No Resting Place (16 page)

“
Naquasdvquo Gatisgani
”

The soldiers tensed, rising in their stirrups, twisting about in their saddles, raising their rifles. To quiet their fears that the unintelligible words were a signal to revolt disguised as music, Agiduda quickly, loudly, to the same tune, sang:

“Just as I am, without one plea”

The entire column of marchers took it up, some singing in Cherokee and some in English:

“
Tsagigvaqualisgasdodv
”

“But that thy blood was shed for me”

“
Alesgiyanisgv Tsisa
”

“And that thou bid'st me come to thee”

“
Wigvlutsi! Wigvlutsi
!”

“O, Lamb of God, I come! I come!”

And although the hymn's mournful measure was woefully out of step with the pace they were made by their guards to maintain, they sang it thus in round-song, one tongue answering the other, as they trudged along. The effect was that of a funeral march.

Waiting at every crossroads to join the column were others rounded up in the countryside, in bands large and small, overseen by their mounted guards. Rather than finding strength in numbers, their despair was deepened by these additions to their ranks. It seemed that none of them had eluded the dragnet. They were being eradicated. After a long lifetime as Amos Smith, Noquisi would still remember his feeling of shame—for the defeated and despised learn from their oppressors to despise themselves.

The day was rapidly heating up and the march beginning to take its toll upon the people. All had trekked along the main road for miles and, before that, many of them had trekked for miles more. Now they were weary, hot, dusty, dry, footsore. Children were growing querulous, balky. The old folks were straggling, falling behind.

Upon the soldiers too the march was taking its toll. The pains the people were enduring at their hands irritated them by arousing in them a fellow feeling which they were forbidden to feel. It created disturbing likenesses between Indians and themselves. This warring upon civilians, upon old men, women and children, was a distasteful assignment for men trained to engage other men in armed combat. It shamed them, and shame in combination with power turned them cruel and petty. Impatient to get the business over with, to return to barracks and go off duty, they were annoyed by any laggardness.

In the band of captives waiting at one crossroads was a lone man who fell in step alongside Noquisi. He was the biggest man the boy had ever seen. No doubt it was his size that first singled him out for the special attentions of one of his captors, a soldier who pestered him with the persistency of a deerfly. A victim so imposing was a provocation. But it was not this alone that irked the soldier. The man's bearing was another goad. Not that he was defiant, sullen; he was anything but that. He was provokingly unprovokable, composed. He seemed to be present in body but elsewhere in spirit. He seemed to be walking in his sleep. This detachment from the scene was what irked the soldier. He wanted the man to experience what he was undergoing, perhaps because what he himself was experiencing was distasteful to him.

The big man was dark-skinned, broad-faced, heavy-featured. His hair was plaited in long greased braids. His buckskin shirt and trousers were frayed and stained. He seemed so out of place as to suggest that he had been found up some remote mountainside or down some distant cove where he had never seen a white man, never heard English spoken. But that was no excuse for not obeying an order so simple it did not need to be spoken: March! And step lively!

The step of none of them was very lively now that their shoes were full of water from fording a creek. The first to arrive at the ford, those at the head of the column, had sat themselves on the bank to take off their shoes and their moccasins, roll up their trousers. It was then that the whips were brought into use. In among the people the soldiers charged, lashing their backs, driving them into the water. “Just as you are!” one shouted derisively, and another added, “Without one plea!”

Once the unspoken inhibition against them had been broken, the whips remained in use. Each soldier was afraid of being thought soft by his comrades and suspected of harboring feelings of sympathy with those animals in human form. They galloped up and down the line wielding their whips and urging the marchers on with the shouts and curses of cattle drivers. “Hi! Hi! Get along there! Hump yourselves, damn you!” Their cruelty fed upon itself; more of the same was the way to dilute and excuse what had gone before. Exposed by his position on the outside of the column, the big man was lashed time and again by the one soldier.

Whenever this happened the man would slowly raise his head and regard his tormentor with a face as blank of expression as that of an ox for the plowman. After a moment there appeared on it a look of mild wonder, as though he were unable to connect so bold an act with the creature that met his gaze. Then, turning to Noquisi, the man gave a little smile. With this smile he seemed to wish to convey two things. First, “He didn't hurt me,” and second, “It's what we must expect of them, isn't it, sonny? It's their nature.”

For the rest of his long life, whatever his name, Noquisi would repent of his not responding to that smile. It was meant to reassure him, quiet his fears, lend him courage, as was the man's handclasp, proffered when the smile failed of its intention. The boy had not returned the smile, he had rejected the hand. If only he had held on to it! There was nothing personal in this rejection. But to a Cherokee there was no greater dishonor than to receive a blow and not return it, and to the boy the big man, now as impotent as the shorn and blinded Samson, was the embodiment of their people's humiliation and helplessness. He was ashamed of him and ashamed for him.

Thus it was that when they came to the fork in the road where they were commanded to turn, the man, with no hand to guide him, went the wrong way. He had gone some twenty feet when that soldier shot and killed him for attempting to escape. No last words did he have for those who got to him before he died, only the wordless babble of the congenital deaf-mute.

At first sight of their concentration camp (this but one of twenty-three like it), Agiduda was struck by a sense of having been there before. It looked like one of the old-time Indian camps. They too would have had their tepees as the soldiers had their tents. A corral for the horses. To take refuge in when attacked, they would have had a stockade like this one of logs sharpened to a point on top. They would have chosen just such a tract of treeless, flat prairie land so that the approach of an enemy could be detected from afar. Here, however, it had been done so that any prisoner who succeeded in leaping over the wall could be seen by the sentries long before he reached the distant woods. Now as the column halted at the gates, on one of which was written
TLA
and on the other
YIDAYOJADANVSI
, the bar was lifted, they were swung open, and the people entered the pen that was to be their home for the next twenty days. The packhorse bearing the deaf-mute's body brought up the rear.

Once they were inside, there was a rush for the water barrels with their metal dippers and for the latrines. These needs attended to, they looked around them at the high walls, and relatives and friends fell weeping into one another's arms and sobbing mothers clasped their sobbing children to them. Then some sat while others distended themselves on the ground to rest their aching bodies. Only the young men did not weep. To them, accustomed to the freedom of all outdoors, brothers to the birds, to the wild animals of the woods, being caged inside the compound was a blow to their pride that amounted to a loss of manhood. Wild animals they worshipped, domestic animals, introduced among them by the white man, they despised; now they found themselves penned, collared, their wings clipped. They despised their condition, and would have avoided one another for shame, but that they were confined and there was no place to hide.

Throughout the rest of the day the gates were opened from time to time to admit more parties of captives. Families separated in the roundup were reunited. First they wept with joy at finding one another, then they wept with sorrow at finding one another here.

All, even the frightened children, were drawn for a look at the deaf-mute's body, lying in the shade of the wall where it had been unloaded from the packhorse. A detail of soldiers was sent shortly after it was put there to remove and bury it, but the sergeant in command was prevailed upon to leave it overnight in order that all might mourn for the man. This commenced after they had been fed their rations of salt pork and cornmeal mush: a low, high-pitched wail, much like the distant howling of a pack of wolves.

Among the parties brought in later in the day were some who had known the man. He had lived alone, unmarried, and having lost all his family. When this information became known, the feeling was intensified that, belonging to nobody, he belonged to them all. They were his family. He was mourned through the night as by his blood kin.

In the morning the soldiers came again to remove the body. The sergeant levied two young prisoners to dig the grave. It was the dead man's clan members who protested this barbaric treatment. It was to the Reverend Mackenzie that they appealed. He went to see the commandant.

He went in anger, prepared to hate the man for his cruelty; he returned from his interview despising him for his sense of superiority. He had not known, the commandant said, that these people cared about such niceties. If they wanted the body buried in a coffin, and had somebody in there capable of making one, why, they were welcome as far as he was concerned. He would supply the lumber and the necessary tools.

There was somebody. Every poor Indian farmer was his own carpenter, but the better-off hired their building done for them, and these two were professionals. So boards were brought in and hammers and nails, saws and tri-squares, and, under the skilled hands of the two of them, a coffin soon took shape. The grave was dug outside the wall. The Reverend Mackenzie officiated while one member of the kinless man's clan, under armed guard, was allowed to represent them all.

That there is strength in numbers is true at times, the very opposite of the truth at other times. Few things in life are more gladdening than a large congregation of relatives, friends and neighbors when the occasion is one to rejoice over, but every additional face at a funeral is one more to grieve with, grieve over. To celebrate a victory, the more the merrier, but in surrender and defeat numbers magnify the loss. The Cherokees were to be removed to the last one, and they were packed inside the concentration camps to await the capture of that last one. The day's catch swelled their universal groan of despair. Though each prolonged their discomfort, they cheered on every one who eluded capture.

Some seventeen thousand were to be rounded up. To do the job seven thousand troops were employed. Of these, three thousand were regular army men, four thousand were volunteers. The regulars did their job out of duty, the volunteers out of zeal. How you got to the stockade, with what, and in what condition on your arrival, depended much upon which of the two it had been your luck to fall into the hands of.

In his orders to his troops, their commander, General Scott, told them that they were to carry out this operation as humanely as possible. There was to be no maltreatment of their captives—not even any abusive language. Special consideration and kindness was to be accorded infants, the elderly, the feeble-minded and women in a “helpless condition.” These orders were generally obeyed by the regulars, generally flouted by the volunteers.

And so the captives arrived at the camp by ways and in states as various as the colors of their skins, which ranged from purest white through all the shades of red to deepest black. Some came on foot, with nothing to transport but themselves, some on horseback, some in wagons piled with possessions, some with a train of slaves—the captives of captives—self-propelled possessions—bearing family heirlooms on their backs. Some were brought in with bruises from gun butts, cuts from bayonets, welts from whips. In the camp they told one another their stories, for these belonged now to a common fund, a collective indictment, like bringing them to the communal New Year bonfire. They had been surrounded and taken by armed soldiers while seated at table, while milking the cow, carding wool, nursing the baby. They had been taken in their privies, while bathing in the creek. Women were taken while visiting friends, not allowed to rejoin their families, children with playmates separated from their parents. The white rabble that followed the soldiers were looting their cabins even as they themselves were driven from the door. They had looked back to see them in flames. The urge to bear witness, to have their wrongs on record, overcame reticence, modesty. Girls told of having been raped by an entire platoon. Husbands, fathers, sons and brothers had watched helplessly while wives, daughters, mothers and sisters were sodomized.

They were like a shoal of fish caught in a net. Instantly all privacy was lost. By day they sat on the ground beside one another, by night they slept there beside one another. Whatever a person did was done in sight of all. In sight, sound, smell, almost in touch of all. A people fanatical in their cleanliness, habituated from birth to a daily bath, whatever the weather, they were disgusted and depressed by the dirtiness they began at once to feel.

The problem of the latrines arose immediately. A platoon of soldiers was needed to enforce order because of the disturbance caused by their daily emptying. Not in the doing of the job—once under way it was done with all possible speed so as to get it over with—but in the drafting of the crew. Some of the young men had to be whipped into submission. Some had to be whipped to the point that they were barely able afterwards to do it.

The scheme devised to overcome this unpleasantness by the corporal in charge of the detail seemed at first to be a cruelty but was soon seen to be, in fact, a kindness. He compiled a list of the eligible men and from it each morning he read aloud the names of the day's detail. No able-bodied man was exempted. What seemed originally a wish to degrade and humiliate them one and all was not what it seemed. When all were untouchables, none was. When this was understood, the men cooperated. Stripped to their breechclouts, the crew did their foul job, accompanied the loaded carts outside, emptied and scrubbed them, then went, under armed guard, to the riverbank where they washed themselves with pails of water. They were not envied, to be sure, but instead of being despised and shunned, as they had feared, they were appreciated and respected. The day came when a man whose name had been mistakenly passed over stood forth and volunteered for the duty.