Citizens Creek by Lalita Tademy
The throbbing turned to a hammer and pounded out everything else. “We are Creek. We are. Old Turtle earned those burying shots.”
“You forget yourself, boy. Back down or pay the price.”
Cow Tom looked down at his hands, balled into tight fists. What Chief Yargee meant was that Old Turtle would have a fitting service for a slave, despite his the high-handed talk about how they were members of the tribe too. Yargee loved a good celebration, whether for life or death or any reason in between, and Cow Tom should have appealed to that instinct in seeking permission for gunshots. Instead, he’d squandered his one opportunity without figuring out how to read the man properly. It was a mistake. His mistake. A coward’s mistake. Slowly, he unclenched his fists and contorted his face to a docile mask. He backed out of the house and made his way back to the Quarter.
Coward, he told himself. He was a coward. He couldn’t show anger. He was slave. But still. He didn’t have it in him to be special.
Cow Tom failed. He’d failed Old Turtle.
After the burial, they gathered outside Old Turtle’s cabin, all the slaves, but Cow Tom’s mood turned dark. Once Amy performed the purification, he went back to his cabin and fell onto the thin mattress as if drunk, although he hadn’t a drop to drink. Something had been severed, a ragged incision that left him without defense. He was alone, pinned in place on the sweated cot. Old Turtle was gone, his faith in his young charge misplaced. The bitter sickness eating at Cow Tom’s insides reminded him of those days just after his mother was taken, and the world around him turned more and more gray, until little had meaning. He finally fell asleep, or something close to it, but jerked awake in terror, searching out something familiar. The night was pitch-black, no light coming through the small window, and Amy sat beside the bed. She had put a poultice on his forehead, and he grabbed at the wrapping cloth and flung it across the room. She was talking to him, but he didn’t hear what she said, he didn’t care what she said. He turned his back to her and curled up into himself, his hands over his ears until the talking stopped.
“Tom.”
Amy again. Must be morning this time. No difference, so long as he didn’t slip back into sleep, and his mother’s port-stained face, mouth open in scream, awaiting him in every dream. His limbs seemed too leaden to lift, his eyes hurt too much to open, and his ears were too tired to listen.
“You have to get up. I told him I’m treating you for the fever, but Chief Yargee can’t be put off much longer. You have to go back to work.”
Dark. It was all too dark for Cow Tom to see.
“Tom.”
Her voice was far away.
“If not for you, or for me, for your son,” Amy said.
His wife’s voice was measured, impossible for him to block.
“Get up for your son, so he knows from the start how a man does.”
If she had shown panic, or desperation, or anger, if she had pleaded, Cow Tom wasn’t sure she could have broken through his fog. But as she repeated herself, over and over, he considered the curious possibility of following the clear, bright line of her voice from the depths of the hole in which he found himself, just for awhile, just to see where it led, and then he opened his eyes, bringing her into focus. She was calm, in a chair by the bedside, sweating lightly, one hand on the high bump of her overripe belly, a strange intensity in those sable-brown eyes that held him steady.
With the connection made, she spoke new words.
“I will give you sons,” Amy said in Mvskoke.
“We are your family,” she said in Hitchiti.
“I will give you sons. We are your family,” she repeated in English. “Go on. Get up now.”
Cow Tom struggled to his feet, fighting the pull to crawl back under the covers. The sun had barely broken the seal of the night. He was still in his grieving clothes, shirt and leggings, his moccasins on the floor, close to the bed. Amy must have removed them. Cow Tom put them on slowly, and set off to the pasture to relieve his wife’s brother in the tending of the herd. He was bone tired, and he was hungry, but comforted that Amy would bring his breakfast out to the field to him soon enough, surely before the sun rose too far in the sky.
Within one week of Old Turtle’s passing, Cow Tom became a father. The tiny, dark baby emerged with a full head of hair, wailing. A girl.
They named her Malinda.
Chapter 5
THE GROUND WAS still sodden from the sudden afternoon squall, but the sun was doing its best to dry the pasture, the fields, and the gardens. It was a less busy time of year, neither breeding nor calving season, and after leaving Amy’s brother and another hand to tend the herd, Cow Tom came from the meadow a little early, splashing through puddles. He had business with Chief Yargee in the main house, but delayed in order to pass through the Quarter on his way. The jagged crisscross of paths between the small logged cabins was second nature, and he practiced his arguments in his head to present to the chief before he came to his own house.
His daughters played together on the damp ground, Malinda and Maggie, the older three and her sister one. Maggie mimicked Malinda’s every move, patting gooey mud into a flat shape, as if making bread for supper. Sons would have pleased him more, but he was well satisfied with his daughters, and there was time enough for the boys who would surely come. Not far away, Amy toiled in the garden, hoe in hand. Cow Tom congratulated himself. He was aware of his good fortune, a wife who still excited him each time he caught sight of her. His detour to the Quarter, he knew, stemmed from the knot of guilt tugging at him, though he intended to hold steady to his course. Cow Tom was a man at war with himself, fighting the need to do right by his family and the deep hunger to be free, to explore.
She looked up, her face betraying both the carryover of their unfinished business from last night as well as concern.
“You’re early. So you’ll talk to him today then?” she said.
“It is Chief Yargee’s choice,” Cow Tom said, as if no time at all had passed since this line of reasoning failed in their argument of the night before.
Amy stared at him, her eyes tunneling into his until he was forced to turn his head, fixing his gaze on a neat row of green-topped onions in their patch of garden.
“I do what’s best for us,” he said. “All of us.”
“You want to go,” she accused. “You steered Chief Yargee into sending you.”
He started to protest, but stopped himself. He couldn’t deny the merit in her words. She knew him too well.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars, Amy,” he said instead. “Freedom comes much faster this way.”
“And if they Remove us while you’re gone? What then? What of us, me and the girls? If you don’t come back, what then?”
“The military man said the war nears its end. Just a few months to round up the last of the Seminoles in Florida. All Creek warriors and translators will be back to Alabama long before our Removal, February at the latest, in time to make the trip with you to Indian Territory, in time for first planting there with Chief Yargee.”
“How can you know how long war lasts? Seminoles are stubborn. And cagey. We would do well to keep out of all their doings, Seminoles, government, and Creek.”
“We are Creek,” Cow Tom insisted, and though she held her tongue, he could see that Amy’s lack of argument did not imply an equal conviction on her part. “Our good is bound up with theirs.”
Amy set her jaw. “You’ll do what you want,” she said.
“There’s no changing course now. The bargain with the army is struck. I leave with the others next week.”
She picked up her hoe and began to stab at the clusters of weeds sprouting near the squash.
He almost told her then, and shared his desperate plan, but feared jinxing if he said the words aloud. He’d have to smooth things over later with Amy. For now, he needed Chief Yargee.
&nbs
“Chief Yargee,” Cow Tom said.
His chief looked as if he had aged ten years in the last twelve months, and he turned to Cow Tom only briefly before resuming his calm stare. Cow Tom wasn’t sure what Yargee saw when he gazed at the blue of the water.
“I am loath to leave,” said Yargee, in Mvskoke.
“It’s been a good place,” Cow Tom answered simply.
“My father, Big Warrior, was principal chief of Upper Creeks here after the Creek War. My brother was killed by whites here. I brought down my first deer in those woods, and married both my wives here. And now they force us to go, like the land belongs to them alone.”
“You’ll take everyone with you? Negro and Indian?” Cow Tom tried not to sound too anxious. “We can all help rebuild in Indian Territory.”
Chief Yargee seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. All will travel together, Creeks, Negroes, and as much stock as they allow. Removal won’t be easy.”
“But the land has been set aside?”
“Yes. Some of us are already moved. Lower Creeks mostly. I intend to wait until my warriors return from Florida to start the journey.”
Before Removal from Alabama, the United States military demanded Alabama Creeks send seven hundred warriors to Florida, and the tribes didn’t dare refuse. Chief Yargee had already picked six of his warriors, and two translators, including Cow Tom.
Cow Tom judged the time right. “The military man promises $350 for each translator.” The possibility of that much money backed by the United States government for a few months of work almost made him lightheaded.
“Yes,” said Yargee.
“Some of that rental money goes to the tribe, like always.” Cow Tom rubbed his hands on his pants. “More than fair,” he added quickly. “Amy and the girls stay behind to help the tribe while I do the job in Florida, like I’ve done for you so many years, translating English and Mvskoke to and fro. And some Hitchiti. I’ll scout and track and round up Seminoles to Remove to Indian Territory like they say. The military will be satisfied.” His palms were still damp, but he let his hands dangle loose at his sides. “I’ll be back in time to help us Remove. And I’m hoping you’ll put my bit of the rental money toward my freedom papers.”
Yargee lit his pipe, and Cow Tom waited while the chief assured himself the tobacco was caught and he drew in the smoke.
“I will put it with the rest,” he finally said. “For your return to the tribe.”
“Half?” Cow Tom said.
Chief Yargee nodded.
Cow Tom made his face a mask to hide the sudden rush of exhilaration. Soon he’d leave Alabama for the first time in his life, and earn enough in just a few months to bring him closer to freedom. And now he would make good on his lifelong hope. Even if akin to tracking a single grain of sand, he renewed his pledge to find his long-gone mother in Florida.
All that was left was to make it up with Amy before leaving.
Florida
–1837–
Chapter 6
COW TOM IGNORED the steady trickle of sweat sliding down his cheeks, his nose, his chin, before dropping to the ground, just more wetness mixing into the Florida swampland. He stood a few feet from the general, eyes slightly downcast, careful not to feed into the man’s agitation. Even when the second mosquito slipped down his shirt collar to feed, Cow Tom didn’t swat the blamed pest or move a muscle, letting the general vent his gall undistracted. They were separated from the other military men in the scouting unit, and Cow Tom waited patiently to find out why the general had called him to his side.
Cow Tom was the general’s favorite interpreter, cut by saw grass, made raw by insect bites, enduring drenching rain, noxious vapors, and scorching sun. He’d waded rivers, marched burning sands, crossed impassable swamps, been subjected to malaria, dysentery, alligators, and venomous snakes. He’d served as interpreter and government mouthpiece for countless treaties, even though he knew them full of half-truths and outright lies on both sides.
“Damned Seminoles!” the general exclaimed. “Millions of our money lost here, and for what? To gain this barren, sandy, swampy, and good-for-nothing peninsula? Sometimes I think it better to leave the Indians here in Florida, where God placed them.”
The white man looked more haggard with every passed day, and as his forced accomplice, Tom could predict the man’s frame of mind before the general himself knew he’d brewed up a temper. This latest had gone on for days, more than the usual swings of mood or fatigue from spilled blood or breathing fetid air while traipsing through the muck of Florida swamps. Hunting down Seminoles in their camps, carrying out orders from a headquarters so removed they didn’t understand the realities of the field, and striking Capitulation treaties with rebellious and uncooperative Seminole chiefs took their toll.
Cow Tom said nothing. After ten months of service, he knew it was better to wait the general out when he got like this. He took his mind instead to the rolling hills of Alabama, absent here in Florida, and tried to fix an image of Amy tending the home fire, and Malinda and Maggie, fed and thriving. He wondered who looked after the herd in his absence, if there was still a herd to tend. They’d thought the war and his stint of service would be over months ago, a short-term rental before relocation to Indian Territory with his family by February, in time to resettle and plant for the new season. And here it was June, yet dragging on. Where were they now, Chief Yargee and Amy? Creek families were held as hostages for the good behavior of Creek warriors sent to Florida, but where? In a holding camp? At a military fort? Now all he wanted was to get back to Amy and his girls before the general got him killed.
“I tell you this,” the general said. “By my hand, by the hand of the United States government, they will Remove. Every last Seminole in Florida.” He thrust a stiff finger in the air to punctuate his point. “I’m tired of Seminole resistance, tired of stubborn chiefs and conniving counselors and bloodthirsty warriors and tricky black translators and antagonistic slaves, ready to die before honoring Capitulation.”
Cow Tom could have pointed out that Seminoles were only defending their family land, but the general was too wrapped up in his righteousness. The United States government was determined to move the Seminoles west, and the Seminoles were equally resolved to hold to the Florida ground of their ancestors.
“I want you to go to Fort Brooke,” the general said. He relit the stump of his cigar and drew in a long breath before exhaling. The smoke coiled in lazy loops around his dark curls, and the sharp tobacco smell made Cow Tom long for a smoke of his own. “And report back any unusual activity.”
Last year, when Chief Yargee rented Cow Tom out for his translator skills, sending him east alongside seven hundred conscripted Creek warriors to fight for the Federals, Cow Tom was assigned to the general. He’d arrived at Fort King green, a novice, amazed by every sight and sound and smell. The fort housed military and military hangers-on, men of both horse and foot. He saw men of prayer side by side with the profane, scholars and dolts, swaggering men of rank, youngsters new to gun and blade, fat men and lean, temperate and drunk, the bootless and idle watching the busy. Cow Tom followed behind the general from one such fort to another, and came to understand what a determined military man he was, ruthless, competent, and capable of deceit.
And now Cow Tom was the interpreter General Jesup trusted most, right hand to the man in charge of the entire Florida campaign of the Second Seminole War. The general turned to Cow Tom for not only words but ideas as well. Few white men could handle Hitchiti, Mvskoke, and Miccosukee, and few Indians English. The U.S. government needed the Seminoles to abandon their native soil, because they wanted Florida lands for themselves. That much was obvious to any thinking man. But some white men of great influence wanted
“Yes, sir,” Cow Tom said.
Fort Brooke. Cow Tom hated the idea of the sprawling camp, like many he’d come to know, holding pens for the dispossessed, way stations for people stripped of every familiarity and shuttled from one hard life to the next, hundreds or thousands of miles away, ripe to death, disease, starvation, separation, and melancholy. Yet this assignment was a perfect opportunity.
“Two is better than one,” Cow Tom said. “Harry Island is a top linguister. Almost good as me.”
The general waved his hand in easy dismissal. “Yes. Yes. Fine,” he said. “Just report back to me immediately if there’s trouble. The situation isn’t . . .” He trailed off.
“Stable?” Cow Tom offered.
He’d handed the general an easy out. What he wanted to say to the general was that the situation was foul. He bore no great love for the Seminoles, two had carried off his mother after all, but this business of repeatedly moving them and all other tribes off ancestral land and taking away their way of life was worse than wrong. As bad as Indians had it, the slaves of Indians were in for even worse if stripped of their current masters and forced to the Deep South to cotton fields or plantations there. But he held his tongue, as he’d learned to do well.
“Yes,” the general said. “Not stable.” He looked as pleased with the word as Cow Tom knew he would. The general used it often to convey broke-spirit compliance with the government’s will, and Cow Tom recognized the value of feeding the word back to him now. Translation wasn’t the only tool of a good interpreter. “The Seminoles have known they are to Remove for three years, and still they threaten hostility.”