Stone South Wind - II
Found in a Diary
1
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Found in a diary:
Gettysburg, 2nd July
I was killed.
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It All Began with Pennell Pittman
“1. Light may be provisionally defined as the physical agency by means of which the eye receives the sensation of sight.”
Introduction to Physical Optics Robertson
Stir up history, and make it grand with words out of legend - and even mythology. It all begins with Pennell Pittman – I suppose – but some people would object and say it all begin with the Queen, that is the Mary Queen of Scots. But I do not take this kind of elaborate querying of things, and so I say it began on one Kentucky morning when Pennell set off on his way. It was before the war, whether one calls it The Civil War – or one still holds to the old Southern way of calling it “The War Between the States.” Why I do not this, why will be explained eventually – but back to a year that was before any of that when the sun had just slipped beyond the dawn and was making its way – very slowly – towards morning above the clouds. There were oaks, maples, and a few pine trees, spread out over some foothills – which the locals called mountains, never having seen the or even the Ozarks.
Understand that in that region of the world, it is night and day in a flash – twilight comes quickly, and the dew is congealed alone the bluegrass – with long rolling meadows interrupted by those aforementioned hills trailing off into the West. He was alone in this world, having his parents goodbye. A couple of others tell the tale, and they branch distinctly because Pennell Pittman was the father father father – give or take a mother or to - to half the country – or so it seemed. Virtually every story contains tracks that lead back to him. At this point he wandered south into Tennessee – but found the same problems which he had found in Kentucky – it was too crowded.
Way West he set his course, beyond the bounds that still held the United States. At that time, they would say the United States “are”, rather than the United States “is”, because as one man in New York put it “it was the only aggregation of communities, not a nation at all.” Everywhere man looked out his front porch, and if he was out in the West, he may not see anyone at all except his wife and his children – that was his nation under God.
Several days since he had left, each time he realized that the sun was slightly later in the when he got to the Mississippi River. Up in the north, the Mississippi was scant, like any other river in the world, but after Illinois, it became something larger, grander – a torrent that would eventually stretch a mile from side to side. This is what men called the Mississippi when they were thinking about the broad Mississippi. - Mark Twain, originally meant “even marked”. It took him a day to etch out a canoe, he only had a knife to do it with – and then he set off along the river, taking care to measure the water level. He knew that there were some depths that had almost no bottom. After another day, he made the other side – there were byways which made it easier. Then he was on the other side, upon Missouri way. You have to pronounce it correctly, with 3 syllables, not two, and with that twang that only someone from Missourah would use. Then, he went up into the foothills of the Ozarks – near the Arkansas border and settled down. He did not know whether he would raise corn, or chickens, or some other variant, such as cattle - perhaps he would raise all of the above. It was not like Kentucky, the earth was hard and mostly barren, though he found a good patch that would make tolerable farming. You will have to excuse my plain speaking, that is the way things are in Missouri.
Some other folks arrived, and after some consideration, he married one of the daughters – this is where various people start the story, but not I. For you see, the daughter he had married died, and this begins another part of the tale. For you see, the next person that he married was a Cherokee Indian. There is some confusion about how he came to marry her – some say that he found her wandering along with the bushes, and since he could not imagine someone unrelated to him – he married her, though it would be some time before slept up together. There are other variants on detail, but most gloss over the fact that she loved him, and he loved her. But they do tell of an interesting part of the story – where she gave to him four stones. They were carved and represented the 4 winds of her ancestors, no one how old they were. He thus learned how to be one of the Ani-Yunwiya and learn to speak Tsalagi – the language of the Cherokee people. He learned deep into the unwritten history – particularly of the forced removal that her tribe had suffered from Georgia. White people would describe him as a medicine man – powerful in the spirit ways. His daughter carried on the tradition and would marry a man who eventually to become both a Baptist preacher and a Cherokee medicine man. He even had his bones interred in the Cherokee way, standing up facing to the West. Certain things remain true, even on to this day.
I am sorry to take so long to recount this tale, but it is important to show where you come from, though my complexion is passed off as white, that is
only partially true. The Cherokee blood shows through, especially in my feet and hands – and that I can not drink alcohol, because it is not from my Scottish ancestors that the weakness for alcohol comes through. So, my family warred in the civil war, married and married again, and in the turn of the 20th century, I was born. Little did we know that great changes were occurring, only the hint that was what was then called “The Great War”.