Author Archives: sydlogsdon

741. In the Canebreak part 2

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Part 1 of this story was posted last week. An explanation of where it came from was posted on the fourteenth of October.

In the Canebrake part 2

Bullfrog and Salali hadn’t been the best pair of substitute parents, but Titus missed them. To be fair, he had been no prize either when they got him. Headstrong; too young to be independent, but determined to be independent anyway.

Titus had spent most of his time with Cotton. He learned Cherokee ways from the slave, the same way Cotton had learned them from Bullfrog when he was a boy.

“Was Francesca in your group?” Titus asked.

“Your wife? Why would she be with us? She wasn’t Cherokee.”

“The soldiers took her anyway.”

“That’s why you’re following?” Titus nodded. Cotton said, “I never saw her, but there were several groups that moved out at different times. She might have been in a different group.”

“Okay,” Titus said, swallowing his disappointment. “Don’t matter, I’ll still find her.”

Cotton bustled about the fire, pulling something out of the ashes. It was meat, long, slender, cylindrical. Snake. Titus didn’t mind snakes, as long as they were dead. And if they were dead, you might as well eat them. When Cotton started to tear it with his fingers, Titus said, “Don’t you have a knife?”

“Got nothing. I should have kept the shovel, but it seemed too much trouble.”

Titus went to his horse and took a knife out of his saddlebag. “Keep it,” he said as he handed it over. “I’ve got another one.” Cotton grunted his thanks and split the snake. It tasted like squirrel, and it was as welcome as a feast.

Except for munching, they ate in silence. Titus hadn’t seen Cotton in a couple of years, and the time showed in extra wrinkles. It was good to see him again.

Titus had been born to a German father who had died too soon, adopted by a Cherokee father who had not been able to handle him, and had learned most of what he knew from this black slave. Only he wasn’t really that black.

“Cotton,” he said, “how come you’re so pale?”

The older man said, “Shit!”, and grinned. He wouldn’t have answered that question for anybody else, but he had known Titus all the boy’s life, and had known and respected his real parents before that.

“It’s a long story, passed down,” he said. “My mother’s mother’s mother was a pale, good lookin’ woman. I suppose she had some white in her, I don’t know how much. Her master caught her one day in the fields and that’s how my granny came about. She was half white plus whatever her mother already was.

“My granny got sold to her master’s cousin, and he caught her out when she was washin’ clothes in the creek. That’s how my mother got to be three-quarters white, and then some.

“She got sold too, when she was still young. She grew up to be a rare, beautiful woman, mama did, so they made her a house slave and she had six of us. She never got married, but the boss’s son spent a lot of time in her room, so we all came out pale as cotton. That’s how I got my name.

“He kept my sisters and sold me to Bullfrog.”

Titus said, “I always wondered.”

Cotton shook his head, not so much angry as bemused. He said, “Hell, I’m whiter than half the so-called white people in Tennessee, for all the good it does me.”

Titus was quiet for a while, then stated the obvious, “So you’re going north to freedom. How far you going to go?”

“How far would you go?”

Titus chuckled. “Cotton, if you want my advice, keep walking north ’til your feet freeze to the ground. Then thaw them out and go further.”

“Sounds right.”

“You going to stay black, or pass for white?”

“What do you think? If I say I’m a free negro, what’ll that get me? If I say I’m white, they’ll treat me like a man.

“I’m going to find me a poor, good-lookin’ white woman, and we’re going to have a batch of pale colored kids. And I’m never going to tell her. And I’m never going to let my kids know that their daddy started out life as a nigger.”

— << >> —

The night wore on. There were worse things than bogles in the night around the two of them.

For Titus, there were soldiers; men, true enough, but full of evil intent. They were of his own people, his own white race, his own nation, but they had come for the Cherokees that his parents had devoted their lives to — that he had lived his life among. They had come for them and had carried them away, out of a country which had been theirs since before the white men ever came, and toward a land none of them had ever seen.

And for Cotton, there were men who looked like Titus — looked like Cotton, near enough, though they would never acknowledge it — men who would take him into captivity and sell his body as if it had no soul. As if he were not almost entirely white. As if some of those soldiers were not at least as black as he was — but don’t say it! They would kill you if you said it.

And what if Cotton had been all black, not mostly white. And what if Titus were a Cherokee, instead of Scots and German. And what if those soldiers were as white as they claimed to be. What then? Would it matter? Really matter?

— << >> —

So the wind made its noises in the canebrake, and the trees moaned. So Titus’s eyes were wide in a white face and Cotton’s eyes were wide in an almost-white face. So the waterhorses frolicked in the swamp, and the moccasins slithered through the stagnant water, and the frogs croaked like the toads of Armageddon.

So the darkness was filled with all the fearful creatures out of Scotland — and out of Africa as well, for that matter. Cotton, too, would have his own demons, brought with his people from their old home across the ocean, and now hiding in the canebrake with the bogles, and the soldiers, and the rattlesnakes.

Even if it weren’t All Hallow’s Eve — even if the barriers between Earth and Hell had not thinned and broken — they might as well have.

Cotton raised his cup and drank the tea made of herbs he had found in the swamp. He handed it across the fire, and Titus’s lips touched the same cup as he drank the same liquid. Cotton said, “In the morning I go north.”

Titus replied, “In the morning I go west.”

They would not meet again. They both knew it, but neither said so.

Fire and death and the hangman. The slave catchers and the block. They are all real, but a man goes on.

Still, it had been good to see Cotton one more time.

— << >> —

Not a Halloween story, you say? No ghosts? I disagree.

These wraiths of fiction never lived, and the men of that era who did live are long gone to wherever souls go. But they still haunt us today, and they will probably haunt our children as well.

Check back in January or February of 2027. There’s a book you’ll want to read, that talks about race and slavery and half-breeds. You see . . .

Your Redneck Granny has a Secret

. . . and you can read what that secret is. But I’ll bet you have already guessed.

finis

740. In the Canebreak part 1

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The background for this story was told last week.

740. In the Canebrake part 1

It was a long, cold afternoon, with spits of snow that were slow melting. There wasn’t any green left in the grass; it was all the crackly brown of late fall. The year was 1838; the month was somewhere in that no-man’s land where October slides into November on a path slippery with sleet.

Titus’s mare was holding out, but he was treating her with extra care since she had lamed up a week earlier. Somewhere ahead of him the main body of the displaced Cherokees was moving westward, but he didn’t know how far behind them he was. He had been riding after rumors, picked up at wood cutters’ camps and isolated cabins since he left eastern Tennessee. Now he was tangled up in a canebrake, following a narrow, muddy trail that paralleled one of the many tributaries of the Tennessee River. It wouldn’t be long now until he reached the Ohio — he thought. He hadn’t been really sure of his location for days, and the low overcast sky didn’t help any.

He pulled up at a familiar churring sound, followed by a slithering in the leaves. Canebrake rattler, probably. Titus had lived around snakes all his life, but he had never gotten to like them. Even worse were cottonmouths. They didn’t even have the decency to warn a man before they struck.

It was getting on dark, and the fog was rising from the stagnant waters beyond the trail. He was two days hungry and there wasn’t a scrap of food in his saddlebags. Pretty soon his horse would not be able to find her way ahead, but there was no place big enough or dry enough to spread a blanket. The tall canes around him seemed to close in as the light failed.

He could smell the swamp. He thought of waterhorses and the sluagh, and all the other fairy creatures his Scottish mother had told him about. Those weren’t comfortable thoughts for a night this dark and cold, on a trail this uncertain, at the approach of All Hallow’s Eve.

Something erupted from the brush at his side and hurled itself scrawking into the air. An egret probably, or maybe a heron, but when he saw it for a moment silhouetted against the moon, it became a boobrie, come all the way from the lochs of the highlands to haunt the Scottish half of his soul.

Then he saw the light, faint, almost luminescent in the distance. Perhaps the light of . . .

Titus took hold of his imagination and put it firmly away. What he needed to worry about tonight were not creatures designed to frighten children, but men with guns and knives, and the intent to do a traveller harm.

He eased forward; the sound of his horse’s hooves was swallowed up by the soft ground. There was a spot wide enough for a simple camp, and somebody had managed to find enough dry wood for a fire.

Then the mare stepped into a puddle. It was a small sound, but the figure by the fire vanished. First he was there and then he wasn’t, and he didn’t leave even a hint of movement in the canes.

Titus froze in place. His rifle was in a scabbard at his knee, but pulling it out now might cause the trouble he was trying to avoid. He hallooed the fire in a low voice, but got no answer.

Titus kicked his mare in the ribs and started forward, pausing at the edge of the firelight. He called out, “How about welcoming some company. I’ve been riding all day and this is the first wide spot in the trail I’ve seen in hours.”

Still no answer.

“I’m not going on in the dark. You might as well come out, unless you plan to stay squatting in the mud ’til morning.”

Still nothing, and a shiver ran up his spine. He wished he hadn’t been thinking of bogles. Then a voice out of the darkness called, “Titus?” It shook him; he had expected almost anything except someone who knew his name. “Is that you, Titus Young?” the soft voice repeated.

In answer, he kneed his horse and rode further into the light of the fire. The hidden voice said, “You scared hell out of me.”

“You didn’t do my heart any good either, Cotton.”

A man of middle age came out of the canebrake and Titus swung down to walk up to the fire. Even though they had known each other most of Titus’s life, they didn’t shake hands, because Cotton was a slave.

Or had been. The fact that he was alone in the dark, not far from the Ohio border suggested he had run away. That left a lot of questions. Titus had been told that the Cherokees were allowed to take their slaves with them, and Cotton had been with Bullfrog since he was a boy.

Cotton was the one who had taught Titus most of what he knew about hunting, fishing, and tracking, and just keeping alive in the hills and the swamps. That counted for a lot, but Bullfrog and Salali were the Cherokee couple who had adopted Titus when his parents died. Even if Chief Ross had told them to do it, and even if Bullfrog hadn’t paid much attention to him afterward, Titus still owed them both a debt of loyalty.

Titus asked, “Why are you here? What happened to Bullfrog and Salali?”

“I’m sorry to tell you, Titus,” the older man said. “I stayed with them as long as they were alive.”

“Go on.”

“Salali was sick all summer. By the time we left, she had no business traveling, but the soldiers didn’t give us any choice. She died two days along the trail.”

“And Bullfrog?”

“He was hurt bad inside when Salali died. He rode all day, he ate, he laid under his blanket at night, but I don’t think he ever slept. After about two weeks, he died too.

“The soldiers didn’t want to give us time to bury him, so I carried him out of camp in the middle of the night. Those soldiers weren’t much. It wasn’t hard to avoid them. I found a nice place under a pecan tree and buried him, same as I had buried Salali. When I finished, I stuck the shovel in the ground like a gravestone and started walking north. I was already out of the camp and there was no reason to go back.”

this story concludes next week

739. Half-breeds, again

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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.

—<<>>—

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.

738. Arbroath 1320, Trump 2026

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The Declaration of Arbroath

In 1320, the Scots had recently been at war with the English. The Pope had sided with the English, and had twice excommunicated the Scottish King.

The Scottish barons penned a letter to the Pope, requesting the lifting of the excommunication, and proclaiming the right to chose their own King, and to depose him if he failed them. It became known as the Declaration of Arbroath.

But after all, if the prince shall leave these principles . . . we will immediately endeavour to expel him as our enemy . . . and will make another King who will defend our liberties. For as long as there shall but one hundred of us remain alive, we shall never consent to subject ourselves . . . For it is not glory, it is not riches, neither is it honour, but it is liberty alone that we fight and contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life.

These stirring words have been rightly seen as Scotland’s Declaration of Independence. The document refers to very specific historical events, so a few bits had to be snipped out to make it readable for Americans today.

For those of you who never quite believe what you read (and more power to you) here is the Declaration with the snippets replaced.

But after all, if the prince shall leave these principles he hath so nobly pursued, and consent that we and our kingdom  be subjected to the King or people of England, we will immediately endeavour to expel him as our enemy, and as the subverter both of his own and our rights, and will make another King who will defend our liberties. For as long as there shall but one hundred of us remain alive, we shall never consent to subject ourselves to the dominion of the English. For it is not glory, it is not riches, neither is it honour, but it is liberty alone that we fight and contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life.

Despite the specific issues it addresses, the Declaration of Arbroath reads as a general indictment of tyranny. It stands beside the Magna Carta and the American Declaration of Independence as documents which, when fought for, brought liberty.

So why am I talking about it today? Because it speaks of removing a King who tramples the liberties of the people.

Trump is a near tyrant. He would like to be completely unrestrained, but he hasn’t quite accomplished it yet.

The Justice Department is in his pocket. The courts are not, but the Supreme Court is filled with his supporters. The Congress is no longer a check on his excesses. Tyranny is half accomplished.

Trump is not on the ballot, and the courts are not on the ballot.

Congress is.

It’s time to vote.

737. 9/11 Plus 25 Years

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This has been posted before, but it had to be repeated in honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.  SL

I was in the shower getting ready for a day at school when my wife called to me. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I dried and dressed, the second plane had hit.

Twenty minutes later, driving to work, I listened to the radio as the towers fell.

All day long I taught science to sixth graders, keeping to the lesson plan. I didn’t want to teach, and no one wanted to listen, but it was necessary to keep a semblance of normalcy. Every break we teachers watched the television, but we didn’t take any news back to the classroom. Our students needed to be in their own homes, with their parents, before they began to deal with the details of America’s disaster.

At the end of the day, I drove home. I had upon me the need to write, but not of the tragedy. Others wrote that day of what had happened, and wrote well. I needed to write of love and joy and beauty – and of my wife who is all those things to me.

Poems come slowly to me; usually they take years to complete. This one rolled freely about in my head as I drove, and when I arrived at home, I only had to write it down.

                    There Am I

Where there is water, there am I.
In sweet, soft rain and in hard rain,
driving and howling,
or filling the air with luminescent mist.
Water is life, and there am I.

Where there is sun, there am I.
In the soft heat of morning or in the harsh afternoon,
or heavy with moisture, forcing its way through clouds,
or dry as a lizard’s back.
Where the Sun is, is life, and there am I.

Where Earth is, there am I.
Whether dark loam, freshly plowed
or webbed with fissures, hard as stone,
or sandy, or soft as moss.
Where Earth is, is life, and there am I.

Where life is, there am I.
rainforest or desert,
broad plains of grass, or brooding jungle,
Where life is, there am I.

Where She is, there is life,
and sun and rain and earth, and all good things.
Where She is, is life,
And there am I.

The “I” was supposed to be me, of course, speaking of my own love for wilderness, and “She” was, of course, my wife.

However, when it was done it felt more like a religious poem. Strike the last verse, let the “I” be God and it sounds like something written by someone with a great deal more faith than I have. Odd.

736. Dogwood Spring

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I wrote this a little over nine years ago. It’s all still true, the writing and the poem

— << >> —

The California dogwoods are in bloom. Today my wife and I took a drive along our favorite semi-secret road to see them. The road isn’t really secret, nor even secluded, but it is off the beaten track. People who don’t live on it, rarely use it. We wound through twists and turns, admiring the green fields and placid cattle, down a steep trail to a hairpin curve at the bottom where a vernal creek rushes through a culvert.

In summer, this is a pool and a trickle, but it has been an exceptionally wet spring and the steep hill behind the pool now provides a double waterfall. We stopped. I admired the bounty of water while my wife took pictures of the dogwoods.

Just at the point where the pool empties into the culvert, there was a clump of grass, rooted in a crack in the rock, partially submerged in the rushing stream. You could see that it had only been growing a few weeks, and shortly the water will fall. When that happens, there will not be soil enough to support the clump, and it will die. But for now, the clump of grass was wiggling and tossing in the water, happy as a hummingbird.

This quatrain occurred to me as I watched.

Though the bee did not come,
And the fruit did not form,
It does not follow
That the blossom lived in vain.

Like any natural poem, you could apply it to a number of situations. Any un- or under-published author will know what I mean.          March 29, 2017

735. In the Middle

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I grew up in a firmly Republican household. Democrats were fools and maybe pinkos. (It was the fifties.) Black marchers in the deep South were just outside agitators from the North.

Watching people being firehosed for asking to be treated as humans convinced me that the last part was wrong. Just observing the world convinced me that the first part was wrong.

But it didn’t make me a Democrat. Just because X is wrong, that doesn’t mean Y is right.

My background does make me want to scream when some talking head says that were are “so polarized, more than we ever have been.” Really? Perhaps they should read a history book. America has always been polarized. We even fought a war over our polarization back in the 1860s.

When my parents hated Democrats, and Democrats probably hated my parents, they were just being the same kind of abrasive American we have always been.

So I have chosen to be neither an Elephant nor a Donkey, just a stubborn schmuck who listens to both sides.

Let me put that in the fewest possible words:

Every opinion has another set against it.
Learn only one opinion, and you think you know everything.
Learn the other and you find yourself right back to knowing nothing.

As Spock said to Kirk, “The answer probably lies somwhere in the middle.” But where in the middle? That’s the hard part, and it is up to you to figure it out.

That is, unless you want to stamp a Donkey or and Elephant on your forehead and stop thinking altogether.

734. A Rant from the Past

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As I have said recently, I am running short on hours to provide a quality post every week, so I have decided to republish a few oldies. Hold on to your hat . . .

This is from post 53, November 30, 2015. I was fighting a new bad thing, which is now an old bad thing, accepted by everybody, and vicious pollutant of the English language.

.          .          .

Dear reader, batten down the hatches. I am going to rant.

I work very hard at appearing calm, balanced, and of “an equable disposition”. It’s all a lie. I really live at a slow simmer, ready to break into a full boil.

I hate ignorance, complacency, and sloppiness, which makes it very hard to watch TV news and all but impossible to watch commercials. I can’t drink coffee while watching TV for fear I’ll throw my mug at the screen.

Of all the irritants in daily life, probably nothing grinds my gears as much as those who torture the English language while thinking they are speaking well.

So, get ready . . .

Small means little. Little means small. What does small-little mean? Is it smaller than little, or littler than small? Despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever, small-little seems to have completely replaced both small and little in everyday speech.

Arrggh!

First ever — are you kidding me? First ever! First means first. Period. It is an absolute. All reasonable modifiers added to first reduce the field over which it is absolute. The first person to graduate from Harvard is absolute. The first black person to graduate from Harvard is also absolute, but from a smaller set of people. The first left handed, gay, Canadian Mormon to graduate from Harvard is absolute, from a yet smaller set.

Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Saying he is the first ever man is space doesn’t make the statement more absolute, it just makes the person speaking seem ignorant.

If you’re first, you’re first. Saying first ever doesn’t make you more first. It doesn’t make you any firster.

What next? Infinity-er, followed by infinity-est?

Arrggh!

The English language changes constantly. What is normal today is likely to seem quaint tomorrow. Despite this rant, I have no problem embracing change, but as users of the English language we still have one obligation.

If the change is stupid, don’t use it.

Still No Number

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Hi again, I wrote the post below about seven this morning (PDT). Since I am still getting used to the peculiarities of the new block system, when I set it for 16:00 on 24 hour time, it thought I meant 4 AM instead of 4 PM. WordPress posted this three hours before I wrote it. Oops, time travel. My fault. No fault of the system, but now I wonder if it got through, so here it is again. Sorry about that.

==================

Hi folks,

This will be short. I may not have a post every Wednesday going forward. (Or I might.)

Since I am not attaching tags, or pretty picture to catch the eye, this will probably only be read by those who get it automatically. That’s the plan, anyway.

The simple fact is that I am swamped with putting together books for self-publication, with prepping one for conventional submission, and I still have an offscreen life.

Putting out posts on a regular schedule amounts to a soft contract with the reader, so I am letting you know — nothing wrong, just swamped. Thanks.

No Number

1 Reply

Hi folks,

This will be short. I may not have a post every Wednesday going forward. (Or I might.)

Since I am not attaching tags, or pretty picture to catch the eye, this will probably only be read by those who get it automatically. That’s the plan, anyway.

The simple fact is that I am swamped with putting together books for self-publication, with prepping one for conventional submission, and I still have an offscreen life.

Putting out posts on a regular schedule amounts to a soft contract with the reader, so I am letting you know — nothing wrong, just swamped. Thanks.