I SHOULD TELL some good things before I go on. I mean about our family and how we came to live here. And how my grandfather had to shriek and throw things in the air and yell out to the world that this land was his in order to claim it.
We’re not yeomen farmers, with fewer than ten slaves. Neither are we small planters with ten to fifty slaves. Before the Yankees came, Pa had over seventy negroes working the fields and the gardens and tending the sheep, the horses, the cows, and the house. Pa was someone to be reckoned with, not just an ailing old man.
He was already in college in the states when his father, Grandpa Holcomb, came from Virginia as part of that group of Stephen Austin’s original “old three hundred” families in that first community of settlers that came to East Texas in 1821.
Edom told me and Sis Goose all this. Edom is close to ninety by now and lives in the log house that is the first one Grandpa built before he built the big one. The same log house all of us live in now that the Yankees came this past June of ’65 and put us out of the plantation house.
Edom was in his early forties then, and was Grandpa’s body servant. He told us how Grandpa claimed his land. To me, it’s so romantic that I never tire hearing tell of it.
In order to take possession of the land, Edom says, Grandpa had to have three witnesses and a surveyor. Stephen Austin was there, too.
The surveyor walked the landmarks with Grandpa, from a red oak tree two feet in diameter, to a pecan tree, to an ash tree, and finally an orange tree. The surveyor dutifully marked it all down.
Then, in order to take possession, Grandpa had to cry out, pull up weeds, throw stones, drive in stakes, and perform other necessary solemn acts to show the land was his.
Exactly the kind of thing I want to do when I’m out riding and I see the endless land and sky. I feel like crying out and pulling up weeds and throwing stones, too. My spirit quickens and I know how Grandpa felt.
Grandmother was with Grandpa when all this happened, of course, on her tall gray horse, Smokey. She’d ridden that horse clear across the country, using a sidesaddle Grandpa had given her. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Not Indians or wolves or outriders. And she could shoot a coin off the top of an apple without disturbing its skin. Gabe says I take after her with my shooting and my spirit.
Pa was there, too, when Grandpa claimed the land. It was just before they sent him back to college in Virginia. Grandpa chose a high bluff to build the plantation house on, but first he had to build the log cabin. He built it with logs right off the property. There is a huge fireplace inside. The door shutter is made out of thick slabs split right off the thick pieces of lumber. And the door was locked at night with a large peg that could not be broken through. This was in case of a raid by Indians.
The Indians did come, of course. After all, this was their land. Kickapoos, like the ones who plague our frontier, the ones who wounded Gabriel, would come and walk around the log cabin at night, hoping to scare the wits out of Grandmother. But all she did in reply was take out her spinning wheel and keep it whistling all night so they would be sure to hear it.
Edom told us that before their final leave-taking, they built a fire on the lawn, right where Ma’s orchard is now, and danced around it in honor of Grandmother and her courage.
That sure made me proud. And whenever Gabe scolded me, he always put in how nobody would ever build a fire for me in honor of my courage, just to make me feel bad.
Anyway, after the Indians left Grandmother and Grandpa, the buffalo came. A whole drove of them passing through the river about a mile above our house. Grandmother figured there must have been close to a hundred of them, and they never stopped. They went over the land like a flood, and they went southward, Grandmother said.
Those first years were a trial for Grandmother and Grandpa. They had about eighteen head of cattle, a small herd. They’d started out with more, but on the trip west the cattle got sick and some died. They had only six horses left. And they set about the task of surviving.
When the buffalo and Indians weren’t plaguing them, the flies and mosquitoes were. Then one year Grandpa’s corn crop failed. The next year there was a drought. The year the corn crop failed they had no bread, not until Grandpa raised a good corn crop.
They had no salt at all. But the cotton crop gave a good yield. The only problem was getting it to its destination.
The first few years, before he built his own landing on the river, Grandpa took the cotton to Mexico on pack mules.
Edom told us of this, too: “One slave could manage ten or twelve pack mules. The cotton bales weighed seventy-five or eighty pounds each. The only roads were Indian trails. But we managed eighteen or twenty miles a day.”
He told us how the men were heavily armed. And how they hoped the Indians were too afraid of the colored slaves to attack. How, in Mexico, Grandpa exchanged his cotton for coffee, tea, clothing, and Mexican silver dollars.
Pa still has a cache of those silver dollars. I have three. I know my brothers and Amelia have their share, too.
I think about all this because I know how difficult it was for Grandpa and Grandmother to build up this plantation. And because now the Yankees have it. They just took it. And I dream of the day we can get it all back.
“What will it take?” I’ve asked Gabe.
“Words,” he’d said. “Isn’t that what it always takes?” And somehow I felt he wasn’t just talking about the plantation, and I was treading on dangerous ground, so I shut my mouth right up.