Doc - Mary Doria Russell [26]
What in hell are you? That’s what everyone wanted to know, and Johnnie would try to tell them sometimes but it was complicated and hardly anybody wanted to listen that long. Course, listening was the pleasure of it for Doc and to make it a fair exchange, he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.
“You’re a map,” Johnnie said judiciously. “Me? I’m a mixed multitude.”
His family had an interesting story, and Johnnie thought it was true. His daddy had told him over and over, “Don’t you forget this, boy. You tell your children and granbabies every word I say.” So Johnnie listened hard every time, though the story was always the same.
“Daddy was a Black Seminole,” he told Doc. “Seminole ain’t a tribe. It’s a word. It means ‘runaway’ in Indian. Seminoles was rebel Creeks, and Muskogee and Yuchi, and some was fugitive slaves. None of them would bow down. Daddy said that was important: the ancestors wouldn’t never bow down. Seminoles lived way off deep in the swamps of Florida. Florida is a jungle, like Africa, with deadly snakes and gators. Gators’re big lizards,” he informed Doc helpfully, “longer than a man stretched out.”
Johnnie’s grandaddy was named Yusif and he came from Africa, so he knew all about jungles and wasn’t scared. “Yusif could read and write Arab, Daddy said. I don’t know if readin’ Arab is the same as bein’ Arab. What do you think, Doc?” he asked, and he was a little disappointed when “Not necessarily” was the best the dentist could do.
“Granny Sal was a Georgia slave what run off,” Johnnie told him. “Her daddy was white and he tried to get her back because she was worth a lot of money, but she joined up with the Seminoles.” Sal married Yusif and taught their children the English that Johnnie learned from his father, which accounted for the boy’s accent. Johnnie said he’d cleaned up his grammar at St. Francis, a mission school near Wichita that he’d attended until recently. Time spent among the illiterate here in Dodge had evidently undermined the improvement some.
“My daddy didn’t get no schoolin’,” Johnnie told Doc, “but he could talk Mexican and Creek, and some Arab from Grandaddy Yusif. Daddy always told me, ‘You come from educated people. Don’t never believe white folks tell you Africans was ignorant.’ ”
The Spanish and the English and the Americans all sent armies into Florida to fight the Seminoles. Georgia slave owners sent militia in, too, hunting fugitives like Yusif and Sal. “Didn’t matter a lick who they sent to Florida,” Johnnie said. “White folks’d get lost, or die of sicknesses, or get killed by Seminole warriors.”
“Remember the names, boy,” his daddy always said. “They had Andrew Jackson and General Gaines and General Jessup and Zachary Taylor, but we had Billy Bowlegs and Osceola and Wild Cat and John Horse. And we was always tri-un-fant.”
That’s how his daddy said it. Tri-un-fant.
At some point, Wild Cat and John Horse led their people from Florida to Mexico. Johnnie was a little hazy about that part, but he was sure that Texas hunters started raiding into Mexico, thieving livestock and dragging Black Seminoles back to sell them for slaves in America.
“They was a war about it,” Johnnie told Doc. “Daddy said Seminoles fought twenty battles ’longside the Mexican army and whipped them Texans every time.”
As far as Johnnie knew, the only thing that ever beat the Seminoles was smallpox. Smallpox carried off his Granny Sal and two of his uncles and his aunt, who Johnnie never got to meet, and it had marred his daddy’s handsome face.
When slavery was done in the United States, it was John Horse who led the Black Seminoles into Fort Duncan in Texas, where the menfolk joined the United States Army. “They was called the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” Johnnie said, head high. “They was four thousand of them, Doc! They could track anybody, they could fight anybody, and they was—”
“Always tri-un-fant,” Doc finished with him, smiling.