Growing Up Native American (29 page)

A few days later we were playing softball at school. The biggest girl, the one who started the fight with me, was pitching. When I came to bat I really whacked the ball and it hit her right smack in the stomach. She fell down, unconscious, while all her friends came rushing in to beat me up again, yelling that I'd done it on purpose. “You're bloody right,” I yelled back, “and if you come closer I'll smash you with this bat!” As they moved in, I swung the bat around and nearly hit one of the girls in the head. Someone ran in to get the principal while one of the girls who hadn't been involved in the matter said, “No one is going to hurt you Bobbi. Why don't you give me the bat and let's forget it?” “Get away,” I said, “or I'll knock your head off too!”

The tension was building, but nothing else happened. The girls just drifted away, knowing I was very serious. Then the principal came out and talked to us. From then on, whenever there were parties, the girls made sure to tell me I wasn't invited…and when our class went on biology field trips, or to the zoo and so on, nobody would walk with me. The other girls started easing off her and she even made some new friends. This really made me cynical. It was the first time in my life I'd been open to friendship with white girls, and now their contempt
and ostracism forced me to conclude that all whites were the same: creepy, cruel racists that I wanted nothing more to do with.

As far as school was concerned, I didn't even want to go anymore. I would often drink mustard with water, getting a bit sick in order to stay home. Mostly, I just left the house and, instead of going to school, took long walks down the canyon or out in Stanley Park. Even in winter I went up to the swamp and hiked—sometimes with my brother, sometimes alone. At times we hiked into the water shed and guards would come and chase us off. Then we sometimes saw bears and ran away. Around our new house the bears were really strange; sometimes they came right into the yards looking for food. Once there was a knock on our door and mom hollered, “Come in! Come in!” but no one entered. Then more knocks and more “Come in's.” Finally though we rarely ever opened our door personally for visitors, mom went and pulled it open with a swish of frustration. Standing there on his hind legs was a huge bear. I wanted to laugh and scream at the same time. Mom was so frightened she just stood there for an instant, her mouth open; then she slammed the door and ran around locking all the doors and windows…as if the bear was bound and determined to come in. Instead, he just ran away…probably as scared as we were.

Later, we had other troubles with bears. My younger brother, George, was three and often went to play in a nearby fruit orchard. One day I walked down through the trees looking for him. Suddenly, I found him playing peacefully with two small bear cubs. I'd heard how fierce mother bears became in defense of their cubs and ran home as fast as I could to tell mom. She told me to get him immediately. Luckily, there was no sign of the mother bear yet and I grabbed George and pulled him all the way back to the house. When more people moved in, the bears slowly left the area. But that was much later.

Squirrels were more fun. We kept them around the house by feeding them…almost like pets. We also had a racoon, but he was pretty wild.

Sometimes dad came to visit us and often paid the house bills. There'd be a lot of tension in the atmosphere, but no serious trouble that I can remember. My negative feelings toward him
eased off, but there was still little emotion in our relationship. In the wintertime he stayed at the house and slept downstairs. Mom slept upstairs with us kids. They didn't live together; just shared the same house. We would put up with him, more or less, till he left again for who knew how long.

T
aken from a novel in progress entitled
Daughters of Lot,
this story of kinship and memory reads like an annotated genealogy of people and place, and illuminates a relationship between land, people, and identity that is at the center of the lives of many Native American people. In the midst of displacement and land loss, a young man learns that no matter where life and circumstances may lead, he carries his identity in his mind, in his heart, in his very flesh and bone
.

Geary Hobson is a Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Qùapaw poet, writer, and essayist. He was born in 1941 in Chicot County, Arkansas. He edited
The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature
and was a contributor as well. He has recently published a book of poetry entitled
Deer Hunting and Other Poems.
He teaches in the English Department at University of Oklahoma at Norman
.

 

B
EFORE I COMMENCE, I JUST WANT TO SAY THIS: I TAKE A LONG
time telling you all about these kin—these aunts and uncles and grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins and all—and the land hereabouts and its shapes and looks back then and all its changes and all its going-ons…

All that land you see across the bayou yonder and some of it on this side, counting where we're sitting right now, used to belong to our folks. All along Emory Bayou, clear down to where it cuts and runs into Muddy Bayou, and
then on north a ways nearly to Black Bayou, and then on due west some almost to Coldstream, nearly all the land that Eustace Tanner claims title to now and rents on shares to people like the Hewitts and Renfros and Wades—that whole portion, which is a shade-bit more than a section, used to be held in the name of our people. Back then, at the time I'm going to tell you about, Uncle Andrew Thompson held title to it but it wudn't just his. What I mean is, he didn't own it all to hisself. The way we all looked at it, it was more Aunt Minnie's and Aunt Velma's and even to say that ain't entirely correct neither. What I mean to say is, it belonged to us all, not to one, or even two, but to
all
. All of us that was kinfolks and lived on it and spent our time on it and knowed it as ours. In them days there was a whole slew of little cabins and clapboard houses belonging to Thompson and Squirrel kin scattered throughout the section and it was mostly woods then. It was ours and it was like an island surrounded by a whole sea of newcomers who moved in and built their houses and started their farms and set up stores and cotton gins and churches and such-like all around us. The way we looked at it, that was alright, long as we was left by ourselves. And for a long time that was the way it was.

I was born out west around Simms Bayou, over where some of your mother's folks are still living. Matter of fact, a whole lot of that land out there used to be ours too. Some kinfolks out there still own some of that land, but what they got left ain't much. It's all just a turnip patch now, upside what it used to be. Same as it is over here. I don't remember my mama any. She died of the typhoid fever when I was two and I never knowed my daddy neither, except that he was a white man. Don't ask me how I know that or why it's even important, if it is, even. I might get around to telling that but I doubt it, since I think it's a separate story all to itself. I was took and raised by Mama's folks, my Grandma and Grandpa Sanford, until they up and died too. First it was Grandma that died and then a few months after that, Grandpa passed on too. They lived right by Grandma's folks, the Lamleys, on a dirt road that run alongside Simms Bayou pert-near all the way to Bayou Bartholomew. When Grandpa passed away or went, as he used to say, “back
into the earth,” I was took and raised by my Uncle Achan. He was one of Grandma's brothers.

There was four of them in Uncle Achan's house on Simms Bayou, not counting me, and they was all old folks and Uncle Achan's bachelor or widowed brothers and sister. There was Uncle Achan, who was sixty-something and head of the place, and his younger brothers, Joe and Zeno, and there was their older sister, my Aunt Gustine, who was in her seventies. They all talked French to each other, but I never picked up none of it. They come from around Arkansas Post and sometimes they would talk about all the property their mama and daddy had had over there long before Arkansas became a state. Quapaw they was mostly, even if you wouldn't of thought it of them because of that French they talked and the way it looked to me like they tried to act when other folks not kin to them or me come around to visit. I'll give you some for instances. Aunt Gustine used to set a real pretty tea set out for evening visitors, and this to folks who wouldn't of been able to tell the difference between store-bought tea and stumpwater. She never done this to put on airs, I don't 'spect, but just to try and keep up some kind of sign of what their folks' ways had been like at the Post when they was all little kids growing up there. And there was Uncle Zeno and his realfine five-dollar gold watch that he was proud as all git out of. Five dollars for a gold watch was some big doings in them days. He used to carry it around in a little homemade watchpocket that Aunt Gustine had fixed up for him on his britches, even when he hunted and fished or chopped corn or cotton. They was a stand-offish bunch that generally kept to theirselves, in a whole lot of ways like my Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma that I'm going to tell you about directly.

I never minded living with them even if I did have to do a right fair amount of fetching and toting for them—as Uncle Andrew one time said about it—and never got to be around any kids my own age. Except for some corn, Uncle Achan and them didn't farm any. They had some horses and hogs, but like us when I lived with Uncle Andrew, they let their stock run loose in the woods until they needed them. Uncle Achan and my other uncles just hunted and fished mostly,
just like our granddaddy Jed used to do. Of course, Jed was directly descended from them and he had the same kinds of ways they had.

I stayed with them for two years and I learned a lot about fishing and hunting. I also learned most of my American from them because I couldn't talk it very good when I was littler and living with Grandma and Grandpa Sanford. Grandpa Sanford talked Cherokee to me and to Grandma too. She learned it during all them years she lived with Grandpa. Uncle Andrew used to come over there from time to time to see how us all was doing. Mainly, though, I think he came just to see me. Finally, one time when he come over, he talked to Uncle Achan and Aunt Gustine about me coming back over here and going to school. Why I was pert-near twelve years old and wouldn't of knowed anything about schooling even if it was to of snuck up on me and bit me in the butt. Uncle Andrew told about how his daughter Letty was learning to read and write real good and that I ought to learn it too. Me, I was all for it. He said they had a surveyor feller with the new railroad that was running by Coldstream who was teaching the younguns thereabouts their ABCs and stuff. Said the man wanted to git out of railroad work because he hated traveling around and that he wanted to set up a full-scale school at Coldstream. So, anyway, it was decided by Uncle Achan and Aunt Gustine and Uncle Andrew and them other Lamley uncles that I ought to come over here and live with Uncle Andrew and Aunt Elvira and learn my ABCs with my cousins and the other kids. And that was how I come to live over here and here I been ever since.

Well, that schooling part went okay for a few months and then that surveyor feller, Mr. Bailey, was up and transferred out by the railroad to somewhere else and that was the end of my schooling. But at least I had my ABCs by then and could read a smidgin and figure some figures and from then on out I went on and learned more by my own self after I growed up.

That great-big cypress over there, where the bayou starts to turn this way? Well, up that rise from it, that's where Uncle Andrew's house used to be, and from where we're sitting now you couldn't of seen it in them days for all the trees. That house was pretty big even for them days. It was log-built with four
rooms connected by a dog-trot to four more rooms. It had a wide front porch and a little bitty back porch and the whole thing was set high up on cypress blocks and covered on the outside with cypress shingles. There was a lot of out buildings too, a barn, a cow shed, a corncrib, and a pigpen. Now you can't hardly see a single sign of none of it, for shore none of the oak and gumball trees that covered the whole place. But if you look close from here, you can see a couple of apple trees that's gone wild mixed in that thicket that runs alongside that ditch going into the bayou. That's all that's left of the fruit orchard Uncle Andrew had in his backyard. One time about ten years ago, I walked around up there, looking at the plowed ground, and I picked up a handful of them old-timey square nails. They was all bent and eat up with rust and not good for nothing anymore. But I still got them in a coffee can that I keep on my bedstand.

Now this bayou here, I spent many a day in there when I was little, getting my tail end wet frogging after crawdads and shiners, and when I got bigger I trapped and fished and hunted all up and down it, clean down to Muddy. I have took many a coon and possum and rabbit out of them bayou woods and snagged many a bass and cat and buffalo with my trapboxes and trotlines. Now you look out there and what do you see? Nothing but a handful of cypress and a soybean field that stays too damp most of the year-round for that fool Eustace Tanner to get much more than a sorry crop out of. That Tanner. He's a sight. Like most of his kin, he's a man that's so stingy and selfish and shifty that he has to lock his tools up every night so he won't steal them off of hisself. It was all a sight better when it was all bayou woods down there.

Uncle Andrew was looked on as our chief around here when I was a boy, but we never called him that. I mean we never made a point of just flat out calling him chief. He just was. He was your great-great granddaddy, and he wudn't actually my uncle at all. What he was, he was a cousin. But I called him uncle all the same and even sort of looked up to him like the daddy I never had. He farmed quite a bit of cotton and corn and had some livestock that run wild in the woods until we needed some beef or ham or a horse to ride. People used to say that he
was better at farming than most of the white farmers around here even, and you might not believe it but that's saying something for shore since it's been my notice that white people always act like they invented farming and things like that. Uncle Andrew was married to Elvira Squirrel, who was Quapaw Indian and close kin to Lamley and Tyrell folks. Uncle Andrew, as you know, was close to being a full-blood Indian hisself. He was almost half-Chickasaw and full half-Cherokee.
im and Aunt Elvira had two girls. There was Letty, who was eight when I came over here to live with them, and there was Marandy, who was already a grown woman and married and with a family of her own. Marandy and her husband lived further off down the bayou a ways, but still in yelling distance of our house. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Elvira had a boy too, I think I heard one time, but he died when he was little and so I never knowed him.

This was all Thompson land that Uncle Andrew farmed. It belonged to his and Aunt Minnie's and Aunt Velma's daddy, and they say that just before he died, he—old Alluk, their daddy—put it all in Uncle Andrew's name because in them days women couldn't hold title to land. Matter of fact, Indians wudn't suppose to neither. I heard it told that old Alluk got around that prejudice by his out and out oneryness and by out-whiting the whites. He donated money to both the Coldstream Baptist Church and the Coldstream Cumberland Presbyterian one that has long since gone out of business, and he never even set foot in neither one of them. This was before the Methodist one come along that Aunt Elvira and Marandy joined up with. Old Alluk bought this section sometime back in the 1840's and moved here from Bonaparte. It was after he died and Uncle Andrew and Aunt Elvira got married and started their family that all the assorted Squirrel and Tyrell kin started moving in over here.

But even if all the outside folks counted Uncle Andrew as our leader, it was really my two aunts, Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma, who was the real head of our folks. Since Arkansas law in them days had it that no woman—not even two women together—could own land in their own name, it was all in Uncle Andrew's name. Them aunts was old women even when I was a boy and they lived off down hereabouts on the bayou, off to
theirselves. Two old-maid aunts they was, always good to me and passable pleasant to most other folks around here, but still at the same time they kept off by theirselves mostly. When I first came over here to live, they was medicine women and they did midwifing and stuff like that for all the folks around here. Over at Simms Bayou, Aunt Gustine and Uncle Achan was medicine people too, but they wudn't educated to it like Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was. And that wasn't all. Aunt Minnie and Aunt Velma was makers of spells and fixers of bones, what they used to call “putter-inners” and “taker-outers.” This meant they was in a special kind of class as healers and was looked up to by mostly everybody around. And it wudn't just our folks that come to them for doctoring either. Sometimes white folks and niggers come to see them, too, when they needed help.