When Oglethorpe came to our land, he thought he found a comrade in Tomochichi, the leader of the Yamacraw people, another tribe of our land.
Yet Oglethorpe had not made a friend. Tomochichi had not made a friend, either. He’d only encountered a pragmatic white man determined to set anchor and build a colony for his English king. Tomochichi had seen white men before, so he was interested in trade, which was a long-standing commerce. There had been Englishmen moving along the paths, going north and south and east and west, for more than a hundred years. Though Tomochichi was a wise leader and probably smelled greed on Oglethorpe, he had no idea of what would follow: sin.
For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans. They would sell their children and split up families. And these white men brought by Oglethorpe, these men who had been oppressed in their own land by their own king, forgot the misery that they had left behind, the poverty, the uncertainty. And they resurrected this misery and passed it on to the Africans.
And now we reach back even further.
The Grandfather of the Boy
The young man who would become the grandfather of Micco was perhaps eighteen or nineteen when he appeared next to the tall mound that marked the entrance of The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees.
The young man was barefoot, and his soles were thickened and rough. His gray-colored shirt and pants were wrinkled, and even to those who were standing far away his garments gave off the smell of mildew—which made sense, because when someone asked him in English how he had arrived at their village he only told them that he had been walking when he’d arrived at a river. Then he’d found that he was hungry, so he had tried to seize a catfish at the edge of the water but had fallen into the river. He talked with his hands, making wide gestures and animated facial expressions—even more so when he described falling into the river—and the villagers laughed. Yet he did not want to offend. He laughed along with them.
“Where do you come from?” an elder of the village asked.
“Over there.” The young man pointed vaguely. He smiled some more, and when the elder asked another question—where was he headed—the young man said he meant to go south.
“Truly?” The elder looked back wisely at the rest of his cohort, and the other men held this elder’s gaze.
Then there was more talking and more asking. But when the young man told them a very small man the size of a child had pulled him from the river and led him through the woods to the mound at the edge of the village, then the small man suddenly had disappeared, the elder gave his cohort a new, surprised look. Now this? This was a different matter altogether. And so the elder and his cohort clustered, whispering in their own language while the young man smiled and nodded as if he understood the snatches of words that he was hearing. He did not understand at all. The elders were whispering about what the young man meant when he had said that he was headed “south.”
They did this because the young man who had found his way to the village was a Negro.
Thus, the elders assumed he was headed to the lands that the Spanish called “Florida,” and that the young man was looking for certain Seminoles. The people who lived in The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees knew much about the Seminoles, because the Seminoles had once been a part of the Creek people before they had broken off to form their own nation. And the Seminoles gave sanctuary to Negroes, taking them into their villages. They mated with Negroes, too.
And so if this young man with mildew-smelling clothes was seeking the Seminoles, that meant that he was not free.
Though slavery wasn’t legal yet in the territory Oglethorpe had settled—that would come years later—there were ways that the English or Scottish got around the law. And one of those finagling men owned this young Negro, which meant that somebody might come looking for him and that somebody might try to cause some trouble. Ordinarily that would mean the people in The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees should take hold of the young man, carry him back east, over the Oconee River, and collect a reward from the English or Scottish person who owned him. Yet the young man had mentioned that a very small man had pulled him out of the river. Could this mean the young man had encountered one of the “little people”？ These were supernatural beings and when they chose to show themselves it was a serious matter indeed. The small man would not be happy if this chosen young man was betrayed.