Relatives from as far as Cincinnati have arrived for the inaugural celebration of “Jackson Lewis Day,” hauling in Crock-Pots of pulled pork and coolers of Vsse lopocke (holly leaf tea) from the parking lot. At the front of the room, family relics abound, from a portrait of an elderly Lewis with a cane to his granddaughter’s state-fair-winning quilt to a copy of Creek Indian Medicine Ways, a book written by his great-grandson in 2002.
Evoking the power of matrilineal kinship, an intergenerational group of women, from a 75-year-old in a wheelchair to the newly crowned Miss Muscogee Nation, begin to sing: Vnokeckvt omecicen mi, hvlwe tvlofv mi (“Because of love here, there is heaven”).
Jon Tiger, the 70-year-old descendant responsible for today’s event, approaches the podium.
“Our mom, Susie Scott, always said, ‘Never forget your ancestors,’” he says, referring to the grandmother who raised him. An artist and lifelong Eufaulan, Tiger hopes this gathering will “instill information to our families, our kinfolk, on what Mr. Lewis was all about.” He has invited me here for the same purpose. Months earlier, I reached out looking for his community’s connections to my family history in Eufaula, Alabama. Tiger piqued my curiosity with the story he shares today:
Jackson Lewis was born in southeast Alabama in 1831, the year after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. As his family prepared to abandon their homeland for the sandstone hills of Indian Territory, Lewis’s father, Tommy Harjo, embraced his wife and son: “Don’t look back,” he told them — like the angels warned Lot’s wife as she fled the destruction of Sodom.
Tiger tears up at the mic, revealing that a white man killed Harjo before they could leave Alabama. Harjo was buried, following Creek custom, inside his house in a grave dug out from the dirt floor. A three-foot-high “spirit house,” made of split planks and clay, was raised over him, sheltering his soul on its way to the afterlife. Leaving home for Indian Territory, Lewis and his mother, Sa Cee Make, had no choice but to leave Harjo’s bones behind.
Traveling with his newly widowed mother, 8-year-old Cacoke (or “Little Jack”) almost drowned at the crossing of the Mississippi River. He fell off his pony into the raging water, but managed to grab its tail. As the pony pulled the boy to the other side, witnesses swore they saw a tiny man (estē lopócke) sitting on the pony’s head.
“This would be a sign that he possessed a powerful medicinal purpose,” says Tiger, Jackson Lewis’s great-great-grandson. “From the day the river was crossed, the little people were teaching him how to doctor sick people in the new land with new herbs and plants.” Settling among other displaced Creek people, Lewis and his mother ended up 3 miles east of Eufaula in North Fork Town: a Texas Road trading post that’s now buried under the largest lake in Oklahoma.