Kinfolks by Lisa Alther

Author:Lisa Alther [Alther, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-176-4
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

The road continues to rise as it winds through endless pine forests across the state line into North Carolina. When I first began reading road maps as a child, I believed that whenever we drove uphill, we were headed north. But on this particular trip this misapprehension is quite accurate: As you drive north from Parris Island through the coastal swamps, the road does rise continuously until you reach the piney forests of the Piedmont. This ascent continues into the foothills of the Smokies, and from there to the mountain passes.

Reaching the foothills, I enter stands of oak and hickory trees with leaves tinged gold and rust. Hazy blue mountains scallop the western horizon. In Pardo’s day, chestnut trees would also have been common, but a blight decimated them early in the twentieth century. The journals of the southeastern explorers marvel over the height and girth of the trees. Vast herds of deer grazed on grassy hillsides, burned over for that purpose by the Indians, as though the deer had been semidomesticated.

Each of Pardo’s forts was manned by ten to thirty soldiers. These men took a formal pledge to hold the fort for their king until instructed otherwise. They swore to do so “under pain of perjury and of infamy and of falling into less value.” After further Indian attacks, the Spaniards finally departed from Santa Elena for good, withdrawing to St. Augustine and abandoning these soldiers in their wilderness forts. They were never heard from again. One Spanish record suggests that the forts were destroyed by the local Indians soon after they were built.

At the base of the Blue Ridge escarpment, I stop at an archaeological dig called the Berry site, which sits along a peaceful creek that flows into the upper Catawba River. A town that Pardo knew as Joara, and de Soto as Xuala, was located here, as was Pardo’s Fort San Juan. Burned beams notched by metal axes and pottery shattered by fallen timbers indicate to archaeologists that this fort was destroyed in some catastrophic way. But no skeletons have been found.

I bend over to pick up a chunk of quartz lying amid the excavations. One side is smooth and the other jagged. Holding it in my palm, I reflect that it was a silent witness to whatever happened here. If only it could speak, it could tell me whether Indians burned the fort and killed the soldiers. Or did they enslave the soldiers? Did they adopt them? Did the soldiers, realizing they’d been abandoned by their commanders and no longer had to honor their pledges, burn the fort themselves and join a native tribe? Did they abduct native wives and start their own tribe? Did they meet up with those settlers thought to have headed north from the deserted Santa Elena? I study the crystalline spikes expectantly, but they aren’t talking.

A Spanish exploring party in north Georgia in 1597 was told by Indians at a town called Ocute “that across a sierra… four days journey

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