Disclaimer: My Take on Something Besides Wake
The past, according to William Faulkner, is never dead. It’s not even past.
Thankfully I didn’t have to hack through Faulkner, a brilliant writer but just too much work, to learn that lesson. I learned it from birth from my mother, who also learned it from birth, as had her father, and his father’s mother before that.
See, Frances Cooper Collins was born in Cherokee, N.C. on July 4, 1925, the third of nine surviving children born to Arnold and Myrtle Cooper. Arnold was one-eighth Cherokee from his mother’s side, the Sneeds, so mom was 1/16th, and that made my brothers and sister and me 1/32nd. The famous Cherokee fiddler Manco Sneed, who played on the Grand Ole Opry with his daughters Mary and Martha, was a great uncle or some such kin. Frances was born with a grudge then 87 years old and still festering, dating back to the removal of the Cherokee from the mountains of N.C. west in 1838. A religious woman who converted in her later years from Methodism to the Church of Latter Day Saints, Frances was not prone to profanity—unless the subject happened to be Andrew Jackson. In our household, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was as close to the Good Lord as we humans get and Andrew Jackson, she was absolutely certain, came from and returned to a lower, somewhat warmer, zip code of eternity.
If you don’t know the story of how Jackson had the Cherokee removed in defiance of a ruling by Chief Justice John Marshall of the Supreme Court check out tonight’s third episode of the PBS documentary of the Native Americans, We Shall Remain. It’s the one I’ve been waiting on, all about the removal. Jackson’s infamy was perpetrated even after Chief Junaluska and 500 Cherokee Braves pulled his bacon out of the fire against the Creek at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson was adamant. The Cherokee had to go, even if it had to be by the point of the bayonet.
I’ve endeavored to instill this grudge in my own children, with way too little success. I don’t sense the same degree of bitter spitting disgust and loathing of Andrew Jackson and what he did. And that bothers me, so bad, in fact, that I went to the lengths of writing a song about the whole chapter of American history. The past, at least this part of it, is not going to die—not on my watch.
I dedicate the song to Frances Cooper Collins every time I sing it in public. It’s called the Trail of Tears.
Early one morning in June, with the mountain laurel in bloom,
The bluecoats came, they weren’t a’knocking.
They drug us out of our doors, said `You don’t live here no more,’
They herded us up like cattle, and put us in the stockade.
See gold was found in our streams, we soon found out what that means,
Carted off to a far-away land we never chose,
So many fell, that the legends tell,
How in every mother’s tear drop, there grew a Cherokee Rose.
Our people argued our case and won,
In the marble halls of Washington,
John Marshall said it was our land,
Like it’d been down through the years.
Old Hickory was having none of it,
He said `You’ve made your law, let’s see you enforce it.’
So the Cherokee marched the Trail of Tears
The mud had frozen hard, in the stockade yard
When, by the point of the bayonet our march began.
By foot, by horse and by boat, only the lucky wore coats,
It was more than any woman, child or man should ever have to stand.
(Coda)
Beside my mother I’d lie,
Until the night my mother died,
The night I learned how to cry,
On the Trail of Tears.
The Trail of Tears.