Turner Descendants Of The Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indians: Cattashowrock Town, Southampton County, VA

In 1963, the story goes, the last of the Nottoway Indians died. A fierce tribe of the Iroquois nation had dwindled over 350 years to one old man, illiterate, who worked as a farmhand and rode a bicycle into town for beer. William Lamb is buried near the farm where he lived and worked, on lands once granted to the Nottoway Indians by the crown of England, to be theirs forever. But the monarch overlooked one thing: The land already belonged to the Indians, had belonged to them for thousands of years, since the ancestors of the clan mothers camped on Stony Creek. They were Indian lands before John Smith set up fort, before Pocahontas met John Rolfe, before the Tuscarora War and the American Revolution and the Civil War and Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. And one more thing. William Lamb wasn't the last of the Nottoway. The blood that is thicker than Nottoway River water has summoned the descendants. They seek to recover a past that was for so many years denied them. They call themselves in Iroquoian the Cheroenhaka, the "People at the Fork of the Stream." They are scattered over at least seven states and Canada. They are coming home, to Southampton County. But like any journey worth taking, it isn't easy.