II. Sula Whitekiller Enters the World in 1915

by Tommy George

Part II. A History of My Mother in Three Parts. 

Left to her own devices, Grandmother Oona elected to remain living alone in the old wooden house, the walls of which exuded salt inside the home. When the wind blew, the outside world turned to a turbulent moonscape, tiny grains stinging Crudestruck for a menial's wage. The marooned Cherokee maiden by her final teenage year had become an accomplished pianist with mind and fine hands to match, consumed by the passionate dexterity required by the music of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin, great European composers.

 

She sometimes lamented of her dark skin tone, for the world was far larger than her young experience, and filled with conflicting words and meanings, stated intent and far different experience. The one principle she had avowed unequivocally was to remain chaste--and not die of rotten sex gone into the blood and the brain, and then blown out the ears, as had been her mother's end, so piteously weeping blood. The solitary maiden resisted for months the animals pawings at her door--young red men, not yet braves but clearly not boys--pleading to be let into her house. 

Oona Whitekiller

She threw their gifts back at them as they slunk back into the night. She smashed their whiskey offerings with her grandfather's ax. But even in the midst of acting out, she knew things couldn't stay forever as they stood, so she began to evaluate more closely the fools who wanted nothing more than to rape her. When finally she relented of her solitude, she chose carefully and admitted only one: the sleekest of the lot, a pale white face who drove a shiny black buggy with two horses in front. He had everything. She did not threaten him with her Granddad's ax. She charmed him with her music. 

Alone for too long, and grown hungry for everything, the young virgin treasured every juniper endearment whispered into her loneliness by the first male to be allowed inside her new abode of self-rule. She knew him to be a liar, and she knew him to be an Aubrey. She knew him far better than he himself did, based solely on things learned from her mother. When the time came, she bore the slippery rip of defloration like a great white queen, thinking of England and things European and refined: things to ease the sting of items purchased on contracts signed in blood, always fully paid. 

She conceived immediately.

Oona's pregnancy with my mother lasted over Winter, 1914; Spring and Summer of 1915. My mother's father (the grandfather I never met) was a white playboy barely out of his teens, one of four brothers belonging to the most powerful white family in the region, the Aubreys of Crudestruck, Oklahoma. Richard Aubrey understood "love" as an ongoing competition between brother-boys. The game was played in a series of skirt-chasing, lying matches that targeted the tendermost parts of girls. The matches customarily ended once a "home-run" had been scored by one of the Aubrey brothers. The brother with the greatest number of home-runs basked in the glory of being Number One; but as ever, rankings changed, and glory was often short-lived.

Richard Scott Aubrey

 Young Aubrey ended up falling in real love with the girl he'd been targeting since first he saw her in the shop of Crudestruck's druggist, buying medicine for her mother. He was surprised she lived on the settlement. Since that day, Oona Whitekiller had existed in his imagination as a match he devoutly wish to play: it would be him against a singularly prime piece of squaw tail, not too fragrant, he hoped (for some of the Cherokee girls smelled awful). This Undantva Whitekiller--what a name!--had a self-possessed strength that would make playing her a challenge. 

Richard longed to stroke and soothe the taut flesh, to dazzle and delight the simple mind with reflected patterns of light from such shiny baubles as a young man of good family might offer; then bat her high into the outfield sky once he'd gained her trust--or gotten her drunk, and just plain raped her, should that prove to be the only means to his end. Either way, hers would be the prize red scalp he wanted to clip to the fob of his gold watch. And he had succeeded.

My mother was the result of Dick Aubrey's dedication to batsmanship, but Oona Whitekiller somehow managed to change the dynamics of the game somewhere along the line. At first, it seemed incomprehensible to him; he must be getting sick. He had lost all heart for boasting of this conquest to his brothers in their usual jocular exaggerations of triumph over a woman's unhealing wound in the heart and between the legs. He didn't pass around his handkerchief, soaked with love juices, for brothers to sniff and howl over. Instead, he remained quiet; he just wanted to slip away and rematch forever. 

The young player had stepped into something he'd never before encountered--authentic love, and it took some time for him to identify it. More confusingly, feelings of paternal tenderness were soon to creep into the game. The prime squaw tail he had meant only to launch over the moon and be done--prime injun poon he hoped wouldn't stink too much--had turned out to be redolent of virgin spring meadow-grass, and had borne unto him a perfectly beautiful child--a white child, a girl.

  

He resolved to bear the ridicule of his brothers for retiring--only temporarily, of course--from the manly sport of womanizing. He wasn't going to be around much anyway, for he was to spend the winter months of 1915-16 playing Poppa and affectionate provider to his love-child and her mother Oona Whitekiller. He parked his buggy behind Oona's settlement house (so as not to seen from the road) and kept his horses in her grandfather's collapsing barn. 

Don't make-believe husbands stay with their make-believe families? Why, just look at Paw! Har, har. He had prepared this riposte for his detractors, but none came to call. His months of fairy tale family life, if only half-subscribed, were the only taste of human grace Dick Aubrey would ever know.

The instant he started living beyond the present, he ruined it. Deaf to his own better judgment, he brought the girls out of their enchanted cloister for an end-of-fall buggy trip to Crudestuck, into the heart of Mammon and the home of his own people. Of course, things went immediately to hell.  Below, examine the load of stale crackers Richard thought to soften. All his ill-advised buggy-ride accomplished was his own damnation and the alienation of the only woman he would ever love. Had he given the situation serious thought, he would never have gone back; but if he hadn't been such a stupid Dick, I would have no story presently to tell.

The Aubrey Family, pictured above circa 1914: Crudestruck's most influential family.

*

At age nineteen, my unknown-to-me grandmother gave birth to my mother, by all appearances a white child. My white-looking mommy would cut Undantve Whitekiller off her family tree as soon as she grew strong enough to handle a saw. By the time Mom got around to revealing our true ancestry--and the lost Cherokee matriarch of my bloodline, a grandmother I never had occasion to meet or know about--I had spent well over forty years in misinformed, strangely off-color whiteness.

Her young paramour belonged to the region's most influential white family, the Aubreys of Crudestruck, Oklahoma. His regular visits over the course of her pregnancy, bearing gifts and reeking of juniper, at first surprised her. His dedication to the visits astonished him too. Something had been stirred, giving them the courage to exchange giddy truths. 

The child she bore him was perfect--and white, despite her mother's dark beauty. Their first nine months together were spent as three happy castaways, in Oona's solitary settlement house following the birth. My infant-mother served as the centerpiece of a universe humming with the song of life. Yet none of them was aware why.

The mournful howls of a feral creature re-chained began only after the naive playboy, with relatively benign intentions--but also in need of a real hot bath, some decent food, fresh clothes, cash, and you and the baby need many new things, do you not?--took his females on a buggy-ride to meet his family in Crudestruck on fall's final day, more precisely December 20, 2015.

The young playboy's family desired very much to adopt the pretty baby--sans maman rouge, cackled his pale sisters conspiratorially--and bring the child into the ruling Aubrey fold of the growing town of Crudestruck, Oklahoma. The Aubreys lived behind walls of stone in a family compound, where a growing white child could safely enjoy the private laws of ruling peoples: much better food and treatment, fine frilly frocks, her own little pony in time, and education by a bona fide scholar imported from New York City to oversee the child's education in the private schoolhouse the Aubreys had seen fit to erect behind walls of their private enclave.

From Dick Aubrey's sisters' point-of-view, my infant mother would be spared exposure to the inconsolable despair that would overtake her birthmother, Oona: beauty seduced, impregnated, subjected to nine months of cumbersome pregnancy, topped by an arduous home delivery--then robbed and spurned. She would have been doled out some token recompense but never recognized. 

Importing the child's mother--a volatile, red-skinned she-devil named Whitekiller--to dwell within the Aubrey compound was out of the question. The final decision was delivered by Aubrey patriarch Winfield Scott, who was knocked off his pins by the reaction it provoked. The exclusionary offer threw my Grandmother Oona into a fury of kicks, slaps, and a knee to the groin of the old man, overlain with her shrieks of refusal as he lay prostrate on the floor--words unrecorded but no doubt hair-raisingly profane and interspersed with canny, cutting insults. 

As Oona stormed off with my mother under one arm, followed at a wary distance by the rest, to board the hired buggy hastily summoned by shaken Aubreys to return this mad red woman to her own kind, she forbade her young seducer and his kin any visitation, and vowed never to receive any Aubrey again. It was only after the drama's concluding front door scene--a last-minute, teary-eyed tug-of-war--that Aubrey females released my innocent child-mother to go too. 

Hot upon the heels of red rejection, my mother's birth name was finalized in the back of the hired buggy. She was to be called Sula Whitekiller in honor of Oona's mother. "Sula" is Cherokee for fox. But this Sula would be more like a natural fox, and less like a runaway showgirl. She would never be possessed by any man. Further, the Cherokee spirit-name bestowed upon her the right to sneak up and take from men whatever she wished, no blame. Her mother also made a vow to keep her white love-child forever out of public view. 

For the red tone of her mother's skin, my white mother was assigned the checkered fate of a cracked childhood passed in salt-stung limbo--a small, pale innocent and her failed, devastated Cherokee mother, two women alone. Oona's style, long inclined to high musical theatrics, now tilted to low suicidal antics. The main witness to her alternating brilliance and abjection was her toddling daughter the color of snow (my mother) who more than once came upon Mommy with her head in the oven, gas hissing as she half-heartedly sought to asphyxiate herself. She was also half-trying to terrify the child, who quickly learned to refrain from the hysteria game. My mom was sharp. Once Oona failed to inspire terror in her daughter any longer with emotional bathos, she took simply to treating pale little Sula as a servant. 

She began her daughter's brainwashing early, and daily drilled the child on a speech concerning her father’s name, color, and infamous deed: my daddy’s name is Richard Scott Aubrey. He is the white playboy that put me in my momma’s tummy, and then forget to come back ‘n’ git me. 

If Mother was to die—an unlikelihood, although toddling Sula still came upon Mommy with her head inside the oven, gas hissing away, from time-to-time; or standing on a chair wearing a slack-roped noose around her neck, searching for somewhere to string it—if Mama were to die, the three-year-old child was to walk cross-country the three miles into wretched Crudestuck, demand to be taken to her father’s family compound, and deliver the oft-drilled message: my daddy’s name is Richard Scott Aubrey. He is the white playboy that put me in my momma’s tummy, and then forget to come back ‘n’ git me. 

Further, she was to supplement this oration according to the deed: And now she dead with her head baked in the oven, or and now she hangin' ona rope hooked on the barn behind the house.

Eighty years later, my mother still remembered these drills, and confessed to me how her mother's fantasies of revenge began to cause even in herself some odd, confabulated thinking. Early on, in mild variants of her mother's rant: 

My real white pa's family, the Aubreys of Crudestruck, mourn sorely for me when they learn their playboy son Richard Scott Aubrey's pretty white baby girl me has been stolen from my cot by a pack of marauding wolves (dogs, bears, Indian boys, etc.) and eaten (hung, thrown down the well, made to dance bare-naked, etc.). He digged up a few of my bones, which he found poking from the salt against the backhouse, and the rich family will miss me forever and ever, but they can make my bones into a necklace and wear it to church. amen. 

By age four, my mother was running their homestead--sweeping salty grit out the front door, fetching water, washing dishes and clothes, even plucking feathers to make chicken and dumplings for her imperious mistress. Oona spared her five-year-old daughter the chore of wringing the birds' necks (Oona's preferred method) although I'm sure Sula could have managed that too. 

Once-virginal Oona now had only to make her presence known by opening the door to her house, and her physical and mental hungers were met by a quick-to-develop coterie of gentleman callers, some less gentlemanly than others, but all coming to call, libation in one hand and dead meat in the other.

On one nocturnal occasion, my curious child-mother entered the boudoir and gazed for some time upon her mother unawares, locked in passionate mid-seance with some local shaman. Both of the seekers tried their liquored-up best to conceal what they were really doing, but could fool not even a four-year-old. My mother was violently disabused of those nocturnal visitations. A tragic-but-still-comely Pocahontas-Mommy could afford to remain independent on the family's ruined acreage only by entertaining several nocturnal visitors on a regular paid basis, and none of them was named Aubrey. 

Continue to Part IIII