Citizens Creek (44 page)

They left Laura behind, too fresh from childbirth to travel well, in care of the smallest ranch children. Jacob and Eugene and the others bounced about in the wagon bed until they came to smoother roads leading to Okmulgee. Rose held tight to a bundle of papers she’d kept safe beneath the floorboards in her bedroom hiding place, all the formal proof of citizenship she’d accumulated over the years. The family Bible with the listing of the birth of each
of her children. Her marriage certificate to Jake. The receipt from the Canadian Colored Town payroll of 1895. She wished she had her listing on the Dunn Roll from 1869, but she knew she was registered and would testify to it. Jake insisted she didn’t need all these things, that they both were well documented over the years and therefore the children were as well, but if land was to be had, Rose didn’t want a technicality to deny their acceptance.

Rose didn’t expect the enormity of the convergence on the tent village in Okmulgee, the Creek capital. It was years since she’d been back and the town had grown beyond her imagining. The bustle and commotion hurt her ears and her eyes. From atop a rolling hill, she saw a great canvassed expanse spread out over the southwest corner of Okmulgee like an armada of ships at sea. But even before they got close enough to see the first tent pole, they began to choke on the dust of all the other families pouring into town. Now there was land to be had, suddenly everybody claimed Indian citizenship, valid or wishful thinking, including State Negroes from the old South and boomers who lost out in the land rush. Swarms of people matched swarms of dust, the air thick as if cattle were on stampede, and no matter which way she looked, Indians were everywhere, coming from every direction, on the move or idling.

All were accounted for but Kindred in the wagon bed. Absent again. Defiant again. The town’s congestion would make a rendezvous with him close to impossible. How could they ever meet in the chaos that was this registration, where families, according to rumor, spent half the day or more waiting to be seen? To be tallied. To be authorized as true.

The noise deafened. Families squatted in the dirt everywhere, biding their time. On the main entryway into the heart of the tent city, a white man with a wild, black beard and squashed-down hat pulled low on his head to keep off the sun sat in a chair in the middle of the dirt road. He was surrounded by baffled questioners, and pointed them in one direction or another. The bearded man appeared to be an official, and Jake joined his line to make sense
of the process. When Jake’s turn came, he asked questions, first in Mvskoke, which the man didn’t understand, and finally English. With the English, the bearded man responded with some degree of good cheer, pointing to one of the tents not far from where they stood. But when Jake motioned to his family, and Rose and the children joined him, the bearded man took one look at the pack of them, at Rose most especially, and suddenly shook his head, almost angry.

“No, no,” he said. “Freedmen to the freedman tent,” he said. “Over there.”

He pointed this time in the opposite direction, on the far side of the square, to a tent at the edge of the clearing.

“My mother was blood Indian,” said Jake. “I thought registration followed the mother.”

The man stared briefly at Jake, a moment’s hesitation, and then pointedly at Rose and the children. He stroked his beard, using his body as if to block entrance to the pathway, and again he shook his head. “Freedman tent is yonder,” he said, and turned his attentions to another questioner, a full-blood in traditional regalia, from feathered turban to moccasined feet.

Jake hitched up his pants, a gesture Rose knew all too well as precursor to either bully or charm, and Rose thought he meant to argue them into the other tent, but to her surprise, as if thinking better of the effort, or convinced of the futility, he backed down without confrontation.

“Let’s go.” He stormed off, leaving Rose to collect up everyone in their group and follow.

They made their way as a family to the tent where the bearded man pointed. The people waiting were clearly darker. Most were obviously freedmen by complexion or feature, but ranged wildly in color, some as fair as Jake, some as dark as she. At least, Rose thought, even if they were separated out, as Jake had feared they would be, at least this was one way to reconnect with Kindred in the massive crowd. She could only hope he showed up soon to the
freedmen’s tent.

They joined the others squatting in the dirt waiting their turn. There were many ahead of them, and for a time, Jake didn’t speak, nursing a private hurt. He’d come around, Rose thought, he always did, and she busied herself distributing the water and foodstuffs she’d brought, seeing to her family as best she could. Rose kept constant lookout for Kindred, nervous after the first passed hour, and more upset as two and then three slipped by. Their turn would come sometime today, and what if her son still hadn’t appeared?

To their right was a family of blacks waiting for interview, a middle-aged man, a rag-headed woman, and six children ranging in age from toddler to old enough to tend the rest. Rose overheard them talking, and from the accent, she knew they were State Negroes from the South, outsiders, new immigrants, not native blacks from Indian Territory. They were on the hunt for free land without the qualifications. She wondered if they would be found out, a day’s waiting for no gain.

Each time someone exited the tent, a frisson of excitement infected the waiting crowd. One family closer to registration, and the opportunity to hear impressions of what happened inside the tent. Freedmen emerged to tell the same basic tale, and the rumors Jake brought home were confirmed. They could expect to find two white men, clerks dispatched from Washington, sitting behind a table, their job to examine whatever documentation the petitioner had and ask questions until satisfied of citizenship. If the official representatives of the United States government weren’t convinced one way or the other, they kept the case open, calling witnesses to confirm a family’s claims.

At one point, Rose got up to stretch her legs, and wandered a bit from the tent. By then, they had waited well over four hours, and she resigned herself to registering Kindred in absentia. She walked dust-clogged lanes between one area of the vast tent city to the next, careful to keep her orientation. When her head cleared enough, and her muscles loosened, Rose headed back again to the freedmen’s
tent. Her family still squatted in the dirt, toward the head of the line. Their turn was closer, but not close, so she set out again, in the opposite direction, toward the area where they first entered the tent city, near the crossroads guarded by the bearded man.

Within the mass of humanity milling around the tent city, it wasn’t her son she first registered, but his beloved deerskin turban, strips patched and replaced over years of wear. The hat fought its way into her consciousness even before the sheen on the pale face beneath, or the intricate tattoos covering his arms and legs and trunk. He’d come in time after all.

An enormous wave of relief coursed through her, and she started to rush to Kindred, but then froze. He wasn’t alone, but strolled with purpose next to an older woman. It was years, sixteen, since she last saw Angeli, and then for only less than one hour’s time, and yet she recognized her immediately. Older of face and body, her dark hair severe and pulled tight away from her face in traditional Creek style, no longer the desperate young girl who walked for days to give away her baby but an assured and almost matronly woman.

The two of them walked side by side, Kindred and Angeli, and even through her confusion, Rose thought again to yell out to him, to let him know his family waited for him, and where they were. But she was suddenly struck with the image, now not as mother but through the eyes of a stranger, observing her son as others would see him. Kindred stood straight and tall amid the throng, surrounded by both full-blood and mixed-blood Creek Indians. Now that he was no longer in the context of their ranch, and coupled with a mother who could truthfully testify she bore him, Rose saw clearly what others must see. He could be by-blood Indian if he chose and no one else denied. As could have Jake this morning. Kindred could declare himself one thing or the other, at his whim.
He could deny the family that bore him, as well as the family that raised him, and in either case, pass over to a different life. Or he could say nothing, and let young whelps from Washington who decided their fates and recorded these claims make up their own mind. Rose had no idea what Kindred would do. She was gripped with a sudden foreboding.

The cry died in her throat, a tainted thing, and Rose fell helplessly mute. Just as she had watched the gatekeeper, the bearded white man, banish Jake to the freedmen’s tent because of his family’s coloring, she saw the same man admit her son to the other side of the tent city.

And she watched as Angeli led the way, taking the turn to the right, away from the rest of them, and Kindred followed behind her in the same direction.

Chapter 63

ROSE DIDN’T KNOW
how her son found Angeli, or how Kindred persuaded her to come with him today, but hows no longer mattered. Kindred had chosen, and he hadn’t chosen his family. Hadn’t chosen her. She hurried back to the waiting place around the freedmen’s tent, threading through the families clustered there, and sought out Jake. He was closer to the opening of the tent, their turn coming soon.

“Kindred,” she began, but she couldn’t continue without squatting down and shutting her eyes for a moment. “Kindred’s gone to the by-blood camp.”

“So he showed up,” Jake said. He didn’t seem overly concerned. “They’ll send him here soon enough.”

“You don’t understand,” said Rose. She expected Jake to jump up and do something, to go retrieve their son and bring him back where he belonged. But Jake didn’t move. “That woman is with him.”

She couldn’t bear to call Angeli by name, but from the expression on Jake’s face, his guilt was clear. He looked on the verge of retching, leaning his head close to the dirt for a few seconds until composing himself. Rose couldn’t quite place his response. Guilt? Shame? Despair? Defiance?

“What do you know about this?” asked Rose. It was as if there was a catching sickness in the air that leaped from Jake to her. Suddenly she felt ill, her stomach tensed and in wait for some heavier punch.

“I didn’t think it would do any harm,” said Jake, quietly.

Even as the question formed on her lips, Rose knew the answer. “What have you done?”

“He’d been after me for so long. He’s no fool. His looks. Anyone can see he could be full-blood by look. He demanded to know who gave him birth. A few months back, I told him about Angeli. I never thought he’d look for her. I never dreamed he’d find her.” He looked at Rose directly. “I never went back,” he swore. “I haven’t seen her for years.”

Rose couldn’t travel all the dangerous paths this admission created, not now. That Jake told Kindred about his birth mother without letting her know. That Kindred needed the mother who discarded him more than he needed her. She couldn’t afford to dwell on whether or not to believe Jake had kept to his pledge to cut off communication with Angeli, an old wound reopened to everyone’s peril.

“Do we go after him?” she asked, her voice atremble. “Or let him be?”

“We haven’t lost him, no matter how they mark him today. Freedman or by-blood, he’s our son.”

There was little time for debate. A tall white man in an odd hat and too-small jacket barely covering his bulging stomach emerged from the tent and waved for the next family. Their turn had finally come.

Two white men sat behind a rickety four-legged table in the tent, surrounded by heavily bound books and sheaves of paper, as well as an inkpot and feathered nib pen. There were only two other chairs, and so Jake and Rose sat, the children fanned out around them, some standing, some sitting cross-legged on the earthen floor.

They looked young and unseasoned to Rose, both white men, and yet they went about their tasks with a certain absolute, if bored, authority. One of them finally looked up from his papers to where the Simmons family gathered themselves.

“English?” he asked.

Jake spoke up. “Yes,” he said.

The clerk seemed relieved. Rose wondered how many of the petitioners coming through only spoke an Indian dialect, and how they managed to make themselves understood by these men.

“We are from Washington, and ask questions to determine citizenship. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Jake said again. Her husband had encased himself in his charm shell. The stakes were too high to show annoyance with the condescending tone.

“You swear that all answers are true from here on out?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are now sworn in. What is your name?”

“Jake Simmons.”

“Are you a citizen of the Muskogee Nation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What town do you belong to?”

“Canadian Colored.”

“How long have you lived in the Creek Nation?”

“All my life.”

“What did your mother look like? Full colored woman?”