Trace. Lauret Savoy
already in middle age. They had come into the world before moving pictures talked, before teamsters drove only horseless trucks, before the iceman had to find a new profession. And they’d lived with elders who could recall life before the Civil War, memories lit by lantern light. Though nearly palpable, their pasts never spoke to me. Dad died before I had the questions. In response to them, Momma said she couldn’t remember. She wondered why I wanted to know.
FROM WHAT DO we take our origin? From incised memories?
Near the end of her life my father’s mother visits us in California, sharing my room. I’m nearly five years old. Slow, tidy with words and her things, ancient to me, Gu-ma brushes her graying chestnut hair each day. It falls below her knees. I like to lean into the back of her thighs, grasping her legs to feel her flesh warm my face. Gu-ma’s hair covers me, hides me. Each night I pray for long straight hair like hers, and for her eyes—my father’s eyes—so I might see through sky, too.
Second-grade recess, Campus School playground, Washington, D.C. I stand by empty swings. A classmate walks up to say “You’re colored, aren’t you?” I nod yes to what really isn’t a question. Troubled by how ugly Bobby Kane could make sun-light and sky-blue sound, I run to Sister Mary Richard Ann. That evening I ask my parents.
Home, many a workweek night. My father sits in his easy chair, alone in the back room, a glass of gin or scotch in one hand, cigar or cigarette in the other. The only light the inhaling burn. What he sees or thinks, I don’t know. What I remember? Smoke. Silence.
Lessons in fifth-grade social studies, Dunblane Catholic School.
One: Our textbook describes the unsuitability of Indians, who wasted away, and the preference for Africans, who thrived as slaves and by nature want to serve. I ask my teacher, Mrs. Devlin, if I might become a slave.
Two: We read in class that Indians are savages who had to give up the land and their wasteful way of life for the sake of civilization. The book calls this part of Manifest Destiny. Confused again, I ask what made the “five civilized nations” civilized?
Imagine searching for self-meaning in such lessons. Am I civilized? Will I be a slave? The history taught wasn’t the history that made me, but I didn’t know this. Any language to voice who I was, any knowledge of how land and time touched my family, remained elusive.
Once we moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, I came to learn how “race” cut our lives. Black, Negro, nigger! came loud and hard after the 1968 riots. Words full of spit showed that I could be hated for being “colored.” By the age of eight I wondered if I should hate in return.
WHAT I COULDN’T grasp then was that twining roots from different continents could never be crammed into a single box. I descend from Africans who came in chains and Africans who may never have known bondage. From European colonists who tried to make a new start in a world new to them. As well as from Native peoples who were displaced by those colonists from homelands that had defined their essential being.
As the nineteenth century ended, family members by blood and marriage had dwelled in rural Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, perhaps Oklahoma, and Montana ranchland along the Yellowstone River. They came to live in cities like Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But how they experienced the world or defined themselves in it remained unknown. Forced removal, slavery, and Jim Crow were at odds with propertied privilege. Forebears had likely navigated a tangled mélange of land relations: inclusion and exclusion, ownership and tenancy, investment and dispossession. Some ancestors knew land intimately as home, others worked it as enslaved laborers for its yield. What senses of belonging were possible when one couldn’t guarantee a life in place? Or when “freed” in a land where racialized thinking bounded such freedom?
As I crossed the Continental Divide, the questions became so urgent they soon composed the journey. High in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, where the Arkansas River rises, I decided to try to trace family, and myself, from storied places and recorded history. But where to start?
Watching the Arkansas’s headwaters begin to carry mountain detritus toward the plains, I suspected this river could guide me. So by its drainage I plotted a meandering course toward Oklahoma, where an elderly cousin of my mother’s had once told me some ancestors might have lived.
SAND CREEK. THE name-shadow long pulled, its memory contested since November 29, 1864. As that dawn broke, several hundred volunteer soldiers led by John Chivington attacked a large Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment along its waters. Black Kettle and other leaders had thought they were under U.S. Army protection by land reserved for them. Most of the troops and Colorado territory settlers would memorialize what happened as a glorious battle against hostile foes. To survivors it was a massacre of about two hundred companions, most of them women, children, and elderly. On Chivington’s alleged orders—“Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice”—attackers mutilated corpses, taking scalps and other body parts as trophies. Heads shipped to the Army Medical Museum later ended up in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections.
It was by a sense of “how could I not” that I entered eastern Colorado’s plains in search of this winding tributary of the Arkansas River.
State Highway 96 and the Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks cross Big Sandy Creek just east of the ruined town of Chivington. No cars, no person passed in the hours I walked along the bank, through high grass and over barbed wire, as the stream bent through shallows and riffles across the plains. Killdeer and red-winged blackbirds were my only vocal companions besides cottonwood leaves shuddering in a constant June-dry wind. A century and a half before, a breeze lifted a U.S. flag by Black Kettle’s lodge. Villagers waved white flags at the approaching troops.
That no roadside marker acknowledged the violence didn’t surprise me. The land hadn’t yet opened to the public as a historic site under the National Park Service. Nothing appeared on my road map or atlas-gazetteer. The slaughter wasn’t mentioned in my schoolbooks. Neither was the muddied water sweeping earth to the horizon, nor the shadows I tried to follow.
WHILE THUMBING AN issue of Colorado Heritage magazine at a rest stop, I chanced across possible treasure. One O. E. Aultman had opened a photographic studio in Trinidad, Colorado, in 1889. Among nearly five thousand surviving images were stunning portraits of African Americans and people of obviously mixed heritage. Surely Trinidad, founded where the Santa Fe Trail’s northern route and Purgatoire River converged, was also a place where many peoples had converged. I had no idea if any of my ancestors had passed this way, but I’d learn what I could.
Both the director of the Trinidad History Museum and a volunteer at the A. R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art were gracious and apologetic.
Little information is left on African Americans in this area—of course, they don’t live here now . . .
Subject information for the Aultman photos is almost non-existent, the titles of many images are just Unidentified____.
Unidentified, unidentifiable. Like isolated grains of sand, these photographs teased absent stories. The town had just begun its big festival to celebrate the opening of the Santa Fe Trail. People crowded the streets. No one looked like me.
. . . of course, they don’t live here now.
I left Trinidad, returning east, downstream to the Arkansas.
MANY RIVERS BECOME one in Oklahoma. The Cimarron, forks of the Canadian, and Salt Fork vein eastward across the state to join the Arkansas before it meanders between Ouachita and Ozark uplands. I drove in with an evening thunderstorm, crossing the hundredth meridian between the Cimarron River and Canadian North Fork. Rolling plains greened almost secretly.
I couldn’t remember being in Oklahoma before; maybe familial memory remained. My mother’s cousin had told me years before that kin might have come here, that they were Black Cherokee or Creek. Whether she was right or wrong, I knew only some surnames: Turner, Reeves, Cade, and