Take the Cannoli (13 page)

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.

So all my life I knew I wouldn't exist but for the Trail of Tears, and it struck me as a little silly that most of the things I knew about it were based on an amphitheater drama I haven't seen for twenty years. I had read some books about the Trail but I wanted to see it, feel it, know how long the distance was. I wanted the trek to be real. I enlisted Amy, who, unlike me, has a license. Perhaps she'd like to do all the driving? A historical tragedy and five fourteen-hour days behind the wheel? Who could pass that up? And so I fly from Chicago, she from Montana, and one spring morning we find ourselves in a rental car on our way to northwestern Georgia, the homeland of the Cherokee before they were shoved out to Oklahoma, the place the Trail of Tears begins.

The Cherokee territory once encompassed most of present-day Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as parts of Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Even before contact with Europeans in 1540, they were a protodemocratic society. They built these enormous council houses, big enough to fit the entire tribe inside, so everyone could participate in tribal decisions.

We're barely on the road an hour when we spot them: Injuns. Ceramic ones, three feet tall, at a shack on the side of the road. Amy drives
past them, we do a double take, and we don't even discuss whether or not to stop, she just backs up immediately and parks.

“Are you of Native American descent?” I ask the proprietor.

“I'm a Mexican. I'm from Texas,” he answers.

“And what brought you to Calhoun, Georgia?”

“The work.”

The eight little Indians he's selling are of the kitschy, teepee-toting, Plains Indian, squaws and braves variety. Which are probably easier to sell than the stereotypical image of a Cherokee—a tired out old woman tromping through the Trail of Tears in rags. Who wants that as a lawn ornament?

“Who buys these Indian statues?” I ask.

“People here from Calhoun. People around here from Georgia love Indians.”

“Well, after they got rid of them?”

He laughs and says, “That's right. That's true. You're telling the truth there.”

The Cherokees, who had always taken an interest in the more useful innovations of white culture, not to mention married whites at a fairly fast clip, were always a nerdy, overachiever, bookish sort of tribe. By the early nineteenth century, they launched a series of initiatives directly imitating the new American republic. In one decade, they created a written language, started a free press, ratified a constitution, and founded a capital city.

New Echota was that capital. Now it stands in the middle of nowhere—a Georgia state park with a handful of buildings across from a golf course. It was founded in 1819. To call it the Cherokee version of Washington, D.C., is entirely applicable, given the form of government the tribe established there. For the Nation sought to emulate not just the democratic structures of the United States government by dividing into legislative, judicial, and executive branches, but the best ideals of the American republic. In 1827, they ratified a constitution based on that of the United States. Its preamble begins, “We, the Representatives of the people of the Cherokee Nation in Convention assembled, in order to establish justice, ensure tranquility, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty . . .”

Unlike Washington, New Echota is cool and quiet and green. Site manager David Gomez shows us around the grounds. Amy and I are unprepared for the loveliness of the place, for its calm lushness, its fragrance. Everywhere, honeysuckle is in bloom. I tell him I like it here.

“It's nice,” he agrees. “It's peaceful and the atmosphere is right for what was going on and the story that we tell here. It's a story that's sad in a lot of ways, but there were a lot of great things happening with the Cherokee Nation.”

The Cherokee, along with the other Southeastern tribes who suffered removal to Oklahoma—the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Choctaw,
the Seminole—are one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes. It was in 1822 that the Cherokee hero Sequoyah developed an alphabet, inventing the sole written language of any North American tribe. Only six years later, Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot founded the
Cherokee Phoenix,
a bilingual, English-Cherokee newspaper published at New Echota. Many Cherokee, especially the large population of mixed-bloods, practiced Christianity. And, because many of these lived as “civilized” Southern gentlemen of the early nineteenth century, they owned prospering plantations, which meant they owned black slaves. More than any other Native American tribe, the Cherokees adopted the religious, cultural, and political ideals of the United States. Partly as a means of self-preservation. By becoming more like the Americans, they hoped to coexist with this new nation that was growing up around them, but they weren't allowed to. Georgia settlers wanted their land. And their gold, which was discovered near New Echota in 1829.

Gomez says, “They were really progressing so fast at this time period. The printing operation was going with their newspaper here. Things were moving so fast for them for a short while here that it looked very promising, but because of the gold and the big demand for land, their fate had really been already sealed for them in earlier years.”

The tribe allowed Christian missionaries to live and work among them, and to teach their children English. The most beloved of these was the Presbyterian Samuel Worcester, who built a two-story house at New Echota, which functioned as a post office, school, and rooming
house. It still stands, and David Gomez walks us through, warning us of the steep steps: “You wouldn't want to have a broken leg on the rest of your trail.”

The state of Georgia, which of all the Southern states treated the Cherokee with the most hostility, passed a number of alarming laws in the 1820s and '30s undermining the sovereignty of the Nation. One of these laws required white settlers within the boundaries of the Nation to obtain a permit from the state of Georgia. Samuel Worcester refused to apply for such a permit, arguing that he had the permission of the Cherokee to live on their lands and that should suffice. Georgia arrested Worcester and imprisoned him for four years. Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court, and the case,
Worcester v. Georgia,
became a great victory for the tribe. The Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that the Cherokee Nation was just that—a sovereign nation within the borders of the U.S., and therefore beholden only to the federal government, i.e., not under the jurisdiction of Georgia state laws.

“And the Cherokee Nation was elated,” Gomez points out. “They thought, ‘All right, the highest court in the land of the United States—this government that we're trying to copy—they ruled in our favor. This is going to be good.' Of course, Andrew Jackson, who was pro-removal from the early years—he campaigned on that issue—decided he wasn't going to back the Supreme Court ruling.”

On hearing of the ruling, the president is said to have replied, “John Marshall has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” Think about that, what that means: a breakdown of the balance of power in such
boasting, dictatorial terms. Jackson is violating his own oath of office, to uphold the Constitution. In the twentieth century, when people bandy about the idea of impeachment for presidents who fib about extramarital dalliances, it's worth remembering what a truly impeachable offense looks like. Didn't happen of course. I refer you to the face on the twenty-dollar bill.

The state of Georgia was thrilled when Jackson thumbed his nose at the Court, and immediately dispatched teams to survey the Cherokee lands for a land lottery. Soon white settlers arrived here. According to Gomez, “They showed up two years later in 1834, with the land lottery deed and with Georgia soldiers saying, ‘I've got this land from the lottery. Get off of it.' ”

Another small constitutional violation that was part of the land grab: Georgia seized the Cherokee printing press, so they couldn't publicize their cause and win political support in states up north.

No one annoyed Jackson like Principal Chief John Ross. Ross was a Jeffersonian figure in almost every sense. A founding father of the Cherokee Nation in its modern, legal form, it was Ross who cribbed from Jefferson in writing the Cherokee constitution. Like Jefferson, he preached liberty while owning slaves. An educated gentleman planter, Ross was only one-eighth Cherokee—just one-eighth, even I'm more Cherokee than that—but he was their chief from 1827 to 1866. Toward the end of his life he corresponded with Abraham Lincoln; in his early years, he was such a believer in the inherent justice of the American system that he lobbied relentlessly in Washington, D.C.,
believing that once Congress and the president understood that the Constitution applied to this virtuous, sibling republic, they would treat the tribe fairly, as equals.

Once the state of Georgia began evicting the Cherokee, and John Ross among them, Ross wrote, “Treated like dogs, we find ourselves fugitives, vagrants, and strangers in our own country.”

The tribe was divided about what to do: stay and fight or demand cash for the land and head west. No one exploited this split more than Andrew Jackson.

The majority of the tribe wanted to stay put and supported Ross. But around a hundred men—including
Phoenix
editor Elias Boudinot and his brother Stand Watie; a hundred in a tribe of sixteen thousand—met at Boudinot's house in New Echota in 1835 and signed a treaty with the U.S. government. They had no authority to do this. Called the Treaty of New Echota, it relinquished all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for land in the West. They figured, Georgia was already seizing Cherokee land; this might be the only way the Cherokee would get something for it.

John Ross, whom the Georgia militia arrested so that he could not protest, was stunned. He accused the treaty party of treason. The rest of the sixteen thousand Cherokee signed a petition calling the treaty invalid and illegal. Congress ratified the treaty by only one vote, despite impassioned pleas on behalf of the Cherokee by Congressmen Henry Clay and Davy Crockett. The tribe was given three years to remove themselves to the West.

We're now standing at the site of Elias Boudinot's house, where the infamous New Echota treaty was signed. Gomez says, “The spring of '38 rolled around, and nobody was going anywhere. The state of Georgia and the federal government thought they were going to have some problems and you had about seven thousand troops come in to forcibly remove the Cherokees from their farms, from their houses, and initially rounded them up in stockades and moved them up into eastern Tennessee and northeastern Alabama to three immigration depots where they were moved out onto the Trail of Tears as everybody knows it. Technically this is the starting point for the Trail of Tears. For the individual Cherokees, it really started at their front door wherever they were rounded up from.”

Amy and I want to step on it, this patch of grass where the treaty was signed, but we hesitate. “It's not a grave,” Gomez tells us. But that's what it feels like. We tiptoe onto it, this profane ground. And then we tiptoe away.

As Amy and I travel the Trail of Tears I wonder if we should be embarrassed by certain discrepancies between our trail and theirs. We're weak, we're decadent, we're Americans. Which means: road trip history buffs one minute, amnesiacs the next. We want to remember. Except when we want to forget.

We register at the Chattanooga Choo Choo. Yes, yes,
the
Chattanooga Choo Choo, track 29! It's a hotel now, a gloriously hokey, beautifully restored Holiday Inn, in which the lobby is the ornate dome of the old train station, and the rooms are turn-of-the-century
rail cars parked out on the tracks. We're in giggles the entire night for the simple reason that the phrase “choo choo” is completely addictive. We try to work it into every sentence: “What should we do for dinner? Stay here at the Choo Choo?” We end up going out for barbecue, saying, “This is good, but I can't wait to get back to the Choo Choo.” We watch
The X-Files
in our train car, commenting, “Is it just me, or is this show even better in the Choo Choo?” I send email from my laptop just so I can write, “Greetings from the Chattanooga Choo Choo Exclamation Point.”