Annie Lampman
1. THE DISPATCHThree Lost Songs from an Enslaved Bitterroot Crossing
Corps of Discovery, 1805
I.
They climb forever upward, leaving the rivers behind—the Lochsa, Selway, Clearwater. Each step higher into these Idaho mountains makes Sacagawea’s heart thrum the coming home song. She hums it quietly, first in Hidatsa and then in Shoshone, vibrating it into her wee one’s body, Baptiste, slung tight against her sixteen-year-old frame, his tiny fists gripping her hair, his sweet breath wet against her neck, his lungs breathing her lungs, his blood beating her blood. A song of mourning and loss, but also joy. A lullaby Sacagawea’s Lemhi-Shoshone mother sang her along the Salmon River, its waters rushing them by, grey and blue, grey and blue, before the time of loss, before being stolen away, purchased by a white man, one of many wives bearing the fruit of his loins.
The smell of fennel and bitterroot and huckleberry is ripe on her fingertips. She breathes it in deeply—all she has gathered for Lewis and Clark, these white men, this Bitterroot Crossing, this Northwest Passage, this Coming-Home. She brushes her hands through spent bear grass as she climbs, singing her survivor’s song—a song of violence, of rape and illness, of injury, flash floods, food shortages, mosquito swarms, river crossings, mountain crossings, pregnancy, a host of conquering white men. A song of the living and the dead. A song of her body and her spirit, of her ancestors and her lost home. A song of the women who have come before her and will come again and again and again. A song of the past. A song of the future. A song she will keep singing until she can sing no more forever.
II.
Watkuweis—“Returns From a Far Land”—knows this song well. She, too, has been captured, traded, moved from place to place, taken from her people, The People. Nimíipuu. Nez Perce. Removed from her Idaho mountain-and-prairie home, the Clearwater River, the Snake River, the Selway and Lochsa Rivers. Taken to Canada, the Great Lakes, the Plains. Purchased by a white man, giving birth to his child before finally escaping him with the help of some friendly whites who gave her a horse and food for her long journey back home to the banks of the Clearwater, to Salmon and Osprey and Raven, to the Weippe Prairie, to Coyote and Elk and Deer, to Camas and Pine, to the North Fork of the Clearwater, to Black Bear and Grizzly and Wolf. She is Xáxaac ‘ilp ‘ilp. She is Chief Red Grizzly Bear’s sister’s daughter. She is Nimíipuu. She is The People.
She is old now, she is tired, but when Watkuweis hears the young men, the warriors, speaking their war plans—Lewis and Clark and their men exhausted, starving, sick, weak, so easy now to kill—she gathers herself up once again. She goes to them, to her people, The People, and she says to them, to these young warrior men, “Do them no harm.” An entreaty, an admonishment, an old woman’s psalm. And thus Watkuweis saves them—these travelers, these white men with their charts and their graphs, their journals and their maps. Do them no harm. Do them no harm…Even if their harm has only then just begun.
III.
Along the river, the Nimíipuu women lead York to the creek, sign for him to remove his clothes. They splash his naked body with water, rub handfuls of sand and gravel onto his skin, sing quietly as they scrub and scrub the dark stretch and crevice of his six-foot-200-pound frame, trying to remove the black paint of mourning, the black paint of war, the black paint of vengeance. Perhaps he is related to the yáaka’—the black bear—some of them say. But no—his skin remains black no matter how much they scrub, rubbing and rubbing and singing and singing until his red blood begins to ooze from all the raw spots. The Nimíipuu men come to take York to the sweat house thinking perhaps heat and sweat and rubbing with the medicine root qawsqáaws will take his dark color away. But no—his skin remains stubbornly black, the cherry-red rocks of the fire glowing and steaming pungent with qawsqáaws water as York shows them his arms, his legs, his feet, as he smiles at them with the bright white of his teeth. They name him “Raven’s Son” for his mystery and strong medicine. A black man whose color will not rub off, the first such person any of them has ever seen. They sing a special song for him and he learns it, too, singing and singing and singing as he rides away free.
For two long years on the Corps of Discovery, Raven’s Son finally knows what was always meant to be. He rides horses, uses firearms, hunts buffalo, deer, and geese, feeds the men who own him. He navigates waterways and trails, has a vote in all the key decisions. He scouts and barters for food with the Nez Perce and finds true love among them. But York is not free, nor, does he fear, will he ever truly be: Clark’s “body servant,” son of Old York and Rose—two enslaved laborers owned by Clark’s father. After the final ride of the Corps of Discovery, he is again held tight in his bondage, punished for his “misconduct,” removed from his “privileged” position as Clark’s body servant. Abused. Cast away. Enslaved. A slave. Never to be set free. But, perhaps, just perhaps, Raven’s Son finds his own way back to his song of freedom. 1832. The Rockies. Trapper Zenas Leonard meets an old Black man living among the Crow. A man who says he first came west with Lewis and Clark, and there, among the Nimíipuu, among The People, finally found his home. A man who says after all these many many years, he has finally made it back home—hunting and riding and fishing and loving, singing forever free.
2. BUREAU INVENTORY"Sins of the Bees" novel
Washington State University Honors College bamboo box
"Raven Feathers" framed photo art
House plants
Antique calligraphy pen
Chickadee cork coaster
Lamp
Laptop
3. BIOGRAPHYAnnie Lampman is author of the novel SINS OF THE BEES (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and the limited-edition letter-press-printed poetry chapbook BURNING TIME (Limberlost Press, 2021). Her poetry, short stories, and narrative essays have been published or are forthcoming in seventy-some literary journals and anthologies such as The Normal School, Orion Magazine, and The Massachusetts Review. She has been awarded the American Fiction Award, the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, a Best American Essays “Notable,” a Pushcart Prize Essay Special Mention, a national Bureau of Land Management artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness, and a Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. She is a Scholarly Associate Professor and Faculty Senator at the Washington State University Honors College and lives in Moscow, Idaho on the rolling hills of the Palouse Prairie where she has a pollinator garden full of native plants, butterflies, bumblebees, solitary bees, honeybees, and songbirds. You can read more about her and her work at annielampman.com.