by Sarah Vowell
There’s something nutty about Old Hickory in this passage. Just the fact that he compares the removal of Indians from their land with the opportunity of his generation to just go out west. I ask Brackett if she can help me understand his mindset.
“Probably not,” she sighs. “The interesting thing about that era was that they really felt that they were preserving. This is how they justified it in their own minds. That this was inevitable. It was sort of the early thought of manifest destiny. They never really seemed to think that we were going to settle the country all the way to the West, all the way to California. So if they just kept moving everybody further away, they’d eventually get to a point where there wasn’t going to be any settlement, which, of course, didn’t happen.”
A few minutes after we pull out of the Hermitage’s driveway, we’re on the highway that cuts through Nashville. I regard even the most garish of the Opryland billboards with what can only be called warmth. Like a lot of people born in the South and the southern backwater states of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, Amy and I watched the Grand Ole Opry on television as children. While other kids our age spent the 1970s banging their heads to Kiss doing “Rock and Roll All Nite,” we were humming along with “The Tennessee Waltz.” Nashville, not Washington, was our cultural capital, home to heroes like George Jones, Ernest Tubb, and Loretta Lynn.
Carolyn Brackett had told us that most of the visitors to the Jackson plantation were spillover tourists from Nashville’s country music attractions. Watching the billboards go by, I’m beginning to realize that maybe that is not such a coincidence. My heart sinks. I want to hate Andrew Jackson because it’s convenient. I need one comforting little fact, one bad guy in a black hat to aim my grief at. But there’s another Andrew Jackson nagging at me, the adjective, the one who lent his name to Jacksonian democracy, a fine idea.
Jackson was the first riffraff president. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and the two Adamses all came from patrician colonial families. They were gentlemen. Jackson, on the other hand, was a bloodthirsty, obnoxious frontiersman of Irish descent, a little bit country, a little bit rock ’n’ roll. And no matter what horrific Jackson administration policy I point out, I can’t escape the symbolism of Jackson’s election. The American dream that anyone can become president begins with him.
My sister and I disapprove of what Jackson did to our people, but the fact is, Jackson is our people too. We also come from that Opry-watching segment of the population which the nicer academics euphemistically refer to as “working class” and the nastier television comics call “white trash.” This is a race which a friend once described to me as “being Scotch or Irish plus at least three other things.” Which is us. It wasn’t anything anyone in our family ever talked about, it was just something I sensed. I first confronted it when I was eleven and read Gone with the Wind. I had the exact same reaction to the book as the young protagonist in Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina: “Emma Slattery, I thought. That’s who I’d be, that’s who we were. Not Scarlett with her baking-powder cheeks. I was part of the trash down in the mud-stained cabins . . . stupid, coarse, born to shame and death.”
Andrew Jackson was partly about being born to shame and death and becoming president anyway. That part of his biography is thrilling just as the similar glory chapters in the biographies of Elvis and Bill Clinton are thrilling. I don’t know how it felt to be a poor redneck out in the middle of nowhere when Jackson got elected, but I do know what it felt like the day a man certain Easterners dismissed as a cracker beat that silver spoon George Bush. Personally, I felt like they just handed my Okie uncle Hoy the keys to Air Force One.
That Jackson’s election was a triumph of populism still does not negate his responsibility for the Trail of Tears. If anything, it makes the story that much darker. Isn’t it more horrible when a so-called man of the people sends so many people to their deaths? One expects that of despots, not democrats.
We drive on into Kentucky, toward Hopkinsville. When the Trail of Tears passed through southern Kentucky in December of 1838, a traveler from Maine happened upon a group of Cherokees. He wrote, “We found them in the forest camped for the night by the road side . . . under a severe fall of rain accompanied by heavy wind. With their canvas for a shield from the inclemency of the weather, and the cold wet ground for a resting place, after the fatigue of the day, they spent the night. Several were then quite ill, and an aged man we were informed was then in the last struggles of death. . . . Even aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back—on the sometimes frozen ground, and the sometimes muddy streets, with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them. We learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed, that they buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping place.”
John Ross’s wife died in a place like this—in winter—of pneumonia. She had one blanket to protect herself from the weather, and she gave it to a sick child during a sleet storm.
It gets worse. I always knew the Cherokee owned slaves, that they owned them in the East and that they owned them in the West. Only in the course of this road trip did it occur to me that the slaves got to Indian territory in the same manner as their masters—on the Trail of Tears. Can you imagine? As if being a slave wasn’t bad enough? To be a slave to a tortured Indian made to walk halfway across the continent?
We stopped in Hopkinsville because it was on the map, but pulling into town we saw signs for a Trail of Tears Memorial Park we didn’t know about. It seemed like a good idea to go there.
A Shelley Winters ringer named Joyce is sitting on the porch of the little museum, drinking soda. She’s one of the volunteers who run the place. When I ask her about the park’s origins, she tells us, “Hopkinsville was a ration stop along the way on the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee camped here. They were here for a week or so. While they were here, two of their chiefs died and they’re buried up on the hillside. You should start here and walk up to the grave area. There are three bronze plaques on each one of the posts. The first two will give you the story of the Trail of Tears. The last one, just before you go into the grave area, tells you about the two chiefs, Whitepath and Flysmith.”
The plaque nearest the graves says that Whitepath was one of the Cherokee who fought under Andrew Jackson in 1814 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson even gave Whitepath a watch for his bravery. In that battle, a Cherokee saved Jackson’s life. Which underscores the level of Jackson’s betrayal of the tribe. Had a Cherokee not saved his life then, Whitepath and Flysmith might not be buried here beneath our feet.
The graves are on a little hill. You can hear the highway down below, but still it’s serene. Up until this moment, all the graves along the trail had been metaphorical. All through Tennessee, Amy and I kept saying, “We’re driving over graves, we’re driving over graves.” But even then, we just imagined them there, under the blacktop, off in the woods. But here, the skeletons suddenly had faces, specific stories. The graves were real.
After Hopkinsville, we drive past farms that look so cliché they’re practically pictographs—barns straight out of clip art, the cowiest possible cows. For whole minutes at a time, I convince myself that we’re on a normal road trip. But we’re not. We’re on a death trip, and I can’t go more than a few miles without agonizing and picking apart every symbolic nuance of every fact at my disposal. Which Amy might have found charming in Georgia since she hadn’t seen me or my obsessions in months, but halfway through Tennessee—right about the second I see her wince in the company of Carolyn Brackett—I can practically hear her silent prayers that I shut up.
I don’t know how old we were when we switched roles. As children, she was the loud one, the one with the mood swings, and I was the dutiful, silent observer. At every Trail of Tears site we visit, Amy wants to be the hospitable guest. She says please and thank you, wants to look around in peace. I can see her squirm every time I ask a question. After I
cornered Joyce at the Hopkinsville site, she scolded me, “Sarah, it looked like she was on her break.”
Back in the car, I try and keep quiet. Joyce had mentioned she gives a lot of tours to school groups. Which sounds like a lot of responsibility. She didn’t make a big deal out of it, saying that the students “ask intelligent questions.” I wondered if they have a hard time emotionally reconciling the facts of the Trail of Tears. She said, “No, I don’t think there’s any emotional stress for them at all.”
Amy swerves a little when, after half an hour of cow-gazing hush, I burst out, “I think working there would be like working at the Holocaust Museum or working on some restored plantation, work that involves displaying and reliving some kind of senseless evil. I can’t imagine having to go there every day. The thing I like about this trip is that it’s going to be over fast.”
“I don’t know, Sarah.” It’s always a bad sign when Amy says my name. “I don’t know how Joyce deals with it. I’m sure she doesn’t obsess about it, because otherwise, she would just go crazy.” Amy glances away from the road a second to give me the eye, complaining, “I think you catch people off guard. She was just sitting there drinking her Coke and eating her crackers and then you showed up.”
“We showed up, Amy,” I remind her. “Do you think asking these people questions and prying into what they do, do you think that’s wrong?”
“I don’t think it’s wrong at all to ask people what they think. I just wonder how it would be different if you sent them a letter and said, ‘Hey, Joyce, how is it working here?’ If she had time to think about it and think about what goes through her mind every day instead of just saying, ‘Hey, do you work here? Can you answer some questions?’ Because she obviously really, really cared. I mean she was proud of that little place and she should be. And how does she know if the kids have to emotionally grapple with the thing. She just trots them around, shows them this, shows them that, and then they get on the bus and go home.”
I bring up another qualm. I get a new one every ten minutes, and this one has nothing to do with blaming America or blaming Andrew Jackson or blaming the Cherokees who signed the Treaty of New Echota. I’m starting to blame myself, because I have this tiny, petty thought—an embarrassingly selfish gratitude for the Trail of Tears, because without it, my sister and I wouldn’t exist.
Amy rolls her eyes. “I don’t think four thousand people needed to die so that we could be sitting here today. But it’s a fact of not just life, but of our life, so I think we need to come to grips with that—Sarah.”
It took the Cherokee about six months to walk to Oklahoma. We’re doing it in five days. Every ten minutes, we cover the same amount of ground they covered in a day.
We drive with the sun in our eyes. On back roads, through Kentucky. We duck into a remote, depressed section of downstate Illinois. A plaque marks a spot where thousands of Cherokee camped, unable to cross the Mississippi because of floating ice. We cross in under a minute. I know we’re going fast but it doesn’t feel fast. We plod through most of Missouri, stopping at yet another Trail of Tears State Park. There’s actually a name for what we’re doing: Heritage Tourism. Which sounds so grand—like it’s going to be one freaking epiphany after another. But after a while we just read the signs without even getting out of the car. At the end of every day, we fall into our motel beds, wrecked.
In the morning, we trudge through Arkansas. We’re stuck for two hours behind a Tyson chicken truck, unable to pass. We cruise through the Pea Ridge National Military Park, a Civil War battleground we visited once as children. It was here our great-great-grandfather Stephen Carlile fought—and lost—under Stand Watie’s Confederate regiment of Cherokees. Watie, by the way, was the last Confederate general to surrender; he kept on fighting for two months after Appomattox; fighting was one thing he knew how to do.
We have another one of those twin moments where Amy wonders what it was like for Stand Watie to come back and fight in a spot he passed through on the Trail of Tears and I’m making myself sick trying to reconcile the fact that oppressed Indians could live with owning slaves, to die for slavery’s cause.
We’re not the only ones touring the park. We’re just another car on the road. A lot of Americans do stuff like this every summer—traipse their kids around historic landmarks as a matter of course. Our dad brought us here, hoping to instill a sense of history in us. And even though there’s really not that much to see except for a couple of cannons and a field of grass, it worked. We’re back, aren’t we? Amy and I came to see this history—and this country—as ours. Though as a kid I would’ve been too carsick and sleepy to imagine that I would someday willingly come back to Pea Ridge of my own accord.
It’s just a short hop to Fayetteville. We have lunch with two old roommates of mine, Brad and Leilani, who take us to a little Trail of Tears marker next to a high school parking lot. It says that a thousand Cherokees camped on this spot in the summer of 1839.
The sign’s facing a semicircular arrangement of boulders. Anyone who’s ever been to high school would recognize it instantly as the place students go to sneak cigarettes or get stoned. And once again it’s striking how the two American tendencies exist side by side—to remember our past, and to completely ignore it and have fun. Look at how we treat all our national holidays. Don’t we mourn the dead on Memorial Day with volleyball and sunscreen? Don’t We the People commemorate the Fourth of July by setting meat and bottle rockets on fire? Which makes a lot of sense when you remember that a phrase as weird and whimsical as “the pursuit of happiness” sits right there—in the second sentence of the founding document of the country.
The most happiness I find on the trip is when we’re in the car and I can blare the Chuck Berry tape I brought. We drive the trail where thousands died and I listen to Berry’s nimble guitar, to the poetry of place names as he sings “Detroit Chicago Chattanooga Baton Rouge,” and I wonder what we’re supposed to do with the grisly past. I feel a very righteous anger and bitterness about every historical fact of what the American nation did to the Cherokee.
But at the same time I am an entirely American creature. I’m in love with this song and the country that gave birth to it. Listening to “Back in the U.S.A.” while driving the Trail of Tears, I turn it over and over in my head—it’s a good country, it’s a bad country, good country, bad country. And of course it’s both.
When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.
Fayetteville’s not far from the Oklahoma state line. A sign greets us that reads, “Welcome to Oklahoma, Native America.”
Amy says, “I don’t remember the signs used to say that.”
I tell her that, no, I think they used to say, “Oklahoma is O.K.” Which is about right: It’s okay.
We’re now in the western Cherokee Nation. And the maddening thing—the heartbreaking, cruel, sad cold fact—is that northeastern Oklahoma looks exactly like northwestern Georgia. Same old trees, same old grassy farmland. The Cherokee walked all this way—crossed rivers, suffered blizzards, buried their dead—and all for what? The same old land they left.
We breeze through Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital. Even though the Trail of Tears officially stops there, our trail won’t be over until we get to our hometown—Braggs. It’s about twenty minutes away and we plan on spending the evening with our aunts and uncles there. I put in a tape of a teen brother band from Tulsa singing “MMMbop,” the first song in the traditional end of Trail of Tears Hanson medley. Of course we don’t get to bop for long.
The road out of Tahlequah is called the POW-MIA Highway. The fun doesn’t stop! God bless America, and history, too. We finished mapping the Trail of Tears two minutes ago and now we run smack dab into Vietnam, a war, as I recall, that brought the word “quagmire” into popular use. What’s next? A billboard screaming, “Honk if you have misgivings about how the FBI handled Waco!”
We turn left on
to the two-lane highway that leads to Braggs, my own private quagmire. This is the nineteen miles of road that connects our hometown to the county seat, Muskogee. Amy and I have been on it hundreds if not thousands of times, though only I know its topography with the intimacy that comes from leaning over every inch of it, carsick. I can’t help but wonder if the grass grows so close to the shoulder because of my personal fertilizer crusade: I was a little Lady Bird Johnson of puke.
“It’s not that far, is it?” Amy asks. “It seemed like it was forever when we were kids to get to Muskogee, didn’t it? Because we always got stuff when we got to go there—pizza and movies. What else did we get?”
I got to throw up on the side of the road.
Amy looks up. “Braggs Mountain. Not much of a mountain,” she says, a Montanan now.
Not much of a town. We’re here. A sign at what could loosely be called the city limits announces, “Welcome to Braggs. Rural Living.”
Our aunt Lil and uncle John A.’s house in Braggs smells exactly as I remember it, like cookies. They welcome us with hugs and food. Our aunt Jenny and uncle Hoy, our funniest relatives, are there to see us, too. We sit around the kitchen table in stitches just like always. I’ve missed this.
After supper, Lil, Jenny, Hoy, and Amy go out and sit on the porch and leave Uncle John A. and me inside to talk. At seventy-four, my mother’s brother is my oldest living relative. He’s a World War II veteran. I asked him about his great-grandfather Peter Parson, who came to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears when he was twelve years old.
John A. says that Peter was brought on the trail by two Presbyterian ministers. “He grew up here. And he was a stonemason. Some of his work is still around Tahlequah. If you’re going up to the Village tomorrow,” meaning the Cherokee Heritage Center called Tsa-La-Gi, “you’ll see two big columns.”
