An Undisturbed Peace (33 page)

Now we are here together, regaining our strength. I wish you could know little Abrahan, my friend. He's a very handsome lad, brave like his father. But also he is just a bit like you. Sly, smart, devoted. Though his lungs are weak, his chest is big and round, his legs thick and short. When I catch him doing something he should not, he tries to hide it, though he learns he cannot, day by day. My brothers, his aunties, and I will make him strong and straight, have no fear. His foster mother lives with us. She teaches him too. He will not shame you.

Of course, I will grieve his father the rest of my life but I know I will see him again and that makes it all bearable. Often, I think upon the nation's past. How could I not? We all do here. We dream of our mountains. Of our forests, where once all things were plentiful and every day was rich with blessing. We remember our villages, our fields, our songs, and our dances. Sometimes a great sadness comes over me. But then I look upon my son, little Sleeping Bear, little Abrahan, and I know. It is not the land, it is the people that must survive.

You told me once you'd like to come west. So far, I can recommend it. I will welcome you if you come. Were you serious? Or was it another of your lies, titmouse? If so, I forgive you. I forgive you everything.

The letter was signed with two words in Cherokee. Abe had no doubt it read Dark Water, which was, after all, her name, her only righteous name. He put the pages of her exodus down on his desk and looked upward at his wife, who regarded him with concern. She took up the pages to read them herself. While he waited for her to finish, Abe kissed the top of Gabe's head and set him on the floor. Judah and Raquel stood nearby watching everything the way children do, with open intensity, waiting without prejudice for whatever happens next. He rose from his desk and went to his wife. She finished reading and looked at him, a world of empathy in her eyes. He took her hand. “Come, wife,” he said. “It's time I go home.”

As they rode back to the house, cozy together up front with the children in back, Hart's ears perked in a way that made it feel as if all was right in the world. Hannah asked him, “Do you think in the end all will be well for Dark Water and her son? Will they prosper in the new land?”

Abe considered. He thought about his vision of America, a land of infinite opportunity that made mistakes but struggled to right them. Still, would anyone care enough about the Jacobs and the Dark Waters of the world to bring justice to their children? A part of him thought yes. A part of him thought no. At least, he decided, the Cherokee were now far enough away from the civilized world for anyone to care about their new land. Maybe they could even keep it.

“I don't know, Hannah,” he said. “I don't know what could restore them after all they have lost. Time will tell. In the meantime, we have our own work to do.”

On impulse, he brought Hart up to a quick trot, which jostled the children in the back. Raquel, Judah, and Gabe squealed and laughed until they were home.

In two months' time, Abe's birthday came as it always did. Although his wife and children celebrated their natal holidays, he'd never adopted the habit of celebrating his own, a habit he considered very American but also very pointless. He commanded his family ignore it. That year, however, Hannah insisted. “The children enjoy a little party,” she told him, “and besides, this year I have something special I want to give you.” He could not refuse. She was pregnant yet again and he knew by now not to oppose her when she carried a child. Contention never ended well at such times.

That day, which was the seventeenth of August, Hannah cooked a special meal of his favorite delicacies and baked a cake, smothering it in blackberries, cinnamon, and browned sugar. The children sang him tribute, presented him with homemade cards and gifts, and went to bed. Abe thought the celebration was over. He sat on the couch facing the fireplace. His wife had installed an arrangement of flowers and dried leaves inside the hearth in lieu of wood, as they had no need of an evening fire in that season. Its fragrance was a delight and inspired him to rambling thoughts of the past, of Hannah and Dark Water both, so that his chest filled with warmth. “Wife,” he called out, “come sit by me and let me thank you for the day.”

Hannah called out in response. “It's not over yet,” she said, a lilt to her voice. “The best is yet to come!” When at last she came to him, she carried a large rectangular package wrapped in brown paper and twine. She handed it to him with a merry flourish, her eyebrows raised, her eyes large, her lips curled in a mischievous smile. He untied the twine, pulled the paper off, and caught his breath.

It was Lord Geoffrey's portrait of Marian and her family, the smudged Jacob and doomed Lulu eternally behind them, all of it cleaned and stretched in a new gilt frame. “Oh my, Hannah,” he muttered. He stroked the image of his first love in the same way he might a sacred object or the brow of his eldest child. He'd not looked at the portrait in at least a year. From time to time, he'd touched it as it lay scrolled up in a drawer but that was all he'd dared for fear of restoring feelings he'd worked hard to digest. Now he felt as if he viewed the painting for the first time. His eyes went moist. “How did you—? When did you—?” Hannah laughed.

“Oh, it was easy to fool you, husband,” she said. “I put another canvas in the spot you were used to while I took this to Greensborough. It's such a big town nowadays. Without much trouble, I found an artisan who could do the job.”

Abe remained flummoxed. “But why, my darling, why?”

She shrugged.

“In so many ways,” she said, “we would not be here if she and hers had not gone before. Not you nor I nor the children. And although she is gone to the new territory, in so many additional ways this is where she truly belongs. Here. In the foothills. In Laurelton. Since she cannot be, she should at the very least reside above our mantel, as a tribute, maybe, or anyway, as a sign of the greatest respect. This way, neither our children nor our children's children will ever forget her.” She took the portrait from him and lifted it to the place she'd so designated, resting it at a tilt against the wall. “Hmm,” she said. “Yes, that's it.” She returned to the couch to sit next to her husband. “It looks wonderful, doesn't it? What do you think?”

Abe gathered her close to his side and kissed her head. “I think you are very wise,” he said. “There are both people and events, though well and gone, we forget at our peril.” For a long time before bed, the two sat holding hands in the afterglow of the longed-for, the honored past.

Author's Note

Many Americans feel an inherited shame over Native American issues, as well we might. But that guilt can color perceptions of native life. When I began research for
An Undisturbed Peace
, I was struck by the fact that although there is a wealth of reputable scholarship on the removal era, there is also an abundance of New Age fantasy surrounding the domestic and social life of Native Americans that is little more than wishful thinking.

It is the accurate portrayal of the everyday details and social habits of a people that brings a historical novel to life. This careful rendering allows the author to sleep soundly at night knowing she has not violated the honor of an ethnicity not her own, and during the research phase of
An Undisturbed Peace
, I found myself struggling to find a way to fulfill that requirement. My previous novels tracked the Southern Jewish experience throughout the twentieth century, so I understood something about the early Jewish immigrants who wandered the southeastern countryside in the nineteenth century with packs on their backs providing goods to settlers, slaves, and Native Americans alike. I knew that as roads improved, the status of these itinerant Jews progressed from foot to mounted peddler, and from wagon driver to shopkeeper in the newly minted towns. The protagonist of
An Undisturbed Peace
, Abe Sassaporta, through whose eyes the Cherokee tragedy is witnessed, was not difficult for me to imagine. Thanks to that prior research and the relationship between the Southern Jewish and African American communities I wrote about in those earlier novels, I felt reasonably comfortable in the fictional but historically accurate portrayal of African American slaves as well.

But when it came to the Cherokee, how was I to sift through the dross to find the gold? Texts by John Ehle and Vicki Rozema were particularly helpful in imagining the time line and process of the removal. But the most exciting moment of my research occurred when I discovered the work of Reverend Daniel Sabin Butrick and his editor, John Howard Payne, at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in North Carolina. The six volumes of the Payne-Butrick Papers stand as the richest extant collection of information on nineteenth-century Cherokee culture. Compiled during the expulsion era, they are especially valuable to historians because many of the Cherokee's own records were lost during the forced removal.

Although Reverend Butrick romanticized the Cherokee as a lost tribe of Israel, a belief that taints a number of his reports, it is not difficult for a reader to look past that and discover a world of reliable knowledge. The volumes represent a grand testimony of the diet, clothes, gender roles, parenting practices, law system, politics, cosmology, theosophy, medicine, and rituals of the Cherokee Nation. Reverend Butrick traveled the Trail of Tears with the people he loved, and despite his sentimental flaws, I respect him for that tremendously.

The reverend's editor, John Howard Payne—who was a playwright, actor, and incidentally the author of the American standard “Home! Sweet Home!” as well as Washington Irving's onetime rival for the affections of Mary Shelley—originally became interested in the Cherokee as a subject for his new journal, one that would be decidedly “pure American” and “not European,” and thus attract a foreign audience. Once Payne hooked up with Butrick, that research became his life's project.

Attempts to “civilize” the Cherokee began as a government effort to absorb Native Americans into the newly formed United States. It was enthusiastically taken up by certain Cherokee leaders, largely those of mixed blood, who stood helpless as their people drowned under a flood tide of white immigration. The leaders thought it might be a way to legitimize the status of the Cherokee as a nation with inviolate borders. Sometimes, the ploy worked—that is, until it no longer did.

The discovery of gold in the Georgia mountains under Cherokee control was the death knell of the once prosperous people. White Georgians were not going to let the Native Americans keep land that had so much potential for profit. General Andrew Jackson, whose life was heroically saved by a Cherokee warrior named Junaluska at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend during the War of 1812, turned against his former allies and, as president of the United States, worked tirelessly to divest them of their territory and cruelly transport them to what became Oklahoma. Junaluska famously said during the removal, “If I'd known then what General Jackson would do now, I'd have let him die.”

An Undisturbed Peace
seeks to explore these injustices and many others that the civilization movement inspired, the most striking among them being the adoption by Cherokee of chattel slavery so that they might be seen as equal to their white neighbors. The work of Dr. Fay Yarbrough, particularly her book
Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century
,
informed me greatly on this issue and provided me with a pivotal event in the novel.

An equally disastrous effect of the civilization movement was the erosion of the role of women in Cherokee society. In the eighteenth century, early colonists were shocked to find that Cherokee women enjoyed an empowerment unheard of in Europe. Carolyn Johnston, professor of American studies at Eckerd College, writes in
Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838–1907
:

Women had autonomy and sexual freedom, could obtain divorce easily, rarely experienced rape or domestic violence, worked as producers/farmers, owned their own homes and fields, possessed a cosmology that contains female supernatural figures, and had significant political and economic power … Cherokee women's close association with nature, as mothers and producers, served as a basis of their power within the tribe, not as a basis of oppression. Their position as “the other” led to gender equivalence, not hierarchy.

However, as the civilization movement took hold, the position of Cherokee women weakened, especially in regard to their property and inheritance rights, along with all the attendant degradations of status and freedom the disenfranchised experience. As I reviewed the manuscript from this perspective, I structured certain elements to ensure that readers would see Dark Water as a woman empowered in every intimate sense. Never does she make a sexual choice that is not her own.

When I work on a historical novel, I go back and forth between imagining the actions and conflicts of my characters and learning more about the time and environment in which they live. There are always surprises and rewrites along the way, but this is part of what makes the work interesting. The two activities feed on each other—a research discovery inspires a plot thread, a character's dilemma demands a new investigation. There is never a day spent staring at a blank screen.

For example, my discovery of the “rubber fever” of 1827 to 1830 was serendipitous. I have entirely forgotten which tiny aspect of the novel inspired me to Google rubber to make sure it was in use during the time frame of
An Undisturbed Peace
,
but once I became aware of that disastrous craze over an untried commodity, I realized I had hit metaphoric gold. The fragile properties of early rubber in conditions of extreme weather nicely reflect the white man's despoiling of the natural resources Native Americans cherished. It was a short step from there to fictionalize a financial crisis for the Sassaporta family by taking advantage of the spikes of brilliant success and wretched failure endured by Charles Goodyear before he eventually discovered the durable rubber we know today to fictionalize a financial crisis for the Sassaporta family.

Abe's journeys to drum up new markets after his family's ruinous experience in the rubber market enabled me to explore the Choctaw removal, which preceded that of the Cherokee. In the end, I found that inclusion very meaningful since, according to some sources, the first occurrence of the phrase “Trail of Tears” or “a trail of tears and death” was during the Choctaw's ordeal. It also seemed important to me to stress that the Cherokee Nation was, while the largest, only one of five Native American nations that suffered the horrors of displacement.

The research process never ends. In a few weeks, I plan to travel back to North Carolina to check out details of Cherokee history I have discovered since finishing my novel. Perhaps I will use the information I gather in a new book, perhaps not. But as I gain an even deeper and richer understanding of these remarkable people, I find myself humbled and inspired.