No Resting Place Page 3

  What were the Cherokee Indians to him? he asked; and then he knew how Cain must have felt under God’s withering gaze when he asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And as much if not more in need of spiritual guidance than the Indians were their white oppressors. But he hardly knew where Georgia was, he protested; and he was directed to go and find it on the map.

  His case strained the Reverend Mackenzie’s faith in God’s infallibility. He respectfully suggested that a mistake had been made, that the call to this duty had been wrongly addressed. He was not made of the stuff of martyrs, and nobody knew this better than he. His letters from Georgia back home to Edinburgh during that summer of 1837 abound in expressions of his unfitness. He prayed for strength but his prayers went unanswered; he knew himself for the weakling he was. He prayed for resignation to whatever the fate that awaited him; he feared that, put to the test, he would turn tail and run, just as his predecessors—all but two of them—had done. It was the treatment of those two that daunted him. For refusing to swear their oaths not to minister to the Cherokees they were beaten, chained and forced to march thirty-five miles a day the one hundred miles from the site of their arrest to the jail, were tried, convicted and sentenced to four years hard labor, denied all privileges and any visitors. The stir this caused in more enlightened parts of the country carried their appeal to the United States Supreme Court. They were released after serving two years. They returned to their homes to find that they had been confiscated. The men were then run out of the state.

  In Savannah, at the customshouse, the Reverend Mackenzie had sworn his oath of allegiance to the constitution of the state of Georgia, which oath was required of all white people wishing to reside in the Cherokee territory. He was one of many off his boat to swear their oaths, for that territory was a land of opportunity. The official who administered the oath drew the Reverend Mackenzie’s particular attention to that provision of the constitution relating to which color of people might assemble for worship and which might not. His aim was to stay within the law by ministering the rites of the church to his red parishioners singly and in pairs, and meanwhile to convert his white congregation to a spirit of brotherly love for their red neighbors. His dread was that, in their determination to brutalize the Cherokees and to make their lives so wretched they would leave of their own accord, the authorities might tighten the law to forbid him to minister to them in any numbers at all.

  Now here he was in this literally godforsaken place.

  But where were the Indians?

  Where were the wigwams and the tepees, the feathered headdresses, the colorful costumes? Where were the beaded moccasins, the bareback pinto ponies? Where were the queues of braided hair, the tattooed faces? Where were the Indians?

  What he was seeing, the Reverend Mackenzie relates in the first of those letters home of his (to be published by a small Indian-oriented press, long after he had gone to his reward, under the title The Missionary in Spite of Himself), was a settlement different from the ones he had passed through in getting there only in being newer, recently prosperous, now all but deserted. There was a former church—the one he was to make his own—now a stable. There was a former school—now boarded up. There was a grocer, a dry-goods merchant, a chemist, even a printshop—the latter now shut down. Large white clapboard houses sat back from the streets on spacious lots. No grisly hanks of human hair hung drying on poles in the gardens of the houses. There were no naked dark-skinned children at play, rather there were fair little girls with golden curls in pinafores and buckle shoes, towheaded little boys more decently dressed than the urchins of the streets of Edinburgh. As for the townspeople, they were an outpost of Scotsmen like himself. Not Raindancer, nor Black Bear, not White-man-killer, but McIntosh, Dinsmore, Ferguson, Duncan, Ross, Stuart, Cameron were their names. Where were the Indians? Had he come just too late? Had they tired at last of their long, losing struggle, capitulated and gone west?

  The Reverend Mackenzie’s first pastoral duty in his new post, just days after taking it up, was the baptism of a child. Not a babe in arms but a boy of twelve or thereabouts. In part because this was the first person he had baptized in the New World, in part because of later developments, he would take a lasting interest in the boy—lasting at least for as long as events allowed. It is in his letter relating their meeting that my paternal great-grandfather, Amos, my namesake, the founder of our branch of Texas Smiths, makes his first appearance. However, at the time Smith was not his name—not even one of his several names.

  He was a short, slender boy, a sandy-haired, fair-skinned, freckle-faced, blue-eyed boy (that was the sequence in which his features were revealed to Mrs. Mackenzie as she opened the upper half of the back door of the parsonage to him and he raised his head), and he was a painfully shy boy—“backward” was the word she resorted to. He had looked at her as if she were the first of her sex he had ever laid eyes on, and when she opened the lower half of the door to show him in (he had muttered that he was there to see the minister, please, ma’am; would she be so good as to ask him to step outside? That she would not, for the minister was prostrated by the infernal heat, but she would ask him, please, to be so good as to step inside) he had slipped past her as if afraid of contamination by her touch. (That, in fact, was exactly what he feared. For while it was over a week ago that he had been ritually scratched, and while he was now free to associate with women again, even to be touched by one, he was not yet used to this restored freedom. Besides, this one was an Yvwunega who would not have known what it meant to be scratched if she were told.) Putting the width of the kitchen between them, the boy said, “My business with the minister is just between him and me, if you don’t mind, ma’am.”

  Yet such a different impression had he made upon her husband, they might have been talking about not one but two boys. (In fact, they were. Actually, three.) Rather a sobersided little soul but perfectly polite, the Reverend Mackenzie found their young caller. Welcomed him here, hoped they were settling in comfortably, wondered if there were anything he might do to be of help. Then he stated his business. On his own, without his parents, he had come to ask to be baptized.

  Today? Now?

  If it was convenient with His Reverence, the sooner the better, for he was no longer a child but had reached the age of discretion and was now accountable for his sins. And there was no knowing when a body might die.

  It was not cant. The boy seemed to have thought quite seriously already about death and damnation.

  Impressed, eager to get started doing God’s work, the Reverend Mackenzie readily agreed.

  He knew a good place on the river for them to do it, the boy said.

  He must be from a family of Baptists. Now, the Reverend Mackenzie had always thought of nonconformists as misguided at best, nitpickers and hairsplitters, and, at worst, as outcasts for going against the kingdom’s established church. This boy brought home to him the fact that he was no longer in that kingdom. On the contrary, he was in the only former colony that had rebelled against the king, against an established church, and had won.

  Surprised at the ease with which he did it, the Reverend Mackenzie found himself thinking, well, better a Baptist than a heathen—although he was quite certain that no Baptist would have said the same for his own creed, and certain too that he himself would not have said it so easily anywhere else but here. One must trim one’s sails to the wind. His church had its tenets and its rites, and that these were the right tenets and the right rites he never questioned, yet here he was in this frontier outpost, the only Christian minister of any denomination—much like a general agent for several insurance companies, though the comparison was rather uncomfortably commercial. Sectarian differences seemed to lose here some of their importance. As a foreign embassy or a consulate sometimes handled affairs with the host country of nations with no representatives there of their own, so he now began to see his function. His bishop might not agree, but, yes, decidedly, better a Baptist than a heathen. The Reverend Mackenz
ie confesses that in that heat a cool dip while doing God’s work seemed to him a jolly good idea. He confesses even to having followed the boy’s example, stripping to the skin and enjoying a total immersion himself.

  The spot was one at which two rivers met and joined to become one big river. Any one of the three would have fulfilled their requirements, but the boy insisted on being baptized in the big river. It symbolized something for him.

  “I am like it,” he said with a solemnity that, in one so young, would have been comical had it not instead been impressive. “Two in one.” He did not volunteer to elaborate on this and the Reverend Mackenzie did not press him. It was himself the boy was talking to. He gave the impression of being a boy who talked to himself a lot. Plainly he found being “two in one” something of a burden. To his credit be it said that the Reverend Mackenzie did not find this precocious gravity commendable. “A child,” he writes, “should be left in happy ignorance of weighty matters.” A Scot, but not your dour Scot, is how the Reverend Mackenzie comes across in his letters.

  But questions for the boy the Reverend Mackenzie did have, in pursuance of his duty, and in the shade of a tree he catechized his young parishioner.

  “What is your name?” he began. The response he got to this puzzled him. By what seemed the most elementary, the most innocuous question possible to put to a person—that is, a person with nothing to hide—the Reverend Mackenzie had unwittingly placed the boy in a dilemma. Plainly he had been dreading this moment. He visibly squirmed. He looked skyward as though seeking guidance.

  His name? Which one of them?

  He had at all times three names, and of these one was continually being changed—in fact, he was going to have need of a new one after the ceremony about to be performed. To most people he was Amos Ferguson. That had been his name at school, was his name to all the world outside the walls of his home. Inside those walls he was Noquisi: Bright Star. That name was not to be divulged to anybody but those of his own clan. An enemy who knew it had power over you, could conjure against you, and the world was full of enemies. You signed your X to any document, preferring to be thought illiterate, shameful as that had come to be in recent years, sooner than reveal your real name. That way too the real you had not signed the document. It was a part of the boy’s dilemma now whether or not to reveal this name to the minister. If he did not, would he really be baptized? All of him? Would he not, in fact, be baptized under false pretenses and for this sin sent to hell?

  But that was only a part of his dilemma. Inside these two names, one of them inside the other, like the meat of a walnut nestled within its outer and its inner shells, was yet a third name, the most personal, the most secret of all: his self’s very kernel. This was the boy’s name for himself, and only he called himself by it, even he never spoke it aloud; nobody else, not any of his friends, not his parents nor his grandparents knew this name. It was doubtful that even God knew it, so often, especially of late, was he obliged to change it in order to keep up with the changes in himself and in the world.

  Once, long ago—three years at the least—when his mother, alluding to his restlessness, his tireless energy, called him her walela—her hummingbird—that had become his name for himself. Then all the world was in flower, with nectar to sip from every blossom. That name lasted him until his dream about turning into a bear, and then for a while he was Yonva. There were times when the name was not of his choosing, for instance, the phase when he was Alsdisgi: Troublemaker. Sometimes from the original to the translation it ran the opposite way, as when, reflecting conversations overheard at home about events rapidly overtaking them all, a time when it was dangerous to speak the old, mother tongue even to one’s secretmost self, he was Worried One: Uwelihisgi. During one particularly troubled period just recently he was Uhnalvhi: Angry One. He had gone through two changes of name in this past week alone, such an eventful time this was for him. First he was Awina: Young Man.

  He had been given the sign that the time had come for him to do two things. He had long ago run the four times around the house with the last of his milk teeth and then thrown it onto the roof with a prayer to Dayi, the Beaver, to put a new one its place; his voice had recently broken; he was expecting this latest and last sign. Its coming made him very proud of himself, yet a power for both good and evil was now his. His years of innocence were over. He would be prone from now on to a new and strong temptation, and he had arrived at the age of discretion and was accountable for his sins.

  In olden times he would have gone naked from birth until given this sign. Boys did, back then. It was not thought good for boys to wear clothes. Clothes made the body soft when it should be getting hard for life as a man. Boys had nothing to conceal anyway. The coming of civilization, of Christianity, had long ago changed all that. But, pagan or Christian, boys had not changed. The change that boys underwent in ceasing to be boys had not changed.

  When he was given the sign again the next day, sure of himself, Awina saddled his pony and, wearing his best moccasins, a turban and a sash, rode the five miles from town out to the farm to make his announcement.

  “Agiduda. Grandfather,” he said, “the time has come for me to be scratched.”

  “Osda, Sgilisi! That is good, my grandchild!” said his grandfather. “Let us go to water.”

  The rite was age-old. The man had undergone it, the boy’s father had undergone it, now he. It had remained unchanged. But meanwhile in the span of those three living generations their world had changed and changed again and was now more than ever in the throes of change. It seemed destined to come full circle once more. Thus the ceremony’s opening invocation, made meaningless in his father’s time, an empty form, had now regained the force, the solemnity and the fearsomeness it had had for the boy’s grandfather. It was a prayer to the Great Spirit to dispose this young brave toward war.

  To the naked boy standing before him the old man said, “Noquisi, you are about to be made dreadful.” Usgasedi was the word: dreadful, horrid, fierce. Qualities which, at the urging of the missionaries, their people had lain aside, qualities which, as their long, losing struggle neared an issue, they would have need of in their young men once again.

  “What is your name?” the Reverend Mackenzie repeated.

  For a moment longer the boy hesitated, then, “Amos Ferguson, sir,” he declared. He had decided to leave it to God to decide which he was, whether red or white, and of the two which of them might be saved. He could not decide for himself, and he had been told so often that the red part was damned past redemption, he had about come to believe it. He reckoned it was only the white part of him that this God was interested in.

  There was some little difficulty over the doctrine of the Holy Trinity but it was not the difficulty that the Reverend Mackenzie had foreseen. He dreaded having to explain the matter to a simple mind because the truth was he had never understood it himself. One God in Trinity and one in Unity. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, and so forth. The Father eternal, and so forth. And yet they are not three eternals nor three incomprehensibles nor three uncreate, but one eternal, and so forth. The Father almighty, the Son almighty and the Holy Ghost almighty, yet they are not three almighties but one almighty. And so forth and so forth. The arithmetic of this made the Reverend Mackenzie’s head ache. The requirement of professing to believe it literally had very nearly kept him from taking his vows of ordination, and was a vexation to his spirit still.

  Said the Reverend Mackenzie with an encouraging smile, “Don’t let it bother you, my boy, if that is not quite clear to you.”

  Said the boy, “But it is, sir. Quite clear. Three in one, one in three.”

  They got through the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacraments and the Last Supper, then for the eighth time in as many days the boy stripped himself for immersion in the river. Usgasedi for a name had lasted him no longer than that. Busy days they were at his turning time of life!

/>   “Great heavens, boy!” cried the Reverend Mackenzie. “What on earth has happened to you?”

  He looked as though he had been mauled in barehanded combat with a bobcat. From top to toe, down his arms, down his legs, across his chest, across his back the scratches ran. Music paper was not more lined than was the boy’s body by the claws of some wild beast. Recently inflicted, the wounds were still scabbed over.

  The Reverend Mackenzie had found his first Indian.

  He thought of those stories so common of white children taken captive and raised as Indians. But no.

  “Jijalagiyai,” said the boy—outlandish sounds, all the more outlandish issuing from the mouth of a freckle-faced, blue-eyed bairn. “I thought you knew. Jijalagiyai. That means, ‘I am truly one of the Real People.’” That was said proudly, this bitterly, “If you don’t believe me, that I am an Indian, just ask any of these true-blue white folks hereabouts, Your Reverence. They will set you straight right quick.” Then this, though with a laugh, ruefully, “The other day I heard a man say—he was a man whose house was being taken from him because he was an Indian, ‘Our Cherokee blood must be very strong blood. It takes so little of it to make one of us.’”

  In the long-laid-aside rite that he and his grandfather were reviving, the boy had been scratched with a comb made from a wolf’s bone. Just so had it been done in former times. The comb was cracked and yellowed with age. The wolf would have been killed by a wolf-killer, a professional, the office hereditary, the formula for deceiving the wolves into believing that the killing had been done by somebody from another settlement, and thereby deflecting their revenge for their brother’s murder, handed down from father to son. The comb was sharp-toothed; his blood had flowed and the pain he endured without flinching filled him with pride of manhood. He washed away the blood by a plunge in the river. Afterwards, to toughen him, his grandfather bathed him in a solution made from the catgut plant. As always in former times whenever any new phase of a Cherokee’s life was about to be entered upon, he purged himself with the black draught, an emetic and a laxative.