Citizens Creek

by Lalita Tademy

  “We’ve the right to sit where we want,” said Cow Tom, “and I could sure use a cushion about now.”

  Odd, hotheaded Harry consoling him instead of the other way around. Time did, indeed, change many things. They hadn’t objected when relegated to the last car on the train, the color of their skin trumping the cost of their train ticket, and they settled into the dirty carriage restricted to Negro, little more than a boxcar. No words were spoken on the platform as the tight-lipped station agent barred access to the forward cars, he and Harry in instant and silent agreement. They needed to arrive in Washington without incident, where the real work waited to be done. A few days of injustice and discomfort was the price.

  “Why so tetchy?” asked Harry.

  Cow Tom lived in reflections now. They thought him a man of influence, Amy and his children and grandchildren, his sons-in-law, the people of Canadian Colored Town, his colleagues at Council. The clock had wound down on what he could yet accomplish. What if he failed, and became pitiable in their eyes?

  “Our task is big,” said Cow Tom.

  “I’m more worried about these wasted hours while the blamed train sits here on the tracks. We can’t beat them if we don’t get to Washington,” said Harry.

  As if Cow Tom needed reminding what was at stake. “Long as we get there before Council figures out we’re gone,” he said. “I hope Washington listens.”

  “We have to make them listen,” said Harry.

  They left the train and regrouped outside the station, figuring how best to find a place to stay and start their search for the senator. A neatly dressed colored man in a suit and small cravat approached them.

  “You gentlemen need transportation?” he said. “A nickel gets you and your bags wherever you need to be.”

  “Congress. You know where that is?” asked Harry.

  The man looked doubtful. He scanned Cow Tom and Harry, from their deerskin leggings to their turbans, forming some opinion Cow Tom feared wasn’t favorable. “I can carry y’all to where Congress meets, but you might need more particulars. What’s your business?”

  “We’re here to find Mr. Harlan. Mr. James Harlan. Senator James Harlan,” said Cow Tom.

  “I don’t know any Mr. Harlan,” the man said.

  “He’s high up,” said Harry. “Works for the government.”

  “That describes a lot of men in this town,” the man said. “I can carry you to the buildings where most politicians set up offices. They’re close to the Senate chambers.”

  “Good enough,” said Harry. “We have to start somewhere.”

  “That nickel is up front.”

  Cow Tom fished a shield nickel from his coin bag and paid the driver, which the man inspected and pocketed before throwing their small bags in the back of the carriage. The carriage parts were old, but clean and cared for, and once Cow Tom and Harry climbed in, the man clicked the pitiful city horse to a sluggish pace.

  The streets of Washington were nothing like Cow Tom imagined. On wide man-made avenues they passed several multistory buildings rising unexpectedly out of the mud, tightly girded within elevated wooden-planked sidewalks for long stretches. They saw mostly white men, almost all hatted, in shirtsleeves and in suits, but there were also black men, and women too, dressed fine, purposeful, and as far as he could tell, treated as proper citizens. His hopes rose.

  The young man called over his shoulder from the front seat as the horse kept a steady, clip-clop pace. “What’s your business?” he asked.

  “We’re from out West, Indian Territory,” said Cow Tom. He was anxious to make this man understand the urgency of their important mission. “Come to Washington to speak up for the freedmen in the Creek Nation.”

  “That explains the clothes.”

  They’d brought their best, but suddenly Cow Tom understood the roughness of their coats, the foreignness of moccasins and leggings and turbans common at home. These were city people, even the carriage driver, black like them, but different. He was refined. Cow Tom was a good judge of people. By bearing, by speech, by the way the young man looked him directly in the eye, he was free long before war’s end, familiar with liberty, wearing it like armor. Both he and Harry projected the same, and he was pleased at the brotherhood.

  “This isn’t such a big town,” the brown-skinned man said, “but I don’t know of any Mr. Harlan.”

  Cow Tom didn’t agree. Washington was big and crowded and chaotic, full of movement and activity, everyone with their place carved, whether teamsters loading and unloading wagons, jacketed men spitting tobacco juice in the dusty street, or women walking parasoled on the wooden sidewalk.

  The carriage driver was chatty. “With the Reconstruction and all, for the first time, I been carrying colored over to the Congress now, as gentlemen, just like white. Didn’t used to be that way. This James Harlan. He one of those?”

  “No,” said Cow Tom. “He’s white. Used to be Senator, but no more. We worked with him years back. As translators. He used to approve treaties from the Washington side.”

  “Well, if you gentlemen plan to stay the night after finding Mr. Harlan, and have need of a place to stay, my sister rents out rooms in her house in the colored section of town. Meals included. Reasonable and clean.”

  The carriage driver dropped them off in front of a cluster of small buildings and helped them unload their bags, and agreed to come back in a few hours to carry them to his sister’s boardinghouse. The pace of the city unnerved Cow Tom, so many men coming in and out of each of the buildings with such purpose, as if they had no time to waste.

  A white man carrying a small satchel had stopped and openly stared in amusement at Cow Tom and Harry as they sorted through their things and tried to figure out their next move. His checkered three-piece suit was a loose fit, a bit of a mismatch for his slender shoulders, as he was a small man, but he looked respectable in his pointed leather shoes, and seemed in no great hurry to be one place or the other. Cow Tom approached him.

  “Good afternoon,” Cow Tom said.

  “Good afternoon,” the man responded. He didn’t seem to be unfriendly, only overly interested in the spectacle of their arrival in the capital city.

  “My partner and I are looking for Senator Harlan. Would you know where he is?”

  “What department?”

  Cow Tom shook his head in confusion, trying to puzzle out what the man was asking.

  The man talked louder and much slower. “Freedmen’s Bureau?” the man guessed, drawing out every syllable. “That would be the War Department.”

  “No, no,” said Cow Tom, “the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Department of Interior.”

  The man looked back and forth between Cow Tom and Harry without comment, not once but several times, as if repeatedly staring at their moccasins and turbans would suddenly reveal some inner truth to him.

  “Indian Affairs, eh?” he finally said. “And I thought I’d seen everything.”

  “Do you know where the Department of the Interior is?” asked Cow Tom, as politely as he could manage. He wasn’t sure why this stranger was willing to be so helpful, but they had little time to wonder.

  “I do,” the man said. “Can’t say I know a Senator Harlan, but least I can get you to the right building. We can walk from here.”

  “Obliged,” said Cow Tom.

  “Follow me,” the man said, as they hoisted their bags to carry. And then, “Wait’ll I tell the missus about this.”

  They were glad for the man’s assistance, who steered them to the right building, but not sorry to see him go on his way once they found themselves in a warren of offices claimed as the Department of the Interior. From there, Cow Tom and Harry were referred and directed and passed from hand to hand, until they convinced a man sitting behind a wooden desk stacked high with papers to let them in to see former treaty commissioner James Harlan himself. The assis
tant personally led them into a small and drafty office, one of many along a long hall.

  “Senator Harlan,” Cow Tom said in introduction. “Cow Tom and Harry Island. We worked on several treaties for the Creeks with you? Last time at Fort Smith in ’66?”

  “Yes, yes,” Harlan said. “Ex-senator now. Ex–secretary of the interior too, for that matter. Come in.” He eyed their baggage, their clothes, dusty from the long trip. “I remember you both.”

  He invited them to sit in the cramped office space. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and memories, until the senator pulled out his timepiece, flicking open the case to check the hour.

  “So. What makes you seek me out now?” he asked.

  Harry took the lead. “We thought to get to the current secretary of the interior, to right a grievous wrong.”

  “The secretary of the interior,” repeated Harlan. He seemed cautious, a politician’s nonstatement. “What is the wrong?”

  Harry launched into the actions of the renegade Creeks in violation of the treaty, and the omission of the freedmen from the payout, and Cow Tom added the name of the new commissioner in Indian country who looked the other way when freedmen were dropped from the rolls.

  “I see,” said Harlan. He leaned forward, fully engaged now, his timepiece forgotten. “Both the secretary and the commissioner are Andrew Johnson’s appointees.”

  “Yes?” Cow Tom waited for him to explain.

  “The president is no friend of the freedmen, and his appointments reflect his thinking. You’ll make no headway with either the secretary or the commissioner. But you may have come at exactly the right time. This could prove useful for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Radical Republicans. Reconstructionists. A year ago, there would have been nothing we could do, but now we have a majority in Congress. Two-thirds, enough to overturn Johnson’s vetoes and pass civil rights legislation. The Senate came one vote shy of impeaching Johnson last week. Yes, exactly the right time, just what we need to throw fuel on the anti-Johnson fire.”

  The senator seemed almost giddy at the prospect, and Cow Tom felt their cause suddenly swept up into some larger fight he was only beginning to understand. But Cow Tom was a politician too, in the Creek government, and understood there could be several different paths to victory. What matter how or why it happened, if they could come away with reinstatement?

  “There are men for you to meet,” Harlan said. Once again he eyed the bags. “Are you staying in town? We’ll need you to testify in front of the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs. As soon as we can arrange it.”

  Cow Tom wasn’t nervous, even when he was led into the cavernous room to testify, even when he saw the collection of white men, somber and forbidding in their dark suits at the front of the large space, and he and Harry were led to sit behind an opposing table, as if facing accusers. It all came down to this, and he was ready. He had been making himself ready for fifty-eight years. He’d practiced his arguments for several days, consumed by laying out an irrefutable case, but a sudden single image crowded out all else. His mother’s port-stained face, and her insistence that he was special. This was his moment.

  “We come to talk about Article Two of the 1866 treaty between the United States government and the Indian nations,” he began.

  One of the senators on the panel had a horn trumpet to his ear, and a colleague at his elbow repeated almost everything Cow Tom said, as soon as he said it. It reminded Tom of his linguister days, but here it was translation of English into louder English.

  “Can’t say I ever heard of an Indian of African descent,” the senator with the ear trumpet interrupted in a booming voice. He was a very large man, wearing a light-colored suit, barely able to fit in a single seat.

  “That’s why we came to Washington, sir, so you can see with your own eyes,” said Cow Tom. “We exist, there are many of us, we’re citizens of the Creek Nation, and we’re part of the treaty you already approved.”

  Cow Tom’s boldness elicited a chuckle, even from the almost-deaf senator, once the remark was repeated to him.

  In the more respectful silence that followed, Cow Tom made his case for treaty violation, point by point, and ended with the statement Senator Harlan insisted would surely get the Radical Republican majority on their side.

  “We assert that presidential appointees are helping the Confederate Creeks to deprive us of our promised funds,” Cow Tom concluded.

  He heard murmurs of outraged whispering as he returned to his seat. They were excused from the room, and Senator Harlan saw them out to the hall while the committee decided whether to take up their claim.

  “You did well,” he said. “Now we wait.”

  It was only then that Cow Tom’s nerves started in, once his testifying was done and they sat on a bench in the drafty hall.

  “Leastways this time you didn’t have to give up a body part,” Harry joked.

  Two hours passed before word came out that there had been a unanimous vote.

  “The senator from Kansas brought a resolution before the Senate,” Senator Harlan told them, “that the secretary of the interior must inform the Senate, as soon as possible, why a large number of persons registered as Creek Indians by the Creek agent in the spring of 1867 were stricken from said rolls and payment of their per capita dividend refused.” He clapped Cow Tom heartily on the back, and then Harry, his delight too big to hide. “Let President Johnson try to ignore that.”

  The pronouncement was only the beginning of a long process—Cow Tom knew that—but he and Harry had exposed the Confederate Creeks’ trick to the light. They had done all they could here, and needed to get back home. They might be caught in the middle of a bigger battle being waged in Washington, but they’d fought for what was theirs.

  Cow Tom only hoped it was enough.

  Chapter 46

  THE MORNING PASSED slowly, full of the usual chores and necessaries on the ranch, but long before noon, someone set the triangle bell to ringing. It was too early for the midday meal, but whoever continued to work the triangle, long and insistent, intended everyone to come to the house. Rose was in the henhouse, her apron full of the day’s collection of eggs, and she came running. Her grandfather was at the triangle, a smile so wide on his face she dialed back her alarm.

  Her grandfather had been off to himself all morning, some mystery afoot. Yesterday, he’d disappeared to meet with the Indian agent, but when she tried to talk to him, he waved her off, in the highest of humor.

  He stood tall by the long wooden table in the kitchen, Gramma Amy beside him, and beckoned them round. Rose emptied her apron of the eggs in the kitchen. There was a great drying of hands on smocks and questioning looks, and Uncle John picked at a clump of mud from the pasture stuck to his moccasin. Once family was accounted for, all seven of them residing under one roof, her grandfather held up his two-fingered hand, as if calling a meeting to order. His hair had gone completely gray now, yet he seemed an overeager young boy with a secret too big to keep to himself.

  “Last year, Harry Island and I went to Washington, DC,” he began.

  All eyes were on him. Rose knew the look well. He waited in silence until satisfied everyone had shown proper respect, and finally pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his old cotton work jacket.

  “Seventeen dollars and fifty-seven cents,” Grampa Cow Tom announced.

  Seventeen, thought Rose. Her age, at least for six more days until her birthday. She thought for a moment he meant to recognize the coming of her eighteenth year, but this was something larger, more significant than that.

  He placed a small stack of money on the wooden in front of him, smoothing each bill as he gave it its own space on the tabletop, placing coins beside the bills in an exaggerated flourish. The bills were still crisp and uncreased. He held up the top paper certificate.

  “This one is worth ten d
ollars,” her grandfather said. He was careful to handle the bill by one edge.

  All of them crowded closer. Elizabeth reached out to touch the money, but one quick swat on the arm from Gramma Amy stopped her, and she drew back, pouting. Rose interlaced her fingers with her sister’s, and Elizabeth settled down.

  “Who is that man?” Rose asked, pointing to one of the bills. A stern-faced man dominated the left side of the note.

  “Same question I asked the Indian agent.” He held up the bill. “That one is Mr. Daniel Webster. He’s dead.”

  “Who is Mr. Webster?” Gramma Amy asked.

  “I don’t know,” her grandfather confessed. “But the white man thinks he’s important.” He held the bill for closer inspection, though no one was allowed to touch the tender except him. “And the woman here is an Indian princess, Pocahontas.” Her grandfather pointed at what looked like an eagle beginning flight at the bottom. “This is a funny one. Turn it upside down and the eagle becomes a donkey. The Indian agent called it the jackass note.”

  He performed the trick a few times until everyone seemed satisfied they had seen an eagle turn into a floppy-eared donkey, and he moved on to the next piece of currency, a crisp five-dollar bill with a scowling white man in one corner and a pioneer family and hunting dog in the center.

  “This is one of the white man’s presidents,” Grampa Cow Tom said, pointing to the small portrait of a caped man with a sour face and unruly mane of wild white hair. “Andrew Jackson. No friend to the Indian, that one. He’s dead too. I asked for Abraham Lincoln instead, but the Indian agent said it didn’t work like that.”

  Her grandfather laid out a two-dollar bill, of odd greenish-brown color, unnatural, different from the five-dollar note. It featured a sharp-nosed Thomas Jefferson in profile and powdered wig. He turned the bill over to the other side to show a white building on the reverse.

  “This here is where Harry Island and I traveled,” Grampa Cow Tom said, “where they make the white man’s laws.” His eyes grew wet. “Washington.” Rose had never seen him so shaky, at least not since Fort Gibson. Her grandfather usually had control of himself, but he seemed suddenly overwhelmed. “We stood up, we argued our case. It took time, but at last, they honor the treaty between the white man’s government and the Creek Nation. This is back pay for what we, as citizens of the Creek tribe, are owed. They couldn’t strip us from the rolls forever.”