Flint and Feather by Charlotte Gray Read Free Book Online Page B

likely to vote as a block. If George combined the roles of official interpreter and Council member, they argued, excessive power would be concentrated in Johnson hands.
    But Helen Martin Johnson had stood firm. She told Council members that they could depose a chief in the event that he did something wrong, but they could not refuse to appoint someone for fear he might do something wrong in the future. Eyes blazing, she warned them that if George Johnson was not appointed, they would end up with no member: she refused to appoint a substitute. The Council members shifted uneasily on their seats; they murmured amongst themselves. They knew that she would not budge. So they accepted her son as a chief. Amongst his fellow chiefs, he was known as “Onwanonsyshon.”
    After this victory, Helen Martin Johnson turned her mind to the question of whom her son should marry. The choice was important politically: after her own death, her daughter-in-law would inherit the powerful role of clan mother. Helen selected a young woman from another Mohawk family who would bring credit to the Johnson name. But her careful plans were wrecked by George’s announcement that he wanted to marry Emily Howells rather than his mother’s candidate. Helen had no particular feelings about Emily, but George’s choice appalled her because a non-native woman could not become a clan mother.
    Sixty years after the event, Pauline Johnson published her own fanciful description of the encounter when George announced his choice of bride. Helen Martin Johnson, according to Pauline, exclaimed incredulously, “But your children, your sons and heirs—they could never hold the title, never be chief!” George winced, but held his ground as stubbornly as his mother had held hers in the Council on his behalf. He insisted he was going to marry Emily. Then he quietlyleft his parents’ house and walked back along the forest path to the parsonage, back to the “fair young English girl whose unhappy childhood he had learned of years ago, [with her] lips that were made for love they had never had.” Meanwhile, continues Pauline’s account, George’s mother “folded her broadcloth about her, filled her small carven pipe and sat for many hours smoking silently, silently, silently.” The breach between mother and son appeared unbridgeable.
    Even allowing for Pauline’s taste for melodrama, this account captures the emotional intensity that had developed between the Mohawk youth and the shy young English immigrant. The intensity was enough to make George betray his family.
    George and Emily could not get married straightaway, because in the next few months a series of tragedies hit the Elliott household. Between November 1847 and August 1848, an epidemic of scarlet fever swept through the community. Despite Emily’s tireless nursing, Adam and Eliza’s three youngest children all died (a fourth child, Emily, had been born after Emily came to live at the parsonage). The following year Emily’s skills as a nurse were again called into service when tuberculosis, the scourge of nineteenth-century Canada, struck her sister Eliza. Within months, Eliza Howells Elliott had joined her children in the Tuscarora graveyard. The following year, the devastation of Adam Elliott’s family was complete. Tuberculosis also took the life of his only remaining child, his eldest daughter, Mary.
    At this point, it became inappropriate for the rector’s unmarried sister to be living in the parsonage with him and his Mohawk interpreter. The moment had arrived for George and Emily to announce their engagement. But Emily quickly discovered that in the eyes of some members of her own family as well as the citizens of Upper Canada’s small towns, she was betraying her British blood as recklessly as George Johnson had broken faith with Mohawk tradition.
    By the mid-nineteenth century, attitudes were changing in Upper Canada’s small towns—although the roads remained unpaved and cows often