Gloryland
Page 9
There’s a man goin round takin names
There’s a man goin round takin names
He has taken my brother’s name
And he’s left my heart in pain
There’s a man goin round takin names
I finished writing and handed the paper to the man taking names. He was still smiling, and to this day I’ve never met another officer in the United States Army who had a bigger, more genuine smile than the officer who took my name.
But when he glanced down at the paper and saw my signature, he frowned. “Son,” he said, “an army chaplain will help you learn how to write properly. Some orders are spoken, but some are written down. One day you may even be giving orders. Consequently, you have to be able to read and write in order to be a good soldier.”
He added my paper to his pile, put a stone on top of it, then wrote something down on another slip of paper and handed it to me. He said I was to give it to a Sergeant Henry at Fort Robinson, out a ways past town. He jerked his head to his left, as if to point out a dusty road full of wagon ruts and still caked with ice.
“Thank you, sir!” I said.
He just smiled. I reached out my hand for him to shake, but it was obvious the conversation was done. I looked at that scrap of paper fluttering like a wounded bird under that stone, and wondered if it was me trying to get out. I could feel the weight of it on my chest.
I glanced at the officer again. Who was he? He never told me his name. It might’ve been Death, I don’t know. Death probably don’t need to ever give his name. The business of giving belongs to other folks. Death’s in the business of taking. Whoever that officer was, he took me that day, and I been a soldier ever since.
Most soldiers when they’re awake are worrying bout living, but maybe when they sleep they dream a little, like me, wondering who it was that took their names. Back then I thought, Whatever happens, wherever I get sent and whoever I run into, I hope it won’t be personal. Cause if Daddy’s right, and it ain’t personal, some farm boy might miss and make it a little easier for me to get that pension.
All you got to do is not get yourself killed.
I don’t think that it was war got my brother killed, or others like him. Like Daddy said, probably his luck run out and he found himself at the wrong end of some field, but I don’t think it was iron that killed him. It was freedom. He didn’t have it, and he wanted it. He was willing to die for it, and he did. And when he died, he was finally free. But he could’ve stayed a slave in South Carolina and got that kind of freedom.
If it’s true that there are different kinds of freedom, then there must be different kinds of slavery. One kind means somebody chases you, catches you, and puts you in chains. Then there’s the kind they got in Nebraska. It’s the kind you gotta sign up for.
Oh, Death is that man takin names
Death is that man takin names
He has taken my brother’s name
And he’s left my heart in pain
There’s a man goin round takin names
To Accustom Horses to Military Noises and Firing
A few trained horses are mixed with the new ones, and toward the
close of a lesson separated a little, and the troopers who ride them
fire their pistols, the riding being continued without change.
from Cavalry Tactics
ninth cavalryman
I had enlisted the day before, and I had the uniform on now, that bit of blue. I remember the sun being hot on the heavy wool, and I remember feeling different somehow. The difference wasn’t just how the new clothes felt on my skin but how I felt in them, which surprised me. I had to admit, that uniform was different from any set of clothes I’d ever worn.
Maybe this feeling showed, or maybe it was just that blue respectability stiff with too much starch, but the townspeople of Fort Robinson seemed to see something that was new, too. They looked at me now like they really saw me, not like yesterday. Then I was just a drifter, a colored one at that.
Everything before seemed like a dream someone else was dreaming, and right now I was waking up into a life I never knew I had. I walked slow and uncertain down the dusty main street of that dusty town in the hot sun. All the towns in Nebraska seemed like they were eager to go to dust. I was just walking, and people were watching me, but it wasn’t bad. It was good. I was wearing a soldier’s uniform and felt like it tied me to every other man wearing the same uniform, and that all of us represented something bigger than any of us alone.
So the walking I did that day was different from any I’d done before, even on the sidewalk in Spartanburg. I was now a private in the Ninth Cavalry, and I had been ordered to town by Sergeant Henry to get supplies for the barracks. We’d taken a wagon into town, and the sergeant told me to start walking back to the fort because he and the others needed more time. They would pick me up on the road.
“Don’t worry, Private!” Sergeant Henry had laughed. “We won’t forget you, but after all that walkin you’ve done, this won’t seem like nothin at all!”
I had a feeling I wouldn’t see that wagon anywhere on the road back to Fort Robinson, and I was right. At first I was angry, but then I started to find it funny that my first duty for the army involved walking. I was so lost in those thoughts, you know I was bound for trouble, and trouble found me. He was heading out as I was heading in, and I walked into him right in the shadows of the Fort Robinson gate. As I stood there on the doorstep to my new life, dazed and my head smarting, Trouble was glaring at me and rubbing his chin. He was a big colored man, about six foot five, in a blue uniform with three yellow stripes on his sleeve. He was around the size of my father.
“Sorry, sir!” I said, like I would have said to Daddy.
“Sorry!” spat Trouble. “Sorry!” he said again. “Private, is that all you say to a sergeant when you walk into him?”
“No sir,” I coughed, “no sir, I just, I mean, I’m really sorry, sir, I just wasn’t payin attention.”
Sergeant Trouble didn’t say anything for a while, just looked me over good, and then something in his look seemed to soften a bit.
“When did you enlist, boy?” he asked.
I answered promptly, “Yesterday, sir. Yesterday afternoon.”
“Well, well,” the sergeant said, “it shows, boy, it shows. But I’m a forgiving man, so I won’t hold it against you. What’s your name, Private?”
“Yancy, sir,” I answered.
“Yancy,” he echoed. “What kind of name is that?”
I’d never been asked that, so I thought before answering.
“It’s my name, sir,” I stated flatly, “and the name of my family.”
“Don’t mean no offense,” he offered, “but knowing your name is the beginning of knowing you better. It tells me something.”
He paused and then asked, “So what was that tune you were humming when you walked into me?”
I blinked. “Sir,” I asked, “what tune?”
He looked at me, his eyes getting bigger. “You were humming something, son,” he said, “and whatever it was I couldn’t recognize it, which means you need help. A soldier who can’t properly carry a tune probably can’t carry other things either.”
I’d never heard that before either.
Then a thought seemed to come to him, and he added, “As a matter of fact, I have something for you.”
Now I was more surprised. I had just acted like a fool with this man, so what could he have for me that was any good? Trouble reached down into a bag he had on with “U.S.” stamped on the outside. It had a worn leather shoulder strap that looked busted in too many places to hold up, but the bag was still holding on, probably terrified of letting go.
“Yancy,” he continued, “you’re just the sort that should have something like this, so I’m goin to give it to you!”
Trouble was holding some kind of musical instrument. It looked like a flute. It was made of wood and straight, with an opening at both ends, the mouthpiece tapered and
very worn, while the other end was just a hollow tube. The end that was tapered had a carved figure on top of it that looked like a buffalo.
“That’s real nice of you, sir!” I managed to say. “I only enlisted yesterday, and to be honest, I wasn’t expectin any favors, especially a gift on my first day as a soldier. No sir. Why me?”
Sergeant Trouble didn’t answer at first. He looked round as if he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He seemed uncomfortable, like his uniform didn’t fit and he was trying to squirm out of it, but at the same time trying to behave like nothing was out of place.
“Well,” Trouble said very slowly, his eyes narrowed as he leaned in toward me, squinting slightly, “you look musical.” He just about whispered it.
Now that was the strangest thing I’d ever heard. To tell a complete stranger he looks musical . . . it sounded like the beginning of a conversation I once had with a scoundrel from Mississippi, a colored man who also offered something he didn’t own but wanted me to have.
“Are you from Mississippi, sir?” I asked.
That simple question took the wind out of Trouble so sudden that all he could say was one word, “Jackson.” Then he asked, “How did you know I was from Mississippi?” He seemed suspicious now.
“Just a guess, sir. No offense meant. But go ahead, please tell me bout that flute.” I thought it was best to change the subject.
“I’ll do that,” he said after a bit, “but why don’t we move away from this gate and sit for a bit under that tree over there?” He indicated which tree with a nod of his head and began to walk in that direction, and I followed him. I was curious bout where this was heading.
He didn’t start talking right off, but seemed to gather his thoughts, and as he did, his eyes seemed to lose focus. Then he began talking in a slower, quieter voice, clenching and unclenching his right hand. Talking like he couldn’t help himself.
“It began at sunup. I was riding behind the second lieutenant, and the rest of the men were behind me as we moved down the slope toward the river. It was almost cold enough to see the horses’ breath, and they were breathing so loud, I knew we’d wake up the village before it was time. I remember the sun seemed far away, and the heat of it even farther. I heard Draw saber! and then the ring of steel sliding out of steel. It seemed louder than the river.
“When the bugle blared out it startled me, even after all these years. The horses had been bunched up cause they knew what was coming, and then, well, we let them loose and followed the crying of that bugle down to the river, through the reeds there, and then we were heaving up, down, up, down, through the water. It was so cold it bit my legs like fire. Then rising out of it, out and up, leaning forward as we rose up in a line, and I heard Charge!
“And then it got real still, like back home when a hurricane comes over and the wind blows round you but doesn’t touch you . . . anyway, in the middle of all that I could hear a flute playing off somewhere, the notes rising and falling like our sabers, high enough so’s we could hear it through the firing of our carbines and the yelling of the children looking for their parents and the screams of the parents looking for their children. That flute sound just riding over everything, clean and pure, the only thing clean that day.
“The sound got louder when everything else stopped, and then I couldn’t hear it no more. That flute just died away until you couldn’t tell it from the wind. There ain’t no noise like the sound of a battlefield when the battle is over, but the noise ain’t out there, it’s in your head, the other side of that hurricane finally catching up to you. And the smell of burning, I can still taste it in my clothes. I can’t get the smell out. I wear the smell of that day, put it on in the mornin and sleep in it at night.
“This flute was lying on the ground for anyone fool enough to take it, next to the old man, that Indian who died holding it. I took it, and after a while I started playing it. I figured if he could play it through all that, then I could play it after. Here it is . . .”
And now he was plainly holding it out to me.
“I play it,” he continued, “and even when I don’t try to remember, hell, it does, it can never forget the music it made on that day, but I don’t want to hear that day no more, so you can have it, boy. It’s yours. You ain’t got to that day yet, you’re still green. I bet you sleep fine! So you’d be doin me a favor by taking it away.”
I didn’t say anything, just reached out my hand and took the flute. Sergeant Trouble nodded and slowly turned and walked out of the fort, down the dusty road. He never looked back. I guess that was one thing the army taught him, to not look back.
Trouble never told me his name. He didn’t have to. It was all about getting rid of something that hurt too much to hold. I never knew you could give away your pain so easy, hand over to a stranger what’s been eating at you from the inside.
The sergeant gave me the pain of that day on the river, and I took it. What could I do, he outranked me. I couldn’t just say, sorry, sir, got enough pain of my own, don’t need more, try someone else, please. I took it in silence and walked with the flute in my hand back to the barracks of Fort Robinson. I was a soldier now.
The officers say that the negroes make good soldiers and fight
like fiends. They certainly manage to stick on their horses like
monkeys. The Indians call them “buffalo soldiers,” because
their woolly heads are so much like the matted cushion that is
between the horns of the buffalo.
from Army Letters from an Officer’s Wife, Camp Supply,
Indian Territory, June 1872, Frances M. A. Roe
buffalo soldier
That’s what the Indians called us. All of them, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, Kiowa, they called us buffalo soldiers because our hair was just like the hair between the horns of the buffalo.
It’s the most respectful of all the names we were called, and it’s interesting that it came from people we were fighting. Folks don’t usually say kind things bout the people they’re in a war with. Yeah, the Indians respected us, at least some of them did, maybe not the Absaroka, but the Absaroka didn’t take to anyone who wasn’t Absaroka, which means “children of the large beaked bird,” and that’s what those folks called themselves, but people who weren’t part of that tribe called them Crow. The Absaroka, like most of those Indians on the Great Plains, are pretty fierce people, and some of them speak and read English, so if any of them read this and get upset cause I got something wrong, I meant no offense.
Grandma Sara used to say that wars are started by people who ain’t got any manners. If the government ever said it was sorry for taking the Indians’ land, maybe a lot of what was bad wouldn’t have happened. Maybe a war is just a bunch of people all being rude at the same time, and it keeps on getting worse cause no one ever apologizes.
It was hard for me being mixed up in it, cause I’m part Seminole, and even though those Indians weren’t Seminole, I felt something in common with them that I didn’t feel with most white people. But many of the colored soldiers I served with hated Indians, and the hate was hot, you could feel it. It was strange cause a lot of those soldiers had Indian blood in them, too.
Maybe it was just a relief to them that the violence was against strangers and not their own families back in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. Instead of a white sheriff putting on a hood and joining a lynching party, the law was going after someone else, and they were part of the law, and it might’ve felt good to not be the victim. But if you weren’t the victim, then you were probably the man wearing the white hood, or the blue uniform.
I don’t know. It made sense at the time to hate Indians. Otherwise, how could you kill them? Looking back, I don’t think I ever actually killed an Indian. At least not directly. There weren’t many left to kill by the time I enlisted, and it always seemed like Troop K arrived a few hours late or a few days late.
But I know I was responsible for killing a few, sort of
. We got orders to shoot buffalo whenever we came across them, and I knew even then that every good shot was bringing down more than just an animal. I felt bad bout that, still do. You see, to understand those Plains Indians, you got to understand that the buffalo was the heart of them. They ate it, almost all of it. It clothed them, kept them warm, and made it easier for them to see what’s hard for a human being to see, that you can’t go it alone, you need something out there in the world to help you.
That was the buffalo. It was a church, a shelter, a two-thousand-pound storehouse packed with goods, running round on four hoofs. And there we were, the Ninth, trying to take it all away, take food out of some child’s mouth, take away what was keeping her warm in the winter. All that and more you can’t say in English. I guess you can only say it in Dakota or dream it in Cheyenne or pray it in Kiowa, but I don’t know the words, and even if I did, the meaning would be lost on me. I wish I knew it in Seminole, but Grandma Sara felt it was tough enough being colored, so why would I want to be an Indian too?
What was it all about? Land. The land you were born on. The land you die on. The land you want your children to live and die on. The land that was given to you. How can you let that go without putting up a fight? Just like the colored men and women on those slave ships, refusing to go along, fighting back, even jumping into the sea rather than living as a slave, cause you just can’t let go of what you had.
And the people coming in, the settlers, they couldn’t let go of what they wanted. They got children too, and some of their boys and girls were born on the way out. Those pioneers didn’t know or care that they were traveling through someone’s country, bringing cattle onto it or digging for gold in it, or breaking up the prairie for farms, because passing through someone’s country is not the same as building a house on it and putting up a fence.
I get angry thinking about it, and I ain’t Kiowa or Cheyenne, but I remember Grandma Sara raging bout how no respect was shown to the Seminole when white people came down into Florida, how none of them ever said, “Excuse me, I’d like to live here too.” They saw colored people and Indians living and working together, and that didn’t set too well with the white people cause they were outnumbered, so it made sense just to kill them all.