Take the Cannoli (14 page)

Sadly, we check out of the Choo Choo and drive across town to Ross's Landing. It used to be where John Ross's ferry service carried people across the Tennessee River. But in 1838, it was one of the starting points for the water route of the Trail of Tears.

And anchored there, at the river, like some ghost ship, in the very spot where Cherokees were herded into flatboats by the U.S. military, is a U.S. Coast Guard boat. I stand on the sand and read a weathered historical marker: “Established about 1816 by John Ross some 370 yards east of this point, it consisted of a ferry, warehouse and landing. Cherokee parties left for the West in 1838, the same year the growing community took the name Chattanooga.”

I'm sure there's no connection at all between those two points. That sounds so nice. They “left for the West.” Bye-bye! Bon voyage!

Ross's Landing also functions as Chattanooga's tourist center. Up the hill from the river is the gigantic Tennessee Aquarium and an IMAX theater. The place is crawling with tourists—a crowd so generic
and indistinguishable from one another they swirled around us as a single T-shirt.

One hundred and sixty years ago, thousands of Cherokees came through this site. In the summer of 1838, they were forced onto boats and faced heat exhaustion, and then later a drought that stranded them without water to drink. In the fall, they headed west by foot, eventually trudging barefoot through blizzards. Either way, they perished of starvation, dysentery, diarrhea, and fatigue. A quarter of the tribe was dead.

Here, in the shadow of the aquarium, the Trail of Tears is remembered by a series of quotations from disgruntled Native Americans, carved into a concrete plaza. One of the citations, from a Cherokee named Dragging Canoe, is from 1776: “The white men have almost surrounded us, leaving us only a little plot of land to stand upon. And it seems to be their intention to destroy us as a nation.”

Good call.

We're moving diagonally across the sidewalk, and happily step on the words of Andrew Jackson, from 1820: “It is high time to do away with the farce of treatying with Indian tribes as separate nations.”

Amy looks up from the brochure she's reading and says, “These cracks in the sidewalks, they are symbolic of broken promises.”

“Are you making that up?”

“No. It says right here, ‘Some of the pavement is cracked to symbolize the broken promises made to the Indians.' ”

Most Americans have had this experience, most of us can name things our country has done that we find shameful, from the travesties everybody agrees were wrong—the Japanese internment camps or the late date of slavery's abolition—to murkier, partisan arguments about legalized abortion or the
Enola Gay.
World history has been a bloody business from the get-go, but the nausea we're suffering standing on the broken promises at Ross's Landing is peculiar to a democracy. Because in a democracy, we're all responsible for our government's actions, because we're responsible for electing the government. Even if we, the people, don't do anything wrong, we put the wrongdoers in power.

Another piece of the sidewalk quotes a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren (who, playing George Bush to Jackson's Ronald Reagan, enforced his predecessor's removal policy) in 1838. “A crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude. A crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokee of a country. For how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more? You, sir, will bring down the renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy. And the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.”

The path ends with a quotation from an unknown survivor of the Trail of Tears who said, “Long time we travel on way to new land. People
feel bad when they leave old nation. Womens cry and make sad wails. Children. And many men. And all look sad like when friends die. They say nothing and just put heads down and keep on go towards west. Many days pass and people die very much. We bury close by trail.”

That last passage, especially the part about “when friends die,” brings Amy and me to tears. And we just stand there, looking off toward the Tennessee, brokenhearted. Meanwhile, there are little kids literally walking over these words, playing on them, making noise, having fun. We sort of hate them for a second. I ask a teacher who's with a group of fourth graders why she isn't talking to them about Cherokee history. She says normally she would, but it's the end of the school year, this trip is their reward for being good. It seems reasonable.

I ask Amy if she thinks these kids should share our sadness. She says, “I think it's a sad story. It's sort of like the Holocaust. You don't have to be Jewish to think that's definitely a sad part of history. And I think the Trail of Tears is America's version of genocide. Really, it started right over there.”

Still, I can't take my eyes off those children. I envy them. I want to join them. I wanted to come on this trip to get a feel for this trail that made us; standing at Ross's Landing, it hits me how crazy that is—how crazy I was. Suddenly the only thing I get out of it is rage.

Why should we keep going?

I don't know. I seriously don't. I know it's an interesting story and I'm supposed to be interested in my past, but what good comes of that?
I'm feeling haunted, weighed down, in pain. This might have been a mistake. It isn't a story where the more you know, the better you'll feel. It's the opposite. The more I learn, the worse I feel. This trip is forcing me to stand here next to a stupid aquarium and hate the country that I still love.

There are only so many hours a human being can stomach unfocused dread. I was tired and confused and depressed and I needed the kind of respite that can only come from focused resentment. In the Trail of Tears saga, if there's one person you're allowed to hate, it's Andrew Jackson, the architect of the Indian removal policy. And since the trail passed through Nashville anyway, we stop at his plantation, the Hermitage. We get a private tour from Hermitage employee Carolyn Brackett. The house and museum are closed to the public when we arrive because of astonishing tornado damage. All the trees are down. Part of me wanted to destroy Andrew Jackson and everything representing him. Seeing all those hacked-up trees made me feel like Someone had beaten me to the punch.

Inside, there's no display mentioning Indian removal because, remarkably, there is no display about Jackson's presidency. Carolyn Brackett showed us around the house, a columned antebellum mansion that looks like a cross between Graceland and Tara. Unfortunately for my spite spree, I liked Carolyn Brackett a lot and I felt bad for her. She would point into the library and say Jackson subscribed to a lot of newspapers before his death, and I'd say, “Was one of them the
Cherokee Phoenix
?” Brackett wasn't sure.

Brackett points into a room and says, “All of the rooms that have original wallpaper, all of the paper was conserved and had to be cleaned with an eraser the size of a pencil eraser. So that was quite an undertaking.” She points to a painting of Jackson that “was finished nine days before his death. I think he shows the wear and tear of his life in that portrait.”

He looks like he's sticking his head out a car window.

Brackett agrees, “I guess he wasn't worrying about his hair much by then.” Brackett guides us past the flower garden planted by Jackson's wife, Rachel, and into the family graveyard. There are a few piddly headstones and one Greco-Roman monstrosity with an obelisk rising from the center.

“He actually had this designed for Rachel and left room for other family members,” Brackett says as she leads us onto Jackson's grave.

I pull a book out of my backpack, a book with the subtitle
Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian.
Carolyn Brackett and Amy exchange a worried look.

I tell her that I'm standing here on Andrew Jackson's grave and that as a person of partly Cherokee descent, I wouldn't mind dancing on it. I read her a letter that Jackson wrote about the removal of the southeastern tribes. It says, “Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers, but what do they more than our ancestors did nor than our children are doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by
thousands yearly leave the lands of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions.” And then it ends, “Can it be cruel in the Government, when, by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontent in his ancient home to purchase his lands, to give a new and extensive territory, to pay the expense of his removal, and support him a year in his new abode. How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?”

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.”