No point in starting off with whatever date Old Miss wrote in her book to record the births of the slaves born onto their miserable tobacco farm off on the far west side of Missouri in a region so Confederate it was called Little Dixie.
So, with Miss Olivia Hathcock, teacher at the Trinidad, Colorado, Free School for the Children of Colored Miners, taking down my words that is what I intend to do. The way I'm being whittled down, I reckon I might have another year, two at the most, to set the record straight before they fit me out for a pine box. Having both my feet amputated last year has not strengthened my case either. No wonder folks don't believe me when I tell them I was a Buffalo Soldier. How do you answer back to a newspaper? With just a few words, that bowler-hatted jasper made me out to be a fraud and every word out of my mouth a lie. "Assumed"? Because I knew when to say "ain't" and when not to? He wrote that I received him "with an assumed formality that had a touch of the ridiculous." When I didn't turn out to be some green country gal fresh off the plantation never knew the touch of shoe leather and was, instead, a person who could talk just as proper as him when she was of a mind to, here's what that skunk dump wrote in the January 2, 1876, edition of the St. Just because I was from the South, that pinch-nosed weasel expected me to be a grinning old auntie, calling him "suh," shuffling her feet, and talking about dem ole days back home. Louis Daily Times never understood about me. What I'm trying to say is I am a Western woman and that is what that dandified reporter from the St. I've lived here in Trinidad, Colorado, for over twenty years and it'd take chloroform and a gun to ever get me back to the South. Only two things in this world the South is good for.
The second thing you better get straight about Miss Cathy Williams is that, even though I had the misfortune to be born in Missouri nearly fifty years ago, somewhere in the vicinity of 1840 to 1844, depending on how Old Miss told the tale that day, I am not a Southerner. No, she had possum teeth, filed to points so, if need be, she could rip an enemy's throat out, for my grandmother was one of the Leopard King's six thousand warrior-wives, what the French called les Amazones. And don't go picturing one of them sweet old grannies like you got nowadays with linty lemon drops tucked into her apron pocket for the grandkids. My royal blood comes from my grandmother, my Iyaiya, as we called her in Fon, our secret Africa language. Not that tea-water queens over in England have to make do with. Royal blood runs purple through my veins.
Here's the first thing you need to know about Miss Cathy Williams: I am the daughter of a daughter of a queen and my mama never let me forget it.
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