Citizens Creek (32 page)

The train lurched again and, amid screeching, came to a stop. Harry jerked awake, and narrowed his eyes in disapproval.

“This train stops more than it goes,” he grumbled.

“Something on the tracks again, I expect,” Cow Tom replied.

He heard his own gruffness, and was glad Harry didn’t shut his eyes to go back to sleep. Harry was hatless, and although darkish strands streaked the hair pulled back tight and fastened with a leather cord at the back of his neck, for the most part his long, coarse hair was grayed. A cloudy halo rimmed the pupils of his eyes, and he squinted often, especially when in direct sun, but his mind was as sharp as the first time Cow Tom met him. Cow Tom compared the Harry before him now, shorter, fleshy, with sag to his jowls and slowness to his movements, with the young Harry of their youth, and conceded how both of them had changed. When did they become old men?

“No need going sour,” Harry said. His friend always could read him well. “We’ll get there the same time whether sitting here or up front.”

“We’ve the right to sit where we want,” said Cow Tom, “and I could sure use a cushion about now.”

Odd, hotheaded Harry consoling him instead of the other way around. Time did, indeed, change many things. They hadn’t objected when relegated to the last car on the train, the color of their skin trumping the cost of their train ticket, and they settled into the dirty carriage restricted to Negro, little more than a boxcar. No words were spoken on the platform as the tight-lipped station agent barred access to the forward cars, he and Harry in instant and silent agreement. They needed to arrive in Washington without incident, where the real work waited to be done. A few days of injustice and discomfort was the price.

“Why so tetchy?” asked Harry.

Cow Tom lived in reflections now. They thought him a man of influence, Amy and his children and grandchildren, his sons-in-law, the people of Canadian Colored Town, his colleagues at Council. The clock had wound down on what he could yet accomplish. What if he failed, and became pitiable in their eyes?

“Our task is big,” said Cow Tom.

“I’m more worried about these wasted hours while the blamed train sits here on the tracks. We can’t beat them if we don’t get to Washington,” said Harry.

As if Cow Tom needed reminding what was at stake. “Long as we get there before Council figures out we’re gone,” he said. “I hope Washington listens.”

“We have to make them listen,” said Harry.

They left the train and regrouped outside the station, figuring how best to find a place to stay and start their search for the senator. A neatly dressed colored man in a suit and small cravat ap
proached them.

“You gentlemen need transportation?” he said. “A nickel gets you and your bags wherever you need to be.”

“Congress. You know where that is?” asked Harry.

The man looked doubtful. He scanned Cow Tom and Harry, from their deerskin leggings to their turbans, forming some opinion Cow Tom feared wasn’t favorable. “I can carry y’all to where Congress meets, but you might need more particulars. What’s your business?”

“We’re here to find Mr. Harlan. Mr. James Harlan. Senator James Harlan,” said Cow Tom.

“I don’t know any Mr. Harlan,” the man said.

“He’s high up,” said Harry. “Works for the government.”

“That describes a lot of men in this town,” the man said. “I can carry you to the buildings where most politicians set up offices. They’re close to the Senate chambers.”

“Good enough,” said Harry. “We have to start somewhere.”

“That nickel is up front.”

Cow Tom fished a shield nickel from his coin bag and paid the driver, which the man inspected and pocketed before throwing their small bags in the back of the carriage. The carriage parts were old, but clean and cared for, and once Cow Tom and Harry climbed in, the man clicked the pitiful city horse to a sluggish pace.

The streets of Washington were nothing like Cow Tom imagined. On wide man-made avenues they passed several multistory buildings rising unexpectedly out of the mud, tightly girded within elevated wooden-planked sidewalks for long stretches. They saw mostly white men, almost all hatted, in shirtsleeves and in suits, but there were also black men, and women too, dressed fine, purposeful, and as far as he could tell, treated as proper citizens. His hopes rose.

The young man called over his shoulder from the front seat as the horse kept a steady, clip-clop pace. “What’s your business?” he asked.

“We’re from out West, Indian Territory,” said Cow Tom. He was
anxious to make this man understand the urgency of their important mission. “Come to Washington to speak up for the freedmen in the Creek Nation.”

“That explains the clothes.”

They’d brought their best, but suddenly Cow Tom understood the roughness of their coats, the foreignness of moccasins and leggings and turbans common at home. These were city people, even the carriage driver, black like them, but different. He was refined. Cow Tom was a good judge of people. By bearing, by speech, by the way the young man looked him directly in the eye, he was free long before war’s end, familiar with liberty, wearing it like armor. Both he and Harry projected the same, and he was pleased at the brotherhood.

“This isn’t such a big town,” the brown-skinned man said, “but I don’t know of any Mr. Harlan.”

Cow Tom didn’t agree. Washington was big and crowded and chaotic, full of movement and activity, everyone with their place carved, whether teamsters loading and unloading wagons, jacketed men spitting tobacco juice in the dusty street, or women walking parasoled on the wooden sidewalk.

The carriage driver was chatty. “With the Reconstruction and all, for the first time, I been carrying colored over to the Congress now, as gentlemen, just like white. Didn’t used to be that way. This James Harlan. He one of those?”

“No,” said Cow Tom. “He’s white. Used to be Senator, but no more. We worked with him years back. As translators. He used to approve treaties from the Washington side.”

“Well, if you gentlemen plan to stay the night after finding Mr. Harlan, and have need of a place to stay, my sister rents out rooms in her house in the colored section of town. Meals included. Reasonable and clean.”

The carriage driver dropped them off in front of a cluster of small
buildings and helped them unload their bags, and agreed to come back in a few hours to carry them to his sister’s boardinghouse. The pace of the city unnerved Cow Tom, so many men coming in and out of each of the buildings with such purpose, as if they had no time to waste.

A white man carrying a small satchel had stopped and openly stared in amusement at Cow Tom and Harry as they sorted through their things and tried to figure out their next move. His checkered three-piece suit was a loose fit, a bit of a mismatch for his slender shoulders, as he was a small man, but he looked respectable in his pointed leather shoes, and seemed in no great hurry to be one place or the other. Cow Tom approached him.

“Good afternoon,” Cow Tom said.

“Good afternoon,” the man responded. He didn’t seem to be unfriendly, only overly interested in the spectacle of their arrival in the capital city.

“My partner and I are looking for Senator Harlan. Would you know where he is?”

“What department?”

Cow Tom shook his head in confusion, trying to puzzle out what the man was asking.

The man talked louder and much slower. “Freedmen’s Bureau?” the man guessed, drawing out every syllable. “That would be the War Department.”

“No, no,” said Cow Tom, “the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Department of Interior.”

The man looked back and forth between Cow Tom and Harry without comment, not once but several times, as if repeatedly staring at their moccasins and turbans would suddenly reveal some inner truth to him.

“Indian Affairs, eh?” he finally said. “And I thought I’d seen everything.”

“Do you know where the Department of the Interior is?” asked Cow Tom, as politely as he could manage. He wasn’t sure why this stranger was willing to be so helpful, but they had little time to wonder.

“I do,” the man said. “Can’t say I know a Senator Harlan, but least I can get you to the right building. We can walk from here.”

“Obliged,” said Cow Tom.

“Follow me,” the man said, as they hoisted their bags to carry. And then, “Wait’ll I tell the missus about this.”

They were glad for the man’s assistance, who steered them to the right building, but not sorry to see him go on his way once they found themselves in a warren of offices claimed as the Department of the Interior. From there, Cow Tom and Harry were referred and directed and passed from hand to hand, until they convinced a man sitting behind a wooden desk stacked high with papers to let them in to see former treaty commissioner James Harlan himself. The assistant personally led them into a small and drafty office, one of many along a long hall.

“Senator Harlan,” Cow Tom said in introduction. “Cow Tom and Harry Island. We worked on several treaties for the Creeks with you? Last time at Fort Smith in ’66?”

“Yes, yes,” Harlan said. “Ex-senator now. Ex–secretary of the interior too, for that matter. Come in.” He eyed their baggage, their clothes, dusty from the long trip. “I remember you both.”

He invited them to sit in the cramped office space. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and memories, until the senator pulled out his timepiece, flicking open the case to check the hour.

“So. What makes you seek me out now?” he asked.

Harry took the lead. “We thought to get to the current secretary of the interior, to right a grievous wrong.”

“The secretary of the interior,” repeated Harlan. He seemed cautious, a politician’s nonstatement. “What is the wrong?”

Harry launched into the actions of the renegade Creeks in vio
lation of the treaty, and the omission of the freedmen from the payout, and Cow Tom added the name of the new commissioner in Indian country who looked the other way when freedmen were dropped from the rolls.

“I see,” said Harlan. He leaned forward, fully engaged now, his timepiece forgotten. “Both the secretary and the commissioner are Andrew Johnson’s appointees.”

“Yes?” Cow Tom waited for him to explain.

“The president is no friend of the freedmen, and his appointments reflect his thinking. You’ll make no headway with either the secretary or the commissioner. But you may have come at exactly the right time. This could prove useful for us.”

“Us?”

“Radical Republicans. Reconstructionists. A year ago, there would have been nothing we could do, but now we have a majority in Congress. Two-thirds, enough to overturn Johnson’s vetoes and pass civil rights legislation. The Senate came one vote shy of impeaching Johnson last week. Yes, exactly the right time, just what we need to throw fuel on the anti-Johnson fire.”

The senator seemed almost giddy at the prospect, and Cow Tom felt their cause suddenly swept up into some larger fight he was only beginning to understand. But Cow Tom was a politician too, in the Creek government, and understood there could be several different paths to victory. What matter how or why it happened, if they could come away with reinstatement?

“There are men for you to meet,” Harlan said. Once again he eyed the bags. “Are you staying in town? We’ll need you to testify in front of the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs. As soon as we can arrange it.”