Land of the Talking Wood
In a real way, this is the most difficult post to write. Until now, I have merely repeated what my grandfather told me. These stories cover the range of Perakee existence from the moment the lines are formed in the hands, called the Pierce of the Earth Arrow, through birth, childhood, early adulthood, and finally to the Last of the Perakee and the Afterlife. But this post will contain knowledge that I have gained since my grandpa’s death in 1978, at the age of eighty-six.
There is much that can be said in favor of tribal life. A tribe, basically, is an extended family. Everybody knows everything about everybody. There are no secrets. Everything from food gathering and preparation to raising the children is done communally. Nothing is hidden. When a story is told, everybody hears it. When new information is gained, everybody knows it. In this way, knowledge is passed from generation to generation. Somebody may forget a part, but someone else will remember it, and the tribal knowledge remains intact for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years.
In the Bo Tribe of the Caddo, Perakee were leaders of the village. But there were times when a Perakee was not available to lead the tribe, and someone else was chosen until a Perakee was born and raised to an age when he would take over. A Perakee could die in childhood, or leave to explore the world and never return, with no one knowing whether he died or what, and the current Perakee could die before another is born. When this happened, there was enough of the Knowledge remaining to help the next Perakee born to understand who and what he was.
This sequence of events was broken in 1912, when the Bo Tribe was wiped out by smallpox. My grandpa had left home in 1909, at the age of seventeen. He never told me where he went, but I have heard him tell stories of working on the Mississippi when he was young. When he returned home in 1913, the tribe was gone. The village had been burned, and the bodies buried in a mass grave. He tried to ascertain if any survived and where they had gone, but to no avail.
My grandpa became an angry young man. He blamed White Man for the smallpox, and he blamed the Caddo for not helping him find his family. He went into the Army and fought in the First World War, where he was gassed and shot in the stomach. It took him two years to recover. In 1921, when he was twenty-nine years old, he became a Methodist minister. But because of his deep-felt anger and frustration, he never balanced his energies, and became Black Perakee.
He was a great preacher, and traveled extensively throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas at tent revivals for more than thirty years. He always packed the places where he spoke. People came from miles just to hear him preach. He saved thousands. He was loved by everyone.
He was loved by everyone, that is, except by his family. For they knew the real Jim Hoover. His private life was marked by sensuality and terrible rages. I heard many stories about my grandpa that I will not repeat.
Once the energies crystallize into a specific pattern, the personality is formed for life. The only thing that can change it is the Spirit Itself. Near-death experiences are only one way that the Spirit can take a personal hand in helping a person fulfill the task that was agreed upon before that person was born. There are other ways. Such an event took place on 18 February 1954, the night I was born, and my grandpa was changed forever. Over the next few days he canceled all his speaking engagements and announced to the world that he had retired.
My grandpa began taking my brother, thirteen months my junior, and me hunting and fishing when we were four and five years old. He was forever telling stories about all kinds of things. He built his stories out of things that my brother and I could understand, usually about whatever activity we happened to be engaged in at the moment. He told stories about Red fish and Blue fish that lived in the River in our hands if we were fishing. He told stories about Red, Blue and Yellow squirrels, rabbits, deer, duck, coon, or whatever we happened to be hunting, even though my brother and I only carried air guns. At the time, my brother and I did not pay much attention to his stories. We loved our grandpa, but to us he was just an old man who was always babbling about crazy things. My brother, who is Mahakah, remembers the stories, but only after coaxing by me.
The only time my grandpa ever became stern with us was when we entered a particular area that he called the Indian Graveyard. He always made us unload our guns, then walk behind him in single file, stepping each foot in his tracks, and no talking was allowed. Then we would reload our ammunition and proceed with our journey. If we came to this place at night, we would walk miles around it. He admonished us many times to never go into the Graveyard at night.
When we grew up in the fifties and sixties the woods in this area were virgin forest. My brother and I only wore shorts, occasionally a T-shirt, and no shoes in summer. There was hardly any undergrowth. Most trees were huge. And there were dozens of tremendously large red oaks that my grandpa called Indian Trees. They were all marked in a particular manner so that you could tell them apart from all other trees. Whenever we came to one of them, we would stand quietly for several minutes.
Grandpa would tell us not to talk, not even think about anything, just listen, and the trees would reveal secrets to us. He told us that these were our ancestors. He explained that when a Perakee would die, he would be buried in a place of his choosing, and a red oak acorn would be planted on the grave. The oak would grow, nourished by the Perakee’s body, and hold all the knowledge that the Perakee had gained in his lifetime. And that whenever we needed to know anything, all we had to do was come to one of these trees and sit quietly and the tree would speak to us and reveal the answers to our questions.
In the summer of 1970, in my sixteenth year, the world caught up to me. Or rather my hormones did. I discovered sex, and I no longer had time to listen to an old man’s stories. In the following year I got married, quit school, couldn’t find a job so I joined the military, and had my first child. I was away from home for seven years. And when I returned, my grandpa was gone. And so were the Indian Trees. A timber company came in during the seventies and the entire Land of the Talking Wood was clear-cut, the trees killed to make lumber. And I was as lost as my grandpa was when he returned home to find his family gone.
But my energies did balance, as these posts clearly show. In 1988 I heard the distant voice calling my name. And the Earth has shown me many things. It showed me that the Legend of Perakee is real, and that the ancient Toltecs did indeed find a way. And that their knowledge is available to anyone who can successfully balance their energies.
I have warned that Perakee Palmistry is not an end in itself, but merely a didactic device that leads to deeper knowledge. From here, my story can only go farther and farther afield from this site’s stated purpose of talking about Simian lines. And so I created this site to go into those other areas.
The end goal of any system of thought, whether used by Mahakah or Perakee, is to bring balance into a person’s life. Without balance, there is only chaos, and very little productivity. This system works for me. It may or may not work for you. I introduce it merely to offer an alternative to what is already here. It offers you a choice. That’s all that most of us really want anyway. We are not lazy, we will do the work, we just need help in understanding what our choices are.