Artist's Statement
“Asin Yahola’s Wife” concerns the legend that Osceola, a leader of the Florida Seminoles during the 19th Century, was married to a Black woman called Chechoter who was seized by slave catchers, and that his rage at her capture was the Seminole casus belli in the Second Seminole War.
“Che-Cho-Ter” is first mentioned by James T. Sprague, an American officer, in his war memoir, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (1848), as Osceola’s wife. He calls her a "Creek." The story of her abduction—not mentioning her name—comes from Joshua R. Giddings’ The Exiles of Florida (1858), a work of anti-slavery propaganda written in the aftermath of the Seminole War. In Osceola's Legacy (2006), historian Patricia Riles Wickman identifies two women listed as Osceola's "wives," Uichee and her sister Alikchen, present at Fort Marion in November 1837. "Uichee" is another spelling of "Yuchi," one of the tribes that made up the Seminole nation, and may not have been her given name. There is some doubt that American observers understood the relationship between these women and Osceola.
Historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter traced the story to a series of contemporary press articles and partisan war memoirs, in his 1941 article “The Episode of Osceola’s Wife: Fact or Fiction?” Porter concluded that it probably didn’t happen, but it was plausible and was reported as historical fact. Florida Seminoles were married to the descendants of Africans who had escaped slavery in the Georgia and Carolina colonies, and those descendants with their increase were subject to capture by white raiders at any time. There is no evidence that Chechoter existed, and the event almost certainly did not happen.
"Asin Yahola" is the proper name of the man Americans called "Osceola." I have followed Susan A. Miller, a historian of Seminole descent and author of Coacoochee's Bones in the spelling of this and other Seminole names.
In “Asin Yahola’s Wife” I treat Chechoter as real, suggesting a conspiracy among some Seminole and Geechee leaders to stage her kidnapping to motivate reluctant Seminole leaders to resist American encroachment. The conspiracy is not mentioned in the text. The conspirators talk around it. I became more interested in the self-image of the Geechee characters Abraham, Levi, and Moses, and their precarious place within the Seminole nation.
The Seminole nation of the 19th Century married two cultures: disparate Native groups that had occupied the region for a long time but were not necessarily united, and the Gullah-Geechee rebels who had escaped slavery in the Georgia and Carolina colonies and continued to mount resistance. In the context of African American culture in South Carolina and Georgia, "Geechee" is understood to refer to Africans living on the Sea Islands, and may refer to the Kissi people of West Africa; but scholars of the Black Seminoles, such as Bruce Twyman, suggest that when the Seminoles said "Geechee" they were referring to the Ogeechee River of Georgia, itself named after the Hogeechee or Yuchi people, remnants of which were part of the Seminole world. I am using the word "Geechee" to refer to "Black Seminoles". "Yuchi" may also have been one name for "Che-Cho-Ter," Osceola's "Creek" wife.
Geechee; Yuchi; Che-Cho-Ter.
The Americans systematically divided the Geechees from their Indian allies by, on the one hand, encouraging the Seminoles to practice plantation slavery in Indian Territory, and on the other hand by offering specific groups of Geechees freedom if they would abandon the Seminoles. The identity of the Geechees was occluded, distorted by the expediencies of white men trying to retain, recapture, or steal human property.
My method has been extensive research and halting, imitative attempts to write prose fiction. I have followed some themes and methods from Jorge Luis Borges’ short fictions in The Universal History of Iniquity, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, and Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon, which set their narrative within a historical context but are not oppressed by it and, at times, actively subvert it. They sometimes verge into the improbable or fantastic, unlike more traditional historical fiction writers like Robert Graves or Gore Vidal. They are each, however, affected in different ways by the ambient self-reflecting culture of white supremacy. For instance, McMurtry's villains are violent—if sometimes sympathetic—Comanches in conflict with heroic—if sometimes inept—Texas Rangers, reflecting the legends and folklore of white Texans. He did not attempt a deep understanding of Comanche history, identity, or experience.
I would like to take a similar approach to history but seek out surprising intersections of identity and ethnicity.
By decontextualizing historical images and introducing counterfactual descriptions and encounters, I followed Michael Ondaatje's distortion of history and his use of 19th century photographs in The Collected Works of BIlly the Kid. Part of Ondaatje's concern in that work was the way myth and folklore distort the record. I'm not that comfortable with it. Discomfort is a part of what I am seeking.
The cover image is of Ruby Tigertail, sister of Charlie Tigertail, from a family of Black Seminoles who remained in Florida after the Seminole Wars. This photograph was taken in 1910. The style of her clothing is probably different from 19th century Seminole women, as the famous Seminole patchwork textiles were developed later, as they gained access to modern textiles. It feels both anachronistic and exploitive of Ruby Tigertail’s identity. Ruby's face is shown on the cover out of context. Deep within the nested, discursive document, Ruby's image is presented with proper attribution. She is not Che-cho-ter. Che-cho-ter was not real.
I didn’t use the image because I thought it was a good idea. I used it because it is powerful, and I wanted to borrow that power. Like the white men on the periphery of "Asin Yahola's Wife," I have bent facts about Native culture for my own purposes.
I have also followed Ondaatje’s lead in distorting or misrepresenting the historical context of a myth. The text is presented as a fictional narrative interspersed with documentation. Seven main pages, presented out of chronological order, hint at the conspiracy at the heart of the story, but are focused on the efforts of several Geechee men—Abraham, real, and Levi and his son Moses, not real—to establish their place in Seminole society. The format embodies the tortuous, confusing, contradictory identity of the Geechee people presented in the historical record, where they are presented as slaves, diplomats, cowards, terrifying warriors, master manipulators, betrayers, excellent farmers, starvelings, drunks, and wretches. My text sometimes contradicts the historical record. For instance, Sprague describes Micco Nuppe as “very fat, and excessively lazy, which unfitted him for the active duties that devolved on him in an open warfare,” (Sprague, 1848) while I describe his “lean muscles bunching in his narrow shoulders." (Rankine, 2021) Contradictions abound in the historical record, and Sprague is an unreliable narrator. He is often sarcastic or dismissive. He is writing about people he fought to displace—people who wanted to kill him.
Photographs, portraits, maps, and documents are contextualized—several of them falsely. The core documents are Giddings’ account of the abduction of Osceola’s wife, and House Document 225. The U.S. Army kept records of the Geechee people who were removed from Florida to the Indian Territories starting in 1838. It lists their names and relations, and the names of the Seminoles who claimed them as slaves. Abraham and Toney Barnet are mentioned. Many of these people were known rebels and fighters. It’s impossible to imagine that they were anyone’s slaves—kinfolk or partners, maybe tenants, wartime allies, but not slaves. Historians consistently distort their nations or ethnicities—Black Seminoles rather than Gullah Geechee rebels; but actually slaves; but also the driving force of the rebellion against colonial encroachment on free people. The two peoples clearly overlapped, interpenetrated, and teasing them apart into competing priorities feels like the erasure of a humane possibility. Black men like Abraham had Seminole names—he was called Souanaffe Tustenuggee, Warrior of the Suwanee River, where Maroons and Geechees had villages before Andrew Jackson's invasion in 1815. Seminoles had Black spouses, parents, and children. Geechees had Seminole spouses, parents, and children. They fought and died for each other. I believe that when the war was lost the Seminole elites claimed the Geechees as their property to save them from slavecatchers.
I have no personal history with these themes. I am a working-class, white, cis-gendered male from New York City. But my father was an immigrant from Scotland, and Scottish immigrants of the 18th Century actively and cleverly subverted of the Muscogee social order, which in part created the world the Seminoles lived in, so there is a tenuous ethnic connection. The white men who perpetrated these acts were not different from me. Currently, I am exploring outside of that paradigm, seeking perspectives different from my own.