Woman of Marked Character (eBook)

The Imagined Portrait of Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix 1812-1891, Book One 1812-1848

Nancy Stanfield Webb (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
408 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798989609819 (ISBN)

Infos

In this sweeping historical novel, the surviving daughter of a prominent Cherokee tribal leader tells her story amid the tragic resettlement of her people from Georgia to Indian Territory during the 1830s, and its ensuing, heartbreaking aftermath.

Author Nancy Stanfield Webb is a writer, painter, and photographer who has devoted three decades to researching and writing the two-part biographical fiction series on Sarah Ridge. The great-granddaughter of Texas pioneers and now living in Rhode Island, Webb's essays and interview articles with visual artists have been published in Southwest Art magazine and various regional magazines. She is the recipient of a writing residency to Millay Colony for the Arts. A Woman of Marked Character is her debut novel.

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The first book of this intensely researched two-part biographical novel series is set in Georgia and Indian Territory. Sarah Ridge, the educated daughter of a Cherokee leader, witnesses events leading to the removal of her nation to west of the Mississippi River in 1837. Braving a treacherous river journey with her white husband, a lawyer, they arrive in Arkansas and join her family. Dealing with an often-contentious marriage, she bears five children and buries two. Following the "e;Trail of Tears"e; when tribal war erupts, Sarah is compelled to seek revenge against powerful forces in the Cherokee Nation.

Textauszug

Chapter 2

Gado Alitelvhvsgv

Oothcaloga Settlement, Cherokee Tribal Lands

Northwestern Georgia

December 16, 1811

The warning of a screech owl fractured the frigid night.

In the third hour before dawn mid-way through vsgiyi—the cold moon—daytime animals roused to sense a restlessness already disturbing their neighboring night creatures.

In the pen beyond the cabin the buckskin mare slowed her pacing, then stopped. Starting again, she placed one tentative hoof after another as if walking on a frozen pond. Again, she stopped. A wretched groan rolled up from the depths of her gut as she hung her head, then spread her legs to keep from falling.

Sharp yaps from the yellow hound guarding the pigs changed to a mournful howl. Echoing through the darkness, the howl blended with the horse’s groans. Pigs snorted and shuffled and dug their hooves into the muck.

In the orchard tips of young peach trees fluttered. Tiny waves ruffled the surface of Oothcaloga Creek, located near that area where the state of Georgia abuts Tennessee. Canebrakes lining the creek began to rustle, their tops whipping together as if buffeted by a windstorm.

There was no wind.

On a rise near the creek sat the cabin—not a pole lodge of the old Cherokee way, but a sturdy log house built in the manner of the white man with a coveted glass window in front. Inside the progressive home slept a progressive Cherokee family: the mother, Susanna, also known as Sehoya, a woman of the Wild Potato Clan, and her warrior husband of the Deer Clan, no longer called Kahnungdatlageh but The Ridge, whose name early European traders translated from the man who walks on mountains. The couple, in embracing the white man’s manner had put aside their children’s tribal birth names calling them in the new way: Nancy, ten; John, approaching eight; and little Walter—Watty, Susanna called the child who was her blessing to take away her sadness when another baby born after John had died. Watty though, now almost two, was not right, not right in learning to walk and speak as did his older sister and brother. And now within Susanna, another baby grew.

Alerted by the animal calls, Susanna awoke. Shifting her position, she touched her rounded belly as if to reassure the child quickening within that the strange sounds filling the air were merely rumbles of wagon wheels on a road passing over river stones.

But there was no nearby road.

When the earth could no longer contain its quivering, the gado alitelvhvsgv, the earthquake, exploded from its depths. The cabin trembled, then shook. A smoldering log rolled from the hearth onto the floor. Chimney stones loosened and tumbled. The Ridge jumped from bed. Susanna sat up. High-pitched screams from her children sliced through the deafening roar that filled the air like thunderous war drums.

The floor fell away as Susanna ran across the room. Panes in the window near the children’s bed imploded. Nancy rolled onto the floor, crawling toward her mother, her hands and knees bleeding. Grabbing for support from the spinning wheel, John tried to stand but his legs crumpled beneath him. Watty screamed from his pallet.

The Ridge shouted for his family to get outside. He shoved the log back into the hearth, beating sparks from a smoldering braided rug.

Susanna seized Watty, carrying him toward the door just as it pulled away from the frame and fell open. Nancy grabbed John. Planks in the floor pitched and parted. Gathering her brother in her arms, Nancy ran out into the yard. Behind her, Susanna stumbled under an avalanche of roof shingles. Batting them away, she clutched Watty and ran to the cornfield, drawing her children around her.

A great crack! broke through their terror. Chickens fell from their limb-roosts in a shower of feathers and squawks. The upper trunk of an enormous white oak separated as if cleaved by a tomahawk. A smaller section began to lean and toppled toward the cabin. Susanna screamed, pleading with her husband to come out.

Falling, crawling, pulling the now-flaming rug, The Ridge reached the cornfield just as the porch roof disappeared beneath a limb. Stomping fire from the rug, he turned his attention to his wife and children. The family clung to each other as the land rocked and shook beneath their feet.

Four hundred miles west of the Cherokee settlement, the flow of the Mississippi River slowed and seemed to reverse. Uplifts in the mighty riverbed created a series of rapids near the earthquake’s epicenter between Memphis, Tennessee, and the settlement of New Madrid in Indiana Territory just below the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi.

The powerful quake rerouted the powerful river. Seismic uplifts created fissures, some five miles long; great bluffs of red clay tumbled into the water. From the river bottom, trees sunk for a century rose like dreadful corpses. Alongside the banks and even in the center flow, geysers—foul-smelling like rotten eggs—exploded into the air disgorging coal and sand, creating a pocked landscape of sand boils and craters twenty to thirty feet deep. Ducks and geese sought out keelboat masts and landed on the heads of horrified flatboatmen who cowered on deck in the deafening noise and turbulent water.

New Madrid residents were thrown from their beds. If they survived to run outside, they watched their cabins roll over or sink into the sand. For hundreds of miles around, cradles rocked and church bells rang. In the unmapped Indian country, unrecorded by white men for their newspapers, unknown damage ravaged the land. In Washington City, President James Madison and his wife Dolley woke to the clinking of clock pendula on glass door-fronts. From as far east as Boston came reports of chimneys cracking and chandeliers swinging.

In New Madrid during the day preceding the quake, it would be reported, the atmosphere had been dark and hazy with red clouds in the evening sky, a day unusually warm for December. As far back as August, the night sky had been lit by a bright comet with a split tail, one side straight, one side curved. Strange times. Prophesies abounded. Christian preachers issued warnings: Repent your sins! God will punish the wicked!

Upriver in Cape Girardeau, the Shawnee Tecumseh—whose name meant “panther passing across” because it was said that at his birth another great comet streaked the sky—recognized these warnings. He implored the Delaware and the Wyandot, the Potawatomi and the Miami: “Unite! Fight against the white man! Restore the ways of your ancestors!”

Fire in the sky. And now the earthshaking, the gado alitelvhvsgv.

The land of the Cherokee had at times trembled since the days when the Old Chieftain drew on his pipe and blew his smoke across the eastern mountains to veil them in blue haze, but never in the memory of the wise ones had such a rocking occurred.

Susanna closed her eyes, one arm cradling Watty and the other caressing her belly while Nancy and John clung to her nightdress. She invoked her ancestorial mothers and prayed to the God of whom the Springplace missionaries read stories from their book. Her husband begged the benevolence of the Great Spirit. All through the darkness of early morning, the earth rumbled. Dawn brought another shock, more fearsome than the first.

As tremors rocked the land beneath his feet, The Ridge remembered last month. He and other Cherokee leaders had gathered at the Creek town of Tuckabatchee with Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole. They had told Tecumseh not to include Cherokee warriors in an alliance against the white man. The council had advised the Shawnee orator not to visit their people with his message of tribal unification. An angry Tecumseh threatened to stomp the mountaintops.

The Ridge did not believe this gado alitelvhvsgv was Tecumseh’s promised earthshaking, his signal that the time had come to repel the white invaders in full-out war—

Or was it?

Three weeks into January—unolvtani, the moon when the cold wind blows—another violent quake struck the Oothcaloga settlement. Powerful upheavals created writhing creekbeds and shattered forests. The springs at the Moravian Springplace Mission went dark and failed to bubble; sinkholes filled with green water. Days and nights grew long while the Cherokee lived outside, afraid to rebuild their homes, moving into caves or broken cabins away from thunderstorms and flooding cloudbursts. One day was so warm they un-barred their windows; the next saw a frigid snowstorm.

Then two weeks later in early kalagi, the greatest earthquake yet destroyed what remained of New Madrid and crumbled the remaining chimneys in St. Louis. It swallowed a Shawnee village in Tennessee; it submerged the woods and people beneath a lake that white men would name Reelfoot.

One evening the sky darkened over the Cherokee wilderness at Oothcaloga like the draping of a black shawl; in the west was a small white stripe on the horizon. From the east shined a red light that lit the land like a full moon. Why? Why these warnings from the Great Spirit? It was said that these signs appear before a great day.

Rumors ran rampant. Prophets promised storms of hail the size of rivercane baskets.

Medicine men and the tribal beloved woman spoke at council meetings. Word passed along streams and into the hills that the Great Spirit of the Cherokee was troubled and was shaking the land with his wrath. His children had displeased him. They had taken the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• ISBN-13: 9798989609819 / 9798989609819