Kinfolks (26 page)

I drive over to the flashy new Cherokee casino that looks as though it belongs in Atlantic City, not in the heart of the Smokies. The only Cherokee I spot are parking cars. Within, the banks of slot machines are as swathed in clouds of cigarette smoke as the mountain peaks outside are in mist. I sit down at a machine with a cup of quarters and wind up donating them all to the Cherokee Nation. It's the least I can do, since my ancestors, if any were Cherokee, managed to sidestep the Trail of Tears.

Like patients on life support, the other players are hooked to their whirring slot machines by cords around their necks, from which hang cash cards that are inserted into the machines. As they draw deeply on their cigarettes, these white folks stare at the spinning wheels of fortune with glazed eyes. Many will die from lung cancer, completely broke. Their money is paying for schools and clinics for the Cherokee. It's also paying for land. The Cherokee are slowly buying back some of what was taken from their ancestors by the ancestors of those who are now losing their 401(k)s in the one-armed bandits. Perhaps there is a God after all — one with an antic sense of humor.

When Spaniards first arrived in what is now the United States, an estimated five to twenty million natives were already living here. By 1700, over 90 percent had died from alcohol, slavery, starvation, war, and disease. In one of history's grim ironies, many survivors survived because of European genes that gave them immunity. Yet on the 1900 federal census, only 250,000 were willing to identify themselves as Indian.

However, on the 2000 U.S. census, some 4,119,301 people defined themselves as Indian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. The Cherokee are the largest tribe listed, with 281,069 members. An additional 448,464 people checked “Cherokee” as well as some other category or categories. Wannabes or not, reinforcements have arrived. Some are most likely descended from tribes in Virginia and the Carolinas whose remnants were absorbed by the Cherokee, but there's no way to prove this. Even DNA testing can't yet distinguish among the different tribes and may never be able to do so, since so much amalgamation has occurred.

*

Quarterless and in the parking lot, I can't remember where I've parked my parents' new car. I think it was blue. I rarely notice brands or styles. My only concern is that a car get me where I want to go. I wander through rows of vehicles with plates from all across the nation, feeling increasingly frantic. How in the hell can I find this car when I don't even know what I'm looking for? I realize that this is an apt metaphor for my search for my wretched ancestors.

I force myself to stand completely still. Taking a deep breath, I ask myself what Ina with her ice test or my grandmother with her eyeglasses scam would do in my place. They might wait until 4:00
A.M
. when everyone else will have departed, leaving my parents' car sitting alone in the lot. They might phone home and ask my parents for the make and color of the car they've been driving for three days. This seems too humiliating for a grown woman. But being grown is my problem: this incident is further proof that I've stopped growing and have started my decline.

After a long period of reflection, I shake myself like an awakened hound. I circle the area in which I think I parked, my finger punching the button on the car remote that opens the trunk. Eventually the trunk of a Buick with Tennessee plates pops open. I still can't remember what color it is.

When I arrive at my parents' house, I don't tell them about losing and rediscovering their new car. I do tell them about Pocahontas, however, and I hand my father a piece of paper on which I've written out the generations leading back to her. As he studies it, my mother suggests that I might want to lay a bouquet on my grandmother's grave in apology. I nod contritely.

Back at the cabin, I sit on the porch in the twilight and listen to the frogs down at the pond. My neocortex is reeling with absurd scenarios as it diligently attempts to make sense of the aimless ramblings of my faceless forebears. Shipwrecked Portugúese and marooned Turks, Pocahontas and Spicie Dewdrop Vanover, escaped Africans and fleeing conversos — the whole thing is at least as far-fetched as ancestral land grants from King James I. I realize that I, too, am prey to the family affliction of mythomania.

Despondent at having wasted so much time on such utter nonsense, I watch the night erase the narrow valley while fireflies flash Morse code messages back and forth. The pulsing of the frogs gradually cheers me up, and the steady beat of their moist oratorio sets me to composing some mocking limericks about my hopeless quest. I get out my banjo and pick out a tune to accompany them. By bedtime I've finished a song I christen “The Red, White, and Black Blues.” The chorus goes:

T
HE GRASS IN THE FRONT YARD
of the cabin is still damp with dew. Zachary and I are toddling through it, examining clover blossoms. I'm trying to keep him quiet so his parents and cousins can stay asleep inside. A gang of calves is darting around the neighboring pasture like a shoal of hyperactive minnows.

I start pulling some weeds in the rock garden. When I look up, Zachary is squatting by the electric fence in his blue shorts and sandals. On the other side stands a small black calf. He and Zachary are staring at one another, both thunderstruck.

Suddenly the pack of roving calves sweeps past like the hoodlums in
West Side Story
. The black one pirouettes and dashes after them. Zachary stands up to watch him go, a tragic expression on his face. Then he stretches out a hand and folds and unfolds it in farewell.

I contemplate what's in store for him — a lifetime of other creatures departing before he's ready and vice versa — and there's nothing I can do to make it any easier for him. Or for myself.

Zachary's four young cousins burst from the cabin in their bathing suits. They race to the pond and clamber into my grandfather's old rowboat. Zachary and I trot into the cabin and don our suits.

By the time we reach the beach, his cousins are swarming the floating dock, cannonballing and then scrambling back up the ladder. Standing in water to his knees, Zachary watches his glamorous older cousins wistfully. I strap a life jacket on him, and he and I float slowly toward the dock. My assignment as he flails his arms and legs is to support him and propel him forward so unobtrusively that he thinks he's doing it himself, thereby gaining the confidence that will one day allow this to happen.

A flash of triple deja vu. I swam in this pond as a child. I taught my sister Jane, the mother of two of those cousins, to swim here. I also taught Zachary's mother to swim here. Now I'm teaching Zachary. The pond remains while the children who swim in it grow up, grow old, and one day die. Yet the pond will endure, as new crops of children arrive to churn these placid waters.

A church sign pops into my head:

BABIES ARE GOD'S PROMISE THAT THIS WORLD WILL CONTINUE
.

These mini-sermons are eggs laid in my unconscious that hatch and burrow into my awareness when I least expect it, like hookworms. The evangelicals have taken over Kroger's, and they're making inroads into my psyche. What if I one day find myself falling to my knees by the roadside, like Saul en route to Damascus? I always think of the Rapture as the Raptor. I don't want to experience it. Hot flashes are bad enough.

Ina, Nellie, and I are sitting on Ina's deck, high above the lake in which the hapless fisherman hooked the human hand. This probably isn't what Jesus had in mind when He asked His disciples to become fishers of men.

Ina is playing her mandolin, and I my banjo. We're singing a campaign song about one of Nellie's relatives, a populist governor of Alabama in the 1940s named Big Jim Folsom. When his opponents taunted him on the stump about his moral failings, he'd reply, “Anytime you bait a trap with a good-looking blond, redhead, or brunette, you're going to catch old Jim every time.” Folsom finally lost the governorship during a campaign in which he appeared on TV drunk. When he tried to introduce his sons, he couldn't remember their names.

Our song, which accuses Big Jim of having fathered a child with an innocent country girl, is called “She Was Poor, but She Was Honest.” We reach my favorite verse:

We finish just as a float boat passes below. A float boat is a carpeted platform on pontoons with padded, vinyl-covered seats and a canopy overhead. Many families on this lake own one. This particular one is teeming with fun seekers swilling beer, shrieking with laughter, and singing out of tune to a portable radio blaring a Tim McGraw song about the good old days when people ate fried bologna sandwiches and didn't speak in vocabulary borrowed from drug lords. A chubby man in baggy red swim trunks, who's standing over a smoking grill, is conducting this choir by waving a hot dog clutched in tongs.

The boat rounds the bend, and the hubbub fades into silence. It's like a scene from a Fellini film. I chuckle.

“What's so funny?” asks Nellie,

I describe the view out my condo window onto Lake Cham-plain, where somber Vermonters swim, paddle, windsurf, and haul heavy sails to the top oftall masts. Yankees work very hard at playing.

“I've finally figured it out,” I announce.

I'm constantly trying out my theories of regional distinctions on them because no two people could be more southern, though at opposite ends of the spectrum. Nellie grew up on eleven thousand acres, tended by a black mammy, whereas Ina grew up in a setting so remote that it lacked electricity and running water. Weighing over ten pounds at birth, Ina was a Five-Chicken Baby, delivered at home by an obese country doctor who devoured roasted chickens throughout a delivery. Neighbors judged the difficulty of a birth by how many he consumed.

Ina and Nellie are waiting for my pronouncement. My most recent aphorism is that southerners like to puff people up, especially if they hate them, whereas Yankees like to put them down, especially if they like them.

“The main difference between the North and the South is that southerners enjoy being ridiculous, whereas Yankees like to feign dignity,” I announce.

“It's the weather,” replies Ina. “The heat addles our brains.”

“And you have to keep drinking to stay hydrated,” adds Nellie.

“But everybody on that boat was probably Baptist,” I observe, “and Baptists aren't supposed to drink.”

“Many Baptists are Baptist only on Sunday,” explains Ina, herself a recovering Baptist.

I smile grimly. Golf on Sunday is just the tip of the iceberg of southern sin. My high school classmates have recently started reminiscing about alcoholism, physical abuse, and mental illness. It seems our sunny little town was actually a snake pit, and the charming snakes were adults I liked and respected.

Ina has told me about Kingsport's answer to the Bowery, the apartments across the street from the train station, entered through a battered green door, where men drank, gambled, and whored their paychecks away, while their wives or children stood in the doorways begging them for grocery money.

Recently an article in Nellie's newspaper exposed a drug and prostitution ring conducted out of a storefront on Broad Street. The kingpin had disguised it as a grocery store by placing several dozen cans of baked beans on the shelves. The police asked the businessman next door if he hadn't found it strange that a grocery store would display only a few cans of beans.

The businessman replied, “Well, hell, I thought he had him a bean store!”

That's how I feel about these revelations of private crimes that should have been obvious to us all: I thought we had us a bean store.

But this phenomenon isn't restricted to any one region or religion. If you live long enough, all your fondest illusions about humans being created in the image of God will crumble into dust.

I'm sitting in Diane's chair while she describes how a champagne-colored rinse she calls her “special” will take on my particular shade of gray. I promise to think about it. She warns me to make a double appointment so she'll have enough time to apply the dye. I worry that my resolve to remain hoar-headed is waning.

Her cell phone rings, and she puts on her headset. After listening for a while, she starts giving advice in a low voice. Since my last appointment, she's apparently started channeling Oprah. Unfortunately, I can hear only one side of the discussion.

I study her in the mirror as she snips away, talking into her mouthpiece about how to handle abusive men. She's tall and slender with a fair complexion. It's hard to know what color her hair might be without her special rinse, which has turned it the attractive pale champagne that I've begun to covet. Does she really have Indian ancestry, or is she another wannabe? Do I — or am I? Is this Pocahontas thing for real, or is there an error, deliberate or otherwise, in the research?

I force myself to face the likelihood that I'll never know. My grandparents are dead, so I can't wring confessions from them. My father is content to be either Indian or Melungeon, but he's as clueless as I am. I could spend the rest of my life in musty courthouses clawing my way through deed books and tax lists. But records don't exist for the earliest years on the frontier. And I've already discovered that some that do exist deceive. The DNA study may reveal something about Melungeons in general, but nothing specific about my family. The Melungeons are finally getting me, just as that babysitter warned. I can neither solve their mystery nor ignore it. It's like having high cholesterol.