The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  The board members regarded her with solemn faces. Only President Stephens smiled slightly as he lifted a folded document from beside his plate. He unfolded it, the heavy sheets crackling in the sudden silence. “I have here a copy of the last land treaty, signed by representatives of the Cherokees. It is the position of the Crown that the lands you claim along the Savannah were never Creek lands at all, but were Cherokee lands. The Cherokees were paid a handsome sum.”

  “Then you were cheated, sir,” she said, emptying her goblet again. “Any Cherokee who ever dared venture into that country would soon find a Creek warrior hard upon his arse.”

  One of the board members repressed a titter by clearing his throat. Stephens ignored Mary’s remark and lifted another sheaf of papers. “Here, madam, I have the current accounts of your husband, Mr. John Kingsley, with whom you have a trading partnership registered with the Crown. For the past several months these accounts have shown a steadily growing indebtedness of the members of your village, a rapid falling behind in promised payments of deerskins and furs for trade goods already given to your people. How can this debt be extinguished except by an exchange of lands for it?”

  She pushed her chair back, rising to her full height, her dark eyes flashing. “Before you people came among us,” she said in full voice, “we did not know that men could be so base. I beg the Maker of Breath to defend us from your manners, your laws, and your power. By God, sirs, you know as well as I that the trade goods are not worth a tenth of the price that is put upon them, and that the deerskins are worth ten times the value you put upon them in trade.”

  “You forget the many gifts, madam, that we have presented to you and your people,” Stephens interrupted.

  “Oh, yes, you have given us gifts, only to demand each time another cession of our lands, so that these gifts are dearly bought.” She sank back into her chair, sipping again at the wine. “I ask you to speak no more of our lands. You are already too close to us. You are like the fires we set in our fields each autumn to burn away the weeds. If we were not there to stop the fires, they would destroy everything. Like the fires, you would overrun our fields and forests if we did not stop you. I advise you to be satisfied with what we have given you and not to demand more.”

  Her voice, grown husky, faded away. A small bearded man near the end of the table clapped his hands together. “God knows, madam, you are a whole-souled patriot and I admire you for it.”

  Stephens nodded. “Yes, with such spirit as you show us, Madam Kingsley, we are most certainly obliged to make a friendly accommodation with you and your people.”

  Mary took a swallow of wine, rolling it with her tongue, and then laughed her loud and lusty laugh. “Don’t go pissing down my back,” she said.

  Stephens’s face reddened. The bearded man who had applauded opened his mouth in surprise. The sour-faced man stared at the ceiling. John Kingsley was whispering something to her.

  “I might put some belief in your promises,” she went on, “if women were present among you. It is the custom among our people for women to speak in our councils. Why do you white men scorn women? Why do women not sit alongside you in your councils? Were you not born of women?”

  The silence that followed was broken by a clatter outside the dining-room entrance. Long afterward, Mary told Dane that she could not clearly remember from that moment the exact sequence of events. She had drunk too much wine. The candlelit room was beginning to swirl. She was aware that Tolchi and another young warrior had forced their way into the outer room but were being held there by a militia guard. Tolchi was calling to her, trying to tell her something about the stout man who had seized his cabin and farm plot, the one she had lashed with his own whip. This man evidently had raised a mob and was threatening the unarmed Creeks who had been roaming through the streets. The other warrior was a messenger from Menewa. Was the Beloved Woman a prisoner? he wanted to know. Did she need Menewa’s help?

  “No, no, no!” John Kingsley was shouting. “Tell Menewa that all is well, that we shall rejoin him soon.”

  Above Kingsley’s voice, Stephens was ordering a militia officer to investigate the disturbance in the streets, and then beyond the hubbub outside, from the direction of the river, came the sounds of gunfire, the irregular pop-pop of muskets.

  “God in Heaven!” Stephens shouted. “It’s those armed rascals on the river!” He kicked his chair back and came striding down the dining room, a finger pointing at Mary and Kingsley. “You have gulled me,” he said angrily. “You plotted this rebellion. Guardsmen, arrest this pair of conspirators and place them in confinement!”

  Mary protested, resisted with all her being, kicked shins and shouted every British epithet she could command, and denounced the militia for interfering with the Queen of All the Creeks. Kingsley offered no resistance, devoting his energies to attempts to soothe her as they were rushed through the streets to a building just above the river that was used as militia headquarters. There they were locked into a windowless evil-smelling room with hard wooden shelves for bunks.

  “Oh, but I was well fuzzled,” she told Dane long afterward. “Never again did I swig wine or rum as I did on that night.”

  Early the next morning guards unlocked the door and summoned John Kingsley. He told her not to fear, that he would soon have her free. After he was taken away, she sat on the hard bunk in the dark. Her head ached but she felt no remorse, only a dull anger and a fear that harm might have come to Menewa. Yet she could remember no sounds of firing after those first irregular bursts from the river.

  At last Kingsley and the guards returned. “Come along,” he said curtly. “We’re going home.”

  The brightness of the morning blinded her and made her eyeballs ache. “Last night,” she asked, “were any of the warriors killed?”

  “No. They’re on the river. Waiting for you. Their weapons have been returned to them. By the way, William Stephens sends his apologies and promises to protect your people from further land seizures by the colonists.”

  She smiled. “Then we won a victory after all.”

  “There are conditions, of course.”

  “What conditions?”

  They were descending the wooden steps to the quay. A sea vessel had anchored alongside the trading boat during the night, and was already taking on barrels of tar and turpentine. Only two or three canoes were left of the hundred or so that Menewa’s warriors had brought down, and the file of mounted warriors was nowhere in view.

  “Where is Menewa?” she asked.

  “He fled early last night. After firing off a few muskets.”

  “Menewa fled?”

  “Decamped.” Kingsley pushed her aboard the trading boat. “I suppose he thought you had gone over to the enemy.”

  The words were like a slap in the face. She had felt betrayed when she first realized that Menewa had left her; now Kingsley made her feel that she was the betrayer.

  Although she asked him several times on the journey upriver what conditions Stephens had demanded of the Bluff Village Creeks, he put her off on one pretext or another until they were back at the trading post. After she had bathed her young son, she confronted Kingsley in the office room. “What were the promises of Stephens? What conditions did he ask of us?”

  Kingsley put his Dutch pipe aside and unfolded a document. “He set it all down in writing, all in order, so that there will be no further disputes.”

  “What is that map drawn there?” she asked.

  “We will move Bluff Village up to the Double Branch, leaving the land between here and the Branch open to settlement by the colonists. As you can see by the map, all lands north and west of the Branch will be forever Creek, inviolate to the colonists.”

  She laughed. “This paper is worthless. I did not sign it.”

  “I signed for you,” he said firmly, “in the interests of peace.”

  “By what right do you sign for me?”

  “English law gives me that right. I am your husband. Your prop
erty is my property.”

  “But I have no property. This land is Creek land.”

  He sighed and spread his hands. “You are a woman, Amayi. You don’t understand these matters.”

  “Damn you and the Georgia Lords!” she cried. “I am a miko, a chief, but because I am a woman, they look upon you, a white man, as being above me. Why do they think a piece of flesh hanging between their legs gives them rights over women? Over a miko of the Creek Nation? The Creeks will yield no more land, not one grain of sand!”

  He reached out in a fit of anger and caught both her shoulders, shaking her. “Don’t be a fool. For bringing those armed Indians into Savannah, they could have charged us with treason, shipped us to England, and hanged both of us. When you wedded me, you became a British subject as I am, liable to the laws forbidding armed rebellion against the King.”

  “I renounce my British allegiance!” she shouted, pulling away from his grasp. She turned her back on him, her chin held high, and started out of the office room.

  “There’s no changing anything now,” he called after her. “You may as well resign yourself to yielding this land and moving upriver. Either we move voluntarily or the Georgia militia will move us forcibly.”

  She turned in the doorway and said scornfully: “You always were one to kiss the arses of the Lords, John Kingsley. How much gold did they give you?”

  Darkness had fallen when she went outside. The frogs were setting up a clamor from the river shallows and the air was heavy with smoke from the tar pots. She saddled the Choctaw pony and rode off in a mad gallop, following the trail to Tolchi’s cabin. She called several times, but he was not there. Letting the sweated pony walk slowly back to the village, she tried to think of a plan to thwart the land-thieves in Savannah. Only Menewa could advise her, and he had deserted her. She could understand now why he had departed so abruptly. Menewa never compromised. He would never share food and drink with the Savannah land-thieves, and he must have surely been offended because she had done so. She must find Menewa, and try to explain why she had acted as she had.

  As she rode into the village, she could hear raucous singing coming from the chunkey yard in front of the council house. A drum began throbbing. They were starting to dance. She could tell from the sounds that they had got rum from Kingsley—which meant that some of them were a step further into debt. Tolchi would be there and some of the older warriors, but they would be of no use to her now. She turned the Choctaw away, in the direction of the trading post, noting that all the windows were dark there.

  She had once loved John Kingsley with all the passion of her heart. After they were married in an English ceremony in Savannah and he brought her back to the trading post, she had taught her people to look upon him as a benefactor. The vision of a mingling of the races had appealed to her then. She had dreamed of a paradise in which the best of the two cultures would take the ascendancy, the natural world of her people combined with the wares and comforts and knowledge of the whites. She waited impatiently for the birth of her first child, the tawny-skinned little boy that she at once named Opothle after her favorite uncle. Kingsley wanted him to be called Edward, and they had their first quarrel.

  Through the busy months that followed they gradually grew apart. Kingsley was constantly critical of what he called her people’s childlike ways, their disregard for the future. In his efforts to satisfy his needs and ambition he became anxious and unhappy. She accused him of wanting to be rich enough to buy other human beings, of making the Creeks so poor they would be obliged to sell themselves to him. Yet she knew that at heart he was not a bad man. He tried again and again to accept her as a child of nature, yielding often to her whims. But he was tainted with the greed of his race, the urge to set men against men, an enemy of the natural world.

  She held tight to the bridle, looking at the dark trading post for several minutes, trying to decide what she must do. Then instead of corralling and unsaddling the pony, she fastened it to a veranda post, and slipped quietly through the unlocked front door. Without making a sound she walked back into the living quarters. The bedroom door was open, and Kingsley was sprawled on the bed, snoring, and she caught the scent of rum on the dead air. For a moment she yearned to go to him, wake him, and comfort him. But instead she picked up a blanket, an extra pair of moccasins and her pistol, and returned with them to the storeroom. There in the darkness she found a saddlepack and began filling it with biscuits, cheese, and dried meat. From the shelves she took some gunpowder and lead, a small hand-mirror, and a knife. After she had fastened the pack to the Choctaw’s saddle, she returned to the bedroom and carefully lifted Opothle from his pallet. The child stirred, and she held one hand close to his face to shut off any sudden outcry, but he made only a few sucking noises with his lips.

  Returning to the storeroom, she slid Opothle gently into a carrying cradle and fastened it to her back. Then she took one last look around; she could think of nothing else she might need. By this time the moon had risen, and light shining through a window slit made the jewel sparkle in the ring that General Oglethorpe had given her. She slipped the ring from her finger and took it into the office room, placing it on the top of Kingsley’s desk.

  Then she went out into the silvery light of the summer night, mounted the pony, and started north along the river trail. Off to the left she could hear the drums and chanting of the revelers in the chunkey yard. She wanted to weep for them, but Opothle began whimpering and she had to turn her head and try to soothe the child with her voice. Somewhere up the river was a westward-running trail that would lead her to Menewa.

  3

  “DISTANCES ARE DECEPTIVE,” DANE said, and swung his chair to point toward the range off to the northwest. “If you rode to the base of that nearest butte on horseback, you might make a fairly accurate guess as to how far it was from this cabin. But let us say you had gone there as a child of ten, and now twelve years later you start out again, it will seem a much shorter distance, don’t you know. That was what happened to Grandmother Mary. She first made the journey to Menewa’s village when she was ten—an age when distances and time are long. A dozen years later, they were shortened for her. “Not until the third day of her journey did she start looking in earnest for the old Creek Path to the west. She should have reached it on the second day, but missed it somehow. Probably turned off for shade and water, and missed it.” He laughed. “Lucky for me, she did miss it, or I would not be here to tell you about her. Maybe she was just riding along with her face to the sun, so gladdened by her new freedom that she would not have seen the trail if it had been as wide as the Yellowstone at flood time.”

  About midmorning of the third day, Creek Mary was surprised to see a small cluster of buildings across the river. It was not an Indian village, but a white man’s outpost, a crude fortification built there by the Carolinians for trade and defense. She turned off the trail at once, keeping behind a meadow of high canes so that she would not be seen. Since the second day she had been alert for strangers, but had met no one, and only once had sighted what appeared to be a trader’s pack train moving far ahead of her.

  After an hour or so she turned the Choctaw pony back to the trail and was surprised to see rapids running in the river. By the time she reached a roaring waterfall she suspected that she might have passed the trail. She was not certain of this, however. She thought that perhaps the fort might not have been there when she had made that childhood journey and perhaps she had forgotten the waterfall. She had no compass, of course, but she knew that if she turned west she would eventually come to either a Lower or Upper Creek village and could then find her way to Menewa. And so she urged the pony on up the rocky winding path, but by sundown she had found no sign of any diverging trail.

  She slept that night in high country, hidden among a thicket of scrub cedars. A strong wind blew incessantly, making musical sounds in the needlelike foliage, but chilling her under the single blanket. Opothle was awake at first dawnlight, crying from cold and
hunger. Fog hung over the earth thick as water, forming droplets on her deerskin cape. She chewed some dried venison and a piece of biscuit, tonguing the masticated food into the child’s willing mouth. She still had enough food left for three or four days, but she could find no water on the rocky height and both she and the boy were thirsty.

  By the time she got the pony saddled, the mists were lifting. A pale red sun appeared and the clouds took on the shape of an enormous winged creature outspread above her, black and menacing. She shivered. The day was not starting well.

  The trail twisted, growing narrower and rockier as it seemed to climb to the sky. During the morning there were two more bad signs. A coachwhip snake came flying along the trail, its black and shiny head held upright as though to stop her passage. At the last moment, it turned aside and vanished into the brush. Soon after that a black turkey buzzard began gliding in circles just above her, dropping lower and lower so that she could see its reddish eyes fixed upon the horse, the woman, and the child.

  As the sun rose in a metallic sky the three grew thirstier, the child crying, the pony snuffling and reaching for green shoots of shrubbery at every opportunity. By midday the heat and humidity were almost unbearable. Suddenly the pony halted, its ears quivering. It tried to lunge into the undergrowth against the pull of the bridle. She held the animal steady. Off to the right she could hear water running over stones. She let the pony go then, through the brush and a narrow stand of tall pines, and there a spring gushed from a ledge of rock to form a pool before foaming off the side of a hill. Around the edge of the pool were recent moccasin tracks.

  While the pony drank she used her hand as a cup, dribbling water into Opothle’s mouth and over his face until he began laughing joyously. From the ledge she could see across a series of timbered ridges that turned from green to purple in the farthest distance. Along the western horizon thunderheads were piling up and lightning was playing across the blackest of the storm clouds.