Barns

“Before the French came among us we were men,” a Natchez tribal leader said in November 1729; and soon his tribe organized a vicious attack on the French in Mississippi, killing over two hundred men, including a military leader and a priest, and taking women and children as slaves.

The victory held up for a short while — some months, maybe more than a year — but eventually the Natchez tribe became complete toast. The remaining few shipped off to Haiti as slaves. Recounted by Wright Thompson in The Barn, the Natchez chief was last seen in Haiti by a French bureaucrat who “recognized him and walked over to reminisce about their days as enemies. The chief greeted his old foe with melancholy in his eyes and said he wanted to go home.”

Thinking of the brutality is somewhat paralyzing. The Natchez tribe of men, women, children, families, stories, and lives, violently driven out of their homes and reckoning with an upturned civilization. The French settlers, full of men, women, children, families, stories, and lives, ransacked one night, dads getting butchered and scalped, families splintered. Can you imagine being one of those people on either side? 

I sit in my rocking chair this morning, enjoying a perfect breeze, seeing a bright yellow butterfly flicker through the sky, bobbing in and out the holes of my Japanese Blueberry trees, and simply can’t imagine the world that way. Somewhere right now, someone does. 

This morning some people wake up in rubble. There’s a lot of “right” and “wrong” arguments to be made. Just like the Natchez tribe and the French settlers, so much history piled up, so many perspectives and complexity.

And if we mentally fast-forward a couple hundred years in time, all the dust from that rubble is long gone, evaporated into the universe just like the sound from all the screams, and the breath from all the life. Everything ages out into a complicated blip of this and that. Topsoil today. Subsoil tomorrow. And then it’s all just the land.  Home always dissipating. Melancholy always compounding whenever anyone reaches backward toward anything.  There’s nothing backward to ever get.

“The chief greeted his old foe with melancholy in his eyes and said he wanted to go home.”