A snippet from The Exsanguination of the Second Society
Chapter 5
The Good-Old-Boys Club
Sucks Now
Miss Lucy found eggs and
canned biscuits in the refrigerator and had breakfast on the table at 6:30. As
Jake sat in front of his scrambled eggs across from his roomie, he said, “Bes a
gaumed up mess. Sorry I got you into this.”
“No,” her gentle smile
warmed the cool kitchen, “I haven’t felt this alive since, since, a long time.”
They returned kind expressions and drank a pot of coffee as Jake read through
her clippings and stopped when a headline revealed that in 1973 several
thousand pounds of stolen Bureau of Indian Affairs reports had been found in
Maxton, NC.
“Appalachian State’s
website has a chronological list of events on the Robeson Peoples, but fails to
include pertinent details, so I found the newspaper clipping from a library
database and made a copy.” “And this?” Jake slipped a stack of stapled papers
from under the couch cushion, “Sorry, but I couldn’t resist.” “I had a feeling you’d take the bait,” she
sipped her cold coffee staring out the window at her little car and Jake turned
to page 3, “We are proceeding on the theory that people who exercise authority
should be held accountable for what happened.” ₂₆ That is the meat of the
Indian problem right there in one sentence.” When Jake’s twisted repose led to
a couple of fast tears, he wiped them dry. “Bruce was,” Miss Lucy stalled, “he
was not a part of that.”
“His people though, they
got him into this. It just rubs me wrong, the same thing - the conspiracy
against Tuscarora by the Lumbee. There’s a interview out there with Dr. Malinda
Lowry - wrote the book pushing the Siouan theory, and she says she’s close
friends with Nancy Strickland at the university’s museum. ₂₇ Henry Berry Lowrey
is their hero, even have a film on him, but nothing about him being a Mighty
Tuscarora. I swear, there is some kind of cover-up going on.” He sniffed,
“They’re so outnumbered.”
Her shoulders rose and
fell as she contemplated sitting at the table again, “The tables have turned on
the Mighty Tuscarora but like the Bible says there is nothing new under the sun
and I believe it. Like poor Israel. Did you read the seizure report in full?”
“Yes, and I woke up thinking about that fat satchel full of files – called me
like donuts about four o’clock.” “You stinker, like Christmas, isn’t it?
Learning something new and what a fiasco, Lord,” she giggled.
“It must a’ been like
that in the seventies,” Jake mused, “Indians fit in with all the other
extremists and had reached their boiling point. But I never heard of the Trail
of Broken Treaties.”
“Well, your age and this
county account for that. It’s operated on Lumbee ideology,” she spouted, and he
agreed. “They’d started out in the Arlington Cemetery on a Friday the 13th,”
she tskd, “The Indians made 20 demands on the federal government after breaking
into the Bureau of Indian Affairs and caused 250 thousand in damages and stole
700 thousand dollars-worth of art and artifacts, on top of walking out of the
building, in and out for 6 consecutive days, carrying over 7 thousand pounds of
reports and no one stopped them, not even the U.S. Marshalls.” ₂₈
“I read that, and
administrators formally declined written requests for them to testify on what
happened. ₂₉ That’s mighty curious, don’t you think?”
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