No Resting Place (12 page)

Did they think that the threat was an empty one? How could they think it? Had recent events taught them nothing? Were they blind to the example of their brothers the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Creeks? Where were they now? All were gone, deported, and along the way, such were the conditions under which they were herded, they had lost thousands of their numbers to disease, exposure, starvation at the hands of swindling sutlers operating under government contract. That same threat hung over the Cherokees. What made them think that they and they alone of all the tribes could escape it?

Even those who asked the question, or who put it to themselves, knew what made them think it. Their innate and unshakeable conviction of their difference, always held, now more than ever strengthened by the invention of Sequoyah's alphabet, the success of their efforts to civilize themselves, the consciousness that outside the American south, all around the world, were thousands of people who believed them to be, and encouraged them to think themselves, superior to their backward, naked and illiterate red brothers. From the white man the Cherokees had learned many lessons, but despising Indians, all except their own, was not among them. In that the whites could have taken lessons from them. That the Cherokees had congressmen and clergymen, editors and philosophers crusading on their behalf whom the other tribes had not had, they took to be fitting and proper.

They had followed a different course from that of the other tribes, a course which, if it had not won, had still not lost. The Creeks, the Choctaws and the Chickasaws had crumpled under pressure at once, had sold out; the Seminoles had fought, and, through base trickery, now had lost. The Cherokees had litigated in the white man's courts. They had won there, and although the President professed himself powerless to enforce the high court's ruling against the state of Georgia, here they still were, unlike the Creeks, the Chickasaws and the Choctaws. Meanwhile their archenemy was nearing the end of his tenure in the White House. In the coming national elections there was a good chance that the other party might win. Its leader, Henry Clay, was a friend of the Cherokees. He would assert the power of the federal government over what Georgia called its state's rights. Meanwhile, working for them tirelessly, selflessly and brilliantly, they had their own Tsan Usdi. How could you lose all hope? To do so was to desert him.

The notice first appeared tacked to the door of the former Cherokee council house, now district headquarters of the United States Army, in the former Cherokee capital of New Echota, toward the end of 1837. Within days it was posted on trees throughout the territory. The message, in English and Cherokee, was that on May 23 of the following year those Cherokees who had not yet removed themselves would be forcibly removed to the lands awaiting them in the west. The locations of depots to be built to receive them were given, and their cooperation was solicited in presenting themselves voluntarily for transport and thereby sparing the Army having to hunt them down. What Cherokee had translated the English and set it in the only existing font of type in Sequoyah's alphabet? For his family name, at least, most needed only one guess. Ridge.

The first sweep by the soldiers of Cherokee homes was for the confiscation of their arms. Not even the poorest cabin in the remotest part was overlooked. And because there was often no communication between the raiders and the occupants, the place was turned into a shambles in the search.

Such as they had were hunting arms. The loss of them was disheartening not because they were deprived of the opportunity of turning them upon people, they had no intention of doing that, but because of their attachment to them. Most had forgotten—had never known—the use of the bow and arrow; upon the household rifle depended the meat for the table traditional to them, their very concept of themselves. An object of beauty as well as usefulness, the product of skilled craftsmanship, purchased at sacrifice or lovingly handed down from father to son, his rifle was often the only possession that a man looked upon as personal. Together, he and it shared memories of many a head of game, and mutual respect, each for the other's trustiness. His rifle was the emblem of a man's manhood, its loss the loss of that attribute. That it should be thought that, even armed, they posed a threat saddened them with the sense of their present-day powerlessness. Agiduda doubted that his Joseph Manton fowling piece or his father's Pennsylvania flintlock would find their way into the federal armory. He suspected that they would remain in the possession of the Georgia State militiaman who rode off carrying them.

Like the condemned man on death row, the date for whose execution had been set, becoming his own cellblock attorney, the Cherokees tried to stop the clock, sending Ross repeatedly to Washington to argue their case, to delay. Yet on the homefront, meanwhile, the setting of the date seemed to have made little or no difference, hardly any perceptible impression. So the Reverend Mackenzie reports.

He had been unsuccessful, incidentally, in his efforts to have the town tavern closed on Sabbath mornings. It was there that the husbands and fathers of his congregation waited for them until services were over. Thus he was not reaching with his message of brotherly love those for whom it was primarily intended.

The concentration camps—log stockades requiring the felling of whole forests—were erected and their gates thrown open to receive the volunteers; they stood empty. On their walls appeared the words
TLA YIDAYOJADANVSI:
we will not emigrate. The Cherokees now had an added reason for wanting to remain in their homeland and resisting to the last all efforts to remove them: horror stories of the journey reaching them from those who had gone west, of the ruggedness of the land out there, and even of the hostility they had encountered from those of their brothers who had gone and settled there earlier, of being swindled by members of their own clans in the purchase of land, stock, provisions, seed. Their troubles had split them, had frayed the tribal tie, and pitted Cherokee against Cherokee. On his errands around the countryside, ministering to the sick and the dying, burying the dead, baptizing the living, marrying them, the Reverend Mackenzie found no evidence of panic, certainly none of widespread preparations to leave any time soon.

He found just the opposite, in fact. People burned off the brush and last year's stover and stalks and vines. They mended fences. As his friend David Ferguson said, speaking of his repairing his verandah, “Why am I doing this for the next owner? I'm not. I'm doing it for all its past owners. They kept it up for me and as long as I'm still here I'm responsible to them.” They even cleared new cropland. The threat that they would not be here to gather their crops did not discourage them from planting; on the contrary, it was as if planting a crop were the guarantee that they would still be here when harvesttime came. The seeds they sowed were their link with that land they loved. The roots of the plants were their roots; the more of them the stronger the tie. Not ordinarily the most industrious of farmers, an occupation they for long resisted, the Cherokees that spring of 1838 were industrious as never before. The winds of change were blowing but they fanned into flames the embers of resistance. As do certain plants, hope flourishes in the poorest soil.

Surely people the likes of the Fergusons were not so simple as to think that by working the soil they sent their roots in it down deeper? Necessity in part dictated their zeal but they worked not just out of necessity; they took satisfaction in the work. Did this arise from a sense that this would be the last time they would ever till that precious soil? Or was it just the opposite of that: the novelty of their doing so for the first time? Was it a sense of belated self-discovery, a disavowal of the privilege and the pampering that had always been theirs and an identification in these troubled times with the masses of their people who had always fed themselves with their own hands? Whatever was their drive, they were always busy whenever Reverend Mac, as they had taken to calling him, and which he forbore to correct (it was not the “Mac” that he minded—he rather liked that; it was the “Reverend” without the “the” that was improper), dropped in on them that spring. Busy spading rows in the kitchen garden, sowing seeds, busy molding candles. It was plain to see that working together drew them together. They were grateful for the physical exertion; it kept them from brooding.

They were glad to see Reverend Mac, for he was almost the only person they saw those days. A siege mentality had gripped them, as it had everyone. This house that had once been open house to one and all—red and white and shades in between—now received few callers. Its size made it all the more silent; its emptiness was large-scale. Neighbors with news to relate came by night, spoke low, were brief and soon departed.

From time to time on his pastoral house calls out in the countryside the Reverend Mackenzie was accompanied by Corporal Willis Odum of the Georgia State Militia. His duty was to enforce one law, to check that the one man to whom it applied was adhering to it. Thus he was present at last rites, conversions, baptisms, always with the same expression on his face of disbelief and distaste. To the Corporal the Indians' Christianity was a pretense and a put-on, a fraud upon the Reverend Mackenzie above all. They were, he said, an open book to him. If so, said the Reverend Mackenzie to himself, it was the only book that was.

“Christians my foot!” he said. “Spawn of the devil. All this religious hocus-pocus ain't nothing but a way to get around going west. But they're going, them johnnycakes, every last one of them, and the sooner the better. You know, Preacher, you're lucky to have me with you out here in some of these out-of-the-way places. You could get bushwhacked and nobody'd ever know about it.”

“I have never met with anything but friendliness and hospitality from these people.”

“Had me a pet fox once. Raised it from a pup. Gentle as a hound. Run loose but never run off. Come when called. Eat right out of my hand. One day for no particular reason that critter turned on me and just look a-here at the scar. That's redskins for you. No more to be trusted than wild animals. Think you've got them tamed but they're fooling you and you're fooling yourself. It don't matter how little a part they are. One drop is enough to taint the blood.

“Unless we kept watch every minute they'd rise up and slit our throats to a man, woman and child. Our biggest mistake is in learning them some of our own ways. Makes them more dangerous than ever. You can put them in decent clothes, proper houses, make them look on the outside like human beings, but you can't take the Indian out of them. And don't never make the mistake of thinking you're the exception to the rule. They hate us white folks one and all.”

“What about the ones over the years who have married among them, become their kin, been taken into the tribe?”

“Them ain't white men. Them are paleface Indians—the worst kind of all.”

He posted himself outside the house of call. Thus he was never actually where he was supposed to be, present at ceremonies, only on sentry duty, and had no way of knowing how many undesirables were assembled inside or what went on. “Stinks in there worse'n that fox den I took that pup out from,” he said. Besides, he was always expecting ambush, and that meant in the least expected places. That the savages had for so long remained peaceful did not reassure him. Indian vengeance matured like whiskey in the cask.

The Corporal was skeptical among all else of Cherokee vows of fidelity exchanged in the rites of holy matrimony. Sitting on the buggy seat and loosing a stream of tobacco juice, his parting words as the Reverend Mackenzie went up the path to perform the marriage ceremony were, “Now, remember, just one bride to the groom, eh, Preacher. More'n that constitutes unlawful assembly.”

The boy and his grandfather were seldom apart during this time. They worked alongside each other. They took walks together. They spoke little then. Each was straining with all his senses to impress the scene upon his memory, to take it with him on leaving. Words were unnecessary between them. Each could read the other's thoughts.

On these walks their sense of their loss was expanded. For this was land which their people had forever tended with a care for it and for all the fellow creatures with whom they shared it, leaving in the field at harvesttime a portion of the corn for the deer and the migrant geese, not farming to the edges of their lots expecting from every inch a marketable yield, but leaving the hedgerows untrimmed, a tangle of protective cover for the small animals and the birds to feed and nest in. And beyond the bounds of their own parcel lay land that they were losing too: tribal land. For as his grandfather said to the boy, a white man thought that only his small plot of earth was his, and not that all of it was. And to him that plot of his was his enemy, begrudging him the living he must wrest from it in the sweat of his brow.

They tried even in their thoughts not to pity each other, for they knew that to be pitied made one pity oneself and weaken. But they did pity each other. The boy pitied his grandmother, for her attachment to her home was like that of the generations-old wisteria vine that clung to it with its many tentacles from the foundation to the eave. But he pitied his grandfather more, for because of his long life as a farmer and an outdoorsman he had as many roots in this soil as did the trees of the forest.

Although he was not getting much taller, as measured by the mark on his wall, it was during this period of inner ripening, of forced mental growth, that the boy's power of thought-reading rapidly matured. He had known to expect this. It was a faculty possessed by Cherokees—one they did not advertise to outsiders. Thus he had known from the time he knew anything that if he was to have any secrets from his grown-ups he must think about them only when he was off by himself, for such thoughts proclaimed themselves like smoke signals. He had had many startling but convincing proofs of that. As this power of penetration grew with age, he was not sure but that Agiduda knew what he was thinking even when they were apart. Not that he had anything to hide from
him
, for with age also came tolerance of youthful mischief. Now the current began to flow in both directions. Old, wise and wily as it was, his grandfather's mind, perhaps deprived of its distinctiveness from others of his kind because of their common predicament, became accessible to the boy. This new ability of his did not gladden him, it saddened him to find that he could enter and find there a mind caught and writhing in the same trap as all the rest. That was one of the most painful aspects of being included with all your kind in a common threat: it was to have no life of your own, no more individuality than a raindrop.