Buffalo Prayer

The first black man on record to hold a vote in the United States was born a slave and given no surname, and after he voted it would take still at least seven more years of his body on earth in human bondage where he’d see his wife sold to another plantation and likely not ever see her again before the man who owned his body reluctantly deemed it permittable for him to be granted emancipation. But there was a stretch of almost three years, and for nearly eight thousand miles trekking across the uncivilized American West, where he’d be the only slave in this nation to ever be simultaneously a free man.

His Christian name was York, born within two years of his master William Clark who inherited him as property rights, in the first of August, 1770. It is considered by historians that the two of them were closer than friends, their relationship resembling something of a brotherly bond, through almost all their lives. Clark would refer to York as his man or his boy, and in turn York called Clark his Massa. Clark hardly went anywhere on earth from his early childhood through becoming a man, without York at his side.

The two of them together left Kentucky, after the United States doubled in size in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana territory from Spain, a region of land stretching from southeast Louisiana all the way to present day Montana. Alongside Merriweather Lewis and somewhere around thirty-three other enlisted men and a dark coated Newfoundland dog named Seaman, Clark and York would discover for the first time by American citizen, the name of her West.

It was at the end of November in 1805 on the coast of present day Washington overlooking the Pacific Ocean with rocks planted on the sands of the shore shaped and modeled after the fangs of mythological and ancient sharks of giant proportions, waves erupting along the beaches in violent cascades, a torrent of winds howling and screaming and rattling through the marrow of man and throbbing against the trees, with rain coming down like bullets from the heavens, that there was the vote held concerning the future endeavors for the company’s encampment. Where and what they ought to do, how they’d survive the coming winter. They were tired beyond description and had up to this point in many instances just barely survived and the odds were not so great they’d survive yet. York’s vote on the issue was tallied and his vote counted. All men stood on the bluffs, in formal circle, scored by the sounds of the ocean, harsh winds roaring from the bluffs under a cruel and cold sky. There was the smell of salt, there were the beats of liberty.

Through their endeavors, they’d see for the first time in their lives, coyotes scowling along the desert floors against the glass-like hazed heat, grizzly bears emerging from the pine and bushes as close to them as were their shadows with a hell-clouded breath and sharp teeth coming for their flesh as they were fantastic beasts delivered from a nightmare, and the prowess from the soul of the rivers, their rapids and current and sucks, the mindless heart of Mother Nature. Countless Native American Tribes and would hear many of them mention stories and speak of the Crow people and would speak in rumor and myth and speculation of the Crow themselves and one night in the final months of their voyage the Crow would steal half the horses they owned and they’d not see this tribe once. They’d see and hear, and probably feel it too from a sense undefined by earthly flesh, the sound of godly thunder manifested by the wild stampede of a thousand buffalo hooves echoing and roaring against the earth with horns stemming from their temples and sphering their scalp, trampling across the Great Plains in the spirit of something holy, a sacred dance, a revival of wingless angels. At night they’d measure the stars in the silver black sky.

York is depicted in a painting by E.S. Paxson standing with five others—including Captains William Clark and Merriweather Lewis each clad in long deer fringed coats and knee-high boots with one of them in an arc-shaped chapeau and the other in a coon skinned cap, and the Native American guide named Sacagawea who would take over duties midway in the expedition as translator for the unknown languages to the white men. And she’s painted wearing a dress also made from deer hide alongside her French mountaineer husband dressed in a white coat with blue stripes and a hatchet by his waist, and they are somewhere in the wilderness of the Rockies just off the shores of a calm and majestic body of water with snow-capped mountains in the background. The collar of York’s shirt is checkered the color of blood underneath a blue and worn-out and ragged coat, his pants rolled up to the knees revealing stockings dirty and frayed, colored in a myriad shade of teal and indigo and turquoise, and on his feet are very large pilgrim-buckled slippers. Strapped at his waist is a nine-inch-long and maple handled knife in a leather pouch and hanging just under his shoulder is a duck head turned upside down and staring at the skies above, and he appears not as a slave at all but a very fine and rustic American Chief. He holds a dirt coated brown felt hat in his left hand and has his single-shot muzzle loading rifle set over his shoulder with the other, and his fingers are remarkably large and he is looking in a different direction than all others present, staring into the heart of something deep in the wild as though it were his own reflection chanting for emancipation sung by the tongue of she who gave birth to him.

The poet Frank X. Walker imagines that York, in this new world that laid beyond American boundary, heard while seeing the ruby-tinged sun rise each morning like a medallion of the natural world, chiming as it scanned across the sky lighting dawn, songs sung from the soul of his mother. That while crossing the Great Falls and toward the Great Portage York recognized they were embarking and entering upon a gaping entrance to the mother of earth, that he had visions of becoming the form of a buffalo and smoking a pipe with an old woman and seeing back home all his family and the slaves too, begotten by the spirit and body of a buffalo herd with York saying to them that one day he will return and they will each sprout wings, and another vision where he floated in the clouds overseeing both oceans from east to west and riding a storm in the sky back home fastened after a buffalo stampede, that he had a father whose namesake he’d carry on and his father taught him things of Great value, maybe not from the material world but of the natural earth and a spiritual realm beyond this world.

It is self-evident and abundantly clear that the narrative of York as presented by Walker is as important, if not more so, as the record or lack thereof given of York by his contemporaries and most historians, who have seemed to mostly to disregard a proper respect or serious concern for the account of his life. The biography of York remains shrouded in a degree of mythology and great mystery and also a very fine poetry, not totally dissimilar to the historical figure of Christ.