The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (10 page)

The three scouts rode back under heavy fire, rescued him and escaped. Sgt. Ward, Trumpeter Payne and Pvt. Factor became the second, third and fourth scouts to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

“Bullis and his scouts were quite close personally,” University of Texas scholar Kenneth Wiggins Porter has written. “They were more like a large patriarchal family than an ordinary cavalry troop, and Bullis' relationship to the scouts was more that of a war chief to his braves than the conventional officer-men relationship…. This relationship of mutual affection and confidence was inestimably important to the scouts' effectiveness as a fighting organization.”

But they weren't treated so well by other whites.

The Black Seminoles believed the government had promised to give them their own reservation in return for their military service. But there was no written record of such an agreement, and despite the efforts of Lt. Bullis and a few other officers who admired the scouts, it never was honored.

And many white civilians along the border, still smarting from the South's loss of the Civil War, hated the Black Seminoles. Scouts caught alone were beaten by white gangs, and criminals led by the outlaw King Fisher murdered three of them in a two-year period.

In disgust, several of the scouts, including Pompey Factor, returned to Mexico, where they had received better treatment, and continued to fight Indians under Col. Pedro Avincular Valdez.

Lt. Bullis eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general; he died in 1911. Three years after his death, the Army disbanded the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts and evicted them and their families from the military reservation at Fort Clark.

Miss Charles Wilson, who was five years old at the time, is the only Black Seminole still living who remembers their camp beside Las Moras Creek. “We lived in a house with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, like the Mexicans,” she says. “But our living room had a board floor, and that's where we took our company. It was the only house in the camp that had a room with a board floor. We were Mexican and Indian. I remember the
metates
that the women used to grind corn on to make our bread.”

The Black Seminoles were never given land of their own. Many of them returned to Mexico, as Pompey Factor had done. Others stayed in Texas and became cowboys. As late as 1939, one of the old scouts, Curley Jefferson, was still writing letters urging the government to grant the Black Seminoles some land or some money. His pleas were denied. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had closed the rolls of the Seminole Nation while the Black Seminoles were still in Mexico, and the blacks weren't included on the official list of the tribe. As Indians, the government said, the Black Seminoles didn't exist.

Mr. Jefferson was the last of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts to die, in 1959.

“No matter what color you are, you're part of the culture you're raised in,” Lee Young says. “We who were born and raised in that part of the country down there around Brackettville and Del Rio, we aren't completely black, and we aren't completely Indian, either. We're a mixture of black and Indian and Mexican. I was raised up speaking Spanish, eating Mexican food, listening to Mexican music. But predominantly, my culture is Indian. That's the way I was raised and taught to do things.”

Sgt. Young has always been proud of that culture, he says. When he was a child, his idols were the Lone Ranger and Tonto. “I identified with Tonto,” he says.

But not all Black Seminoles have been so proud of their heritage. “When I was small and they told me I was Seminole Indian, I was really ashamed of it,” says Lily Mae Dimery. ‘“Don't call
me
Indian!' I'd say. ‘I'm not no Seminole!' The way they talked, the Gullah language that they used, my dad tried to teach it to me, but I didn't want it. I was ashamed of it. I didn't know what the history was, what we had, what it was all about.”

Mrs. Dimery, who is 71, is standing with her husband, Louis, and her in-laws, Art and Carol Dimery, in the Seminole Scout Cemetery a few miles outside Brackettville, near the site of the scouts' old camp.

She's gazing at the tombstone of Carolino Warrior, her grandfather. Nearby stands the tombstone of John Shields, the grandfather of the Dimery brothers.

“But it's a thing to be proud of,” Mrs. Dimery says. “I just didn't know that then.”

Louis Dimery moved away from Brackettville for 30 years and lost contact with his history, too, until he returned in 1972. “Then Miss Charles and Willie, they started talking to me about it,” he says.

“Miss Charles” is Miss Charles Wilson, who taught all the Black Seminole children of the Dimerys' generation in a one-room schoolhouse. “Willie” is William Warrior, Lily Mae Dimery's cousin, who works for a trucking company and serves as a reserve deputy sheriff in Del Rio.

“When I was little, I didn't know nothing about the Seminoles,” says Carol Dimery. “But Miss Charles, when we was in school, she would tell us stories about them, and we would say, ‘Well, tell us more.' But it just went in one ear and out the next. Now that time is going by, she's telling us more, and we're remembering it this time.”

When the Brackettville schools were desegregated in 1960, the Seminole Indian Scout Association—a group that Miss Wilson and Mr. Warrior and the Dimerys helped organize—bought their old school building and grounds. “We wanted to keep it for ourselves, because our parents worked so hard to get it for us,” Miss Wilson says. Big photographs of Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts hang on the wall near her old school bell.

Now Black Seminoles return to the school from all over the United States and Mexico twice a year to celebrate their history. “We have a celebration on Juneteenth [June 19],” Miss Wilson says, “but that's to honor those Negroes who were slaves. We were
not
slaves. And since we started our organization and are trying to get our people back, we have what we call ‘Seminole Days' the third weekend in September. We dance. We sing the old songs. We wear our long Seminole dresses and our turbans. I tell you, we have a good time. On Sunday, we go to the cemetery and have a service in memory of the scouts.”

She sighs. “I think the Seminole culture is dying, though, even in Mexico. There are very few of the original Seminoles left down there, because of intermarrying with the Mexicans. That's why the older ones like me are trying to pass something on to the kids.”

But much has been lost, she says, because the Black Seminoles always have been reluctant to talk about their lives and history.

“I didn't hear much about the scouts after we left the camp,” she says. “The older people just didn't open up. It was their upbringing, I guess. Maybe it's the Indian in them. But after I retired from teaching, I became interested in our history. I give talks here and there. And Willie's getting to the place where he'll open up.”

Willie Warrior is 64 years old. He wears the Western hat and boots befitting a lawman on the Rio Grande. When he was in grade school, Miss Wilson was his teacher, and in 1945 he was one of the first two black students to graduate from the 12th grade in Brackettville.

Mr. Warrior is the grandson of Carolino Warrior and the nephew of Curley Jefferson, the last of the scouts to die, and he's a mine of information. He owns a big briefcase stuffed with photographs and documents, and can spin tales for hours.

One by one, he pulls the pictures and the papers from the case and tells a story about each: “When John Warrior enlisted in the service, he stammered. When they asked him his name, he couldn't get it all out. He said, ‘Warr… Warr… Warr…'So they wrote him down as ‘Ward.' He's buried next to his father, Tony Warrior.

“Back in Florida, everybody had just one name. Like ‘July,'” he says. “But it was in Spanish. It was ‘Julio.' And my great-grandfather was ‘Guerrero,' which means ‘Warrior.' ‘Guillermo Guerrero' is my name in Spanish. John Horse's name was ‘Juan Caballo.'

“You take a black kid or an Anglo kid and raise him in Mexico, he's going to be a Mexican,” he says. “You raise him as an Indian, he's going to be an Indian. It's where you're raised, and who you're raised with. Down here on the border, everything bleeds into one.”

He pauses for a drink of whiskey. He says he wishes more people would listen. “We try to teach the young ones,” he says, “but they don't want to learn. We try to make them understand, but they don't care.

“There were Some Seminoles who were
never
slaves, you know. My father traced back our family history, and he could not find a generation of Warriors who had ever been slaves. …”

Willie Warrior opens up, deep into the night, telling the stories.

February 1992

JOHN

One of the few people I envy is John Graves. He has lived two of my best fantasies - taking a long canoe trip on a river alone, and finding a quiet, beautiful place away from everybody and living there. He also wrote
Goodbye to a River,
which I think is the best Texas book of this century. John hates interviews and hemmed and hawed when I asked him. He lately had turned down quite a few people who wanted to write about him, he said. If he let me, somebody might get mad. Let him think about it and call him back in a few days, he said. When I did, he said, “Come on out. I'll talk to you.”

O
N
A FALL AFTERNOON 35 YEARS AGO
, J
OHN
G
RAVES
SHOVED A CANOE
containing a shotgun, a couple of fishing rods, some camping gear and a dachshund puppy into the Brazos River, then climbed aboard and began paddling south. The day was raw and windy, one of those gray, cut-to-the-bone spells that North Texas can get in November, not the crisp, golden day that he had hoped for the beginning of his journey.

He planned to float from Possum Kingdom Dam, where he had put in, to a spot near Glen Rose, not far above Lake Whitney. As the crow flies, the distance between the two points is only about 60 miles, but as the river flows, twisting like a snake on a hot rock, it's close to 175.

From childhood John had fished and hunted along the Brazos and listened to the stories of what had happened along its banks in the days when the Comanches, who called themselves “The People,” held this part of Texas in terror. This stream, which the Spaniards had named “The Arms of God,” had become a part of him.

Although he didn't know it yet, he was about to become a part of the river, too. In years to come, when people would think of the river, they would think of John, and when they would think of John, they would think of the Brazos. For this journey was different from the other times that he had spent on the river.

The government had plans to build five new dams between Possum Kingdom and Whitney, turning the part of the Brazos where John was into a string of lakes. So his journey, he thought, would be his last along this beautiful and familiar stretch before it was drowned in its own waters. It would be a farewell journey. He would see the river one last time and say goodbye to it.

John, who was 37 that year, had been away from the Brazos for a long time, living in foreign places. He only recently had returned to Texas, and was revisiting old haunts, trying to regain the familiarness of the things that had gone into the making of him. That was most of the reason for the journey. He hadn't yet thought that he would write a book.

“I had a little scribble notebook,” he says. “I would sit down in the evening and write up the day. I was thinking at the time that it would make a good magazine article, and my agent had gotten a commitment and some money from
Sports Illustrated.”

When the three-week-long journey was finished and the article written,
Sports Illustrated
rejected it. “It wasn't sporty enough for them,” John says.
Holiday
magazine published it instead. By the time he had finished writing it, John saw that he had put much more into his notebook than the mere facts of his trip. “I became aware,” he says, “that I had the material to make a book.”

He wrote it and named it
Goodbye to a River
. “In a way, I was trying to explain Texas to myself by writing it,” he says. “I was redefining home things. And I liked it. But my experience at that point was only a failed novel or two. I didn't have any great euphoria about its prospects.”

It did better than John expected. The critics received it warmly. It was nominated for the National Book Award. And although it lost to William L. Shirer's
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, one of the most popular nonfiction works of the 1960s, John's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has kept its hardcover edition of
Goodbye to a River
in print for 32 years now, and Gulf Publishing's paperback edition remains one of the most popular items on the bookstores' Texana shelves.

For many of its readers,
Goodbye to a River
defines Texas, as writing it redefined John's “home things” for him after his absence. It says more eloquently and truly than any other single piece of writing what Texas was and is and is becoming. It reveals—by describing the bitter toil and the bloody conflict and the unforgiving land in which it was created—the Texan soul, without adornment. There isn't a speck of chauvinistic hokum or romantic baloney in his book.

Neither is it parochial or provincial, for it also is about The World and Nature and Life in the way that great literature everywhere illumines these things—by incarnating them in such small, specific creatures as a man and a dog floating down a river.

The journey wasn't particularly dramatic or exciting. Neither men nor beasts nor the elements ever threatened John's safety. He made and broke camp. He caught fish and shot ducks and squirrels and cooked and ate them. He wrote in his notebook and read the books he had brought with him. He had brief, uneventful encounters with other people, but most of the time he was alone.