Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [127]
“You think I’m overstating the case?” Annawake asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever read about the Trail of Tears?”
“I heard of it. I don’t know the story, though.”
“It happened in 1838. We were forced out of our homelands in the southern Appalachians. North Carolina, Tennessee, around there. All our stories are set in those mountains, because we’d lived there since the beginning, until European immigrants decided our prior claim to the land was interfering with their farming. So the army knocked on our doors one morning, stole the crockery and the food supplies and then burned down the houses and took everybody into detention camps. Families were split up, nobody knew what was going on. The idea was to march everybody west to a worthless piece of land nobody else would ever want.”
“They walked?” Alice asks. “I’d have thought at least they would take them on the train.”
Annawake laughs through her nose. “No, they walked. Old people, babies, everybody. It was just a wall of people walking and dying. The camps had filthy blankets and slit trenches for bathrooms, covered with flies. The diet was nothing that forest people had ever eaten before, maggoty meal and salted pork, so everybody had diarrhea, and malaria from the mosquitoes along the river, because it was summer. The tribal elders begged the government to wait a few months until fall, so more people might survive the trip, but they wouldn’t wait. There was smallpox, and just exhaustion. The old people and the nursing babies died first. Mothers would go on carrying dead children for days, out of delirium and loneliness, and because of the wolves following behind.”
Alice uncrosses and crosses her arms over her chest, understanding more than she wants to. She knows she is hearing the story Annawake has carried around her whole life long. A speedboat whines past, far away on the other side of the river. Long after the boat and its noise are gone, they are rocked by the gash it cut in the water.
“They figure about two thousand died in the detention camps,” Annawake says quietly. “And a lot more than that on the trail. Nobody knows.”
A bright yellow wasp hovers over the water near their feet and then touches down, delicately as a helicopter. It floats with its clear wings akimbo, like stiff little sails.
Annawake gives an odd, bitter laugh. “When I was a kid, I read every account ever written about the Trail of Tears. It was my permanent project. In high school Civics I read the class what President Van Buren said to Congress about the removal, and asked our teacher why he didn’t have us memorize that, instead of the Gettysburg Address. He said I was jaded and sarcastic.”
“Were you?”
“You bet.”
“Well. What did President Van Buren say?”
“He said: ‘It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures have had the happiest effect, and they have emigrated without any apparent resistance.’ ”
Alice feels she could just slide down into the water without stopping herself. It’s monstrous, what one person will do to another.
Annawake and Alice sit without speaking, merely looking at the stretched-out body of Tenkiller Lake, drawing their own conclusions.
“Somebody must have made it,” Alice says at last. “You’re here. I saw the newspapers and all, that they had.”
“Well, on the good side, we had the run of the place for a while with no interference. By the late 1800s we had our act together again. If you’re really inclined to be Cherokee you should go down to the museum and have a look. We had the first free public school system in the world. For girls and boys both. In secondary school they taught physiology, music, history, algebra, Virgil.”
“Shoot, that’s more than they ever taught me.”
“In 1886 we got the first telephone line west of the Mississippi into Tahlequah. They didn’t want to