Straight Pool Page 8

  * * *

  Derek Kirk, sandy haired, red-faced and lean as a reed, was in the parking lot of a two story brick building at the Seekonk’s edge, enjoying a fat, black cigar. Smoking is not permitted within fifty feet of any University doorway but Derek, being a Scot and a nicotine addict, didn’t pay much attention to ‘foolishness’: he once regaled me with other ‘naturals’ he had inhaled in his treks around the world and compared to those, tobacco is benign. Khakis are his year round uniform—he changed from trousers to shorts when it was warm enough to do so—and today he displayed knobby knees, tanned legs, and high white socks in beat-up hiking shoes. He greeted me warmly as he rubbed out the cigar in an empty flower urn which I suspect was there for that sole purpose and pointed to two motionless blue herons fishing where the river became brackish with Bay water. He then ushered me up a flight of stairs into a small office furnished with a beat-up wooden desk, an equally ancient wooden swivel chair, shelves of books and manuscripts, and a file laden table with a computer; weavings adorned one wall, a white board another, and the flag of St. Andrew was the backdrop of his desk. Despite the clutter, there was something about the office that seemed ordered. Ironically, for an explorer and anthropology professor, over the pile of books perched precariously on a sill, his view was of the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street.

  “So, ‘tis the Quonochontaugs, the ‘Quonnies’ that interest yew.” His eyes were bemused. “Canno’ imagine why our University Counsel needs a history lesson?”

  I told him. As I finished, he shifted in his chair and stretched his hands out in front of him, cracking all his knuckles. “Tis my belief that Quonnies deserve to be recognized as much as any eastern, so-called, ‘tribe.’ But unless yew are a reader of the Westerly Star, yew likely know little if anything about them.” The blue of his eyes became more piercing as he warmed up to his subject. “Ready? The ten minute course?”

  “Yes,” I said and he began a well practiced narrative.

  “When the colonists arrived in Rhode Island, from Plymouth mainly, it was a fairly chaotic place. Most of the Indians were of the Algonquin linguistic group….”

  “You said ‘Indians….’ ”

  “I say ‘Indians’ because ‘native peoples’ and ‘indigenous people’ and ‘native American’ are awkward and wrong. And they refer to themselves that way. Yew know, the ‘American Indian College Fund?’ If they kin, so kin I.”

  I was reminded that Derek was very non ‘pc’ for an anthropologist, maybe eccentrically so.

  “The native population was down by the time Plymouth was settled, decimated by white man’s diseases like typhoid, syphilis, various pests and germs for which they had no immunity. Around here, the Narragansetts held the west side of the Bay, the Wampanoags the east, and Pequots were pressing in from Connecticut. Lots of smaller groups like the Niantics, Nipmucs, Sakonnets and others under sway of still others, all goin’ back and forth over what is now Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Now, we are talking about sophisticated people. Not only were they warriors, farmers, and fishermen, their sachems were consummate politicians, always ready to change sides. Could have been pupils of Machiavelli.”

  I smiled at how his accent turned the Italian philosopher into a Scot.

  “Despite commonalities among them, they warred on one another, sometimes for the hell of it, sometimes for food or captives, or real or imagined violations of traditions. They made and broke alliances among themselves as fast as they did with the colonists in Boston, Plymouth, and Providence, but for fifty years, they mostly got along with the whites. Eventually, it got dicey as more colonists arrived and squeezed them into smaller territories. Which leads us to King Philip.” From a shelf behind him, he took a large book, thumbed pages, pressed the book open on the desk to a full color painting of a handsome, full faced man of perhaps thirty, with piercing eyes and a hook nose, long black hair pulled back and tied in ribbons and feathers, dressed in scarlet robes and adorned by bead and bone necklaces and shell bracelets. “Not really him, of course, but the jewelry and garments are close to authentic.”

  “Now, this is where legend and fact may diverge,” he said as the book was closed and reshelved. “Legend has Philip as the acknowledged leader of most tribes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, a hero, intelligent, charismatic. But contemporaneous writings say he was often beset by doubt, sometimes surprised in battle, and egotistical enough to lose support of important allies. In any event, he conceived a united effort by all New England tribes against the predatory whites, and began what became an epic battle for survival that history calls ‘King Philip’s War.’

  Derek took a boxed display of arrow heads off his desk and handed it to me. “These were collected by a settler from what was left of his farm house in Lincoln, Massachusetts after a raid in 1677.” There must have been twenty or so, including one that was a glossy obsidian.

  I handed it back and he continued. “Neither side gave quarter in their raids and pillaging during the summer and fall of 1675. That winter, the Narragansetts, Philip’s sometimes allies, withdrew into a fort in the middle of The Great Swamp down in Kingston. Now, this was during the mini-ice age of the middle of the seventeenth century, colder than a witches teat, if yew get my drift, and the Narragansetts probably thought the place would be impregnable because it was fifteen miles from the Bay and there were no trails into the swamp. They may have let their guard down because in December, about a thousand colonists from Plymouth, Providence, and Connecticut, dragged themselves through miles of frozen, swamp, guided by native allies.”

  He hunched forward for emphasis. “Now, remember, about half of the natives supported the settlers! Some for loot, others were paid, others because of old scores to be settled. Imagine that!” he said as he smacked the desk with an open hand.

  “It was a fierce battle and the defenders eventually gave way where a palisade wasn’t high enough, and a fire, probably from an arrow, destroyed the refuge in the center of the fort where the aged, the women, and children huddled. A bloody slaughter, with only a few escaping capture. Devastating to Philip’s cause.” The regret in Derek’s voice was obvious. “Still, the war continued for two more murderous years, with towns and settlements and native camps destroyed, more abandoned. All of Providence west of the river was burned in 1676 and the east side would have been razed except that Roger Williams, at the age of seventy-six, addressed the raiding party and out of respect for him, they left that part of the settlement alone.”

  He paused in his narrative and his face became somber. “So, the tides of war turned against Philip, forcing him back to his camp at Mount Hope in Bristol where a native sharpshooter brought him down. Do yew want to know what they did to his body?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, it was nasty. After that, whatever was left of native unity fell apart and one-sided treaties were signed which brought the loss of most tribal lands. Maybe half of the already reduced native population had died or had been sold into slavery to the West Indies for the goin’ price of thirty shillings a head! Kin yew believe it? Our God-fearing Pilgrims did that …? And in less than two decades, most had abandoned their tribal organizations, except the Narragansetts who endured in Charlestown.”

  “You still haven’t mentioned the Quonnies.”

  “I’m gettin’ there. Be patient!” He was getting agitated as he described the disintegration and desolation of the tribes and his burr was becoming as pronounced as a bagpiper’s wail. “A few survivors, refusing to be reconciled or to acknowledge their losses, found refuge in an almost impenetrable swamp in Greenwick that the whites didn’t covet. Privation and disease quickly dwindled their numbers but a few survivors eked out a bare existence trapping and fishing. Eventually, escaped slaves joined them—Rhode Island was a slave state then—along with outcasts of one kind or other. So long as they laid low in what became known as ‘Indian Swamp,’ the whites left them alone. Eventually, the whites called them ‘Quonnies’ from ‘Quon
ochontaug,’ a salt pond south of the swamp. They didn’t care what the whites called them, and it stuck.”

  His description of the South County swamp brought to mind a Cub Scouts overnight camping trip at age nine or ten. For a city boy, the dense woodlands, ponds, swamps, and mosquitoes and, why remember this, holly trees, made a lasting impression. Our camp site was near Worden Pond, and that night around our fire, our pack leader frightened us with a creepy legend about a lost tribe, the Quonnies, whose ghosts roamed the swamp nearby. Our imaginations ran wild that night as we huddled in our tents, with the ghosts outside waiting for anyone who foolishly slipped past the fire’s light.

  I mentioned my camp experience and Kirk smiled at my naivety. “Good stories to frighten the whites, don’t yew guess,” he responded.

  “They practically disappeared from history until 1726 when some Greenwick farm boys got drunk and decided to get rid of these swamp dwellers, whom they blamed for any local mischief, once and for all. They got about as far into Indian Swamp as where the band has its headquarters now, when a young Quonnie leader called Magua, with a handful of followers, started picking off the invaders as they were strung out single file on a trail between swamps. After the whites took a half dozen casualties, they ran away. The militia was called out and got about as far as the ambush site when some wiser heads called it quits.” Derek obviously thought ‘good on you, Quonnies.’ “After that, Indian Swamp was effectively, off limits for whites. The colony put out a reward for Magua but it was ne’er claimed. Supposedly, he lived a Robin Hood life raiding farms for cattle, sheep, and chickens, and escaping into the depths of the swamp. One night, accordingly to their legends, Magua went into the most uninhabitable part of the swamp and after building a huge fire, walked into the flames and disappeared, becoming a ghost who still haunts the Indian Swamp. Years went by, memories dulled, a few Quonnies survived, and Indian Swamp became a kind of reservation without being a reservation.”

  Magua, I thought. The name was so damn familiar. Got to remember to google.

  “Now,” he said, “we get to the nub of the problem for the Quonnies and federal recognition. The Narragansetts retained tradition and organization, even after Rhode Island mindlessly declared the tribe extinct in 1881 and gave each of them about fifteen dollars for their land claims. Ipso facto, they were supposed to disappear! But they didn’t. They kept their sachems, their medicine men, crafts, a church, burial grounds, pow-wows, corn festivals….”

  “The Quonnies…?”

  “None of the above. Remember, they were isolated in a swamp nobody wanted. As swamp dwellers, they didn’t keep records, not even births and deaths, barely had an oral tradition and because of their origins as remnants of different bands and non-indian groups, there wasn’t much of an organizational structure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite clear evidence of differentiation from the Narragansetts, whom they warmly hated. All they had were the legends about Magua, some family alliances, a few customs and fire rituals near the solstices. As time went on, with a lot of prodding from the state after it bought or condemned a good part of the swamp, most Quonnies eventually left the area, got educated, intermarried with others, integrated in the community. Then, in the nineteen seventies, one family in Greenwick, the Gardiners, identified all who they thought were Quonnies, about forty of them, and organized a council composed of Gardiners mostly, along with some Jones’ and Booth’s and Ballou’s. One of our faculty members heard about them, collected their few legends, and weaved them into something coherent.”

  Derek pushed his chair back, stood up, raised his hands far above his head in a stretch, took a step around his desk and opened a door to a closet containing a file cabinet. “My Quonnie library. I study those still in or around the swamp, called by themselves, and others, ‘swamp Quonnies.’ Their meager oral history is in being outsiders, over three hundred years of not giving in to white man rules or standards, retaining the independence they achieved in their swamp, holding grudges against the Narragansetts, a few antagonistic to whites. Some fight Oaky Gardiner, their elected sachem, on everything that comes before their council, claiming he is too ‘white.’ One or two even claim not to be bound by ‘white man’ laws. Reminds me of the stories of wild Highland boys I heard as a boy.”

  He closed the closet door and sat on the edge of his desk. “Now, quickly, to the present. In the early seventies, the Narragansetts filed a land claim—a lis pendens, it’s called—against all the real estate in southern Rhode Island. Claimed the land had been taken from them illegally by the state in violation of a federal law, the Non-Intercourse Act of 1792.” He chuckled. “Love the title. Anyway, the suit scared every property owner in South County and knocked the hell out of the real estate market so Rhode Island offered a compromise: the Narragansetts would get a state reservation in Charlestown, about eighteen hundred acres on the condition they had to agree to be subject to all Rhode Island laws. That was the trade off: they got a reservation of undeveloped land and state recognition, and gave up their claims. Federal recognition came a couple of years later. This settlement, of course, didn’t include the Quonnies who were not Narragansetts.” He studied my face. “Are yew getting all of this? Too much?”

  I responded that I was and it wasn’t.

  “When my colleague retired, I took over about when they applied for federal recognition. That was denied because the Quonnies failed to document their organizational history or prove they were a separate band before the United States was formed. Another petition is being prepared to meet the objections of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The land claim has been narrowed to most of Indian Swamp which is largely owned by the state, worthless enough to persuade the bureaucrats and assuage the fear mongers.”

  “How many Quonnies are there?”

  “Ah, that is a good question. Remember, for over two centuries, they rarely recorded births and deaths so membership standards have tended to be loose. According to the ‘official’ band records, about a hundred. Only about twenty or thirty, mostly from the Jones family, live on or near the swamp. Oaky Gardiner, for instance, lives in Richmond now.”

  “A casino? Is that what they want?”

  “Some, like Oaky Gardiner, more than others. A few, mostly the swamp Quonnies like the Jones family, are set against it or want to control it exclusively because they claim to be ‘authentic’ Quonnies. Quite divisive in the tribal council.”

  “Did you ever hear of a place called ‘signal hill?’ ”

  “Aye,” he said, surprised by my question, “Mouwneit. How did you come on that? South of Indian Swamp in Westerly, wrapped up in the Magua legend. That’s where Magua gathered his kinsmen before they ambushed the whites. Later, they used it for fire rituals through part of the nineteenth century and started again after Oaky Gardiner got them organized. But, without a dig there, nobody will be able to prove anything helpful to the application, and that’s not bloody likely, is it, since its been bulldozed away…?”

  “You mean, the golf club…?”

  Derek shrugged and said in a conclusion, “Alger, I know a lot about the eastern tribes and bands, but the swamp Quonnies are like no other group. They remain secretive, independent, and some have their own ethical slant on things which you might not approve. They don’t even want me to know everything, and I’m on their side!”

  I said, “I hope this isn’t out of bounds, but how do you get away with saying things like that?”

  “High-minded blunders are worse than outright lies,” he responded. “They are humans after all, some good and some not so good, in our eyes.” He smiled. “Glad that yew asked?”

  I couldn’t help it. “Aye, laddie!”

  * * *

  I thanked Derek for his time and exposition and left shortly after, but not before asking him why Rhode Island had forgotten the Quonnies and their struggles. “Because it had to,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Flanaghan laughed when I telephoned him from my office to co
nfirm arrangements for Charlie’s vetting and mentioned I’d gotten an education on the Quonnies.

  “How’d you get into that?”

  I told him about Nadie’s challenge and he listened, chuckling discretely.

  “Up there in Greenwick, in the Indian Swamp area, the Quonnies own a few acres, the state owns most everything else in a land management reserve. There’s still some camp sites in there, fishing shacks, trapper’s trailers, back from when nobody cared who did what there. If you go in, get into the maze of trails that peter out into swamp, you can’t find your way out. Every year or so, somebody goes missing and the DEM rangers and emergency people have to rescue them. Even ATV’s don’t go in because of the tales about quicksand.”

  “Sounds like what Kirk described.”

  “And Oaky Gardiner? He runs a tavern near Low Town. That’s in a corner of Greenwick at the edge of the swamp where it borders Richmond, Westerly and Charlestown, with the tribal headquarters he set up next door. Oaky’s been pretty much getting a wink and a nod from the three towns’ cops for years for whatever he gets into, gambling, after hours drinking, you name it, because he keeps the petty vices out of their nice neighborhoods. I don’t mean to say his customers are only Quonnies; they’re some other lowlifes we got down here, too. Anyway, by the time a Greenwick police cruiser could get to Oaky’s, it’d be as quiet as church.”

  Could this hellhole be run by the sachem of the Quonochontaug Band? I asked and his voice cooled to a ‘let me tell you, I’ve had experience’ tone. “The Quonnies I know are just plain, law-abiding folks except a few that call themselves swamp Quonnies, or ‘real’ Quonnies. When I was solicitor, I prosecuted a couple of them. They never cooperate, are always defensive, and got more issues than National Geographic. Oaky, because he’s the Quonnie leader, raises bail when one of them gets arrested, hires the lawyers, and most of the time, Oaky, backed up by his son Peter—now, that’s a piece of work—keeps these characters under control. While Oaky’s pretty smooth, Peter is about as smart as a sack of rocks. And mean! He’s a security guard at Calibrese’s track when he’s not enforcing whatever his old man wants.”