It’d be like a stranger walking into your house, sitting in your chair, drinking your whiskey, eating your food, sleeping in your bed, and then treating you like you’re just the furniture that come with the place, furniture he don’t particularly care for. How mad would you be? Yeah, I understand Seminole anger. So maybe I understand Cheyenne anger too, even if I don’t know the words they use to say it.
But I know that for an Indian to call me a buffalo soldier was being bout as respectful as he could, cause the buffalo was right there next to God. And it sure as hell sounded better than “nigger cavalry” or “brunette” or “darkey policeman,” no, I think buffalo soldier sounds just fine.
Being a buffalo soldier meant a bugle getting you up before the sun, meant feeding the horses, watering them, and drills for everything you might do on that horse. Drills taught you how to keep your seat if you suddenly had to speed up to a canter or come to a stop, drills taught you how to turn your horse, back your horse, go at the walk or the trot, to sidestep, to do everything but dance. And the bugle would sound another day, and it’d be something new, firing from horseback or using the saber, riding in formation, learning to move as one unit and think as one unit, doing it again and again so you wouldn’t have to think because that was the point of drills, to not think but simply do, because it’s hard to think when other people are trying to kill you, when you’re afraid that you’re going to die, so the army puts you in that situation and they drill how you should act, over and over, so hopefully when you’re having that bad day you can survive it by just slipping into reflex, into the drill. Because crying or praying to God when bullets are flying don’t prepare you for the battlefield, but it does get you ready for what comes after, and a soldier’s duty is to fight so well that the man on the other side is the one with his hands pressed together, sobbing and praying for deliverance, the man no longer holding his rifle, the man who is already dead.
It meant the chaplain with the quiet voice who drilled you with letters of the alphabet, who made you string letters into words and words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into stories and stories into reports, reports about patrols through country that was being emptied and filled up at the same time, patrols that brought Indians and belligerents into custody, warriors into custody, old men, women, and children into custody, into wagons, into corrals like stock, where they’d be standing round like dead people.
And that meant I could write letters too, letters home, like Daddy wanted me to do.
December, 1887
Dear Mama and Daddy and Grandma Sara,
I’m writing to you from Ft. Robinson, Nebraska, where I am serving as a private with Troop K, Ninth Cavalry. The winters are very cold, but there are good men here and I guess army life suits me and my attitude. It’s hard seeing what war has done to the Indians, but I know, Grandma, that doesn’t surprise you. Your Elijah is wearing the uniform of the country that made war on your people. I think about this all the time and wish there was something that would’ve made things turn out different, but I’m a soldier now. I chose to enlist, but circumstances were such that I had very few other choices that would have allowed me to be a man. I’m a warrior and warriors should not feel shame at what they do because war is the job. The shame is on those who give us the work. But the men don’t talk much about war. They talk about their families, they tell stories about the people they love.
One day we will be together again. We will all sit together and tell each other everything that’s happened since I left. That will be a long night! Daddy, I hope the deacon helped you with the alphabet so you can now write back to me. Mama, don’t worry about me. Everyone dies, and if I die a soldier I will be wearing this uniform, and it looks good on me, so maybe Death will think I’m too pretty to leave this world and he’ll leave me alone.
Grandma Sara, what you taught me helped get me here, so you only have yourself to blame that I’m a soldier. I know you’re yelling at me as you read this so I’m glad I’m a thousand miles away. It would really hurt if I was there with you in Spartanburg. It hurts right now. Take the best of care, all of you.
Your Elijah
Of course, in those first months and years after I left Fort Robinson, I didn’t think of myself as a buffalo soldier. We were Ninth Cavalry, and I tell you that meant something, and it still does. Most of my life I’ve been a soldier, a cavalryman. I’m proud of my regiment, proud of the Ninth because we look so damn good. And because all of us feel like we’re more than soldiers, we’re representing our families back home, even families that aren’t our own.
I may die in this uniform, and if that’s my fate, then I will have died for my country, the same country that enslaved Mama and Daddy, that made war against Grandma Sara’s people, but maybe me dying will prove that all of us deserve to be treated like Americans because we are Americans, and that’s what it means to be in the Ninth Cavalry.
Sure, other buffalo soldiers served in the Tenth Cavalry, but that’s probably cause they didn’t get accepted into the Ninth. There were colored soldiers in the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry regiments too, but those poor men can’t even ride mules, let alone horses. They got to walk, though they call it “marching.” How sad. If a cavalryman’s walking, it means he’s had a really bad day cause he’s either been bucked off his mule or lost his horse.
Now, I’m not saying an infantryman’s not a good soldier. They sweat and bleed and risk their lives just like a cavalryman. It’s just that when they come marching over a hill singing their songs, they ain’t as pretty.
Cavalry or infantry, for colored soldiers like me, the army was a way to be in the world and feel part of something, a better way than sharecropping anyway. But it wasn’t easy cause of how some white soldiers felt about us, especially officers. A lot of officers refused to serve with the colored troops. They thought it was beneath them, or maybe some were angry about how their own career in the army wasn’t going so well. Those second lieutenants fresh out of West Point were looking for commissions in the First Cavalry or the Second or the Third or the Fourth, and it’s a long way down the list before you get to the Ninth or Tenth.
There was one general in particular, a famous one, who felt that leading colored troops would be a personal disgrace. I think about that officer from time to time, bout his hatred of me, his low opinion of what I was capable of, even though he never met me. And I think about how his hate saved quite a few buffalo soldiers from an early end. It ain’t often that race works in our favor, but this officer’s contempt saved the lives of people who were beneath his notice.
If that officer had been a better man, a man able to see past the color of skin to what’s inside, maybe the Ninth Cavalry would be lying under the ground beside the Little Big Horn, instead of the Seventh Cavalry.
At least that’s what I tell my men when they’re having a bad day, or think they’re having a bad day. “It could be worse,” I’d say, “it could be a Custer day.” Those words usually pull them out of whatever dark hole they fell into. As long as you’re breathing, seeing sky, able to put food in your belly, drinking water or whiskey when you want it, even if you’re shivering under a blanket out in the middle of a cold so deep that Old Man Winter himself is chilly, well, you’re doing all right. You got nothing to complain about. But if it’s a Custer Day, you’re done.
That’s how I got through my thirteen years at all those lonely forts in Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Kansas, and Arizona, going on all those patrols through country that had been emptied of people but not beauty. It was sad, grinding work, riding out day after day looking for the last Lakota, Crow, Arapaho, Comanche, Apache, Hidatsa, Blackfeet, Kiowa, Navajo, Gros Ventre, Osage, Hopi, Cheyenne, Salish, Pawnee, Havasupai. If you name all those nations, say their names out loud one after the other, it does something to the air and to your mind, you hear the voices of people who were here long before all of this started, people who tell stories about how the world began.
I don’t know what it did to the other men, but it wore on me. No matter what direction you looked out from a fort, or from the saddle, the people you were looking for weren’t there no more, not the way they were just a few years earlier. They all got herded up, forced to walk hundreds of miles, put on trains, and coralled finally in what the government calls a reservation.
I’ve seen reservations, and I tell you, you can put people inside them, but they can never hold what’s inside the people. I remember eyes staring out from bodies that weren’t getting enough food or blankets or shelter, not getting enough of what they needed even more than those things. And what was behind those eyes had nothing to do with the reservation, it was something that couldn’t be put in a tent or a cabin or a plot of land that wasn’t healthy for a tumbleweed.
At least a tumbleweed is free to drift with the wind, and it was freedom behind those eyes. I know what freedom looks like. It always seems to be something outside of me. I recognize it when it strolls by whistling a song I wasn’t meant to hear, but no one ever taught me the words to “Freedom.”
I guess you got to teach yourself how to sing that song. The words must be about living with yourself after you let go of everything that meant something to you. How do you do that and keep singing? Some of those Indians did.
Like the old man who looked at me through the fence of a fort in Montana and began to sing, sing so hard his chest was like a bellows taking in all he had lost and giving it back to the wind, his white hair blown back, his mouth open and his eyes closing, but the sound, the high cry of his voice like a wounded hawk. The sound of an old man whose world is gone but he’s trying to call it back.
I tried to help him, because I’m a fool. I tried to put what he was saying in my flute. The others shut in there saw me do that, saw the soldier playing a cedar flute while they sang, but I didn’t look at them because the old man and I were having a conversation, the flute and the cry, and I felt what was Seminole and Cherokee in me sing, and in that moment I could hear Grandma Sara crying too for what she had lost, and what they had lost and what I had lost.
I could feel the coldness in the looks from the soldiers on guard duty, but they couldn’t feel my shame, not shame at myself but at such a world where it was so easy to make the wrong choice and then choose to go on living.
I remember hearing that a Paiute named Wovoka was the one who started the Ghost Dance, sometime in the late eighties. I guess they believed if they sang hard enough and long enough, all the dead buffalo would hear them and come back and fill up the hills and valleys and plains, and everything would be like it was before the white man came. Before there were soldiers. Those Indians kept on dancing and singing as if their voices could reach into the world where the buffalo had gone, and where their dead had gone, a world that used to be right there on the plains.
But everybody knew how it would turn out. Except the officers who kept us on patrols, kept us watching and waiting for what wasn’t there no more. Soldiers like me, just watching and waiting for it to end.
When someone takes away what you love most in the world, what would you choose to sing? That’s what I wondered at the time, what I’d be singing if it were me and my people. I remember Grandma Sara singing in that language that wasn’t African or Indian or Spanish but like a stew of all those simmered down to a different flavor, and you didn’t have to understand the words to know it was a sad song.
A soldier’s supposed to follow orders, not wonder about why, but a voice in me kept asking what those Ghost Dance Indians were singing, and maybe it was God’s voice. God must be plenty confused during a war. Men crying out to Him, praying for their lives while they’re pulling a trigger or pushing a bayonet, or swinging a tomahawk or thrusting a knife. If God was confused, then where did that leave me?
I think the part of me that’s Seminole, the part buried deep, woke up when it heard the singing from the Indian camps.
The Indian War was a river running fast, like Big Creek in the spring flood. It carried away a lot of my years, like the river carried away some Indians on that morning when Sergeant Trouble and his troop charged. A river that went from silver to brown, getting all cloudy from the dirt it picked up, so that pretty soon I couldn’t look through it no more. I couldn’t swim against its current neither. I just had to ride it out.
Yeah, I’m a buffalo soldier all right. If you want to call me that, go right ahead. I been called a lot worse.
Skirmishing
The objects of employing skirmishers are, to cover movements and
evolutions, to gain time, to watch the movements of the enemy, to
keep him in check, to prevent his approaching so close to the main
body as to annoy the line of march, and to weaken and harass him by
their fire; to prepare the way for the charge on infantry, by rendering
them unsteady, or drawing their fire.
from Cavalry Tactics
the florida blockade
What became the Spanish-American War began in 1898, when the Spanish blew up the U.S.S. Maine in Cuba. I was back in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, when it started.
Almost ten years had passed since the end of the Indian Wars and nothing that interesting had happened in between. In that time Troop K just drifted from fort to fort, and the routine of garrison life didn’t change all that much. Only the fort names changed: Huachuca, Davis, Larned, Smith, Reno, Griffin, Lawton, Sill, Bayard, Riley. Oh, yeah, and my rank. First I got promoted to corporal and then to sergeant.
One thing that happened when I got back to Fort Robinson was that I got approval to go home for about two weeks, for the first time. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to, cause of what Daddy told me when I left, cause South Carolina was still South Carolina, and cause my attitude had only gotten worse since I became a sergeant in the Ninth Cavalry. Even now, I wanted to see my family cause it had been such a long time, but I wasn’t dying to see them, if you understand my meaning. It’s not like I didn’t miss them, but they were always with me.
But I put in for the leave anyway cause I wanted them to see who I was now, and maybe the uniform would keep me out of trouble. I figured my request would be turned down because of the blowing up of the Maine, but it wasn’t. I ended up taking the train down from Fort Robinson to Atlanta, Georgia, with some of the other cavalrymen, who were on their way to Tampa, Florida, and then to Cuba. I’d switch trains in Atlanta and keep heading east.
At a lot of places along the railroad there were people, white and colored folks standing together on both sides of the station platforms, cheering us on, waving flags, excited about seeing us soldiers. Until we got close to the Mason-Dixon Line. South of that boundary there was silence, and the whites and colored were standing on opposite sides of the tracks. I remember how that made me feel, and the look in the eyes of the men in my troop.
Disappointment followed by Sadness followed by Anger. Those were the names of the towns along the tracks from that point on. And when we got to Atlanta, there was a message from some colonel denying all approved leave.
I couldn’t go home. After thirteen years. I was headed for a war now, and it was a good thing, cause I felt like killing somebody. A few days past Atlanta, we got to Tampa, Florida, where army troops from all over were gathering to ship off to Cuba. That’s where the war was supposed to be, but meanwhile a different war broke out. The battleground was just off the train tracks in Tampa.
Don’t remember the regiment, but white volunteers from Ohio were the cause of it. Maybe it was the liquor they’d been drinking, but I think it was hate, not whiskey, drove those boys to do what they did. They grabbed a two-year-old Negro child from its mother, probably the sweetest thing on this earth to that child’s mama and daddy, and they saw fit to use that child as a target just to show the world how well they could shoot. They showed the world all right, and their aim was true, except what hit home was how little they valued the life of a colored child.
And that start
ed the Tampa Riot, which raged all through the night of June 6, 1898. When some colored soldiers heard about the shooting, they went crazy and busted up some white-only saloons. I was stationed in an encampment just outside town, and the commanding officer had forbidden us to leave under any circumstances. There were a few officers from white regiments coming into the camp, enough to give us news of what was happening. Apparently, the blood of colored people didn’t stop flowing through the streets till sunup.
And that’s about the time, or shortly thereafter, when the Florida Blockade began. At least that’s what I call the anger that clouds my sight every time I remember that night.
You see, I was hoping to say something bout colored men fighting in Cuba, bout how the Tenth Cavalry fought at Las Guasimas, or the Twenty-fifth Infantry at El Caney, or the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, and Roosevelt’s Rough Riders all charging up San Juan Hill. That’s what I was hoping, but the blockade won’t let me get there.
I got so much heat in me that I can’t see past Florida at all. Cuba just won’t come into view no matter how I strain my eyes. And the problem ain’t my vision, it’s that my anger’s so big I can’t see to the other side. It’s like bad weather filling up sky with white clouds and black lightning, filling you up till you choke and burn.
If Anger is a place to live in, then I think 1898 is the year I moved all the way there. But when you’re a good citizen of Anger, you’re living alone, and there ain’t no church, no God to hear you raging, and no family near enough to get singed by your heat, like I used to get burned sitting beside Grandma Sara.
Gloryland Page 10
