Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  When Stopper joined the army, he became “an invisible man.” He was a soldier without a paper trail, meaning that there wasn’t clear documentation on where he was stationed and what he did there. When he returned to Oklahoma in 1985, he became disenchanted with how his people were being treated, and he migrated to California, where he got married and had a family. In his own words, “If they [the Seminole Nation] can interrupt the bloodline of the Freedman and the next generation, the younger ones, and make them disappear, then there’s nobody to step up.” And, in a sense, the “disappearance” had already begun in Stopper’s family:

  “I have one grandson—he embraces here. The rest of them, they don’t want nothing to do with here.”

  “Why is that?” I asked. “Are they ashamed or they just don’t want to have to fight?”

  “They was raised in San Diego.”

  Stopper’s children did live in Oklahoma City with him until they reached high school age, then returned to San Diego to live with their mother. But, like other black Seminoles who left Oklahoma and got plush jobs in New York during the Great Migration, none of them returned. They “didn’t want anything to do with these woods.” These woods, though, are home, and like the Lowcountry of South Carolina, that home is decreasing. The stories are horrific. Sam Osborne was found dead in his home. All the doors were locked and every stove in the house was turned up full blast in the summertime. The Osborne family used to be one of the largest landowning freedmen families, and the acres were supposed to be passed down to descendants as heirs property. One relative leased his acres to a property developer, and then that corporation took over everything. No one can say for sure how it happened, but those acres were no longer in the family name anymore.

  The protest ran for about three hours before LeEtta mentioned where we would be going next. Stopper and another freedman, nicknamed Happy, followed in their truck behind us. Stopper currently lives in Wichita, 160 miles north of Oklahoma City, but the distance doesn’t bother him when LeEtta calls upon him to travel. At first, I didn’t understand why they were following behind us to the Burger King and then to the Seminole General Council House, but I didn’t mention it. This wasn’t about simple hospitality. We were two women traveling with a preadolescent boy in the backseat. The more cornfields we passed, the less reception on my cell phone. Happy and Stopper didn’t want to follow us; they needed to or else they would go their separate ways with guilty consciences about what could have happened to us.

  When LeEtta parked the car in the council house lot, she told me that if we’re lucky, the council house would be unlocked and I could take as many pictures as I needed. A white-passing woman was fortuitously exiting one of the doors on the other end of the building and kindly said hello before asking us what we were doing. LeEtta cryptically replied that she was just going to show me around, and as she spoke, I hid my phone. The woman turned her back on us and LeEtta twisted the knob. The door was unlocked. Large black-and-white images were behind the black chairs where I assumed that the council members sat. There were two columns framing pews like those of a church. In front of those columns were wooden dividers. Then there were two more columns and more black chairs. I assumed that the black chairs were for those who held more senior roles and the pews were for the constituents.

  The first image on the left-hand side of the room was of a lynched black man. His hands and feet were tied together and there was a white cloth over his eyes. The caption reads, “Last Execution Under Seminole Law.” This man was whipped by one of the Light Horsemen—the Indian version of police—and his wailing was said to have been heard for many blocks. Butch told me that the lynched man was accused of stealing chickens. LeEtta has tried to get the council to remove the picture but to no avail. Next to the lynching image was one of the Seminole Whipping Tree, which still stands in front of the Seminole County Courthouse. I snapped pictures as fast as I could. If someone came in while I was taking pictures, LeEtta might have gotten into more trouble. She already had her enemies. Besides, I wasn’t from here, and a stranger taking pictures would be viewed with suspicion.

  Outside, I took pictures of the granite monuments, one dedicated to each band that designates a clan within the Seminole Nation: Ceyvha, Hecete, Osceola, Billy Bowlegs, Ocese, Coacochee (Wildcat), Hvteyievlke, Thomas Palmer, Fushutche (Bird Creek), Tallahassee, Tusekia Harjo, Dosar Barkus, Caesar Bruner, Nurcup Harjo. As we walked toward LeEtta’s truck, a car pulled out in front of us and drove off. Once the car pulled back out onto NS Road and sped off, LeEtta grinned and said, “We were being followed.”

  Although I was exhausted at that point, LeEtta wasn’t finished. She drove me down to Wewoka, to the courthouse, so I could see the whipping tree. I tried to quiet the small voice in my head that said, Do I have to? Do we have to? I looked behind me at LeEtta’s son, who was still preoccupied with his electronics, and I admired his nonchalance in the face of all that we were observing. I wondered how many times he had been to this tree and what other disturbing historical artifacts he now categorized as normal or quotidian.

  The city of Wewoka was founded by a Seminole freedman named John Horse in 1849. The name of the town in Seminole means “barking water,” from the sound the nearby waterfall makes.8 In 1923, oil was discovered a mile and a half southeast of Wewoka, and many Seminoles became wealthy from partnership with Magnolia Petroleum Company. By the 1930s, these Seminole oil fields became the largest suppliers of oil in the world. In two years, the population ballooned from 1,527 to 20,000. Once the oil was sapped, jobs decreased, people moved out, and many of those who remained grappled with poverty.9 That’s the official story. LeEtta says that there were billions of dollars’ worth of oil in Wewoka. Once the Seminole Indians knew about freedmen sitting on that much wealth, they moved into the territory, ingratiated themselves with the freedmen, married the black women, and before anyone knew it, the whole family would be wiped out. LeEtta and her ilk have chalked up these disappearances as murder but there is no documentation of rampant homicide in this area. In LeEtta’s words, “They took the money and ran. They raped the land and killed all the trees, killed the soil. You can’t even plant down here. All the granite rock will kill a garden.”

  LeEtta made her son take pictures of her standing in front of the whipping tree, and I was beside myself that she was smiling in every single snapshot, her own kind of resistance. My eyes started to burn. I was not sure if it was because of the sweltering heat or if I was overwhelmed with emotion, I had to turn my body away from LeEtta and her son to collect myself. When that was insufficient, I took a few steps backward, then walked off to the side, because I could not stare at that tree head-on for more than a few moments.

  Stopper and Happy didn’t stop following us until we were safely on our way back to Oklahoma City. When LeEtta lost her husband, Stopper made it his responsibility to escort her to and from places as much as he could, coming all the way from Kansas just to accompany her to council meetings. He’s been the only one, she says. Sometimes, though, LeEtta would take her chances and go somewhere alone, but the roads have never been safe places. A male relative of hers was coming from Bible study when a drunk driver hit him head-on, killing him instantly. Back near the Bureau of Indian Affairs office, Stopper and Happy said that they had essentially become invisible, and as long as freedmen continued to lose their identities through documentation, their history and line would be lost for good. I thought their complaint was incomplete. What about the women? They’re just as vulnerable, if not more so because of their gender. But after hearing about LeEtta’s family—her grandfather Sam, who died in an odd manner in his home while the family was fighting over land, and a cousin who died by a drunk driver—I wondered if the deaths of these freedmen were coincidental.

  LeEtta admits that she often fears she’ll be driven off the road, but just as before, she is not shaken. “People gotta understand that everything that comes in here will die. But sometimes it’s at the hand of someone. Envy will kill. I u
sed to be a person that didn’t want nobody ever to be angry with me, [would] try to be the goodest person in the world, be there for people, take the second seat, you know. I can’t take the second seat down here. I got into this. I said, ‘Wait a minute, y’all just taught me something.’ The chief said, ‘Well, what you learn?’ And I said, ‘You got me sitting on the other side of God.’ They said, ‘What does that mean?’ I said, ‘I am his wrath.’”

  I thanked LeEtta for her time and attention and gave her a hug. A part of me wanted to ask if she would be safe returning to her home, but my head was buzzing with everything I’d learned in such a short time that day. She knew what she was doing. She knew the lay of the land. I, on the other hand, was worn-out. I hurried to my hotel room and locked the door behind me. Night had not fallen yet but the darkness didn’t matter to me. I was still a bit rattled after all I had seen and heard, afraid that I wouldn’t get any sleep that night, afraid that when I returned to the East Coast and slid back into my progressive, liberal New York circles, no one would believe me. Immediately, I uploaded all the pictures, videos, and interview recordings to my Google Drive and sent the audio of everyone’s voices to my transcriptionist. But as I sat in silence, I thought, hell, I don’t even believe me.

  Not only was I physically weary, but I was also mentally unmoored and disillusioned. They had documentation of their Seminole lineage, yes. And yet still, their identity as black and native people has been either not recognized or recognized but not acknowledged with the same rights and privileges as other Seminole people. Then, I wondered, what was the point of documentation? According to Natasha Hartsfield, vice president of programs at the Tallahassee Museum, “The Dawes Act was an act of colonial economic interest that had a great impact on Native American and African culture and identity. The act . . . [was] used to control people of color with interests other than capital gains.” The Dawes Rolls document the American government’s white-supremacist intervention in order to divide the Seminole Nation. And if these rolls were tools to dominate and establish racial hegemony, then they cannot be the be-all and end-all of familial relations and land inheritances. The oral histories I gathered undermine the Dawes Rolls. The tribal rolls were rife with flaws. But documentation has always been undermined by African American oral history. According to Jennifer Dos Reis Dos Santos, a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, folklore has been our culture’s salvation. “Folklore has not just helped African Americans to record and remember large-scale events . . . it has helped with individual family genealogy too. Having an aspect of genealogy in folklore makes African American history not only traceable but more approachable. The stories relate to specific people, their experiences and the places where they lived. . . . They demonstrate and track the fight for freedom and independence.”10

  I was going to take these Seminole freedmen’s stories, as well as the stories of everyone else I would interview for this book, as valid and reorient myself to a different kind of truth, one that does not rely solely on documents and textbooks. This different kind of truth is less static and more fluid, persisting throughout generations of marginalized people and outside the traditional framework, which favors the voices of the powerful over the voices of the disempowered. As a Seminole freedman said to me at the protest, “The blood is in the land,” and the land was once theirs. But documentation still meant something, or else why would they be fighting?

  I called my grandfather and all of his brothers to get a name, any name that I could search for in the Dawes Rolls, but they didn’t remember any. I searched for Jerkins in the directory for the Dawes Rolls online. Nothing. I messaged my mother and asked her if she knew of any other names connected to the Jerkins line, and she told me three: Hadley, Wade, and Clarke. There were no freedmen with the last name Hadley. There were some Cherokee freedmen with the last name Wade. But there were both Cherokee and Seminole freedmen named Clarke. Could this be something? The names were there, but were they my people? I shrank in my seat. I’m just a woman from southern New Jersey. I had never heard of any family being in Oklahoma.

  Unlike the people I met, all I had were stories. I had stories full of characters with no first names. All details were vague. My mother didn’t have any documentation pertaining to indigeneity. My grandfather didn’t either. No relative I had interviewed so far made any reference to documentation, not to Cherokees or Seminoles or any other tribe. Besides, after all I’d seen that day, I couldn’t imagine that the Seminole Tribe would recognize me, considering what those who looked like me were still fighting for. I mourned, not necessarily for myself but for this story of my great-grandfather and the Seminole woman. If I reimagined that story with what I knew now and thought of them both as black migrants in Indian territory, would she have even helped him? Would she have accepted him? Who cares, I thought. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t even heard of any documentation, so I had no dog in this fight, so to speak.

  But I didn’t go far enough. There was another family story about our lineage and ethnic identity. There was always one more.

  3

  WHEN I WAS a preteen, I decided to take an Ancestry DNA test because I thought that scientists from somewhere else in the world would be able to tell me about my heritage with data that none of my family members could provide. The results never indicated that I had indigenous ancestry, but rather pointed me toward the East among the Berber populations of North Africa, the Fula tribe of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Romani people of Europe. I thought this result was conclusive and that blood dictates everything. Now as an adult, I wonder if perhaps my skepticism toward my relatives’ oral histories about Native American ancestors was due in part to this DNA test. I can’t tell you how many black people I’ve come across who’ve told me their family members claim Native American heritage but DNA says otherwise. But after all that I observed so far on my trip, of how families were separated between full-bloods, half-bloods, and those with “no blood” because of their black blood, what if blood could not provide the full truth? Or even more radical—what if blood could not provide any part of the truth whatsoever? If other black families like mine claim Cherokee, where does this persistence come from in spite of the tests? I wanted to know more about how bloodlines in black families may have overlapped with Cherokee families and how DNA tests hinder our ability to continue learning about one another.

  The conversation about Indian blood reached a fever pitch in 2018 when Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, in response to President Trump’s bigoted attacks suggesting that she was a fake “Pocahontas,” took a DNA test to prove that she was part Cherokee. The results did in fact show that she had Native American ancestry, but the backlash from Native American people was swift. In a statement to NBC News, Julie Hubbard, the executive director of the Cherokee Nation said, “We are encouraged by this dialogue and understanding that being a Cherokee Nation tribal citizen is rooted in centuries of culture and laws, not through DNA tests.”1 According to Aviva Chomsky, writing in the Huffington Post, companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe construct algorithms that make ethnicity something that can be entirely quantifiable through genes. There are no companies that have databases of ancestral DNA. Instead, these testing companies compare your genes to other people who have already taken the test—and Native Americans are one of the groups that have contributed to these databases the least.2 Just because Warren may have Native American blood does not mean that she is an enrolled citizen of any tribe; she isn’t. And despite the fact that a freedperson’s descendant may carry no Native American DNA, that person’s ancestors may have been de facto members of the tribe since the nineteenth century.

  Hubbard’s statement bothered me. If being a Cherokee Nation tribal citizen is rooted in “centuries of culture and laws,” then why was it that before 2017 freedmen of African descent were not considered tribal citizens? And what does her statement mean to the countless African Americans who have heard family lore about their native admixture, tales that have been around
for centuries?

  When black people let DNA tests take precedence over their family stories, as I did, they reinforce narrow, racist misconceptions about blood purity and authenticity. Historian Jean O’Brien says, “New England Indians had intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the credence for their Indianness in New England minds. The supposed ‘disappearance’ of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which, in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a people.” Even worse, this assumed nonexistence can change or separate families for generations. The truth is, the relationship between black and indigenous people is both contentious and harmonious, pushed and pulled by racist laws and restrictions.

  One woman who showed me how migration, bloodlines, and questions about “authentic” Cherokee heritage upend lives is Darnella Davis, author of Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage: A Personal History of the Allotment Era. Davis is the daughter of a Creek mother and Cherokee father. When it was time for her to go to grad school, she applied for a scholarship from the Cherokee Nation after learning that cousins of hers had received money for postgraduate study. When she collected her father’s relatives’ Dawes Roll numbers and submitted them to the board, the Cherokee Nation told Davis that she needed a CDIB, or Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. Because the people on Davis’s father’s side were listed as freedmen, officially he had no Indian blood. “I said, ‘Well, that’s not right.’ There’s Indian blood on my dad’s side, but by the time I figured it out, I’d already finished grad school.” This took place thirty years ago. Davis cannot be considered a member of the Cherokee Nation because she’s already a Creek citizen, and one cannot be a member of more than one tribe. Despite her Creek citizenship, she still faces challenges: “If I have a health issue and I go down to the complex, if it’s a nice day and they remember that my cousin is on the [Creek] Supreme Court, right—he’s the chief justice—they might treat me. But otherwise they’re not going to give me anything, because I’m only listed as one-sixteenth Creek and that negates all the Cherokee blood that I might or might not have.”