—Book me a cabin to the fore, then.
—You’ll not be sorry.
SHABBY AS IT WAS, there was almost nothing about the paddleboat and its passage eastward toward the Atlantic that I did not like. Churning down the broad brown rivers of the coastal plain, tying up at night at some backwoods landing with torches burning globes of yellow light against the black night and turpentine barrels and cotton bales stacked high on the dock and the slaves working shirtless and sweating and singing mighty rhythmic songs while they loaded the goods onto the boat. Sun rising yellow through fog hanging so thick across the water I could hardly see the green jungle we passed through. Or the big cleared fields planted with indigo or cotton, their dizzying furrows running in converging lines to a distant flat horizon unlike any I had ever seen before. I could hardly sleep for fear of missing something. Booming down the river through all that coastal area with its pine savannas and cypress swamps cut through by guts and creeks—which were not at all like creeks where I came from but were just tidal ditches of black mud and stinking salt water, but they seemed exotic and like the places that travel writers got all worked up over in the quarterly journals I favored.
The riverboat cabins were hardly bigger than tipped outhouses and not much better smelling, with their sleeping pallets stained by every fluid the human body is able to produce and unemptied chamberpots and poor ventilation. And they were so close and hot in the summertime that on the few nights when the mosquitoes were at all calm I preferred to sleep on deck, swinging in a string hammock and watching the moonlight fall on the river and the dark woods pass above the steep sandy banks.
Contrary to the purser’s assessment, I found the food excellent, though supper might be no more complicated than a good fish soup with little beads of yellow butter afloat on the surface of a thinnish milk broth, accompanied by fine-crumbed corncakes and little gherkins, heaped bright green on a white plate with the stained vinegar pooling underneath.
The passenger list was shuffled up at each stop down the river as people came and went from town to town. In that part of the state, the men all talked in a certain style, with their lips run out and pooched up in front of them so that they reminded me of hens gabbling right after they have laid an egg. They were without exception wild for gambling and would sit up all night in the little salon playing cards and swapping money to and fro among themselves. I played seldom and carefully and quit early, for I did not care to lose much money. But I haunted the salons until late, having discovered that the ladies on board found me exotic. At the supper table one evening, the tall and thirtyish wife of a somewhat younger little indigo factor listened to my very brief and reluctant accounting of my life and then said, Imagine that. From the far mountains. An orphan adopted by an Indian chief. Intimate with Nature. And yet a lawyer and businessman and now an Indian chief himself. And so well-spoken. And on his way to Washington City to lobby Congress and the Jackson administration on behalf of his people.
I said, Well, I do wear shoes and can count to twenty with them on and everything, but there are lots of chiefs. It’s not like being president. More like mayor. And I’m just the chief when it comes to business and law. My father Bear’s the real chief.
Late that night while her husband was still at cards, the indigo factor’s wife pecked on my cabin door with a knuckle, and we had a fumbling and fully clothed congress rather less than fully reclined on the miserable pallet. And then she straightened her clothes and smiled and kissed me a glancing blow on my cheekbone. She said, You might consider just letting people think a chief is whatever they imagine it to be without further correction. It will work better for you. Then she eased out the door. The whole thing had taken three minutes. But from then forward, I elaborated on my life a bit more fully and romantically during dinner conversation, and if anybody wanted to call me chief, they were welcome to it.
WASHINGTON CITY WAS being built on a landscape of utter insignificance, a mudflat by the river barely elevated above sea level, with a midsized southern town arising on it, with the distinguishing addition of a few scattered half-formed classical temples of enormous scale, in such a state of partiality that it was hard at first glance to tell whether they were falling or rising. Hogs ran free range right into the edges of town. The raw new city amounted to not much. And perhaps that was the point. Any gesture of accomplishment could stand tall, for it would lack further reference or perspective beyond itself. In such a place, the pale dome of the Capitol could loom high as Mont Blanc from the mud riverbanks, and the men who peopled it could consider themselves Goliaths.
Congress was in town, so Washington City was a busy place. Most of the principal streets were paved with cobbles, so there was always a racket from the metal hoops of carriage wheels clashing against them, and at night the calkins of horseshoes struck sparks off them. The unpaved road up the hill to the Capitol was like a winding stream of black mud, such an axle-deep mire that drivers mostly forsook the roadway and set out cross-country directly up the slopes of the hill, which had become cut like new-plowed ground with the parallel tracks of wheels and the cupped prints of horses and mules right to the Capitol steps.
I ARRIVED GREEN as a barrel of June apples. Since I was there to represent the Cherokee, I dressed the part. My idea of what an agent of the Indians, a member of a clan, a business chief, ought to wear for meetings with government officials expressed itself fully only on one occasion, my first visit to the office of the secretary of war, where all Indian business began and most of it ended. I wore a silk turban in the style recently adopted by many of the eastern Indians for occasions of high seriousness. Mine was deep purple and patterned with yellow figures of pineapples. I had on a regular black frock coat, but my waistcoat matched the turban, as did the cravat securing the neck of my starched white shirt. On my feet, beaded buckskin moccasins, laced to the knees and fringed along the outer seams. It was a splendid outfit. As I walked from my hotel to the War Department, people on the street took little note of my odd display, for the town was full of various kinds of outlanders, everything from Creeks to Turks.
When I arrived at the office, Secretary Cass did not offer a chair but stood looking at me a long time, and then he said, Sir, I don’t wish to take up any of your time just now, when you so clearly have appointments with hatters and cobblers. Perhaps you could arrange to return after those obligations have been met.
I said, No, Mr. Cass. I have plenty of time right now.
Cass again looked at me silently for a long uncomfortable span of seconds. He finally said, Let me be clear, then. I was trying to avoid saying that you look the fool. You’re not the first young man ever to do so. Come back when you don’t, and I’ll be glad to meet with you and hear your business.
I flushed red to the hairline and got up and gave a little one-inch head bob of a bow and left.
—THEY’RE WEARING THEM with wider brims and rounder crowns of late.
I put the narrow-brimmed creased-crowned specimen back on its display block.
—One of those new sorts then, I said.
—I can have it done in a week, the hatter said. He wrapped a tape measure around my head and said, Excellent. And I wondered, but did not ask, how the size of my head might be worthy of such a superlative. That began the period of time when I refused to wear any outfit in which the hat failed to correspond with the clothes.
I had first taken a room in a boardinghouse that was cheap and bleak and not at all well situated and was popular only among the youngest and least influential congressional aides and other useless wayfarers. I soon moved to the famous Indian Queen, even though I could not really afford my long stay there. But it was popular among young men of bright prospect and also various Creek and Cherokee and Seminole legations come to Washington City to negotiate treaties. Sam Houston had been a regular before he fled to Texas, and the management still talked of him with sad affection. Nothing could ever again match the times when Houston was in residence at the Queen and held court late
into the night in the lounge, often until the first flicker of dawn, for he didn’t sleep well in the dark and liked to pass the night drinking and talking and listening to fiddle music. He only went to his bed when daylight began rising, and then at midday he arose all red-nosed and puffy and ate a vast dinner of beef and began conspiring. All the chambermaids and desk clerks agreed that those were the days, and it had all been downhill since.
I RETURNED TO the office of the secretary of war as soon as my embarrassing entrance into politics could be corrected. I had since visited every fine tailor and cobbler in the city and had acquired all the wardrobe I could afford. By any standard, I looked irreproachable.
I thought my argument was simple and unassailable. Bear’s people were too small and remote to be of interest to America. And there were the deeds Bear and I held to the land we occupied. Our land was not the Nation, it was America. Private ownership of land was intended to mean something in this country. Real property was a bond as strong as blood. The dissolution of the Nation and the exile of its people to the West had no bearing on our situation, for we owned our land outright.
—All Indians? the secretary said.
—Yes.
—Some would say that fact is all that matters.
—My argument is about ownership of land, not blood.
—How many Indians are you representing? the secretary said.
—We have never been more than a thousand souls. A little village called Wayah. Existing independently outside the Nation for many years.
—But all of them Indians?
—Yes. All of us. Mostly full-bloods.
Cass sat looking at me, at the hue of skin visible outside my clothing—my face and neck and handbacks—judging blood degree. And he was an expert, for every fraction of Indian in existence had passed through his office.
—You’re white, the secretary said, not inflecting a question at all.
—Yes, I said. Adopted.
—And only a thousand of them?
—Well, fewer of us than that.
—How many, then?
—Five hundred, about. Or somewhat fewer.
—Let’s say four hundred Indians. And not a one of them with the vote.
—I vote.
—So the entire tally of electors is one? Why should I bother?
IN A WEEK, armed with only a few letters of introduction, you could meet everyone of political or social consequence, right up to the president. It was a small town. I made the rounds, office to office. I talked with seat-fillers in various departments and agencies. Met with many young representatives, and even a couple of old regal senators, one of them the famously contentious John C. Calhoun. And I soon saw how the business was done but realized I did not have the money to do it very well. I took men of influence out for suppers and drinks, but I could not offer any more in the way of inducement. And more was what the situation called for. I was left to stand on the logic of my argument about the sanctity of property ownership. And in Washington City that did not amount to anything.
I went from office to office, and the men who inhabited them would sit and listen, but I could see wheels turn and the teeth of interlocked gears engage behind their eyes. They soon ceased listening and began wondering how agreeing with me might benefit anyone who mattered. In particular, themselves. Everybody I talked to came to the same conclusion as the secretary of war. Why bother? I’d ask them for their support, and they would look me in the eye and go off talking on some vague other heartwarming topic, with the sincerity of a dying man addressing Jesus. They were artists of misdirection as sure as any thimblerigger shifting his three shells and one wizened pea.
But at least Calhoun saw some prospect in me, or some element of entertainment. The senator had coffee brought in and we left off business and talked more generally, as elder to younger. At some point in recounting my brief history, I mentioned that I had taught myself French with no other help than a grammar and a dictionary, for there were many books in that language I had yearned to read, in particular Rousseau’s Meditations of a Solitary Walker and the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, either of which, by the way, I would have considered entirely worth the effort, and so it was like I got Voltaire thrown in for free. When I arrived in Washington and heard the language aloud for the first time, it was a great disappointment to find that I could not understand a lick of it. Nor could any of the young aides to French diplomats understand me when I tried to speak. The short of it was, French didn’t sound a bit like I thought it would. Calhoun said it was without a doubt the nastiest-sounding tongue practiced by any known people on the round globe and he himself spoke a very little of it, only what he could remember from his classes at Yale many years ago. But he would pass along a trick he had learned, which was this: you couldn’t go far wrong if you pronounced every single word of the language as if it were a child’s euphemism for the private parts.
I WENT TO the White House with a letter of introduction from Calhoun, who warned that it might have more the opposite effect since a rift had developed between him and Jackson after they won the election of ’28 and Calhoun had become Jackson’s vice president and then resigned in a quarrel over the issue of nullification, there being no stronger supporter of states’ rights than Calhoun.
But you couldn’t say Jackson wasn’t warned about the temperament of his second in command, for Calhoun had also fallen out similarly when he was vice president the first time under Quincy Adams. Calhoun’s nature demanded that he buck against anybody who sat above him, and yet he never managed to get himself all the way on top. It was more than clear to everyone in Washington that Calhoun and Jackson, though both old men, were still violent as fighting cocks at their cores and would very much like to kill each other. So it was a wonder to me that they didn’t find themselves out of an early morning by the misty Potomac squaring off in a pistol duel. And it is a shame they didn’t, for they would have put Burr and Hamilton in the shade as a piece of history.
Calhoun’s letter in pocket, I walked up to the White House, past the paddock where Jackson’s horse stood switching flies and dozing, and on through the door. I searched down long corridors for someone to whom I might present the letter. Finally I opened a door and found the old murderer himself in his office, holding forth to a small gang of cronies, most of them young men about my age. Jackson was stretched out on a chaise, alternately talking and sucking on a pastille. The pleated skin around his mouth opened and closed rhythmically as a bellows. Flattering portraits notwithstanding, Jackson looked older than he was, sixty-five or thereabouts. He had indeed the pointed face, tiny blank eyes, and sharp snapping teeth of a possum. He blinked his little vicious dark eyes beneath his upreaching, pyrotechnic white hair and registered scant interest in me beyond an assessment of how difficult I might be to kill in a formal pistol duel or an impromptu tavern knife fight, both of which he had successfully fought in his youth and middle age.
When I presented the letter and brought up my business—launching quickly into the details of citizenship and ownership of land—the look in Jackson’s eyes suggested he might have a killing or two left in him. But all he did was raise one hand and give a dismissive gesture in my direction and then begin talking around his pastille about his new boots. He wiggled his feet down at the bottom of the chaise to highlight them. His opinion was, the new boots were close to the finest he had ever worn. Whereupon all the attending young men, in turn, commented favorably on their every superlative feature, from heels to lacing. I judged the heels too high to be strictly proper for a man but kept that opinion to myself and occupied my mind, during the round of praise from the cronies, in looking at Jackson’s head and thinking that, between them, Jackson and Calhoun had the two most alarming manes of hair I had ever seen on white men. I qualified the judgment in that way because as a boy I knew a few old Indian warriors who still sported coifs from their youth way back in the previous century, styles that involved plucking half one’s head with mussel-shell tweezers and
letting the other half grow long, festooning random braided locks with colored beads and silver fobs and making part or all of the remainder elevate in spikes with the assistance of bear grease. But in a contest of extravagant hair just among white men, Jackson and Calhoun would have split the prize. They hated each other and yet continued to share their lofty hairstyles, which struck me as having all the features of placing exploding possums on their heads. Of course, they were both from South Carolina and thus given to strange enthusiasms.
WHEN THE LEADERS of the Cherokee, Chief Ross and Major Ridge, came up to Washington City to lobby against removal, they were a source of deep racial confusion to those in power. Chief Ross, the head man for the whole Nation, was as white as any congressman. And Major Ridge, though dark-skinned, dressed somewhat better than all but the richest senators and carried himself with an arrogant attitude that created a suspicion that he was of superior intelligence. Both men were wealthy plantation owners and almost equally powerful within the Nation, which was a new and uncertain country set inside America like a reflection in an imperfect mirror. I had been to New Echota many times and was never sure whether it represented a grand experiment or a pathetically inept confidence game.
Chief Ross had more Scots blood than anything else—seven-eighths majority of it, in fact. He was a short man who spoke Cherokee so poorly that he would not attempt it in public, nor could he even read the syllabary. But he was a sharp and close trader in business and politics, and a prideful little man who parted his hair just above his left ear and carried the long remainder up and over to the opposing ear in an attempt to cover the barren ground of his bald pate. He used a fragrant pomade, and the comb tracks were straight as bean rows traversing his scalp.