Living by the Word by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

for one great old man down in the poor and beautiful and simple South had magically, in the new world of college and literature and poets and publishing and New York, led me to another.
    1987

MY BIG BROTHER BILL
    [At a powwow in honor of Bill Wahpepah shortly after his death, Carol Wahpepah, his widow, asked those of us who had memories of Bill to write a collection of them for his children. This was my response to her request.]
In regard to the contact between the two races, by which such stories (i.e., the “Uncle Remus” tales) could be borrowed from one by the other, it is not commonly known that in all the southern colonies Indian slaves were bought and sold and kept in servitude and worked in the fields side by side with negroes up to the time of the Revolution. Not to go back to the Spanish period, when such things were the order of the day, we find the Cherokee as early as 1693 complaining that their people were being kidnapped by slave hunters. Hundreds of captured Tuscarora and nearly the whole tribe of the Appalachee were distributed as slaves among the Carolina colonists in the early part of the eighteenth century, while the Natchez and others shared a similar fate in Louisiana, and as late at least as 1776 Cherokee prisoners of war were still sold to the highest bidder for the same purpose. At one time it was charged against the governor of South Carolina that he was provoking a general Indian war by his encouragement of slave hunts. Furthermore, as the coast tribes dwindled they were compelled to associate and intermarry with the negroes until they finally lost their identity and were classed with that race, so that a considerable proportion of the blood of the southern negroes is unquestionably Indian. — James Mooney*
    I first met Bill Wahpepah in the fall of 1984, in Custer, South Dakota; I think perhaps our mutual friend Belvie Rooks introduced us. She and I were in Custer to attend the trial of Dennis Banks, and I was coming out of a long period of spiritual reassessment and political hibernation. On top of everything else—by which I mean the assassinations of the sixties and seventies, the repressions (on Indian reservations and in ghettos, in particular) of the seventies and eighties, and the rape and brutalization of the planet in general—the election of Ronald Reagan, with Nancy Reagan posited as a desirable model of twentieth-century womanhood, had hit me hard. During this period, which encompassed several years, Indians were very much in my consciousness. There was my mother’s mostly Cherokee grandmother to contend with in myself, for instance. There was my gravitation toward Indian art and artifacts, which had in fact started years earlier: the need to have arrowheads on my person (I never flew without one) and Indian pottery, jewelry, and rugs around. And there was my study of Cherokee folklore and folkways: I made the astonishing discovery that the animal tales, commonly known in North America as “Uncle Remus” stories, which, as told by my parents, I grew up listening to as a child, and which I had assumed were from Africa, could as easily be from the Cherokee, since the very same tales abound in their folk “literature.” I also discovered what appeared to me to be the origin, or one interesting possible origin, of the expression “the blues.” Among the Cherokee the color blue itself was “emblematic of failure, disappointment, unsatisfied desire.”** When one felt that way, one painted one’s body or part of one’s body blue. When one felt better, red was the color of choice. I began to recognize in the faces of the people among whom I grew up traces of the Cherokee Indian tribe that everyone around me, when I was a child, had claimed was gone forever, last seen as its members left Georgia on the ominous Trail of Tears. And of course the myth the white people perpetuated to make black people feel even worse about having been enslaved was that the Indians, warriors to the