I had the pleasure of meeting Diane Glancy when she was here
last year, on a two-month visit doing some writing and research.
And it was wonderful to have her be a part of our community
and to get to know her work better,
so we're very happy that we could invite her back this year.
She was born in Kansas City of German, English, and Cherokee
parents, received a BA from the University
of Missouri, an MA from Central State U in Oklahoma,
and an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Her books of poetry include One Age
in a Dream, Offering, Brown Wolf Leaves the Res,
Iron Woman, which won the Capricorn prize,
and my favorite, Lone Dog's Winter Count,
a really stunning series of poems that works off
a spiral calendar of pictographs written on a buffalo hide.
Several books of stories or mixed-genre books--
Firesticks, Trigger Dance, which won the NYLON Fiction
Award from the University of Colorado.
A wonderful memoir called Claiming
Breath, which won the Before Columbus Book Award.
And as well, plays which have been published in War Cries,
and for which she's been awarded playwriting awards
from Tucson's Borderlands Theater
as well as from the Five Civilized Tribes.
And she has a novel forthcoming.
Obviously, one of the most stunning things about her work
is the breadth of it, and her eagerness
to try as many genres as possible
and to mix up her sense of what these genres might become.
Of Claiming Breath, Adrienne Rich says that "Glancy has
written one of the new source books brought forth in this
country today by poets for whose parents and grandparents
literacy or English was not a given."
And as Glancy says, "we get down to our bones in art.
We find there the bones of others."
And in that, she helps to establish common ground among us
all.
Please welcome Diane Glancy.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Alison.
I'm very glad to be here.
Thank you all for coming.
"Coyote's Shyness."
"Coyote, the Native American trickster, used to be shy.
He who was always shouting at everything in sight.
A long time ago, Coyote talked quietly.
You could say he was even shy.
The grandfathers were proud of him, because, you see,
when you tell a story, the little words you speak
migrate to the ear.
And when Coyote first spoke, he spoke this way,
and his words ran like small animals covered with fur
and crawled into the cave of the ear,
where the words hibernate for a while,
then begin to turn and scratch and come slowly awake
and tell their story.
That's how stories get started.
Hardly before you know it, one gets into your head.
And after a while, you hear it, and you begin to know who you
are."
Storytelling has always been very important for me.
I had a hunger for words.
But how do you begin putting your stories together?
This next piece is dedicated to Connie Hart, who
was a Koorie woman in New Zealand,
and she learned basket-making by herself
because her mother had not been allowed to teach her
in the mission, and her baskets are now
in the National Gallery in Victoria.
I saw them last year when I was in Australia,
and there was pictures of her starting to weave her baskets.
And in the beginning, the grasses would fall apart
and she would cut her fingers, and yet she kept on and on.
And I thought, if she can do that with baskets, I
can do that with words.
"A woman makes a story because there is no shade,
and you know how a story branches.
A story is a tree unfolding.
The leaves hide the beating sun.
A story comes just like a tree, where it stands after winter.
The woman says, the tree feels the sun through its bark.
It feels the leaves pick-axing their way out.
The trees move all summer on those little plots called stems.
You know some afternoons, a story full of leaves
folds up and lifts?
But there has to be leaves falling
after the budding all summer, after the shade
to stand between, then rakes gather meaning,
not from a tree out of leaves, but from moving to story again.
The woman says, when it's cold, the bark
looks like a column of hard, dark flames.
In winter, you can hold your hand to a tree.
I think of story as a living being--
not an abstract accumulation of words and voice, but a tribe.
Each part of the story is a member
of the family who wants to go where the others go.
The last time I told the story of how we got light,
I forgot the last part.
It knocked in my head until I had to let it out
to join the other parts of the story, which
had migrated to others--
how the Earth was once in darkness,
how the buzzard would go get a piece of the sun
the animals remembered in the other world.
But he carried the piece of sun on the top of his head,
and it burned off the feathers.
That's why the buzzard is bald, you know.
Then the possum burned the fur off her tail trying
to get a piece of the sun.
And finally, the spider traveled to the other world
and wrapped a piece in her web, and brought it to our sky.
Now, the part I forgot.
That's why the spider's web radiates outward like the sun.
So now the story has made camp in your heads.
The story will hunt, and at night, its campfire
will keep you alive.
It will tell you how not to overlook the light in sometimes
unlikely things.
A story speaks to the silence.
You will feel it moving.
A story will take you all your life to put bodies to."
That actually happened in my Native American literature
class.
I always open class with a story,
and I did forget that last part.
And it was on a Friday afternoon, and all weekend,
that the rest of that story was in my head, knocking to get out.
Last week was library week in Minnesota.
In fact, I think it was National Library Week,
so maybe it was here, too.
And a couple of years ago, Macalester College
asked me to write a poem about the library, which I thought
it was very strange, because my Cherokee grandmother was
illiterate, and books were something
that we didn't have very many of.
So I walked over to the library and just stood awhile,
and soon the words came.
This is called "Grandmother Library."
"The books stand like ancestors on the shelves.
They sing our hunting songs.
Thank them, like the animals, for their lives.
Float into the white clouds of books.
Surely, they are goodness within.
Thumb through the pages.
You'll feel the draft of wings.
Look at the books as the giver of allowances,
and you are holding out your hand.
Act like you know them all.
Gather their prairie grass into your arms.
Stomp dance in the library.
Powwow.
Tell the books they are brothers.
Say to them, you are relatives.
Honor them with corn pollen on their noses.
Honor them with a star quilt giveaway.
Tell them they are good medicine,
a buffalo herd snorting softly.
Say to the books, the war ax of your pages cut.
You are rows of women making a tremolo for the warriors.
I see the books as rows of horses carrying the warriors
into battle.
I hear the war cries of books.
Tell the books they are spirit dancers.
Their pages are white flocks of birds.
Say you hate big books, you boogie where there is no band.
Say they are a table set for a company full of white plates,
an after-dinner cigar or the smoke of the peace pipe,
a spider carrying pieces of the sun
and her web to bring us light.
Say to the books, your pages are snow angels
in winter, a bush full of white blossoms in summer.
Look at the library like a forest or an elk herd grazing.
Think of it as an intercessor saying, have mercy.
Look at the work the people have done.
Tell the library it is a grandmother telling stories.
Without her words, we do not live."
Besides stories, I think my car has been
very important in my life also.
And this is to honor the car, and it's called "War Horse I."
"I have a new car now, but for 13 years,
I drove a brown Buick station wagon.
It had 184,555 miles when I gave it to a friend.
You know, I think I left my husband easier
than I left that car.
Toward the end, I cried when I had to look for another car,
but it wouldn't pass emissions test in Minnesota.
I asked an Indian friend what he was going
to do with his Indian car.
He said there wasn't a test on the reservation,
and he could keep his car.
He asked what I was going to do with the Buick.
He could use it for hunting.
As soon as I had a place for it, I could think of another car.
The first key I had for it bent from turning
the ignition all those years.
They almost never got a new key made.
I remember when I saw the car in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1978,
I knew it was mine.
I don't live in Oklahoma anymore,
but I remember it on the back roads there,
driving Highway 62 to Altus, Oklahoma
when it must have been 105--
no air-- sitting on Mount Scott near Lawton,
driving to the black mesa that reaches New Mexico.
My children grew up in that car.
Everyone said it would never start in Minnesota when I moved,
but it did.
I got a small truck battery, and we went through the snow.
I cleaned out the glove compartment
when the car went to the Fond Du Lac reservation without me.
Insurance papers with eight addresses
in three different states.
A few invoices for new brakes, a transmission,
tires, a whisk broom, an air gauge,
a bulb for the rear light, a few maps.
A Bible with curled pages under the front seat.
Nothing in the trunk but two ice scrapers,
and some rope I used to tie things on top of the car
once in a while.
A 1978 Buick Estate wagon, serial number 4R35X8X153975,
brown as a war horse."
"War Horse II."
"The next time I see my old car, it's in the movies.
Yes, you wouldn't believe it.
But there's this film, this documentary,
Without Reservation, and my old car
is in it, showing up like a big shot next to the moose
hanging on the scaffolding after hunting
season, the Indian friend who has my car now starting
to dress the moose, and the car there as
if it had part in the hunt, as if maybe it held the bow
and arrow, just like when you go to the hunting grounds,
you are new again, and the old way of life
returns as if you'd never had to do without it.
Yes, I know someday I'll see that car again on the highway,
will pass as if old friends.
Did not our heart beat within us, the disciples asked,
when Christ passed them on the road after Resurrection?
They were just going somewhere talking with their friends,
and he just passed.
Yes, sometime I'll be going somewhere,
and my old car will come up from behind and pass me the way I
know sometimes my father has been beside me,
only I didn't know it until the moment he left."
I have a piece here I've never read before,
but I think I'm going to read one that I have first.
I always feel more comfortable with a piece.
I was at a writer's conference several years ago,
and I heard that Comanche, who was
the only survivor of the Little Bighorn, had been preserved.
And not only that, but he was at Lawrence, Kansas in a museum,
and my daughter happened to be in school in Lawrence
at the time.
And so the next time I visited her, I stopped at the museum,
and indeed, Comanche is there.
So if you're ever in Lawrence, Kansas, stop by and see him.
"Comanche, Museum of Natural History, University of Kansas,
Lawrence."
"It was after a hard day.
We followed rain on the Kansas turnpike.
We have it often out here.
Pecking the windshield louder, then softer,
with a brief respite under the underpass, as if the wind
suddenly stopped to take a breath.
And the clouds raised their white flags in the sky,
and I thought of the horse I had seen in the museum in Lawrence
after visiting my daughter, and now my friend
and I were returning to Minnesota.
The horse, Comanche, the only survivor of the Little Bighorn,
June 25, 1876.
He stood in his glass case with some drums and war clubs,
some sage grass, and a few bleached bones to give him
the still-on-the-prairie look, his dark eye like a buckeye,
his bridle marked 7th Cavalry, his body restored with excelsior
and wood and a few bones.
The mount of Captain Myles Keough, a plaque
explains, the only living thing found on the battlefield
by relief troops arriving two days later.
The horses that could walk were led off by the Indians--
Cheyenne, probably, though other bands gathered against Custer.
Now we pay toll at the end of the Kansas turnpike,
and I look for highway 35 to take north to Minnesota--
nearly eight hours away, and it's already
5 o'clock in the afternoon.
And there off in the distance is Kansas City,
and the rain isn't falling except in big drops
off the viaducts, and under overpasses
and what washes up from cars ahead of us.
We pass the refineries and storage silos
like a tribe of ancestors, then the old stockyards where
my father came as a young man 70 years ago and lived his life,
and now it's over.
I wonder what it was like for Comanche, that first
and second night he lay on the prairie by himself.
Maybe he heard the moans of the dying soldiers.
He must have heard the Indians at their work
of scalping and dismembering and gathering up
what could be carried off, as though the battle were over,
and the booty of boots and brass buttons
and epaulets and war weapons and rifles were really theirs.
At first, the sleet is delicate as a gourd rattle,
as delicate as the rattle in a burnt out light bulb.
A few miles later, the sleet pecks harder.
The highway is fragile as glass in a light bulb.
We expected fog in Iowa, some icy roads,
but we hear on the radio of the snow in St Paul.
Temperatures down to below zero.
I watch the white line to stay on the road.
My friend watches ahead for the red tail lights of other cars.
Several hours later, in Minnesota, the highway
is nothing more than a few ruts through the snow.
I keep driving, thinking of the power of the ancestors.
When we get to St Paul, I even make it
up the hill on Randolph Boulevard,
make it within a few blocks of my house,
but my street has not been plowed,
and I have to leave my car in a snow bank
at the end of the street.
There's snow over the wheel wells, and the car won't move.
We walk through snow up to our knees.
I feel it inside my boots and the legs of my trousers.
I even struggle to get into the house
through the snow packed against the front door.
We make several trips back to unload the car,
lifting our four feet through the snow, the dark sky over us,
the moans of the dying storm around us,
the white air of our breath among the war shields and war
clubs and ghost drums."
I also wanted to read that piece for you
so that you know all the snow that you are missing down here.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, this is a piece I've never read before, so it
feels like a stranger to me.
"Television is the West Pole."
"It's a story preserved with many voices--
telling it on their own channel, you see--
sometimes associated with snow, which some stories can only
be told during.
Yo, TV'S the new oral tradition, continuing stories
which alter our consciousness.
Have you had a house in which one room was empty?
You didn't have any furniture for it?
That's what my Indian heritage feels like--
an empty room, maybe some curtains
at the window, a few memories of old trips
to see the grandmother, all when I was small.
The going back along the old road,
the upholstery in the back seat of the old car
scratching my legs.
Bookshelves empty, whole histories unknown.
Maybe the bed of a few stories you
know you can rest in now and then,
but it's narrow as the body that's on it.
The spread, a little rumpled, wrinkles under you
in the wrong place.
I can tell you what it's like to be Indian.
It's having an invisible self to talk to.
It's having an attic and knowing you're part of the land,
like feeling full just after half a blueberry pie,
the berries you picked yourself.
When I go to powwows, I get in tears in my eyes
watching those girls dance.
I missed all that.
I don't think they had powwows in Arkansas anyway.
My father was cut off from it.
My white mother wouldn't allow it.
All that noise and dancing, it would
have taken away the isolation.
That's what my childhood was, living on the great ice cap.
The frozen island of the ice-blue light
on the television in the dark all the while moving,
migrating with the current, Kansas City to Indianapolis
to St Louis to Columbia to Tulsa,
to Kansas City to Tulsa to Iowa City, to St Paul, Minnesota.
I spent most of my life packing and moving.
Sometimes time goes by, and I wake up
and want to wad newspapers and wrap the dishes in newspaper
and box them up.
Yes, I can hear the silverware like a jingle dress, sewn
in patterns, all fringe like-- well, I don't know.
Some things you got to leave unexplained.
But the drumming and the stomping with the feet, it's
tricky.
You just don't get out there and do it.
But I didn't get to have it when I was a child.
No, it's what I miss.
My eyes tear up, and I have to swallow and look
somewhere else for a while until they stop.
And afterwards, I put my blanket on the hardwood floor
of the empty room, I go to bed, and I
can see the geometric patterns and the movement of something
within me.
Yes, that's where the Indian lives in his (tele)vision--"
and tele is in parentheses, and the vision is afterwards--
"in the dance of the unknown memory.
The West Pole is having the TV as a companion.
Well, this is how the Indian created nature.
He carved a round bowl of wood and painted it bright,
with silver and copper and uranium,
and shining with 100 fireflies--
runners who take it up to the sky, who broadcast it
with some maple sap to stick it up there where it can transmit.
Stars are the broken voices where the story pours out--
the assimilated mixed-blood voices of this age.
Now, the Sun went on its track each day, and howled like a woof
over the next ridge.
A-ooh, a-ooh, like that, you know, a-ooh
all night, especially the Moon, which
is only a reflection of the Sun, yes with those stars.
I want to see that Moon when it comes out, yes, I
do, opening the picture show of the stars in town,
sometimes full face, sometimes looking out
behind the door of her room there in the night sky,
sometime with their mouth on her.
That's the rounded black curve you see in the moon.
You know we don't know anything.
Whole worlds are going on here, and we don't always know it.
Yes, that's what we get for thinking
we're so smart, just chugging on our own little trail each day.
I tell you, my life reads like a roadmap.
And what does the world look like through blue eyes?
Grandpa played marbles.
Yes, he was a sharpshooter.
No animals in the woods to hunt anymore.
He shot those round, shiny balls with swirls of red and blue,
just under the surface where you couldn't
put your finger on them.
No legs or tails or ears to worry about.
Nothing but the click of marbles, the click of a glass.
What does it matter?
If I turned into an animal, I'd want to become a marble.
I can feel my legs falling off, my arms and my hair.
I can feel myself starting to fall, yes, right off this Earth.
Soon I'll be up there like one of those shiny marble stars,
marbley and slick as breath."
I am not really sure exactly what that means,
but you know how some things move
in the peripheral vision, kind of like the dream, kind
of like the unconscious.
And I like to get them down, too, as well as narrative poems.
I think stories speak with many voices.
This is from a manuscript called "(Ado)ration."
And again, the ado--
A-D-O-- is in parentheses, and the ration
is out there by itself, because I've always
had to ration my adoration of the world.
"You know the Indian, when first he saw a man on a horse,
said, whoa, a four-legged.
Six, really, though two legs unusable
because they were too short.
But a four-legged with two hands, two heads, a mane,
and an amazing tail.
Then, if that wasn't enough, the creature came apart from itself,
could actually dismount the other
in a truly emblematic reference, by which you
discover the binary trail you'll probably be on the rest of life.
And you saddle up, as if Jesus on a motorcycle with an angel
driving the sidecar.
Yes, the angels, hand-raised as if riding in a rodeo,
reaching through a hole in the air,
and it's like putting your finger into a light socket
and you're wired.
You bunny-hop with the conquistadors,
riding the horse up from Mexico.
Being extinct on the North American continent
since the Ice Age, now, after crossing on ships from Española,
they come back.
Yep, maybe it's the speed of the Harley.
Maybe it's the bleeding heart of Jesus flapping on his chest.
No T-shirt logo.
No, Jesus is quick as a whip-tail lizard.
You feel him running through your insides,
washing the hurt, the mean-spirited stuff
you have done.
You remember as a child, you heard him
rolling like a loose hubcap.
You knew him in high school, smoking with the gang
in the parking lot.
You know how, in those days, you were always drawn to the hoods."
"Theology of Deer."
"The Jazz bows of Earth.
Their roll through space, traveling farther each day.
The cherubim on drums.
A trumpet of angels.
The beats of an old life.
A smaller inverted mind.
When you stop that night on the road
through the Cattaraugus Reserve to watch the northern lights.
The crowd of spirits, their migration to the Res,
tuning Indian cars, holding babies in their arms.
When a deer crosses the road in the fog behind you,
you think Christ for a moment it's him and you say dude
of dudes and deer of deers."
I've always had a very strong Christian faith
and many friends, both Native and white,
say how can you believe that stuff.
I had a junior sabbatical last semester and I had a whole--
I think it was eight months off to write.
And I finished a novel that I had
been working on for many years about the Trail of Tears.
The 1838 removal of the Cherokee from the Southwest--
from the Southeast to Oklahoma.
And when I was down here in Tucson for two months
last winter I pretty much finished it up.
I also went up to the Heard Museum
and did some research there.
The novel is called Pushing the Bear,
because there was always a dark presence, a heaviness,
in front of my characters as they walked.
I was in a museum in Tulsa in the basement.
And once a year, they open the museum
and let you go down and see all their excess.
And there was a little ivory sculpture
of a man leaning over pushing a bear
and I knew just in an instant that would
be the title of my manuscript.
The main character's name is Maritole
and her husband's name is Knobowtee.
And Maritole is sitting on her cabin steps
one morning in the fall of 1838 when
she looks over the cornfields.
Maritole, I heard my husband call from the field.
I started to get up, but the baby tottered at my knees.
Maritole, Knobowtee called again.
Soldiers had rounded up Cherokee in Tennessee in North Carolina
the past summer.
Put them in stockades for the march
West, but fever and dysentery had weakened the Indians
and they went back to their farms or camps
near the stockades.
There couldn't be soldiers on the road.
They couldn't come to the backwoods of Georgia.
No matter what the men said.
I saw dust swarm over the dried corn stocks
in the fields near the cabin.
Horses were coming.
For a moment the cabin in the small clearing in the woods
seemed a whirl.
The baby cried, but I couldn't hold her.
I saw Knobowtee walk between the mounted soldiers
into the clearing.
I stood at the cabin steps and the baby slipped from my knees.
"I had seen the white men often.
They came through New Echota to trade.
Sometimes, they rode by the farm.
I heard their language from the white ministers in church.
They'd read from the scriptures in English,
then one of our holy men would translate with his usual grunt.
But there was no hope for us now.
I saw the soldiers' impatient movements
and heard their quick words.
They seemed invisible inside their dark clothes.
Some Cherokee had already migrated West.
How many earlier trails had there been?
But we wanted to keep our land.
I stepped on the apple core that fell from my lap.
The sun had burned away morning fog, and light blurred the men.
I had to wash the baby's clothes.
Later, I was going to take some corn to the mill in New Echota.
A bushel of apples and peaches from our trees
waited by the wagon.
I didn't understand what the soldier said
in the clearing of the cabin.
They talked fast.
In our own language, my husband told me to carry the baby.
We were leaving for the stockade in Tennessee.
Then we also would migrate West.
No, I said to him.
We will march, Knobowtee said, I've always known it.
Chief John Ross at Red Clay, Tennessee
said we had hope of keeping our land,
but the chiefs here, Ridge and Boudinot,
said we were right in signing the treaty.
We have to leave.
I won't, I said to Knobowtee.
A soldier dismounted and told Knobowtee
to give me the crying child.
He put his bayonet to my side and poked.
Knobowtee turned and walked ahead of me.
I couldn't leave the farm, the cabin, and the yellow leaves
where my things were, my grandmother's spinning wheels
and cotton cards, her copper thimble.
I felt my knees fold.
The baby screamed, and Knobowtee took her.
A soldier lifted me to my feet, and I knew he said, march.
They couldn't remove us.
Didn't the soldiers know we were the land?
The corn stalks were our grandmothers.
Long ago, Selu, a Cherokee woman, had been killed.
Where her blood fell, the corn grew.
The corn stalks waved their arms, trying to hold us.
Their voices were the long tassels, reaching the air.
Our roots entwined.
My feet would not walk, and the soldier held me up by my arm.
I walked sideways, and fell into the corn stalks
at the side of the road.
A bird's chirp filled my ears.
I wanted to hold the air and the sound of the land.
The soldiers laughed and poked me with his bayonet.
I thought for a moment, his face was painted blue.
I tried to get up, but my knees wouldn't hold.
I saw the apple core in my hand and wondered how it got there.
Wagon, the soldier said and pulled me out
of the corn stalks.
I tried to follow Knobowtee, but I walked like I was old.
I was my grandmother before she died, when her knees would not
hold her up.
I heard the soldiers laugh again.
Walk straight, Knobowtee carried the baby and looked at me.
We don't have any choice.
There'll be a wagon ahead.
You and the baby can ride.
I looked back at the cabin, but we
had passed the first bend in the wagon ruts.
My grandmother's scissors, and her bone hairpin,
and the shell beads were on my dresser.
The bed my father helped Knobowtee make, the nutting
stone and pestles he gave me when we married,
I couldn't leave.
My grandmother's things had been given me to take care of.
Sometimes, I still heard her voice in the cabin.
The white sky passed before my eyes,
and I felt myself hit the hard ground.
The rumble of the wagon startled me from blackness.
I sat up.
Knobowtee walked beside the wagon,
and Anna Sco-so-tah held my baby.
The wagon was crowded, and I tried to make room
for the others, Kee-un-e-ca and the widow Teehe, Lacey Woodard,
Quaty Lewis, Mrs. Young Turkey.
The wheels jolted over the ground,
and I held the side of the wagon.
A terrible silence fell over our people,
thick as the fog that sometime covered us in the morning.
Chief John Ross had gone to Washington
from Red Clay, Tennessee, but the Ridge and Boudinot faction
in Georgia knew the Indian had no chance to keep his land.
I heard the men's angry voices in council.
Andrew Jackson would not uphold the agreement that
kept Indian lands for Indians.
My father said the white men were
still angry we had joined the British during the Revolutionary
War.
Then gold was discovered in northern Georgia,
and the white men wanted it.
They also wanted our farms.
Knobowtee said again, we didn't have a chance.
I looked at him as he walked beside the wagon.
He seemed a stranger to me.
I thought of the birds and the geese, the curl of wood smoke
and the chirp of bugs from the woods.
The trees were our ancestors.
Their roots reached fingers into the creek banks.
The squirrels ate walnuts and fussed in their branches.
I wanted to hear the buzz of a fly around me
on the cabin steps.
The corn fields and land surrounded me all my life.
We were made of the red soil we farmed.
Now, the dust roads seemed to flare like cooking fires.
I thought once I heard the thunder of the Great Spirit's
anger against the soldiers.
I looked at them from the wagon.
Their boots dusty from the road.
Their uniforms like bruises.
The wagons passed easier over the pine needles.
The baby slept for a moment on my lap,
but woke with a toss of the wagon.
I thought of the chickens on the farm and the crops
I had to tend, butter not yet made.
Knobowtee was in the field, cutting the dried corn
stocks for fodder, when the soldiers came.
Did he leave the horse hitched to the plow?
What would happen to it?
Where was the young raccoon that came to the cabin step to feed?
What would happen to us?
The Cherokee men walked in their turbans and tunics.
The bright colors made the soldiers' uniforms
sink into the trees.
The autumn sun shone on our heads,
lighting the black hair and eyes that were dark and strained."
The novel, which goes on for 400 pages--
actually, a little bit more than that--
is full of different characters.
I wrote it the first time with just Maritole walking
the 900 miles, making 10 miles a day through the four winter
months of 1838.
But that one voice didn't carry the story,
so I went back and added all the other voices.
Some of the names came like magic.
This one is called Jelest, J- E-L- E-S-T,
and whether through hysteria, or whether it actually happened,
or whether she went crazy--
I don't know-- this is about an animal transformation,
and this is her speaking.
"You soldiers, I knew you were coming.
Ha!
You didn't startle me.
The baby who was born talking said you were coming.
It was a Choolaskey, conjurers.
As soon as the baby's head was out, it sang its own birth song.
It said its own secret name.
It said it was afraid of winter because it didn't want
to be one of those who walked.
The holy men made stick crosses for the four directions,
and the crosses fell to the West.
Even the birds are quiet.
I would run from you, but my legs
are stiff as the willow strips I soak in the creek.
I hear your horses on the road.
I know you stop at my cabin.
I hear nothing but my heart beating in my ears.
Maybe you are standing still, thinking what to do.
I could hear your footsteps if you walk to the creek.
If I were an animal, the soldiers could not find me.
If I hold still, I would become a deer.
I lean over the creek and lap with my tongue.
I feel under my skirt for the hooves, the soft deer tail.
My nostrils widen.
I smell the wind.
I look into the creek and see the downy ears on my head.
I lift my head and step through the woods."
This is Anna Sco-so-tah speaking.
There's also Cherokee words.
But I do not speak the Cherokee language,
so I just skip over them.
"The soldiers came down the road and told her to leave.
Her legs wouldn't walk.
The soldiers grabbed her arm and held her up.
Their bayonets poked her legs.
The sky was brown as the hen blood on her boots.
She tried to call to her neighbor,
but her voice crackled.
For a moment, she thought she was a hen.
She flopped on the ground, her brown feathers in the dust."
And this is Anna Sco-so-tah's neighbor.
"They stopped at a stream to drink.
How quickly they felt thirst.
The birds called to them across the trees.
Even the water spoke.
I heard Anna crackle, her neighbor said.
I knew the soldiers was coming anyway.
I've seen Anna, too, in a dream.
I was in my cabin, and she came to the window.
Her arms were short.
They was covered with feathers.
She's a witch, the neighbor said.
That's all I can say.
He's a sorcerer, Anna told the others.
The chickens cluck when he comes.
Sorcerers are night travelers.
The chickens don't like them.
Huh, the neighbor said, she's only got three chickens.
If she eats a chicken one day, I see it walking around the next.
She's a witch, I tell you.
That's all I can say.
The chickens peck him if I don't chase them with my stick.
Huh, the neighbor grunted as the soldiers hurried on.
That's how I know he's a sorcerer,
Anna Sco-so-tah said, walking beside her neighbor.
The chickens don't like him."
So they go to a stockade in Tennessee
where they stay until all the Cherokee are rounded up.
And then one morning, late in October, they leave the stockade
and travel North through Tennessee and Kentucky.
And they come to the Ohio River, which they cross,
and they cross the bottom of Illinois.
And this is the next stop here at the Mississippi River.
And after that, they continue across Southern Missouri,
and down across the corner of Arkansas,
and then into Oklahoma.
This is Maritole speaking.
"Suddenly, one day, we came to a huge river.
The soldier said it was the Mississippi.
We camped under the cover of brush
and watched the ice chunks float by Green's Ferry.
Sometimes, wailing was heard.
Look at that terrible outcropping of rock up river.
A bluff, the soldiers called it.
The hills were higher than they had
been when we crossed the Ohio, and weren't the trees shorter,
allowing the heavy sky to push down upon us?
Many more of us died waiting for the ice to pass.
Knobowtee and the men, men sat spitting into the fire.
I felt my fear of the river grow.
How can we cross that river?
I cried in panic to Tanner one evening, we'll die.
We'll drown like the others.
My father didn't say anything.
His hair had grayed, and his eyes were dull and hollow
in his head.
Lucy held her boys, we'll make it the rest of the way.
I watched the ice pass for a few more days.
Then one morning, I woke with the taste of peaches
in my mouth.
I heard the soldiers preparing to cross the river.
We had always been toward the front of the line.
We would be among the first ones to cross.
My heart pounded wildly.
I held something in my hands, but always, always, I
found they were empty.
The bear camped before me as usual.
I tried to push him away, but his bulk did not move.
I felt the stirring of his breath on the cold morning.
Old bear, I said to him, today we crossed the river.
I patted his hide, move over, even if I go to the afterlife
with mother and the baby.
The boys fretted as we waited for the raft that
would take us across the river.
They cried frantically when the soldiers herded us
toward the landing.
I felt a tightness in my chest, and my arms hurt.
Surely, the land and the trail we walked
would fold under the earth with the sun.
I nodded to the trees.
We go, I told the boys.
They would not hold still, but tried to run.
Don't run, I told them again.
Above us, the clouds wore my grandmother's bone hair--
bone carved hairpin.
Maybe, it was now, the time I would join her.
Grandmother, I called, and she smiled.
Her face was now gray and lovely above the wind
that snarled upriver.
I saw the spirits eating from my feather edged dishes.
I heard them in the wind.
They put down their knives and forks.
They came and held the sides of the tossing raft
as we stepped onto it, some of us falling, others crying out.
The spirits wore bright tunics and turbans,
and I couldn't see beyond them as we crossed the river.
They held the raft steady through the large pieces of ice.
I spooned more cornbread to them, more squirrel meat,
and peach cobbler.
I had cooked it just this morning in my dream.
Hold on, hold on, I heard them say.
We tottered across the river, their ghost voices laughing
to the freezing wind."
Well, they finally make it to Oklahoma.
Approximately 11,000 started out that fall,
and a fourth of them died along the way.
I think it's a very important part of American history,
and so I was glad to be able to think what it must have
been like to make that walk.
Maybe one more, and that will be it.
This book is called Firesticks, and of course, the fire
sticks used to be the sticks that you lit the campfire with.
And in this day, fire sticks are words.
There was a time that was magic when what you spoke actually
happened.
That's why you have to be very careful with your words
because words carry power.
They create.
When you speak, you make the trail on which you have to walk,
and this is the tiny little excerpt that explains all that.
In Firesticks, the main character has had a dream
and she says, "the man spoke, and I saw the words come out
of his mouth.
Only the words were shaped like what they spoke.
When he said tree, I saw a tree between his teeth.
He said grass, and I saw the grass tumble off his tongue.
He said sky, and the sky flew from his lips
and attached itself to the clouds.
He said house, and I saw the four walls stand up.
Who is it?
I don't know, hope I guess.
I always felt I had nothing.
Maybe, it's myself speaking something into existence.
Maybe, words are not always separators.
If I speak light, I have light.
My words are fire sticks."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Any questions?
You've been a good audience.
Thank you.