Marthe Reed


Looking for No Name Woman



  

Wanderers, gamblers, we ride on the back of academia's dice game, abandoning California: we come, my family and I, strangers to southern Indiana's sprawling cornfields and John Deere dealerships, its hog-sheds and towering silos, its enormous harvesters and tractors squatting in the fields, slumbering like giants amid the corn. Having lived on both coasts, this is our first sojourn in the Midwest. Mike conducts research at the university, and I come to what? I unpack our boxes and lives, set up house, make the usual arrangements for living. Yet what I have come looking for belongs to the past, perhaps irredeemable from what is at best a partial record: a woman born in the second decade before the American Revolution. Nameless, birthless, apparently no record even of her death, I hope to find she came to southern Indiana with her husband Thomas, joining him here as she had come with him before.

Though I grew up on one of central California's many almond orchards, farms here are not the same as those I knew growing up in California in the 1960's and 1970's. There are no orchards here, nor irrigation -- the landscape never arid in the summer. Mexican migrant families and crews do not pass through southern Indiana at harvest time as they do through California, moving from farm to farm and from crop to crop: first strawberries, peaches, and tomatoes; later in the summer almonds and walnuts to be drawn down from the trees. In Indiana the corn, fodder for hogs hidden away in their long sheds back of the fields, is brought in by those enormous tractors and the families who borrow to own them.

Even the young men sent off to college stay home when the corn is brought in, all but the harvest and the churning roar of the machines drawn to a standstill. The woods, too, are new to me, nearly all of California's great, spreading oaks cut down by settlers to make way for farms. Pushed out of the way, like the Yokuts who made their living amid the valley oaks, the few trees that remain spill down summer shade for cattle grazing over the dry foothills of the Sierra and Coast ranges. There are no mountains here either, though the indigenous peoples of Indiana, the Miamis and Potawatomis, were long ago displaced like those of California. In this second growth remnant of what was once a temperate forest, I come looking for a way to make this home, for a woman to whom I might return. Stranger to woodlands, to these green, low rolling hills, I come looking for No Name Woman.

Mid-October, my three-year old son and I walk amid the drying leaves of Bloomington's Griffy Woods. Brilliant maple leaves, lobed sassafras, browner ones of white oak, and the bristle-tipped leaves of red oak: autumn crinkles and snaps beneath our feet. Above us dark limbs scrape the surface of a watery blue sky, the canopy nearly bare. We follow a well-worn path along the lake and into the woods, where we take another less traveled trail to the creek. Zeke crashes ahead of me, exploring side-tracks, running after the dog, stopping to look out over the water. I come more slowly behind, in one hand the papery, silken skin of a water snake, perfect eye holes at the head where the skin opened and the snake slipped out. Zeke carries a painted turtle's shell. Inside one thin rib still clings to the boney carapace, scrubbed clean by water and raccoon teeth, ready to be made into a dance rattle. Gifts of the lake: back at the house these will come to rest along side the loosening teeth and bone of a raccoon's jaw, beside a bluebird's nest, worn limestone pebbles, a gathering of drying leaves.

For now they come with us, down to the creek, down to the low bent bough of a sassafras tree which leans over slow-moving water. Day still, even the resident Canadian geese on the lake behind us are quiet. Soft and decaying in the clear water, fallen leaves litter the creek bed. Sunlight filters through a tangle of branches and the last leaves still clinging to them. To woods like these, Thomas Prather came, following his son Basil, to settle, to clear away a section of trees and farm. But all this came long after. After serving in the North Carolina line of the Revolutionary forces, after burning down the Cherokee towns along the Hiwassee and Valley Rivers with Colonels Love and Lock, after taking the battle at Kings Mountain, he took a Cherokee woman for his wife. Common-law or otherwise, he courted and married her. Six generations back, my grandmother, the history of European and Native American contact played out in my family's history: the Native presence effaced, disappeared, erased, until only the barest referent remains, a tribal identity, a distant grandmother for whose daughters are my names given, Suzannah ("Nancy") and Martha. Surrounded by the names of her kin, she has no name. No Name Woman. Palimpsest: "A Cherokee," or Tsa lagi, a name corrupted by transliterations into Portuguese, French, finally into English, is all that remains. Nowhere in the crumbling volumes of marriages and deaths is her name given: unwritten, the voices which might have spoken it gone.

Tsa lagi or tsaragi from Choctaw chiluki ki meaning cave people, from these come the English word Cherokee. Perhaps when they first found themselves in the Smokey Mountains, the Cherokee lived in caves, in openings in the mountains, as in their stories of the entrances to the realms of the Immortals; or like the Cherokee Bear Clan, who literally transformed themselves into bears, turning back to that first life in the mountains, sheltering and sleeping within the roofs and walls of caves. The Iroquois, linguistic kin of the Cherokee, call them Oyata ge ron, inhabitants of the cave country. But Yunwiya is the name the Cherokee give themselves, the real people: descendents of Selu, Corn, and Kanati, the Lucky Hunter. Where Buzzard grew tired and his great wings carved out valleys from the wet earth, where he rose and his flapping wings built ridges and mountains, in the Smokey Mountains, in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, they lived.

A Cherokee story tells of Mole, little Mole living in the ground who, hearing a man in tears over a woman who spurned him, took pity on the man and offered to help him. Mole told the man that he, Mole, had magic and could change the woman's mind. So while the woman slept, Mole burrowed down, deep underground, and came up into her house. Mole burrowed under there and carried off her heart: he stole it, and gave it to the grieving lover. Mole told the man, "Swallow this and she will come freely to you, and she will love you." The man did as he was told. When the woman awoke, she came. She could not understand herself, or stop herself, but she came never the less and told the man she loved him. Afterward they were married. As for Mole, his magic made all the other sorcerers angry, jealous, furious at insignificant Mole who did what no one else could do. That's why Mole lives deep underground. He went into hiding and stayed there.

Thomas had some love magic of his own, mole magic he borrowed to woo No Name Woman's heart. Perhaps he loved her, or had come to regret what he had done to her people in service to his new nation. Perhaps, as some claim, he married her because there were few white women in the frontier. Still, after the Cherokee towns were burned, after their English allies were defeated, the flood-gates holding back the land-hungry Americans were washed away. Nothing stood between the Cherokee and their eventual removal. Thirty years after the Revolution, eight hundred Cherokee men would serve under Stonewall Jackson in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, yet once Jackson was elected President he would neither honor that service nor the decisions of the United States' Supreme Court protecting the Cherokee. In 1815 gold would be discovered in Georgia, and the fate of the Cherokees sealed. Their lands would belong to the whites, and the principal people would be force-walked to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, over four thousand dying along the way. It may be that No Name Woman saw the inevitability of what was to come, and did the best she could for herself. It may be she loved Thomas, or believed it beneficial to ally herself and her family with a white man. Her children after all would still be Cherokee, still belong to her mother's clan.

Though a white in-law might have afforded her family some protection, Thomas took his young wife away, leaving North Carolina's Mulberryfields and settling along the Smith River in Virginia. Family historians surmise that his family disapproved of his liaison with a Cherokee woman, since his parents' identity remains uncertain. They may have been Samuel and Suzannah Prather, who appear on the census living near Thomas in North Carolina: Samuel whose parents were Thomas and Martha. They likely disowned him, though the names have carried through. Nor does there exist any record of Thomas' marriage, and probably there was none. In Virginia Thomas farmed, owning three horses and two cattle. Along the Smith River, Thomas and No Name Woman reared five children: Drucilla, Elizabeth, Suzannah, Martha, and Basil. Eventually Thomas, and No Name Woman with him I presume, relocated to Kentucky where a sixth child, Elisha, was born. Finally in 1817 at age forty-one, Thomas moved to Salt Creek, Indiana, as his so n Basil had done before him, and he stayed. Whether No Name Woman came with him is not known.

I want to believe that she is somewhere in these Indiana woods, so that in coming here I will find her. I want to believe that Thomas and No Name Woman loved one another. That when they made love it was passionate and mutual. That whenever she caught sight of the shape of his back or caught the scent of his sun-warmed skin her desire flickered up out of its sleepy embers and warmed her. That Thomas would wake at night, his fingers tangling in her long black hair, unable to stop themselves from winding into that starless wash of night spilling over her back, pulling him into it. That their children were formed and rose out of that passion, that they were nurtured in its heat. But it might well have been otherwise, a convenience to each. Still, it seems he gave up his family for her, and she hers for him. With no one but themselves, they started over, for a time at least, no way of knowing how long it lasted. During those seventeen years in Virginia, distant from her home in the Smokey Mountains, I imagine she grew hungry for the sounds of Cherokee being spoken. As her labors approached she pounded hickory nuts, or picked their meats from the broken shells, singing to herself the songs of the old Cherokee women who attended births: "Little boy, little boy, hurry, hurry, come out, come out!

Little boy, hurry; a bow, a bow. Little girl, little girl, hurry, hurry, come out, come out! Little girl, hurry; a sifter, a sifter; Let's see who gets it, let's see who gets it!"11 As her children grew, she taught them to count in Cherokee handing them sticks or ears of dry corn as she named the numbers, English words giving way at times to more familiar ones. Yet it was not only the sounds of Cherokee for which she must have longed but for all the sounds of home: Long Man rushing fast over rocky river beds before crashing and spilling down a falls -- Selu's other lover, father of her Wild Boy; the night-long dances around a fire, sounds of turtle shell rattles and drums, of songs spilling out with the warmth and light of the fire; the stories of the old men and women -- Rabbit's escape from the wolves, how Rabbit stole Otter's coat, why Possum's tail is bare; the wild games of ball, too, little brother of war, the crack of wooden rackets hurling a hard deer skin ball up and down the field. And her mother's house, the company of her mother and her sisters and all their children, she must for longed for all of these at times, and the drifts of mists which cloak the Smokey Mountains.

Perhaps she went back to North Carolina after all, homesick, and was removed along with nearly all the Cherokee to Oklahoma. Then it may be she died along the way as so many did. Perhaps she hid out in the high hills with a few others, and refused to leave. Perhaps she was the Sarah Wilson of Jackson County, Indiana, who made a deposition on Thomas' behalf in his old age as he applied for a Revolutionary War pension. What remains? A patch work of guesses. At Thomas' side, behind his cattle or astride his horse, she left North Carolina carrying a digging stick, ready to turn the ground. In a river cane basket she took with her rhododendron wood combs, bone needles, a meal sifter, perhaps a cherished necklace of shell and polished quartz, and on her back her mother's gift of a cradleboard. Thomas brought with him an axe and a frow, an iron cooking pot and a three-legged skillet, or spider. Once in Virginia, in a tulip log house hewed from the woods, she made corn soup and corn stew as her mother had, set on a table near the door for all those who entered.

As her mother had, she tended a garden, harvested corn and beans, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, sunflower seeds. To supplement her harvest she gathered wild grapes, strawberries, and hickory nuts; in the spring she and Thomas made maple sugar, hunted morels. Drinking water they caught off the roof of the house in a rain barrel. In summer they washed themselves in the river, but in the winter hauled water up the bluff to be boiled over the fire. She combed her long black hair with her rhododendron combs, twisting it into plaits, or into a knot set neatly at her neck. When she and Thomas wore out their shoes, she sewed new ones from the hide of white tail deer, stitching with a bone needle. Mornings as she stood in the warmth of the rising sun, did she offer a silent prayer to Sutalidihi, Grandmother of the Light, as her mother had? And when her babies fussed and couldn't sleep, she sang to them the Mother Bear's Song: "Let me carry you on my back, Let me carry you on my back, Let me carry you on my back, Let me carry you on my back; On the sunny side go to sleep, go to sleep; On the sunny side go to sleep, go to sleep."

Griffy Creek slips away underneath us, the sun moving low in the sky. A year distant from the warm coast of southern California, my son and I gather around us the names of trees and songbirds accustoming ourselves to this new place, to these old woods. In back of the trees, our friends Sue and Charlie tied a last cutting of hay before winter, circling the field behind Doc and Jim, Belgian geldings. Like Thomas and No Name Woman, they sleep and love in a tulip log house, farm with horses, husband the land and their cattle. Like Thomas and No Name Woman they catch their drinking water in a rain barrel, cook in an iron pot over a fire, feed themselves from their gardens. Firewood is laid up for the winter, the barn's loft filled with hay, each day a circle of labors: milking, haying, mending fence, when the time comes, calving; in the spring, maple sugaring, and turning over the gardens. On quiet days, winter days, after a snow and the sky is lit again by the sun, they may take time out, after the milking, after a late Sunday morning meal, to look out over the woods and pastures, past the frozen creek and admire what the earth has given, what they have wrought. Somewhere in these Indiana woodlands, these Indiana farmlands, Thomas Prather is buried: in Salt Creek where he lived and farmed, where he settled near his children. And No Name Woman? In what ground is she buried, by what name known? In me, in mine. By what are any of us known but by the stories we tell, the stories told about us?

(Quotes are from James Mooney's History, Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee , "Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees" --Asheville, NC: Bright Mountain Books, 1992, pages 364 & 400.)