Reflections: The Legacy's in the Land

Spend enough time poking about in the back of closets in an old house and there’s no telling what you’ll find. Something which came to light earlier this summer, during the interminable renovation of our son Charles’s room, was a Tupperware container containing scores of stone arrowheads found on the property by various ancestors. For the first hundred-odd years during which my adoptive family inhabited this patch of Tunica Hill country in West Feliciana Parish they farmed, making a living coaxing crops of corn, sweet potatoes, and soybeans from the heavy loess soils that comprise these forested uplands. And while it’s not great agricultural land—not compared with the floodplain land closer to the Mississippi, anyway—the hunting has always been good here. This fact was clearly not lost on the Native American people who were calling it home long before European settlers began to turn up. So back in the day, when my wife’s farming forebears would disk up the soil, particularly in areas close to the pebble-strewn course of Thompson Creek, from time to time the heavy clay would give up delicately knapped projectile points—mute testimony to the hundreds of generations of people who came before. 

They’re beautiful things, precisely flaked from the same rounded pebbles you’ll pick up in any sandy-bottomed creekbed crisscrossing the Tunica Hills. Properly termed “projectile points” (I’ve recently learned), the points in our box are mostly too large to have been arrowheads, and most were instead made to tip spears. From half-pound, palm-sized projectiles that might have served as a spearhead, knife, or hand-axe; to tiny, barbed affairs for spearing fish or bringing down a bird, these points come in all shapes and sizes. One thing they all have in common: they’re wicked sharp, pressure flaked to a serrated edge still quite capable of opening a vein all these centuries later. Anyone who has ever sat in a streambed, whacking sand-colored pebbles together in an attempt to flake off the beginnings of a cutting surface, will marvel at the dexterity and patience required. Handling these pieces, you get the sense that the people who made them took pride in their work. It’s easy to imagine that the best points, and those who knew how to make them, would have been highly valued, and that when a favorite point went astray its maker might have taken the loss pretty hard. That seems to have happened a lot, if the number of spearheads recovered from the land our family farmed is any indication. But then again, people had been living here a long, long time before my wife’s ancestors ever put plough to ground. 

It was Warren Woods, my wife’s grandfather and the last full-time farmer to wring a livelihood out of this land, who found most of the projectile points in our box. As a farmer he not only knew every inch of this land, but also the various kinds of game that called it home, and where those animals were most likely to be found. It should come as no surprise, then, that the riverbank or game trail where animals tended to gather might also turn out to be a good place to keep one’s eyes peeled for a long-lost spearhead, uncovered after a heavy rain. My mother-in-law, Dorcas, has gathered her own fair share of points over the years, including one beautiful, black specimen that she literally found in her hands while turning over pebbles in Thompson Creek. Not long ago she showed her box of points to an archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History named Samuel McGahey, who authored the Mississippi Projectile Point Guide. McGahey put most of the points at between three thousand and five thousand years old. That’s a long time—enough, perhaps, for a people to figure out how to live in balance with their place on the earth, neither taking too much or too little. It also puts our own brief tenure into perspective, and reminds us that we’ve a lot left to learn.

Our son Charles is becoming a hunter. Sixteen this year and with the rare misfortune of being born a Southern country son to a father without a passion for hunting, he’s kind of late to the game. But now, armed with an aerial map of his great-great-grandfather’s farmland, he’s making up for lost time. Charles is learning every inch of the property, getting to know the trails the deer follow, where the creeks converge, and where the game comes down to drink. Doing this puts him not only closer to the land, but also to all the people who’ve fed and clothed themselves from it before him. One day perhaps the sight of a long-lost spear point emerging from the soil will provide him with his own, unbreakable bond to the long arc of history that runs through the streambeds of this place. I hope so. 

James Fox-Smith, publisher

—james@countryroadsmag.com