Take the Cannoli (16 page)

I ask John A. about our family and the Cherokee presence in Oklahoma. I ask him a lot of off-topic questions about his service in World War II, mainly because I was dying to; I was never allowed to ask him about it when I was a kid, because thirty years after V-J Day, he was still having nightmares and flashbacks. And then I ask him a mundane, reporterly question about whether he thinks the state of Oklahoma has done a good job educating its students about American Indian history. He says yes, then jumps into a non sequitur about his own education that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

“I just wish that I could have maybe went to school a lot more. I didn't get no education. That was one of my big faults. But when I was growing up, it took everybody to make a living. I had to work.” He says he only got a third-grade education. “Did you know that?”

“No. Third grade.”

“That's all I've got,” he says. “Third grade. We didn't get no education. So what you learn, you can't afford to forget.”

On this trip I've been so wrapped up in all the stories of all the deaths on the Trail of Tears. Sitting there, listening to my uncle ask “what if,” I realize that there are lots of ways that lives are pummeled by history.

If the Trail of Tears is a glacier that inched its way west, my uncle is one of the boulders it deposited when it stopped. He had to work the farm, and the farm he worked was what was left of his grandfather's Indian allotment. And then came the Dust Bowl, and then came the war. All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.

Uncle John A. remarks, “It's good to know where you're from. To know where your beginning is. It really, probably, don't amount to all that much. Only just to one's self. It has nothing to do with what you're going to do tomorrow or a week or two from now. But at least, if you want to look back on this trip, and say, ‘Well, I was down in the area there where some of my ancestors originated from.' ”

The next morning, the columns are the first thing we see when we get to Tsa-La-Gi. The last time we were here, we were nine years old. Not surprisingly, the columns are more diminutive than we remember. We rush over to the amphitheater entrance. We walk past the place where you'd get your programs, and Amy waves hello to the statue of Sequoyah. She points to the stage where the Phoenix would rise again. I point to the spot where Stand Watie was always throwing a fit.

Unfortunately, due to loss of funding the drama here at Tsa-La-Gi won't be performed this summer. Amy and I sit in the chairs where we first learned about the Trail of Tears and talk about our trip. Our experiences were different. She minored in Native American Studies in college. She not only owns a copy of
Black Elk Speaks,
she could quote from it.

For Amy, the trip was about empathy: “I've been pretty close to tears sometimes just thinking about the pain, what the kids must have been thinking. When we were driving, I just kept imagining the kids saying, ‘Where are we going? Where are we going? What is happening?' I've just been thinking about what it really must have been like.”

I've been thinking about those kids, too. But the person I identify with most in this history is John Ross, because he was caught between the two nations. He believed in the possibilities of the American Constitution enough to make sure the Cherokee had one, too. He believed in the liberties the Declaration of Independence promises, and the civil rights the Constitution ensures. And when the U.S. betrayed not only the Cherokee but its own creed I would guess that John Ross was
not only angry, not only outraged, not only confused, I would guess that John Ross was a little brokenhearted.

Because that's how I feel. I've been experiencing the Trail of Tears not as a Cherokee, but as an American.

John Ridge, one of the signers of the Treaty of New Echota, once prophesied, “Cherokee blood, if not destroyed, will wind its courses in beings of fair complexions, who will read that their ancestors became civilized under the frowns of misfortune, and the causes of their enemies.” He was talking about people like my sister and me. The story of the Trail of Tears, like the story of America, is as complicated as our Cherokee-Swedish-Scottish-English-French-Seminole family tree. Just as our blood will never be pure, the Trail of Tears will never make sense.

As 1997 wore on, I considered changing the message on my answering machine to “Frank Sinatra deathwatch.” Thanks mostly to a little essay I wrote in February of that year called “Ixnay on the My Way”—a plea to television producers not to rehash my least favorite song in their inevitable obituary segments—friends and acquaintances kept calling, leaving bulletins like “He's in the hospital again” or “I heard that he's a goner for real.” An editor I had promised a proper, postmortem obituary would keep me posted: “I hope you're not too busy this week . . .” If journalist Gay Talese's most famous essay of the ‘60s was called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” my most famous essay of the ‘90s should have been titled “Frank Sinatra Is Going to Die.” Of course, when I heard the news of Sinatra's death on May 15, 1998, I watched TV all day, checking up on the programs I had pleaded with in the essay, and every last one did exactly as I had predicted. It is no fun being right. (Though, in a weird postmodern twist, a version of this story ended up at the end of ABC's
Nightline
that night, functioning in TVland as something of a last word.) Perhaps “Ixnay on the My Way” became irrelevant the moment it came true. But ultimately, I don't think it's about Frank Sinatra as much as it is about television news: What if they're giving us the cheap and lazy “My Way” obit version of
every
story they report?

IS
THERE ANYTHING NICER THAN
a really good TV obituary? Any day now, Peter Jennings will cut away from some freak mudslide story (casualties: six registered voters), face another camera, and announce Frank Sinatra's death. Later, the
World News Tonight
credits will roll over a tasteful montage of Frank's film stills and album covers. The other networks will run similar tributes, as will the brainiacs at
Entertainment Tonight
and those swingers on
The NewsHour
at PBS. But you know what? It will not matter whether Sinatra's video wake is hosted by the tweedy Jim Lehrer or the perky Katie Couric. Because each and every remembrance will be accompanied by the same damn song: the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly dictatorial chestnut in the old man's vast and dazzling backlog. “My Way.”

When the guy who generously gave us greats like “I Get a Kick out of You” kicks it, we won't put on our Basie boots or get a load of those cuckoo things he's been sayin'. We'll be bored terrif-ically, screaming at the TV set every time he and that sappy string section face the final
curtain. Get it? He's dead
and
on tape from the grave talking about “how the end is near.” Spooky.

The only way “My Way” has ever worked is if the person singing it is dumber than the song. Which is why the only successful rendition of it was perpetrated by Sid Vicious. Frank, and Elvis for that matter, was always too complicated, too full of rhythmic freedom to settle into the song's simplistic selfishness. “My Way” pretends to speak up for self-possession and personal vision when really, it only calls forth the temper tantrums of two-year-olds—or perhaps the last words spoken to Eva Braun.

Toward the end of 1996, there were rumors from Belgrade that each night when the government-controlled evening news was on, the townspeople blew whistles or banged on pots and pans so they wouldn't hear the state's lies. Keep that beautiful action in mind when Sinatra's dead and all the TVs in your more boring democratic world are playing “My Way.” Drown it out. Play something else to the montage in your own heart. Or just turn off the TV sound. Have your stereo cued up and ready to go. He could keel over any second. Be prepared!

Why not play “Angel Eyes” for its subtle reference to the singer's Mediterranean windows to the soul, for its knowing jaunty adieu: “ 'Scuse me, while I disappear.” Are you with me, Peter Jennings? Think about how great that would work under all those postwar, black-and-white snapshots, how that nice Christian harp outro hints at Frank's unlikely salvation.

I admit, “Angel Eyes” may not be quite stupid and obvious enough for network television. So for the staff of the
Today
show, here's another suggestion: “That's Life.” If “Angel Eyes” is all periods and pauses, this song is all Exclamation Points!!!!!!! Picture quick-cut shots of Sinatra with Ava Gardner, Sinatra with daughter Nancy, Sinatra with Kennedy, Sinatra with some mob boss no one will recognize anyway, while the singer belts his résumé, “I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king.” “That's Life” is a terrible choice, just as corny as “My Way.” But at least it's got a little bit of the old ring-a-ding-ding.

As for me, when I hear the big news, I'm tempted to think I'll be cranking up my favorite Sinatra side, “Come Dance with Me.” But it's too disrespectfully cheerful to work as a dirge and kind of creepy if taken literally. Who except Tom Petty wants to fox-trot with a corpse?

I've decided instead to blare the Capitol recording of Cole Porter's “What Is This Thing Called Love.” It's the driving question behind the entire Sinatra research project. And it's a lovely pop song, suitably melancholy for mourning, reflective, and wise. The orchestra starts off low. Enter a clarinet that's somehow lewd and ponderous at the same time. Frank scrawls the topic sentence, then repeats it, adding one word—this
funny
thing called love. It begins as a rhetorical question and, by the end, turns into a cosmic inquiry of God. At the end of the song, Frank asks “the Lord in heaven above” its question and then he cuts out, as if he's off to face the Creator in person. And then, once
he's gone, the orchestra resolves to a sweet final chord, as if they have the answer, but Frank Sinatra's no longer around to hear it.

Can't you just see the freeze-frame? Frank, in the recording studio, the hat askew, the tie loosened? TV producers of America, I beg you—for all of us, for Frank—ixnay on the “My Way.”

L
ONG DISTANCE LOVE AFFAIR BY
cassette tape: It happened to me. While digital romances grow increasingly common, our strange fling was quaintly analog. We talked on the phone for hours and enjoyed the occasional mushy rendezvous in the flesh at airports and bookstores and bars. But mostly, we wore out the heads on our respective tape decks compiling Memorex mash notes. I'm not really the scented envelope kind of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffylite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind.

The most interesting thing about the correspondence was that we rarely agreed. While we cared for each other, we cared little for each other's taste in music. I sent him lovey-dovey lullabies like Blondie's “In the Flesh” and he sent me back what could have been field recordings of amplified ant farms by bands with names like Aphex Twin and Jarboe. I sent him the Jonathan Richman song that goes “If the music's
gonna move me it's gotta be action-packed,” but he didn't take the hint, sending back music that was almost uniformly action-
lacked.
I think my scrappy little pop songs got on his nerves, and his techno-ambient soundscapes left me impatient for something,
anything,
to happen. Still, I gritted my teeth through them all, groaning over every last spacy synth jam as if I were doing him some kind of personal favor. Since he went to the trouble of making the tape, the least I could do was sit there and take it.

I liked picturing him in his little house, flipping through records and putting them on, taking them off and timing out the cassette so he could fill it up as much as possible but still avoid those immoral endings in which the sound gets cut off in the middle. Just as I liked running around my little apartment trying to remember, say, every rock song that ever had an accordion in it and whether the keyboardless concertina counts.

After a while, the question we asked each other about the tapes we sent wasn't “Did you like it?” The question was “Did you
get
it?” Because receipt ultimately took on more importance than pleasure, and that was perhaps the most telling note. Not that I miss those “songs” of his since we parted ways—not by a long shot. (The letters were good. Those I miss. He quoted James Baldwin a lot. And the phone calls were sweet. I fell in love with him on the phone. He had a soothing voice. A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just
swooned
when he did that.)