“This is a real Indian state. And I wish they’d give it back to them.” — Private Billy B. Hobby, in a letter home from Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, training ground of the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division in WWII
The land is red.
Clay, hills, and creek beds cut through the landscape like a wound that never quite closes. The hills rise and fall with blackjack oak and persimmon and black haw, roots driving down into the earth so far they intertwine with whatever is buried there. The sky is a canopy of uneasy blue. A solitary yellow-billed bird calls out from the thickness of trees, a hollow, liquid sound, descending, like the staccato of rain on metal. Redbud and pawpaw line the creekbeds. A brook bends and gurgles. The cicadas tick and whir and sing.
This is not soft country; it is hard land, the kind of land that makes you work hard to hold it. And it holds, the way a body holds everything done to it, everything buried within it, through all its time.
Before it is Rainbow land, it is Raincrow land.
Before it is numbered and mapped and parceled into a sixty-thousand-acre training ground with barracks and mess halls and motor pools, it is wild, unruly land. Before the boots go down and the rifles learn to fire in formation and the soldiers march up and down the rolling hills, a woman makes her home here.
Her name is Rachel Raincrow.
There is a pension file, page after page, in the looping handwriting of clerks paid to drip ink on paper and move on to the next name, the next ledger line. Each entry says the same thing:
Widow of John Raincrow.
Mother of Washington Raincrow.
Never her signature.
Always an X, with the words: “her mark”.
She is more than a widow, more than a mother, more than a mark.
Rachel Raincrow is born in 1807, in the Cherokee homeland in the Southeast, in the hills and rivers her people have born, bred, and died on for centuries before any white foot walks there. Born the daughter of a chief, Joseph Oode Sah de You Duha, she is thirty-one years old when soldiers arrive and tell her family there is little time to gather what matters most, and there is no time to grieve what will be lost.
The Cherokee call it Nunna daul Tsuny, the trail where they cried. The journey west takes months, and moves through cold and rain and disease and death. Thousands are buried along the trail, left to animals, to namelessness, and the sorrow of a life unremembered. No ceremony, no sanctity. Just goodbye and move along.
Rachel lives through it all.
She is brought to the rolling hills of Indian Territory with her parents, and they settle in what will eventually be called Oklahoma. This land is not given to her by inheritance or legacy but she tends this new ground and its bird-calls, its coyote song, its thick mosquito twilight. She puts down roots, literally, pressing seeds and cuttings into the earth, coaxing the lifegiving ways of her people into this earth. Black haw. Persimmon. Cherokee rose. The soil is supple and warm from the day’s sun and gives under her hands.
Two dozen moons later, the leaders of her native people circle on the bluff above the lake they have named Tearful Waters. The night air is still. Below them the water holds the moon without moving. The insects have gone quiet. With calloused and capable hands they ignite a fire and carve symbols into stone; determination and humiliation glow from the cracks time has etched across their skin.
A Y-shaped section, its surface carrying their people’s history, is broken off and slowly, intentionally passed around the circle. One elder at a time invokes the elements as he presses the fire-heated rock to his breastbone.
Tearful Waters holds the grief. The fire burns steady in their hands, carried from a homeland they were forced to leave and refuse to relinquish in their hearts. The earth takes what is given to it, the heat, the ash, the words spoken low into the smoke. It billows through the air and seals the circle, holds the sound of what is whispered and cried, carries it up into the night and across the dark bowl of water, and sets it into the land.
An elder feels his final heartbeat, and, cradling the newly carved talismanic stone against his body, is laid to rest in the bluff. An oak rises from that place. Its roots bend, shaping around and within what he was. Whether or not Rachel’s father, Chief Joseph, is in this circle, the record doesn’t say. Either way, Rachel’s bloodline intersects with what unfolds on the land this night.
Rachel watches the Civil War move through their land, skirmishes cutting through Cherokee fields, soldiers taking what they can carry, what they can break, what they can burn in a valley split open. She buries her husband. Then her son. They are both taken by disease while serving in the Indian Home Guard Regiment at the nearby fort, at watch against an encroaching Confederate Army.
Oklahoma becomes a state in 1907, and with statehood comes the government’s dissolution of the Cherokee Nation. Through the resulting Dawes Act, Rachel is given an allotment, her own ground, made official at last with a deed that has her name on it and the government’s seal. She is one hundred years old.
Then one hundred and one. Then one hundred and two. Then one hundred and three.
Then, in 1910, a census-taker walks up her long porch, knocks on her door, opens his ledger and writes her name. Three months later, Rachel Raincrow inhales her last breath, and exhales one long and lingering sigh that floats upward into a blue Oklahoma sky. She is returned to the earth with song and flowers and prayers in the Raincrow family cemetery, just down the crooked road from the Tearful Waters.
The rain crow, the yellow-billed cuckoo whose name Rachel carries as her own, feels the sky with its full, feathered body, reading the pressure shift before the clouds gather and before the light changes. The air thickens. Into silence the rain crow calls ka-ka-ka--kow-kow-kowlp. A storm is on its way.
The storm arrives in December of 1941. The whole world holds its breath. The United States Army needs sixty thousand acres, and needs it fast.
The Army surveys the land around Braggs and Muskogee and sees opportunity. It sees scattered farms and the Cherokee and white families on them, generations of people who have put their hands and hearts to taming a life out of the rough land here. President Roosevelt believes the Depression has already ruined these people, and that a fresh start somewhere else would serve them better. Their land is condemned and the families are given a piece of paper that offers them a sum of money and forty-five days.
Forty-five days to decide what can be carried and what must be left behind: the crops in the ground, the tools too heavy to load, the particular way the afternoon light falls across the timber porch of the house they built by hand, and the graves of their ancestors where they have anchored their meaning.
What comes next is the engineers, with shovels and tools and a task: the cemeteries dotting the acreage must be opened. The deceased Raincrows, like all the other pockets of bones tucked around these hills, are dug up, placed into trucks, driven down the road, and reinterred.
Rachel Raincrow travels again, one more time, in her afterlife.
When you know where to look, the underbrush still shows you where the family rested, cocooned in their earthen nest. Small indentations pockmark the treescape where the graves once were, like leaf-covered foxholes. Like carved hollows where death has slept. In spring, daffodils open in places where daffodils have no reason to be. They are the only headstones some families left behind.
The life Rachel nurtured in this ground with its petals and brambles remains, opening and fruiting. Fed by the flesh and bones of the people who tended them, the ever-hungry roots reach down still, and the Raincrows rise back up through the bark and the blossoms.
The acreage has a government boundary now. It is called Camp Gruber. The barracks go up next to the mess halls, motor pools and training ranges. All of it rises fast, one new building every twenty minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Where the rain crow called and the fresh showers spilled and kicked up the scent of rain on dust in wide open swaths of human-free air, now there are hammers and saws and the shouts of fast-moving men.
The officers’ club, where rank insignia will sparkle in twilight as glasses clink to the future of America, is constructed a few footsteps from where the elder’s oak has been growing for a century. The bluff now holds a splash of tall trees. They watch as the log structure rises.
The women arrive.
They pass through the gates of Gruber with heels striking dust, skirts catching the wind, the faint trace of powder and perfume tangling in the smells of oil, metal, and cut timber. Lipstick is set carefully in compact mirrors that reflect a one hundred and eighty degree view of war underway. Their fingers move across switchboards, typewriters, scalpels, and ledgers. They take their places inside the telephone exchange, the laundry, the commissary, the hospital, the post office. Their voices travel down wires. They open envelopes that carry love and longing and, with practiced restraint, censor and reseal them. The Women’s Army Corps move in unison and uniform through the white clapboard buildings; their presence is sanctioned and watched. The Black WACs are here too, separated by policy, housed apart, working alongside the Black nurses who tend to Black soldiers. They too, are watched, and through a different lens entirely. Still, they move through it, and they serve.
The land does not know these women in the way it knows Rachel. It holds them at its surface, the way it holds the buildings, the roads, the temporary weight of this war. Whether they are civilian or enlisted, the women of Gruber carry their men with them. A brother’s laugh, a husband’s weight in the doorway, the remembered shape of a boy’s hand held once and let go. These memories settle into muscle and bone, and surface in the quiet moments between tasks. They are present in the folding of sheets, in the pouring of aspirin into a waiting palm, in the exchange of coins across the Post Exchange counter for a roll of film. The work is precise and it is endless. The women understand that this, too, is how to win a war. They do not fire the rifles, but they hold together everything that might otherwise come apart.
The Rainbow soldiers come.
These young men form the fifteen-thousand deep ranks of the 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division. Every trainload is greeted by the brass band playing “The Caissons Go Rolling Along”, whose composer Camp Gruber is named for. They spill onto the tracks and the platform in their olive drab uniforms, packs on their backs, and blink in the sunlight. This is a scene from an old wild west movie: a single small building, a railing, a horse with its head hanging down, a white sign with six black block letters. BRAGGS. On the other side of the tracks, a short march away, a different kind of ceremony waits.
The fire invoked here is that of a whole world in flames. The location is the vast parade ground, an expanse of baked earth that sends the heat back up through the soles of fifteen thousand men. Dust chokes their throats as they call out the Rainbow Division anthem at the top of their lungs: “There’s a Rainbow in the Army, like a rainbow in the sky … let our voices show in our hearts we know that a true Rainbow will carry on, hey!”
As their general reviews them they offer, in unison, the Rainbow salute. Smoke cans swirl out the Rainbow colors of red, yellow, and blue. The sun is merciless and their uniforms are pools of sweat. There is no ceremonial rock pressed to the breastbones of elders, but there is a different sort of leader, and there is a flag.
The beloved Rainbow flag of World War I passes from elderly yet battle-hardened hands to younger hands destined for a new fight. The banner lifts, its colors cutting through the breezeless afternoon, through the heat and scent of thousands of men. The ground hums with marching boots and songs sung. General Harry J. Collins receives the flag and brings it to his lips. In the Cherokee way, the U-nv-go-la-dv, the rainbow, is the garment worn by the bringers of the storm. On Collins’ soldiers’ shoulders: the rainbow patch, a symbol pressed into men, carried on their shoulders the way the elders brought the stone to their chests.
His wife Maude is not here today. Their daughter Patricia is.
Maude Collins, a former Miss Texas, was thrown from her car. General Collins watched in horror as glass slashed through her face, her jaw smashed on impact with three years of surgeries to follow. Finally, ready to ride again, she took her horse out. Collins came around a bend and found her under her horse, her pelvis crushed, permanently paralyzed. Her body, once thriving across open ground on horseback, is now held still inside rooms that do not move. She withdrew into silence. General Collins fills that silence with stubborn, wordless devotion. He knows what loss is, and he pours himself into training his soldiers. For him this means one thing: his men come home.
Patricia has learned from her father how to endure. It has been over a year since she received the yellow missing in action telegram with her husband’s name. She is suspended inside the electric state of the unknown, and she does what women have always done with the unbearable: she organizes. She gathers the officers’ wives around her, women who have followed their husbands to the edge of this thing and now live in the houses in Braggs, Muskogee, and everywhere else the women and children of the Rainbow will fit. They meet, pack boxes, write letters into the night. These women put their hands and hearts to use on this land where Rachel Raincrow’s roses still open their faces to the sun.
The women who work inside the post offices stamp, censor, and shuttle love letters between Rainbow soldiers and their sweethearts. Those between Barney Parrish and his sweetheart Vicki are among them.
Barney writes from the back of an ambulance on the mortar range and calls Vicki his “future Mrs.” He tells her he has requested a furlough to marry her. “I’ve always said I wouldn’t do so while in the Army,” he writes, “but there have been some changes made.” Barney gets his furlough, and he marries his Vicki. He returns to Gruber, the hours accelerate, the training grinds on.
Before anyone is ready, the trains return. The soldiers pile back on in the exact place they piled off months before.
Vicki is there that day in November when Barney leaves with his regiment.
Her belly is round with their whole world. Vicki stands on the platform with one hand there, the other raised against the late autumn sun.
She holds Barney in her sight for as long as she can.
The crowd around her is compressed into one moment: a sea of soldiers in uniform, women with wet faces, children waving flags, the band playing. It is a cacophony of pretend bravery, a crowd of cheers and tears. Collins is there, standing with his staff among the families and the clamor and the dust.
The train lurches. Then moves as its whistle cuts through the crowd.
Vicki watches it go.
One hand on their child. One hand raised toward her husband.
In two months, Barney will be dead.
Four and a half weeks after that, Vicki will go into labor. The umbilical cord squeezes a full circle around the neck of Barney’s daughter as she slips out into the bright yellow lights of the hospital room, red and blue from head to toe.
She lives, and grows up knowing that her father did not.
The land holds all of it.
Before the color cuts through the sky, in the liminal edges surrounding every living thing, the rain crow calls.