People of the Weeping Eye

Prologue The second week of October was always special for Mary Wet Bear. In her little frame house outside Tishumingo City, in Oklahoma, she began making pottery in midsummer. She did it in the old way, digging her own clay, washing it, and screening it through fabric. She formed the bowls with paddle and anvil. Then she incised the outside with a pointed piece of turkey bone, or a bit of copper wire. She fired them in her yard, using hardwood to create the bed of coals, and poplar to finish the process. Lastly, she dropped a dried corncob inside to burn hot and seal the clay. These vessels she carefully stored away, wrapping them in newspaper and setting them to the side on the floorboards of her creaky wooden porch. As each one was finished, she would look out at the apple tree, and watch the ripening fruit. When the fall colors came, and the apples had either fallen or been collected for preserves and pies, she would load her wrapped pots, one by one, onto the floor of her old Ford van. Inside, she would already have stowed her bedroll, Coleman stove, and lantern. The folded white canvas vendor's tent fit neatly under the wooden bed her cousin had built into the van's rear. She left the big blue plastic cooler by the side door to be filled at a Safeway in Tuscaloosa. Then she would start the engine and pull out of her narrow dirt driveway. The Ford van would nose its way down the drive, its sides caressed by thick stands of lilac. Peering through the cracked windshield, she would follow the back roads east. I-20 would have been faster, but the narrow county lanes winding from Oklahoma through Arkansas and Louisiana suited her just fine. She liked this route, far from the main thoroughfares. It reminded her of the old days, and left her marveling at the path her ancestors had taken on their journey west from the ancestral homelands. In Mississippi, she would stare at her worn road atlas and pick the least-traveled path toward Tupelo. In one of the state parks outside the city, she would camp for a night, sitting on her cooler, listening to the Spirits of the Old Ones. At times, if she was quiet, and drove thoughts of Washington, television shows, and the radio news from her souls, she would see them. The spirits of the Chickasaw still lingered in the deep forests and the swamps; their dark forms would flit between the oaks, shagbark hickory, and pines. The city of Tupelo, Mississippi, itself had been placed near a spot labeled Chickasaw Old Fields on the ancient maps. Sometimes she would Sing to the ephemeral ghosts, sensing their curiosity and delight as they crept closer to her van. She still knew some of the old Songshad learned them at her grandmother's knee on long-vanished nights in the Oklahoma summer. And when she packed to continue her journey, she left offerings of cornmeal and tobacco from cigarettes she had peeled free of paper. Crossing the divide east of the Tombigbee, she wound through the forested hills to Tuscaloosa, and the final leg. Through her window she would watch the trees, stare out into the white man's fields, and wave at the stolid-faced blacks who watched her pass. Even these newcomers had grown old in a land without time. She had first come to Tuscaloosa in the early fifties to study history. At the university, she had stumbled across a book, a big thing, written by a white man. The title had sounded exotic: Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Black Warrior River. The author had been a rich northern adventurer named Clarence B. Moore. She had stared at the drawings of decorated pottery, the fine stone axes, and the copper ax heads. A voice had whispered to her souls, familiar, haunting. The next day, she had driven south to Moundville: the little town beside the great mounGear, W. Michael is the author of 'People of the Weeping Eye', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765314383 and ISBN 076531438X.