by Jean Fischer
“Better yet,” said Sydney, “you’ll get to meet them in person—well, sort of. We sometimes use webcams to talk with each other. Mine is built right into my laptop.”
“But we only use them to talk with each other,” Elizabeth told her. “You can’t be too careful on the internet, especially with webcams.”
Sydney turned the computer on. The screen went from black to blue, and it started cycling through the start up. “I texted the girls and told them to stand by,” she announced. “We might need their help.”
Galilahi lifted the lid from the box. She folded back several layers of crisp, white tissue paper to reveal a rectangular package wrapped loosely in an old linen cloth. Carefully, she removed the wrapping to uncover an old family Bible that was tattered and worn. Its cover was barely attached to the book, and the yellowed pages were ragged with their edges sticking out every which way.
Elizabeth placed her hand gently on the chocolate-brown cover. “Oh,” she said. “This is ancient.”
“I’m not sure how old it is,” Galilahi replied. “But Great-Grandmother Rogers’s mother gave it to her.”
“Your great-great-grandma,” said Sydney.
“Right,” Galilahi confirmed. “She died when Great-Grandma Rogers was a baby.”
“So, Great-Grandma Rogers never got to ask her mother about the Bible,” Elizabeth observed.
“No. All that Great-Grandmother knows is that this Bible belonged to her mother, and that someone wrote family names inside.”
“Check out this neat design.” Sydney pointed to a series of symbols on the cover.
“That’s not a design,” said Galilahi. “Those are words written in Cherokee.”
“They probably say ‘Holy Bible,’” Elizabeth suggested.
“But the words aren’t made of letters,” Sydney declared. “They’re symbols.”
“That’s the problem,” said Galilahi. “Words in Cherokee don’t look at all like words in English. The language has its own special alphabet. Like I said, I don’t know how to read it, so I won’t be much help.” She sighed.
“Don’t worry about it,” Elizabeth assured her. “We’ll figure it out.” She pulled her chair closer to Sydney’s.
“Can I open it up?” Sydney asked. “I’ll be really careful.”
“Sure,” said Galilahi. “I trust you. This is the first time that I’ve had it out of the box. Actually I’d never even seen it until I watched Great-Grandmother pack it up before we left. She treated it like gold.”
“So you’ve never looked inside?” Elizabeth wondered.
“Not until now,” said Galilahi.
Sydney opened the Bible’s front cover. An old smell drifted from the pages and reminded her of lavender and mothballs. The Cherokee words were repeated on the first page. Beneath them was written: “February 28, 1863—The Lord is my Shepherd.”
“Look,” Sydney said. “Someone wrote in here in English. Maybe it was your great-grandma?”
Galilahi looked at the writing. “No. That’s not Great-Grandmother’s handwriting. She writes much smaller and straighter up and down. But maybe her mother, my great-great-grandmother, wrote it.”
“Which makes sense,” said Elizabeth. “Because the Bible belonged to her.”
Sydney looked at the inside front cover. “Here are the names. It looks like they were written in different handwritings, though. Some are neat and others are sloppy. They’re even different shades of ink.”
Elizabeth and Galilahi listened as Sydney read them aloud.
“Galilahi Adair Coody.”
“That’s my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother!” Galilahi said. “That’s Grandma Hisgi.”
“Hers is the first name on the list,” said Sydney.
Sydney read the second name. “Salli Coody Lightfoot.”
“I don’t know who that is,” said Galilahi.
“Lucy Lightfoot Kingfisher?”
“I don’t know her either,” said Galilahi.
“How about Nanny Kingfisher Fields?”
“No.”
“The next name is Mary Fields Rogers,” Sydney said.
Galilahi gasped. “That’s Great-Grandmother!”
Carefully, Sydney moved the Bible toward Galilahi so she could see. “Is that her handwriting?” she questioned.
Galilahi studied the small, straight up-and-down writing.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s how Great-Grandmother writes. And look. My grandmother’s name is under hers, ‘Nancy Rogers West.’ And my mother’s name is the last one on the list, ‘Melvina West Lowrey.’”
“It looks like your grandma’s name was written by your great-grandma,” said Sydney. “The handwriting is the same.”
Elizabeth had been jotting down the names on a piece of paper. “I think I know what this is,” she said. “It’s a list of mothers and daughters. The middle name is each woman’s maiden name, in other words, their last name before they were married. So, Salli was Galilahi’s daughter, Lucy was Salli’s daughter, Nanny was Lucy’s daughter, and your great-grandma was Nanny’s daughter—”
“What about your grandma?” Sydney asked Galilahi. “Your mother’s mother. Why haven’t you mentioned her?”
“Because she ran off, and nobody knows where she is,” Galilahi said. “It happened a long time ago, when my mom was a baby. I don’t know much about it, but my mother was raised by Great-Grandmother. Nobody talks about it.”
Galilahi went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic pitcher filled with lemonade. She poured some for each of her friends.
Sydney pulled the Bible closer. She began turning the pages, being ever so careful.
“This book is so old that some of the pages are falling apart,” she said. “Whoever owned it underlined some of the words and, once in a while, wrote in the margins. It’s in English, but the ink is so faded that I can’t figure out the words.”
“Let me see,” said Elizabeth. She leaned closer to Sydney. “I can’t make it out either. And do you know what’s strange? This Bible isn’t very thick. It’s about half the size of a regular Bible.”
“Maybe the Cherokee symbols don’t take as much space as English letters and words,” Sydney suggested. She sipped her lemonade and then swirled the rest around in her cup.
“Maybe,” Elizabeth agreed.
“Or maybe it’s not a Bible at all,” Galilahi offered.
“Oh, it’s a Bible all right,” Elizabeth affirmed. “I can tell by how the chapters and verses are set up and numbered.”
Sydney continued turning the pages. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “A few of the pages at the very back were stuck together. And when I turned them, they pulled right out of the binding. Good thing they were blank pages at the back. Hey, what’s this?”
A thin paper envelope was tucked between the pages. Like the book, it was old and yellowed. The handwriting on the envelope was barely readable, but Sydney could make out the words. They were written in English: “To my family Adair.”
The envelope was sealed with a thin blob of wax.
“Adair,” said Galilahi. “If Elizabeth is right, that was probably Grandma Hisgi’s last name before she was married.”
“Right,” said Sydney. She took another drink of her lemonade. “Did you notice that the handwriting on this envelope is the same as the handwriting used for Grandma Hisgi’s name?”
Galilahi pulled her chair nearer to get a better look. “Sydney,” she said. “Do you think this is Grandma Hisgi’s handwriting?”
“I do,” Sydney agreed. “And do you know what else I think?”
Galilahi gasped. “This is Grandma Hisgi’s Bible!”
Elizabeth smiled. “Good thinking! We’ll have to make you an honorary Camp Club Girl.”
Galilahi took the envelope from Sydney and held it gently in her hands. “And Grandma Hisgi wrote this letter.”
“I think so,” said Sydney. “Do you want to open it?”
“We have to,” Galilahi ex
claimed. “It might hold a clue.”
Galilahi turned the envelope over. She gently broke the wax seal with her fingernail. Then she looked into the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. It was thin, like tissue paper, and on it were written many rows of Cherokee symbols. At the bottom was a simple line drawing of the sun rising over the mountains. Underneath it were a few more Cherokee words.
“I wish I could read this,” Galilahi said. “But it’s all written in Cherokee.”
Sydney swirled the remaining lemonade in her cup. “That’s where the other girls come in,” she said. “Let’s text them and tell them to turn on their webcams.”
Sydney logged in and switched on the webcam on her laptop.
“Kate has this set up so we can all see each other at once,” she told Galilahi.
Elizabeth had been on the phone texting the Camp Club Girls.
“We’re fortunate,” she said. “Everyone seems to be at home right now. They’re going to get on their computers.”
Soon, the image on the screen divided into fourths and four faces appeared. A girl with black, chin-length hair and bangs waved to the camera.
“That’s Bailey Chang,” Sydney said.
“Hi, everybody!” Bailey said, cheerfully.
“Hi, Bailey,” Sydney replied. “Girls, this is Galilahi Lowrey.”
Galilahi smiled and waved toward the screen. “Hi,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
“And this is Alexis Howell,” said Sydney, pointing at another girl on the screen. Alexis, with dark brown hair and lovely, blue eyes waved and said hello.
“And McKenzie Phillips,” Sydney continued. A cute girl with a smattering of freckles across her face smiled and waved.
“And Kate Oliver.”
“I love your name,” Kate said.
Just then, a shaggy little dog scampered into the picture behind Kate and slid across the floor. Ruff-ruff A-roof. Ruff-ruff A-roof!
“And this is Biscuit the Wonder Dog,” said Kate.
“Oh, he’s so cute,” Galilahi said.
“So, what’s going on?” Kate asked. “Have you looked at the Bible yet?”
“We have,” Sydney answered, “And we have a ton of stuff to tell you.”
Sydney, Elizabeth, and Galilahi explained all about the Bible and their theory that it had belonged to Galilahi’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
“Can you scan the letter?” Kate wondered. “So all of us can see it.”
Sydney looked at Galilahi. “Do you have a scanner?”
“My dad does, in the den. I’ll go scan it. Where should I send it?”
Elizabeth wrote down the girls’ email addresses for Galilahi. “Be careful when you’re scanning,” she cautioned. “That letter is so fragile.”
“Oh, I will,” said Galilahi. She disappeared into the next room.
Kate scowled, which meant she was thinking. “While you guys were talking I went online and did some research,” she said. “Not all of the books of the Bible have been translated into the Cherokee language. So what you have there is probably just the New Testament.”
“That would explain why the book is thinner than most Bibles,” said Elizabeth.
“And while you were doing that, I was sleuthing on my own,” McKenzie announced. “I looked up the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee people were forced off their land in 1838. Galilahi said that Grandma Hisgi was ten years old then, so she was born around 1828. She probably didn’t get the Bible until she was a young woman, so that was probably around 1850. That would make the Bible more than a hundred and sixty years old.”
“Wow,” said Sydney.
The scanner in the next room whirred. “I’m sending the letter right now,” Galilahi called. “Let me know when they get it.”
“Did you hear that?” Elizabeth asked the girls.
“I heard,” said Alexis. “I just got mine.”
“Here comes mine,” said Bailey.
Kate and McKenzie opened their copies too.
“If you give me a couple of hours, I think I can translate this,” Kate said. “I found a website that tells all about the Cherokee alphabet. I’ll send you the web address.”
“Okay” said Sydney. “Let’s meet back here at 2:30. I can’t wait to hear what that letter says.”
After logging out of the webcam, Sydney, Elizabeth, and Galilahi went to the website Kate had suggested.
“It says here that the Cherokee symbols were invented in the early 1800s by a man named Sequoyah,” said Elizabeth. “His mother was Native American and his father was an English fur trader. Sequoyah’s English name was George Gist. It says that until Sequoyah invented the syllabary, the Cherokee people didn’t have a written language.”
“What does syllabary mean?” asked Sydney.
“Let’s check an online dictionary,” Elizabeth said. She opened another window on the screen and searched for the definition. “Syllabary is a language that has characters that represent syllables.” She went back to the language page. “It says that this syllabary has eighty-four different symbols that represent eighty-four syllables the Cherokee people use when they speak. Today, the words are often written phonetically in English.”
Galilahi pulled her chair nearer the laptop. “What does that mean?”
Sydney picked up a pen and wrote something on a scrap of paper. “This is how your name would look if it were spelled phonetically,” she said. “If it were written the way it sounds: ‘ooh-lee-low-he.’”
Galilahi looked at her name on the page. “It sure would be easier if the letter were written like this,” she said. “I hope Kate can figure it out.”
“Oh, I’m sure she can,” Elizabeth told her. “Kate can do anything.” She read some more on the language page. “This is cool. There’s a pronunciation key here. It tells how each of the vowels would sound if you wrote a word phonetically. In other words, if you read the words aloud phonetically and use this pronunciation key, you’ll be speaking Cherokee.”
Galilahi sighed. “This is a bit confusing. I think I’d rather learn the language by listening to Great-Grandmother.”
Time passed quickly until it was time for the girls to go back online, at 2:30 sharp.
“So, Kate, did you figure it out?” Galilahi asked.
“I did,” Kate answered, “But I’m not sure what it means.”
“Tell us,” said Bailey.
“Yeah, I can’t wait to know,” said Alexis.
“I’ve been on pins and needles,” McKenzie agreed.
“Okay,” Kate said. “Here goes.” She read from a sheet of paper: “‘The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.’”
Kate set the paper down.
“That sounds like the circle thing you quoted this morning in the helicopter,” Sydney said to Galilahi. “The quotation from that Indian leader, Black Elk. Say it again for the girls.”
Galilahi repeated the quote. “‘The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were.’”
Bailey sneezed. “Excuse me,” she said. “Hay fever. Anyway, the similarity is interesting.”
“Do you think the letter is just someone writing a version of the Black Elk quote?” asked Alexis.
Elizabeth picked up her tote from the floor. She unzipped it and took out her Bible. “I think I know what it is,” she said.
The girls sat quietly, anxiously waiting for Elizabeth to say something.
She flipped through her Bible and stopped. “I found it!” she announced. She began to read, “‘The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.’ That’s in Ecclesiastes 1:5 through 7.”
“So, it’s a scripture passage!” said McKenzie.
“And there’s one more thing,” Kate remarked. “That line of symbols under the drawing of the sun? It says—‘I am here.’”
“Now,” said Sydney. “We have to figure out what this all means.”
Biscuit barked in agreement.
The Secret Message
“So, Grandma Hisgi wrote down a Bible verse for her family,” said Galilahi. “But why? I mean, if she wrote them a letter, wouldn’t she want to tell them something more?”
“Maybe she did,” Alexis speculated. “Maybe she sent them another letter telling them to look at this one in the Bible. Only, maybe it didn’t arrive or maybe she didn’t send it.”
“But why wouldn’t she just give all the information in one place? Especially in those days when sending letters was rare,” McKenzie reasoned. “Maybe this letter is her full message.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe! I’m so confused.” Galilahi cried.
“Think about it,” Alexis suggested. “Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Scooby Doo … all of them, at one time or another, discovered a code that they needed to break in order to solve a mystery. I think that’s what we have here, Ecclesiastes 1:5 through 7 is a code.”
Sydney played with her cornrows, something she often did while thinking. “Or, maybe, Ecclesiastes 1:5 through 7 was just Grandma Hisgi’s favorite Bible passage—”
“Except that she might not have known that Bible passage, because it’s in the Old Testament,” Kate interrupted. “Her Bible only has the New Testament.”
Elizabeth sighed. “But do we know that for sure?” she said. “This Bible is written totally in Cherokee. We don’t know for sure if it’s just the New Testament. And why would she have to write to her family in code? How would she know this Ecclesiastes scripture if she only had the New Testament?”
Biscuit pressed his nose against Kate’s webcam. Kate peeked around his furry head. “Maybe because she was hiding, or because the soldiers would punish her family if they knew that her family had hidden Grandma Hisgi before they left on the Trail of Tears.
