Chito Alla: Searching for Life on the Natchez Trace

It’s never fun waking up, not knowing why you’re in so much agony. Rising from a death-like period of unconsciousness, with dried blood and other fluids caked in your hair and smeared across your face. Whatever is in your mouth is sour and feels like real thick sorghum syrup is coating your teeth and throat. You don’t know if it’s from the booze, the puke or the blood that your clothes are also covered in, but the smell and the taste is terrible.

The experience wasn’t new to the young man, known only as Chito to the other miscreants at Natchez Under-The-Hill. He’d started showing up a couple times a year in around 1790-something, four or five years earlier. He always came with plenty of money, a fresh outfit of clothes, including new boots, and an almost too friendly demeanor. Like many others who frequented the whorehouses, gambling halls and bars Under-The-Hill, Chito came to escape from whatever reality he lived in. He came to Natchez to drink, gamble, screw and fight; nothing more! When he left, days or possibly weeks later, the clothes, money and charm had been spent.

This day, he knew it was time to go back to where he came from… if only he knew where that was. It seemed wherever Chito went he didn’t quite fit in. He had never really remembered belonging somewhere specific and for the last five or six years had just gone where he felt like going. He had no agenda or purpose as far as anyone who ever met him could tell.

And that’s the way it had always been and probably always would be. The way Chito thought of his life, was that without knowing where he came from, there wasn’t much sense in knowing where he was going. Although he was not able to remember anything about his parentage, he had often wondered what caused him to be deserted in that swamp, that lay next to the Trail that he now slowly walked North on.