Sarah Ridge
Running Waters
Summer 1831
W
ill opened the kitchen door with scrapes on his cheek and dirt embedded in his eyebrows. He dropped split wood from a broken plow handle at his feet. He shut the door and slammed the latch closed, resting his back against it. “There is a tsgili nearby.”
“A witch?” I asked while spoon-feeding Susan. “There’s no such thing.”
“How else,” he asked, “could I explain the rock in the middle of a field I’ve planted many times before? Why didn’t the mule see it? The blade hit a deep rock and pulled me over the handle. It snapped and sent me straight into the clods.”
“Come. Sit. Tell me why you think it was a witch.”
“When I got up from the ground, I felt her eyes on me from the woods, but the only animal I saw was a dewa twitching her tail, staring at me from a high pine branch. Sweat dripped into my eyes. When I wiped it away, the squirrel disappeared.”
I said, “Squirrels move quick, Will.”
I rinsed the cloth in water from the basin and sat beside Will to clean his cut. He turned his head away, not in pain, but in dismay that I didn’t panic like he did. He believed wholeheartedly in what he was saying, shivering, even though it was July.
“Everyone should stay close to the house. A broken plow is an omen.”
“Quatie and I planned to ride to New Echota today.”
“Don’t go.” Will stood and retrieved the pistol from the top shelf and began loading it. “Something bad is coming.”
When he set it on the table, I lifted Susan from her chair and put her on my hip. “There’s no need for all that.”
Honey came into the kitchen, tying her apron behind her back. Will’s serious look stopped her movement. He said, “There’s a tsgili in the woods.”
“Aww, Lawd, no,” she said. Then, in a rush, Honey took Susan from me and went into the front parlor. She stared out the window, guarding the children. My mouth hung open, amazed at how seriously the two reacted to the word tsgili. Such superstitions were astounding. Will picked up the broken plow handle from the doorway and left the kitchen armed.1
It would be an hour before Quatie arrived. We planned to meet Mother Susannah and tend to Ann Worcester through her impending childbirth. With the time, I sat at John’s desk and began a letter addressed to the Indian Queen Hotel. It had been a month since I received word from him. The delegation lived in Washington these last six months. Honestly, I hoped he’d never receive this letter, already aboard a steamer for home. Every time he left, I waited longer for him to return. I dipped the quill and placed its tip on the parchment.
My dearest,
Rollin misses you a great deal. Your father taught him to ride, and he cannot wait to show you how well he sits a horse. Clarinda has sprouted, her head reaching my waist. Little Susan sits up to watch her brother’s and sister’s antics. I prop pillows around her so when she belly-laughs, watching them argue with their hands, she doesn’t hit her head when giggling and falling to her back.
It eases my loneliness, hearing their laughter. When I miss you so much, think I can’t leave our bed for selfish sadness, the children wake. I pray my gratitude for God’s gift of healthy babies. He answers in their voices, granting me the will to rise another day.
I refilled the ink, thinking how Rollin's voice was so like John’s, albeit spoken in higher tones. Their cadences were the same. I noticed it the most when Rollin argued with me at bedtime. But after quieting each night, in the silence, I brushed away the thick black hair from his eyes.
Clarinda inherited John’s eyes and keen sight. She spent more time with Mother Susannah, learning herbal remedies. When Susan coughed so last spring, Clarinda found bishop’s weed. We pounded the leaves for their oils. I rubbed the mixture on Susan’s chest, and she breathed easier because of her sister’s efforts. I rubbed honey on Susan’s gums and let her drink more with lemon in the water. It helped tremendously.
Whenever John left, his essence remained on the faces of our children. Taking care of them and this farm was all I could do to take care of him.
Lost in the letter and my thoughts, Quatie called from the kitchen. Hearing her serious tone, I knew finishing John’s letter would have to wait. When I found her, Quatie stood beside an elder Cherokee woman, hunch-backed with white, unkempt hair matted around her shoulders and eyes set so deep that her lids covered the whites of her eyes. Underneath them, skin pooled, resting on her cheekbones. Her skin was like leather from years spent laboring under the sun.
Quatie turned the old woman by her shoulders and showed me whip stripes along her back, each crusted with dirt and dried blood. I gasped, staring at the results of barbarism and cruelty.
Quatie said, “She came to me this morning. I didn’t know what to do except bring her here. Her name is Marz.”
“Does she speak English?”
“Yes,” Quatie affirmed.
I asked the woman, “Who did this to you?”
Marz didn’t answer, but Quatie did, flushed with indignant anger. “Who else but the white soldiers? She said the Georgian Guard evicted her. When she refused to leave, they drove her away with whips!”
Quatie helped the injured old woman sit. Marz whimpered when I twisted water from a cloth and began dabbing her wounds. She arched her back at my every touch and moaned in pain.
I called Sunflower, who came from her cabin into the kitchen. “Help me?”
Sunflower shuttered, as if overcome with cold, as Will had done before. Clarinda came into the kitchen from the main house and stopped in the doorway.
The old woman cooed at Clarinda and reached out with long and dark fingernails. Sunflower moved the puzzled child by the shoulders toward us. When I handed Sunflower the bloody cloth, she traded places with me and continued cleaning the wounds.
I signed to my daughter, “Help me find some herbs?”
Clarinda answered by grabbing her basket from the hook on the wall and my hand. She pulled me toward the running water. From the base of a poplar tree, we gathered wild ginger root with its broad, green, circular leaves.2 She smelled the plant before pulling it from the ground, like Mother Susannah taught her to do.
Clarinda signed, “Goldenseal, Mama.”
I nodded and reminded her, “Yes, white and red berries with large soft leaves.”
She signed, “Squirrels eat it. It grows in the shade.”3
Clarinda blew her whistle. I found her hunched over, smelling the red-spurred flower pod in the plant’s center. After gathering what we needed, we hurried home.
Sunflower steeped cherry bark tea for pain while Clarinda and I ground the plant leaves to an oily paste. “I’ll take her to my cabin.” She took a deep breath before she said, “The head men must make this stop.” One palm hit the other with insistence as she exclaimed in signs.
Quatie sighed and said, “Ross would never have allowed Marz to stay with us.”
“Why ever not?” I asked.
“Important men and high-ranking officers meet with him. Stay for days at a time. He wouldn’t want anyone to see her.”
“Why? In case they recognize their handiwork?” I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice while I tore bandages from woven strips of cotton.
Quatie said, “I don’t want to anger him. Since George was born, Ross has been different.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Tender,” she said.
In Sunflower’s cabin, the three of us moved in silence. We covered Marz’s back with poultice and bandages. We cleaned her face and hands, dressing her in a clean shift. Sunflower brushed her hair. She thanked each of us with a squeeze from her long-nailed hand, and fell asleep, safe and in less pain. Sunflower kept watch from the bedside chair.
L
Quatie and I promised the Boudinots and Worcesters we’d come.
When we reached the forest surrounding New Echota, she said, “Hunters have taken all the game.”
Looking like an outpost settlement, canvas tents covered the heads of Cherokee women left idle with no fields to plow or bread to bake. Whiskey barrels had found their way in, toppled and empty, as medicine for broken hearts and stolen homes. Pony clubs had stolen nearly five hundred head of cattle and horses. White settlers, the impatient but fortunate lottery drawers won the land, and further assisted by Georgian soldiers, evicted more Cherokee families.
Quatie followed my stare. Men gambled near campfires as their shoeless children chased one another through the encampment. She said, “Ross said Georgia disbanded the Light Guard. Unemployed officers are finding their fortunes bringing whiskey wagons, selling cups for cheap.”
I said, “No one benefits when fathers drink, and gamble away what they’ve saved from last year’s crops. We must feed these people.”
Quatie said, “They won’t accept a white woman’s charity.”
I replied, “It isn’t charity, Quatie, it’s humanity.” When families lost ground, they discarded hope, like seeds, along the roads they sojourned. Harvesting nothing, in abundance.
When we arrived at Reverend Sam’s, cavalry officers surrounded a wagon. Whispering onlookers ogled from a distant perimeter.
Last March, Reverend Sam refused to sign his allegiance to the state. They’d arrested him but released him a month later, because he was postmaster and paid with federal funds. The last time I saw Reverend Sam, he hunched over his horse, carrying a boulder’s weight in certain guilt, knowing that staying home placed his family in danger. Were the soldiers here to arrest him again?
Elias and Harriet came to us from across the street, hand in hand. Elias said, “Georgia’s Governor Gilmer asked President Jackson whether he considered missionaries servants of the government. Jackson said no. So, after that, Georgia restricted all mail coming into or out of the nation and dissolved Worcester’s postmaster position.”
I asked Harriet, “Is that why they’re here? To arrest Worcester? What about Ann? Would they have so little Christian mercy to arrest a father so close to his child’s birth?”
Harriet said, “Of course they would. They draw surveys of the land and invade the gold mines, prosecute with vigor with authority of their Christian governor. Every day, the Cherokee cry robbery. All to no avail.”
Elias pulled his wife close. “We are denationized.”4
All movement forward ceased. Whispering voices hushed when Sam walked down the front stairs, pale and silent. His hands were bound behind his back, escorted on either side by two soldiers gripping his elbows.
Soldiers held hitched horses still while they stationed Sam behind the wagon. Already inside sat Missionary Butrick and another man I didn’t know, both bound and gagged.
Chief Ross hurried past us to intervene, arguing with a blue-coated officer whose shoulders were adorned with golden epaulets. I couldn’t hear what they said, but he held up his hand to deny Ross whatever mercy he’d requested.
Behind us, another guard cursed and taunted minister and physician, Doctor Butler. “Get over there, you Indian savior.”
The prisoner lost his footing. The soldier dragged him by his coat across the road toward Sam and the awaiting prison wagon.
The schoolhouse door opened. Sophie Sawyer shouted, “Let him go! You cannot do this! He is a doctor, a man of God!”
Ross shouted, “Stop!” Waiting horses twisted their harness chains, frightened by his stern command.
Sophie Sawyer ran too close. The soldier let go of his prisoner, turned his gun, and hit her with the butt end shoved into her chest. The blow pushed her to the ground. Then, a smirk, evidence of his little remorse for striking a woman, the soldier grabbed Doctor Butler’s coat only to throw him forward to tumble at Sam’s feet.
Quatie, Harriet, and I ran to Sophie’s aid. She panted and held her chest, stupefied at the guard’s cowardly blow. There was nothing we could do but watch as the soldiers took the ministers. If Elias and Ross were powerless to stop them, we could do nothing. To the militia, we were just a spread of skirts, colors arrayed against a dirt road.
The commanding officer ordered one cavalry soldier to dismount and handed him two trace chains, one for Doctor Butler’s neck. The other he strapped around Sam’s throat. No smith ever forged horse tack for use on free men.
The soldier gathered the chains by their loose ends. He fastened Sam to a horse and Doctor Butler to the end of the cart. The soldier driving the wagon released the brake and snapped the reins. The prisoners lunged forward, while another soldier prodded them from behind with his bayonet.
Chief Ross shouted, “Where are you taking them?”
“To prison or to Hell,” the officer said as if the scene were a play, a comic skit rather than a somber-telling prologue to a tragedy.
The commander ignored his subordinate’s sarcastic remark and said, “They’ll face trial in Lawrenceville, a week’s walk from here. It’s where they’ll be prosecuted and hung.”
Chief Ross asked for another mercy from the commander. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the commander refused. “No. They’ll walk,” he said. Without another word, the commander mounted his horse, passed prisoners and wagon, and led the charges through town.
Sophie gathered enough breath to say, “With wounded feet. Chains of thorns. Carrying their own crosses.”
An unnecessary fife and drum led the wagon around the next bend, as if the gallows were feet instead of miles away. None nearby could turn their eyes from the scene; the music was unwarranted.
When we could no longer hear the march, Ann Worcester stepped to her porch in shift and shawl. She held the child in her womb, and another infant in her arms. Tears dripped into the babe’s pale hair.
That evening, Harriet played hymns on her pianoforte. I sat on the Worcester’s porch steps, drying my hands on a towel. Sophie Sawyer closed the door and sat beside me.
I said, “Amazing Grace. God knows we need to hear it now.”
Sophie said, “New Echota looks nothing like it did when Harriet’s parents visited a summer ago.” She placed her hand over the sore place where the soldier’s gun bruised her chest. “They brought her that instrument at great expense. They spoke of you and your family when they were here. You two grew up together?”
“Yes.” I focused on the damp dishtowel in my hands. “My parents just left Connecticut for Massachusetts. After John and I married, my father’s position at the Mission School was threatened. After all, he and Mother raised such an immoral daughter. Then, after the town’s hypocrites burned effigies of Elias and Harriet down Bolton Hill Road, the school’s doors closed for good.”
I scoffed and silenced nearby crickets. “When the Golds returned North, they reported to my mother and father how influential their son-in-law’s paper had become. Until Mistress Gold told Mother how well we were, how successful John’s law practice had become, I think she still believed we lived in a mud hut and scraped our dinner from barren fields. My mother thinks her grandchildren believe in witches roaming the woods. She’s never met them.”
Sophie hummed a harmony to the hymn’s final chorus over Harriet’s accompaniment seeping from the open window. After the final note, the window went dark.
Sophie asked, “What would she do if guards came for Mister Boudinot? I fear it only a matter of time.”
I said, “If Elias were jailed, if he died in prison, I think she’d take their children to her parents. Put them in school and move forward as if their Cherokee half didn’t exist.”
“And you?” she asked. “What would you do if the soldiers arrested your husband? Go to Massachusetts?”
My mind replayed the cavalry’s fife and drums, blending into the pianoforte’s lingering key. “No,” I said. “Not even if John died. I’d do the only thing I could. Remain on Cherokee ground, seed the fields, protect our children, and never let them forget their father’s sacrifice.”
L
Baby Jerusha Worcester, another girl, was born a day later, but only survived the week. She failed to thrive, wouldn’t suckle, losing blood in her nappies. Her imprisoned father didn’t know he should grieve.
Georgia’s Supreme Court sentenced both ministers to four years of hard labor in Milledgeville prison. While nine other arrested ministers signed their commitment to the state, Reverend Sam and Doctor Butler continued to refuse any offers of clemency.6