Free Men

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THE FIRST SIGN that order had slipped its axis was that the slave who came to tell us of the murders was riding a horse.

I was reclining on a mat this morning next to a chief of the Creeks, cleaning my pipe while his wife tended to his hair, and I was in the midst of reminding myself to make a note of this habit, the way she greased her fingers before the ritual untangling, when he snapped his head away from her and shouted at one of his lieutenants to get that man off the good horse. The Indians let their slaves ride mules and are generally rather lax with regard to discipline, but this steed was evidently of superior breeding, which detail briefly obscured the greater fact that the slave was alone and was clearly distraught.

I traveled down to the southern hunting grounds yesterday with my chief and his attendants and various wives, including my own, and I was expecting a reprieve from the recent flurry of negotiations and skirmishes that now color the post-revolutionary landscape of the inner American wilds. I am grateful for the role that I, an outsider and a Frenchman, have been given in such proceedings, but I have long preferred to take an observational seat. Though I can see how my intellect and experience are useful to these Creeks — or Muskogee, as they call themselves — I pursued this circuitous path to America in order to catalog the divergences of man. I left friends behind in Paris who dissect amphibians and sketch leaves, but I hope to earn my place in the burgeoning science by classifying human action, to construct not a hierarchy but rather a forecast for future generations. While history may be used to explain the present, I believe that the present may also offer prophecies.

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