And to the glory of our great, courageous and generous ancestors, Mr. Stanford said, they managed to curb the damned devils, beat the tomahawks from their hands, and then humanely move them to a place where they threatened nobody. To Oklahoma, for example.
Then, much later, I read the documentary book by Dorris ‘Dee’ Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, in which I found out the real history of the Indian people and understood that Mr. Stanford had lied. Lied – deliberately and insistently – because it is simply impossible to be so mistaken. Of course, it was ‘the children’s lie’ because we simply wouldn’t understand the truth.
Maybe I’ll come back to the Indian topic later and for another reason. But here I’d like to tell you about the Cherokee because this tribe, one of the five so-called ‘civilized tribes’, always seemed to me that part of ‘the real America’ which had to be in the present United States.
And so the Cherokee somehow managed to create a small, but quite real state, the Cherokee Nation, with its own parliament or tribal council, a constitution, written laws and a nationally elected president referred to as the ‘Great Leader’.
By this time, the end of the 18th century, they had already become Christians, led a settled life, lived in houses, cultivated plantations, raised cattle, and even had black slaves – in a word, they were no different from their white neighbors.
And from bad to worse: it was the Cherokees who, for the first time on the continent, created a free school system, with more than thirty schools, and their president Sequoya, named in English George Guess, created the special Cherokee alphabet in which even a Cherokee newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix was issued in 1828.
The Indians had a newspaper, do you realize? If Mr. Stanford was to mention it, he’d probably say it was a forum for discussing scalping techniques and how to cut the hearts out of white men.
Our ancestors didn’t like the competition with the Cherokee. Civilized Indians threatened the existence of the young country which not so long before had achieved independence.
And everything ended in 1838 when, under The Law on the Removal of Indians, the Cherokee were sent on a ‘Trail of Tears’ to a new homeland in the desert valleys of Oklahoma.
On the road more than half of the tribe died of cold, hunger and disease.
Interestingly, their black slaves, and even some whites living in the Cherokee Nation, moved with the Cherokee. And so our ancestors breathed a sigh of relief, having finally got the lands belonging to the tribe.
Just to say a few words about scalping, since this is considered a purely Indian atrocity – ripping skin with the hair off the head of an enemy. I deliberately checked on it, and it seems to be nothing of the kind.
Scalps were remove by ancient Scythians, who hung up triangular pieces from the heads of killed enemies on the reins of their horses. The more of these leather fringes there were on their reins, the more their owner was respected.
In the Dark Ages, according to various chronicles such as that of the 9th century abbot Emmanuel Dominic, Anglo-Saxons, and Goths and Francs, all tore off scalps.
Then when the war of independence broke out on the territory of the future USA, the English Vice Governor Henry Hamilton declared that he would pay any person for a killed American immigrant. And how would you prove the murder has happened and the white person was killed? Ingeniously simple but nasty: with a piece of skin and the lock of hair cut from the head!
Soon Hamilton received the nickname of The Famous Hair Buyer among trappers and Indians. Scalping became a very convenient way of reporting on killed enemies and during the Frontier wars with the Indians and, during the Clearing of the Great Plains, our civilized pilgrim fathers counted killed red-skins by scalps. Thousands, tens of thousands of scalps, men’s, women’s, children’s…
But I learned all this much later, after college, and for me as a child, Mr. Stanford was a real idol. Lao Tzu was right when he said that an eloquent person is often false whereas a moral person is usually not eloquent. But Mr. Stanford then could compete in my eyes for authority with Pa or Aunt Prist.
Damn, I had totally forgotten about her! When we still lived in Elizabeth City, I liked to visit Aunt Prist.
She was not really my aunt. She wasn’t a relative at all. It’s just that when grandpa, my pa’s father, employed her as a servant, it turned out that she saved his and all the family’s lives.
She noticed two robbers climbing into the house at night and called the police. The robbers were caught, and it turned out that they were in fact ‘the Black Devils’, a couple of cold-blooded murderers who sent to glory nearly thirty people in four states down the East coast.
They got into houses at night, killed everyone in the house with a gun with a silencer, then quietly took away all the valuables and slipped away before dawn. Needless to say these devils were called ‘black’ because both were Afro-Americans.
So, Aunt Prist received an official message of thanks from the police department, an award from the state governor and a tidy sum of money from our old man.
After that she worked for us a long time and when she became old and our own family affairs went downhill, she lodged in the neighborhood. My sister Judith and I often dropped in on the old woman, and she always treated us with gingersnaps and tea like in England.
Aunt Prist loved everything English, except their movies. She watched American films, but old movies, not color. She had a big player for videotapes, apparently, in a format called VHS, and her TV was old too, with a picture tube, with polished wooden sides and a convex screen.
She often showed us her movies while we had tea and dangled our legs under the table. They were mostly comedies about a little man with a short moustache and a ridiculous gait. He was called the Tramp, and he constantly got into some silly situations. Ju and I laughed loudly as crumbs of gingersnap fell from our mouths.
Then for some reason Judith stopped going to Aunt Prist, so I watched the movies about the Tramp alone, while Auntie knitted in the corner – she knitted all the time with a smile in the corners of her wrinkled mouth – and glanced at me over her glasses.
Of all the movies I saw at Aunt Prist, the two I most remembered were Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Well, the dictator was Hitler, that was clear there, and in Modern Times the Tramp kept going to prison because he couldn’t fit into the conveyor of life, though once he even was drawn into a huge car factory.
Then he fell in love with a poor orphan girl and tried to arrange her life for the better, the girl got arrested but he saved her. There was a lot about the Great Depression, about strikes and the people’s fight for their rights. Anyway, the Tramp and the girl were forced to leave the city to look for happiness in another place.
Of course, I didn’t understand at once what this movie was about. I watched it absolutely as a child, but once, when I was six or seven, I suddenly realized that in order for people to be happy, you need to break all these cars and factories, and then everything will be good.
I went and told that to Father. Pa… he, well, let’s say didn’t approve of my idea and… And he called Aunt Prist the old hen. My Pa is in general a severe person – I’ll return to this later.
So I didn’t tell Pa about The Great Dictator. And I started going less often to Aunt Prist so that Pa didn’t see me going, because if something or someone isn’t pleasant to him, and I am on friendly terms with them, then that could only bring further trouble.