by Sarah Vowell
Aside from the ornithological cannibalism and the Cinderella parade which David refers to as “a relentless mocking of my purported sanity,” we’re pleasantly surprised at how tasteful the Magic Kingdom is. There aren’t that many movie tie-ins. In fact, as we make our way to Tom Sawyer Island, it seems like the only tie-in is Mark Twain.
I cherish the memory of the autumn of my sixth-grade year in which, every afternoon, our class got to sit on the floor and listen to our teacher offer chapters of Tom and Huck and Becky and that awful Injun Joe. It is magnanimous, if not bad for business, for a motion picture and television empire like Disney to devote Disney World space to the promotion of literature. Doesn’t Disney lose money every time a child cracks open a book?
I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I’m going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad’s Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes.
To set foot on Tom Sawyer Island, one must board a raft à la Huck and Jim. Floating to shore reminds me of my favorite paragraph of Huckleberry Finn, the plain poetry of the way Huck narrates, “It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.” David, my own huckleberry friend, has similarly Twainlike talents as a naturalist, describing the rustic island as “just like the Ramble at Central Park, but without the men jerking each other off.”
The best thing on the island is Injun Joe’s Cave. A sign at its entrance reads, “Do not wurry. Injun Joe ain’t been seen in thess parts for a long time. His cave is deeserted!” As a sixth grader I was, right alongside Tom and Huck, terrified of the murderer Injun Joe. I know that the dark, cramped, and deeserted cave is making David as nervous as I am when he reassures me, “I’ve got Xanax!” We are relieved to reach the exit, marked up with edgier material than the “Tom + Becky” whitewash graffiti outside: “Fuck Off Nazis” is scrawled on the wall.
We then follow a map to Indian Territory. It’s obviously a reference to the final two sentences of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck says, “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” But when we arrive at the territory, we scratch our heads, wondering what it means that the territory is blocked off. The emblem of freedom is literally a dead end. Did the Disney planners just plunk the territory here at the edge because they were running out of room and that’s where the book ends? Or is the Magic Kingdom offering some sophisticated commentary on the elusive nature of the American dream? And then again, by restricting access to the promised land, is Disney telling us that the important thing is lighting out, that the journey matters more than the destination? Standing here mulling over such questions is itself a kind of ride, and the lines aren’t as long as they are at Splash Mountain.
I’m a meaning junkie anyway, but lately, the whole country’s on symbolism alert. Huck and Tom are the archetypical American boys, and American boys are this year’s pariahs. We’re walking around Tom Sawyer Island exactly one month after two teenage boys in Littleton, Colorado, opened fire on their classmates at Columbine High. Talk about species-on-species abuse. The boys killed twelve students, one teacher, and then killed themselves. I’m taken aback at how much that event colors the world, colors Disney World. All the kids I bump into and step on—here they’re so plentiful and so short I have to say “I’m sorry” every thirty seconds—seem less like real children and more like Symbols of Childhood.
Before I came here I asked my friend Sara, the best-read twelve-year-old I know, if she had read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and she had not. Unlike a lot of old-fashioned children’s books—the Hardy Boys series, Little Women—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn might beless universally read not because they’re so tame but because they’re not tame enough. Even I can understand why teachers might shy away from Tom’s rambunctious antics—the pirate fantasies, running away, sassing your aunt, tricking others to paint the fence you’ve been assigned. Huck even smokes. Add to that the liberal usage of a certain synonym for the term “African American” and the fact that the villain is half Indian (and, groan, named Injun), and I can see how the book wouldn’t fit into the treacly “values” units that are the educational vogue. I wonder how the teachers who were doing Huckleberry Finn the week of Littleton handled the joking beginning, in which Tom starts his own gang and informs Huck and the other boys that their reason for being is “nothing but robbery and murder.” Children’s books can’t say that anymore, even in jest. Which is too bad, because even though the two books’ boy-talk brags about killing, when Tom and Huck witness an actual murder it terrifies them, and Injun Joe the murderer is the object of their disgust and fear. Tom Sawyer articulates the difference between the language of child’s play and the consequences of evil.
The next morning David and I are watching CNN in Disney’s Contemporary Resort as we pack and they cut to breaking news: A kid in Conyers, Georgia, just opened fire at his school, wounding six fellow students. The shooter is fifteen years old.
We still have a day to kill. I wouldn’t mind sticking around Disney World and going on some rides. But yesterday in Frontierland, when I asked David if he would accompany me on a roller coaster that winds through an abandoned mine shaft, he recoiled as though I’d just asked him to French-kiss a girl. So we’ve agreed to spend our last hours in Florida visiting the Disney-planned community next to Disney World called Celebration, a town that might be described as Life: The Ride. It’s a sort of Main Street, U.S.A., in three dimensions.
If ever there were a town constructed for the purpose of making kids feel safe, it’s Celebration. As a cab drives us past the perfect houses to the center of town, I can’t help but wonder if I would have looked at these eerily charming porches differently two months ago (before Littleton and the new shooting this morning, but long enough after all the other school shootings last year for the child murderer memories to fade a little). I might have laughed off Celebration’s purposeful wholesomeness as parental paranoia. But after four straight weeks of teenage bullet wounds and funeral footage, I cannot dismiss the impulse to circle the wagons here in Our Town.
Still, in post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America, odds are that the more you shoot for Frank Capra, the more likely you are to end up with David Lynch. Once I notice that the town diner where we’re having breakfast is about to celebrate something as corny as National Chocolate Ice Cream Day I start looking for lopped-off earlobes in my hash browns.
Established by Disney in 1994, Celebration’s planners have tried hard to answer some of the criticism of suburbs—that the houses are all alike, that there aren’t any sidewalks, that they’re organized around automobiles. While nearly every house on each block has a porch to encourage neighborly socialization, stylistically, each house is different: a clapboard next to stucco around the corner from a cute Cape Cod. According to an official architectural walking-tour booklet, “The town places special emphasis on restoring streets and sidewalks to the public realm on the assumption that streets should belong to people, not cars.”
We rent bikes and ride them to the real estate office, where we watch a soft-focus promotional film for the town in which earnest parents talk up the pleasures of living in a place where “everybody has the same ideals.” A nullification of the First Amendment? Maybe Celebration succeeded where South Carolina failed. Well, the joke’s on them. Sometime, and sometime soon, all those adorable towheaded kids in the promotional film are going to turn thirteen. Once a family member hits puberty, odds are that everybody is not going to have the same ideals. Unless everybody gets together and agrees that the new ideals involve turning the front yard into a skate r
amp and officially changing Dad’s name to Fuckhead.
As Huck Finn might put it, this town sure is sivilized. And since every teenager worth the word has a little Huck in her, Celebration is almost the perfect place to be from, to light out from—the perfect place to leave. Even though—maybe because—Celebration is meant to be a symbol of stability, it appears so fragile. Perhaps it’s all that fresh paint. The town looks too clean, too new, too perfect to hold up. It’s just standing there, immaculate, waiting to be violated, waiting for the paint to chip or a drought to dry up the lawns, waiting for the patina of age and decay. If its greatest purpose is to be an upstanding environment in which to raise children, it resembles a child—no wrinkles, soft skin, soft hair. It doesn’t look like a place for real men and women to live real life.
We ride our bikes past the kind of views that have become rare in the messier, less intentionally constructed parts of the country. We turn onto a bike path bordering a wetlands preserve, and out of my right eye I can see herons, wild turkeys, turtles, and a thick brushy primeval forest that probably hasn’t changed since Osceola himself left Osceola County. My left eye ogles a row of immaculate houses and rectangular, Crayola green lawns. It is a split screen of nature and culture, the pre-Columbian and the oh so post-. Even though the houses are surely infringing on the wetlands, it looks like that jungle will return to claim its own, swallowing the superfluous buildings whole.
David, alluding to the last page of The Great Gatsby, nods at the wetlands and says, “Look! It’s the fresh, green breast of the new world!” It is the most beautiful passage ever written about the promise of America. In it, Nick, a Midwesterner, stands on what had been Gatsby’s lawn looking across Long Island Sound and muses, “And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
I adore those words, worship them actually, and yet I do not buy that part about “the last time in history.” Because the narrator himself is having such a wondrous moment; because every American who comes to love this lovable, hateful place knows this wonder, too. Because screeching the brakes on my rental bike and watching a turtle that is who knows how old creep across the wilderness of palm fronds that juts against such a painfully cute subset of civilization, I know exactly why the painfully cute civilization wants to be here, build here, make their homes and babies at such a place. So what if they got it wrong? Is there anything more American than constructing some squeaky-clean city on a hill looking out across the terrible beauty of this land? While most of the rest of us have internalized these impulses, turned them into metaphors, at Celebration, Disney is attempting the real deal; like the Puritans and the pioneers, they’re carving out a new community. An eerie, xenophobic, nostalgic community I can’t wait to leave, but still.
David, poor thing, is about to drop dead of heat stroke. He tells me, “It looks like a Norman Rockwell town, but it’s so hot he’d have to paint everybody with enormously enlarged pores.” And if he were not drenched enough already, he starts tearing up in the cab to the airport as the elderly driver tells us the story about how her perfect life degenerated when her husband had a stroke and she lost her business and now has to drive a cab and live with an aunt. Her story isn’t making David cry—her Disneylike cheerfulness is. When she drops us off she smiles and chirps, “You’ve got to come back and stay longer!” David gives her an ungodly tip and reassures her that we’d love to, though once she drives away he mutters, “No. We will never come back.”
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.
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, an
d 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 . . .”
