My friend and colleague Professor Malinda Lowery of Emory University pointed me to the book below a few years back, saying “aren’t your people from Greene County? I bet you were not taught this in school.” She was correct.
David La Vere’s book, The Tuscarora War recounts the period from 1690 to 1725 when European Settlers moved West from New Bern into the heart of what is today Eastern, North Carolina, but that was not yet a British Colony. The book tells a complex and nuanced multi-decade story of the conflict—it did not start with the death of John Lawson in 1713, but the end result was that more than half of the American Indians confederated under the “Tuscarora” alliance were killed in battle or died of smallpox, and the survivors were enslaved, driven away, or placed in Reservations as the area became a full-fledged British Colony.
I knew the name Tuscarora as a kid because it was the moniker given to a nearby Boy Scout camp, but did not know the history told by Prof. La Vere’s Tuscarora War. The new information mesmerized me because Greene County was so familiar—I spent summers with my grandparents harvesting Tobacco and my family has lived there for generations. This area was the heart of the Tuscarora nation’s stronghold long before my family arrived, including fort Neoheroka situated West of Snow Hill, on the Contentnea Creek that divides the county.
Below is a watercolor of the creek from February, 2020, an early work of mine,
and as anyone who has seen the creek will tell you it has never looked that blue (see picture below, taken near Snow Hill, NC).
A few months after reading The Tuscarora War, I helped my mother and step dad move out of the house in Goldsboro, North Carolina where I grew up. My newfound historical knowledge was cast in a different light as I cleaned out my childhood bedroom, rummaging through the contents of a box that I found in the top of the closet that contained small tokens of an adolescent boyhood. Some jacks and a few marbles, a pin for perfect Sunday School attendance in 1981, a baseball, a picture of Michael Jordan making the first ‘the shot,’ a rusted pocket knife, a few baseball cards.
And several arrowheads.
The arrowheads had come from the Greene County, North Carolina Tobacco fields of the 1970s and 80s where the Tuscarora War had been fought 260 years before. When I was doing farm work as a kid, arrowheads were not everywhere, but they were not uncommon. Sometimes I knelt to pick them up, and other times stepped over them. Some of those picked up were skipped across a mill pond, while others made their way into my pants pockets that got emptied eventually into a box in the top of my closet, where they lay fallow as I went off to college, got married, had children and lived life.
Arrowheads were especially common when the fields were “broken” each February to prepare for the planting of Tobacco, Corn and Soybeans, a process that brought the soil that was 30 inches below the surface to the top. I have only seen a small plot done with a plow pulled by a mule, but it would have looked something like this in 1915 (acrylic).
Tractors were used to do this work in the 1980s and today, and this picture shows the modern process that completes the task that has been used on this land for Centuries—bringing to the surface hints of who lived there before.
As I looked through a box untouched for at least 35 years, having recently read The Tuscarora War and learned of excavations of Fort Neoheroka in Greene County, I realized that I had lived an excavation of that land as an adolescent and teen, and yet the seemingly obvious question when finding arrowheads: “I wonder where all the Indians went?” was not mine.
Our memories are truncated by what we are taught, and our interests point us where we expend effort trying to learn. It is true that the history I was taught in school was deficient and incomplete, but there were signposts pointing me to the buried history, hiding in the wide open of my life, literally at my feet, but I did not have the curiosity to wonder. I have been wrestling with why it took me so long, and why it was so easy to not pay attention, and I will be writing more about this over the next months.
I did the painting below in acrylic last week, and it is the view of my mind’s eye looking down two rows of a “field just broken” getting it ready yet again for planting, growing, discovery and harvest. The rows here, stretch on, seemingly forever, into the rising sun.
Don Taylor
beautiful. you are an anthropologist at heart. tell these stories Don!