Some people say I have waited long enough to tell this story, the first seasons of my life with a particular man. Others think the rapture is still too soon. But I will tell it as I know it now, a whole story, not as I knew then before the pieces came home. A place to start is a day in June of 1863. It is important to know that I was an in-between person at that time.
Blackberries were as plentiful as the spring showers that year. Their vines rambled along the rail fences and grew thick on the burned log piles of the new ground. Mr. Carter was fond of blackberry jam. The day before, he and I picked almost three gallons after dinner. I was cooking them down over a fire in the side yard when I saw dust rising in the road to the south. It was a peculiar dust, not big enough for a horse or mule but too big for a person. As it got closer I found myself stirring the berries faster and choking the sycamore paddle harder. Soon I could tell it was a man moving slowly in and out of the shadows of the overhanging oak trees. A wren sang her hurry song from a dipper gourd on the porch. She too was anxious. The man came steady on past the corner of the garden. A leg dragging in the north Louisiana powdered clay made the dust, that and a cane stabbing it with each desperate step.
“Abita,” he called my name from the gate, and I recognized this dream person as Lemuel Greenlea. In a heart’s beat I was terrified to my soul.
I came to live with the Carters before the moon began singing to my body. I was born in a place the white people called Indian Village thirty miles to the southwest of Iron Branch. My mother was Choctaw and lived there with a small band of her people. The Spanish talkers had invited her grandfather and his brothers to this country many years before. They were warned to beware of treacherous English speakers with their crazy lust to possess all of the land and water. The white men fought battles and made and broke treaties among themselves. When one group of English speakers, Americans, finally claimed victory, they decided there was no room for the Choctaw on the ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River. Most were forced to walk to a new home in a place white men called the Indian Territory. I have heard stories of the death that swept over people on this journey and after they arrived in a land on the edge of rains.
My mother’s people had only been in the Ouachita country for one generation then. Few in number, they were mostly ignored by the white authorities. Still they took no chances and shied away from the settlements. My mother told of a boat load of her imprisoned people from the ancestral lands that came up the river going to Arkansas where their long walk would begin. The steamboat stopped at a plantation below Monroe to take on wood that slaves were allowed to sell. In desperation, two Choctaw jumped from the boat and tried to swim the river. The soldier escorts just watched as one boy drowned in the icy water but another escaped. He survived alone in the wilderness for several months before people from mother’s village found him as they returned from a salt-making journey. Peter Ittibano was his name. He was from the Okla Falaiah or Tall People Clan, and later he married my mother’s oldest sister.
People called my father a “breed.” His father was a French Canadian who had floated down the Mississippi to trap beaver and shoot deer for their hides. He stopped in this country called Ouachita, or Big Hunting Ground, by the native people here at the time. He took a woman who became my grandmother as a wife. She spoke an ancient language that Choctaw could not understand, and her few remaining people soon vanished forever.
My father became a hunter also and provided game for the growing number of settlers coming from the East. Twice a year he would stop at my mother’s village and leave four deer hides to be tanned and made into his personal clothes. On one such visit he met my mother. She liked him because he always brought four hides and Choctaw know that four is a lucky number. They lay together in her hut during a freezing rain and from his seed came the waves in my hair. His name was Leboeuf and I never saw him.
Mother named me Abita, which means flowing spring or fountain. It was not as some of the Choctaw women believed, that she vainly thought me beautiful. My features are plain. If I have ever possessed beauty, it is only in my skin, unblemished except for four marks. A man once said it was the shade of tupelo gum honey, but his dark eyes saw more of me than was there to be seen. Mother named me Abita because of the ease of my coming. I sprang from her womb like a fountain even before she could prepare the birthing hut. She took this as a sign whose meaning would be revealed some day.
I lived in the village with my mother until I was ten years old. We raised chickens and tended a garden of corn and pumpkins. My days were filled with the cycle of the corn. We did not know of the sweetness of Stowell’s yellow corn then; we were satisfied with the old corn of the Choctaw. I helped plant the seed when the white oak leaves were as big as a squirrel’s ear. As it ripened I stood watch during the day to protect it from raiding crows and raccoons. In the evenings I tended the staked dogs that took on the night guard. Once, one of the mongrels bit me in the side leaving a white scar and a bad memory. The harvested crop was stored in cribs set atop cedar posts five feet off the ground. For many hours of my childhood I polished the posts with sand rocks to save the fruit of our labors from the white-bellied mice.
Mother was known as a healing woman because of her knowledge of the wild medicine plants. The white doctors would call on her to purchase for their patients the herbs of the forest that could not be found on the pages of thick medicine books. In this way we were able to eat and live happily even though Mother did not have a man.
Living in the village was like having a quilt thrown over my head. I could only perceive the patterns of life that were close and had no understanding of the changes taking place throughout the country. Settlers from the eastern states poured into the hills west of the Ouachita River. They came upstream on steamboats in the winter and spring as the rising waters flushed the overflow swamps in an ancient rhythm. During the droughts of summer and autumn they drove ox carts and six-mule wagons from Mississippi through a vast and mysterious forest to seek Edens free of flood and fever. They brought with them all the many leaves on their trees of life. My mother saw these changes on her visits to Trenton and Monroe to sell cane baskets and ground turtles. In time, she made a decision that could only break her heart.
I do not know how Mother learned of Thomas and Elizabeth Carter. Perhaps they met in town and bartered over a grass sack of sassafras roots. Somehow, in a mother’s way she determined they were good people—good enough to have her only child.
For weeks before I left the village my mother tried to prepare me for a new life. She taught me every word of English that she knew and made the other Choctaw do the same. An old man with blue lightning tattooed on his face insisted on teaching me the signs of the four directions should I ever need to find my way home. I know now that I was also told of some things before my time—the matters of women and even the ways of men. It would be years before I could understand their truths. What mother could not tell me was why I must leave. No language held these words.
On the first day of the year that smelled of autumn we walked to Trenton carrying my belongings in a corner-tied blanket. We met the Carters at the steamboat landing late in the afternoon and Mother talked to them for a long while as I watched mirror-scaled minnows dash about in the currents of the riffles. Finally, she turned and looked at me for a moment before quickly walking away. I remember seeing both of her hands opening and closing, opening and closing, as she went over the bank and out of sight.
The river was low and the small sternwheeler lay in the narrow channel across a long mud flat. Mr. Carter picked up my blanket and his wife took my hand and led me down a trail of rough-cut planks to the boat. The screaming whistle startled me, but I was not scared as the backing paddles changed direction and began pushing us upstream. I was in-between.
A rattling fisher bird led the steamboat around the first few bends, stopping to wait for us on her favorite perches. In about two hours the boat pulled in at a crude landing called Loch Lomond on the west shore, and we were the only ones to depart during the brief stop. We walked up the bank and Mr. Carter whistled through his teeth as if he were calling for someone. I had never heard anyone whistle in that manner. No one answered.
A small bayou flowed into the river just above the landing and a wide trail hugged its high bank into the dense forest. We sat under some very tall pecan trees and waited.
Near sunset we heard a trotting horse approaching. Soon a boy came driving up in a buggy pulled by a beautiful Claybank mare. He was only a couple of years older than me and I was amazed at the way he handled the spirited and powerful horse. Mr. Carter said, “Praised be the Lord! He ain’t bloated in the melon patch and just an hour late.” After the scolding we all squeezed into the buggy. I sat close against the boy breathing in the strong scent of pine smoke on his linsey shirt.
We rode back up the trail along the bayou until we came to a slab-sided cabin. A man, a woman, and three small girls poured out, and I was able to determine from everyone’s talk that the boy had spent the day there after carrying the Carters to the landing that morning. The woman gave us some cathead biscuits and we drove on in the darkness.
Before midnight we reached the Carters’ home place. The boy let us out and continued on with the restless, silver-maned horse. That is how I came to live with Thomas and Elizabeth Carter on Bayou de l’Outre. That is also how I met their nephew, Minor Barrett, a boy with eyes as dark as mine.
Thomas Carter homesteaded this place in 1840. He left a barren wife in a fresh Georgia grave and fell in with a small wagon train of settlers bound for Natchez. There they loaded possessions and hopes on a steamboat that dodged snags and sandbars up the Red, then the Black, and finally the Ouachita. He chose as his new home a flat piece of land bordering Bayou de l’Outre but free of the yearly backwater floods. The soil was sandy loam, and a windstorm had thrown down many trees, easing the labor to clear a farm field in the wilderness.
The boats continued to bring settlers, and soon all of the “good lands” were claimed. Merchants, preachers, and tavern keepers who only felt safe when God’s forest was kept at a distance built the nearby village of Iron Branch along a small stream that ran red with strong minerals.
On a trip to New Orleans to buy a new rifle and glass windowpanes, Mr. Carter met Elizabeth Barrett, a governess looking for a position. She found a husband instead, and he brought her back to a new double-pen log house and an old feather bed. They were not young, but their dreams were ripe and sweet.
Mr. Carter hired two men to clear forty acres behind the house. They sawed the wind-thrown giants from their stumps and rolled the logs into piles to burn. Of the large trees still standing, they girdled the bark of the trunks with axes to starve the leaves. For several years bull-tongue plows weaved among these dead sentinels to prepare furrows for the cotton.
By the time I came to live with the Carters, the fields were clean and the farm was in good working order. A vegetable garden, orchard, and free-ranging livestock fed us abundantly. Corn was grown for meal and feed for the animals while cotton bought the white folks’ unnecessary necessities.
I missed my mother and her village, but I liked living with the Carters from the beginning. They were good to me and in time I came to love them. I was taught to be their housekeeper, and Mother’s fee for my labor was soon revealed. She had insisted that Mrs. Carter teach me to read and write. Mother had never known a Choctaw that possessed the magic in books.
Elizabeth Carter was a natural teacher. She had sacrificed her youth for the profession, and I was only the last of many students to be fired with her joy for learning. Until I left her home she tutored me four hours a day every day except Sundays. Even as we worked in the kitchen or garden she would drill me in the correct use of the English language. My old thoughts tangled my sentences terribly. She never discouraged my Choctaw words, but as time passed they drifted to distant places in my mind. Within a year I could write every word in Webster’s Blue Backed Spelling Book. Mr. Carter teased me. “Girl, you done kissed the learning stump,” he would say. By the time I was fifteen I had won the Annual Iron Branch Scholar’s Competition, an honor that had always gone to girls who attended Mount Lebanon Baptist College in Farmerville.
I learned other lessons as well. It still seems strange to me that such an innocent and personal notion as knowledge could stir poison in the heart of another human being.
“Abita,” he called again. “It is me, Lemuel. Can I have water? I am injured.”
My mind was spinning like a summer dust devil as I ran to the gate.
“Of course, come in,” I cried. “But what of Minor?”
His face was close to mine and much older than it was a year earlier. Our eyes locked together and the dread-words came.
“He is shot in the groin in Vicksburg but was alive when last I saw him.”
I fell then, sudden and hard, like a steer struck properly with the back of a single-bit ax at slaughter time.
Minor Barrett’s father was a brother to Mrs. Carter. He was raised in New Orleans and trained in Nashville as a physician. He married into a wealthy Creole family, and the frequent ailments of their prosperous friends soon made him rich also.
His wife, though, possessed a spirit uncommon in those accustomed to constant luxury. She was an artist and a musician and yearned for adventure. The wilderness stories told by Mrs. Carter during Christmas visits to her brother’s only stoked the fire. Before long the Barretts with their young son were residents of Iron Branch.
They built a fine house in the village using pit-sawed lumber of heart pine. The paint on the outside was the color of beech bark, between white and gray. A whole room was filled with books of the world, the medicine books of Dr. Barrett, the art books of his wife, and countless others. Minor said the library filled a wagon and a half when it was brought from the boat. As a girl, I thought this parlor to be the most mysterious and wonderful place in the world.
I never knew Dr. Barrett. The room that later held such magic for me held the casket of its owner within a year of his arrival in this country. He was called out in the night to treat a sick slave woman on a passing steamboat at Alabama Landing. She resisted his help and had to be tied down and cupped. When Dr. Barrett died suddenly the next day other Negroes said she was a hoodoo woman with the power of curses. I still wonder if the devil or Jesus took this man.
Mrs. Barrett buried her husband in a new graveyard facing resurrection east on the point of a sandy ridge that jutted out into the l’Outre Swamp. She marked his grave with a large iron cross and went back to painting misty scenes of forests without people and playing her violoncello. From this time forward, rumors held that Mrs. Barrett purchased unusual amounts of alcohol just to clean the rosin from her strings.
I saw Minor Barrett from time to time after I came to live with the Carters. He would drive his mother out for Saturday dinner if the road was good. Sometimes we would visit them in the village. Unlike most people he would speak to me like I was a whole person. There was a gentleness about him. Then when he was fifteen he went away to school in Philadelphia to study the law books. I did not see him for more than two years.