Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell

Author:Sarah Vowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

OBITUARIES

What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill

BEING AT LEAST A LITTLE Cherokee in eastern Oklahoma where I was born is about as rare and remarkable as being a Michael Jordan fan in Chicago. I mean, who isn’t? Both my parents are Cherokee to varying degrees, and I’m between an eighth and a quarter. It goes without saying that my twin sister, Amy, is, too. Except that I have dark eyes and dark hair and she’s a blue-eyed blond, and so our grandfather nicknamed me Injun and her Swede.

“Those roles were assigned to us, Indian and Swede,” Amy says, “because of the way we looked. But it was also more like the things we were told about ourselves.” She mentions that when we were children, I was the one given the Cherokee language book and she was told she resembled our Swedish grandmother who died before we were born. She continues, “I think I was probably six or seven before I realized that I was Cherokee, too.”

We’re a little French and Scottish and English and Seminole, too, typical American mutts. But the Cherokee and Swedish sides of the family were the only genealogies anyone in the family knew anything about. Here’s what we knew about ourselves: Ellis Island, Trail of Tears. And I think, to a kid, “Trail of Tears,” the Cherokees’ forced march from the East to Oklahoma where we were born, seemed enormously more interesting, just as a name. Even the smallest children know what tears mean, and I think in my earliest understanding of where I came from, I pictured myself descended from a long line of weepers with bloodshot eyes. The Trail of Tears took place in 1838–39, when the U.S. Army wrenched sixteen thousand people from their homes in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, rounded them up in stockades, and marched them away, across hundreds of miles. Four thousand died.

Every summer when we were children, our parents would drive us to a place about half an hour from where we lived called Tsa-La-Gi, which is the Cherokee word for Cherokee. It’s the tribe’s cultural center. There’s a re-created precolonial village, a museum, and—this was our favorite part—an amphitheater which staged a dramatic recreation of the Trail of Tears. Every summer we watched Chief John Ross try like mad to save the Cherokee land back east. We saw his hothead rival Stand Watie rage off to the Civil War. We especially loved the Death of the Phoenix, a noisy, magenta-lit interpretive dance in which the mythic bird would die only to rise again.

Amy took it to heart: “The play was really tragic. I have a reverent feeling toward it. And I think it’s because this play was so serious and told such a detailed story that it took this place of significance. It was really important. It really mattered.”

The amphitheater show so influenced my thinking that even though my dad and my grandfather used to show me photographs of Cherokee leaders like Stand Watie in books, when I imagine Stand Watie now I still picture the actor at Tsa-La-Gi.

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