Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Read Online Free PDF Page B

them this land? Did their God give them the right to subjugate us? Who is their God? It cannot be the one called Jesus.”
    Poppa continued weaving the tale. “Margaret Little went up into the Smoky Mountains and hid for nine moons, livin’ on nuts and berries, and whatever she could catch with her knife and tomahawk. She's never spoken about anybody bein’ with her durin’ those nine moons of hidin’ like a fugitive. She always said she could smell a Bluecoat soldier a mile away 'cause her tomahawk would start singin’.”
    Margaret Little survived with the help of Corn Woman and the GreatMother. She firmly believed in the power of the ancestors to protect her through her dreams, which became her guiding light. So one morning, knowing that soon she would starve to death or be captured, because the tomahawk had started to hum, she trusted her instincts and made her way down from the Tennessee side of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains onto a large farm in North Georgia, where she signed on as an indentured servant. There she worked, and there she caught the eye of Granddaddy Rice, as Poppa called him. According to Poppa, Margaret Little wasn't very popular with Granddaddy Rice's grown-up sons, who still mourned their mother, who had passed away. Because Granddaddy Rice could still feel the steel in the tip of his boots, as Poppa phrased it, he had a very different idea on what should be done with the question of Margaret Little than his grown-up sons and their wives had. After Margaret Little had a wedding ring on her finger and a bun in the oven, possibly simultaneously the grown-up sons tried to run her off. But, as she would say to Poppa, “If I could stand up to a whole army of Bluecoats, I could handle a few hateful, greedy white boys.” So on the day that the two grown sons showed up to threaten the life of Margaret Little and her unborn child, while Granddaddy Rice was away on some trip, they were met by one of Margaret Little's best friends.
    Poppa would say, “I've met Margaret Little's best friend, and she keeps her underneath the tie of her apron.” The two sons stood in the doorway with a shotgun, telling her that if she didn't get her savage squaw ass on the next mule out, then she and her little brat would be found dead in a hunting accident. She turned her back to them and they let their guard down, thinking she had acquiesced. That's when Lady Tomahawk, Margaret Little's best friend, sliced through the air between the bodies of the two hateful sons, splitting the wooden doorstep in two. They literally did not know what in God's creation had just hit them. A rantingMargaret Little ran up and retrieved her tomahawk to place underneath the tie of her apron, with the warning, “Next time I won't miss, boys.” When Granddaddy Rice made his way back home he was met with the news that his sons and their wives had relocated to Texas to try their hands at ranching. Over the years Margaret Little and Granddaddy Rice formed a kind of partnership in order to keep the farm going through good times and bad. In 1861, Granddaddy Rice was an old man and Margaret Little was somewhere around her late thirties. The Civil War began then, bringing the South to her knees.
    I remember being at the Sunday dinner family reunion—that would happen every weekend in the summer—and when someone would mention “the Wahr” I began to realize that rarely were they talking about World War II or even Vietnam. Because so many families fought against each other, cousin against cousin, father against son, the schism that tore through the land, up and down the young American coast, was still trying to heal when I was born in 1963, more than a hundred years later. That many southerners in our modern-day society, as rockets were beginning to go up to the moon, were still not over this particular wounding shows in some way the extent of this physical and spiritual bloodbath.
    As Poppa always said, Margaret Little never agreed with the