Gloryland (12 page)

Finally he must’ve got tired of me pleading, cause he grabbed the bow of his big canoe and began to drag it toward the water, running dark and silent a few feet away. When he got there, he went in a couple of steps, then walked back onto the land, went round to the rear and pushed the canoe mostly into the water. He held it steady and looked back at me. It looked enough like an invitation that I stepped in, and moved awkwardly toward the bow of the canoe, rocking it back and forth. He gave a big push and then jumped in at the stern.

The boat began to drift downstream, so he told me to grab the paddle at my feet and use it. I did. He sat down in the back, and began to paddle himself. I could feel his eyes on me.

After a bit I said, “Thank you, sir.”

All he said was, “You talk a lot for a shadow, boy.”

So I kept quiet all the way cross that river, but he made me paddle all the way. I could only see blackness except for the lantern in the bottom of the boat. I paddled till my arms almost fell off from the aching, but after about a half hour there was a bump that shook the canoe, and we were at the other side. I got out, and he said nothing, and I said nothing, and I walked some more till my legs were as tired as my arms. When I couldn’t stand up no more, I drifted off the road, just a shadow boy, lay down, and slept.

I slept well, with a heaviness that came from walking, using my
body day and night for months just to put some country between me and South Carolina. Every river meant a crossing, and every crossing meant a ferry or someone like this man on the Tennessee. Afterward there would be the Mississippi, the Arkansas, Oklahoma Territory, and Kansas.

Fear was the road I was following. It wound round through this and that place, past what I remember and what I can’t forget. I walked. I killed for meat if I was lucky. I worked for meals sometimes, but always found some food growing where there was no work. As the country opened up, so did the people, mostly, so I found it easier to be out in the open under sun and stars.

It all left me cold inside, but the fires warmed me, the streams rinsed away the mud and dirt, and I slowly made my way west, into a country that got darker with every step. Daddy used to say that going west was asking for trouble. He said that his mother called it the “Darkening Land” because that’s where the sun went to die, but that’s where I was being led, so maybe there was some light on the other side of that dark? His mother, Artana, my other grandmother, was Cherokee, and she died when I was little. She looked at things different than Grandma Sara, but they came from different people with different stories to tell.

I remember how my grandmother Artana smiled with the sunrise but sighed at sunset. She would have told me I was heading west toward my own death. We all are, I guess, but I hoped there was still a lot of road between me and my final resting place.

You know, there are thousands of places I ain’t ever heard of, or even imagined, and I could’ve ended up in any of those places, but eventually the one I got to was called Nebraska.

Y
ou could tell that one day it would be a town, but the day hadn’t come yet. Even though it was just a few miles from Fort Robinson, there wasn’t much to it but a dirty street with dirty buildings, and a cold wind that never seemed to stop.

It was April, and the people looked as cold as the land, but if you looked closer there was something inside them smoldering. The fire wasn’t completely out. They were settlers, pioneers, the people walking this street or riding in wagons and on horses. Daddy used to say a pioneer was someone who went looking for a place just like what they left behind, but with fewer people, or, better, none at all.

I remember walking down the main street, which seemed to be the only street worth walking on, when I saw out of the corner of my eye a table with a man in a uniform behind it. I paid him no mind and was just walking by when he said, “Excuse me, young man, do you have a moment?”

And I remember being surprised by a white man calling me “young man.”
That
got my attention.

I turned to face him and said, “How can I help you, sir?”

He looked at me fully now, and I seemed to meet with his approval. He said to me, “You look like a strong fellow, and the army could always use strong men.” He glanced down and gestured to some papers on the table. I walked over to get a better look.

“If you sign your name,” he pointed, “or put your mark on this paper, you can become a soldier in the United States Army. You’ll get meals paid for and the honor of serving your country. What could be better than that?”

I thought about what Daddy had told me about joining the army, how my attitude, which had gotten me in this situation, could actually help me if I was wearing a uniform, or at least it couldn’t hurt.

Besides, what else was I going to do? Nothing had really changed since I left South Carolina. Whether I was there or in Nebraska, if I did nothing to improve myself, I’d be a sharecropper, a farmer who doesn’t even own the land he’s working. If I worked hard every day to build a better life for myself, I’d be a farmer. If I prayed to God every night for a better world, I’d still be a farmer.

“How much does soldierin pay?” I asked.

“Son,” said the man, slow and easy, “if you join now, you’ll get thirteen dollars a month, like any white man. You work hard and do your duty, you may even get some stripes, and that means respect. All you got to remember is to be respectful of your superiors and do your duty, and . . .”

He stopped and smiled a little, not much, and finished up with, “You’ll even get a pension if you make it through to retirement.”

“If I make it through?” I asked with a catch in my throat.

“That’s right,” he said, “if you make it through. This is the army we’re talking about. Being a soldier is honorable but dangerous work. Not every man is suited for it, but if you can listen, learn, follow orders, and trust in those above you, you may spend your days making a contribution to your country, and even get to that retirement.”

I laughed a little and said, “So what you’re tellin me, sir, all I gotta do to get to that retirement is not get myself killed. Is that right?”

He smiled again. “Getting killed would pose a problem with regard to securing your pension, so certainly I can understand if you were to choose another way of getting on in the world.”

He looked down and began sorting through the stack of papers on his desk.

He knew there weren’t any other ways. He knew me even though he didn’t know my name. Even though I might write it down in front of him, it didn’t matter. Sure, the deacon back home had taught
me bout the alphabet, how to write my name, but those letters that made up
Elijah Yancy
were no different from the letters some other colored man had put down. However you mix them up, we were all the same. It didn’t matter if we were from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, or South Carolina, we might as well all have the same name as far as he was concerned.

Colored or white, the military don’t care who you really are, you’re just a body in a uniform and a name written down to make it easier for the government to notify kin, in case you don’t survive. Now I’d
be
the government, the same government that made soldiers of some men and sent them down into the swamps of Florida to hunt Grandma Sara’s people. My people. Maybe those soldiers hated Indians, but maybe their choices were no different from mine. They were poor. I’m poor. What choices do poor folks have?

Getting on in the world always meant doing what I was told. If I didn’t, my daddy would soon enough let me know how things were. And he didn’t have that many choices himself. I couldn’t see how the army was going to be much different. It was still sharecropping, only the crop was different. I still didn’t own the land, but I had to work it.

Working in the army, though, I wouldn’t be planting seeds, I’d be uprooting plants that were native to the soil. Some people called them weeds, but weeds are just plants folks don’t got a use for.

Out on the Great Plains, those weeds were called Indians.

I’d heard plenty bout the Indian Wars along the road to Nebraska. Once I got out of the South, it seemed a little safer to move out in the open, so I did. It felt good to be out under the sun, just a stranger looking for work, instead of going the long way round everything and everyone. Strange to say, but I fit in. There were a lot of other people on the road, and they all had something to say.

Particularly about Indians. About every time I got hungry enough to find work, people would be talking bout Indians. Farmers wondering if some Crow raiding party would put their crops to the torch, ranchers afraid that Cheyennes would run off with their cattle,
townspeople fearing that the Sioux might attack someday, even if those particular Indians weren’t anyplace nearby. Everybody talking, lots of folks just scared, and their voices getting louder and louder the farther I headed west.

I was used to seeing colored people afraid, but not white people. When I thought about it now, the white folks back home were probably just as afraid of the colored people around them, but they hid their fear under white sheets while they were torching a colored family’s home, or lynching someone. Out here there was a different threat, and it didn’t look like me.

It seemed to me those Indians had something my daddy always wanted more than anything. They had their own land, even if they didn’t see the land as something they owned but something that owned them, and “own” ain’t even the right word for it. English doesn’t have a word for living as if everything matters as much as you do. Ain’t it peculiar that the first time someone offered me a real job, I’d be helping to steal land from other Indians? What would Grandma Sara say? My daddy was back home right now working land that didn’t belong to him, so I know how he’d feel about it.

Seems like to get something in this world, you gotta take it from someone else. God knows I was tired and hungry, I barely owned the air in my lungs for a few seconds, but there must be a way to get rest without kicking someone out of their bed, and eat without stealing food off another person’s plate.

I remember thinking: if I sign my name and put that uniform on, maybe I’ll die straight off, cause Grandma Sara will know, just know, and she’ll kill me in her heart like she killed those other soldiers. Maybe I won’t make it to retirement. But if I don’t sign, I may not make it to the end of the week.

I’d been standing in front of that officer for some time, but he was still looking through the papers on his table. No hurry. He had all the time in the world. He knew my decision before I did. Finally he looked up at me.

“So,” he asked, “do you have something else in mind? If that’s the case, I’m a very busy man . . .”

“No sir,” I said. “I’ll sign your paper.”

I bent over that table and saw where I should leave my mark. I picked up the pen and began to write “Elijah Yancy,” nice and clear like the deacon showed me. But as I began to write, I thought of something else and stopped.

I thought of my older brother, Oliver. Like Daddy said, he escaped from the plantation that used to be part of the land we worked. He left before I was even born. He must’ve had an attitude problem too, but he was a slave, not a sharecropper, so it was an even bigger problem.

You can’t have a little bit of freedom. You either got it or you don’t. My brother left home to find it, going up North before the war, and when the war came on, he joined some kind of militia and got killed at a place called Fort Wagner. A colored man who knew him in the army came and found us one day and told my mother and father as much as he knew about Oliver.