The Book of Duels (5 page)

Asi-yahola (a.k.a. Osceola; born Billy Powell), 31,

Seminole Warrior

 

W
e came to you naked singing the hawk-tail song and offered you the white feather and the black drink and you shackled me, friend, caught me in chains like one of your dark slaves and held me in a cage where I bared my teeth and growled like the wolf until my cunning spirit said to you,
In five days’ time I shall bring to you the men of my band
, and you stroked my spine, made a great present of this Spanish rifle whose stock is well oiled and holds the weight of the deer shank, and now I aim it at your head as you waddle from the same fort where you told me what the Great Father demands—you do not know, friend, that on a cool night when the stars crackled in the black sky of my boyhood, the Great Father you serve, General Jackson, led an army of whites and traitorous reds, thick as the summertime locust, to kill and drive us from our homes and we fled into this flat wet country—now that same man threatens that if we do not go to the far side of Mother River to live among the false and faithless Creeks he will send another storm to roll over us—but I will tell every living man this: I am no longer a young blade of grass bending in the big wind, I am now the hard cypress standing strong in swamp water—so bring your thunder and rain, friend, but I will not be swayed and you will not have our land and you will not have our rivers or swamps or sward and you will not have our dignity, which the Breathmaker gives us from his very mouth, and neither will you have our Negroes—not our slaves or Maroons and not my wife and my son, the one you call half-breed, the same as you called me the day you bade me sign the Great
Father’s treaty, the one I stabbed with my scalping knife as my signature as well as my promise: my white half hates you, friend, and my Muskogee half will make your skull red and leave it to blacken in the sun while your body is devoured by the vulture and the rat—

I cry my war whoop and we step into the open and you can see I am true to my word: I have delivered all of my men—sixty
hadjo
, each in battle dress singing the death-scalp song and running straight at you—but do not fear, dear friend, for they will drive past you and on into the fort—no, I alone will stop and wait for you to arm yourself before I kill you and share your scalp with all.

Bloody Hands, 16 & 54,

Muskogee Artist & Alleged Witness to the Duel

 

T
his controversial piece of ledger art was uncovered by Professor Scott Gage in an antique store outside St. Augustine, Florida. It is a fine specimen; however, its authenticity is disputed and has come under some level of scrutiny. The artist purportedly witnessed this event when he was a teenager and a participant in the Second Seminole War. Some forty years after the event, according to Dr. Gage, Bloody Hands created this art piece while serving in a US government internment camp for Aborigines. Interestingly, he is one of the few ledger artists who are not of Plains Indian origin. In support of the artwork’s integrity, Dr. Gage argues that, after the Second Seminole War, many Florida peoples were forcibly relocated to the Oklahoma Territory where, perhaps, Bloody Hands fell in with Sitting Bull and participated in the hit-and-run attacks on US forts in the upper Missouri area during the 1860s. In support of this claim, Dr. Gage points to the fact that Bloody Hands was incarcerated in Fort Yates, where his name appears on various government documents. Later, he was shipped back to Florida and imprisoned in Fort Marion, where he purportedly composed this picture and, later, in 1898, died of pneumonia, accompanied by what doctors at the time described as dementia praecox or, by today’s nomenclature, acute schizophrenia.

Steel Hole by Hole: Henry v. MacKenna

Laying Train Tracks through the West Virginia Mountains,

September 27, 1871

John Henry, 28,

Steel-Driving Man

 

D
one drove twenty durn miles of line and that machine on my heels steady behind, comin down on me like rain on the tin roof above where I slept as a youngun—chicken and dumplins stewin in the pot lure me out a dream of Daddy comin home from the workhouse with a sackful of orange rock candy, back into the world of Ma Ma Ma and she be hammerin home her orders with that two-inch-thick belt she call “Mercy”—
Get yo ass out that bed and slop them hogs, boy, and gather them greens fore I tan yo hide
—I shore do as she say and when I come back it’s her ladlin in our best bowl the chicken and ramps and carrots and pellets of dough—I come over the top again for the ten one thousandth time today and my bones brittle beneath my muscles all stove up and tight—a pang of fire runs right through my arm and catches a stitch in my heart—I hear a poundin there and know that machine gonna pound on past, poundin, like Ms. Freeman poundin on the front door, her askin Ma if she’s seen the egg layers that skidaddled out her yard, and if we find em, wouldn’t we please just please let her know and I get the guilt-face lookin at the food afore me but Ma just suck her teeth and say,
Nah, Miss Lady, I ain’t see no bird ’round here today
—I like to of died from shame but Ma say Miss Lady a uppity-actin old biddy anyway, say she just wish I’d drop dead of a stroke fore she’d even give one yard bird back to that uppity-actin old biddy—I remember a dozen times when I squeamed at loppin the head off a hen but Ma would grab that heavy axe out my hand quick as you please and say,
What kindly man you gon be?
And she’d cut that thing clean in two
and hand me back that tool and say,
Don’t never you need to send no man to do what a woman can damn well do, because she will, by God, and do it even better too
.

I am my mother’s stout arms steady swingin my axe down on chicken necks and it clangs and sparks and trues the rail and I slip to a knee and my hammer fails and I grab up my arm, it burnin like the stew on the stove top, burnin, and I can’t hardly breathe—breathless, headless—I fall on my side and see Ma Ma Ma in the mountaintop cawin like crows shakin they tail feathers, she shakin her head, sayin,
Who is the chicken now, my big baby boy?

Conor MacKenna, 57,

Protestant & Foreman of the L & N Train Line

 

I
willna lose this contest, not to him nor any of his kind, what lost me both me boys, Owen and Callum, in the war conscripted by Lincoln, leaving me alone with the great herd of hogs and slop and row upon row of wheat and corn and oats and the rye I’d fashion into a fine little whisky—I was forced to sell our Pennsylvania farm—both me boys killed wandering in the Virginia, cold and hungry, fighting for the freedom of these blasted brutes and for what, so this black blow-in could destroy me livelihood now by unionizing me labor, well by God, industry will win ever time, boyo, and these men can become memory a-fadin just like that Yokum boy what jumped me back when I was but a lad and I come home with the torn collar and the bloody nose and upset me mam, saying through me tears,
That Lamar Yokum and his two big brothers ganged up on me and salted me somehow fierce
, now thinking I’d get me a coddle, but me mam caught me up by me eartop and marched me down to their shack and shouted their ma to the front porch and called her all kinds of nasty names—bitches and cunts and such—said,
Look here at what your little monkeys have done
, and me lip throbbed great against each pounding pulse and I smiled as their ma beat em about the heads with the ladle she held and the boys begged and scurried and Lamar swore he’d done the deed his lone self and so me mam said,
Well, I don’t believe that for one feckin second now, do I?
and me tongue swoll in me mouth, liked to of choked me dead, it did, and we tumbled and we tussled and he busted me lip once more and he busted me nose this time too and I slipped in the slick grass and he
pinned me arms down with his knees and I could smell that sour pig smell on him and then he just vanished—heroically, me mam had snatched him from off me but then she began to beat me gob with the ham of her fists, yelling,
I’ll teach you to lie to me, you rotten bastard, you!
and for what all I know she was right—I have never even laid eyes upon me father—I cockroached out from under her and lost me shoes and still I ran all the way home in me sock feet, which got all soaked and one slipped halfway off and flopped and flapped about me, but she caught me up and she beat me arse-end with a thin switch for a good long while and to this day I still have the scars to show for it—

And then this here bluegum he falls and I know he’s not to prove whatever he thinks he was set to prove and his union will be busted, me machines are the future of labor, aye, and sure now I can visit me mam’s grave and tell her,
You were right all along, dear
—
can’t no coon whip me, Ma
.