Maria

SEPTEMBER 2

IN THE MORNING I drove to the youth shelter to read to the children, since Wyatt wasn’t supposed to arrive until the afternoon. The kids who stayed there had either been kicked out of foster homes or were waiting to be placed in a foster home. I’d been visiting there regularly since I retired. I always liked helping children. This was my career, in social work, finding justice in a world where it felt like there was no justice. I wanted to save everybody, especially children and families on the verge of losing everything. I wanted them to have a chance to succeed.

For sixteen years I was a social worker for the tribe, working with children and at-risk youth. I liked working with deprived children. I transported them to various foster home placements, youth shelters, or treatment centers, which often took a long time. The trips could take two or three hours, so I told them stories about Cherokee myths, or other times I made up my own stories. I told them about my own family, my Cherokee ancestors who suffered on the Trail of Tears after Andrew Jackson forced thousands to leave their land. Some hid in the mountains, others died. The ones who survived barely made it, suffering through measles and whooping cough, walking in the brutal cold of winter, their cries drowned by the bitter wind. They were women walking hunched forward with blankets over their shoulders. They were men carrying children. They were on their knees, dying from pneumonia. My ancestors made it to Indian Territory, to Oklahoma, where they tried to start over. When I was growing up, my elders taught me about real history, about the removal, when many schools didn’t talk much about it.

As a social worker, I watched children cower into their siblings, afraid of all the caseworkers. I watched them spit and call everyone evil monsters. I listened to them moan and wail in fear. The youngest kids were the most trusting. Our office had toys and treats for them during the hours they spent in our building. They had a TV, dolls, stuffed animals, crayons, building blocks. They had books and handheld video games. The older siblings gave dirty looks and held on to their younger siblings, didn’t trust the workers, never smiled.

“We want to help you,” I told them. “We won’t hurt you. We’ll find a safe place for you. Everything will be better now.”

AT THE YOUTH SHELTER, I read stories from books about Cherokee culture and healing. Afterward I asked them, “What is healing?”

“When you don’t feel like killing yourself,” a girl named Amber said. She was twelve or thirteen, with light-brown hair cropped short. Her face and body were thin, but her pale-blue T-shirt and jeans were baggy. She sat forward with her elbows resting on her knees, listening to me.

“That’s right,” I told her. “You don’t want to hurt yourself, you’re healing. You’re getting better. Maybe you start talking to a counselor or a doctor, too. But many years ago the Cherokees used nature for healing.”

I read aloud: “‘All the trees and shrubs and plants of the earth were used to cure sickness.’” I stopped here and held up the book to show a photograph of a yellow flower, then continued: “‘The black-eyed Susan plant contains a liquid that cures earaches.’” A boy, maybe ten or eleven, raised his hand. He was small, sitting cross-legged on the floor. His hair hung in his eyes.

“My brother got a black eye,” he said. “His name is Jack. He has medicine for his face.”

“Did you know,” I told him, “that some people put liquid from the black-eyed Susan plant in their tea and drank it?”

“Did it help their black eyes?”

“I’m not sure, but it helped them feel better. It was good for snakebites.”

I held up another page with a photograph. “This is the catgut plant,” I said. “The Cherokees believed that if you mixed the bark in water, it would make you strong.”

Amber was really listening to me, leaning forward and concentrating. I told them a story about a young boy who was shorter than all the other boys in his school. “The boy isn’t able to play sports,” I told them. “He’s too small to reach the monkey bars on the playground. None of the boys like him, so he spends all his time on the playground jumping rope and being friends with the girls. At home, his father makes him drink the catgut bark mixed into his tea, and soon the boy grows, gets stronger, and by the end of the school year he’s stronger and taller than every boy in his class. Now all the boys want him to play sports with them, but he refuses unless they allow the girls to play too.”

“Why?” Amber asked.

“At first the boys refuse,” I said. “They don’t want girls to play. Meanwhile, one of the girls who is Cherokee also has been drinking the catgut plant in her tea and challenges all the boys to arm wrestling. She beats every one of them, so the boys let everyone play. Boys against girls—guess who wins?”

“The girls?”

“That’s right.”

She gave a smile. Marty, one of the young part-time library helpers, came over and told me he could never get them to pay attention for very long. “And you make them interested in plants,” he said. “How do you do it?”

“This is my passion,” I said. “It has always been my passion.”

ON THE DRIVE HOME I stopped at the market to buy a carton of ice cream for Wyatt’s visit. Outside the store I happened to see an elderly woman, standing stooped over with an afghan around her shoulders. I stopped to examine the stitches and folds in her afghan.