Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  Terry decided to look into the photograph and discovered that his grandmother, Bettie Ligon, was a Choctaw freedwoman. Along with two thousand other freed Choctaw and Chickasaw descendants of the enslaved—or freedmen—she filed a lawsuit in 1907 in order for them to be transferred from the freedmen rolls to the rolls of the Choctaw and Chickasaw by blood. She refused to even accept a freedmen land patent until the courts decided if she was a freedwoman or a citizen by blood. In 1911, the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, where it was ultimately dismissed because “the appellants failed to file printed briefs.”3 For over thirty years, Terry has been telling the story of Bettie Ligon and mobilizing efforts to connect descendants of other Choctaw and Chickasaw freedpeople throughout the country. Had Terry not found those photos, he would have thought of himself as African American only, with no ties to other cultures or identities. If Terry hadn’t pushed past his initial disbelief, he would have never discovered the indigenous background that rooted him to a specific time and place in Indian territory. Before the end of our conversation, Terry said to me, “What you’re doing is very important, because it’s all tied together. We tend to see ourselves so apart that we don’t see how closely we’re related. It’s the fallacy of race.”

  Terry informed me his late father, Warren, was from Oklahoma and left that state because he couldn’t stand the conservative Southern attitudes any longer. I decided that Oklahoma was the next stop for me. If blacks and indigenous people were as tied together as Terry claimed, then maybe that was the place to unearth those connections.

  Upon further research, I came upon an NPR feature on a group of Oklahomans fighting to be recognized by the Cherokee nation. They looked like regular black people to me: no high cheekbones, and not all of them had slick, dark hair. But they were native. And they were also black. And they, like the Creoles of Louisiana, were fighting to be able to exist, legally as citizens of both the United States and the Cherokee Nation. Their ancestors were categorized as freedmen. But that label historically was the beginning of a long, cruel road of separating black people from their indigenous heritage, negating their blood connections, and seizing the lands that they had claims to; such treatment eventually induced some families, like Terry Ligon’s, to abandon the continual struggle to possess what was rightfully theirs and migrate instead.

  Many Americans have some familiarity with the Trail of Tears, but I’d like to back up a bit for context. In the 1830s, about 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions and millions of acres throughout the southeastern United States in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. As one can imagine, these millions of acres were worth an inestimable amount, and the United States government wanted all that land to grow cotton for slaves to line white pockets with. But white people weren’t the only ones who owned slaves. In terms of hierarchy, enslaved black people were the lowest of the low—subhuman and possessed. Indigenous people, though inferior to whites, were superior to blacks, which gave them a chance to be groomed and refined into mainstream society.

  George Washington believed that the best way to correct the “Indian problem”—for he thought of them as savages—was to civilize certain tribes through education, conversion to Christianity, English language proficiency, and slave ownership. These tribes, known as the Five Civilized Tribes, were the Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. The United States government encouraged the Five Civilized Tribes to participate in chattel slavery for two reasons: (1) to interbreed the native population with their white fellow slave owners, diluting Indians’ undesirable “primitive” traits, and (2) more important, to dissuade the Native Americans from protecting runaway slaves.4 But even assimilation didn’t protect these tribes from white atrocities. Because whites didn’t see indigenous people as equals, they dispossessed and massacred them at will. Before Andrew Jackson became president, he led wars against the Creeks in Georgia and the Seminoles in Florida, transferring many thousands of acres from natives to white farmers. And then in 1830, when Jackson was president, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced these tribes to move west of the Mississippi into what is now known as Oklahoma. The brutal journey they took is known as the Trail of Tears. A little-known fact about the Trail of Tears—one I never learned in grade school—was that both free blacks and enslaved blacks accompanied the Five Civilized Tribes on this journey.5

  Historians, such as Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, consider this journey westward to be the Second Middle Passage.6 For the second time in history, enslaved black people were forced to leave their homes and the lands they knew, to cross another body of water into unfamiliar territory. Instead of being crammed into the holds of ships, they had to walk thousands of miles without enough wagons to carry the sick, elderly, and young. Instead of suffocating heat, they died of bitter cold, disease, and malnutrition.7 This forced migration was a precursor to the Great Migration.

  By the mid to late nineteenth century, the ideas surrounding blackness, indigeneity, and blood purity all became contentious points. Once enslaved blacks were emancipated, these categories began to take on a more capitalistic and therefore more racially segregated meaning. The question for both the United States government and the governments of these five tribes was this: What was to be done about the blacks, all of them now free? Were they American citizens, citizens of the native nation, or both? In 1866, treaties with the United States government and the Five Civilized Tribes were signed saying that all people of African descent would be able to vote and would be afforded the same rights and privileges as everyone else.

  In order to “civilize” these tribes even more, the government wanted to switch them from communal to individual land ownership.8 To implement this, the Dawes Act of 1887 empowered the president of the United States to divide tribal land into individual allotments. The Dawes Commission was responsible for carrying out these orders. The commission separated people into categories and allocated the land differentially. The citizens and freedmen were different categories. If you had African ancestry, you weren’t a citizen; you were a freedman.

  White clerks dispatched from Washington set up offices in Oklahoma towns and villages to categorize people. Because most of these clerks did not speak the languages of the tribes, they relied on sight. If you “looked” black, you were placed on the Freedmen Roll. It didn’t matter if you had an indigenous parent. If you looked black, you were; you weren’t given a blood quantum, like full-blood or half-blood. If you “looked” Indian, with typical Indian features, such as high cheekbones, reddish skin, and silky hair, you were placed on the By Blood Roll. As you can imagine, this procedure led to an imbalance of rights and privileges among relatives. Members of one family would be on different rolls. Indigenous women married black men, and their children suddenly became freedmen. Blacks free prior to emancipation were grouped with the formerly enslaved blacks.

  With the exception of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, everyone in the same tribe received the same land allotment: Cherokee, 110 acres; Creek, 160; and Seminole, 120. The Choctaw and Chickasaw by blood were to receive 320 acres, while the Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen were to receive 40.9 But freedmen were often disenfranchised of even that land. Unlike the by-blood people, they didn’t have to clear their land transactions with the Indian Bureau, making them vulnerable to unscrupulous white settlers migrating from the Deep South. Many freedmen, fresh from the throes of slavery, could not read, and it was not uncommon to hear of a freedman selling his 160 acres for a measly fifteen dollars.10 At the same time, white people were paying clerks five dollars to put them on the By Blood Roll to get the land allotment. So many did this that they came to be known as the Five Dollar Indians.11

  I was meant to believe that blacks and natives were always separate; the Dawes Rolls enforced this separation. It’s no accident that I believed blood determines one’s race or ethnicity and that blackness precludes any
claim to be partly anything else; that’s the ghost of the one-drop rule. It’s no accident that I thought blacks should look a certain way despite having mixed and intermarried with other groups for centuries. These misconceptions that my family held to be true had historical precedents, even though we weren’t aware of the Dawes Rolls or any black people in Indian country. This expulsion across the Mississippi was a direct cause of our narrow ideas about black identity.

  After absorbing this information, I returned to that NPR article and found out that the leader of the fight for Cherokee freedmen to be recognized by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma was Marilyn Vann. Marilyn Vann is a distant descendant of James Vann, one of the largest slaveholders in the Cherokee Nation. At the time of his death, at age forty-three, he was said to be one of the richest men in the Cherokee Nation as well as the eastern United States. Two decades later, under the Indian Removal Act, James Vann’s family and their two thousand slaves marched to Indian territory.12 I e-mailed Marilyn through her contact information on the website of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes—of which she serves as president—and she responded to me within less than forty-eight hours.

  During a lengthy introductory phone call, she told me that her family has been in Oklahoma since the early 1800s, but she can trace her line back even further. Her late father, George Musgrove Vann, spoke Tsalagi, the official Cherokee language, and attended stomp dances. He was awarded 110 acres as compensation for the United States government forcing his family to move to Oklahoma from Georgia on the Trail of Tears.13 Hmm, I thought. My maternal line is full of relatives who claim Indian. My maternal grandfather is from Georgia. Could Cherokee be the Indian that my family thought was in ’em? This wasn’t enough to go on, though. Not yet. I listened to Marilyn as she talked and kept my assumptions to myself until I had more information.

  Vann has ancestors on the Cherokee Freedmen and By Blood rolls. Back in the late aughts, she applied for tribal membership in the Cherokee Nation but was denied. Like other black and native people, she had been unaware of the term freedmen. “I called the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and they kind of blew me off. I called the tribal registrar’s office, and they kind of blew me off. I was not aware of freedmen. Up till that time that term had not meant anything to me. The only thing that I knew was that my father had been a member of the tribe and he had received a land allotment at some time. But I didn’t know that he had status of freedman—him and his parents, grandparents, everybody.

  “I don’t know what happened to my father’s allotment. The majority of allotments were stolen from freedmen people. They were stolen from other tribal members too. One of the freedmen on my mother’s side was Choctaw and Chickasaw. They said that their elderly relative had died and they found some oil on his land. They said a white man showed up and demanded they leave the property that day. They squatted on the land and were eventually able to get it.

  “You have all these kinds of cases with people—murders. You’ve probably heard of the Osage murders. You had some of those. You had a lot of just outright murders, intimidation, harassment—white men showing up with guns, you know? And telling you to leave. Outright murders, you know—people disappearing. Being persecuted. Bodies disappearing. Or whites filing false papers in the courthouses saying that they had been sold this land for ten dollars—160 acres.” Just to be clear, 160 acres is approximately 121 football fields. “There’s just not many people who still have their valuable land.”

  Marilyn Vann was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Cherokee Nation. After a decade of fighting, in 2017, a US district judge ruled that Cherokee freedmen must have citizenship rights. Vann called the decision “groundbreaking.” In an interview with NPR, she says, “What this means for me, is the freedmen people will be able to continue our citizenship . . . and also that we’re able to preserve our history. All we ever wanted was the rights promised us to continue to be enforced.”14

  The turning-point period between black and indigenous families was 1890 to the late 1950s—Reconstruction and the Great Migration. Whites were threatened by the influx of black people pouring into Oklahoma because of the promise of land and so enacted Jim Crow to curtail their movement. The first bill passed in the Oklahoma Senate stipulated that if you had a drop of African blood, you were black. If you were indigenous, especially if you were white-presenting, you were legally defined as white. Vann said to me, “You have a lot of people in these former slaveholding tribes who now think they’re better than their Negro relatives and neighbors.”

  “So they were identifying as white?” I asked.

  “Yes! I’ve heard stories of how some would hide their black grandparents in the back of the house so people wouldn’t see them. All people of African descent know about having family members who pretend like they don’t know you in certain places. Oklahoma is full of that.”

  During the second wave of the Great Migration, from about 1940 to 1970, Oklahoma lost 14 percent of its black population, much of it to the West.15 One of Marilyn’s cousins was part of that group. In 1940, he moved to Los Angeles, where he still lives. There isn’t as much scholarship on the black-and-indigenous mixed-race people who fled the South during the Great Migration as there is about black people specifically, doubtless due to the strict racial binary dictated by the one-drop Jim Crow laws, which said there was no black-plus-something-else. But if Marilyn had a family member who left, could it be that many of those who fled Oklahoma during this time were mixed black and native? Then that could mean that African American and Native American people are spread out all over the country. I contacted Andrew Jolivétte again, to ask him if my guesses were a stretch. He replied succinctly, “Not a stretch at all.” If in Oklahoma legally white indigenous people were forsaking their own black relatives, and then those black relatives also fled to greener pastures with less racism, who’s to say how many families were splintered with no clear way to suture those old wounds?

  After my phone call with Marilyn, I contacted my mother again. I thought maybe I needed to pay more attention to what she was saying about our family, no matter how farfetched it had once seemed to me. After all, laws had erased other parts of black people’s lineage. From our chat, I soon realized that I’d been wrong in my own assumptions. My mother and Aunt Sharene, or Reenie for short, were assumed to be part indigenous not only by black people, but also by indigenous people when she traveled to the South. She told me that it happened on more than one occasion, and, growing up, she heard it from her father, my Pop-Pop, too.

  “Which tribe was it, Mom? Do you remember which one it was?”

  “Well, Dad always said that we were Cherokee Indian.”

  I asked Marilyn if she would be my liaison if I traveled to Oklahoma. She agreed, but with some stipulations: she wanted to meet with me the first night I was in town, and she wanted me to stay in a hotel that was close to her home. I was shook. None of my previous liaisons had cared where I stayed. Was I in danger? I had never been to Oklahoma, and no one in my immediate circle ever had either. When I told Tracey, back in Louisiana, that I would be going to Oklahoma, her mood changed and she looked down before asking, “You gon’ be goin’ by yourself?” I knew Oklahoma was more conservative than New York, but now I started wondering if I should learn how to shoot a gun. If murder and fraud were happening to black people with land claims, then what the hell might happen to me investigating the freedmen’s legacy? I complied with Marilyn’s requests. We met on a quiet evening at a Saladworks in Oklahoma City, only a ten-minute drive from my hotel.

  She came prepared with all sorts of documents—forwarded e-mails, political ballots, advertisements . . . During our meeting, she told me more about all the resistance she and her supporters had encountered as they fought for freedmen to be recognized by the Cherokee Nation. One of the biggest opponents of the court ruling that granted freedmen tribal citizenship is David Walkingstick, a white-presenting tribal councilor of the Cherokee Nation. About three months
after the US district judge ruled in the freedmen’s favor, Walkingstick sought to appeal, citing as grounds not race but the fact that tribal councilors had been left out of the process. He said he wanted to uphold democracy according to the Cherokee Nation’s constitution. In 2007 the tribe had voted to deny the freedmen citizenship, and its members were dismayed by the extra program dollars it would cost to recognize them.16 Walkingstick introduced a bill before the Cherokee Tribal Council to appeal the judge’s decision, and soon a petition was circulated to get him to step down from his position as the Muskogee Public Schools director of Indian education.17 In January 2018, he reached a resignation agreement with the Muskogee Board of Education, whereby he received his salary plus $17,528 and the board was “released of all claims and liabilities.”18

  Marilyn also showed me e-mails from officials who argued that freedmen are not Cherokee by blood and that Joe Crittenden, a deputy chief, derisively dubbed the Freedmen’s Friend for giving them citizenship, is seen as the enemy. The worst of them was a widely circulated e-mail from Darren Buzzard, a Cherokee Nation tribal member and son of a council member, who asked, “Why do Freedmen want to be Cherokee? Why don’t they develop their own culture? Do African-Americans not have their own culture? . . . Could it be that they want the monetary benefits? . . . Don’t get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry.” For her own safety, Marilyn does not post her whereabouts on social media until after the fact. Luckily, nothing has ever happened to her.

  No sooner had I returned to the hotel than Marilyn sent me a list of names and phone numbers of black and indigenous Oklahomans categorized as freedmen. She must’ve alerted them that I was coming, I assumed. No matter which tribe they came from, legally they were all connected as being of African descent. My meeting with Marilyn was both a primer and a warning: Stay open. Listen carefully. Be careful. Question everything. My family’s oral histories hadn’t failed me yet. I wasn’t sure I’d have as much luck as I’d had in Louisiana, but in spite of the racism, the displacement, and the length of time that had passed, for all the black people in Oklahoma, for my mother and her family, I was damn sure going to find out.