In Memoriam

On this day 188 years ago, May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the deaths of over 1/4 of the total Cherokee population and thousands more from Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, Delaware, Shawnee, and Osage nations. The Cherokee fought this act in Congress and in the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court, in fact, where the Court ruled against Jackson and found the Cherokee a "sovereign nation." Jackson famously taunted the Court with their inability to enforce that decision and sent the Army in to round up the Cherokee, imprison them in internment camps, and forcibly drive them across the country to Indian Territory.

In memory of my ancestors, here is a poem to mark this dark day in American history.

INDIAN REMOVAL CARTOGRAPHY

“I fought through the War Between the States and have seen many men shot, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”
— Georgia soldier who participated in the removal

It’s an old map,

looks hand-drawn.

Starting in Georgia,

North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama,

a broad swath of territory

belonging to the Cherokee,

yet shrunken so

from where the first Europeans found them,

that kidney-shaped province

splayed across the states

contracts

down to these thin lines

marking the paths they were forced to travel.

This old-looking map

has been modified for the modern scholar

with gray-banded place names highlighted.

When you hover a computer mouse

over one of these shaded names,

pertinent facts appear.

From New Echota, capital of the Cherokee Nation

in 1838, now a state park,

to Fort Butler, one of five North Carolina stockades

where Cherokee were held under foul conditions,

to Fort Payne, yet another

removal fort and internment camp in Alabama,

to Ross’s Landing where more than 2,000 were held prisoner

and departed in three large groups

to travel to Indian Territory by water.

The Unicoi Turnpike, an ancient war and trading path,

took other groups onto the Trail of Tears,

is now designated a Millennium Trail.

Charleston, Tennessee, where 13,000 were held

for months, waiting to begin their unwilling trek

across five states in winter.

Hopkinsville, Kentucky,

Chief Whitepath died and was buried here,

remarkable for being one of the few

whose graves are known.

Hover long enough over Hopkinsville

and the screen will tell you

“Most of the thousands of Cherokees who died on the Trail lie in unmarked graves.”

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publications, 2018)

Catching Up, or Why I Was Gone

I have been a very uneven blogger here lately, in part because this past winter has been a physical disaster for me. After developing Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA), a major illness that requires me to be on massive steroids in a maintenance dose for possibly years and the pain and difficulties I went through with that before it was diagnosed and treated, I then contracted the awful H3N2 flu that turned into bronchitis and knocked over a month out of my life. 

As we began to come into spring, and I was just getting starting to get back on my feet slightly after the flu and bronchitis, I fell and shattered my right shoulder. This has left me almost totally disabled. I am right handed, and it's not just the arm that I cannot use but the shoulder, as well, so it's basically the whole upper right side of my body that cannot be used. You would be surprised how much you cannot do if you cannot use the upper right side of your body. Even hauling yourself out of the recliner you must spend most of your time in can be difficult—or impossible, in my case. (Luckily, I have a lift recliner chair arriving Tuesday, which should allow me more independence.)

My right arm and shoulder have been immobilized by the doctors. Because I'm on all the steroids and because I have lymphedema in that arm from my radical mastectomy for breast cancer, I am a really poor risk for surgery, even though that shoulder requires a complete shoulder replacement. We are, instead, trying to get the shoulder to heal in some jury-rigged way without surgery.

I have, after the first week, continued to do work on freelance writing and editing contracts and teach a large, intensive online class in writing a novel. The only way I am doing this is with voice recognition software, which is also how I am completing this blog. Because of all this, I will probably still be rather hit and miss with this blog for awhile here. Voice recognition software has not reached a great pinnacle of efficiency. It does save me a lot of time and a lot of work with my left hand, which is excellent, because my left shoulder and elbow have damage from lupus, and I don't need to injure them further. But after dictating, I must go over and correct multiple mistakes that the software puts into my text. Random capitalizations all over the place. Words that may have been mistaken for others. Typos. Egregious misspellings. It's quite time consuming. (So please forgive any typos I've missed.)

Just as I went down with the flu, my next book of poetry was published. Dark Sister is truly a book of my heart. It is a book of poems that are based in my family, in my heritage, and in my community. They deal with some of the things that are most important to me in the world. Unfortunately, I have not been able to do what I planned or would have wished to promote this book. I hope to be able to do more in the future. I would greatly appreciate anyone who is interested in buying or reviewing the book. Dark Sister is my 10th book to be published, rather a significant milestone that I would like to celebrate by promoting the book and helping it to find its readership. It had been seven years since my last book of poetry, Heart's Migration, which brought me awards and opportunities, but in those seven years, I published seven other books, including several anthologies of other poets' work.

I also had hoped to bring back my blog series, Books of Interest by Writers of Color. So many wonderful writers of color are publishing terrific books right now. This is a golden age for these books by diverse authors. Unfortunately, most of them are from very small houses without promotion and publicity budgets, and they get very little distribution and very little publicity. So I would really like to be once again promoting these books and letting readers, teachers, and librarians know about them with links to buy them. That will, unfortunately, have to wait until I am a little further along in recovery, I'm afraid. That's a big disappointment to me.

I do hope, however, to blog more regularly here, as I get better at using the voice recognition software and begin to heal and regain use of my right arm and shoulder little by little. So I hope to visit with you more often and begin my Books of Interest by Writers of Color series again soon. There are SOOOO many terrific books I want to tell you about!

Remembering My Mother on Mother's Day With A Poem

Mother's Day is always a difficult holiday for me. As with many people my age, I buried my mother a number of years ago. So this day that celebrates mothers can be tough. 

I find it especially difficult because my mother and I did not have a good relationship for the majority of my life, especially near the end of hers. My mother was never able to show me any kind of love or affection, no matter how much I showered her with, and this was always an open wound in my life. 

I know many other women who have had similar dysfunctional relationships with their mothers, so I know this is not a unique problem. Mother's Day is not the warm and fuzzy holiday for us that it is for women whose mothers are still alive and with whom they have/had close, loving relationships.

I love my mother and miss her terribly even after all these years , but I also longed for her and missed her in much the same way during her actual lifetime. So this post and this poem are for my mother on Mother's Day—and for all the other women out there like me who still long for and miss their mothers, even after their deaths. A complicated woman in a complicated relationship, who, like most mothers , did the best she could, I suspect.

CONVERSATION WITH MY MOTHER’S PICTURE

You and Dad were entirely happy here—

you in purple miniskirt, white vest and tights

(you always wore what was already too young

for me), Dad in purple striped pants,

a Kansas State newsboy’s cap

made for a bigger man’s head.

You both held Wildcat flags and megaphones

to cheer the football team who,

like the rest of the college, despised you

middle-aged townies, arranging for their penicillin

and pregnancy tests and selling them

cameras and stereos at deep discount.

But you were happy

in this picture, before they found

oat-cells in your lungs.

After the verdict, he took you to Disneyland,

this man who married you and your five children

when I was fifteen. He took you cross-country

to visit your family, unseen

since your messy divorce.

He took you to St. Louis

and Six Flags Over Texas and to Topeka

for radiation treatments.

I don’t think he ever believed

you could die. Now he’s going

the same way. And none of us

live in that Wildcat town with the man

who earned his “Dad” the hard way

from suspicious kids and nursed

your last days. For me, this new dying

brings back yours, leaving me only this image

of you both cheering for lucky winners.

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)