Standing Peachtree: The Mvskoke Village

Lyrics

Before the stake was driven.
Before the name was chosen from a railroad ledger.
There was this place.

Here.
Where the Chattahoochee accepts Peachtree Creek.
A low bank of red clay and river mud.
The land remembers a village here.
The archive does not.
We have a name for the people: Mvskoke.
We have no names for the people in this place.
Only the geography they kept.
And the name they gave a tree.

Standing Peachtree.
A mis-hearing, maybe.
A convenience for the traders' maps.
Their journals say Standing Pitch Tree.
P-I-T-C-H.
The sticky, amber resin from the longleaf pine, used to seal a canoe.
Not the soft fruit of a summer stone.
The truth is always harder.
And sticks to your hands.

This was a crossroads before the iron came.
A natural salt lick drew the deer.
The deer drew the hunters.
An east-west trade path beaten into the clay by generations of moccasins.
Not by survey chains.
A shallow ford where stories were exchanged like currency.
A center point made of water and need.

We have no census from Standing Peachtree.
No letters home.
No headstones to read from a family plot.
Just the echo in a name we probably got wrong.
Just the ghost of smoke from a cooking fire we can't precisely place.
The water flows over their silence.
The river keeps their counsel.

The pitch pine still weeps its amber tears on the bark.
The river still carries the red clay south.
The confluence remains.
This was the first center.
The one made of water.
The one that was already here.