No Resting Place (18 page)

Here, confined inside the stockade, for the first time in years they were free to assemble in worship, to partake of communion, and the Reverend Mackenzie celebrated it on every Sabbath, somewhat disturbed in mind always by a suspicion that it was welcomed as an entertainment rather than as the profound mystery and illumination it was, and that some of the communicants had no notion of what it was about, even after it had been interpreted for them by the boy. Yet, said one of the biblical precepts he quoted to them,
The Lord preserveth the simple
. Surely among His limitless abilities, speaking Cherokee was one. Or if not, He could interpret His own word in some sign language understood by His backward children everywhere. It did not bother the Reverend Mackenzie that among them were some who were not members of his own congregation, they having been converted by his predecessors, the Methodist and Moravian missionaries. He did not believe that he was leading them astray from the tenets of their particular faiths—or if he was, that it mattered much now; nor did he believe that their pastors would have refused them dispensations, any more than he would have refused his parishioners under these circumstances. Any version of the gospel was better than none, as in a storm any port. The thought would once have shocked the Reverend Mackenzie to his soul, but it seemed to him now that here denominational differences mattered no more, indeed, they mattered a great deal less, than the differences in complexion of the people whom he saw before him. Indeed, he was learning that denominational differences mattered less anywhere than he had been taught to believe. Surely here, inside these walls, behind those barred gates, with no roof overhead but heaven, was the primitive, universal, ecumenical house of God.

How was it to be explained to people who thought it fitting and proper that they sign their infants' names to petitions that only somebody of the age of discretion could be confirmed, and only by a bishop? Not only the mother but everybody inside these walls was ready to attest that God's servant
Usdi
—Little One—was a true upholder of his and his parents' faith.

At birth the child had been so tiny it looked as though it had hatched from an egg. It had filled out or lengthened little in the time since. It was still as shriveled and shrunken as the oldest inmate of the camp. Solemn-faced and unresponsive, it gazed at you from big, incurious black orbs; wisdom-wearied they appeared. It was as though it had taken one look at its world, at the defeated, despised, dispossessed and despondent people of whom it was one, and given up the fight as lost without entering the lists, had lain down before starting on the long trek west. The concern felt by its mother was felt by all for this child of their captivity, her wants for it endorsed by all. It was uncertain whether Usdi would ever speak for himself.

What his punishment would be for knowingly misusing his priestly office, the Reverend Mackenzie could not even imagine, so great must it be. Nonetheless, he was prepared to bear it upon his conscience and to suffer the consequences. Any guilt and remorse that he might have felt for having confirmed Kanama's Usdi was laid to rest when, aged three weeks and a day, the infant died. The mother blessed her minister; thanks to him she would see her child again in heaven. A synod of bishops could not have made the Reverend Mackenzie repent of his act. Were he to be unfrocked, he would wear a breechclout without shame in the sight of God, for so he had seen good men go clad in His sight.

At the funeral service, held inside the compound and attended by all, with the coffin, custom-made by the carpenters—the work of a morning, little bigger than a loaf of bread—resting on sawhorses, few eyes were dry, not excepting the Reverend Mackenzie's own, as he intoned, “Man that is born of woman …” Yet his were moist as much from joy as from sorrow. It came over him that he had found his people.

The funeral procession, consisting of the young parents, the Reverend Mackenzie, Amos and their guards, was passed outside. The father carried the coffin. It was placed in its tiny hole and covered. When the graveside service was concluded, Kanama said, and Amos interpreted, “He didn't want to go west. He wanted to stay here forever.” Then the party was escorted back through the gates, on the one of which was scrawled
TLA
and on the other
YIDAYOJADANVSI
.

They had languished for months, now they were ordered to be ready to leave tomorrow morning.

Late that afternoon the prisoners were interrupted at their frantic wainwrighting, wheelwrighting, horseshoeing, packing, mending harness, patching moccasins by the spectacle of a family brought into the compound. These were the last holdouts, and they looked the part. They looked as if they had held out against the first white man ever. The husband was being led by a rope around his neck, his hands were tied behind him. The wife, babe in arms, was wild with grief. She wailed the way the old-time Indian women wailed.

They were the purest of purebloods, with the classical, the quintessential Cherokee color and features, and this automatically conferred upon them a special status. They were the originals, the Adam and Eve of the tribe. In those like these The People had seen themselves memorialized as they were before the coming of the white man; now, in the woman's desolation, in the infant's homelessness, in the man's defiance and his defeat, they saw their nation personified.

The officer in command of the detail dismounted. Whip in hand, he raised his voice and said to the crowd that had gathered round, “This man struck and knocked down a soldier.” He paused for them to be properly awed by that enormity. Their expressionlessness provoked him. “His punishment is one hundred lashes.”

It was meant as an example to them but it was deflected from its aim. To a man, the prisoners turned their backs upon the scene, and their children copied them. Thinking that they were expressing their contempt for him, the officer laid it on with the whip all the harder. What they were doing was sparing their brother being seen to undergo this worst of humiliations. Afterwards, they bathed him, symbolically washing away his shame.

The woman's story, when they were able to get it out of her, was that she had pleaded with the soldiers to be allowed to go and find her other child, a four-year-old. He must have seen the soldiers, been frightened by them, and run to hide. He would come to her call, she said. But none of them understood Cherokee. When she refused to leave without her child, one of them prodded her with his bayonet. It was he whom her husband struck.

She pleaded now for someone to explain things to them for her.

“Agiduda,” she said—although he was not her grandfather—“be my tongue. It is getting dark. The child will be frightened. He will want his mother. He is hungry. I will find him there. They must let me go for him. I promise them to return. They may take me wherever they will, but not without my child.”

He had to tell her that they were all ordered to leave at break of day.

To nobody's very great surprise, the husband was found dead that morning, hanging inside the carpenters' shed on that length of rope by which he had been led in.

That last night in camp the Reverend Mackenzie, with Amos interpreting for him, preached a sermon.

He began by saying that God worked in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. While waiting for this to be translated, he wondered why it was that God worked in so mysterious a way. Was human existence not hard enough without that? Wasn't a little light shed upon life's all too many mysteries what was needed? Wouldn't it have been easier to follow Him if he took us into His confidence and explained His doings?

The Reverend Mackenzie, through the firelight, saw his interpreter attending upon his next observation. He collected his scattered thoughts.

He allowed that at this moment it might seem to some as though God had forgotten, had abandoned to a cruel and undeserved fate, His Cherokee children.

Out of the darkness rose a groan of assent, and when, for the benefit of those whose only language was Cherokee, his words were interpreted by the boy, there rose a seconding groan.

They had, in fact, been chosen, he told them—and waited for grunts of disbelief, disgust, derision. Hearing none, he was pleased but puzzled.

God's chosen people, he said—the Israelites of old, the Cherokees of today—were those whose faith He tested, that they might have the selfless, the pure joy of showing their love for Him. The Reverend Mackenzie believed what he said, yet he wondered what kind of god was that? How could He expect to be loved and worshipped and thanked?

Chosen, he said, to spread His word to their heathen brothers in the west. Into his mind as this was being translated came the picture of some Arkansas Osage listening to the gospel from the mouth of an immigrant Cherokee, and noting his condition, and thinking how he and his had gotten where they were, and saying to himself, “A fine god you've got!”

The grunts he had expected to hear earlier he heard now. Then silence fell, a silence as deep as the darkness from which it emanated. The Reverend Mackenzie could think of nothing more to say. He had failed, had been tongue-tied, ineloquent, unpersuasive; he had failed God: that was what the silence said to the Reverend Mackenzie. What he said to himself was that God had failed him. On his young interpreter's face in the firelight he saw a look of deep disappointment, of barely disguised disgust. The boy looked as though the words he had just had to mouth had rearisen like pap that would not go down. Another opportunity—guidance—His inspiration to do His work, the Reverend Mackenzie prayed for. “Here is your chance,” he told Him. But he was not judged worthy to be the vessel of God's word.

It suggested itself that the time had come for the hymn. In the words that the boy had taught him, the Reverend Mackenzie sang:

“
Unelanvhi Uwetsi
”

Out of the night came:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound”

To which the Reverend Mackenzie, accompanied now by half his audience, responded:

“
Igaguyvheyi Hnaquotsosv Wiyulose
”

And the other half sang back:

“That once was lost but now am found”

To be answered by:

“
Igaguyvhonv
”

And that by:

“Was blind, but now can see.”

Silence fell as the dying notes rose with the sparks from the fire into the darkness.

The Reverend Mackenzie then led his congregation in prayer. He prayed for their strength and courage and good health. He prayed for a speedy journey and for their protection along the way. He prayed that their long years of suffering and disappointed hopes, their patience and faith throughout, be rewarded with a new home in the west of such beauty and bounteousness as to make them forget the one they were leaving—and his words were wormwood and gall in his mouth. What he was thinking was, “If I forget thee, O Zion …” Finally he called upon them to go with pure hearts, free from bitterness, forgiving those who trespassed against them, and even as he did so he was saying to himself, “Do as I say, not as I do.” For, as he confesses in his diary entry relating the event, he was wishing he had Aaron's rod for a day. Had he had it he would have stretched it over the waters of Georgia and turned them to blood. With it he would have smitten the ground and brought on plagues of frogs, lice, flies, all-devouring locusts, sores and boils upon the people, a murrain on their herds, hailstones and whirlwinds and darkness that might be felt. He was not sure that he would have stopped short of bringing death down upon their firstborn, from that of the governor who sat upon his throne, even unto that of the maidservant behind the mill.

They started on their way westward dejected in spirit and weakened in body by months of bad and insufficient food, inactivity and debilitating illnesses. With the wrongheadedness that has characterized the operations of armies since the first one ever levied, they started at the least favorable time of year. They started then because they could no longer be kept where they were.

Nothing so saddened them as leaving their homeplace, nothing so daunted them as the trip they faced, nothing so appalled them as the place of their destination, but such had been the horrors of camp life that when the gates were thrown open that morning there was a rush to them.

And so the wheels made the first of their million turns and the feet took the first of their million steps toward no promised land, no land of milk and honey, but rather toward the land of darkness, land of death.

The last to exit were barely outside the stockade, to which they had set fire, when “Amazing Grace” was struck up. Down the long caravan of already weary, already disheartened travelers it went, linking them like a joining of hands.

Part Four

By holding out, litigating, stalling, the Cherokees were the last but one of the Five Civilized Tribes to go west. That other one, the Seminoles, were on their way now too.

Thus they went knowing all too well what to expect. Knowing it had been one of the factors swaying them to hold out and resist going. In warning them to avoid a like fate, relatives and friends already out west, those voluntary emigrants, wrote telling them what had happened to the other tribes evicted from their lands and convoyed under government escort. It had been going on for some seven years already, though the experience had taught the overseers nothing, and the money to be made off the operation by profiteers, swindlers and corrupt officials had multiplied their numbers like buzzards flocking to a feast.

First to go were the Choctaws. Pacified for centuries, their boast was that never in their history had they warred upon their white brothers but had welcomed them from the first ones they ever saw. They went without protest, agreeing to the treaty proposed to them offering an exchange of land in The Territory for their homeland, and readying to leave before the ink of their X's was dry.

The Choctaws were dispatched in yearly parties of a couple of thousand head, not in one fell swoop as was the entire Cherokee nation. The Choctaws were a large tribe—over twenty thousand; they had been on the move in these piecemeal installments since 1831, and their remnants still were. For them, emigrating had become an annual rite, almost an inherited characteristic, like the passage of the birds, with the difference that they went north in winter, and none of them returned south. And, not being birds, they lacked wings. The overland trip, on foot, took them all winter long. For it they were issued blankets—one to a family. Natives of southern Mississippi, they hardly knew what winter was. They went shoeless, or at best shod in thin moccasins, many shirtless, and in cotton smocks. It had been the luck of the Choctaws that the seven winters of their expulsion were like the biblical years of leanness in severity.