CHAPTER 1
K
Listening to the Corn Grow
As a child, Te Ata learned tribal folklore from her father, Thomas
Benjamin Thompson, a Chickasaw emblematic of tribal members
facing the final phase of acculturation at the turn of the century. A
natural storyteller, Thompson loved entertaining his children. But, as
a man working hard to be successful in business in white society, he
passed on little else about the tribe’s heritage or his own Indian
ancestors. If he had schooled his children in such matters, Te Ata
would have recorded it, for she sopped up his stories like a sponge.
But in the voluminous amount of material she amassed on her life
and times, there are only a few scraps of paper containing names of
a handful of her Indian ancestors. Since virtually no details exist,
these people, including her paternal grandfather and great-grandfather, were nothing more than disembodied figures in her mind.1 In
her unpublished memoir, “Te Ata: As I Remember It,” none of her
ancestors except her parents is named. In fact, her only reference to
earlier ancestors was indirect: she wrote that both Chickasaw and
Choctaw blood ran in her veins.2 Moreover, Te Ata told some interviewers that her mother, Bertie, had a little Osage blood, but the
claim was undocumented and therefore not recognized by either
tribal or federal authorities.3
A chart in Te Ata’s papers identifies Thomas Jacob Thompson as
her paternal great-grandfather.4 Thompson lived in the old Chickasaw
Nation in what is now northeastern Mississippi. He apparently was
7
married twice. He may have had Choctaw-Chickasaw blood, as Te
Ata’s family believes, but it is said that he was adopted into the
Chickasaw tribe, likely because one of his wives was Chickasaw.5
He did not join the tribe’s forced migration to Indian Territory but
stayed behind and fathered four sons. One of them, Thomas Jefferson Thompson, born in 1840, was Te Ata’s grandfather. When he and
a brother were teenagers, they decided to join the tribe in the west.6
Subsequently, their father joined them and then died in Indian Territory, the year unrecorded.
Thomas Jefferson enrolled at the Chickasaw Manual Labor Academy, which in 1851 had become the first tribally established boarding
school in the Chickasaw Nation, located near present-day Tishomingo.
After he graduated his flair for numbers landed him a job teaching
mathematics at the academy. On Christmas Day, 1863, he married
Millenium Bynum, an eighteen-year-old Chickasaw woman.7 The
couple’s first child, Thomas Benjamin (Te Ata’s father), was born on
May 20, 1865, near Emet, about eight miles from Tishomingo, the
capital of the Chickasaw Nation. Almost nothing is known of Millenium (Te Ata’s grandmother) except that she was a direct descendant
of James Logan Colbert, a Scotsman who settled in the old Chickasaw Nation in 1729 and started, with the help of three Chickasaw
wives, one of the tribe’s leading mixed-blood families.8 Millenium
died giving birth to Mary Frances in 1867, when Thomas Benjamin
was just 2 years old.9
Soon after Millenium’s death Thomas Jefferson married Loisina
Harkins, and they had two sons. Thomas Jefferson was named clerk
of a local Chickasaw court and was later elevated to clerk of the Chickasaw Nation’s supreme court. He died inexplicably at the age of 35 in
1875. His eldest son, Thomas Benjamin, was 10 years old. The boy was
taken from his stepmother by his maternal grandmother, Lucinda
Bynum, who placed him in a tribal boarding school for secondary students, the Lebanon Orphan School. He later attended the Harley Institute in Tishomingo. One year before graduating he went to work for a
prominent judge, Sobe Love, in Marietta, near the Red River. Surely the
Bynums arranged the situation with Judge Love, to steer him toward a
career in the law, as they might have done earlier for his father.
A turning point in the boy’s life occurred in 1881 when Nellie
Bynum, from his grandmother’s side of the family, married Douglas
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Te Ata: Chickasaw Storyteller, American Treasure
Johnston, who in 1898 would be elected governor of the Chickasaw
Nation. As Thomas Benjamin was just 16, it was arranged that he
should live with the young couple; Nellie was 21 and Douglas 25.
There is no record of how long Thomas stayed with the couple, probably only a year or two, but in 1884 Johnston became superintendent
of Bloomfield Academy, a Chickasaw boarding school for girls that
was located at Achille, about three miles north of the Red River. Two
years later Nellie died in childbirth. Although the formal Thompson
link to Johnston was then severed, the two men continued to feel kinship, and from this bond their relationship expanded in the years
ahead.
In the 1880s Thomas learned merchandising by working in a
Tishomingo general store. He married a Choctaw, Belle Gardner, in
1888, and they established a home in Emet, near his birthplace. That
same year he was elected permit collector and the following year
followed in his father’s footsteps by being appointed clerk of the
Chickasaw Supreme Court. In 1890 Thomas helped to conduct the
Chickasaw tribal census, he had seventy-five acres of fertile land
under cultivation and Belle was pregnant with the couple’s first
child.10 Then Thomas’s world turned upside down. Belle died in
childbirth, but the baby, Selena, lived. In the matrilineal tradition of
the Chickasaws and Choctaws, the baby went to live with her
maternal grandparents.
In 1893 Thomas and Douglas Johnston opened a general store in
Emet. Johnston’s job at Bloomfield made him a partner in absentia;
that Thomas was able to operate the store while holding down his
court job probably was due to the help of his new wife, Lucy Alberta
“Bertie” Freund, whom he had married on April 16, 1893.11
Bertie was born on March 25, 1870, one of six children of tenantfarmer parents who settled in Texas. At times the family lived off the
land, but through hard work and trusting in the Lord, the Freunds
held together. They gradually accumulated some livestock and a little
money, but they never owned land. Bertie learned how to read and
write by attending school for parts of four years, as time and circumstances permitted. As Bertie suggested in her unpublished memoir,
handwritten in 1939, most of her childhood was spent at hard labor:
“I had to get up very early for I had to milk 6 cows, feed 4 head of
horses, had to cut and carry green corn for nearly a half mile to feed
Listening to the Corn Grow
9
Te Ata’s mother,
Bertie, about the
time she married
“her Indian,”
Thomas Thompson.
them twice a day. . . . On Saturdays I had to stay home and wash
and iron.” In season, she picked cotton all day long.
Although Bertie’s parents, Daniel and Mary Freund, were impoverished and never stayed in one place long enough to make friends,
they always cared for their neighbors in need. If a family needed
clothes, Bertie sewed for them. If someone was sick, Mary or her
daughter administered natural preparations of their own making.
Bertie wrote, “In those days, we had the only sewing machine near
us and Ma would make me sew for all the neighbors.” For one family of eight, Bertie had to “make shirts for three men and all the underwear for the whole family, dresses, bonnets, aprons for the women.”
She was paid with a fifty-pound sack of flour. “Ma thought it was all
right. When she loved her neighbors, she would do anything for
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Te Ata: Chickasaw Storyteller, American Treasure