Growing Up Southern: December 12, 2017

Life was simpler, and fun a lot less expensive when I was growing up. If you were thinking of things to do, and there were lots of choices, one of the cheapest and most interesting was to go looking for “are-heads” along the bayou.

What were they? They were remnants of the original inhabitants of this spot of earth we now claim belongs to us. They were, mostly, stone artifacts left over from encampments along bayous or rivers. Yeah, yeah, Yankees and schoolteachers called them “arrowheads,” or more acceptably, “artifacts,” I cling to the old ways when I can.

I don’t know how old they were. We used to say those who made them appeared around 10,000 years ago in what is now the U.S. But, scholars have pushed the date back further and further. I have even heard the figure of 30,000 years. At any rate, they are old.

The makers disappeared from around here nearly two centuries ago. My father-in-law, born in 1923, always told us that he knew, as a kid, an old man, born a slave, who claimed to remember the last Indian family that lived along Baker’s Bayou in Lonoke County, Arkansas. He said the family “just disappeared” one day when the old man was a boy. That would have placed the extermination date around 1850, a guess supported by a state archeologist who visited us one day to help classify and locate the artifacts we had collected over the years.

I like to think the family migrated to better life. My wife thinks the Mother Ship picked them up and took them home. I hope she’s right and, with each day’s news, I scan the night sky more hopefully. Who knows? Perhaps those artifacts were part of a guidance system and that is why we, as a country, have lost our way.

Anyway, farther north but still in the county, where our farm is located, there aren’t any signs of settlements. It is interesting to note, though, that the property is located on what came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.” The name derived from the devastating effects of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, whereby the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. Estimates are that 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.

Ah, but America was “great” then according to our current leaders. Besides, the Cherokee people were just savages and not a group that civilized people—like us—could abide.

Or were they?

I read something interesting last evening. It seems that, during all the turmoil between white settlers and the Indian nations, there were countless cases in which immigrants to the new lands, either by flight or capture, spent time living among those “savages.” There are few recorded cases where such individuals later chose willingly to rejoin “civilized society.” By comparison, there are practically no recorded cases where native-Americans, once incarcerated among whites, chose to remain if offered the chance to return to their people.

I don’t hunt “are-heads” any more. I’m too old, too capable of enjoying more expensive pastimes, and have developed a brooding belief that those artifacts best remain where they

are.

Let us not, however, forget the tragic stories of the peoples who made them.

Just Thinking.