Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 237

Doak's Stand, were less inveterate now, but because this canoe bore not

the meek and bloody cross of Christ and Saint Louis, but the scales the

blindfold and the sword-up the river to Le Fleur's Bh_iff, the

trading-post store on the high mild promontory established by the Canadian

voyageur, whose name, called and spelled 'Leflore' now, would be borne by

the half-French half-Choctaw hereditary first chief of the Choctaw nation

who, siding with the white men at the Council of Dancing Rabbit, would

remain in Mississi:3pi after his people departed for the west, to become

in time among the first of the great slave-holding cotton planters and

leave behind him a county and its seat named for himself and a plantation

named in honor of a French king's mist ress-stopp ing at last though still

paddling slowly to hold the pirogue against the current, looking not up

at the dark dispossessed faces watching them from the top of the bluff,

but looking staring rather from one to another among themselves in the

transfixed boat, saying, 'This is the city. This is the State';

1821, General Hinds and his co-commissioners, with Abraham DeFrance,

su.)erintendent of public buildings at Washington, to advise them, laid

out the city according to Thomas Jefferson's plan to Territorial Governor

Claiborne seventeen years ago, and built the statehouse, thirty by forty

feet of brick and clay and native limestone yet large enough to contain

the dream; the first legislature convened in it in the new year 1822;

And named the city after the other old hero, hero Hinds' brother-in-arms

on beaten British and Seminole fields and presently to be President-the

old duellist, the brawling lean fierce mangy durable old lion who set the

well-being of the Nation above the White House, and the thealth of his new

political party above either, and above them all set, not his wife's

honor, but the principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not

since, defended, it was, whether or not; -Jackson, that the new city

created not for a city but a central point for the governance of men,

might partake of the successful soldier's courage and endurance and luck,

and named the area surrounding it 'Hinds County' after the lesser hero,

as the hero's quarters, even empty, not only partake of his dignity but

even guard and increase its stature;

And needed them, the luck at least: in 1829 the Senate passed a bill

authoris*nq the removal of the capital to Clinton, the House defeated it;

in 1830 the House itself voted to move to Port Gibson on the Mississippi,

but with the next breath reconsidered, reneged, the following day they

voted to move to