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| ISBN-13: | 9781504018913 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 412 |
| Sales rank: | 743,985 |
| File size: | 745 KB |
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Alaska
A Novel
By Jana Harris
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1980 Jana HarrisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1891-3
CHAPTER 1
NEW ARCHANGEL SETTLEMENT
Russian Alaska
Spring 1867
"How much did you pay for me?" I yelled at Noah York as he paddled the dugout across Sitka Bay. "How much did you pay for me and what do you want me for?" I screamed, feeling the muscles of my stomach go rigid underneath the heavy starched gathers of my black muslin dress.
With silent deliberation, the American pointed the bow of his canoe away from New Archangel's familiar shipyards, and the trappers' sealskin boats grew smaller in the distance.
"What do you want me for?" I yelled again. But he was like a deaf-mute. Behind me I saw the cedar-plank castle of Prince Dimitri Maksoutov begin to disappear, along with the gold onion domes of the Church of Saint Michael.
"You're as bad as the Russian priests!" I screamed at the Yankee, remembering the Mission Fathers who had stolen me from my Indian mother when I was a little girl of ten. But my new American owner never even looked in my direction. "Bozhe moi," oh, my God, I moaned, thinking that by now I should be accustomed to being owned by people. For the last eight years my Russian guardians had treated me like a serf. And as I looked back where New Archangel stockade had vanished into the fog and the steep green mountains of Baranof Island, I wondered if this new servitude could be any worse.
"What do you want me for?" I asked again, my voice cracking as I stifled a sob.
Noah York lifted his paddle from the calm water. "Never end a sentence with a preposition, Little Nadia," he said, and spoke no more.
The first time I saw this Noah York, he was walking down the gangplank of the Calafia, an ice ship just in from San Francisco via a lumber camp all the Americans call Seattle. I noticed him right away, because of his sunset-red hair and his clothes, which weren't rank-smelling peasant trousers and a baggy shirt like the promyshlenniki, the Russian trappers, wore. He was dressed in city clothes like they must wear in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. But I had no time to contemplate the redheaded stranger, because that had been the day after my master, old Professor Karimoff, died; and since I was the smartest pupil in the Russian church's Mission School I had been ordered to give the lessons in my dead master's place.
Later that afternoon this same stranger passed by me on the Governor's Walk, his white teeth grinning down into my face. So it didn't surprise me when he came to Gospozha Karimoff's door the next day and began to bargain with my mistress to purchase me.
At first he offered only a few rubles, saying that I was undersized and probably weak. "Couldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds wet and with her pockets full of silver dollars."
My mistress frowned, her broad forehead wrinkled in lines that ran into her thick black-graying hair. "My husband die," she said, crossing herself with two fingers. Six armed and black-booted Cossacks marched by, one of them smashing a vodka bottle on the graveled pathway. "I not so good feelingk," Gospozha mumbled as she eyed the soldiers, then gave the American a cold stare. "Nadia, she tiny little thingk, but she is strongk like vwild boar. Listen, I tell you how to get much vwork out of her. Always, once, twice a day, vwack her mouth, is only vway. Da. Nadia, she little, but vwack her hard. Get much vwork out of her." Gospozha shook her finger in the American's long thin face.
Mr. York reached out his arm to touch my red-black hair. "A half-breed," he said, stroking my head and looking at me as if he were measuring my height and breadth with some invisible ruler. "Can't be more than five feet tall. She doesn't look like the other Indians I've seen around here, not with that dark auburn hair." His vowels came out like sharp noises, not at all the way Professor Karimoff had taught me to speak English, and I almost had to bite my tongue to keep from correcting him.
"Nadia is Haida Indian." My mistress rested one hand on her skirt-layered hip as she shifted her weight nervously from one foot to the other. Then, for once, she began to recite good things about me. "She best student in Russian Fathers' colonist school. She experiment of Professor Karimoff. Da, is true." It had been her dead husband's dream, she said, to educate the Indian savages, but since the tall, war-loving Tlingits refused to learn European ways, Professor Karimoff had given up on them and concentrated on just teaching me. "Nadia, she speak three languages," Gospozha told Mr. York, as if she were proud of me for once. "English, French, and Roossian, she speak."
I wanted to tell the stranger that my mother had also taught me the Indian tongues before I was taller than a deer's leg, but Gospozha forbade any mention of Indian cultures in her house, or even under the handhewn lintel of her doorway. And since she was grieving for her husband, I remained silent to spare her the added trouble of having to slap my mouth.
"Da, Meester York," said Gospozha, as the American stared at the black bodice of my dress, making me feel as if he were unbuttoning it with the dark pupils of his gray eyes. "Professor Karimoff used to tell me that vwhen fur business got better, he take us back to Roossia, show Nadia to university in Saint Petersburg — savage servant girl readingk three languages."
I stood beside her, remembering the day Professor Karimoff had told me that if I were good and did all my lessons, perhaps the chamberlain of Prince Maksoutov, Governor of all the Alaskas, would ask for my hand in marriage. How excited I felt when the professor described my wedding at the Church of Saint Michael and my chambers up in the Castle, with their grand rooms, ceilings carved in angel's faces and walls painted red and gold. Yes, I would live in the Castle, where huge chandeliers hung in a giant mirrored ballroom and rows of Cossacks in silver-buttoned uniforms danced with Russian noblewomen dressed in purple Chinese silks to the music of clavichords and balalaikas. Late at night, when I wasn't doing chores or language lessons, I would sit at my tiny upstairs window, dreaming of my noble husband and watching the brilliant seal-oil light that burned in the Castle's cupola to guide the Russian-American Company's fur ships back from Canton. With all its rum- and cognac-drinking celebrations, the Castle was so grand a place that Professor Karimoff called it the Paris of the Pacific. I never asked my Russian master if this noble husband of mine would come with us when he took me back to the old country to show me off. But now the professor was dead, Gospozha was going to sell me to a Yankee American, and I would have to forget all my hopes of living in Maksoutov's castle, studying at Russian universities, and finding my mother, whom I hadn't seen since the Russian priests stole me from her eight years ago.
"Does she speak the Tlingit language?" asked Noah York.
"Da," said Gospozha, blushing. "Awful heathen vwords."
The American smiled as if she had just told him that I could make shrimps whistle. "What's your Indian name?" he asked, addressing me for the first time.
"Small-Lake-Underneath," I said in English so that he could understand. The last time I had spoken of Indian ways in Gospozha's presence she had washed my mouth out with soap every morning for a week, saying that it was the only way to get rid of the Indian pigment and the devil inside my mouth.
My mistress scowled but didn't strike me. "How much you give me for servant girl?" she asked the American in a voice surprisingly loud for a widow in mourning.
I cringed, remembering the awful rumors I'd heard about Americans. In camp Seattle, the promyshlenniki said, lumbermen hired Indians to drag felled trees from the hills down to the harbor, where boats towed logs to San Francisco. When the Indians finished a week's work and demanded their wages, the lumbermen herded them into the bay, drowning hundreds.
"And her parents?" Noah York was concerned whether there were other claims on my head.
"Nyet, nyet. Father die long time ago. Vwoman-Always-Vwonderingk is Nadia's mother. Vwoman put hex on father; she was vwitch, always makingk the evil eye. Priests always vwanted to burn her from vwitch tree." Her voice was shrill as she pointed a narrow finger up the graveled walkway, past the wooded Russian tea gardens, to an old hemlock where the mission priests hung and then burned Indian shamans who refused to be converted.
"Vwoman-Always-Vwonderingk, one day she disappear." Gospozha spoke with a note of disappointment, as if she might have enjoyed seeing my mother sacrificed to the golden Madonna of Kazan at the altar of the Church of Saint Michael. "One day after priests take Nadia to be servant of my house and servant of the Lord, Vwoman-Always-Vwonderingk go off vwith promyshlennik."
Gospozha clutched her handkerchief to the high collar of her black mourning dress. I flinched at her lies about my mother but said nothing.
"Nyet, nyet," Gospozha continued, reassuring the stranger. "Nadia, she not bootiful, eyes too small, too slanted, but is nothingk she vwill not do."
No, Gospozha didn't tell the Yankee American the bad things. She didn't say that my father, a Russian convict I'd never met, had bought my mother for ten rubles from a Spanish clipper captain who'd stolen her from her Haida tribe in the British islands north of the Oregon Territories. My mother, the Russians said, was ungrateful to the white men for saving her from the heathen world. She wanted no part of my father, Ilya Ovechkin, wouldn't even marry him, and when I was born she took me to live in the Tlingit Village of the Raven, the nearest Indian village to the New Archangel stockade. I can still remember the Russian Fathers stroking their pointed black beards as they told my mother that she should be punished for not marrying Ovechkin and that she should punish me as well by leaving me alone in the woods with no food, the same way so many other half-breed children had died.
"Nyet." Gospozha was beginning to haggle with Mr. York over my price. As I listened to them argue — would payment be in rubles or in pieces of silver? — I shuddered at the thought of being sold like the squat, docile, half-starved Aleuts whom Prince Maksoutov brought in boatloads from the old Alaska capital at Three Saints Settlement, or Kodiak, as the Indians called it. I looked squarely at the American. He even had hair the color of Gospozha's orange dahlias on his large-knuckled hands. Perhaps he had this same hair all over his arms and chest. Was he alone, this Noah York, or did he have a wife? I felt ill as I imagined his naked figure, with long red hairs growing even out of his backside, coming toward me, moving his lips and wagging his tongue. Gospozha had only tolerated me in her house because I had been her husband's experiment. I hated chopping wood for her and cooking pirozhki and cabbage in her tiny kitchen, but the thought of being sold to this man whose face reminded me of schoolbook pictures of Ivan the Terrible brought a dizziness to my head and a nausea throughout my body.
"You do this awful thingk to vwidow? Take her servant girl for pennies?" Gospozha continued to bargain. I took a deep breath, embracing myself with my own arms to try to calm my shaking body. Once I knew the number of rubles I was sold for, then I'd know how many blue-fox pelts I'd have to tan to buy my freedom so that I could go in search of my mother and her Haida tribe. But just as the two were about to agree on an amount in silver, my mistress sent me into the kitchen to stoke the dinner fire.
Later, when Gospozha helped me pack my few belongings into a trunk, she told me that Noah York was from a place called Massachusetts. She had found me a good master, she said, a rich one. Mr. York's grandfather had made a fortune selling railroad land, and his father had made another fortune selling munitions during the civil war they'd just had in America. But Mr. York was both an abolitionist and something called a Unitarian, who didn't believe in going to war.
The constant southeast Alaska fog dripped on the roof above us. There's more to this Noah York than meets the eye, I told myself. If he's an abolitionist, why has he just bought a slave girl? Perhaps he thinks he's saving me from a fate worse than slavery — that of being turned out by my mistress into the woods to starve and die. Perhaps in his eyes he is doing me a favor by purchasing me and giving me a home to work in and a man to serve, since no one in New Archangel has offered me a proposal of marriage. Whatever his reason, I thought, taking a breath of damp cedar-scented air, certainly an abolitionist who journeys five thousand miles from his homeland to buy a slave girl is a very queer sort indeed.
Mr. York's father was a world traveler, continued Gospozha smugly; Paris, London, Athens — he went wherever he could buy gunpowder for the lowest price. But Mr. York's poor mother had been bedridden with arthritis and a diseased hip since his birth. The American, Gospozha Karimoff said in a haughty voice, had gone to some school called Harvard, where an American czar's children, if there were such people, would attend classes. All during his studies, she said — crossing herself with two fingers and making a half bow to the icon in the corner of the room — Mr. York had been a good son, living at home to see that his mother got proper care. When his mother died, he had become so grief-stricken, like herself, that he had decided to leave home. So he had booked passage for New Archangel on Baranof Island, Alaska, to live in a cabin among the Indians and Eskimos, or as Gospozha always called them, the people with the tails of dogs.
As my mistress's broad hand closed the lid of the trunk, I eyed her with distaste. At last I was free from the Russian colonists. Free from the stench of their cabbage-smelling kitchens, free from the relentless criticism and dour faces of the Russian priests.
How much did you pay for me? I wanted to scream it loudly enough for the Sea Spirits to hear me, but I knew by now that the American wouldn't answer. As he paddled the canoe, Noah York looked across the island-dotted water of Sitka Bay toward a rock-strewn shore where some Tlingits clad in deerskin were gathering seaweed from tide pools, standing on the same large flat rocks that my mother and I used to sit on before the Russian Fathers took me to live with the Karimoffs. Woman-Always-Wondering and I would come to this bay every day during the spring and summer, awaiting a "message." I remember how we sat for hours on the largest rock — the Wishing Stone, the Russians called it, because of us — watching the tide move in and out. Then my mother, wearing her necklace of salmon vertebrae and wolffang amulets, her long black-red Haida hair tied in a topknot and a jade labret in her lower lip, would point to a sea gull on a floating log. "Good omen," she'd say. "Sea bird riding log that floats against tide. Thoughts of Haida people are with us, Small-Lake."
My mother's grandmother was the head of her tribe, and she'd prepared my mother to succeed her. My mother knew that her Haida people would come for her in a canoe someday. I wanted to tell the American that my mother's people had found her; she hadn't run off with promyshlennik, as Gospozha had told him. I wanted to tell him that if I waited long enough my mother's people would one day come for me.
I turned to look across the water at the sea gulls floating on the tide. Mr. York pointed his canoe toward Indian River, near where the Raven tribe of the Tlingits lived. Dark hemlocks and spruce lined the shore, but the sun burning through the Alaska fog shone so brightly on the snowcapped crater of Mount Saint Lazaria and the white tips of Three Sisters Peaks that my eyes squinted in the glaring light. Perhaps the old ones in the Village of the Raven will have news of my mother, I thought, avoiding Mr. York's intense gray eyes. Even though the Tlingits were usually at war with the Haidas before the Russian colonists came, they had welcomed us into their village, knowing that my mother was a shaman. They gave us food and baskets and asked Woman-Always-Wondering to tell them what she knew of the salmon runs in her islands to the south. For days my mother told them about lives of her ancestors. Each one had a story, and each year of my mother's life she had learned about another ancestor until she had seen sixteen salmon runs and learned sixteen stories. I remembered hearing her tell each one several times with not a word altered. When my mother had seen sixteen salmon runs and learned sixteen stories, she said, she was stolen from her people by a man with yellow hair and gold teeth.
I sat erect in the canoe, suddenly filled with the memory of my mother. I was being stolen just as she had been. She had also felt this fear of a strange, chalk-faced wordless man, this fear that made my small red, work-swollen hands lie numb in my lap.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alaska by Jana Harris. Copyright © 1980 Jana Harris. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Chronology,Part I: 1867–69 Nadia Karimoff (Small-Lake-Underneath),
Part II: 1893–98 Ulla Björklund,
Part III: 1923–28 Mrs. Barnett Zimmerman (Catherine York),
Part IV: 1934–42 Eskimo Tommy (Tumukitit),
Part V: 1959–74 Donna Lee Douglas,
Acknowledgments,