The Wounds of the Past

(The illustration: Andrew Jackson by Simon)
We've been learning about the Indian Wars and the presidents who won them--to Simon's great delight. But all week my mind drifts away from bloody battles and the Trail of Tears; instead, I find myself thinking about the afternoon I saw my first John James Audubon—about whom we also read recently. It was over twenty-five years ago. My college sweetheart and I had a friend who was renting a room near Harvard Square in someone's private home, and one day we went to pick him up to go for kebabs, or a beer. The Audubon hung in the entrance of that home, over the stairwell, luminous and playful and exact.

Peter was the friend's name. Peter had been our pal in college. He had moved to Boston to study law. Peter, a child of missionaries, was, unlike some of us, not only thoughtful but also single-minded and ambitious. At that time, I was working at an arts bookstore and my sweetheart, Mark, was trying to figure out how to paint in his own style, as opposed to all the painters he admired. Mark and I dallied in the arts and the book business. But Peter had bigger plans. Last I checked, he has spent his life prosecuting white collar criminals in Texas.

We were let into the entrance and asked to wait. It was one of those well-appointed homes to which I, at that time, had no access: fleur de lis wallpaper, wainscoting, Queen Anne couches and Persian rugs, portraits and paintings illuminated by their own individual light. Through a double-doorway, I could see a wall of books and a group of older women in dresses drinking tea.

Waiting for Peter to come down the stairs, I found myself drawn to the Audubon. Which Audubon? No idea--birds of some sort. What I do remember is feeling deeply content to be living in Boston, even though the rent-controlled apartment we called home looked nothing like this one, and within a year Mark and I would split, and the gay men I worked with at the bookstore had AIDS, or their lovers and friends had AIDS, and before long most of them would be dead.

There were many moments of my life in Boston that were perfect and uncomplicated, like gazing at that Audubon: Saturday mornings at the Museum of Fine Arts when you could get in for free; listening to the Messiah at the Emmanuel Church; playing hooky just to spend the day perched over books in the vast and stately Reading Rooms of the Boston Public Library on Copley Square; wandering through the haunted hallways of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and coming upon a John Singer Sargent; or better still--a poorly illuminated Vermeer. It was so easy back then--I was twenty-three or four--to love this country.

“That's an original Audubon,” Peter said, when he finally skipped down the stairs. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

* * *

I read Simon about John James Audubon and show him images on my laptop. I point out the elegant compositions, the clean lines.

“They're just birds, Mom. What's the big deal? Birds are soooo lame.”

Audubons don't grab his interest, but Andrew Jackson surely does. Simon carries the biography around the house. To my amazement, he offers to read it to me all over again. Jackson used expletives and fought in the Revolutionary War as a thirteen-year old; he had a scar down his cheek, a gift from a British officer whose boots he refused to polish; he conquered Florida; he won the Battle of New Orleans; he was born in a one-room cabin but he ended up with a big plantation and hundreds of slaves; he was tough, rough and very popular.

“But what about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears?” I ask. “After Jackson conquered Florida, he relocated the Seminoles to Oklahoma. He made them walk--thousands died.”

“That wasn't so good,” he says after a moment of silence. “I'm glad I'm not a Seminole.”

Simon is eleven. He wants to like what everyone else likes. He wants to fit in. The biography Simon read told him that, unlike John Quincy Adams, Jackson was immensely popular, that he was a war hero. Moreover, Jackson conquered Florida from the Spanish for the United States. In Simon's mind, if Jackson hadn't done that, Florida might never have become part of the United States. If that were the case, how would he access Cartoon Network from our living room in Miami?

“And Simon, remember he also had a huge plantation with hundreds of slaves.”

“Well, I'm glad I'm not a slave.”

This is how a kid's mind works. It takes information that is hard to process, that it cannot accommodate comfortably, and it finds a way to live with that knowledge. It was terrible, but at least it wouldn't have happened to him.

My mind, in turn, wants to wander away from that knowledge altogether and think only about Audubon, walking around in gorgeous Kentucky, drawing birds. For me, the stories of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and William Henry Harrison are fascinating—and repulsive. Land was needed for all the new immigrants coming to America; canals were built to connect rivers and lakes to ease transportation, settlement, and trade; peace was necessary to ensure the well-being and prosperity of immigrants, commerce and transportation. So the land was cleared—cleared of Creek, Choctaw, Blackhawk, Sauk, Seminole, Cherokee, Shawnee, etc. The Indian Removal Act was enacted, and battle after bloody battle after bloody battle was fought and won. From these deadly encounters the likes of Jackson and Harrison emerged as heroes--while whole nations vanished.

Unscrupulous despotism, tyrannical chauvinism—these are words I want to teach Simon. I want to tell him how much I hate this ugly side of the American character. I want to let him know it frightens me that there are Americans to this day, millions of them, who are certain they are better than others--a chosen people. These same folks are full of a zealous and aggressive patriotism, and a blind enthusiasm for military glory. I want to tell him that part of this country's complex heritage is made of stark inequalities and a ground soaked in innocent blood.

But I don't. I've rocked the boat enough as is. I need to let Simon make sense of these stories on his own. There are many ways to view Jackson. He won the Battle of New Orleans, killing two thousand British, suffering only a couple of dozen casualties. They called him “Old Hickory,” because hickory wood is tough.

From Jackson we move onto Van Buren and then William Henry Harrison. Harrison won various battles against Tecumseh and the Shawnee. Eventually, Tecumseh was killed by Harrison's men at the Battle of the Thames River.

Simon gazes at all the battle paintings in the Harrison biography and says: “War is horrible.”

Learning about Tecumseh, how he'd organized a large Indian confederacy that opposed the United States army, I remember that long ago I read a poem by Mary Oliver called “Tecumseh.” I pull my ragged copy off the shelf. I bought that little collection, American Primitive, back in Boston all those years ago. I wonder what Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison would make of a lesbian poet. Would they find a place for her in their America? And I think again of Peter-- has he ever read Oliver? Does he remember the lovely Audubon? We lost touch decades ago. Maybe I should drop him a line.

“Tecumseh”

by Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from the crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow
to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.

from American Primitive