I first encountered the spirit of Black Hawk in February of 1979. It was an unseasonably warm, muggy night in New Orleans. A gauze of mist shrouded the city as I left the French Quarter, crossed Industrial Canal bridge, and entered a threadbare black neighborhood of the lower Ninth Ward.
The bishop said opening prayers; after an a cappella hymn punctuated by tambourine bursts, he made a brief statement. “And so we welcome tonight our Black Hawk celebrator . . .”
“We welcome all our people,” the bishop murmured cautiously.
“We believe in the spirits,” Anderson said, “and we know the spirits will come if we call them.”
The man looked shocked. Then he said, “I wanna testify!”
“All right now. The money is coming. But you have to wait. But the money is coming. Now, when the money comes, it will be a check in the mail. And you leave that check up on yo’ bureau. When it comes, no matter how much you need that money, you leave it on the bureau, and wait five days before you spend it.”
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Some chroniclers of Indian history have questioned the authenticity of Black Hawk’s autobiography. But Donald Jackson, who wrote an essay and footnotes for the 1955 edition published by the University of Illinois Press, makes a persuasive argument that it is genuine. The interpreter, Antoine LeClaire, spoke Black Hawk’s tongue and read the dictated work back to him. Although the text is dotted with Anglicisms like “whilst” and other phrases that betray a white man’s pen, such embellishments recede beneath the powerful voice of the narrative. “Black Hawk’s story,” writes Jackson, “despite the intrusive hands of interpreter and editor, is basically a tale told by an Indian from an Indian point of view.” It’s a tale of betrayal, anger, and humiliation; it marks the passing of Indians forever from Illinois and the last gasp of native resistance to the white man’s usurpation of the Northwest Territory.
