A Hunter of the People
These would be the men who hunted our people in the time of Andrew Jackson, one hundred years after Oglethorpe’s ship anchored in what would become Savannah, Georgia. And Jackson would be called Indian Killer. And in the time after all those broken treaties with our people, there was the final Removal Act. When our people were forced from our land in the 1830s.
We don’t want to remember how our people looked back as they walked away.
How they mourned us, while drinking in the beauty of the pine, the oak, the pecan, the cedar. The heaviness of plums and peaches that contained a solacing flavor. Blackberries enticing snakes from their hiding places. The deer that watched with large eyes that seemed to understand. When someone or something dies, at least there is an ending, a resolution, no matter how mournful. Yet with our people, there was no ending, for as the last groups began to walk west to Oklahoma, they knew that our land was alive. And so their longing would never abate.
Yet there were a few of our people who remained on our earth. And the white men who were hungry for our land began to seek out the people who refused to leave on wagons, and the descendant of that worthy Franklin was one of these men. This was Jeremiah, the oldest son of Carson, who was the great-grandson of Gideon.
During the time after the Removal of the Creek, Jeremiah became a hunter of our people. Whatever Jeremiah found, he claimed as his own, and either kept it or sold it. Yet the plunder and the bounties weren’t the only pleasures for him. He loved the viciousness of the people hunt.
In a neighboring county, there had been a stubborn Creek mestizo who refused to leave during the Removal. He’d stayed after things became dangerous, and hearing about this man, Jeremiah had snuck up on the man in his field of vegetables, hitting him with a large staff. The mestizo staggered about, recovering enough to charge Jeremiah with his hoe, but Jeremiah managed to beat the man to unconsciousness with the staff. He used the hoe to chop the mestizo’s body into pieces, and then walked to the cabin. However, the mestizo’s wife had spirit. She charged him, but he hit her with the bloody staff, then struck at her throat with the hoe, killing her.
This turn of events annoyed Jeremiah, for he considered himself an honorable man. Jeremiah enjoyed killing men, but not women. He didn’t like rape, either; his brothers did, but they weren’t with him that day. When the wife fell, her two daughters looked at each other. One could escape Jeremiah, but the other would fall. Thus, Jeremiah feigned breathlessness and sat down on the dirt floor. He did not pursue the daughters when they ran out the front of the cabin, though he could have grabbed at their long skirts. After they were gone, he bounced up quickly. After that, he went through the cabin’s belongings: a teakettle, a pot, two pans, three petticoats, a set of colorfully beaded boots made from the skin of deer. Also, the dead man’s rifle and a horse and pig in the barn.
Soon, the few remaining Creek people hid themselves in the woods. If they were mestizos, their white skin could often hide their lineage. If mulattoes, they were enslaved as Negroes. Jeremiah’s appetite for blood had not been sated, however, and he became a slave patroller for Putnam County, the new boundary that had been established after the land lotteries. This patrolling gave Jeremiah an income, since he made no money as a farmer, as he owed everything he made to Samuel Pinchard, who owned the land. Jeremiah lived in a small cabin next to that of his father and four other cabins populated by his brothers and their wives. All were built in the shadow of the mound, the landmark that was despised by his family.
So when the only beloved person in Samuel Pinchard’s life ran away, Samuel sent word to Jeremiah, saying he wanted Nick returned, but he did not want him hurt. It was the morning when Samuel sent word, and Jeremiah arrived promptly with the hound dogs he had raised from pups, who heeded his voice and signals. The men working with Jeremiah were his younger brothers, and they admired Jeremiah’s coldness when dealing with Negroes and his lack of obsequiousness when standing in the dirt in the front of the steps of a wealthy, condescending white man’s big house.
“Your nigger might be in the area. Then again, mayhap not. But if he is, we gone find him. You best believe it.” Yet it had begun to rain, and Jeremiah failed to say that would hinder Nick’s retrieval. He was not about to educate his landlord on hunting slaves, for he was being paid ten dollars up front to find Nick.
But even before the rain, the trail had been lost. For in the daylight before the evening that Nick ran away, Aggie and her gaggle of Quarters-children had walked into the woods. She’d carried a burlap sack and a large jug. After telling them of her game, she reached into a sack of wild onions and passed them out. She told them, run and throw. Run and throw. And they did, with enchanted calls.