I'm doing some research as I revise my first novel. One of the characters, Faryn Glidewell, calls himself a "Mississippi Shawnee." Faryn, an ex-wrestler, chooses to flaunt his version of this identity when he returns to the small town in north Mississippi where he was born: black hair to his shoulders, black clothing, turquoise and silver from head to toe. Before my imagination gave it to me, I don't think I knew that the Shawnee actually lived in Mississippi among other places. Their descendants not only lament the forced removal but that they, unlike other tribes, are now associated with no particular place. Corabeth, the teenaged narrator of the novel, admires Faryn for his dignity, depth, fearlessness. She also identifies with his sense of placelessness: not belonging to his own community, unable to find another quite like him. The novel is set in 1979.

I'd like to write about this for a day or so. But I'll begin with an excerpt from the novel (Corabeth's idea of
Indians" before she meets Faryn):

After a while, I decided Faryn must've been one of the silent and threatening villain wrestlers, and I was dead sure he wouldn't have dressed up like a cowboy-movie Indian with feathers on his head, no matter how much they paid him. And you know they would, like the Indians up at Cherokee, North Carolina, that the gift shops use to get money out of tourists.

One summer we went up to East Tennessee and saw those Indians in the Smoky Mountains. It was one of the two real vacations we ever had, the other down to Biloxi where I first saw the ocean at the Gulf of Mexico. Both times, we saved up the gas money and stopped at stores along the way and made our meals from bologna and cheese and crackers whenever we found a picnic table. Terri was little enough that she had to be carried most of the time around Gatlinburg. Nothing there impressed me much, and I was just biding my time, waiting to see the Indians.

I had already been learning about them in school, about the way they lived and what they ate and all the spirits they believed in and the stories they told and how they loved the woods left all natural, just like I did. I almost drove Mama and Daddy crazy when we crossed the mountains, asking when we were going to get there. At the same time I was also complaining from being carsick on account of the winding road. It didn't help either situation when that road kept doubling back on itself.

When we finally got to Cherokee, I wouldn't even let Mama check out the campgrounds to make sure we had somewhere to put up the tent; I just kept hollering to see the Indians. When Daddy found a parking spot in the town, I was out of the truck before we'd hardly even stopped. I'm not even sure what I expected exactly, but it sure to goodness wasn't what I found: phony-looking folks in beads and war paint that had been sat down in front of the shops selling little rubber tomahawks. I reckon it didn't take me more than ten minutes of running around until I told Mama, "Let's just go on and look for a campground."

I can't explain why Cherokee hit me so hard like it did. It was something about what I thought it would be, something not written up so easily in my diary, about how people can't be made to add up like a problem in my math book. Something like I saw in Faryn, who now called himself a Mississippi Shawnee farmer, when I'd catch sight of him bending over to pick up a log of wood like it weighed nothing. Something like what I saw in Daddy, losing our money at the poker table and saying it had nothing to do with how he loved us, refusing to go to church and claiming he was right to do it.

Before I went to Cherokee, I had thought seeing Indians would be a little like seeing the ocean; after Cherokee, I thought they were nothing the same. But now I wonder if I wasn't right to begin with, for an ocean is something beautiful, even at a place like Biloxi where you have to stare straight out ahead and pretend the motels and the people aren't there. An ocean is something beautiful, but too dark and deep to see to the bottom.



posted by Sandy at 7:08 AM