Half-breeds, again

I’m not into things that go bump in the night, but if there were ever a holiday that calls for the telling of stories, it would be All Hallows Eve. This was first posted during the Halloween season of 2019. It is a scene that was planned for a historical novel, but that novel was never written. Today I’ll tell you why the novel never came about, and show you a scene that did.

This was originally posted a decade ago, over four days. This year I will squeeze it into today, next week, and the week after. That will finish just before Halloween.

Of all the novels I’ve written in my head, but never on paper, Titus Young is the most complete. I know who my protagonist is, I know his antecedents, and I know his offspring. Titus Young is the middle book in three well plotted but mostly unwritten generational historical novels which carry members of his family from Pennsylvania to the Cherokee lands of Tennessee, and finally to Oklahoma.

I would write them all if it weren’t for money. Money? Yes; I could write five SF novels in the time it would take me to research and write one lengthy historical, so I can’t afford Titus Young or the other two. Simple but sad.

Titus Young himself was a half breed — half Scottish and half German, that is. I assume that the term half breed is offensive now; I certainly haven’t heard it in years. During my childhood it was in common use especially in Oklahoma, formerly known as Indian Territory.

Nevertheless, now that I’ve gotten your attention, I will switch to mixed race to avoid offending modern sensibilities.

Titus’s Scottish mother met his German-speaking Moravian father and they married in the unwritten novel Nativity. They moved from Pennsylvania to south-eastern Tennessee to be missionaries to the Cherokees. Moravians often did that. Titus was born there and the Youngs became respected for their compassionate work. When Titus’s parents died during an epidemic, John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokees, himself mixed race Scottish and Cherokee, arranged for Titus to be adopted by one of his relatives. Thus Scottish-German Titus became legally Cherokee, without a drop of Indian blood.

As a young man, Titus took a flatboat down the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers with a load of cargo for New Orleans. His boatmates were two white brothers. They sold their wares in New Orleans, but on their return up the Nachez Trace a disagreement led to a lifelong feud.

While in New Orleans, Titus met and courted a beautiful young Italian girl. Actually, she had an Italian father and a Natchez Indian mother, but she so hated her Indian heritage that she chose to pass as Italian. On a later trip to New Orleans, Titus met her again and they married. They returned to Tennessee where they opened a store.

Some years later, the events leading up to the Cherokee removal occurred. When the soldiers come to round up the Cherokees, Titus was away. His old enemies informed the soldiers that Titus and his wife were Cherokee.

Titus’s wife was half Indian, but no one knew that. She was believed to be Italian, and Titus was Scots-German, but Titus was an adopted Cherokee and she was married to him. That was enough for the soldiers. She was taken away with the rest of the tribe.

This irony of this left her with much soul-searching to do as she experienced the horrors of the Trail of Tears, and saw those horrors inflicted on her husband’s adopted people.

Titus returned, found himself a fugitive, found his enemies in possession of his business, wrought a bit of revenge, then fled. He headed west, following the path on which the soldiers had taken the Cherokees. While he was on this journey, he came across a runaway slave named Cotton, whom he knew from when he was a boy, and that scene formed 2019’s Halloween posts.

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In the 1830’s, America was full of half-breeds (to use the then contemporary term). Even more appear in this story than I’ve presented so far. A lot of them were passing for white, and making life hard for the half-breeds who weren’t passing. Gay people didn’t invent the idea of being in the closet. We’ve always had closets.

Over the course of  years, I have written about race in all it’s permutations. Those posts will be gathered together in a book called . . .

Your Redneck Granny has a Secret

. . . which is presently scheduled to be published early next year, some time between MLK Day and the end of Black History Month.