Page 8 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH OBSTACLES ON THE ROAD TO IMMINENT DISASTER

I bought an ornate gold-colored frame for my Exeter acceptance letter and nailed it to a wall in our living room.

Surrounding it were Kayla’s oil paintings, depicting elders in buckskin outfits harvesting corn.

And elders in colonial outfits, freezing to death on the Trail of Tears.

Kayla’s paintings had helped her win Junior Miss Cherokee.

She wore a crown and rode through town on a float.

My Exeter letter, framed, couldn’t even get me an apology.

I wouldn’t make it to NASA, not without Exeter. The least I could do, on my way to dying a nobody in Oklahoma, was guilt my mother. But I never once saw her look at it.

Two years passed, two years when I could have been at Exeter. In that time, I gave up.

You wouldn’t have known it from looking at me.

My Cherokee improved. I received excellent grades.

I went out to the country with Brett most weekends to help his parents with the struggles of being old.

I read constantly, mostly sci-fi, and wrote some, mostly observations in what I called my geo-journal, about the soil and rock in our part of Oklahoma.

Since I’d never get to study other planets, I was trying to figure out this one.

In the spring of my sophomore year, I decided to audition for the school play. It’s good to be well-rounded, I thought, when you are a person with no dreams. Also, Meredith was auditioning. She rarely spoke to me. But, in a play, she would have to.

The play was written by the senior class, following a Cherokee family on the Trail of Tears.

Kayla had no interest in auditioning, but she always lit up at the stories of our ancestors.

To her they were like Bible stories, only true.

At breakfast on the morning of my audition, once Brett had poured coffee for himself and our mother, Kayla pounced.

Who in our family had been on the Trail of Tears?

How many months had they walked? Barefoot, yes? Did they all die on the way?

“That far back, you’ve got a heck of a lot of ancestors to account for,” our mother said. “Not all of them Cherokee. And if all your ancestors had died on the way, do you really think you’d be sitting here?”

“Well. Do you know, like, any stories about them? Just the Cherokee ones?”

“If you’re interested, there are researchers who can help with that at the Heritage Museum,” Brett said. “I could take you over there, maybe after school?”

Kayla asked three more versions of the same question, even though Brett had just offered to help. His help required research and work, though, like when I wanted to look at the moon and he made me calculate its angular size. Kayla just wanted a story.

Our mother kept looking at Brett and then back down at her cereal bowl, increasingly uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure why. Brett leaned back in his chair, arms crossed.

“All right, all right,” our mother said. “The only people I know a Trail of Tears story for—you have to have done something to get remembered as special that far back—well, those people I know about did Removal in their own way.”

“What’s that mean?” said Kayla.

“They went west, same as everybody! But they went a little early, by steamboat.”

“Jesus, Hannah, you’re kidding,” Brett said. Something must have flown over our heads.

“Steamboats were dangerous back then! A lot of them sank or exploded. People died.”

Brett sighed. “Did your family’s steamboat explode, Hannah?”

Our mother ignored him. She told us the reason for the steamboat.

Her great-great-grandfather John, and nineteen other Cherokee men, had signed a treaty to sell what remained of Cherokee land.

Otherwise it would have been taken by force, she explained, and people would have died.

The treaty-signers chose the people over the land. That took moral courage.

Brett said people did die, thousands of them on the Trail. A full one-quarter or more of our tribe, dead.

Brett said, turning to face only me and Kayla, that it was okay to admit the stuff our family once did was selfish and cruel. That didn’t mean we were selfish and cruel. We were strong, smart, Cherokee women. (Kayla sat up straighter at this. I tried not to roll my eyes.)

“Your ancestors were put in an impossible position,” our mother said.

Kayla nodded, gravely.

“Hannah, they got paid,” Brett said.

Our mother stood abruptly. She poured orange juice all the way up to the rim of my glass, and it almost spilled.

“Don’t share this stuff with people outside the family,” she said.

She gestured back at Brett with her chin, though I’d thought he was inside the family. “You see? They wouldn’t understand.”

I ate my cereal and thought about the Earth dying someday. We’d have to go to another planet, to choose humanity over our home. The people over the land. I could understand that.

Brett drove us to school. As a teacher he had to get there early, which meant we did, too.

He said, “I don’t think you girls have been taught about the Cherokee Freedmen. Is that right?”

I said no. In the back seat, Kayla rolled down her car window.

“They’re people descended from people,” he said, “who were enslaved by Cherokees.”

I was quiet but alert, looking to Kayla to make sense of this. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

“After the end of slavery,” Brett said, “many of them stayed here in Cherokee Nation. They were put on the rolls—a segregated part of the rolls. Then later, maybe ten years ago, they lost the right to vote in Cherokee elections. Because they don’t have CDIBs, which means they can’t be citizens.”

Kayla said oh , almost brightly, like now this made sense.

CDIBs meant Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood.

Anything to do with CDIBs had to do with being colonized, and being colonized was something she thought about all the time.

She’d probably already filed slavery under things caused by colonization .

I didn’t have her confidence. CDIBs were just cards, one of two that we each had.

The light blue card, paper with a perforated edge, came from the Cherokee Nation. It declared our tribal citizenship, which was determined by our constitution. If I had babies with a non-Cherokee, and then that pattern continued for one thousand years, all my descendants would still be Cherokee.

The white laminated card was a CDIB, which came from the federal government.

It kept track of “how Indian” every Indian was in the country, which in my family was Not Very, as the fraction halved each time one of my Indian ancestors had children with a non-Indian.

(That had happened plenty, even before Removal.)

Watching the trees pass by on the side of the road, I tried to work through what Brett had said about Cherokees.

About slavery. My mother told us stories about our ancestors because she said those stories—what our ancestors had lived through—made us who we were today.

But now I knew Freedmen had Cherokee stories, too.

What degree of Indian blood did I have over them, to make me real?

The car slowed and stopped. We were at school, in Brett’s faculty parking spot. He waited to open the door. “It’s not gonna be in your school play, I bet, that some Cherokees forced slaves to walk the Trail with them. But I think that’s something you girls need to know about. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

By lunchtime, I’d managed to shrug off the shadow of Brett’s story. What did it matter what I thought about Freedmen, when I didn’t make the laws on who could vote? That was the business of people on the tribal council, like Brett and Beth.

After school, almost no boys auditioned. I was cast in the role of Meredith’s husband. This I could work with!

In preparation for the role, Brett took me to his barber. I asked him to give me the haircut of “a hardworking, middle-income, Cherokee family man in the late 1830s,” which he interpreted to mean “short,” which was good enough.

Together, Meredith and I were the most tragic, godforsaken couple in the world. We held hands a lot. Our first time, I felt panicked and sweaty but also good.

At our first rehearsal after my haircut (which had made my mother cry in the kitchen), Meredith improvised a gesture during the scene where she was taken from the house I’d built for her.

As our classmate in a soldier costume pulled her away from me, Meredith pressed her forehead to mine and cried out, catching a fistful of my hair at the back of my neck.

It hurt. My heart, metaphorically, fell out my butt and slammed on the stage.

When we were on the Trail together, I took care of Meredith. Her chest was in constant movement, her breaths deep and labored. She acted her heart out, the bundled-up red-haired American Girl doll that was our baby pressed against the many shining buttons of her shirt.

In the second act, I broke the neck of a mockingbird with my bare hands—which was a metaphor, because you’re not supposed to kill them—and I gave the whole thing to Meredith to eat. In turn, Meredith did whatever she could for our children.

Our two oldest, twins, died in the stockades in Georgia. Our third child died of scarlet fever in Alabama. When a soldier in Tennessee threatened to shoot our crying baby, Meredith accidentally smothered it.

After we buried it, just past intermission, Meredith blocked the whole third act so that her head lay against my chest as we walked.

She had chosen that, not the drama teacher.

It’s possible she loves you , I told myself.

I bought a chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A and zipped it into the outside pocket of her backpack after our second performance.

No note. It wasn’t a mockingbird, but it was something.