Thirteen Moons, By Charles Frazier
New York: Random House, 2006.
“Does overwhelming change, the annihilation of all you know, create an intensity of memory that would not have existed otherwise? When all you know is lost and gone forever, does it become sweeter in the mind? Does it make you want to let go [of life] or hold on even tighter?”
Through this self-questioning, Charles Frazier’s narrator-protagonist, Will Cooper, helps himself and the reader to savor the uniqueness of this nonagenarian’s recounting of his life journey. His list of credentials stretches credibility: a self-made entrepreneur and lawyer, an Indian chief, a senator, a Civil War colonel, and a land baron. Yet the detail with which he dissects each episode brings to life his understanding of what fate has dealt him and how it has helped him to grow—sometimes in unimaginable beauty and passion and sometimes in heart-rending spiritual paralysis.
Lost to Will are the three main loves of his life: the Cherokee people who had adopted him after his own family sold him into bondage; the beautiful, rugged land from which the racist, self-serving government had driven the Cherokees; and Claire, a married woman with whom he shared a passion, but could never share a life commitment because of his indecisiveness. In anecdote after anecdote, Will reconstructs his assimilation into the Cherokee nation, mainly through the guidance of Bear, a local chief who adopts the isolated white youngster. Through Bear, Will learns to love the wooded and mountainous regions of western North Carolina. He learns the Cherokees’ reverence for the spirits of animals, many of which have been killed off by the white pelt-hunters. Will learns of the code of tribal living, and he realizes that honor, truth, loyalty, and courage mean more to these “savages” than to the “civilized” whites.
A lover of books, Will educates himself and prepares to practice law; realizing that in the long run, his fight will be futile, he nevertheless lobbies, negotiates, maneuvers, and manipulates, finagling his way into the U.S. Senate, where he attempts to protect the Indian nation’s land from the rapacious Jackson and Buchanan administrations. In spite of the government’s precedent-setting “Trail of Tears,” Will manages to preserve land for Bear’s people—though admittedly, he has utilized clouds of legal obfuscation and questionable funding practices. His own fortune and land-holdings eventually diminish greatly through bad deals, unpaid debts, and mismanagement-through-neglect.
Towards the end of the novel, Will speaks of a wooden box, his “museum of failed love”:
“A pearl from a broken strand. A handkerchief spotted with blood. A dollar bill of antique currency. A letter, its blue ink smeared [by tears] in three places across cream paper. An octavo edition of Werther.”
Each item is a memento of its respective relationship, terminated by disease, inability to commit, or blind romanticism crushed by cruel reality. The most haunting loss is Claire, the object of his passion since his teen years, during which they lived together for two summers. The relationship cools when Will learns of the “complication” of her marriage to Featherstone, an older plantation owner of mixed blood. When Featherstone, apparently aware of Claire’s dalliances, steals and castrates Will’s horse, the younger man confronts the elder, knowing full well that the castration was symbolic. But whether he wins or loses the ensuing duel does not matter, for Will has driven off Claire through his intransigence. Years later, when Featherstone is forced to leave his plantation due to the government’s “Removal” of Native Americans, Will again misses his chance to win Claire, simply by failing to speak his true feelings.
Given the continual awareness of loss, it is no wonder that much of the novel’s tone is nostalgic and elegiac—tones that fill Will’s reminiscences. He is, as one traveling writer observes, “among [the Cherokee] rather than of them. Though he grew to be a man among these people, there is a sad isolation about him, a sense of truly belonging to no place, neither this nor any other.”
There is a lighter side to Will Cooper. The 90-plus year old narrator routinely fires birdshot at passing trains; he is a curmudgeon futilely—and comically–striking out against the modern world which has engulfed much of what he has always valued. This closing is not bathetic; in fact it is consistent with the wry sense of humor displayed throughout his recollections. He mocks his own ineptness at trying to fit into two worlds, neither of which is fully comprehensible to him. He laughs at the follies of clueless representatives of white civilization, who destroy land in which they cannot survive, and drive out the harmless people whom they cannot understand. Will smiles at the idiosyncrasies of both Bear, who struggles to preserve the old ways of living, and Featherstone, whose wealth cannot buy him acceptance or stability in the “pure white” society.
Will Cooper’s life is not totally fulfilling, yet he has revealed that the nineteenth century was an exciting, changing period in U.S. history, and that even—or perhaps, especially–in the “backwoods” of North Carolina, human drama could be played out richly and movingly.
Ted Odenwald and his wife have lived in Oakland for 39 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust.