27
Family Stories
A YOUNG WOMAN WEARING A lot of beads and a complicated hairdo leads Alice and Sugar through the basement hallway of the Cherokee Heritage Center. She unlocks the door to a small room with a huge oak table in the center.
"You need help finding anybody?" she asks. Alice has noticed that the girl is trying not to chew the gum in her mouth while they are looking. Is that what old women look like to the young? Their fifth-grade teacher?
"No thanks, hon, I've done all this before," Sugar replies.
Their guide leaves them, chewing her gum earnestly to make up for lost time as she heads back upstairs to the gift shop. The big table is covered with old brown ring binders, sprawled out hodgepodge across one another like farmhands taking a break. One wall of the room is covered with an old-looking map of the Cherokee Nation districts, and some sort of film-viewing machine crouches against the other wall. Lined up across the back of the room are antique wooden cabinets of the type that might sit in a country doctor's office. Alice feels exactly that kind of nervousness--as if she's about to get a shot, for her own good.
Sugar sits down in one of the plastic chairs. "This here is the index for the Dawes Rolls," she says, picking up a ring binder thick enough for a toddler to sit on at the dinner table. "1902 to 1905," she reads. She straightens her glasses, licks her thumb, and begins to page through it.
"Are you sure we ought to be doing this?"
Sugar looks up at Alice over her glasses. "I swear, Alice, I don't know what's become of you. You used to make me sneak out to the beer joints on a double dog dare, and now you're scared of your shadow doing just a ordinary everyday thing."
"I don't want to break any rules."
"For heaven's sake, sit down here and look. This isn't nothing in the world but a long list of names. People that was living here and got allotments between certain years."
Alice sits down and scoots her chair toward Sugar, who is holding her chin high so she can see the small print through the bottom window of her bifocals. She looks like a proud little bird with a forties hairdo.
"I'm just going to show you your grandma's name. She's not going to reach out of the grave and tickle your feet."
"She might, if she knew I was trying to cheat the Cherokees."
"Alice Faye, you're not cheating."
Alice gets up and moves restlessly around the room, leaving Sugar to her search through the roll book. "What's this?" she asks, holding up a yellowed, antique-looking newspaper covered with strange curlicues.
Sugar looks up over her glasses. "The Cherokee Advocate. That's old, they don't run it anymore. That's what the writing looks like for the Cherokee. It's pretty, isn't it? I never did learn to read it. Roscoe does."
Alice studies the headlines, trying to connect their cursive roundness with the soft guttural voices she heard at the stomp dance. "They had their own paper?"
"Land, yes," Sugar says, without looking up again from her book. "It was the first newspaper in Oklahoma. The Cherokees got things all organized out here while everybody else was cowboys eating with their jackknifes, Roscoe tells me. Them big old brick buildings we passed by in Tahlequah this morning? That was the Cherokee capitol. Oh, look, here she is, right here." She motions Alice over, holding down Grandmother Stamper under her fingertip. "Write down this enrollment number: 25844."
Alice digs in her purse for a pencil, licks the end of it, and dutifully records this number in her address book under the "Z's," since it seems unlikely she'll ever get close to anyone whose last name starts with a Z. For that matter, the whole address book is pretty much blank, except for three pages of crossed-out numbers for Taylor.
"Now all you've got to do is prove you're descended from her. Having the birth certificate is the best, but she didn't have one. What we did, when Roscoe helped me do this, was we writ to the records office down in Mississippi and we got the record of where she was drownded at. And then we just took that on down to the tribal recorder's office and explained how she was my grandma, and that was that. I think I showed them some family pictures and stuff. They're pretty understanding."
Alice stares at the book of names. She can't put a finger on who, exactly, she feels she's cheating. All the people on the list, to begin with, and the fact they are dead doesn't help. She wishes Sugar hadn't mentioned the business of coming out of graves and tickling feet. "It doesn't feel right to me," she says. "I always knew we were some little part Indian, but I never really thought it was blood enough to sign up."
"It don't have to be more than a drop. We're all so watered down here, anyway. Did you see them blond kids at the stomp dance, the Threadgills? They're signed up. Roy Booth over here at the gas station, he's enrolled, and he's not more than about one two-hundredth. And his kids are. But his wife, she's a quarter, but she's real Methodist, so she don't want to sign up. It's no big thing. Being Cherokee is more or less a mind-set."
"Well, maybe I have the wrong mind-set. What if I'm just doing it to get something I want?"
"Honey, the most you're ever going to get out of the Nation is a new roof, money-wise, and you might have to wait so long you'll go ahead and fix it yourself. There's the hospitals and stuff, but nobody's going to grudge you that. They'll collect from your insurance if you have it, no matter who you are."
Alice feels her secret swelling against her diaphragm from underneath, the way pregnancy felt toward the end. She is even starting to get the same acid indigestion. "Sugar, you're a good friend to me," she says. "I appreciate that you never have asked why I came here."
"Oh, I figured a bad marriage, whatever. Then when you asked after Fourkillers I thought you must be looking for Ledger, for some kind of cure." Sugar holds Alice steady in her gaze, and puts a hand on her forearm. "Everybody's got their troubles, and their reasons for getting a clean start. People's always curious for the details, but seem like that's just because we're hoping somebody else's life is a worst mess than ours."
Alice feels a pure ache to break down right there on the roll books and tell all. But she's so afraid. Sugar might withdraw that hand on her forearm and all the childhood hugs that stand behind it. A month ago, Alice wouldn't have thought any person alive would argue that Turtle belonged to anyone but Taylor. Now she sees there are plenty who would.
"My reasons for coming are different from anybody's you ever heard of," she tells Sugar. "I want to tell you, but I can't right yet. But what I'm thinking is that it could help my cause to sign up here and be Cherokee."
Sugar cocks her head, looking at Alice. "Well, then, you ought to do it. I don't reckon you have to say you're sorry for coming along and picking a apple off a tree."
Alice knows she has to pick the apple. But in her heart, or deeper, in her pinched stomach, she knows it will hurt the tree.
The afternoon is humid and buggy. Alice waves her hand around as she walks, to chase off the gnats that seem to spring right out of the air itself. She wishes she'd worn her shorts. Though when she pictures an old lady in baggy shorts walking down a dirt road to the river, waving her hands wildly, she comes up with something close to Boma Mellowbug. It's just as well she wore her double knits. She wants to make a good impression.
Alice asked Annawake if they could meet someplace besides the cafe in town; she's not crazy about having every Tailbob in sight overhear what she wants to discuss. Annawake suggested her Uncle Ledger's houseboat. Now Alice is fairly confident she's lost. Just when she arrives at the brink of serious worry, she sees the flat glare of the lake through the trees, and then the corrugated tin roof of what looks like a floating trailer home with a wooden veranda running all the way around. Thick ropes bind it to the shore, and thinner lines run from boat to treetops like the beginnings of spider webs, from which all kinds of things are hung: men's jeans with their legs spread as though they mean to stand their ground up there; and buckets, too, and long-handled spoons. She spies Annawake sitting on the edge of the porch with her legs sunk into the water.
r /> "Yoo hoo," Alice calls, not wanting to startle Annawake, who looks at that moment like a child lost in the land of pretend. Annawake looks up and waves broadly, and Alice is struck by how pretty she is, in shorts and a velvety red T-shirt. Last time, in the cafe, Annawake showed sharp edges, a cross between a scared rabbit and the hound that hunts him, and her hair seemed deliberately shaggy. Between then and now she has had it trimmed into a glossy earlobe-length bob, and her maple-colored skin is beautiful.
Alice walks across the wobbly-planked bridge from bank to boat, hanging on to the coarse rope handrail to keep herself from falling in the water. The side of the boat is lined all around with old tires, like bumpers.
"You call this a lake?" Alice asks. "I could just about throw a rock to the other bank."
"Well, I guess at this point you could call it a glorified river," Annawake admits. "Did you have trouble finding us?"
"No." She looks around to locate the "us," but sees only Annawake and a lot of dragonflies. Annawake had said Ledger had to go bless a new truck in Locust Grove.
"Do you mind sitting out here? The mosquitoes will be here pretty soon, but the water feels great."
"Don't mind if I do." Alice sits beside Annawake and catches her breath, then takes off her tennis shoes and rolls her pants legs to her knees. When she plunges her feet into the cold, it feels like a new lease on life.
"That haircut looks real good," she tells Annawake, feeling motherly in spite of herself.
Annawake runs a hand through it. "Thanks," she says. "I kind of went crazy and cut it all off when I went to law school. I think I was in mourning, or something. Seems like it's growing back now."
"That was a good idea to meet out here. It's nice."
"Well, it's private. We used to come out here when we were kids, for the summer, and we felt like we'd gone to California. We thought it was a hundred miles to Uncle Ledger's. If anyone would have told me you could walk out here from town in half an hour I wouldn't have believed it. Because nobody ever does."
"Didn't even take that long. Twenty minutes."
"You're a fast walker."
"I always was. If you're going someplace, I figure you'd just as well go on and get there."
She and Annawake look each other in the eye for a second, then retreat.
"So, you've got something to tell me."
"To ask, really," Alice says.
"All right."
Alice takes a breath. "Would it make any difference about who gets to keep Turtle if I was, if her mother and I were enrolled?"
Annawake looks at Alice with her mouth slightly open. After a while she closes it, then asks, "You have Cherokee blood?"
"We do. I found my grandma yesterday in that roll book."
"The Dawes Rolls," Annawake says. She blinks, looking at the water. "This is a surprise. I thought I knew what you were coming here to tell me today, and this is not it."
"Well, would it make any difference? Would that make us Indian?"
"Let me think a minute." She runs her hand through the hair at her temple, pulling it back from her face. Finally she looks at Alice with a more lawyerly look. "First of all, yes, if you enrolled then you would be Cherokee. We're not into racial purity, as you've probably noticed. It's a funny thing about us eastern tribes, we've been mixed blood from way back, even a lot of our holy people and our historical leaders. Like John Ross. He was half-blood. It's no stigma at all."
"That just seems funny to me, that you can join up late. Wouldn't it seem like showing up at the party after they've done raised the barn?"
"I guess it could be seen as opportunistic, in your case." Annawake gives Alice the strangest grin, with the corners of her mouth turned down. "But generally there's no reason why enrollment should be restricted to full-bloods, or half-, or wherever you'd want to make a cutoff. Anybody who lives our way of life should have the chance to belong to the tribe. I sure don't think outsiders should tell us who can be enrolled."
"Don't it kind of dilute things, to let everybody in?"
Annawake laughs. "Believe me, people are not lined up on the Muskogee highway waiting to join the tribe."
"So I'd be as Cherokee as any soul here, if I signed up."
"Legally you would be. And I'll be honest with you, it couldn't hurt your case."
"Well, then, I'm going to enroll."
"But that's kind of missing the point, where your granddaughter is concerned. You'd be Cherokee legally, but not culturally."
"Is that the big deal?"
Annawake presses her fingertips together and stares at them. "When we place Cherokee kids with non-Indian foster parents, we have a list we give them, things they can do to help teach the child about her culture. Take her to the Cherokee Heritage Center, get Cherokee language tapes, take her to Cherokee National Holiday events, things like that. But that's just making the best of a bad situation. It's like saying, 'If you're going to adopt this baby elephant, you must promise to take it to the zoo once in a while.' Really, a baby elephant should be raised by elephants."
"She isn't an elephant. She's a little girl."
"But if she's raised in a totally white culture, there's going to come a time when she'll feel like one. And she'll get about as many dates as one. She'll come home from high school and throw herself on the bed and say, 'Why do I have this long, long nose?' "
Alice wants to argue that there are worse things, but she can't immediately think of any. She still doesn't want to buy it, though. "If I'm Cherokee, and Taylor is, a little bit, and we never knew it but lived to tell the tale, then why can't she?"
Annawake lays her dark wrist over Alice's. "Skin color. Isn't life simple? You have the option of whiteness, but Turtle doesn't. I only had to look at her for about ten seconds on TV to know she was Cherokee."
Alice crosses her arms over her chest.
"Alice, there's something else. I was going to call you in a couple of days. It turns out we have compelling reason to file a motion to vacate this adoption." She watches Alice carefully as she says this. "Someone has come to me asking that I help locate a missing relative who could be Turtle." She continues to look Alice in the eye.
"Oh," Alice says, feeling her heart pound.
"You didn't know about this?"
Alice's mouth feels dry. "No. Nobody would think to tell me about it. Sugar wouldn't, nor anybody, because there isn't a soul except you that knows what I'm here for."
"I see." Annawake looks back at her hands. "Well, we don't know for sure. All we have to go on really is the child's age, and the circumstances of her being removed from the family. The child they're looking for might be someone else entirely. But to tell you the truth, I think it's likely to be Turtle. I have grounds enough to subpoena Taylor and require her to bring the child here for identification."
Alice stares at the flat river where upside-down trees are dancing and cattails reach down toward the blue sky below them. There is a whole, earnest upside-down world around her feet.
"I thought you already told her she had to come here with Turtle."
"No. I suggested it, but I haven't filed the motion yet. What I'd like most is for Taylor to go ahead and do the right thing on her own. For the good of the child, I'd like to handle this with a minimum of antagonism."
"Well, Taylor's already done antagonized. She's living on the lam. That's the truth. I have to wait for her to call me. I don't even know what state she's in."
Annawake shakes her head slowly. "I keep thinking there has to be a way to explain this so it doesn't sound to you like we just want to tear a baby from a mother's arms."
"Well, what else is it?"
Annawake looks thoughtful. "Do you remember that surrogate baby case a few years back? Where the woman that gave birth to the baby wanted to keep it? But the judge awarded custody to the biological father and his wife."
"That made me mad! I never did understand it."
"I'll tell you what decided it. I read that case. The biological father stood up
and told the jury his family history. He'd lost everybody, every single relative, in concentration camps during World War II. That baby was the last of his family's genes, and he was desperate to keep her so he could tell her about the people she came from." Annawake looks sideways at Alice. "That's us. Our tribe. We've been through a holocaust as devastating as what happened to the Jews, and we need to keep what's left of our family together."
Alice watches the water, where dozens of minnows have congregated around her calves. They wriggle their tiny bodies violently through the water, chasing each other away, fighting over the privilege of nibbling at the hairs on her legs. It feels oddly pleasant to be kissed by little jealous fish.
"You think I'm overstating the case?" Annawake asks.
"I don't know."
"Have you ever read about the Trail of Tears?"
"I heard of it. I don't know the story, though."
"It happened in 1838. We were forced out of our homelands in the southern Appalachians. North Carolina, Tennessee, around there. All our stories are set in those mountains, because we'd lived there since the beginning, until European immigrants decided our prior claim to the land was interfering with their farming. So the army knocked on our doors one morning, stole the crockery and the food supplies and then burned down the houses and took everybody into detention camps. Families were split up, nobody knew what was going on. The idea was to march everybody west to a worthless piece of land nobody else would ever want."
"They walked?" Alice asks. "I'd have thought at least they would take them on the train."
Annawake laughs through her nose. "No, they walked. Old people, babies, everybody. It was just a wall of people walking and dying. The camps had filthy blankets and slit trenches for bathrooms, covered with flies. The diet was nothing that forest people had ever eaten before, maggoty meal and salted pork, so everybody had diarrhea, and malaria from the mosquitoes along the river, because it was summer. The tribal elders begged the government to wait a few months until fall, so more people might survive the trip, but they wouldn't wait. There was smallpox, and just exhaustion. The old people and the nursing babies died first. Mothers would go on carrying dead children for days, out of delirium and loneliness, and because of the wolves following behind."