The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

The Meeting In April

The eleventh of April, 1812.

You have to understand what the country was like by then. Tippecanoe had been fought in November, four months earlier, and every settlement in the Territory had spent the winter telling itself stories. There were men on our creek who had not laid eyes on a Delaware family in a year and who had worked themselves into a state where they could not sleep.

Captain Doak called a meeting at the meeting house to put it to a vote that the families in the sycamore bottom be required to quit the creek.

He did not call it driving them off. He called it a request, and he said that if the request were refused the militia would see it carried, and everyone in that building understood what was being said and everyone let him say it the polite way.

Thirty one people. I counted them later. I sat on the back bench with Polly on my lap because she was three and would not be left.

Four men spoke for it. One man said he had seen signs at his fence line. One said his brother in law at Anderson’s Town had heard things. Nobody said they had lost anything. Nobody said anybody had been hurt.

And then Silas Doak stood up and said that the families in the bottom had been stealing out of the settlement’s caches all winter.

That is what got me up. Not courage. I want to be very clear that it was not courage, because people have called it that to my face and it makes my skin crawl. I had been sitting there with my hands full of a three year old, working out whether I could afford to speak, doing the arithmetic on it the way you do, and I had very nearly got to no.

And then he said it the other way around.

I stood up with Polly on my hip and I said I wanted to say two things and that I would sit down after.

I said the first thing was that on a day in the first week of February I had walked down the creek to cut cane and I had seen Silas Doak standing in an opened cache in the sycamore bottom with a brand in his hand, burning it, and that he had looked at me and I had looked at him, and that I had said nothing about it until that minute and that was my own shame and not anybody else’s.

The room did not do anything. That is the part people never believe. Thirty one people and not one sound.

And I said the second thing was that my children were alive.

I said that Captain Doak had opened a barrel at the store for me in April of last year in front of everybody in that room, and that nothing had ever come out of it, not one time, and that I would say so anywhere I was asked to. I said I had gone into December with two weeks of corn and three children. And I said that every week from the ninth of December to the middle of March, meat or corn had been left in the hickory by my door by a Delaware widow out of the sycamore bottom, out of her own stores, in a winter when her people were burying children too, and that she had asked me for nothing and had refused to be thanked.

And I said: so when you vote, vote knowing that the people you are voting to drive off the creek are the reason the Vestal children are in this building.

Then I sat down, because my legs would not hold me.

Susannah Prather stood up about ten seconds later.

She said she had seen Silas Doak coming up from the bottom in February with a brand and had told herself it was nothing. Then Jonas Tatum stood up and said that he had put four dollars into the Widow Vestal’s barrel in May and had wondered ever since why he had never been thanked for it.

That is what I mean about what speaking does. I did not change one mind in that room. Not one. What I did was go first, and there were two people in there who had been sitting on something all winter the same as me, and neither of them would have stood up into silence.

The vote failed, nineteen to twelve.