Katy Smith: Free Men

“Chief, it’s morning time! There are birds awake!”

Summer in Iroquois country is like spring at home. I pull the blanket tighter around me. At home I cannot say how I’m remembered; I am a runaway, a traitor, or entirely forgotten. Here, in this dry cool, I am the chief of Hillaubee.

The feast was in my honor, for I arrived not only with my bald-faced horse and my belongings but with a reputation. From the Tunica I had traveled north to the Shawnee towns and then east to the old center of power among the Iroquois. In a pillowcase given to me by a girl in a prairie fort, I had letters and promises neatly stacked from the Spanish, French, Americans, and a dozen tribes from the Caddo to the Miami. My coins were dwindling, so it was the pillowcase that I kept now beneath my bed at night. If I could ally myself with the nations of the Iroquois, dissolving though they were, or this Oneida village alone, I could not be turned away from my home. This was the last stitch needed in my suit of war, if I chose to wear it.

The boy has found one of my shoes — not the kind with buckles — and is trying to drag it onto my foot, though the leather keeps catching on my toe. There is something about children and shoes. Was Cat anything like this as a boy? Or would he have been, if he were born into a family?

I follow him down to a bright river, where he watches me wash. My legs are sore from dancing and my belly is still telling me about supper. Downstream, a black man scrubs a pair of breeches.

“Is he a slave?” I ask.

“Just Old Henry,” the boy says, “Ojistah’s granddaddy. He has terrible farts.”

The war suit I envision has no relation to the world I’m actually in. Clashes still light up the country like fireflies, but the enemy is no longer a stranger. There are outsiders, but there are no more foreigners. Now in every battle you must confront someone whose face you’ve seen before. You can hold on to your land, fight for sovereignty, but in the morning you will still wash your feet in a river with a black man who is the ancestor of an Oneida.

The new Americans don’t understand the nature of the country they’ve claimed; they have turned the Oneida into Christians and then turned them from their lands. They want to see a mirror of themselves wherever they look, but though they make claims for the rights of the individual, there are no individuals here, only kin. And kin is not a mirror at all, but a mixed woods, where nothing is alike.

In the afternoon I send a messenger with a packet of letters intended for the chiefs of the Muskogee towns surrounding Hillaubee. It is already 1789; most of the villages will have a man who can read a page of English.

The boy takes me to a nearby hill overlooking a lake long and blue, on which the wind makes quick cuts.

“Beyond that is land they’ll take from us,” he says, and flops to the ground, worn out from the climb.

I sit beside him and wave a mosquito from his face.

“When I’m grown I figure I’ll take it right back.”

Above us a tulip tree grows so high that its canopy is hidden by the crowns of all the smaller trees. Something moves in those upper branches; clusters of leaves float down to us. We can hear wing beats fluttering from a nest to an insect and back. On the ground, a mink shoots between the curls of bark fallen from the birches and stops, sits up, watches us. All this life I didn’t observe when I was a boy of ten. I only wanted to know what my uncle was doing. Beneath the breeze comes the faint sound of pounding meal and men laughing, and those human sounds are the ones my young guide is listening for.

I am old enough now to offer advice, to tell the boy that thirsting after fairness only leads to a parched life, but I am also old enough to deserve this quiet. When I close my eyes, there is nothing behind my lids to see, just a spray of light retold on my own skin. All this hill knows is my body as it exists today; we both stay quiet and smell the mink and the season and the boy’s recent snack of onion. The hill and I are not waiting. I surely have not spent my whole life waiting, first to punish and then to be forgiven. That would be the way a life gets lost.

“Do you have ghost children here?” I ask.

“What are those?”

“Spirits that linger after a body’s dead. They play games, tickle your skin when you’re sleeping.”

“Sounds nice.”

“No, they’re worse than that,” I say, uncertain how to describe the precise discomfort. “They’re like memories.”

He picks himself up, finds a stone to hurl over the edge of the hill like a man of any time, of any color, and after listening to it ricochet against the trunks he turns back toward his village again. “I guess we haven’t got them.”

February 15, 1790

IT WAS TWO weeks ago, when I came to the American capital in New York to meet with representatives who took an interest in the Indian territories, that I first wondered: Was I seeking vengeance, or was I running away? That day when I walked out of the village in anger and with a convoluted scheme of retribution, was I just terribly afraid? Have I spent the last two years elaborating on my cowardice?

The room I’m sitting in is marble and stone, with four tall windows that let in the low winter light. The long table is surrounded by upholstered chairs, all of which are empty except for one at the end, where a round man in a hat dozes, and mine. Soon the rest will be filled, and men will ask my opinion of the frontier violence and whether certain tribes must be paid in cash, or whether calico will do. But now there is time to read again the letter I found in my rooms this morning.

It did not take long to discover there had been another Muskogee in this city. Mrs. P., a woman who enjoys hosting Indians in her afternoon salons, told one of my companions, and he came to me with the news. She had forgotten the young lady’s name, but she had returned to the southern territories directly after the Christmas season. Had left behind nothing but a few letters to be sent by post. Mrs. P. had distributed them all except one, which had no address, and sent it along by my companion, hopeful that I would know the whereabouts of this correspondent, all Indians being surely familiar with each other. My companion said nothing to Mrs. P., but he saw that it was my name.

I sent him to the stables to brush down our horses while I sat at the desk by the narrow boarding-house window and broke the dribbled wax of the seal. It was dated November 15, 1788, too long ago.

It is autumn in Virginia, in Richmond, I made it as far as I said. You see, I have learned to write. A gentleman is giving me lessons. And dresses, and whatever I desire, but you should know I do not always accept. I want to write because it burns my heart that you must think I took the money. (Though I did.) But it is not what a man should think of a woman. I am doing my hair in the new style, and that also hurts. The ladies like to guess what will surprise me. They thought I would gasp at their houses. I told them we have houses too. They thought I would devour their food, but it is overboiled and bland. I enjoy the clothes but only because people look at me more kindly. Stockings are an unusual feeling. I could not see the purpose of your money. You wanted to buy me, but you wanted to make me happy, and I would have been happier with the money than with a husband. So what was I to do? I saw my father, the white one, before I left. You must not have known. He did not know me, I think. I painted my face for him and asked could I go visit an English town and he said yes. He gave me the name of a man he knew in Richmond and said he would stop to see me next time he went through. I showed him my pretty eyes so that he would not forget, but I planned to tell him who I was next time I saw him. I would not have let it go too far. But they say he is dead, killed by robbers. I heard this from an Indian who was not Muskogee so I am not sure I believe it, though I do not mind if he is. He is a bastard, I told you. I wondered what the life was like, the one he left me for. I wanted to know what was better than Hillaubee. I think with women we are asked to be beloved, and nothing more. Give babies, and food, and shelter, and not take anything. I know this, I am used to this. I use it. But I was bad at planting corn. Oche will tell you. Though good at baskets. I have sold many here. A white woman sets me up with cane and I do it in a room for all to see. I want to wear a silk dress but she puts me in skins. I make money this way, to add to your money — I am sorry — and now I have two silk dresses I can wear when I am not an Indian on display. I took the coins and the pony, I felt bad about that, to Okfuskee. A group of men were riding for Columbia and I used some money to pay my way with them. They were meeting with the whites to talk about land. In that city, there was a servant who wiped the seats after we stood. I found a woman to make me a plain dress, not from Indian cloth, and I rode the carriage up in stages to Virginia. I should have bought a bonnet. I was stared at. Sometimes I enjoyed it and sometimes I did not. I just wanted to see other places. I was in Williamsburg for a time and though it was big it felt too small, so I used more coins to get to Richmond. I know you laughed at this plan of mine, but here I am and I do not think you are chief yet. So. I stay with the sister of the man I mentioned, who was not the friend of my father’s but someone else down a line of friends. The family is good to me and gives me a room for my baskets, but I will not stay much longer. The children make hollering noises when they see me and one called me ugly, which I am not. I thought I would have some mark on my face for being a white man’s daughter, but no one seems to recognize it. This should be as much my town as any other. I am not always happy, but I am happier than I was. I will not say yes to the man who keeps asking to marry me. That is in no ways what I want. You won’t believe it but I love you. Or else you will believe it because you also love me, and you would not if you thought I did not. Because you are as selfish as me. I will not come back, and I do not expect you will come to Richmond. You thought our town was all there was, and worth saving. I want to repay you for what I took. I have been putting a little aside from my baskets. I call it lover money, and kissed each coin at night until that made me laugh and I stopped. But it is here for you when you would like. I want to see you again. You liked me even when I was rotten, but I was young. I cannot ask for forgiveness too many times or I will seem not worth forgiving. I have dreams that we are lying by the river and the magnolia leaves are dropping on us. We are pretending that we are not in love but we are. It was you I wanted, not Thomas Colhill. In the spring I think I will go to New York where the American government is, because they say those men enjoy seeing Indians.