Dale Barnaby, whose mother, Vara, was Ruby’s sister, had moved this house in 1952 from the abandoned prairie town of Purcell. Dale was eighty-six years old, and his wife, Kahla, born in Nunn, was eighty-seven. Because I had come to stay with them, they’d called his brother Galen, seventy-seven, his younger sister Toots, seventy-four, and his sister-in-law Fuzz, seventy-six, to join us.

  These five people hadn’t seen me for thirty years. In 1982, my brother Jeff and I drove across the country, and we slept one night at this tiny house. Now they stared at me. I had asked about my grandmother Ruby. They kept glancing cautiously at one another as if to decide whether I was old enough to hear this. Their voices were rough and hesitant. They didn’t even want to say my grandfather’s name.

  “Well, it was right over there in Purcell, I’d say, at the schoolhouse,” Kahla said. “They had a dance, and four of the sisters went.”

  “And he had a gun,” Dale said. He moved his mouth from side to side, looking at me. I was a Straight. Descendant of the man whose name no one liked to mention, even then. I felt so strange, thinking that this terrifying blood was my blood, even though my father had nothing but fear in his own bones.

  “Bob Straight,” Dale finally said. “He had a gun in his coat.”

  “Mom said he seen Ruby right away, she was so little and pretty, and she’d just gotten here from Illinois. Where they were from. The sisters,” Toots said.

  Dale said, “He went all around the dance floor tellin’ every man not to dance with her, and he shown ’em his gun. She was just alone all night, she was real sad, and no one asked her to dance. Only him. He finally asked her and she danced with him. Then after that they got married.”

  My father was Ruby’s youngest child. Richard Dean Straight.

  Until I was eighteen, I saw him once a month. Maybe once or twice a year, he talked about his mother, Ruby, in very short cryptic tales, almost like fables. In our part of southern California, we lived very close to the heat of the desert, but also within sight of the mountain ranges whose spines ran the length of the state. I lived in Riverside, and my father lived with his new family twenty-four miles away, near Pomona, at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. My father’s young life had been so turbulent, dangerous, and unsparing that he could never pull himself away from those memories, and each strange scene he gave me was out of context, like a Picasso where I was staring at noses and elbows and then a knife. He told me he ate sheep that had been dead for days. A gray-white grizzly bear that he and his father cut into pieces. We ate Wonder Bread smeared with margarine, and he told me this bread had once been a miracle to him.

  He had been raised in the coldest place in America—Fraser, Colorado, elevation 8,573 feet in the height of the Rocky Mountains. In winter, he took me to the snow here in California, and when I marveled at the crystalline shimmer and the whiskers of ice inside my nostrils, he said that in Fraser, the snow would bury their ranch cabin, and ice would coat his blanket, coat the iron rims of the bed where he slept in the barn, seal their cooking water inside the bucket.

  I spent one weekend a month at his house—without fail. No matter whether I missed birthday parties or trips to Disneyland or a school event—without fail. When I was small, and one time forgot to flush the toilet, he said that he never lived in a house with inside plumbing until he was twelve, and I was five, and I had always had a toilet. If I forgot to turn off a light, he said he had never lived in a house with electricity until he was twelve, and I was seven, and had always had wall switches.

  But he taught me to fish. He taught me to cook a trout at the edge of the lake. At night, he bent to check the night-light near me. A night-light in each room. He was obsessive about that. Even then, I realized how much my father, so intimidating to me, was afraid of the dark.

  Ruby Triboulet was the third of six sisters, born in 1901. She was small, just five feet tall, with soft waves to her dark hair. Soft eyes. Soft wide mouth, not quite a smile. Soft cheeks. Her picture, taken when she was leaving for Colorado, at nineteen, shows no bones—no sharp shelves of cheek, no bump on her nose, no prominent forehead or collarbones. Not like her mother, Amanda, or her sisters Hazel, Vara, and Emma. They are all bones. Ruby looks apprehensive, dreamy.

  The Triboulet girls—Hazel, Vara, Ruby, Emma, Genevieve, and Helen—and their only brother, Carl, were born on a farm at Bear Creek, in Hancock County, Illinois. (It’s possible other babies died.) The land belonged in 1859 to their grandfather, Francois Edouard Triboulet, who had come to America from France in 1850. The farm was near the confluence of three creeks, about forty miles from the Mississippi River, which formed the border with Iowa. Their father, Francois “Frank,” born in 1872, and mother, Amanda Baldon, born in 1874, were married in 1890. Francois sounds like a gentle, hapless man whose house was full of women; Amanda’s face, which was always angry according to my father and in the two photographs I’ve seen, was replicated in the faces of four daughters with the pointed chins and hatchet cheeks and classic gaunt features of rural hard-life women. Only Ruby and her baby sister, Helen, had the round cheeks and constant
curving smiles of their father.

  Francois Triboulet, Genevieve Triboulet, Amanda Baldon Triboulet, Emma Triboulet, Carl Triboulet, Ruby Triboulet; in front, Helen Triboulet. Hancock County, Illinois, around 1920; Ruby and Emma are going west.

  The weather was often bad, the land flooded, the crops were poor, and the daughters would inherit no land.

  Hazel, the eldest, paved the way for all her siblings to move west. She’d gone bravely to the prairie drylands of northeastern Colorado, where antelope outnumbered people in the big square counties. She became a schoolteacher, and wrote to her sisters about the abundant land, the farming and ranching, the prairie schoolhouses, and the climate without humidity or drenching rain. Hazel and Vara had married two cousins, Charles and Armon Barnaby, and they all went out in 1915 in a Model A Ford to Nunn, Colorado, a tiny town on the railroad where people raised dryland crops, depending on rain. White wheat and sugar beets. Beef cattle and dairy cows.

  Vara’s husband, Armon Barnaby, was a big rough dark-haired man. They didn’t live in town, but on a series of windblown ranches where Vara had ten children. Places with no water or electricity, with snow drifted inside the attics where the children slept, with deer shot in fall up on the Poudre River, and antelope shot for dinner any day on a bad week. But Armon Barnaby said that in the dry sweet air and constant wind, he could breathe for the first time in his life.

  After a time, the sisters sent for Ruby, Emma, and Genevieve. (Only Helen, who was seven, stayed in Illinois.) Now there were five young women out on the prairie, loading up in the Model A Ford and heading up the Poudre Canyon to the Rockies, driving backward because those old gas tanks would empty out the other way. Picnics and fishing. Church on Sundays—they had all joined the Foursquare Gospel Church of Aimee Semple McPherson, and became Sunday school teachers. In each tiny prairie town, the first ranchers to fence land would construct a small church, a white spire to break the endless horizon of green grass and big sky.