Remember the Morning

by Thomas Fleming

  Bold Antelope had his musket in his right hand. His left hand held Nothing-But-Flowers’s arm. He let her go, dropped to one knee and fired a shot at the running giant. As his gun flashed the giant dodged to one side and the bullet missed him. Bold Antelope sprang to his feet and drew his hatchet. The giant did not stop his headlong rush. At six paces he leaped through the air and crashed into Bold Antelope before he could swing the hatchet.

  The gleaming weapon flew out of Bold Antelope’s hand. He drew his knife and tried to stab the giant but the white man caught the downward thrust and held it against Bold Antelope’s full weight. With a mighty shout he flung Bold Antelope on his back and pressed the knife against his throat. Bold Antelope, facing death, released the knife. The giant flung it into the woods. He flung the hatchet after it and smashed Bold Antelope’s musket against a tree.

  Totally defeated, Bold Antelope fled into the forest. I ran up to Nothing-But-Flowers and covered her face with kisses. I turned and kissed the giant too. He was a true warrior. Maybe white people were not as lacking in bravery as my Seneca grandmother claimed.

  Into my head flashed my grandmother’s prophecy that I would meet my husband before the snow fell. Was this the man? He smiled at me in a very interesting way. But he also smiled at Nothing-But-Flowers-and she was smiling at him. With a sinking heart, I realized Nothing-But-Flowers might fall in love with this yellow-haired warrior too. I could never compete with her beauty—even if I wanted to try. I owed Nothing-But-Flowers too much to steal a husband from her.

  “Cat-a-lyntie?” the giant said.

  I nodded shyly. I could accept my white name now.

  “Clar-a?” the giant said.

  Clara nodded too—not shyly. She was never shy. She let the giant take her hand. He took my hand too and we walked back toward the white tents together. Above us the sky was a blue dome ablaze with sunlight. The hunchback danced around us, laughing and shouting and slapping the giant on the back. None of us knew we were enjoying one of our last moments of pure happiness.

  THREE

  “MAL-COLM.”

  “Rob-ert.”

  “A-dam.”

  Laboriously, we learned the names of our new friends. Mal-colm was the bear. Rob-ert was the fox. A-dam was the little man with the hump on his back. Every time I looked at Mal-colm’s thick blond hair, I felt a tremor of desire. I imagined myself alone with him in the woods, taking him inside me, while that wonderful hair swirled above me, full of sunlight. I tried to speak to him with my eyes, but he did not understand my looks any more than he knew my Seneca language.

  I wondered why the fox seemed so sure of himself, even though he was no warrior. Why was he richer and more powerful than the bear? I wanted the bear to be immensely powerful in the white world. I wanted a powerful husband who was also a great warrior! That would make up for all the insults the Moon Woman had borne as a lowly member of the Turtle Clan.

  Warily, while I struggled to pronounce their names and the names of other things they were busy teaching us—shoe, foot, hand, mouth, pistol—I stole a look at Clara. Was she attracted to Mal-colm? It was hard to tell. Clara always withheld that part of herself when she was with a man. She did not have to beg for attention, like the Moon Woman.

  The three men returned us to the clothing tent with fresh instructions to outfit ourselves. We found the dresses with their long skirts and pleats and ruffled sleeves, the heavy petticoats and bonnets, the strangest assortment of nonsense we had ever seen. How did white women live in such clothes? We both chose white petticoats and red shoes and ignored the rest of the stuff.

  When we emerged from the tent, Mal-colm, Rob-ert, and A-dam doubled over in laughter. Soon we were surrounded by two dozen grinning white men who said things to each other that produced bursts of guttural laughter. The voices had the same hot crackle I had heard when young warriors joked about sticking a pretty girl. I smiled and joined in the laughter, delighted to have so many men desiring me. But Clara became furious and dragged me back into the tent.

  “Can’t you see they’re laughing at us?” she said.

  In a few minutes a white woman with a dirty face and even dirtier clothes came into the tent. With her was the older white man with the tuft of a beard on his chin. He spoke harshly to the white woman and she helped us put on dresses over the petticoats. She made no attempt to match anything. Clara got a blue skirt and a bright green blouse. My skirt was green and my blouse brown.

  Trailing in the mud, the skirts soon grew sodden and tripped us. Robert showed us how to hike the hems high enough to walk freely and we finally made some progress toward a tent where we were served ham and venison and bread and butter and hot bitter tea. We consumed everything in quantities that astonished our hosts, who had no idea we had eaten nothing but a few mouthfuls of parched corn for three days, in the style of Indians on a journey.

  At noon there was a final parade. The company of red-coated soldiers fired a cannon and several volleys of musketry while the Indians watched with expressionless faces. I saw the whites were trying to impress the Indians with the power of the British nation. The cannon was a terrible creature. Clara and I put our hands over our ears each time it roared and spewed a round iron ball into the woods, where it smashed down tall trees.

  On that warlike note, the great peace council broke up and the Indians vanished into the forest. Within an hour, the wind shifted and a cold rain began to fall. The beautiful morning became an ugly grey afternoon. With rain whipping our backs, the negotiators and soldiers and redeemed captives trudged south to the Hudson River. The white leaders rode on horses, the red-coated soldiers and ex-captives walked.

  Pausing only to bolt down some cold food, we reached the river as night fell. A half dozen sloops were waiting for us. The sight of the ships, with their white sails flapping like ghosts in the darkness, stirred the swamp in my head again. Cat cat cat went the woodpecker, van van van croaked the crow. Then another word, which erased these other sounds like the cannon’s roar: Pettikin. What did it mean? I wondered dazedly.

  I wanted to ask Clara, but aboard our sloop, the bearded man forced a smile to his thin lips and introduced himself as Joh-annes. He added that other name, Van Vorst, and another word in Seneca, which his thin smile seemed to belie: uncle. He directed me to a cabin on deck. Clara casually followed me. Joh-annes seized her arm and roughly thrust her back on deck. I was baffled. Why was I being given a dry cabin while Clara was forced to sleep on the deck in the rain? To my relief, Malcolm, took off his cloak and wrapped it around Clara.

  Weary from the march, I stripped off my wet clothes and huddled under a blanket in one of the cabin’s narrow bunks. There were five women redeemed from other villages in the remaining bunks. All of them were as unhappy about their return to the white world as I was. One of them repeatedly cried out the name of a warrior she loved. The youngest, who was about twelve, sobbed for her Indian mother. An older woman wept for a sick child she had left behind her.

  In the morning, in the sloop’s main cabin, Clara rejoined us and we were fed gruel and cider and some stale bread. Uncle Johannes Van Vorst gazed at us with a strange mixture of fear and dislike. The stoop-shouldered man’s eyes continued to speak pity and the judge’s eyes retained their haughty disapproval. Only the fox seemed to regard me with enthusiasm. He used a word whose sound I liked, even though I did not understand it: beautiful.

  My uncle replied with words that made some men laugh in the hot crackly way that meant desire. That did not bother me particularly but I was troubled by one strange word my uncle used: whore. I had no idea what it meant but I did not like its sound. Now I know he was saying that he was worried about us because Indian women—in his opinion—were all whores. I turned to Clara, hoping she understood what they were saying and could reply for both of us.

  But Clara was angry about other matters. She told the white men she was a member of the noblest family of the Bear Clan of the Senecas and had decided to go back to her village. She did not lik
e the way the white men were treating her. The captain of the sloop, who knew some Seneca, translated her words.

  Johannes Van Vorst and the judge gazed at Clara with contempt. I was amazed. I had never seen any man gaze at Nothing-But-Flowers that way. Then Johannes spoke so slowly, I was able to remember all the words. “Tell her she’s a slave. We own her.”

  The closest the captain could come to slave was the Indian word for captive. There were no slaves among the Seneca. Clara and I exchanged baffled glances. The captain did not know enough of our language to explain slavery to us. The yellow-haired giant looked sad as he gazed at Clara and said something the captain did not translate. “She’ll have to learn the hard way.”

  In four days we were in New York. We were totally bewildered by the brawling confusion of the docks, the shouts and curses of cartmen clogging the narrow streets. Even more astonishing were the hundreds and hundreds of houses. It was a thousand times bigger than our Seneca village. How could anyone live in such a place, surrounded by strangers who might be enemies?

  Clara and I were taken to Johannes Van Vorst’s redbrick mansion on Broad Street. The place left us breathless. Every inch of the wooden floor gleamed and white tiles glistened on the stairways. Thick yellow curtains framed the shining windows and tables glowed with polish. The upholstered chairs had yellow and blue cushions on them. Rugs decorated with brilliant pictures of ships and cities covered the floors. To young women used to the rough simplicity of a Seneca longhouse, the place was a wonderland.

  A tall thin black man with a mournful face emerged from a door that led to the cellar. Uncle Johannes pointed to Clara and spoke curtly to him. “Yes, Master,” the black man said and seized Clara by the arm and led her down a flight of dim stairs. Before I could protest this separation, a woman hurried into the room wearing a beautiful blue dress with a great hoop skirt. The hoop was so wide she had to come in the door sideways.

  The woman gazed in amazement at me, tears leaping from her eyes. “My God!” she cried and rushed across the room to kiss me, no easy task in a hoop skirt. Her small thin-lipped face and expressive blue eyes stirred a fragment of memory in my head. Where had I seen her before?

  I was introduced to Uncle Johannes’s wife, Gertrude. She wiped fresh tears from her eyes with a small handkerchief and smiled tenderly at me. Aunt Gertrude had large eyes and almost no chin. Her face resembled the face of a cat. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a great tower of curls, decorated by many ribbons.

  Johannes said something harsh to Aunt Gertrude. Her tender smile vanished. The words “father” and “will” were repeated many times. I sensed unhappiness in their voices. As they talked, two women around my age crowded through the door in beribboned green dresses which also swayed around them on hoops. Their hair was also piled high on their heads in thick curls. One had her mother’s cat face. The other resembled her father, down to his hard mouth and narrow eyes. Their mother spoke excitedly to them. They gazed at me in amazement.

  The young women were named Anna and Esther. “Cousins,” Mrs. Van Vorst said, with another smile. I did not know what the word meant. At an order from Aunt Gertrude, Anna and Esther led me upstairs. In a room with a canopied bed that was almost as large as an Indian cabin, they stripped off my peace council costume and washed my dirty hands and feet and face—which left me baffled. When people were adopted into the Seneca tribe, they were taken into the lake and washed from head to foot to cleanse them of their old identities. Were the Van Vorsts only adopting my hands and feet and face? I would soon learn that the hands and feet and face were the only parts of their bodies New Yorkers washed from New Year’s to New Year’s.

  While they washed me, my cousins talked about me in the same nasty voice and with the same mean expression I often saw on the faces of Big Claws and my other enemies in the village of Shining Creek. From the drawer of a great chest the sisters seized a device made of bone and steel and tried to strap it around my body. They were simply obeying their mother. Fashionable young ladies wore corsets from the age of ten. But I had never seen or heard of such a strange garment. I reacted with violent alarm. They were going to torture me!

  I spied a nail file on a dressing table. Bursting out of the corset before my cousins got a single strap buckled, I seized the file and retreated snarling to a corner of the room. The Misses Van Vorst ran screaming downstairs and the house erupted into chaos. Gertrude Van Vorst sallied into the room and retreated crying to her husband for help. The rattled Johannes rushed upstairs armed with a pistol.

  At that moment the rumble of a coach filled the street. Gertrude Van Vorst reappeared in the bedroom doorway crying that word “father” again.

  Everyone froze. Johannes and Gertrude gazed at each other with anxiety in their eyes. Then a deep voice rumbled up the stairs. “Pettikin!” the man boomed. “My darling Pettikin!”

  The word crashed through my terrified soul like a cannon shot. I remembered! The swamp filled my head with cold mud but I walked above it as if it were firm earth. I suddenly remembered so much. Trembling, I pulled on my soiled traveling dress and ran to the head of the stairs. At the bottom stood a fat red-faced old man with a great hooked nose. Leaning on two canes, he gazed up the stairs at me, a smile illuminating his face.

  “Pettikin!” Cornelius Van Vorst said—and added in Seneca, learned from his years as a fur trader. “I am the grandfather of your dreams. Come down and embrace me.”

  I flung myself into his arms. In the doorway to the street stood the sad-eyed stoop-shouldered man from the peace council and the yellow-haired giant, Malcolm, smiling cheerfully. I realized they were father and son—and had brought the news of my return to my grandfather.

  Johannes and Gertrude Van Vorst watched the tender scene with thinly disguised disapproval. They barely managed to smile and nod as Cornelius, playing interpreter, introduced them to me as my uncle and aunt.

  “Oh, Grandfather,” I said in Seneca. “I remember the terrible thing that happened.”

  For a moment the swamp sucked at me again. “You really are my grandfather. You’re not the Evil Brother?”

  “No, no, Pettikin,” Cornelius said. “You’ll never have to fear the Evil Brother again.”

  I did not believe that assurance but this huge old man’s arms around me seemed protection enough for the time being. I was able to tell him the story of my parents’ death without trembling or weeping. I told it without hate or remorse, as part of the war that had raged through the forests and over the lakes for all the years of my life.

  Released from the swampy clutch of memory, I felt lighter than air. But I was dismayed to see I had shifted the burden to my grandfather’s aged shoulders. Cornelius Van Vorst slumped in a chair and berated himself for sending his son and his wife and children into the wilderness. His face grew mottled, his breath came in ratchety gasps.

  Johannes said something to the old man that troubled him. The word “will” was mentioned several times. Cornelius gazed at his surviving son in a heavy mournful way. I recognized the same discouraged look my Seneca mother had often cast on her white daughter. She loved me but there was always the wish that I were different, more attractive and popular. Cornelius wished his son was a better man.

  I watched my grandfather struggle to overcome the regret that was engulfing him. “Well, at least I have the consolation of seeing this beautiful creature before I die,” he said in Seneca, gazing fondly at me.

  Gertrude Van Vorst said something harsh to Cornelius. I saw that my grandfather disliked his daughter-in-law. I watched as she began lecturing him in a sharp voice. Now I know she was warning him that I was a savage who would need constant watching and discipline if there was to be any hope of civilizing me.

  “Is she telling you that I tried to stab my cousins with that little knife?” I said in Seneca. “I thought they were going to torture me with the strange metal thing they tried to strap on me.”

  “I understand, my darling,” Cornelius said. “You will come ho
me with me now—I’ll explain it all later.”

  “What about my friend Clara?” I asked as Cornelius led me to the door. “They’ve treated her very badly. I don’t know why. Can she come to your house with us?”

  Cornelius asked his son Johannes a sharp question. His reply included that baffling word “slave.” He gestured to the basement door to explain where Clara had gone.

  Cornelius shook his head angrily and pointed to me. After several tense exchanges between the father and son, Johannes summoned Clara from the basement. Gertrude Van Vorst made one more attempt to protest her release.

  “She will live with us!” Cornelius thundered. It was another sentence I found easy to remember, although I did not understand it at the time.

  Clara and I departed with the old man, followed by the yellow-haired giant and his father, who continued to gaze sadly at us. Johannes and Gertrude Van Vorst said nothing, but their eyes were livid with dislike or fear—perhaps both. Why?

  FOUR

  “SLAVE?” CLARA AND I SAID, ALMOST in unison. “I still don’t understand.”

  Grandfather had tried to explain slavery to us a half dozen times. He finally decided only seeing was believing. On our second day in his house, he bundled Clara and me into his coach and we rumbled to the East River docks. There we watched black men emerge from the hold of a ship. Many of them were strong-looking young warriors—except for the lack of flesh on their bodies. Their bones were almost visible beneath their skin. They resembled Senecas during a bad starving time. Grandfather explained the ship had captured them in a place called Africa and carried them across the Great Ocean to New York.

  One by one the black men were led to a platform in the center of the dock, where many white men clustered. Another white man stood on the platform and pointed to each black man and made a speech to the crowd. The white men in the crowd shouted back to the man on the platform and eventually the black man was handed over to one of them, when he gave the man on the platform a certain number of gold and silver coins. The buyer marched the black man to a carriage or a wagon and rode away.