by Sarah Vowell
“He built those?”
“He helped build those two columns. See, they built that right after they came up here.”
I didn’t know that. The columns he’s talking about—and there are actually three instead of two—are the great symbols of the Cherokee Nation in the West. For years, I’ve had an old photograph of the columns stuck on my refrigerator door. They are all that’s left of the remains of the Cherokee Female Seminary, the very first public school for girls west of the Mississippi, which my great-grandmother on my father’s side attended.
Everything about the journey until now has been a little world-historical. Hearing that our ancestor helped build the columns is the first time I felt an actual familial connection to the story.
I ask John A. about our family and the Cherokee presence in Oklahoma. I ask him a lot of off-topic questions about his service in World War II, mainly because I was dying to; I was never allowed to ask him about it when I was a kid, because thirty years after V-J Day, he was still having nightmares and flashbacks. And then I ask him a mundane, reporterly question about whether he thinks the state of Oklahoma has done a good job educating its students about American Indian history. He says yes, then jumps into a non sequitur about his own education that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.
“I just wish that I could have maybe went to school a lot more. I didn’t get no education. That was one of my big faults. But when I was growing up, it took everybody to make a living. I had to work.” He says he only got a third-grade education. “Did you know that?”
“No. Third grade.”
“That’s all I’ve got,” he says. “Third grade. We didn’t get no education. So what you learn, you can’t afford to forget.”
On this trip I’ve been so wrapped up in all the stories of all the deaths on the Trail of Tears. Sitting there, listening to my uncle ask “what if,” I realize that there are lots of ways that lives are pummeled by history.
If the Trail of Tears is a glacier that inched its way west, my uncle is one of the boulders it deposited when it stopped. He had to work the farm, and the farm he worked was what was left of his grandfather’s Indian allotment. And then came the Dust Bowl, and then came the war. All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I’m so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.
Uncle John A. remarks, “It’s good to know where you’re from. To know where your beginning is. It really, probably, don’t amount to all that much. Only just to one’s self. It has nothing to do with what you’re going to do tomorrow or a week or two from now. But at least, if you want to look back on this trip, and say, ‘Well, I was down in the area there where some of my ancestors originated from.’ ”
The next morning, the columns are the first thing we see when we get to Tsa-La-Gi. The last time we were here, we were nine years old. Not surprisingly, the columns are more diminutive than we remember. We rush over to the amphitheater entrance. We walk past the place where you’d get your programs, and Amy waves hello to the statue of Sequoyah. She points to the stage where the Phoenix would rise again. I point to the spot where Stand Watie was always throwing a fit.
Unfortunately, due to loss of funding the drama here at Tsa-La-Gi won’t be performed this summer. Amy and I sit in the chairs where we first learned about the Trail of Tears and talk about our trip. Our experiences were different. She minored in Native American Studies in college. She not only owns a copy of Black Elk Speaks, she could quote from it.
For Amy, the trip was about empathy: “I’ve been pretty close to tears sometimes just thinking about the pain, what the kids must have been thinking. When we were driving, I just kept imagining the kids saying, ‘Where are we going? Where are we going? What is happening?’ I’ve just been thinking about what it really must have been like.”
I’ve been thinking about those kids, too. But the person I identify with most in this history is John Ross, because he was caught between the two nations. He believed in the possibilities of the American Constitution enough to make sure the Cherokee had one, too. He believed in the liberties the Declaration of Independence promises, and the civil rights the Constitution ensures. And when the U.S. betrayed not only the Cherokee but its own creed I would guess that John Ross was not only angry, not only outraged, not only confused, I would guess that John Ross was a little brokenhearted.
Because that’s how I feel. I’ve been experiencing the Trail of Tears not as a Cherokee, but as an American.
John Ridge, one of the signers of the Treaty of New Echota, once prophesied, “Cherokee blood, if not destroyed, will wind its courses in beings of fair complexions, who will read that their ancestors became civilized under the frowns of misfortune, and the causes of their enemies.” He was talking about people like my sister and me. The story of the Trail of Tears, like the story of America, is as complicated as our Cherokee-Swedish-Scottish-English-French-Seminole family tree. Just as our blood will never be pure, the Trail of Tears will never make sense.
Ixnay on the My Way
As 1997 wore on, I considered changing the message on my answering machine to “Frank Sinatra deathwatch.” Thanks mostly to a little essay I wrote in February of that year called “Ixnay on the My Way”—a plea to television producers not to rehash my least favorite song in their inevitable obituary segments—friends and acquaintances kept calling, leaving bulletins like “He’s in the hospital again” or “I heard that he’s a goner for real.” An editor I had promised a proper, postmortem obituary would keep me posted: “I hope you’re not too busy this week . . .” If journalist Gay Talese’s most famous essay of the ‘60s was called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” my most famous essay of the ‘90s should have been titled “Frank Sinatra Is Going to Die.” Of course, when I heard the news of Sinatra’s death on May 15, 1998, I watched TV all day, checking up on the programs I had pleaded with in the essay, and every last one did exactly as I had predicted. It is no fun being right. (Though, in a weird postmodern twist, a version of this story ended up at the end of ABC’s Nightline that night, functioning in TVland as something of a last word.) Perhaps “Ixnay on the My Way” became irrelevant the moment it came true. But ultimately, I don’t think it’s about Frank Sinatra as much as it is about television news: What if they’re giving us the cheap and lazy “My Way” obit version of every story they report?
IS THERE ANYTHING NICER THAN a really good TV obituary? Any day now, Peter Jennings will cut away from some freak mudslide story (casualties: six registered voters), face another camera, and announce Frank Sinatra’s death. Later, the World News Tonight credits will roll over a tasteful montage of Frank’s film stills and album covers. The other networks will run similar tributes, as will the brainiacs at Entertainment Tonight and those swingers on The NewsHour at PBS. But you know what? It will not matter whether Sinatra’s video wake is hosted by the tweedy Jim Lehrer or the perky Katie Couric. Because each and every remembrance will be accompanied by the same damn song: the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly dictatorial chestnut in the old man’s vast and dazzling backlog. “My Way.”
When the guy who generously gave us greats like “I Get a Kick out of You” kicks it, we won’t put on our Basie boots or get a load of those cuckoo things he’s been sayin’. We’ll be bored terrif-ically, screaming at the TV set every time he and that sappy string section face the final curtain. Get it? He’s dead and on tape from the grave talking about “how the end is near.” Spooky.
The only way “My Way” has ever worked is if the person singing it is dumber than the song. Which is why the only successful rendition of it was perpetrated by Sid Vicious. Frank, and Elvis for that matter, was always too complicated, too full of rhythmic freedom to settle into the song’s simplistic selfishness. “My Way” pretends to speak up for self-possession and personal vision when really, it only calls forth the temper tantrums of two-year-
olds—or perhaps the last words spoken to Eva Braun.
Toward the end of 1996, there were rumors from Belgrade that each night when the government-controlled evening news was on, the townspeople blew whistles or banged on pots and pans so they wouldn’t hear the state’s lies. Keep that beautiful action in mind when Sinatra’s dead and all the TVs in your more boring democratic world are playing “My Way.” Drown it out. Play something else to the montage in your own heart. Or just turn off the TV sound. Have your stereo cued up and ready to go. He could keel over any second. Be prepared!
Why not play “Angel Eyes” for its subtle reference to the singer’s Mediterranean windows to the soul, for its knowing jaunty adieu: “ ’Scuse me, while I disappear.” Are you with me, Peter Jennings? Think about how great that would work under all those postwar, black-and-white snapshots, how that nice Christian harp outro hints at Frank’s unlikely salvation.
I admit, “Angel Eyes” may not be quite stupid and obvious enough for network television. So for the staff of the Today show, here’s another suggestion: “That’s Life.” If “Angel Eyes” is all periods and pauses, this song is all Exclamation Points!!!!!!! Picture quick-cut shots of Sinatra with Ava Gardner, Sinatra with daughter Nancy, Sinatra with Kennedy, Sinatra with some mob boss no one will recognize anyway, while the singer belts his résumé, “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king.” “That’s Life” is a terrible choice, just as corny as “My Way.” But at least it’s got a little bit of the old ring-a-ding-ding.
As for me, when I hear the big news, I’m tempted to think I’ll be cranking up my favorite Sinatra side, “Come Dance with Me.” But it’s too disrespectfully cheerful to work as a dirge and kind of creepy if taken literally. Who except Tom Petty wants to fox-trot with a corpse?
I’ve decided instead to blare the Capitol recording of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love.” It’s the driving question behind the entire Sinatra research project. And it’s a lovely pop song, suitably melancholy for mourning, reflective, and wise. The orchestra starts off low. Enter a clarinet that’s somehow lewd and ponderous at the same time. Frank scrawls the topic sentence, then repeats it, adding one word—this funny thing called love. It begins as a rhetorical question and, by the end, turns into a cosmic inquiry of God. At the end of the song, Frank asks “the Lord in heaven above” its question and then he cuts out, as if he’s off to face the Creator in person. And then, once he’s gone, the orchestra resolves to a sweet final chord, as if they have the answer, but Frank Sinatra’s no longer around to hear it.
Can’t you just see the freeze-frame? Frank, in the recording studio, the hat askew, the tie loosened? TV producers of America, I beg you—for all of us, for Frank—ixnay on the “My Way.”
MIX TAPES
Thanks for the Memorex
LONG DISTANCE LOVE AFFAIR BY cassette tape: It happened to me. While digital romances grow increasingly common, our strange fling was quaintly analog. We talked on the phone for hours and enjoyed the occasional mushy rendezvous in the flesh at airports and bookstores and bars. But mostly, we wore out the heads on our respective tape decks compiling Memorex mash notes. I’m not really the scented envelope kind of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffylite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind.
The most interesting thing about the correspondence was that we rarely agreed. While we cared for each other, we cared little for each other’s taste in music. I sent him lovey-dovey lullabies like Blondie’s “In the Flesh” and he sent me back what could have been field recordings of amplified ant farms by bands with names like Aphex Twin and Jarboe. I sent him the Jonathan Richman song that goes “If the music’s gonna move me it’s gotta be action-packed,” but he didn’t take the hint, sending back music that was almost uniformly action-lacked. I think my scrappy little pop songs got on his nerves, and his techno-ambient soundscapes left me impatient for something, anything, to happen. Still, I gritted my teeth through them all, groaning over every last spacy synth jam as if I were doing him some kind of personal favor. Since he went to the trouble of making the tape, the least I could do was sit there and take it.
I liked picturing him in his little house, flipping through records and putting them on, taking them off and timing out the cassette so he could fill it up as much as possible but still avoid those immoral endings in which the sound gets cut off in the middle. Just as I liked running around my little apartment trying to remember, say, every rock song that ever had an accordion in it and whether the keyboardless concertina counts.
After a while, the question we asked each other about the tapes we sent wasn’t “Did you like it?” The question was “Did you get it?” Because receipt ultimately took on more importance than pleasure, and that was perhaps the most telling note. Not that I miss those “songs” of his since we parted ways—not by a long shot. (The letters were good. Those I miss. He quoted James Baldwin a lot. And the phone calls were sweet. I fell in love with him on the phone. He had a soothing voice. A couple of times he called the second he’d finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.)
That music of his did not bother me when we were making out on a bench in front of the La Brea Tar Pits or the alley behind my favorite Chicago bar. It bothered me in those ponderous solitary moments when I asked myself if I could really love a man who did not think, as I do, that a band with two drummers playing two drum sets was some kind of mortal sin, just as I’m sure he asked himself if such a freewheeling, free-jazz, open mind as himself could really fall for such an oldfangled, verse-chorus-verse relic like me. Which might be shallow, but our incompatible music pointed to incompatible world views. He was the ocean, preferring waves of sound to wash over him with no beginning, middle, or end. I’m more of a garden hose, fancying short bursts of emotion that are aimed somewhere and get turned on and off real quick.
A couple of days after the last time I saw him, I got a typically well-written postcard. He said that after he kissed me goodbye at LAX he was driving away and turned on the radio. Elvis was singing “It’s Now or Never.” In my personal religion, a faith cobbled together out of pop songs and books and movies, there is nothing closer to a sign from God than Elvis Presley telling you “tomorrow will be too late” at precisely the moment you drop off a girl you’re not sure you want to drop off. Sitting on the stairs to my apartment, I read that card and wept. It said he heard the song and thought about running after me. But he didn’t. And just as well—those mixed-faith marriages hardly ever work. An Elvis song coming out of the radio wasn’t a sign from God to him, it was just another one of those corny pop tunes he could live without.
What I did get out of the entire sad situation, besides big phone bills, a box of cassettes I’ll never touch again, and a newfound appreciation for the short stories of Denis Johnson—especially the sentence in Jesus’ Son that says, “The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs,” which was pretty prophetic considering that the two men I took up with after my heart was broken were Jack Daniel and Neil Young—was a lingering sentimentality about the act of taping itself. A homemade tape is a work of friendship, an act of love.
I was reminded of that when I was reading Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity. One of the subtexts of his story is the emotional complexities of the taping ritual. Much of the book takes place in a London record store. Clerks Barry and Dick are emotional cripples stuck in that mostly male pop culture circle of hell in which having seen a film (the right kind) or owning a record (ditto) acts as a substitute for being able to express what these things mean to them. Since they are incapable of really talking about human feelings, they get by on standing next to each other at rock shows and making each other complicated tapes of obscure songs.
Rob, their boss at the record s
tore, met his girlfriend Laura when he was a DJ at a dance club. She first approached him because she liked a song he was playing called “Got to Get You Off My Mind.” Rob woos Laura by making her a compilation tape, claiming, “I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with ‘Got to Get You Off My Mind,’ but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and . . . oh, there are loads of rules.”
While I was reading Hornby’s book, I happened to glance at an ad in San Francisco Weekly that read, “I’ll tape record albums for you. Reasonable rates, excellent service. Pick-up available. Bob.” And it gave a phone number. Prostitution! That’s what I thought, anyway. Paying someone to make a tape for you seems a whole lot like paying someone for a kiss. It is traditional to cover for one’s inability to articulate feelings of love through store-bought greeting cards. It’s another thing entirely to pass off a purchased compilation tape, a form which is inherently amateur and therefore more heartfelt. To spend money on such a tape would be a crime against love. Aphrodite herself might rise from the ocean to conk such a criminal on the head with the seashell she rode in on.
I asked Hornby what his music-mad record clerks would think if they saw Bob’s ad in the paper. “Their public view would be that it’s a terrible, awful job for a grown man to do, and why haven’t all these people got their own turntables? But I think maybe they’d think secretly it was kind of a neat job and they’d like to sit at home all day taping other people’s records.”