In the last post about the Front Porch Republic I mentioned how Nikita Khrushchev didn’t care to have his mother sitting outside their apartment building, zavalinka-style, because in Stalin’s Russia these heart-to-heart discussions could get you killed. Ken of Palm Beach Bike Tours commented on the front porches of his childhood, saying they were good places to tell lies and gossip. So it seems they can be bad places to tell the truth and good places to tell lies. But I’ll bet it sometimes works the other way around, too.

I said I didn’t have a photo of a zavalinka. It’s true, I don’t have one of my own. But above are image excerpts of a couple I found on the web. You can click on the images to go to the web pages that contain the complete originals.

Scenes like the above on the left can be seen in old Russian movies. I infer from what I’ve found by googling that while zavalinka literally means “mound of earth”, the mound can be almost any kind of bench where people can sit and visit in front of a home. The one on the right is one of the strangest I’ve found. It seems to be made from an old railway car.

And judging by movies I’ve seen, Nikita Khrushchev’s mother was far from the only person who brought the peasant style of visitation to the big city. Scenes of women sitting outside their city apartment buildings and gossiping are a staple of older Russian movies.

While googling I also learned that “savilinka” is part of the name of several Russian blogs and discussion forums. The Front Porch Republic people are not exactly innovators in making the analogous type of connection in English, it seems.

BTW, I hope I’m not giving out misinformation, because if I do I’m liable to get caught at it. All three of my blogs get a lot of visitors from Russia. In all three blogs the 2nd leading country that provides visitors is Russia, and Russia has a huge lead over whichever country is third. I was surprised to find that ranking a few days ago. I don’t know when it started to be that way, but it hasn’t always been.

Even though this is not the front porch of a residence, I think it qualifies as an American-style zavalinka. It’s across from the courthouse in Dadeville, Alabama, the county seat for Tallapoosa County. The photo was taken on a bike ride in early April 2006. It looks like only one rocking chair on the far end of the row is occupied. It would be interesting to see and hear what it’s like on hot summer days. Or does air conditioning now have greater attraction to the old men of the town than the shade of the big awning?

This is the courthouse building that can be scene from the row of rocking chairs. It’s where Nate Shaw/Ned Cobb of “All God’s Dangers” was put on trial in the early 1930s. His story was one of two historical episodes that got me on a bicycle tour to this part of Alabama. Cobb/Shaw had used a gun to try to defend his private property rights at his home several miles south of Dadeville. Ironically, it was the American Communist Party, not usually thought of as a defender of property rights, that provided a defense lawyer for him. It also provided his wife with a small monthly payment so she could make ends meet while her husband was in prison. A few days before my visit to Dadeville I had ridden past the prison where he spent most of his 12-year sentence. Photos of that ride are here.

It’s good to sit on a zavalinka and talk about such things.

[Late edit:  If I'm going to write a post about zavalinka, I suppose I should spell it consistently.]

I wasn’t looking at front porches in particular when I stopped to take a photo of this house. It was on a bike ride I did in April 2006, between Auburn and Tuskegee, Alabama. It looks like it has both a front porch facing the road and a back porch.

This Greek Revival house is in the northeast corner of Kalamazoo County of Michigan. I came across it on a bike ride last month. There is still a front porch that faces the road. But with the front door boarded up, the public space is not as connected to the private space, and is probably not so much used anymore. My impression of Front Porch Republic is that it is trying to re-open those connections, so to speak.

About the same day when I first encountered Front Porch Republic I also encountered yet another type of Front Porch. It’s one for which I don’t have a photo, unfortunately. It’s in Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev’s book about his father, “Nikita Khrushchev : and the creation of a superpower (2000)”. Early in the book he quotes from notes his mother had written about their move to Moscow in the mid 1930s. Nikita Sergeyevich’s parents came to live with them:

Grandmother Kseniya Ivanovna spent most of her time in her room or sitting on a stool on the street near our entrance. There were always people standing around her, and she would talk with them. N.S. didn’t approve of her sitting there, but his mother wouldn’t listen to him.

Sergei Nikitich explains:

Grandmother Kseniya Ivanovna was totally unable to adapt to city life and didn’t want to change her habits. In the village she was used to sitting outside on a zavalinka [mound of earth around peasant homes--Trans.] and spending hours chatting with neighbors, and she continued this in Moscow. But Moscow was not Kalinovka, and in the 1930s a heart-to-heart talk could cost you your life. That was why Father worried.

I get the impression that Front Porch Republic would approve of Kseniya Ivanovna’s behavior, and would like to keep our country from becoming a place where heart-to-heart talks on the front porch could cost you your life. But maybe there is a cost that will have to be borne anyway when we leave our private patios to enter public forums; otherwise we wouldn’t have secluded ourselves in back patios or under anonymous pseudonyms on the internet.

[I've posted this under both pseudonyms: The Reticulator and The Spokesrider]

On September 18, 2003, I happened upon this historical marker in Crawford County, Ohio, on my way from Nevada to Mount Vernon. It’s where William Crawford’s army fought on its retreat from Ohio in 1782. Crawford himself had been captured the previous day, and was later tortured to death near Upper Sandusky. It’s a well-known story. The torture was largely a revenge for the Gnadenhutten massacre.

Andrew Frank’s excellent book about Creeks and Southerners reminded me of it. In tonight’s reading I came to a section (still in the Introduction) where he tells about four options the Creeks would choose from with those people they captured. These options were adoption into the tribe, torture to death, slavery, or ransom.

I have a bone to pick with the way Frank lists them, not because I want to pick on Frank in particular, but because he’s following a pattern that is used a lot by anthropologists and historians these days. He writes:

Barber [captured in 1818] failed to recognize the other two options available, slavery and ransom, but she did identify the two extremes of captivity: complete adoption and ritualized torture and death.

The bone is that word “ritualized.” Any time a modern anthropologist talks about torture, it seems s/he gets all defensive about it and puts that word “ritualized” in front of it. I suspect it’s because we all want to be cultural relativists (at least I do) but we shrink from the implications of torture. So we insert a word to make it seem mechanical, and to distance the practitioners from it — perhaps making them less responsible for the action. “Nothing against you personally, but this is the way we always handle cases like yours,” as they skin the captive and press burning coals on his genitals.

I don’t disagree that these torture precedings were ritualistic. But so were the adoption proceedings, and just about everything else. If anthropologists are going to use the word ritualistic for the one, they should use it for the other.

And even if the proceedings were ritualistic, that doesn’t mean the practitioners weren’t heavily involved emotionally. Frank quotes Barber on the subject of adoption:

If deemed adoptable, Eunice Barber noticed that each prisoner “was unbound, taken by the hands, led to the cabin of the person into whose family he was to be adopted, and received with all imaginable marks of kindness. He would then be “treated as a friend and a brother,” and the new families “appeared soon to love him with the same tenderness as if he stood in the place of their deceased friend.”

But this sort of intense emotional involvement was true for both adoption and torture. In fact, Frank makes my case better than I could.

One European American resident among the Creeks succinctly summed up the stark dichotomy between torture and adoption, “Hospitable and kind as these people are to friends, they are, if possible, still more inveterate to enemies.”

One of the reasons I am fascinated by these stories of Indian captives is because they demonstrates a type of intense interpersonal relationship that seems no longer to be possible in our modern welfare-industrial society. It’s a type of relationship that even back in the late 18th century made some white captives prefer life as Indians to life in the society where they had been born . I read these stories, wondering how we could get some of that back into our modern societies.

But there was also the torture. Whether the two somehow necessarily go together is an interesting question. One thing to note is that there wasn’t complete agreement among native peoples about the acceptability of torture, at least if we are to believe the stories about Tecumseh.

So although it’s best to at times step outside these stories and societies and analyze them dispassionately without imposing our own values on them, at other times we can’t help but be be drawn in, value systems and all, and get involved in the rightness and wrongness of what happened. Either way, the word ritualized isn’t particularly relevant, and isn’t going to do what I suspect anthropologists are trying to do with it.

(Minor edits, 7 hrs after posting)

The introduction to “Creeks and Southerners” by Andrew K. Frank (2005) tells of Andrew Brissert, who in 1783 got in trouble with the Spanish authorities in Pensacola. He and his wife had come to buy some food supplies and sell two African American slaves. He was arrested for being “dressed and painted as an Indian” and suspected of being a spy.

The thing was, he was an Indian. He was born in England, spoke English, and except for his paint and dress acted like an Englishman, but he was also a Creek. His Creek family back in Fushatchee (150 miles to the north-northeast of Pensacola) objected to his arrest and threatened to retaliate if he wasn’t returned to his home. Eventually the Spaniards gave in.

If the Creeks claimed that Brissert was one of their own, the Spaniards were in no position to disagree. Race, culture, and language, they reluctantly conceded, had deceived them.”

There were many other people like Brissert.

“In villages in what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, many of the ealry American newcomers recognized their newly obtained Creek obligations even as they held what appeared to be European American economic and social practices. They held and sold African slaves and participated in the annual Green Corn Ceremony. They herded cattle and fenced their lands, while they partook of the ritual black drink and painted their skin. They held positions in Europrean trading firms, even as they catered to the interests of their wives’ clans. They spoke English, Spanish, or French wihle also interpreting it into Muskogee, Alabama, and Hitchiti. Their behavior and appearances defied simple identification.

googlemap

After reading about Brissert, I looked through my photos to see if in April 2006 I had taken any of Fushatchee. Amos Wright’s book, “Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838,” gives several historical references to several locations for the town. One location that has been the subject of archaeological work is on the north bank of the Tallapoosa River, near the mouth of Chubbehatchee Creek.

In checking my maps from that ride, I saw that I had even made a note of it on the day I rode to Tuckabatchee. I didn’t ride down to the mouth of the creek. My maps didn’t show that there was a route to that location, though now I see that DeLorme shows some sort of road. It could very well be a lane on private property. I contented myself to take photos near where County Road 4 crosses the creek, a couple of miles from the Tallapoosa.

The location of the above photo of a bare chimney is probably the closest I got to the village site as the crow flies.

It’s not too far from the Mitchell Creek Grocery. County Road 4 continues along to the right of the store, and in a larger version of this photo you can see where the land drops down to the creek bottom on this side of the horizon.

Why does it say Mitchell Creek rather than Chubbehatchee Creek? And why is the road to the left of the store called Mitchell Creek Road? So far I haven’t been able to find a Mitchell Creek on any of my maps. Was it just another name for Chubbehatchee Creek? Another case of dual identify, if you will? (Of course, identity means more than just the name for something, but that’s often part of it. Andrew Brissert, who very likely knew this location before the store and road were built here, may very well have had a Creek name to go with his English name, but Frank’s book doesn’t mention it.)

I certainly didn’t know about the Andrew Brissert story when I rode here on April 3, 2006, but I must have known something of Fushatchee that I have since forgotten. I recall riding up out of the valley and then realizing almost too late that I had better stop to at least get a photo looking back at it.

According to the reviewer, this book challenges the common supposition that the French differed from the British in their relationships with Native people. “Frank estimates that at least eight hundred European Americans found spouses in Creek villages over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Most of these were from Scotland or elsewhere in Britain. In other words, it wasn’t just the French traders who were willing to marry Indian women.

The result was a lot of children with dual identities, in a world in which they could simultaneously be Indians and European Americans. Later on such dual identities were not possible. Later on people had to choose to be one or the other.

BTW, the author said “simultaneously act as.” It’s my own wording when I say “simultaneously be.” I’ve been talking that way since reading the autobiographies of people like John Tanner and Jonathan Alder. Especially with Alder, it seems more accurate to say that for much of his life he was Indian, not that he was a white person living as an Indian, or that he was a white captive acting like an Indian. It also seems that at many times he was both.

In reading about people like Alder, Isaac Zane, James McPherson, and their wives, I have been somewhat surprised to keep coming upon references to more and more of these people — captives who had become Indian. (This is in addition to the European-American traders and/or their offspring who were Indian.) Compared to what I’ve read of Michigan history, it seems that for a while Ohio had a substantial population of these people.

Back to Alabama. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, there were Indian leaders like William Weatherford, William McIntosh, and Menawa. Weatherford fought with the Red-Stick creeks against the other Creeks and the United States. He somehow escaped, making his way to the other side of the Tallapoosa River (in the photo above) and eluding the Lower Creeks who were guarding on the other side. He later surrendered himself to Andrew Jackson and ended up becoming a wealthy Alabama Planter. William McIntosh was a leader of the lower Creeks, who were allied with the United States army against the Red-Sticks. Menawa, also of Scottish and Creek ancestry, was a leader of Red-Sticks who, like Weatherford, escaped at Horseshoe Bend. But he didn’t go over to the United States. He later led a party that assassinated William McIntosh for signing a treaty that ceded land to the U.S.

So there were three Creek leaders, children of Scottish and Creek people, who were Indian leaders at Horseshoe Bend, and whose identities took three different trajectories. It sounds like I should read Frank’s book to learn about many others, and about what it meant to be Indian or among Indians at a time before the concept of “race” came to have such overriding importance.

googlemaps

Here’s a googlemap showing the location of Horseshoe Bend, and the route I took to get there. The same issue of AHR that reviews Frank’s book also has reviews of two other books about Native peoples in the southern U.S. That, plus the heavy snow we’re having in Michigan, makes me think I should do some more riding down in Alabama one of these days, and perhaps should add some southern Georgia destinations, too.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2009/01/11/biculturalism-on-the-early-american-frontier/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/05/06/tallapoosa-county-courthouse/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/05/06/tallapoosa-county-courthouse/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 06:52:09 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/05/06/tallapoosa-county-courthouse/

(More from April 6, 2006).

I hung around Dadeville (known as Beaufort in Theodore Rosengarten’s book) for a while, looking for anything that might have been connected to Nate Shaw’s (Ned Cobb’s) trial there in 1932 (or 33?) when he was put on trial for his part in the shootout at his neighbor’s place. I didn’t even have to look, though. This courthouse was right at the center of town, as it is in many county seats throughout the U.S. From the style of construction, it looks as though it could have been the one that was here at the time of the trial, but I haven’t found out for sure.

Nate Shaw (Ned Cobb) spent 5 months in jail here while waiting for his trial. Here is some of what he had to say about the trial itself:

I couldn’t tell who was in the courtroom and who wasn’t. I didn’t even see if Mr. Watson come to my trial. But I do know this: they wouldn’t allow Mr. Horace Tucker in there. He tried to come in the buildin but they made him go on out again, get away from there. He’d been known–he took Leroy Roberts, after Leroy was shot down, he picked Leroy up and carried him home. So they didn’t allow him in the courtroom; they didn’t want the public to know that some of their color took any stock in helpin the niggers out.

Well, my brother Peter come, he was there, and TJ. My wife was there, some of my uncles and aunts, and my cousins too.

The backside of the courthouse has these words on it: “Equal justice to all people.”

Here’s more of what Nate (Ned) said about the trial:

Trial didn’t last but one day. Started one mornin in May and it was over when they took a notion some hour before dark; quit it and left the thing open. And the next day, mornin, didn’t have nothin to do but put the sentence on me. Jury come in to the courtroom first thing in the mornin and pronounced me guilty. They’d separated me from teh other boys when it come to the trial, but we all stood up there together at the sentencin–me, Leroy Roberts, Ches Todd, Wat Smith. And they tried Sam Todd and Willy Turpin, but they was tried after we was put in prison. Them officers took down a bunch of names at Virgil Jones’ house that mornin, but there’s numbers of em didn’t meet that trial–

Judge Bolin called me up to the stand and gived me twelve to fifteen years in the state penitentiary on good behavior.

The quotes are from pages 336 and 339 of Rosengarten’s book, “All God’s Dangers.”

More from April 6, 2006. Nate Shaw used to haul logs and then lumber with his mules, though not on this very road.

The lumber industry went into a decline after the country got logged over, but is now important again. It’s now being conducted on a more sustainable basis. Here’s a web page about the timber industry in Alabama, titled: “Historical Review of Sawmills in Alabama, Focusing on the Consolidation of Sawmills and the Effects on Employment.”

Nate Shaw’s lumber hauling was done further south, where my bike ride was going to end up this day. This photo was taken at Dadeville, the seat of Tallapoosa County. The one below was taken further south, maybe a couple of miles from where he lived the last years of his life.

Here is some of what he told about it (from pages 173-4 of Rosengarten’s book):

Mr. Ed Pike soon put me to haulin logs. Knowin that I had a good pair of mules that could swing it, it was ‘Nate, I want you to haul logs.’ Hauled logs to the mills two or three days, boss man Ed Pike told me, ‘Soon as you catch em up good with logs, go on to haulin lumber.’ They had a yard of lumber with about two hundred and fifty thousand feet, right southeast of my house on the creek.

By “the creek” I presume he means the creek near where I took the above photo, though a few miles further upstream. More about that creek another time.

…Hauled lumber on my wagon up from the creek and out from under them mountains and all and stocked it on top of the hills where the trucks could pick it up. … White men drivin them big GMC trucks would pick up them loads of lumber where I left em on the road, done carried em out from under the hills where the sawmills was and hauled it up and out of places them trucks couldn’t successfully pull. Them big GMC trucks, had two of em –good God, you might meet em on the road with a load of lumber, looked like a house comin.

The roads here are now wide enough that I didn’t mind meeting the trucks myself, but not so wide that I wasn’t wary about them coming up from behind. I can’t say they were a problem, though. At one place in Tennessee I had gotten off the road for a bit when the log-hauling trucks got too thick and the evening light too dim. I don’t recall any uncomfortable encounters with lumber trucks in Alabama.

This old house was on Hwy 49, between Horseshoe Bend park and Dadesville. It’s further north than the places where Nate Shaw lived. I’m not sure if cotton was grown up here or if there had been sharecroppers here, but it reminded me of what Nate Shaw had told about the houses provided to tenants by landlords:

Mr. Curtis soon got the house done. Just a old plantation-style house, built for colored folks, no special care took of how it was built. But it’d keep you out the rain, it’d keep you out the cold; just a old common-built house, board cabin…. They wanted all colored people on their places and they built the house accordin to the man and because it was a nigger they just put up something to take care of him. And the white man would cut his britches off if the nigger fooled around in that house too much. Whenever a white man built a house for a colored man he just run it up right quick like a box. No seal in that house; just box it up with lumber, didn’t never box it up with a tin roof. They’d put doors to the house and sometimes they’d stick a glass window in it, but mostly a wood window. Didn’t put you behind no painted wood and glass, just built a house for you to move in then go to work.

So, Mr. Curtis built me a cheap house with wood windows and put a chimney to it. (All God’s Dangers, p.102)

A house put up on stones like this one, where the air could blow underneath, would get mighty cold here in Michigan. But this one may have been better in its day than the ones Nate Shaw told about. It has a tin roof and glass windows. I don’t know how it compared in size.

I kept my eye out for old sharecropper-type houses from the early 20th century, but I didn’t really expect to see any. They wouldn’t have lasted, most likely.

It was while listening to Theodore Rosengarten’s book, “All God’s Dangers : The life of Nate Shaw” that I got the idea that we should go to Alabama to see the places he told about. Myra reminded me that I had never taken her to Florida. So I devised a trip plan that included Florida (the Appalachicola region) and then she was all in favor, too.

I came to realize this was where Tecumseh had come on his famous 1811 trip to the south, so read a pile of books to learn more about the history of the Creek Indians and the Creek wars. That kind of crowded Nate Shaw out of the main emphasis for this trip. But this day, April 6, 2006, I was mostly going to visit some of the roads and places that Nate Shaw had talked about. (I had already taken photos at the Julia Tutwiler prison, where he spent about ten years of his life.)

I started at the visitor center of the Horseshoe Bend park, where the cannon in the photo is located. That’s where I had left off with my riding the day before. Myra dropped me off there, and we went our separate ways for the day, as usual. We planned to meet in the evening at a campground near Auburn.

This is where Alabama state highway 49 crosses the Tallapoosa River, including what’s left of an old bridge. The battle site on the peninsula formed by the Horseshoe Bend is off to the right of the photo.

The Battle of Horseshoe Bend was called The Battle of Tohopeka on Gen. Andrew Jackson’s map, It wasn’t spelled exactly that way, but I can’t tell for sure from the handwriting on that image from the National Park Service web site.

The little crossroads in the photo is called Tohopeka. It’s not the battle site, though. Modern-day Tohopeka is on the south side of the river, about a mile and a half away from the Tohopeka of 1814. The National Park Service says the word means fort or fortification.

This is where the fortification was, according to archaeological evidence. The NPS tells about it here.

The log breastwork that the Red Sticks had erected across the peninsula was, according to Jackson, “eighty-poles in length, from five to eight feet high & of remarkable compactness & strength . . . “It was “prepared with double rows of Port Holes well formed & skillfully arranged, [and] was of such a figure that an Army could not approach it, without being exposed to a cross fire.”

Jackson’s army did cross it, though, along with his Creek and Cherokee allies.

Their reward for helping him in this dangerous work was to have a good share of their land taken from them at the Treaty of Fort Jackson.