Читать книгу Trace - Lauret Savoy - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSeven years old on a sun-bright June day, she stands by the curio shop’s postcard rack. In their move across country her parents have visited many national parks—Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Zion, the Grand Canyon’s North Rim—and at every stop made, for gassing up or seeing sights, she runs first to the postcard rack. Turning through metallic squeaks she seeks more images of home, a vision grown beyond California’s coast to canyons, deserts, and mountains of her West. These places must come east, too.
Ten cents a card. She takes selected treasures to the cashier: Point Imperial at sunrise; goldening aspen groves; layered, dusklit canyon walls; brick-red river against brick-red rock. Light, texture, home.
The woman behind the counter tilts her head but greets a man approaching the register. She will help him. Marlboros. Then another customer. Postcards and questions about road conditions and nearby motor courts.
The girl stands quietly, her head at counter level. These people act as if she isn’t there. Through the display glass she examines polished stones and beaded place mats under sunlit dust. The room smells stale.
Only after all others have gone does the woman behind the counter extend her hand. Six cards, sixty cents. When the girl reaches up with three quarters the woman avoids the small hand to take the coins. Cash register clinks shut. The woman turns away.
The girl starts to ask but stops as the woman faces her. At seven she doesn’t yet know contempt or refusal, and runs far into the pinewoods behind the store. That night, with all her home-cards covering the motel bed, she wonders if each bright place is enough.
SAND AND STONE are Earth’s memory. Old worn postcards keep a child’s memory safe in my desk. Stanley Kunitz wrote in his poem “The Testing-Tree” that “the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.” At a young age I began to hope that despite wounds a sense of wholeness could endure. That each of us possesses a hardness—not harshness, not severity, but the quality of stone or sand to retain some core though broken again and again.
This child-hope remained hollow of adult understanding until my second journey across country alone some years ago. After two months on the road I reached Southern California, the point of return. A threshold to memory opened in crossing the Mojave Desert to the Devil’s Punchbowl.
Steeply tilted sandstone ledges hundreds of feet high rim the Punchbowl, a “geologic curiosity” within the San Andreas Fault zone. Fluent and patient in its work, the small stream draining the rocky bowl gathers and reworks pieces of the cliffs and abutting San Gabriel Mountains, today as it has done through centuries of days. It is a tactile reminder that here is a land of process and response. From cloud to creek, the motive forces of water—the forces of weathering and erosion—and abrasive, shuddering movements along bounding faults shaped and continue to reshape the cliffs and basin. What one might perceive as timeless is but one frame of an endless geologic film.
I descended through stands of pinyon, manzanita, and mountain mahogany to wade the cooling water. To watch grain after entrained sand grain roll, bounce, and be carried aloft. Long-avoided questions emerged as the current nudged me downstream with its sediment. I was five years old when last at the Devil’s Punchbowl, on a picnic with my mother and father. Decades later the cliffs and basin still fit within memory’s frame, satisfying a wish to feel sun-warmed sandstone and this stream’s grainy flow. But perhaps I also returned to reach beyond memory to some origin, to some direction. That five-year-old had imagined these waters flowed from the beginning of the world.
Odysseus said, “I belong in the place of my departure and I belong in the place that is my destination.” I hadn’t known either place, fear stilling me for years. But the Punchbowl’s ledges, this stream, and the shaping faults seemed to re-turn me to an awareness I couldn’t reach alone. That long-ago picnic fired a child’s passion to inhabit stories the land held—stories that assumed great importance as I grew up in a family with little spoken memory.
• • •
The San Gabriel Mountains rise to ten thousand feet, jutting high above Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. Between peaks and city basin lies the sharp turning hinge of a geologic trap door hidden by alluvium, freeways, and sprawl. These mountains continue to lift at rates among the fastest on the continent. But as they grow, they weather away, grain by grain, the residue carried downward to spread around their base like a fallen skirt. The daily business here is uplift and erosion, mountain-making and decay.
The nearby Devil’s Punchbowl consists of sandstone and conglomerate, once sands and pebbles of ancient mountain streams that flowed millions of years ago, now upended into rocky tablets.
What to take from this?
Each grain, each pebble embedded in Punchbowl rock, began as detritus from the denuding of ancestral highlands. Now-vanished cascades once conveyed sand and gravel down now-vanished mountains. If you and I were to examine the pieces, consider their texture and makeup, we could deduce much about their places of origin, about climate through time. But the Punchbowl as a place of tilted rock also means later shifting and deforming. Earthquake after earthquake dragged and shoved this terrain against the San Gabriel Mountains like a crumpled carpet shoved into a wall.
Origin and material source. Warping displacement. We can still detect both kinds of provenance even though most of what once existed long since eroded away.
What of us? What of who we are is owed to memories of blood or culture, custom or circumstance? To hardness? What makes an individual in a sequence of generations?
These questions simmered on my drive east from the Punchbowl. June edged toward its longest days as I followed Pacific-bound streams to their source, then across the Continental Divide. It did seem easier to piece together the geologic history of almost any place on Earth than to recover my ancestors’ past. Easier to construct a plausible narrative of a long-gone mountain range from the remnant pieces than to recognize the braiding of generations into a family. Than to know my parents’ reasons for turns taken.
FROM WHAT DO we take our origin? From blood?
I am the child of a woman with deep brown skin and dark eyes who married a fair-skinned man with blue-gray eyes. Yet as a little girl in California I never knew race. Skin and eye color, hair color and texture, body height and shape varied greatly among relatives. Like the land, we appeared in many forms. That some differences held significance was beyond me. Instead I devised a self-theory that golden light and deep blue sky made me. Sun filled my body as it seemed to fill dry California hills, and sky flowed in my veins. Colored could only mean these things.
On that drive east from the Punchbowl I realized how little I knew of my family as an organic unit held together by shared blood, experience, or story. I was born to parents already in middle age. They had come into the world before moving pictures talked, before teamsters drove only horseless trucks, before the iceman had to find a new profession. And they’d lived with elders who could recall life before the Civil War, memories lit by lantern light. Though nearly palpable, their pasts never spoke to me. Dad died before I had the questions. In response to them, Momma said she couldn’t remember. She wondered why I wanted to know.
FROM WHAT DO we take our origin? From incised memories?
Near the end of her life my father’s mother visits us in California, sharing my room. I’m nearly five years old. Slow, tidy with words and her things, ancient to me, Gu-ma brushes her graying chestnut hair each day. It falls below her knees. I like to lean into the back of her thighs, grasping her legs to feel her flesh warm my face. Gu-ma’s hair covers me, hides me. Each night I pray for long straight hair like hers, and for her eyes—my father’s eyes—so I might see through sky, too.
Second-grade recess, Campus School playground, Washington, D.C. I stand by empty swings. A classmate walks up to say “You’re colored, aren’t you?” I nod yes to what really isn’t a question. Troubled by how ugly Bobby Kane could make sun-light and sky-blue sound, I run to Sister Mary Richard Ann. That evening I ask my parents.
Home, many a workweek night. My father sits in his easy chair, alone in the back room, a glass of gin or scotch in one hand, cigar or cigarette in the other. The only light the inhaling burn. What he sees or thinks, I don’t know. What I remember? Smoke. Silence.
Lessons in fifth-grade social studies, Dunblane Catholic School.
One: Our textbook describes the unsuitability of Indians, who wasted away, and the preference for Africans, who thrived as slaves and by nature want to serve. I ask my teacher, Mrs. Devlin, if I might become a slave.
Two: We read in class that Indians are savages who had to give up the land and their wasteful way of life for the sake of civilization. The book calls this part of Manifest Destiny. Confused again, I ask what made the “five civilized nations” civilized?
Imagine searching for self-meaning in such lessons. Am I civilized? Will I be a slave? The history taught wasn’t the history that made me, but I didn’t know this. Any language to voice who I was, any knowledge of how land and time touched my family, remained elusive.
Once we moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, I came to learn how “race” cut our lives. Black, Negro, nigger! came loud and hard after the 1968 riots. Words full of spit showed that I could be hated for being “colored.” By the age of eight I wondered if I should hate in return.
WHAT I COULDN’T grasp then was that twining roots from different continents could never be crammed into a single box. I descend from Africans who came in chains and Africans who may never have known bondage. From European colonists who tried to make a new start in a world new to them. As well as from Native peoples who were displaced by those colonists from homelands that had defined their essential being.
As the nineteenth century ended, family members by blood and marriage had dwelled in rural Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, perhaps Oklahoma, and Montana ranchland along the Yellowstone River. They came to live in cities like Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But how they experienced the world or defined themselves in it remained unknown. Forced removal, slavery, and Jim Crow were at odds with propertied privilege. Forebears had likely navigated a tangled mélange of land relations: inclusion and exclusion, ownership and tenancy, investment and dispossession. Some ancestors knew land intimately as home, others worked it as enslaved laborers for its yield. What senses of belonging were possible when one couldn’t guarantee a life in place? Or when “freed” in a land where racialized thinking bounded such freedom?
As I crossed the Continental Divide, the questions became so urgent they soon composed the journey. High in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, where the Arkansas River rises, I decided to try to trace family, and myself, from storied places and recorded history. But where to start?
Watching the Arkansas’s headwaters begin to carry mountain detritus toward the plains, I suspected this river could guide me. So by its drainage I plotted a meandering course toward Oklahoma, where an elderly cousin of my mother’s had once told me some ancestors might have lived.
SAND CREEK. THE name-shadow long pulled, its memory contested since November 29, 1864. As that dawn broke, several hundred volunteer soldiers led by John Chivington attacked a large Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment along its waters. Black Kettle and other leaders had thought they were under U.S. Army protection by land reserved for them. Most of the troops and Colorado territory settlers would memorialize what happened as a glorious battle against hostile foes. To survivors it was a massacre of about two hundred companions, most of them women, children, and elderly. On Chivington’s alleged orders—“Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice”—attackers mutilated corpses, taking scalps and other body parts as trophies. Heads shipped to the Army Medical Museum later ended up in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections.
It was by a sense of “how could I not” that I entered eastern Colorado’s plains in search of this winding tributary of the Arkansas River.
State Highway 96 and the Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks cross Big Sandy Creek just east of the ruined town of Chivington. No cars, no person passed in the hours I walked along the bank, through high grass and over barbed wire, as the stream bent through shallows and riffles across the plains. Killdeer and red-winged blackbirds were my only vocal companions besides cottonwood leaves shuddering in a constant June-dry wind. A century and a half before, a breeze lifted a U.S. flag by Black Kettle’s lodge. Villagers waved white flags at the approaching troops.
That no roadside marker acknowledged the violence didn’t surprise me. The land hadn’t yet opened to the public as a historic site under the National Park Service. Nothing appeared on my road map or atlas-gazetteer. The slaughter wasn’t mentioned in my schoolbooks. Neither was the muddied water sweeping earth to the horizon, nor the shadows I tried to follow.
WHILE THUMBING AN issue of Colorado Heritage magazine at a rest stop, I chanced across possible treasure. One O. E. Aultman had opened a photographic studio in Trinidad, Colorado, in 1889. Among nearly five thousand surviving images were stunning portraits of African Americans and people of obviously mixed heritage. Surely Trinidad, founded where the Santa Fe Trail’s northern route and Purgatoire River converged, was also a place where many peoples had converged. I had no idea if any of my ancestors had passed this way, but I’d learn what I could.
Both the director of the Trinidad History Museum and a volunteer at the A. R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art were gracious and apologetic.
Little information is left on African Americans in this area—of course, they don’t live here now . . .
Subject information for the Aultman photos is almost non-existent, the titles of many images are just Unidentified____.
Unidentified, unidentifiable. Like isolated grains of sand, these photographs teased absent stories. The town had just begun its big festival to celebrate the opening of the Santa Fe Trail. People crowded the streets. No one looked like me.
. . . of course, they don’t live here now.
I left Trinidad, returning east, downstream to the Arkansas.
MANY RIVERS BECOME one in Oklahoma. The Cimarron, forks of the Canadian, and Salt Fork vein eastward across the state to join the Arkansas before it meanders between Ouachita and Ozark uplands. I drove in with an evening thunderstorm, crossing the hundredth meridian between the Cimarron River and Canadian North Fork. Rolling plains greened almost secretly.
I couldn’t remember being in Oklahoma before; maybe familial memory remained. My mother’s cousin had told me years before that kin might have come here, that they were Black Cherokee or Creek. Whether she was right or wrong, I knew only some surnames: Turner, Reeves, Cade, and Allen.
A road sign declared YOU ARE ENTERING I.T.
Enslaved African Americans once lived in “Indian Territory.” They’d been brought by members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations forced across the Mississippi River in the southeastern removals of the 1830s and 1840s. Although only an elite few of the “five civilized tribes” held human beings as property, more than seven thousand people with African blood lived in bondage in Indian Territory on the eve of the Civil War. But bondage took different forms, from the rigid “slave codes” of the Cherokee Nation to more fluid social relations in Seminole society.
Autonomous communities of Seminole “slaves” formed the earliest Black towns here. Freed people established more settlements after the war. Then came the 1889 and 1890s land runs. Thousands of African American homesteaders were among those who settled “unassigned” or “surplus” lands—what hadn’t been reserved for other removed tribal peoples including Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Apache. Many settlers came from the Deep South searching for what one Black territorial newspaper called “the last chance for a free home.” By 1910 at least thirty all-Black towns had formed in what was now the new state of Oklahoma, most striving to become independent, farm-supported communities. Those now abandoned—like North Fork Colored, Cimarron City, Liberty, or Wybark—rival in number those surviving—like Summit, Tullahassee, Boley, and Langston City.
I had no idea where my mother’s family fit in, if at all.
ROLLING AND GULLIED red plains lie south of the Cimarron River in north-central Oklahoma. Langston City began there in 1890 on unassigned lands opened in the 1889 run. Its population once exceeded three thousand—before the state highway was rerouted.
I spent a day gathering what information I could in the Black Heritage Center archives of Langston University, formerly the Colored Agricultural and Normal University of Oklahoma. Through the 1890s and early 1900s, Langston City’s founder, Edwin P. McCabe, and other leaders promoted a “Negro” Oklahoma. They advertised existing towns and recruited immigrants for new town colonies and homesteads. “Langston City restores to the Negro his right and privileges as an American citizen and offers protection to themselves, families, and home,” wrote McCabe, also editor of The Langston City Herald. “Langston City is the Negro’s refuge from lynching, burning at the stake and other lawlessness and turns the Negro’s sorrow into happiness.”
The hope that Oklahoma might be admitted to the Union as an African American–controlled state was far from fancy for thousands of Black homesteaders. But the promise of self-governing havens would be dashed. Owners of small farms had little margin against drought or repeated crop failures. Few could afford the turn to mechanized farming. And when Indian and Oklahoma territories became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, the legislature disenfranchised African American residents and segregated public facilities.
OKFUSKEE COUNTY. ALTHOUGH it appeared that I-40 had sucked the life from Highway 62 in rural east-central Oklahoma, the road sign was enough to draw me in:
WELCOME TO BOLEY
LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN TOWN
FOUNDED 1903
BOLEY RODEO MEMORIAL WEEKEND
The historical marker clinched it: BOLEY, CREEK NATION, I.T., ESTABLISHED AS AN ALL BLACK TOWN ON LAND OF CREEK INDIAN FREEDWOMAN ABIGAIL BARNETT . . .
The wide main street was empty of cars, the stone-and-brick buildings lining it more boarded up than not. I almost didn’t stop. But at Boley’s Community Center I met Mrs. M. Joan Matthews, mayor, and her sister Mrs. Henrietta Hicks. They gave me a tour of the town “museum,” an old house opened on request.
From these generous women and other residents, I learned that Boley began as a rural community of Creek freed people following the Civil War. Formally established as a town after the turn of the twentieth century, it quickly became “a going concern,” with more than four thousand residents.
Like The Langston City Herald, The Boley Progress found its way throughout the South, promoting the town as a refuge. “Have you experienced freedom?” began one early article. “What are you waiting for? If we do not look out for our own welfare, who is going to do it for us? Are you always going to depend upon the white race to control your affairs for you?” ran another.
By 1912 Boley boasted two banks, five grocery stores, five hotels, seven restaurants, three or four cotton gins, three drugstores, one jewelry store, four department stores, two livery stables, two insurance agencies, two photographic studios, two colleges, plus a lumberyard, ice plant, electrical generating plant, funeral home, newspaper, post office, and railroad depot. Its Masonic temple was the tallest building around for some time. Visiting a few years earlier, Booker T. Washington had praised Boley as the “most enterprising, and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States.”
Now the population hovers around a thousand. The main employers, I was told, are a nearby prison and the Smokaroma, on Bar-Bq Avenue. The town’s biggest event, the “oldest existing rodeo in an African American community.”
Everyone I met in Boley was warm and welcoming. Still I felt an unbridgeable distance. These people know. They were born here; they’ve lived here all their lives. They know their past. They know home. The names of the Creek freed people who founded the town didn’t include names I knew.
A century and more ago it was Come to Boley! Come to Cimarron City! Come to Liberty! Did ancestors come? I imagined some of my mother’s forebears relocating from Alabama’s water-thick air, plantation fields, and dark woods. I imagined their response to expanses of grass and sky, to the opening of distance to the eye, to a land on which they hoped to live on their own terms. I imagined the difference in felt attachment to place that one generation could make—one born in the antebellum South, another on the plains.
Had they wagoned in on a day like that of my visit, the sky an open vault, the air scented by the previous night’s rain and a thick June greening, they must have imagined possibility and then begun to live it. I’d like to say the old homestead lay upstream, that they called it haven, that maybe they raised broodmares and grew the best greens for miles. I’d like to believe imagination could be sparked by familial memory.
Or did any arrive in bondage decades earlier as slavery and enslaved were brought westward on trails of tears? Were any of them “Buffalo Soldiers” posted at Fort Sill or Fort Reno? Companies from the army’s then all-Black regiments served a century and more ago in Indian Territory.
I imagined but did not know.
Boley elders suggested looking for family names in the Dawes allotment rolls of the five nations. So east I drove to Okmulgee, capital of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation, by the Deep Fork of the Canadian River. The library and archives had lists segregating “by blood” tribal members from freedmen and freedwomen for all five nations. Although no Cades appeared on the rolls I saw, there were Turners, Reeves, and Allens. But were any of them my Turners, Reeves, or Allens? Without more than surnames, it was impossible to learn if any rolls listed my mother’s ancestors, by blood or not.
What I did learn was that the Cherokee Nation had revoked tribal citizenship of descendants of its freedmen and women. A knoll overlooking Tahlequah, capital of the nation, still goes by the name “Nigger Hill.”
• • •
Before leaving Oklahoma I returned to flowing water, crossing the Cimarron River—its ripples aglint and aglitter in slant waning light. Cimarron—wild, untamed—is a good name. Centuries earlier los cimarrónes had escaped Spanish slavery to live in seclusion on the isthmus of Central America.
Wading into the river’s insistent flow I could almost believe the impulse of life. At a confluence these waters merged with another channel’s flow, their sand and mud loads merging, too. Many rivers become one in Oklahoma, but not human beings or blood streams.
Bridging the distance between history and the particularities of family seemed an impossible task given the erosive and estranging power displacement could wield. Circumstances leaving no trace could outweigh any longing to remain in a homeplace. Any continuity forged by knowing one’s lineages of kinship could break and break.
The river surface blushed in the last crimson light of day. Perhaps, I thought, wounds also flow in the blood. As if rending could begin in one’s veins and arteries, leaving partial access but never the whole. Self-knowledge reworked over generations becoming piecework.
But piecework needn’t mean empty. Fragmented needn’t mean all gone. Ankle-deep in the Cimarron, I needed to believe this.
*
SILENCE CAN BE a sanctuary or frame for stories told. Silence also obscures origins. My parents’ muteness once seemed tacit consent that generational history was no longer part of life or living memory. That a past survived was best left unexposed or even forgotten as self-defense. But unvoiced lives cut a sharp-felt absence. Neither school lessons nor images surging around me could offer salve or substitute. My greatest fear as a young girl was that I wasn’t meant to exist.
Yet one idea stood firm: The American land preceded hate. My child-sense of its antiquity became as much a refuge as any place, whether the Devil’s Punchbowl or a canyon called Grand. Still, silences embedded in a family, and in a society, couldn’t be replaced even by sounds so reliable: of water spilling down rock, of a thunderstorm rolling into far distance, or of branches sifting wind.
By the end of the nineteenth century some of my mother’s people had left rural Alabama and Virginia behind for the capital of Pennsylvania. How or if Oklahoma entered, or what existed before plantations, I don’t yet know. Scattered elements of language, like Momma’s Pennsylvania thee, touch me. Dad’s forebears took different paths, known and unknown, through the Chesapeake tidewater and Piedmont. Choices both parents made cast long shadows over me. The unvoiced history of this continent calls, too. It may ground all.
An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. The past looms close, as immediate as breath, blood, and scars on a wrist. It, too, lies hidden, obscured, shattered. What I can know of ancestors’ lives or of this land can’t be retrieved like old postcards stored in a desk drawer. To re-member is to know that traces now without name, like the “unidentified” subjects in O. E. Aultman’s photographs, still mark a very real presence. To re-member is to discover patterns in fragments. As an Earth historian I once sought the relics of deep time. To be an honest woman, I must trace other residues of hardness.
Far from any real town, my house sits at the edge of a field cleared two centuries ago, bordered by relict stone walls and wooded, worn-down hills. So different from the Devil’s Punchbowl or Cimarron plains, this landscape is yet kin and reminder. I like to walk through hemlock, white pine, and hardwood cover to the top of Long Hill, the ancient rocky mass behind my home. It’s on rain-soaking walks especially, when drops strike exposed schist, that tracing hardness seems most necessary.
