by Dee Brown
“Go on, son of John Kingsley,” she said with bitterness in her throaty voice. “If we see you again in this world, the soldiers will have to bring us to you.”
In the Strawberry Moon, Opothle and his family left Okelogee in a light carriage and three wagons loaded with clothing, bedding, cooking utensils, tools, and one plow. In addition to Suna-lee, William, and Priscilla, there were also four black slaves in Opothle’s party. For the remaining slaves and his house and farm, the United States government paid him a handsome sum in treasury warrants. Opothle Kingsley was the fourth richest man among the Cherokees who had signed the Treaty of New Echota, and the signers were emigrating together to the Cherokee Nation West in Indian Territory. Opothle’s son, Jotham, and his nephew, Dane, accompanied the caravan only as far as Ross’s Landing, from which place they drove two of the wagons back to Okelogee after unloading the goods aboard a river steamboat.
Because blacksmith Timothy Rogers had secured a contract from the U.S. War Department to supply a considerable number of wagons for use in transporting some of the remaining thousands of Cherokees to the West, Opothle gave Jotham permission to remain at Okelogee until Creek Mary’s family was forced to emigrate. Jotham and Dane moved into a shed adjoining the smithy, and boarded with the Rogers family.
Several moons, almost a year, went by before Jotham received any news of his family, and then a long letter came from the Indian Territory, some of it written by his father, some by his sister Priscilla. He read it aloud to both Dane and Tim Rogers. Tell Tim to pack up and move his blacksmith shop to Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation West, Opothle wrote. We have only one blacksmith among us now, and he can by no means meet the needs of our people. A new capital for our Nation will soon be built near here, offering opportunities for all who are willing to work. William and I have finished roofing our trading post, and as soon as the rainy weather ends we will be going to Independence in Missouri to buy goods to stock it with. In her schoolgirl script, Priscilla wrote that their cabin was very rough and small and that she very much missed her younger brother and wanted him to come on to Indian Territory. Give our love to Dane and Grandmother Mary and Uncle Talasi and do write me about Jerusha and little Pleasant. Has Dane made her his wife yet?
“I’d like to show this letter to Grandmother Mary,” Dane said.
“Do you think she’d care?” Jotham asked.
“Oh, she might pretend not to care. But they’re her blood, you know.”
Before leaving the smithy that evening, Dane picked up a scrawny flop-eared puppy that a few days earlier had wandered in from somewhere wanting to be fed. As the springtime air was warm, he found Mary and Jerusha sitting on the bench under the arbor.
“I brought Pleasant a dog,” he said. “He’s old enough now to have his own dog.”
“You remembered his birthday,” Jerusha cried, smiling up at him with sudden pleasure.
The three-year-old appeared in the doorway, wearing only a long-tailed gray shirt. His hair was the same ripe-wheat color as Jerusha’s, his skin light olive. “Come here, Pleasant,” Dane called. “I’ve brought you a dog.”
Pleasant padded to the arbor, but when Dane reached for him, the boy swerved toward Mary, burying his face in her lap. She tousled his hair playfully.
Dane set the puppy down at Mary’s feet, and it turned on its back.
“What’s its name?” Pleasant asked, looking down at the animal.
“Whatever you wish to call it,” Dane replied.
Mary sniffed. “It smells like a skunk,” she said. “We’ll call it Dila.”
“Dila,” Pleasant repeated, and squatted to stare intently at the puppy’s pink belly.
Words, words, words, Dane thought. Grandmother Mary is teaching that sprout more words than it can hold in its head. She looks so old now, with wrinkles deep in her face, and pouches forming under her eyes.
“Jotham heard from his family,” he said.
“Are they all well?” she asked quickly. He offered her the letter. “Read it to me,” she said. “Even by a bright candle my old eyes can’t make out writing, and in this dim light…” Her voice grown thin trailed off.
He read the letter slowly, skipping only Priscilla’s inquiry as to whether he had made Jerusha his wife.
“Poor Opothle,” Mary said. “Past sixty winters he is, too old to be working so hard. Roofing a house at his age? He never did like to work with his hands. Took that from his Unega father.” She yawned and rubbed her sleepy eyes with her fingers. “Have you and Jotham built enough wagons yet to haul us all to Indian Territory?”
24
DANE WAS GAZING OUT the window, remembering green Georgia hills as he faced the brown sweep of Montana. “To the very last day my father stubbornly refused to believe that we would be driven from our home. Such a thing was against all the laws of nature, he thought, too dreadful to imagine, not even the Christian Unegas could be that savage.
“But early in May—Grandmother Mary always called that time of year the Mulberry Moon—General Winfield Scott brought seven thousand soldiers into the Cherokee Nation. That was about two soldiers for each of us unarmed Cherokees. He headquartered at New Echota and sent companies of men out to build several stockades to pen us up in until they could start us west by boats and wagons. Yet the Runner still paid no attention to warnings and rumors. Every morning he and Walina would go out to their farm plot, he digging the ground and she planting seeds, as if they were going to be there forever.
“One morning Walina came by the blacksmith shop and invited Mr. Tim Rogers and Jotham and me to a noontime meal to share their first little corn ears. You can be sure we all went. My mouth waters now just thinking about those sweet juicy little ears of boiled Cherokee corn we always had in late spring.
“Walina had plates fixed for everybody in the yard, but a rain shower came on just as we arrived from the smithy, and we all moved inside the house. We had hardly got started eating when we heard the sounds of horses, many horses’ hooves pounding on the gravel somewhere up the Little Singing Stream.
“ ‘What is the noise?’ Jerusha asked. She was still fearful of the Georgia Pony Boys although they had not been around Okelogee for a long time.
“ ‘I saw a blue hawk today,’ Grandmother Mary said. ‘Circling way high and crying a warning.’
“ ‘What kind of warning?’ somebody asked her.
“I remember she had one of the little corn ears in her fingers, waving it back and forth in front of her. ‘Maybe it was not a warning,’ she said. ‘More likely the blue hawk was telling us good-bye.’
“The sound of horses’ hooves kept growing louder. I got up and went to the door. A long file of mounted soldiers was winding down the pathway, and at every house they passed, four men would drop off the end of the file and ride up in the yard and dismount.
“ ‘Who is it, Dane?’ Mr. Rogers called to me
“ ‘Soldiers’ I told him.
“Four were already in our yard, dismounting quickly and taking their carbines from the slings. Jotham came up to my side just as the leader, a sergeant, pushed us away with the barrel of his weapon and strode inside. ‘Everybody out of the house!’ he ordered in a loud voice, motioning toward the door with his carbine. The first to obey was the flop-eared hound, Dila. He scurried from under the table and streaked through the door. Pleasant slid off the bench and scampered after his dog.
“Mr. Rogers was the first to speak. ‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’ he demanded.
“ ‘Outside!’ the sergeant repeated. ‘If you refuse, we have orders to use force.’
“We all walked out in the yard, facing the other three soldiers, who stood in a half circle with carbines at the ready. We stood there while the sergeant searched the house. When he came out he told us we must wait in the yard for wagons that would take us to a stockade. ‘You can go back in the house one at a time,’ he said, ‘and each get one blanket and any personal belongings you can carry. Nothing more.’
&n
bsp; “Mr. Rogers explained to the sergeant that he was a visitor and asked to be released to go to his own home. ‘Your wife a redskin?’ the sergeant asked. Mr. Rogers said that his wife was Cherokee. ‘Then she’ll be taken,’ the sergeant said. ‘But you’re white. You don’t have to go to the stockade.’ Mr. Rogers said he would go wherever his wife went, but that he needed to return to his house to pick up a few belongings. The sergeant told him to leave. ‘Go straight to your house,’ he said. ‘If you fool about or try to interfere, you’ll be shot the same as a redskin would be.’
“Jotham spoke up then and said he lived with Mr. Rogers and wanted to go with him. The sergeant shook his head. ‘No. You’re redskin. You stay here for the wagons.’ He turned and beckoned to two of the other soldiers, leaving one to guard us while they mounted and rode on down to the next house. Up the pathway along the Little Singing Stream we could see our neighbors suffering the same treatment that had befallen us.
“We went back into the house one by one, bringing out a blanket, extra moccasins, clothing, and a few little keepsakes. My father brought out an ax that he valued highly, but the soldier made him put it back in the house. Walina timidly asked if she could take her spinning wheel in the wagon. ‘You could not walk and carry a spinning wheel,’ the soldier said. Walina had traded deerskins for that spinning wheel, and many of the warm clothes we wore were made from yarn she had spun from wool obtained from the Scots. The Runner took one look at my stepmother’s tortured face and went in the house and brought out the spinning wheel. He gave the wheel to Walina and lifted the frame to show the soldier that they could carry it.
“While all this was going on, Jerusha was pacing back and forth, anxiously looking up the pathway. ‘May I go and find my little boy?’ she asked. She was wearing an apron and had knotted it up in her nervous hands.
“ ‘No, ma’am,’ the soldier answered. ‘My orders are to keep you all here.’ I could see he was puzzled by Jerusha’s presence among us. ‘You live here, don’t you?’ he asked.
“ ‘Please, sir, let me go look for him,’ she begged.
“ ‘I can’t do that, ma’am.’ He was a tall narrow-faced mountain settler, hardbitten against all Indians, unsettled in his mind because he had to treat one of his own kind like he was treating us.
“About this time a dozen wagons came rattling into view, some stopping along the way, others rolling on until one pulled into our yard. The driver of it wore a greasy leather dragoon cap. His face was marked with pus-pimples and he had a wispy chin-beard. He was the Georgia Pony Boy, Cyrus, who had been at New Echota that day with One-Eyed Jack Suggins. Jotham and Jerusha recognized him, too, and I was sure Jerusha was going to faint from fear. I moved close to her and held her by the arm.
“ ‘Load ’em up!’ Cyrus yelled at the soldier, who went over and let down the tailgate. The soldier then fixed a bayonet to his carbine and ordered us to get in the wagon. My father helped Mary and Walina up, and then I lifted Jerusha. Her frightened blue eyes filled with tears. ‘Dane,’ she whispered, ‘we can’t go without Pleasant.’ I told her that Pleasant was sure to be in one of the other wagons and that we could find him when we reached the place where they were taking us.
“Except for the driver’s, there were no seats in the wagon, and we had to sit on the hard bed with our legs straight out and our backs against the low sideboards. About the time we were all in, a soldier on foot came splashing across the Little Singing Stream, pulling Stalking Turkey after him with a rope tied around the old man’s waist. ‘Got room for another one?’ he called to the driver. ‘Found him hiding in a corn patch.’
“ ‘Pile him in,’ Cyrus said.
“We made room for the Stalking Turkey. His long white hair was tangled with dead leaves, mud oozed from his moccasins, and his breath whistled in his throat after the hard run. Mary began combing the trash from his hair.
“ ‘We should have killed them all, Amayi, when they first came to our land,’ he said, separating each phrase with a gasp of air.
“ ‘I know, old Turkey,’ she answered him. ‘Instead we welcomed them as friends.’
“ ‘We lost because we tried to be like them,’ he whispered. ‘It is not the nature of the Tsalagi to be like the Unegas.’
“ ‘We lost because we would not listen to Tecumseh,’ Mary said. ‘We lost at Tohopeka, at the Horseshoe Bend.’
“The driver cracked his whip and we began jolting over the graveled pathway. ‘Look,’ Mary said, her eyes opening wide as she pointed to a rain shower that shrouded the green head of the Sleeping Woman. ‘She is weeping for us.’ We had moved only a few yards when a band of horsemen trotted across our front, halting the wagon. The riders all wore leather dragoon caps like the driver’s so that I did not at once recognize One-Eye Jack Suggins without his belled hat.
“ ‘Look who we got here,’ Suggins snickered as he pulled his horse right against the wagon, his ugly eye fixed on Jerusha. ‘The li’l yellow-hair sister. You want to go with me, li’l sister, git y’rself away from these stinkin’ red niggers?’
“She wouldn’t look at him, just kept her head down. I gripped her trembling hand tight, not daring to do more.
“Suggins noticed the spinning wheel that Walina held between her knees. He reached for the wheel, lifted it over the wagon board, and flung it toward the Little Singing Stream. I looked at my father, saw the hatred in his eyes, and feared what he might try to do. ‘Give me the wheel frame,’ Suggins said to him. The Runner sat motionless. ‘You know you ain’t suppose to take things like that to stockade,’ Suggins whined. He kicked his horse into motion and circled to the other side of the wagon, reached in and jerked the frame from my father’s hands, dashing it to the ground.
“While this was happening, some of his men had entered our house and were bringing out chairs, blankets, whatever they might want. ‘Find anything worth takin’?’ Suggins called to them.
“ ‘Candlestick and a good ax,’ one replied.
‘“They must have the good stuff on ’em.’ Suggins’s head turned slowly, his eye searching us for ornaments that might have silver in them. When he saw the coin gorget on the chain around Mary’s neck, he eased his horse in close and his dirty hand reached out like a claw for it. Before his fingers could touch it, I was on my feet, bringing my fist down hard against his wrist. He swore, jerking his arm back in pain. The driver, Cyrus, was on me then, his heavy body pinning me to the wagon bed. Jotham, however, leaped quickly to my assistance, both hands gripping Cyrus by the ears and making him scream for mercy.
“By this time Suggins had his rifle out, the muzzle cracking hard against my cheek bone. ‘I’ll blow y’r head off, redskin!’ Then he yelled at Cyrus: ‘Git the rope off that old man and tie both them boys up!’ Cyrus took the rope from around the Stalking Turkey. Then while Suggins held his rifle on Jotham and me, Cyrus tied our hands tight behind our backs and shoved us down as hard as he could, kicking each of us in the ribs with such savagery that it took our breaths away.
“When I looked up through a mist that covered my eyes, Suggins was grinning, showing his yellow teeth in pure enjoyment. ‘Now let me see that purty little thing the old squaw woman got round her neck,’ he said. This time my father tried to stop him, lunging for Suggins’s shoulders in an effort to unseat him from his saddle. But the Runner must have lost his balance. Suggins, who’d been a gouge fighter all his life, pulled his knife out in a flash, stabbing it into my father’s arm and hurling him down against the steel-rimmed wagon wheel. My father’s head must have struck the rim or axle, or else Suggins did the worst of it with the butt of his rifle after he jumped out of his saddle. He would have killed the Runner right there, except the soldier left to guard us had called for his sergeant, who came riding up and shouted at Suggins to stop. Suggins claimed that the Runner attacked him, but Grandmother Mary was up on her feet telling how the Georgia Guards had robbed our house and tried to rob our persons. I’d heard her use the King’s profane English before when she was
angry, but this time I think she used every oath she’d ever learned in her life. A tiny little smile formed on that sergeant’s hard face. He turned to Suggins and told to get himself and his Pony Boys out of Okelogee.
“ ‘We’re wagon drivers,’ Suggins objected.
“ ‘Well, go drive your damned wagons,’ the sergeant cried, ‘and quit robbing these people.’
“While the Georgia Guards were riding off, the sergeant and one of his men eased the Runner into the wagon. My father’s sleeve was soaked red with blood and he had a bad cut on his head. Walina held his head in her lap while Mary and Jerusha tried to clean the wounds and stop the flow of blood. A soldier climbed into the wagon and cut the ropes from Jotham’s and my wrists. One side of my face was numb and swollen, and my ribs ached from Cyrus’s kick, but I was too worried about my father to bother with such things then.
“Nobody said anything until we reached the trail fork where we passed the Okelogee burying ground. One-Eye Jack Suggins and his men were out there digging up the graves of our people, laughing and throwing bones around whenever they found any little relic that had been buried with the dead.
“ ‘Savages!’ Mary screamed at them, but if they heard her they paid no mind. We soon joined other wagons heading slowly west toward Ross’s Landing. Jerusha tried to stand on her feet, bracing herself with one hand against my shoulder while she shaded her eyes with the other, straining to see if Pleasant might be in one of the wagons behind or ahead of us.
“After we topped the last rise, Mary turned and watched the Sleeping Woman slowly sink from our view. For the first time in my life I saw tears in her eyes, and then she bent to look closely at the Runner’s face. He was breathing hoarsely with great effort, his eyeballs rolling back so that only the whites showed, and little bubbles of blood formed on his lips. I had always thought of my father as an immortal shield, but now the center of my universe was gone, my world was coming to an end. The last thing any of us saw of Okelogee was smoke rising from our burning schoolhouse. At last the Pony Boys were rid of that hated symbol of Indian equality.
