The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

People did not really understand who they were until they had been tested, and then came the terrible surprise that they did not know who this new person was either.

“What I have heard from the Mandan and Sioux is that the Comanche are perpetually in a state of war with everybody. A Brulé Sioux man, an old man, said they had come from beyond the Rocky Mountains and simply leapt on everybody like tigers. Now you need a spirit stove and a sou’wester.”

“The Indians are what we have made them,” said Dr. Reed. “Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.”

North Texas was a good place to be a black man; slave or free, they were all expected to carry arms. Every hand was needed to a gun or a plow or a branding iron and there were no records and what with the chaos of the war and incessant guerilla warfare with the Comanche and the Kiowa a person could pretty well do what he liked and he could be whatever he took a mind to as long as he had a strong back and a good aim. Britt walked to meet the men out of the smoke of the grass fires that burned in long, thin lines across his pastures.

Vesey said there would be the men coming home, towns going up. That’s the place for a free nigger, is freighting. That’s what the free niggers did in the South, done it for years. White men don’t care if you freight or barber. Now I don’t want to be a barber. I’d cut somebody’s ear off by mistake and they’d lynch me. “Don’t make jokes like that,” said Britt.

This was a world unto itself that lay between the Canadian River and the Rio Grande as if it had been designated on the day that God made it as the place where men would come to fight and kill one another. The Texans had brought their women and their children and their slaves right into the middle of the war land and expected to set up houses and fields and herds and live as if they were in Maryland, and were surprised on moonlit nights like this when Comanche arrows sang through the air in the dark.

rinches

A derogatory term used by Comanche and Mexicans to put down the Texas Ranger Companies.

“They sang as they came into camp. Fifty men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms and ranches of the enemy. And somebody started up a mourning song for Eaten Alive’s little brother, ah, it made me cry to hear them singing as they rode. You could hear their voices for a mile. They had a red scalp and two blond scalps, very long ones that waved and shook in the wind, and in that hair was the soul of the enemy held tight, tight. There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”

“Oh, I think we want to try some unusual methods in dealing with the Indian people. Honesty. Honoring our treaties with them. We will not use the military. Not on my agency.”

“Yes, novel and untried,” said Deaver. He took up his knife and fork. “So they have given the most warlike tribes on the plains into the hands of Quakers. The most warlike and the least known. How interesting life is. How strange.” He ate a large bite of his steak. “How peculiar are the ways of government.”

malmsey.”

A fortified Madeira wine

“Various realities out here unknown in the East, as I have learned.” He cleared his throat. “Here is the legal situation. It is illegal for Texas state troops or ranger companies to cross the Red River into Indian Territory and onto this reservation. It is against our orders to pursue raiding Indians over the line as well, even in hot pursuit. Once they come onto the reservation they are not to be confronted. In addition the reconstruction government in Texas is forbidding any state militia or ranger companies at all. The new requirements are that we cannot use force in any way. I am very happy with that. Believe me. But they do raid down into Texas, and they take captives. They say that was their hunting and raiding country long before we came. Then the parents and relatives come here to the agency and want the agency to get their children back, or whoever, but unless we offer money and trade goods we’re bolloxed.”

That night Samuel sent the guards back to Fort Sill. He would not have uniformed army soldiers anywhere near the agency buildings. He would win over these people with patience and kindness. They would understand that white men were no threat to them and would not attack them, or take their land, and thus they would leave off their raiding.

pendejos.”

Stupid or contemptible person. Derogatory or vulgar: asshole, scum bag, or dirt bag

As they rode Tissoyo spoke of the death of all the old people when his father was young, from the sickness that had come with the wagons that were going west. The wagons were all full of men and they were anxious to get to someplace called California. The fever was a malediction that grew and spread and ate people. It was invisible in the plains air but slaughtered whole villages nonetheless. They lay down and died and rotted in their tipis and whoever could walk or get on a horse left them there. Once a small girl lived through the fever in one of those decaying tipis, alone among the dead. She walked out on the empty land and a man called Twisted Horn came upon her but did not know whether she was still inhabited by the hostile, acidic beings, and so he left food and blankets for her, and stayed by her at a distance for days until it was clear she was going to live and that the fever had left her. Then he took her up behind him. Her face was full of holes as if she had been shot with birdshot.

I consider how we have crowded them and dispossessed them from the Atlantic on westward. They have been driven and harried and cheated. Perhaps they feel that by taking captives they will convince us to stop.”

“How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

“They are our great mystery. They are America’s great otherwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”

Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”

bannocks

Bannock is a variety of flat quick bread or any large, round article baked or cooked from grain. A bannock is usually cut into sections before serving

jorongo,

full-length poncho masculine noun, Spanish

Britt said, “I closed the deal on Lottie Durgan and we are talking about her grandmother, Elizabeth Fitzgerald. I can get her cheap.” “Jesus,” said the major. Here was a black man bargaining for the price of a white woman. The world had turned upside down.

Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach itself from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.

four-point Hudson’s Bay blanket.”

A Hudson's Bay point blanket is a type of wool blanket traded by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in British North America (now Canada) and the United States during the 1700s and 1800s. The company is named for the Hudson Bay and the blankets were typically traded to First Nations in exchange for beaver pelts

She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.

Osage orange. It was also called bois d’arc.

The trees acquired the name bois d'arc, or "bow-wood",[3] from early Frenchsettlers who observed the wood being used for war clubs and bow-making by Native Americans.[10] Meriwether Lewis was told that the people of the Osage Nation, "So much … esteem the wood of this tree for the purpose of making their bows, that they travel many hundreds of miles in quest of it."[12] The trees are also known as "bodark" or "bodarc" trees, most likely originating from a corruption of "bois d'arc."[3] The Comanches also used this wood for their bows.[13] It was popular with them because it was strong, flexible and durable,[3] and was common along river bottoms of the Comanchería. Some historians believe that the high value this wood had to Native Americans throughout North America for the making of bows, along with its small natural range, contributed to the great wealth of the Spiroan Mississippian culturethat controlled all the land in which these trees grew.

Britt stood outside and watched the regimental band straggling back to the barracks with their instruments in hand. Troopers of the new black Ninth Cavalry had been dismissed and were housing their guidons in the long leather cases. They walked back to the stables, leading their horses. All bays. Brown shoe polish had been used on those horses with white blazes or socks and so they all looked alike.

The 9th Cavalry was one of the original six regiments of the regular U.S. Army set aside for black enlisted men. These were authorized by Congress in the act of July 28, 1866 reorganizing the army for post-Civil War service, mainly against native peoples in the West. Colonel Edward Hatch, an officer with no military experience prior to the Civil War but who distinguished himself as the commander of an Iowa cavalry regiment during the rebellion, was the 9th’s first commander. Initial recruiting efforts centered on New Orleans and vicinity. By February 1867, twelve companies were organized and on their way to Texas. The regiment participated in numerous frontier campaigns, against the Comanche, the Ute, and most notably the Apache between 1877 and 1881. In the early 1880s it also engaged in efforts to restrain settlers seeking to take up land in Indian Territory before that area was legally open. In the 1870s the regiment was involved in the El Paso Salt War and in the 1890s it participated in efforts to restore order in the wake of the Johnson County, Wyoming Cattle War (1892) and railroad labor disputes (1894). Colonel Hatch remained in command until his death at Fort Robinson, Nebraska in April 1889. Forty-four of its soldiers were killed in action during this period, 28 against the Apaches. Eleven members of the regiment received the Medal of Honor for actions between 1870 and 1890. Sergeant Emanuel Stance was the first in 1870. He was followed by Sergeant Thomas Boyne, Private John Denny, Corporal Clinton Greaves, Private Henry Johnson, Sergeant George Jordan, Sergeant Thomas Shaw, Sergeant Augustus Walley, Sergeant Moses Williams, Corporal William Wilson, and Sergeant Brent Woods. All of the awards were for bravery in combat against Indians, eight against Apaches. The term Buffalo Soldier was used by the Native American warriors who fought against the Ninth Cavalry.

For a moment he asked himself where it would be better. Cities of the North, with their sections for blacks only. The South in ruins and seething with bitter ex-Confederates and confused and rootless freedmen. Unknown places with unknown rules, and all in a perilous state of flux.

Britt's thoughts on post bellum America

Britt carried ammunition to Fort Belknap for the Ninth Cavalry, who were allowed to gallop after the Comanche raiders as far north as the Red. They stopped and watered their horses from the silky oranges and reds of the river. The black Ninth Cavalrymen slapped their hands together in frustration. They wanted a fight. They wanted to prove themselves. Instead they had a boil-up of coffee and ate some biscuits. Then they tightened their cinches on the hated McClellan army saddles and turned around and came back.

“Ven y muere, pendejo.”

Translation: Come and die, pendejo. Pendejo: Literally, a pubic hair. Idiom: Fool, idiot, or asshole.

“Donde está mi hijito negrito? Ladron.” Britt laid his rifle barrel

Where is my little boy thief (robber)?

Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, traveling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.

Captain Kidd was an elderly man who read all the newspapers he could find in Dallas and then he traveled from town to town and told the news both foreign and domestic.

Captain Kidd is the protagonist in Jiles' "News of the World."

“And now an amendment has been got up between the several states,” said Captain Kidd. He stared out over the men and the women with their pancake hats, their bonnets, as if in a trance. He seemed to be receiving messages from another world. “It is the Fifteenth Amendment to our glorious Constitution which Constitution was written under threat of arrest and execution by our forefathers who signed their names and their honor and their sacred fortunes. This Fifteenth Amendment allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servitude. That means colored gentlemen. That means the sons of Ham.

All he had was the story of his life, which was as good as any other man’s, and in the end it is all we have.

Britt Johnson is mentioned in many histories of north Texas, and the accounts are often contradictory or confusing. They all come down to two or three oral histories taken down in the early 1900s, and three pieces of hard evidence; a census of 1860, an 1864 muster of a scouting company, and the diary of Samuel A. Kingman, who was present at the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 and whose diary mentions Britt Johnson in search of captives. The story of Britt’s journey to rescue his wife and children from captivity is beyond doubt, as are the brief accounts of his life afterward. Entering Britt’s name in a search engine will lead to several good Web sites. This is a work of fiction, but any full rendering of Britt’s story would of necessity be close to fiction since there is so little to go on, but that little is arresting and quite moving. I have sorted out the names of his children and of his former “owner” as best I could. Many of the Comanche and Kiowa people named here were real people, such as Kicking Bird, Toshana, Hears the Dawn, Aperian Crow, Esa Havey, Setanta, Satank, and Old Man Komah. Others are invented. Sergeant Elijah Earl was a real person, as were Dennis Cureton, Vesey Smith, Paint Crawford, and Medal of Honor winner Emmanuel

From Paulette Jiles ' Afterword