Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (5 page)

By 1828, the first Cherokee newspaper, the
Phoenix
, was publishing articles. The Cherokee people believed they had built the necessary bridges to integrate into the modern world, but white soldiers and civilians soon began to destroy everything that the Cherokee had created. Once gold was discovered near Dahlonega, Georgia, white folk exhibited a lascivious desire
for Cherokee property. An ethnic cleansing that had been looming for the past two hundred years was now on Margaret Little's doorstep.

The
Cherokee Phoenix
was burned to the ground in 1834 because its editors were speaking out against Jackson and the Indian Removal Act, and so the oral history that Poppa passed down came from Margaret Little, who knew at sixteen that she had to flee. In Poppa's words, “Certain animals know before there is an eruption of a volcano, it's time to run for yer life. Margaret Little said, ‘The white soldiers called us Indian dogs; better the instincts of a dog than a white man. That's what saved my life and why yer here eatin’ up my vittles today, C.C ”

Poppa was brought up by Margaret Little because his mother had a stroke at a very young age. Poppa only ever referred to her as Margaret Little, never Grandma Margaret, never Granny Maggie. She would tell Poppa, “Some of the older Indians would be arguin’ that we should give the white man the benefit of the doubt. Now, unfortunately the ones who did ended up walkin’ the excruciatin’, torturous eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile walk to the dust bowl—where there were no green fields, no Corn Woman, no lakes, no mountain streams—toward what the white man called Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. That was the white man's idea of a fair trade; their ‘God has given them this land,’ that's what they kept sayin’. Did their God have the right to give them this land? Did their God give them the right to subjugate us? Who is their God? It cannot be the one called Jesus.”

Poppa continued weaving the tale. “Margaret Little went up into the Smoky Mountains and hid for nine moons, livin’ on nuts and berries, and whatever she could catch with her knife and tomahawk. She's never spoken about anybody bein’ with her durin’ those nine moons of hidin’ like a fugitive. She always said she could smell a Bluecoat soldier a mile away 'cause her tomahawk would start singin’.”

Margaret Little survived with the help of Corn Woman and the Great
Mother. She firmly believed in the power of the ancestors to protect her through her dreams, which became her guiding light. So one morning, knowing that soon she would starve to death or be captured, because the tomahawk had started to hum, she trusted her instincts and made her way down from the Tennessee side of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains onto a large farm in North Georgia, where she signed on as an indentured servant. There she worked, and there she caught the eye of Granddaddy Rice, as Poppa called him. According to Poppa, Margaret Little wasn't very popular with Granddaddy Rice's grown-up sons, who still mourned their mother, who had passed away. Because Granddaddy Rice could still feel the steel in the tip of his boots, as Poppa phrased it, he had a very different idea on what should be done with the question of Margaret Little than his grown-up sons and their wives had. After Margaret Little had a wedding ring on her finger and a bun in the oven, possibly simultaneously the grown-up sons tried to run her off. But, as she would say to Poppa, “If I could stand up to a whole army of Bluecoats, I could handle a few hateful, greedy white boys.” So on the day that the two grown sons showed up to threaten the life of Margaret Little and her unborn child, while Granddaddy Rice was away on some trip, they were met by one of Margaret Little's best friends.

Poppa would say, “I've met Margaret Little's best friend, and she keeps her underneath the tie of her apron.” The two sons stood in the doorway with a shotgun, telling her that if she didn't get her savage squaw ass on the next mule out, then she and her little brat would be found dead in a hunting accident. She turned her back to them and they let their guard down, thinking she had acquiesced. That's when Lady Tomahawk, Margaret Little's best friend, sliced through the air between the bodies of the two hateful sons, splitting the wooden doorstep in two. They literally did not know what in God's creation had just hit them. A ranting
Margaret Little ran up and retrieved her tomahawk to place underneath the tie of her apron, with the warning, “Next time I won't miss, boys.” When Granddaddy Rice made his way back home he was met with the news that his sons and their wives had relocated to Texas to try their hands at ranching. Over the years Margaret Little and Granddaddy Rice formed a kind of partnership in order to keep the farm going through good times and bad. In 1861, Granddaddy Rice was an old man and Margaret Little was somewhere around her late thirties. The Civil War began then, bringing the South to her knees.

I remember being at the Sunday dinner family reunion—that would happen every weekend in the summer—and when someone would mention “the Wahr” I began to realize that rarely were they talking about World War II or even Vietnam. Because so many families fought against each other, cousin against cousin, father against son, the schism that tore through the land, up and down the young American coast, was still trying to heal when I was born in 1963, more than a hundred years later. That many southerners in our modern-day society, as rockets were beginning to go up to the moon, were still not over this particular wounding shows in some way the extent of this physical and spiritual bloodbath.

As Poppa always said, Margaret Little never agreed with the idea of slaves, African or Cherokee, but like a lot of other farmers in the South who didn't have slaves she was just defending her home at a certain point. He would say to me, “Imagine a world, Shug, with no radio, no tell-e-vision, so it's hard to even know what kinda crazy makin’ those polly-ticians were drummin’ up on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. People could get all worked up—just hearin’ the preacher talkin’ about losin’ everythin’ to them greedy Yankees. It got folks all suspicious and scareder than scared, and they wasn't wrong to be scared … So it's awful easy for this sixties generation to think they know so much about what they woulda
done. They didn't even have them a gee-tar that plugged in back then to make all that racket at some protest rally for the good guys. See, the crazy thing was, was that we didn't see we was the bad side, 'cause we didn't have slaves or wanna be slaves, and by the time it got to us, the average pappy-tryin-to-put-food-on-the-table-for-his-youngins, we was just a voiceless majority of a piece of the South.” As Margaret Little told him, “When it all started gettin’ heated up, the farmers’ wives thought they'd just take care of the crops, do the farmin’, and those polly-ticians can settle this thang and everybody's gonna be aww-right, the God Lord willin’ and the creek don't rise.”

By this point in the story, I'd already snapped my beans and gone to sit on the porch steps just downwind of Poppa's apple-smoked pipe tobacco and his hypnotic tenor voice. “So y'all can guess,” he would say, “the chagrin of Margaret Little when in 1864 she heard that the Bluecoats were comin’ her way … Burnin’ everything down, stealin’ all the livestock, folks, youngins and kinfolk, whose hearts are already halfway to heaven dyin’ of hunger and brutality. Yep, all the stories that were spreadin’ like wildfire she'd heard before. She'd heard all about the roundups when she was a young girl, son taken from his momma by the Bluecoats, makin’ all those people walk on foot, gettin’ gangrene rotted feet. Hell, they treated pigs better than they treated her people who were dyin’ on the way to Indian Territory. This was one woman who was not in a state of disbelief about what the Bluecoats could do, so she made up her mind. She didn't listen to the preacher or the other farmers’ wives sayin’ that their God would protect 'em. Stands to reason that a woman like this, whose people had been subjugated, while lookin’ at those Christian graves starin’ out at her with so much superiority, would realize she'd had about enough. And she had. So she came up with an idea. Turns out, about a week later, Bluecoats came and sure 'nuff burned the house, burned the barn, burned
the fields, mammas and daddies even, everythin’ they could burn they did. They took the livestock for eatin’ and left Margaret Little's family to starve to death. Now ya gotta understand when I say this—there was
no
freeza full of food or a Winn-Dixie down the street, or another farmer who had a country store a mile away. No suhree, the South was in cinders and ya could even hear a mamma cryin’, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ as she cradled her burned baby in her arms.”

By this time in the story Nanny would be snoring—after all, she's been up since four-thirty a.m., getting the homemade biscuits and the skillet-fried cornbread prepared for the army of people she would be feeding through the day. I, on the other hand, was transfixed. Poppa's drawl drew me back in. “Shug, now be honest, now: have ya figured out how Margaret Little outfoxed the Bluecoats?” And, as always, I said, “Poppa, tell me. My memory isn't so good.” He would look at me and say, “Yer only six and a half, Shug. Ya betta have yerself an extra helpin’ of mustard greens every day so yer mind don't turn hollow, like them Bluecoats in their grave. Shug, that like to tickle me to death, yer memory ain't good. Well, if you'll listen I'll tell ya again. Margaret Little would say to me, ‘Ya gots to know your enemies, C.C. To figure out how yer enemy thinks, ya gots to crawl inside his blood, inside his veins. Now ya look into that fire and ya picture yer enemy and ya feel his breath in yer lungs. Now ya walk 'round like this and shur 'nuff, perddy soon ya'll be thinkin’ like your enemy, and then ya know what's gonna happen? You, C.C., will know exactly the next move yer enemy's gonna make.’ ”

Poppa about now would inhale from his pipe, and I would crane my neck to try to get a whiff of the apple-sweetness. “Shug, have ya ever defiled a Christian grave?” “What are you talking about, Poppa?” “I said, defiled a Christian grave, Shug … I can see by the look on yer face, I need to explain. Ya see, Margaret Little knew how the Bluecoat thought. She
knew that nothin’ was sacred to the Bluecoat down South. But, ya see, the Bluecoat's God was not Southern, but he definitely was Christian. So Bluecoats, as well as any other God-fearin’ Christian, all got buried in white Christian graves. Yep, even the Bluecoats as well. So, turns out, Margaret Little pinpointed the only piece of land that wouldn't get burned. That wouldn't be drenched in blood. And ya know where that was? Yep, them white Christian graves. Margaret Little knew that she was never gonna be allowed to be buried in a white cemetery. Ya see, Shug, there was white churches and black churches back then. And ya wasn't allowed to mingle socially. While Granddaddy Rice was alive, which wasn't for much longer, the church wasn't gonna say no to Granddaddy Rice and his money. So Margaret Little accompanied him to church sometimes, but mostly she had her church in the woods surrounded by the kingdom of the Great Mother.

“She'd say to me, ‘I saw me some fresh dirt, and the word was, Bluecoats was tryin’ to bury their friends if they died. So I went into this Christian cemetery and dug me some graves m'self. I'd taken all our seed, put 'em in as many bundles as I could, and dug fresh graves for my seed all 'round these fresh Bluecoats. And I even thought to m'self, bein’ since they'd slaughtered all our livestock, I was sure I could come up with a recipe for Bluecoat stew. But ya see, my seed wouldn't be harvested till after the Bluecoat turned into a No-coat. I also had me some dried beef and enough eatin’ for me, Granddaddy Rice, and the youngins for at least a couple moons. I had it wrapped in such a way that would discourage any vermin from gettin’ to it.’ ” Poppa's eyes would shine when he said, “And the Bluecoats came and, likes I said before, left nothin’, just a wasteland, but shur 'nuff Margaret Little was able to feed her family with the dried food she had hidden in the fresh white Christian graves. I asked her how in the world she planted the seed. And she turned and looked at me and
gave me a look that could freeze the sun. ‘C.C., I'll tell you what I did— since they butchered our oxen to eat for themselves and took our horses, there was only one thing left to do—I got me a young lad from the village and had him steer me as I became the oxen m'self. I strapped that harness on and plowed the fields with my body. When harvest time came, it wasn't a lot, but it was more than enough for Granddaddy Rice and the youngins and the young lad and his family.’ ”

I looked over at Nanny and realized her people were on the Eastern Cherokee tribal rolls also. That's one reason Nanny and Poppa joined forces. They were both called half-breeds.

On Nanny's side, her grandfather, who had also tried to escape the Trail of Tears in 1838–39, had been murdered. Many of her family's stories were lost. Her grandfather was known as John Akins. John had married a white woman who remarried a white man soon after John's murder. The white woman's new white husband didn't want anything to do with her “savage brat,” and so she gave up her son. At just around two years old, little John Akins, named after his daddy, was abandoned.

Nanny always referred to her daddy, my great-grandfather, as Poppa John. He was reared by former slaves who had just been freed. He was a half-breed; his mother was German, and his father, a Cherokee man, was dead. Nobody would take him, so this black family with few material possessions nurtured him with love. As far as he was concerned, this was his family. Eventually, Poppa John's biological aunt pieced together what had happened to her nephew and made contact. They developed some semblance of a family connection, and much later on in life, after Poppa John had created many children who loved him with a wife he adored, named Ellen, his little German mother reentered his life. Because not one of her
white kin would take her in, this tiny woman in her eighties, standing four foot nine inches, demanded a room at Ellen and Poppa John's. When Poppa and my mother would start giggling up a storm, I would hear my mom say, “Oh, Poppa, you shouldn't say that.” And I always knew they were talking about that mean little woman. At that point Nanny would join in the giggling and say, “Mary Ellen, I know it's an awful thing to say, but what Poppa says about old Granny is the truth, but I'll let him say it 'cause he's a goin’ to hell anyways.” Poppa would chirp right up and look down at the ground and say, “I'm addressin’ you, Granny, where I think ya gone. Ya was as mean as a snake in life that even the snakes won't take ya now. I'm tellin’ ya the truth, Shug. I was sure she was that mean old biddy from ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and I never let yer mama anywhere near Granny because I knew she'd likely turn her into Mary Ellen pie.”