In The Face Of Death (20 page)

“I would like to study them all,” said Madelaine with feeling.

“What about the ones who don’t want to be studied?” asked Hagen, relishing their on-going debate. Now that they were in less hazardous surroundings than the mountains had been, or the bloody plains of Kansas, he had taken to intellectual fencing with Madelaine as an amusement.

“You mean the Apache?” Madelaine shifted in her saddle to be a little more comfortable.

“I mean them, and the Seminole, and probably a couple dozen others who want to keep to themselves.” He chuckled, enjoying himself. “What makes you think that the others wanted to be studied, anyhow? How do you know they told you the truth when you asked them questions? Why should they tell you the truth? Can you be certain that you did not change their ways simply by being there?” He glanced at Mineata and smiled at her, and was rewarded with her most profound look of gratitude.

“I don’t,” Madelaine conceded.

This was not the response Hagen was hoping for, and he scowled. “Then how do you justify what you do?”

“I don’t,” she said a second time. “If we had to justify curiosity, we should all be still building pyramids and worshipping the sun. America would remain undiscovered, except by the Indians, and—”

“All right, point taken,” said Hagen, and shaded his eyes to check the horizon. “We’re going to have rain in an hour or so. Do you want to stop or keep on?”

“Is there shelter ahead?” Madelaine asked, her tone cool and practical.

“I think there’s a way-station about eight miles on. If we pick up the pace, we should make it.” He signaled to Mineata. “We’ll have to press the mules.”

“They won’t like it,” said Mineata, who had had a lot of experience with the animals.

“Too bad,” said Hagen, and pushed his mount to a bone-jarring trot.

“This is when I miss horses,” said Madelaine, using a military post to break the worst of the jolting. “Mules were never intended to trot.”

“They would agree,” said Hagen merrily, refusing to be aggravated by the gait.

Madelaine gathered her reins and prepared for a hard eight miles.

Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, 30 June, 1857

To the north are the Cherokee and the Creek, to the west are the Chickasaw, to the south is the Red River and Texas, to the east is the State of Arkansas. This is the place the United States gave the Indians when they were removed from their traditional homelands in the States of Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Cherokee come from further north, from the Carolinas, or so I am told by Joseph Greentree, who has agreed to answer my questions. In regard to the uprooting brought upon his people some twenty years ago, he informs me that not all his people left their lands when the government demanded it, that there are still small settlements in remote areas of their old lands, and that there is continuing contact between the Nation and these isolated Choctaw.

These people have made many concessions on certain points to the whites, but have remained sternly uncompromising on others. Joseph Greentree has told me that he will never reveal his Indian name to any white, for only Choctaw may know it, and I am content to honor his determination. He is part of the Greentree clan, and so accepts it as a family name as is the way of Europeans. He is an interesting man, about thirty-five, well-schooled and clever, with an excellent understanding of the many difficulties confronting his people. His wife has given him four children, which pleases him because all four are alive and well. I am to call her Sarah. . . .

Mister Hagen and Mineata have departed for St. Louis, and I wished them happiness together and gave them a wedding present of fifty dollars and three mules. They are carrying my notes for me. They will deliver them personally to Lucas and Turner, and inform them where I may be reached for the next year or more. I will contact them myself as soon as I know how I intend to go on here, which will depend more upon the Choctaw than on me. . . . It was tempting to ask for news of Tecumseh, but I resisted, to a point: I did ask how business was going in San Francisco, as part of arranging transfer of my remaining funds there back to St. Louis.

I have also instructed that all but two of the reserve chests of my native earth be shipped to me here, for once I have been allocated a house, I will need to prepare it, and I have just the one chest left. . . .

Shortly after moonrise, Joseph Greentree came to the door of the simple frame house the Choctaw had set aside for Madelaine’s use. He held his lantern up as he knocked so that she would be able to see his face plainly when she opened the door. “I don’t mean to disturb you,” he said as soon as she answered his knock. As was correct, he did not use her name, for that would be an unacceptable invasion of her privacy.

“I was making notes; you don’t disturb me, Joseph.” Madelaine recognized his courtesy, and knew that so long as she used his public name, she would not offend him. She held the door a bit wider. “If you want to come in?”

He shook his head. “Thank you, but it would be considered . . . odd.”

“You mean it would be improper for you, or for me, to do this,” she corrected him gently. “Many of the other Indians I have studied have had similar restrictions, and I will respect them. And I appreciate your concern. It is awkward for you, I’m sure, dealing with me, since I am foreign and a woman. I hope that your teaching me the language of the Choctaw will not make trouble for you.” She kept the door open, and studied him, noticing how serious he looked. “Tell me what is bothering you.” It was hot and close in the way of summer, though it reminded Madelaine of the steaming winter laundry at Conners’ Mine.

“It is nothing so important that I would call it a bother. No, it is something I believe you should know for your own protection, so that you will not be drawn into a dispute, which could go badly for you. It is a thing that is worrisome to the people here.” He cleared his throat and spat, to show that he would not allow a lie in his mouth. “We are all troubled by it. It is the matter of slavery. We must come to a decision.”

Madelaine cocked her head and looked at him. “Yes?” Why did he come in the night to tell her this, she asked herself. What had her studies to do with the Choctaw debate on an institution that was not of their making? She remained quiet, giving Joseph Greentree the time he needed to answer.

“We have had a long meeting, the other Greentree clan members and I, and we have decided that we do not want slavery any more. Not for Greentree.” He regarded her with a direct look. “It is an incorrect thing.” The word he used in Choctaw implied shame and loss of face as well as incorrectness.

“And what has that to do with me?” asked Madelaine, truly puzzled.

“There are those in the Nation who do not agree, who, like the Cherokee, keep slaves, or have had them before. But if we are ever to be allowed to be our own state, we must agree on slavery, as a condition of our statehood.” He coughed once, and rubbed his chin with his free hand. “It is not the way of Choctaw people to make another man property, even if the man is black, unless he has been defeated in battle, and we do not fight the blacks. To buy a slave is not honorable, for there is no contest to see who has the right to rule the other; that is our way. These blacks are purchased like sheep and pigs, and that is not our way.”

“As you understand it, you of Greentree,” Madelaine added for him, sensing what was coming now.

“Yes, as we of Greentree understand it. It is not what all Choctaw accept.” He turned his head away from the lantern to conceal his frown; without success, for Madelaine’s vision was keener than he knew. “It may be that you, as our guest, will come to hear of these things. I do not want you to believe we ask you to take our position, but it would not be wise for you if you were to disagree with us among the rest. Such things are not understood here as they are in your world. It would appear that you disdain our hospitality.”

She listened to him without comment, and when he stopped talking, she took a short while to reply. “I do not think my opinions are needed in this matter.” Not, she added inwardly, that they would pay any attention to her in any case. “It is because I am French, that you think I will know things you do not?”

He stared at the line of her roof. “Some might suppose this to be so.”

Madelaine made a gesture of dismissal. “I am here to learn from you, not to teach you. I am not like the missionaries, who bring you reading and the Bible at the same time, with the intention of using the skill they teach to bend you to their faith. My purpose here is to record as much as I am permitted to discover about you, not to persuade you of my correctness. Whether or not the United States are agreed upon slaves or whether the central government has the right to decide these things for all states is nothing to me if it does not have meaning to you.”

He nodded, only his eyes showing his relief. “I will tell the others.”

“As you wish,” she said, and prepared to close the door.

Joseph stopped her. “Certainly you may believe slavery is acceptable, if that is your way. I will not try to persuade you, either.”

“Ordinarily it would not be appropriate for me to tell you. However, if you are curious,” Madelaine added pointedly, “like you, I do not favor slavery, not after all I have heard of it.” She did not say that the accounts she had received had been from Saint-Germain and had concerned his centuries in Egypt, and his later misfortunes in Tunis and Spain, not the published catalogues of the plight of the blacks in America, which she had only encountered once.

Joseph Greentree managed a slight smile, as a concession to her European manners. “It is a good thing to hear of you. I would not have expected anything less from you.”

Madelaine regarded him steadily. “Is it going to get unpleasant? For your people?”

“I don’t think so. The Americans will have to change their laws, but we have nothing to do with that. Their laws are theirs, and they will maintain them or change them according to their understanding.” He made a gesture that took in the whole of the Choctaw settlement. “It is not our way to fight over such things.”

“But the . . . the Americans are fighting, already, from what I have seen and read. In the Kansas Territory.” She looked directly into his eyes, and made no apology for her affront to his position.

“They are. But it is their fight, not ours.” He hesitated, then went on with some awkwardness. “Many of them want it to end there, in the Kansas Territory. That is why the army does not stop it. As long as the army plays no part, the matter can be resolved peaceably. Otherwise, they fear there could be war.”

“Not a great one, surely,” said Madelaine, recalling all she had heard in her travels. “And not over slavery. That is still decided by the states, is it not? How can that be changed?”

“Yes, the states decide, and they do not agree,” said Joseph Greentree. “But it might not always be.” He lowered the lantern; the wavering light cast his face into stark, low shadows.

“That is for some time in the future, and for the Americans,” said Madelaine, her demeanor mildly distant. “Neither you nor I will be consulted when the time comes.” She knew it would be sensible to thank him and close her door before it could be noted that they had been speaking for longer than was seemly.

“No, we will not,” he said, and stepped back to wish her good night. As an afterthought he said, “Allan Riverman is leading those who favor slaves.”

In spite of her best intentions, Madelaine looked startled: Allan Riverman was one of the men she had felt drawn to and had already once visited in his sleep. “He is?” She wondered if she blushed at this outburst.

“Yes,” said Joseph Greentree, his face revealing nothing of his thoughts. “You ought to know it.”

“All right; thank you,” she said, and went back into her house.

With the Choctaw, 3 September, 1857

. . . How anyone contrives to work in this heat, I cannot think; it drains the will as well as the strength. The last two weeks have been one continuous roasting in the worst of sweltering dampness I have encountered anywhere. Egypt was an oven, but its heat was the desiccated heat of aridness, not this rich, green, strength-sapping enveloping moisture. Saint-Germain described this to me from the time when he went into the jungles in South America, but I never supposed I would endure it here, on the plains of the North, where there is a sea of grass, and no vast green umbrella overhead to hold in the heat. It cannot have been this miserable when I was with the Kiowa, or Cheyenne, or Ute peoples, or I would have given up skirts then. How I miss the summer chill of San Francisco fog now. . . .

I have arranged with Darius Jones of New Orleans, to have books shipped to me as regularly as possible; I have deposited two hundred dollars with him, on account, to ensure his quick service. I have missed having something new to read, and I find my own writing grows stale if I am not exposed to new authors. I am planning to make a similar arrangement with William Harris of Philadelphia, who has had a business there for twenty years and more, and who is reputed to be most reliable. . . .

Joseph Greentree has told me much of the history of his people, though I notice he does not go farther back than when the first white men came here, and I have been unable to coax anything earlier from him. Still, what I have will undoubtedly be useful, the more so because he has taught me so much of the language of these people. . . . He has agreed to arrange for me to talk with a number of the clan leaders, though he has warned me that it is not likely I will be able to get information from them he has not supplied already.

I am still not allowed to talk with the women of the Nation. Apparently the missionaries have convinced the men here that I, and all foreign women who are not missionaries, may be a bad influence on these women, tempting them to turn against the traditions and virtues of the Choctaw, though why I should want to do that, since it is their tradition I have come to study, I cannot imagine. . . .