The Little Brother of War

 I tried writing about this topic for over two decades; I failed again.  The Little Brother of War is the Choctaw's alternative name for their sport of stickball, which in their language is called kabocca towa, (chapucha toli). This translates literally to stickball in English. 

(Detail of George Carlin’s painting Ball Play of the Choctaw - Ball Up. The painting was done in Indian Territory around 1846.)

Some years ago I wrote a post about my friend Tom Deitz and mentioned stickball there, and intended then to do a follow-on about stickball, or toli as we called it for simplicity. We played toli at the University of Georgia in Athens as a club sport on the university's intermural fields. The team's founder was Greg Keyes, another author, and the idea of creating the team came to him in  a dream. Greg is one quarter Choctaw and hails from Meridian, Mississippi, not far from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw's reservation. Greg named the team the Flying Rats after a Choctaw story about the origin of the bat in an allegory of birds and mammals playing the first ball game. The Mississippi Choctaw called us the na holos, or white ghosts. Toli and the friends I made playing toli altered the trajectory of my life to a degree that I viewed us in mythic terms for many years. It's impossible for me to write about in a manner that  gives any justice to my feelings. 

                                            (Choctaw style kabocca and towa, sticks and ball)

The best I can do is this: My wife played stick ball for a year or so while we were still "just friends".  Back then she was very poetic, and described our toli this way: feel the earth, hit the sky. That captures it better than I can. We played barefoot in the traditional way, and our uniforms were shorts or pants and t-shirts, with shirts often shredded or gone after an intense game. 

(One of the few remain pictures I can find on the internet of the UGA Flying Rats playing a toli game against the Conehatta Skunks from Mississippi.) 

Toli as we played it was a rough and tumble game with few rules. As the Little Brother of War it was used as a method to resolve conflicts between communities rather than going to actual war. Toli remains an important, maybe integral, part of Choctaw identity today. Most Choctaw communities in Mississippi have a team made of of kid, adult, and old-timer squads, which today include girls and women's teams. (This was a development that the UGA Flying Rats take credit for due to our team always having women and insisting they play in games versus Conehatta. I'm not sure that the Flying Rats were directly responsible for the Choctaw women's teams, but it is part of our mythology.)

(Two opposing teams playing stickball at the Choctaw Fair. This contemporary style at the Fair is as structured as the sport gets. The author joined the Connehatta team at the Choctaw Fair on two occasions, and on a third occasion played with the mixed Choctaw and na holo, or white ghost, team called the Blood Brothers. Na hola is a term Choctaw use for European Americans.)