Frances and the women learned more of each other’s words and ways every day, and Frances could understand most of the stories pretty well now. These people told so many. Most of the stories had animals in them that could talk to each other, and the things that happened in the stories showed how the animals had become the way they were. Like Crow. Most of the stories spoke of a time long before, when the animals, the four-leggeds, and the people, the two-leggeds, and the Winged birds and even the Fish, could all talk to each other and understand each other. Frances thought what a wonderful time that must have been.
In the beginning, when she had been brought here unable to understand or speak any of the Indians’ language, she was lonely and afraid, but now that she could talk and understand, she was seldom lonely or scared. Sometimes now she would imagine being able to understand all the animals. At night she could hear owls and wolves, coyotes in the evenings, crows in the daytime, horses anytime in the village, and dogs, and sometimes she would think she almost understood what they were saying. She was never sure, though. But just in case, she did sometimes practice imitating their sounds and songs. Some of the boys could exactly make the sounds of almost any animal or bird, and some of those boys would teach her how, if she asked, though there were others who did not think that was something a girl should know. Like how to win snow snake.
A tall, gray-haired Indian man came walking toward her, wearing a fur hat with the animal’s face still on it above his own face. It still had fangs. The man’s face was sharp and narrow-eyed. He was carrying a gun and a pair of snowshoes. A few weeks ago she would have cringed in fright on seeing such a man approach. But she knew now that this man was just a hunter who was going out, and that he would put on the snowshoes when he was in the woods so he could walk on top of the snow because hunters had such long distances to go.
“Zhaynkee,” he said to her, and his thin lips stretched in a smile with very white, even teeth, the kind of good teeth few white people his age would still have. She smiled at him, and he went on. She knew now that the word meant “English people.” The old huma who lived in Neepah’s wikwam had called her that for days before she learned what it meant. Many people in the village called her that, but they did not speak it as a hateful name. They might be at war with the white people, but no one seemed to dislike her for being a white person.
But maybe they liked her just because she was a child. They did seem to love children. Everyone was kind to everyone’s children, and the children were hardly ever punished.
Here in the Indian village after these few weeks, Frances found herself to be much as she had always been at home: very much favored, and able to gain more attention and loving kindness than did even the younger and prettier children. Now almost six, she was very concerned with her place in people’s affections, and tried to keep a close accounting of the ways in which she maintained it. At home her mother had always made much of her bright talk and her eagerness to learn everything. It seemed that the women in this village were pleased with her for those same reasons. She was learning their language quickly, and whenever she offered to tell one of their lachimu, or stories, back to them, they were delighted. Another thing they liked was her explanation of the beliefs of the Quaker Friends. She would remember as well as she could the things she had heard her parents say about that: the peacefulness, the fairness, the equality between people. They liked it that a Quaker woman could state her beliefs to her husband and make choices and decisions. “Lenapeh women too!” they would exclaim, pointing around to each other and laughing. And if a man happened to be there hearing, he too would laugh and nod his head. But then he would usually shake his head and flutter his hands in the air and make a sour face.
Another thing in Frances’ favor here was simply her thick, long, wavy red hair. At home, in a family almost all red-haired, that had not been such a remarkable asset, though her mother had always made much of its thickness and luster and often sat brushing it for her in the evenings. Here among these dark-haired people it was her particular glory. She knew they were fascinated by it. Often they would reach out and play with its curls while talking to her.
She turned back the deerhide door flap of Neepah’s wikwam and ducked into the warmth. It was so dark after the sun on the snow that she could barely see Neepah at first. The woman said in her own language, “I greet Palanshess home.”
“Waneeshee, Neepah. Hello, Minnow.”
Frances moved near the fire, sat close to Minnow on a mat, and slipped off her wet moccasins. She propped them on a fire-ring stone with the soles up, leaned forward in the fire heat, and rubbed her icy feet with her icy hands until her fingers and toes were hot and tingly. Then she told Neepah and Minnow, as well as she could in that language, about getting into the boys’ snow-snake contest and doing so well at it that the boys quit and left.
At first Neepah laughed. Then she was quiet for a while, moistening a strand of sinew with saliva to soften it, then wrapping it tightly around a short handle to bind it to a flint blade. Then she said: “Kulesta!” Listen! It was the way a story always began. And so, happily, Frances sat playing with her toes and listened.
It was about Neepah Huma, Grandmother Moon. Neepah had been named for the moon, Frances knew by now, and so many of her stories were of Grandmother Moon, in some way. In this one, the time was very long ago when Grandmother Moon was young. If you looked up from the ground in those days you saw the Young Moon surrounded by stars all as big as she was, some even bigger in the sky. She was so wonderfully bright and shiny then, and the stars were so close around, that they all made night bright as day. All the stars were young men and they hung around Moon to court her. Young Moon thought she could be even brighter than stars. And so she shut her eyes and strained, making herself brighter and brighter.
Soon, Young Moon was so bright that the stars could not even be seen from here. Shamed, they went far away, silently. Young Moon had not even noticed their leaving, but she just kept her eyes shut and strained and shone even harder, until suddenly it was too much and, with a burst of smoke, she just burned out. When she looked around, she was alone. The stars were far away. And that is why Grandmother Moon now is the color of ashes, with dark smudges on her face, and is alone, and night is dark.
Neepah said, “Lenapeh women speak equally with Lenapeh men in Council. They are as strong as men. Some things we can do men cannot. We can create babies in our bodies. But we let them be best at things they like to do. Hunting. Fighting. As long as they think they are better at something, they like to stay near us. Zhukeh lachimu kishalokeh!” The story is finished!
Frances clapped. “Waneeshee, Neepah! Wehlee heeleh!”
It was not until she was nearly asleep that night, snuggled between Neepah’s big warm body and Minnow’s little skinny one, that Frances realized that the story had been meant to teach her not to outshine boys in the things they like to do.
After that snow-snake game, many of the girls came around to be friends with Frances. Snow was melting, though now and then new snow would still fall, and little by little the days were growing warmer. With the tree-sugaring finished, there was not much work children could help with, so Frances and Minnow and their many friends, girls their age, roamed the town like a little twittering flock of birds, flitting from place to place and amusing themselves with anything that came to mind.
To Frances it seemed that most of the people in the town were women and girls. There were few men and boys. In the mornings most of the men left at daybreak and were gone trapping and hunting. And many of the men, like those she had seen riding away from the town with her cousin Isaac, were often gone on journeys with the green-coat soldiers.
One of the girls one morning led them to a spot by the creek, downstream from the bathing place, so she could show off her grandfather, who was a canoe maker.
Even before they saw the smoke from the canoe-making camp, they were hearing the measured striking of the tools, like axe blows. The creekside glade reeked of as
h and charred wood.
Frances had not expected to see people who were black, and nearly recoiled in fright at the sight of the men working in the smoky place. Their faces, clothes, and hands were as black as their hair, and when they looked up at the approaching girls, their eyes were red. Frances had heard of black-skinned people. Her mother and father had spoken of black people because the Friends were against the owning of slaves, who were black people or sometimes Indians.
These men working with tools were in the midst of fires. Huge fallen trees lay on the creek bank, with fires burning on top of them. The ground was covered with charred wood and ashes, and the girls’ moccasins were blackened at once when they walked into the place. Everything was black, and when the girl’s grandfather got off a log he was chopping to come toward her, Frances realized that his skin was not really black, it was just covered with soot and char. He was an Indian, with white hair grayed by ash, and he smelled like soot.
The old man was kind to the girls and showed them how the canoes were made. The top sides of the fallen logs were burned until the burnt wood could be scraped and hewed out with stone tools, something like the adze Frances’ father had used in building the family’s log house, except his tool had been metal. Only two of these Indians had metal tools, one an axe and the other a short-handled adze. The men with the metal tools were cutting on an unburned log, and their chips lay white and yellow on the blackened ground. The canoes were long and round-bottomed, hollowed downward by the chopping and scraping, and when the girl asked her grandfather if the girls could get in one, he let them climb into the unburned one. They all faced the end that was toward the creek, ten girls with room left over, and for a little while they pretended that they were canoe-riding in water, until the grandfather told them they would have to get out and let the men go on working on the vessel. Minnow asked Frances if she had ever ridden a canoe in the water, and when she shook her head, boasted that she herself had often ridden canoes, and not just in creeks, but on the big river.
“I will sometime,” Frances bravely announced. “I will ride in a canoe on the biggest water there is.”
They were hungry and started back toward the town, stopping for a while by the wikwam of the sakima, the town head man. He was sitting on a log in front of his wikwam with his eyes closed, while a woman did something to his chin. “The woman is the sakima’s wife,” Minnow explained as they went on. “She pulls out those hairs that grow on a man’s face so he will not have hair growing there like the wapsi men.” Frances, with a twinge in her breast, remembered seeing her father shave his face hair off with soap and a razor.
“My father did not let hair grow on his face,” Frances said. She did not want Minnow or the other girls to think she had come from people with hairy faces. Sometimes Frances almost forgot that she had come from another kind of people, but these Lenapeh seemed so proud that they were not like white men that it would remind her, and she hoped they really understood that her Quaker people were not like those others. She felt that they would have to know that in order to like her. They really did seem to like her, but when they said things about the wapsi people, she was afraid they might look at her wapsi skin and keep Lenapeh secrets from her. She tried not to mention the wapsi people herself, but paid careful attention to what was said of them. Wapsi just meant white. A white person was wapsini. Wapsituk meant “those white people.” Lenapehwuk meant “we the People,” or “us.” But Lenapeh itself meant “the Real People.” Frances wanted to know how to say all those things just right, so she always listened carefully to how her friends said them. But for explanations she asked only Neepah. Sometimes other older people would explain things, but she asked only Neepah, who was the one she could confide anything to or ask anything, like a mother. In Frances’ heart, Neepah was the center of this place.
When they came to Neepah’s wikwam, she was outdoors pounding dried corn into meal. She stood over an upright section of log that was hollowed like a bowl in the upper end. The corn was in the bowl, and Neepah was lifting and dropping the pestle with both hands. It was as long as she was tall, large at the upper end to give it weight, slim as a child’s arm the rest of its length. Neepah could do this tirelessly, lifting and dropping it, giving it a little turn, so the fire-hardened small end beat the corn into finer and finer meal, fine and white as flour. Frances saw that this was the pale kind of corn Neepah used for making dumplings. The bluish-purple kind called sesapsink was used in other ways, usually as a roasted meal that warriors or hunters carried dry in a pouch to eat while traveling. Frances remembered having seen warriors eat it without even stopping along the path when they had brought her here. Sometimes the sesapsink corn was just scorched without grinding and carried that way by hunters going far. Frances had learned some of the secrets of xaskwim by watching and listening to Neepah, but the woman had made it clear that there was much more to know.
“The wapsituk learned from us how to grow corn,” Neepah would say, “but they know nothing about using it. They do not even know it is sacred. To them, eating is just belly-filling. They will eat any meat, even rabbit, horse, muskrat, woodchuck, which we Lenapehwuk know are kulakan.” She had explained that anything kulakan was forbidden by the Creator. And not just foods were kulakan; so were many behaviors. Creator had forbidden many things, such as stealing and gossiping. No one must ever marry someone from the same animal-sign family. One from the Turtle Clan, for example, could not marry anyone else from that clan, but must instead take a mate from the Wolf Clan or Turkey Clan. It seemed there was so much to know to be Lenapeh; one had not to know anything to be wapsini. Among Lenapehwuk, for example, it was permissible to blow stinky air in the presence of some relatives, but kulakan to do so among others, and a child must learn such rules very young.
“In the pot by the fire is m’sukatash,” Neepah told the girls. “It is still hot for you to eat.”
While the two girls were eating succotash and warming themselves by the fire, Neepah came in with the flour she had made. She mixed it with a little water, in a big hewn-wood bowl that Frances had seen every day without really noticing. “It looks like a little canoe!” she exclaimed to Minnow. Minnow thought so too, and laughed.
Neepah chuckled. “Made just the same. Half a log hollowed out. This would be a good canoe for a baby.” The girls laughed.
“We watched them making canoes today by the creek,” Frances said.
“I knew that.” Neepah was working the dough into little balls.
“How did you know that, Neepah?”
“Your feet and your bottoms are black. So, you saw the canoe makers. The hardest workers of all men. They work almost as hard as women.” She looked in the succotash pot. “As I thought, you two have nearly eaten it all. We will make broth for these suhpahnmush to cook in.” She told Minnow to put more wood on the cookfire and hang the iron kettle over it half full of water. She always told the girls how she was cooking so they would come to know. “This is dry deer meat,” she said, dropping in several dark, thin leathery strips. “Now acorn meal. Now this is a little powder of dried squash, so the broth will not be thin like water. Now it will have to get hot and bubble a long while. Then we will drop the suhpahnmush in to cook. You will be hungry again by then. It will take that long. Almost night by then. Do you want to go and play? Or lie down awhile to rest? Or help me make string?”
So for a while they made string. Neepah took down from the roof a great wad of spruce root that had been hanging there. A mouse jumped out of it, landing almost in the fire, then scurried into the shadows under a bed. “Eh!” Neepah exclaimed, shaking the wad to dislodge any more mice if there were any. None fell. She sniffed the roots. “No. She was not living in here, that axpo’kwess. Where axpo’kwess lives smells like her urine. She was just in here stealing roots to make her nest.” Neepah and the girls sat separating and untangling fine strands. Neepah soaked them in water and then twisted two strands together one way while Minnow twisted two strands the same way, and then,
still pulling them tight, they twisted their double strands together in the other direction so they tightened up together. At the end of each strand, they wove in threads of a new length of root, still twisting and reverse twisting, so that the string grew longer and longer and there were no weak places. Neepah tied one end to a roof pole and pulled on it so hard that water squeezed out, but it would not break.
Frances watched until she felt she could help, and soon all three were making string quietly, humming, the broth seething fragrant in the kettle. She remembered how her father and mother had used lots of brown rope and white twine, but her father had always bought it. Her mother never made string, though she did spin flax and wool yarn for clothing. Frances worked the wet fibers with her fingers and remembered her mother’s whirring wheels and spindles. She remembered too the wheels on the white people’s wagons and carriages. She mused on this, which she had never really thought of: that white people used wheels for many things; even the grinding stone had been a wheel. But she had seen not one wheel here among the Indians, and yet they seemed not to need any kind of wheels, and could still do anything they needed to do without them.
Neepah had begun talking about something in a story voice. Frances’ mind returned from wheels to the ancient days of which Neepah was telling:
“Lenapeh are the Grandfathers to many peoples, the many who speak a tongue like ours, the many who sing songs like ours. The Powhatan, the Nanticoke, the Mahikan, the Miami, the Ottawa, the Anishinabe, the Piankashaw, the Abenaki, the Micmac, the Shawnee, they all grew out of the first Lenapeh who came down from the ice mountains in the north and made homes all over Taxkwox Menoteh, this land on the Turtle’s back. Many generations all lived in peace and sang the same songs. Now and then we had to have war with the Iroquois, and the Talekewi, who were large and pale and attacked us near Namesh Sipu, the Mother of Rivers, out that way.” She jutted her chin toward the creek, westward. “But those other peoples grew out of the Lenapeh, and moved down other rivers, making towns, taking those other names, but still peaceful with us, and they knew us as the Grandfathers, and they still go many generations in peace. But since the wapsituk came, those happy ages have ceased. Now they have pushed us out from our homeland by the Eastern water, and divided all the peoples and set them against each other with lies. We are losing. Only once was there an honest and fair wapsini. We called him Mikwon, the Quill. His wapsi name was Penn.”