Citizens Creek by Lalita Tademy
They set out north one last time. Gramma Amy hummed as she walked, so Rose did too. Midmorning, they came upon a small group surrounding an overloaded wagon stuck on the open trail. A healthy, full-sized stallion trailed his reins as he grazed, and two women rolled out a new wheel. One of the men fixing the wagon was black, about her grandfather’s age, but the rest looked to be full-blood Cherokee.
Her grandfather and the ranch hand rushed to lend a hand. Although close to the fort, they weren’t yet within its protection. There were four children, including a pointy-nosed, dark-haired Indian boy a little older than Rose, and a girl about Elizabeth’s age. They couldn’t have been on the trail very long. Not only was their horse fresh, they all looked well fed. Once the new wheel was in place and they were ready to move on, their main man offered Grampa Cow Tom a wagon space, and he chose Granny Sarah to ride. The two parties took to the trail again together.
They fell into a rhythm walking in the daylight, and Rose gravitated to the middle of the pack, the road wide enough and the sky light enough they no longer had to follow single file. She listened to the worried squeak of the wagon wheels in front, and took solace from the men with guns behind. The Cherokee boy also walked in the middle, and they trudged along almost side by side without words. After an hour or so, the boy pulled out a piece of dried meat from his pocket and began to tear off chunks with his side teeth, chewing as he walked. Rose hadn’t eaten since last night, and she couldn’t help but stare at the deer meat. She tried to quell the desire by sipping a little water to trick her stomach. That only made things worse.
The boy held out his half-eaten strip to Rose, and said something to her. Grampa Cow Tom had taught her a few words of Tsalagi, but those weren’t the words the boy used, and she didn’t understand.
Rose was uncertain whether he offered the rest of the piece or one bite, but she took the chance to look at him squarely for the first time. He was full-blood. His long, dark hair was pulled back away from his face and stuck under his cap, his leathery skin a rich, coppery color and free of facial hair, his eyes a warm brown, set deep. His face was the opposite of her own, sharp nose, high cheekbones, thin lips, a profile so graceful it was almost feminine, and she suddenly worried about how she appeared to him.
She bit off a chunk and worked it in her mouth, savoring the tangy juice. She tried to hand the rest back to him.
“Chibona,” he said, pointing to himself, watching her.
“Rose,” she replied.
He pointed to her and then to the strip of meat, and back to her again.
Rose nodded and accepted the remainder of the chew. She knew she should save it for Elizabeth, but she wanted nothing more at this moment than to possess something the Indian boy had touched. And she was hungry. She bit off another piece, smaller this time, and stuffed the rest into her pocket.
He pointed to her once again and asked a question, but she couldn’t catch the meaning of his words and shook her head.
This time, Chibona pointed to the black man who had fixed the wagon wheel, walking ahead of them, and then back at Rose.
“Gvhnige?” he asked.
Rose suddenly understood what he asked and bristled. “Yargee is our chief, but we’re free,” she said in Mvskoke. “Not slave. Creek and free.”
Chibona studied her, uncomprehending.
“The Confederates came to take our ranch. I warned everyone just in time.” Rose couldn’t stop herself from talking, even though she knew he couldn’t understand Mvskoke. “We’ve been walking five days.”
They trudged along in silence for a time, but Rose ached to hear his voice again. She couldn’t bear that he’d lost interest.
“My Grampa Cow Tom goes to Fort Gibson all the time. He interprets for our chief. I can speak English too.”
“English,” Chibona repeated. He shook his head and fell into an easy stride, and she kept up, but didn’t initiate any more talk. When one of the older men called for him to help with the horses, he made his way toward the front of the group, leaving her behind.
For the first time since they started walking days ago, Rose shut out some of the ache of leaving the ranch and Twin, and the terrors of the trek. She caught a glimpse of the back of Chibona’s head and, comforted by the gestures of a stranger, dropped back to walk alongside Elizabeth.
Chapter 33
THE BLENDED PARTY journeyed on, rounding a bend on the trail, and in the distance, on a hill, a sprawling stone structure came into view, with wide porches running its length on both levels. They’d made it to the fort.
“Look, Elizabeth,” Rose said. “One day, I’ll have porches like that.”
The fort didn’t look at all like what she’d created in her mind, and as they came closer, word passed down the line that the building on the hill was a barracks for the soldiers, and not the main army post after all.
A bit farther, the fort itself rose up out of the flatlands. Rose had never seen so much stone. The walls were thick, and scores of soldiers carried rifles. But more jarring than the soldiers, which Rose expected and welcomed, were the Indians scattered everywhere, outside the walls of the fort as well as inside, sitting, standing, lying down, out in the open. Makeshift tents of blankets and pelts dotted every square inch of the terrain, intermingled with scrawny cattle, a few horses, chickens, and wagons of every sort crammed with personal and household items.
There were more displaced people at Fort Gibson than she could possibly count, many more than there were soldiers. Mostly Cherokee, judging from hair and beadwork and feathers, but also Upper Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole as well, as far as the eye reached. Since younger men were off fighting in the army, a majority of those surrounding the fort were women and children, or old men like her grandfather. Sprinkled in were family clusters with skin as dark as hers, but there was no way for Rose to know whether they were slave or free. Almost all seemed in the same condition of wretchedness—malnourished, shivering against the cold, ragged, weak, sick.
Grampa Cow Tom led the way through the motley sea of people, and pressed forward toward the front gate. Several bodies lay splayed on the ground in unnatural positions, not moving. Rose wasn’t sure if they were dead or sick or asleep. There was something in the faces of the Indians who inhabited Fort Gibson as they stared back at the new arrivals, something Rose couldn’t quite articulate, but instinctively grasped, at least in part. Fatigue. Despair. Resignation. But most of all, hunger. Clearly, most of the people here were starving. They shivered in the cold, damp mud and huddled together in family units, lethargic. For so many people in one place, there was remarkably little activity, as if everyone waited on something.
An army soldier on horseback yelled in English for a cleared lane to enter the fort. Few understood his words, but his intent was obvious, and people parted to open a path.
“Food,” someone called out from the crowd in Mvskoke, and others picked up the refrain, in Mvskoke and Hitchiti, in Tsalagi, in other Choctaw and Cherokee dialects, hands reaching toward the man on the horse. The soldier spurred his huge mount forward. Rose understood only some of the petitions, but not all, the languages crowding one another.
“Nothing to hunt.”
“Please. Medicine.”
“Dead. My two children gone.”
The soldier didn’t respond, not to any, and kept his eyes purposefully forward and focused on the gate. Rose recognized him. The man on the horse was Lieutenant Phillips, the white man who sometimes visited their ranch to talk to Grampa Cow Tom.
The black man riding with the Cherokee family called out to Lieutenant Phillips in English, and the lieutenant leaned down to hear him over the noise of the crowd. There was extended conversation back and forth, the black man acting as interpreter, and at the end, the military man agreed to something. The Cherokees they’d traveled with for the last few hours lifted Granny Sarah from the wagon, disentangled themselves from t
Before Phillips could disappear through the gate, her grandfather grabbed the bit of the lieutenant’s horse. At first, Phillips seemed ready to lash him with the rein, but pulled back in recognition.
“Cow Tom. You made it to the fort,” he said. “Bad situation all around.”
Her grandfather switched to English. “Confederates came for us.”
“Not many Indians left out there, Cherokee or Creek. Confederates are burning or destroying what they can. Most everyone not fighting in the army is in the fort now.”
Cow Tom gestured toward the Indians surrounding them. “These people look starved,” he said.
“Not enough food to go round,” Phillips said. “Supply wagons don’t always get through.”
An old woman, full-blood Creek, hair done up in a traditional topknot, reached out to Grampa Cow Tom, pulling at his leather cloak with her thin, fragile fingers.
“You speak the white man’s tongue,” she said in Mvskoke. “Tell him how we die without food and warm clothes. They don’t feed us and we can’t go out to hunt without being killed by Confederate Indian. They don’t give Creeks our rations.”
A slave in Creek dress came at her grandfather from the other side. “Soldiers come, say get to the fort after the Battle of Honey Springs, but we belong to Indians don’t got nothing now. And no way to raise food or make cloth.”
A bone-thin woman, filthy, in a ragged scrap of dress, elbowed Rose as she pushed to the front. Rose fell to the ground, but no one noticed, and she scrambled to pick herself up. She grabbed at Granny Sarah’s hand to try to shield her. A swarm of bodies and voices crowded in as attention channeled to her grandfather, and the assumption he was linked somehow to the army man on the horse. Most had lost someone to smallpox or dysentery or stomach disorders, to pneumonia or other disease. Everyone had some story of uproot, of neglect, of starvation, but even her grandfather struggled to understand so many different languages and dialects.
“We can’t tell what they say, but there’s damned little we can do anyways,” Lieutenant Phillips shouted to her grandfather, and he gave his horse a little kick, moving him through the crowd. He turned back. “Come tomorrow. Translator skills might prove useful,” he said.
The lieutenant disappeared through the gates, the Cherokee family behind him, and the rest of the crowd fell back. The thin woman who knocked Rose down rushed forward and began to pick through the fresh horse droppings for bits of undigested corn. Another woman followed her lead, and they fought over the spoils.
All Rose wanted was to get warm and to sleep. She pulled Elizabeth under her blanket to share body heat. Grampa Cow Tom circulated among those outside the gates of the fort he could readily identify as Creek, whether black, mixed-blood, or full-blood, gathering complaints to present to the military about the cold, insufficient food, disease, and lack of supplies.
It was Gramma Amy who began the search for a place for the night. Rose’s family never walked through the gates into the bowels of Fort Gibson. Her grandmother found a spot on a grass-trodden knoll outside the walls of the fort and formed a ring around what few supplies they had left. The grass was damp and the wind blew, but they lit a fire and ate the last of the cold tack and jerky. There wasn’t enough to offer their neighbors, and Rose couldn’t ignore the greedy eyes of want trained on all of them as they chewed. So tired she could barely think, she wrapped Elizabeth beside her, covered them with her blanket, and laid her head down.
Already, Rose didn’t like their new home.
Chapter 34
ROSE WORRIED OVER Granny Sarah. The trek to Fort Gibson drained them all, body and spirit, and the wretchedness of their situation weighed heavy all around, almost as searing as the persistent rank smell of open sewage and filth, the unpredictability of on-again off-again food rations, and the sickness girdling them no matter which way they turned. Hacking coughs pierced the darkness of the night, and a piteous chorus of moans came from several directions at once within the mass of humanity outside the gates of Fort Gibson. Someone died every day, a stiff body found in the morning after a long, chilly night, first loudly mourned and then stripped of their blanket to pass to the living. Deadly fever struck whole families, gone one after the other, dependent on strangers for the burying.
If only. If only Grampa Cow Tom could stop and talk to her, just the two of them, the steady drone of his voice in story a magic shield against the crush of the days and nights away from the only home she’d ever known. But he was always too busy, with strangers, with family, always in a group, always in demand. Not even a full moon had passed, and now Granny Sarah, weary, had lost the will to go on.
Rose stepped in to minister to her great-grandmother the best she could when Gramma Amy had others to attend, but Granny Sarah refused the little food or water they scrounged, and spent most of her time sleeping. Granny Sarah had been ancient as long as Rose could remember, but now she no longer made an attempt to rise each day, lying abed like so many others in the packed camp, her new routine one of sloth and resignation on the cold, damp ground. She perked up only slightly when Grampa Cow Tom came to sit by her side, for him and no one else, and slumped back into her own world when he absented himself to do his linguister work among the émigrés or camp officials. The weaker her great-grandmother became, the more Rose stayed close, struggling against her own loneliness in this world without Twin.
“I’m here, Granny Sarah,” Rose announced one early afternoon, a week after they first came to Fort Gibson.
Her great-grandmother motioned to be pulled upright, her desiccated weight light and unresisting even for a twelve-year-old girl as small as Rose. The day was mild, and a bit of the sun’s rays fell on Granny Sarah’s face, and she luxuriated in it, as if it was a gentle, stroking hand at her cheek. She was in a talkative mood, and put her clawlike hand around Rose’s.
“You got his face,” Granny Sarah said. “I pray you got his grit.”
“Yessum.” What else could she say?
Granny Sarah seemed to lose her concentration, but then squeezed Rose’s hand again.
“I was Bella before I was Sarah,” she said.
Although Granny Sarah’s eyes were age-clouded, there was a brightness behind, ravenous, fixing on Rose as if her great-granddaughter were the only person on earth, despite the filth and misery and anonymous thousands surrounding them. Granny Sarah pursed her dry lips and squinted hard, in search of what, Rose didn’t know, and Rose lifted the gourd for her great-grandmother to drink, afraid to break Granny Sarah’s mood. The moment offered the possibility of some glimpse of the past, something Rose longed for and seldom received. Once in a while her grandfather parceled out dribs and drabs of the exploits of his youth, the same few tales over and over, but he was miserly in the telling, and Ma’am never opened any parts of her life to inspection.
Rose knew so little about this frail woman whose wrinkled skin clung to her bony frame like an ill-fitted suit. “Who was Bella?”
A fine sheen of sweat covered Granny Sarah’s face. She seemed at the edge of answering, but then released her grip on Rose.
“Wasn’t my fault,” she said.
“What?” Rose prodded. She wiped the moisture from her grandmother’s forehead with her sleeve. “What wasn’t your fault?”
“I see you with your sister, watching over her. You got it in you to do better than me, but hang tight to your children, hear? No matter what, keep them close. Don’t let them go.”
“Who was Bella?” Rose almost whispered, so soft, at first she wasn’t sure her great-grandmother heard.
Granny Sarah released her grip and wiped at her eyes. They were dry.
“Don’t even have any tears left,” she finally said. “No use rooting in the past. What’s done is done and gone.” She closed her eye
Rose fought the wash of disappointment, and prepared to help Granny Sarah lie back down, when her great-grandmother’s eyes fluttered open again.
“I was Bella once, but Sarah’s better.”
“Please.” Rose held her great-grandmother’s hand. There was a secret here, she was sure of it, some meaning that might help her endure this terrible time at Fort Gibson if she could just keep her talking. Everyone in the family, so stingy with their stories. “What was Bella like?”
“Never you mind. Leave it be. Some things aren’t for sharing,” Granny Sarah said. “My story belongs to me.” Granny Sarah made a great effort to focus, and tightened her grip on Rose’s arm again. “Children matter. That’s all what matters. You’ll see when you have yours.”
The moment was lost, and Rose didn’t push further.
“Ma’am thinks I’m too plain to get a husband,” she said instead. Amid the misery of Fort Gibson, she imagined herself and Granny Sarah alone and free to say anything.
Granny Sarah laughed, a short, dry sound that took much of her energy. “No need putting plain in your mind. You are Cow Tom’s granddaughter. That’s enough. You’ll make it enough, and find a way, once decided what you want.”
Granny Sarah lay back of her own accord, spent, her brittle bones a-creak. She closed her eyes and settled into a pattern of labored breathing. Rose pulled her blanket up to cover herself. As afternoon stretched toward evening, and Granny Sarah’s breathing grew more ragged, Rose reflected on what her great-grandmother’s words might mean, and what she most hoped for. Home. Husband. Family. Children. Enough, without constant want. Safety. She would sacrifice almost the world entire to have these things.