No Resting Place by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page A

Ferguson—Noquisi— Ajudagwasgi: Stays-Up-All-Night—was now putting behind him. It was as if his childhood and that of his people had lain until now ripening in the womb of time.
    It had been, for the most part of it, a happy childhood—doubly happy, for it had been two childhoods in one, and whenever one of them turned temporarily unhappy there was always that other one to take refuge in. Until it became the worst of times, the worst of places, it had been the best of times, the best of places, to be a boy, to be two boys in one, red and white. No matter what the day of the week or the season of the year, deep inside himself he was always that secretmost self with its own unutterable name, whatever that happened to be at the time, but depending upon the day and the season he was one or the other of his two known selves. When school was in session, on weekdays, he awoke as Amos Ferguson, and put on shoes; on Saturday he awoke as Noquisi, and put on moccasins. The proportion of six days to one just about corresponded to his mixture of bloods. His white blood was the milk of his being, his red blood the cream, and on Saturday it rose. But without milk there can be no cream, and while it was that rich side of him that took him out of doors, on pleasure, and that brought him, at his grandfather’s knee, tales of olden times, appealing to that love of the past, that conservatism and longing for stability common to all children, school was no drudgery to a child whose schooldays were those when his entire people had enrolled along with him, and were garnering the new knowledge as though it were manna from heaven. For that was what had happened, and even now, despite everything, was still happening. For the Cherokees it was a time of overnight emergence from the stone age to the age of iron, from benightedness and inconvenience to enlightenment and comfort. The first products of the Industrial Revolution had reached them. Later on would come the iron horse, the factory smokestacks, the pollution of the water and the spoliation of the land, but for now it was the small material blessings that make life a bit less brutish and, perhaps, a bit less short. Knives and hatchets of steel instead of stone. Instant fire: you could not know, you who took it for granted, what a convenience that was! Needles—a small miracle! Eyeglasses! They showed the world to people condemned to grope their way to the grave from the age of fifty, forty—from birth. They put an end to the barbaric practice of abandoning such people to die. Instead of having to stump through life lame after breaking a leg and having a witch doctor mumble over it, now it could be set and splinted and mend straight again. Imperfect as was his administration of it, the white man brought representative government, trial by jury, condign punishment, and replaced the code of blood revenge, the endless family feuds. Freed from superstitions that answered none of one’s questions about life but only threatened one with curses and blights, they were healthier in mind. One went to school each day filled with expectation, and brought home to the hungry family what one had learned like food for the table. Revelation upon revelation it had been. With the rapture of children at a fair, a nation of twenty thousand gaped in wide-eyed wonder at a world in which the things that had always mystified them were suddenly simplified and the deep mysteries for the first time revealed. “Amazing Grace,” they sang—it had become almost the national anthem—“how sweet the sound/ That saved a wretch like me,/ That once was lost but now am found,/ Was blind but now can see.” And there was that coincidental acquisition of their own alphabet. What no white man had ever done one of theirs had done. As well as the whites, The People could now communicate with others of their kind who were out of sight. (Blood was forever being talked about in those