Even As We Breathe

“I wonder if the bones of my father are exposed and clean now. I picture a perfect white skeleton, fully intact, framed within the pine coffin—like the one I saw in anatomy class. So perfectly preserved, the bones could teach. I know it sounds odd to speak of my father like that, but you have to understand, I never knew him in the flesh. I never felt the breath of his lungs. His memory is as much a skeleton as his body.”

In this passage, Cowney reflects on some of the “bones” that hold symbolic significance for him. In visualizing his father’s unknown bones as akin to those he once saw in anatomy class, Cowney both gestures to how bones symbolize the connections between the living and the dead in the narrative more generally, and the way in which attempting to mentally reconstruct his father’s skeleton is an attempt at reconstructing his own identity and past.

“And right then I knew what I had to do. See, Pap used to tell me about sneaking down to the stockade and taking food to his older brother and his family right before they moved ‘em west during the Removal. He used to tell me that the government had made an animal of his brother and that he knew he would never get caught or he’d become one too. So he hid out in the mountains and later stayed with a family who’d been traded a small piece of land ‘cause freedom was worth more than life.”

These are the words of Tsa Tsi, an elderly Cherokee man, as he relates a story told to him by his grandfather. Tsa Tsi refers to the apprehending of the Cherokees as part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Tsa Tsi, like all of the Cherokees in the narrative, is a descendant of the Cherokees who took refuge in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains of North Carolina, hiding until they were officially recognized as the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. The phrase “freedom was worth more than life” speaks ironically to the situation of the Cherokees, who, in Cowney’s experience, are still not fully free from American social prejudices in spite of their apparent victory.

“Aside from the temporary military structures dotting its grounds, the Grove Park inn looked as if it had been forcefully extracted from the rocky earth by some red-gloved god. The base of the main structure mimicked the stone-formed mountain landscape […] I felt as if I were arriving at some sort of sacred site. Not sacred to my people, but to the people of Asheville—or, more accurately, to the wealthy whites of Asheville.”

Clapsaddle contrasts the timelessness of the eternal, self-renewing mountains to the gaudy, hand-hewn, continually sagging, and in-need-of-repair edifice of the Grove Park Inn. Cowney senses the reverence the white population feels toward the inn, granting it an almost holy status. Clapsaddle plays this deferential human attitude to the inn against the encompassing spiritual embrace of the forested mountains that seem to reach out and engage any who are willing to enter. The author implies that the grandest human efforts can only mimic the holiness experienced in nature.

“Golden-fried chicken overflowed from porcelain blue serving dishes. I could smell the rich tang of buttermilk batter. Mounds of white whipped potatoes, skins and all, were carved by melted butter rivers and piled high in a huge metal bowl […] I had to wonder if ordinary citizens were conserving so that stateside soldiers and their prisoners did not go without.”

Clapsaddle describes wartime America in 1942 as marked not only by the prejudice Cowney experiences continually but also by ironic disparities and inequalities. Cowney notes that rugged Indigenous American reservations contain Japanese American internment camps, while one of the nation’s most luxurious resort hotels hosts high-ranking enemy “prisoners” and their families, suggesting that high socio-economic status can secure the prisoners better conditions than those of impoverished American citizens.

“Back home, being Cherokee meant I fell into a role. Unfortunately, it also meant I had only a few options: I could farm. I could work for a white man. I could leave […] But oh, the hunger! I always felt half empty, like I was missing out on some grand feast just over the mountains. I was headed in all the good ways and in all the bad.”

Cowney’s dilemma embodies that of many young Cherokee citizens: there are limited opportunities for them due to the “role” prejudiced American society has constructed for them. This uncomfortable reality drives Cowney to leave Cherokee to go to college and drives Essie to dream of going to New York City. One irony of this refers back to Tsa Tsi’s grandfather’s observation that the Cherokee people who managed to avoid the Trail of Tears did so to preserve their freedom—yet, as Cowney suggests, these Indigenous people still had little real freedom.

“‘Milk?’ she asked, holding up my cup. ‘Good for the bones.’

‘No thanks. Black’s fine.’

‘I like mine with a little sugar.’ She grinned. ‘Need all the sweetness I can get.’ I was glad I had smuggled some from the inn back for her.”

Beyond being an innocuous exchange between Cowney and his grandmother, Lishie, this passage is rife with symbolism. Sugar is Lishie’s metaphor for love, implying she needs tender compassion to deal with the memories of her deceased son, Cowney’s father, for whom she still weeps. When Cowney returns home from Asheville, he brings love—sugar—for his grandmother, symbolizing the enduring tenderness of their bond.

“There are some nights, some days, you just pray it will rain. Not because the crops need it or the wells are dangerously low. Sometimes you just need the clouds to burst and release the pressure building around you. The smoke, it’s constant swarm and release with changing winds, some other the skyline, suffocating me in the process. I wanted it to feel like it did back at the inn, with the rain pouring nearly every day.”

Lying on his bed as the smoke of a forest fire makes Cherokee a miserable place for Cowney to be, he longs for the rains he experienced in Asheville. Water imagery is a symbol of healing, growth, and wellness. Smoke symbolizes foment, troubles, and change. Thus, Cowney wishes the new vitality and peace he shares with Essie at the inn would bring renewal to Cherokee. The presence of encroaching fire and pervasive smoke, however, indicates that major changes are coming to Cowney’s life.

“I wanted to tell Essie that New York City was sounding a lot like room 447. She was all I wanted to see, and 447 made that possible [. . .] We were slowly creating the most beautiful culture I had ever known. It grew richer by the day and, as new as it was, it felt ancient, ageless. 447 held our own language, our own art, our own system of existence.”

Smitten by Essie and fortunately able to spend evenings with her in room 447, Cowney enjoys numerous moments of happiness exceeding anything he has experienced prior in his life. Cowney is learning about building true friendship, expressing dreams, and sharing emotional intimacy—an important aspect of his personal growth and character arc. The closeness and honesty of his relationship with Essie enable them to create “the most beautiful culture” complete with their “own language” and systems, thus allowing them to forge their own sense of identity.

“It must have been 25 feet high from its base. It extended so wide across the mount slope, 15 feet at least, that I figured I might be home to a sleeping bear or panther. The base pool was clean and clear enough to reveal its shallow bottom. I dipped my hands into the cold water and rubbed them clean. I cupped my hands and brought the water first to my mouth and then across my face. The scratch on my cheeks stung a bit, but then numbed from the coolness.”

Cowney recounts his first visit to the waterfall in the woods that will become his personal site of renewal and serenity. Stumbling through the woods, Cowney falls and becomes covered in dirt. He washes off in the cool basin by the waterfall and notes the mysterious empty cavern behind it. When he calls into the cavern, a gust of wind nearly knocks him down. This experience—which takes place immediately after he leaves church—is a symbolic baptism, giving him a powerful burst of spirit that overwhelms and inspires him. The waterfall has, in essence, become Cowney’s church.

“I was just a boy then, and had no real insight into a woman’s heart. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t an automatic fit for each other, a promised pair of sameness in this strange place. In the years since, I have learned that not all love is made of equal parts. They are more kinds of deep affection than we are sometimes willing to accept in society. I wish I had known then that she was more than any friend or girlfriend could be. What we had was deeper than a physical relationship and too big to be made simple with naming. It was everything and absolutely indefinable all at once.”

Remembering the moment of his greatest pain and fragility, the mature Cowney describes the intimate, lasting relationship he and Essie had built together without realizing it. Having just encountered Essie kissing Andrea in the stairwell, Cowney feels betrayed. When they rework their relationship, it will be without the romantic passion Cowney longed for, instead built around honesty and acceptance. Cowney here suggests that their “deep affection,” although not necessarily romantic, ultimately turned out to be something of central importance in his life.

“In truth, I didn’t have a Lishie, not in the Cherokee sense. Not a maternal grandmother. Not one that I knew. My Lishie was my father’s mother and should have been called a-gi-ni-shi, if we’re speaking in the strictest sense. But there was nothing strict about our family tree. I guess I always just thought that my mother needed Lishie more as a mother than she did her own. It was Lishie who brought clean linens to sop the blood from my birth. There was no room in that story for any other mother.”

Here, as he prepares emotionally to face his grandmother’s death, Cowney reflects on the adaptive way Lishie cared for him. She inherited the name Lishie, meaning “maternal grandmother,” because of the care she gave Cowney’s mother. She became something more and greater to Cowney than the typical social role would have predicted. Their relationship mirrors the development of his relationship with Essie as well, as she also becomes a figure beyond anything Cowney expected.

“I felt so guilty that I hadn’t stayed. If I had known... I would have written down everything she told me. What more could she have said to me? She knew more about my father, I had no doubt. I couldn’t fathom why she wouldn’t tell me. Maybe she thought I couldn’t handle it or that it didn’t matter anymore. I wonder who would tell me the stories now. […] She had always been the only one.”

Cowney stands before his deceased grandmother, hoping it is a trick and she will rouse. For the first time, he realizes how dependent he was upon Lishie and in particular, how she was his connection to the past. He longs to hear all the things Lishie knew about his father that she did not share. In a broader context, Clapsaddle is demonstrating the importance and power of oral history. The author posits that Cowney’s generation and the Cherokees as a whole are in danger of losing their heritage if the tradition of passing life stories from one generation to the next dies.

“The bear stopped his roll and rose onto all fours in the pool. He shook his body as a dog would, sending water flying. He huffed a deep breath and then sauntered out of the water and climbed back toward the cave with no sign of a limp. I struggled to glimpse his left flank again, trying to see the extent of his injury, but saw nothing. As he entered behind the waterfall, I watched as the cascade purged the bear’s blood and agitated mud from its pool. By the time the bear disappeared, the water was completely clear.”

Grieving over Lishie’s death, Cowney goes to the waterfall basin and bathes. As he lies on a log near the pool, an injured bear emerges, bathes in the pool, and returns to the cave behind the pool, apparently healed. The bear symbolizes Cowney and, to a larger extent, the Cherokees. Like Cowney, the bear suffers from an injury to his left hind leg. Like Cowney, he finds healing in the pool, implying that wholeness comes from returning to nature.

“Seeing Essie Stamper standing in my living room was surreal. She entered my past uninvited. It was all well and good that Essie had come to know the Cowney I wanted her to know; I had carefully shielded her from the Cowney that my father and my mother had created, that Bud had created, that a twisted left foot had created. But now she was here to see the Cowney that Lishie had created, and I needed her to see him, too. Everything that happened at the inn suddenly seemed so unimportant, but I recognized how utterly weak it would have been of me to embrace her like nothing had happened, like she could treat our friendship with as much disregard as she wanted if it was convenient for her.”

Cowney experiences emotional turmoil when Essie appears at Lishie’s visitation. This passage reveals the layers of pretense and realities Cowney must confront. Essie demonstrated her true intentions to Cowney through her liaison with Andrea. Now, Cowney must decide for himself how he will react to the woman he loves. His determination to stand up for himself—refusing to “embrace her like nothing had happened”—demonstrates his maturity and growing self-respect. Cowney is here starting to take control of his own feelings, identity, and relationships.

“We buried Lishie that morning high on a hillside, beside my father and my mother, beside two open spaces awaiting Bud’s and my bodies. […] I thought too of Watkins Cemetery, close to Bryson City. How other Cherokees elected to continue to share the cemetery with whites, blacks, and those of their own blood. Graves side by side […] I wondered where I would choose to be buried if I could. Would it be among the purest of the familiar blood on this hilltop, or could I make one last attempt to improve my bloodline in shared soil?”

In this passage, Cowney reflects on the cycles of life and death and the enduring weight of his heritage. In reflecting upon how his father, mother, and now grandmother all lie buried together, he also notices how his own grave is also already waiting for him by their side. The graves suggest the binding connections between generations of Cherokees, leaving Cowney to wrestle with his own identity, speculating whether will choose to be buried with his family or seek to break from his heritage.

“For several moments I just stood and stared at the godlike portrait of Jackson and studied every detail of his garb I looked hard into his eyes which refused to look into mine. […] I thought of how he had betrayed John Ross, a distant relative of mine, as Lishie told it. How Ross saved his sorry life at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, and Jackson repaid him with the same kindness Hitler was now affording the Jews. Maybe they left me with Jackson on purpose, and had given him the orders to finish me off.”

Left in Griggs’s office while soldiers search for the piece of bone, Cowney stares at a large portrait of Andrew Jackson. Cowney’s encounter with Jackson’s portrait is ironic in that no American was more of a villain to the Cherokee and to Indigenous Americans than Jackson. Jackson subdued the Red Stick Muscogee (Creek) nation largely with the assistance of other Indigenous nations, in particular with 500 Cherokee volunteers. Subsequently, as US President, Jackson ignored a Supreme Court ruling to the contrary and enforced Congress’s Indian Removal Act. In this passage, Cowney’s helpless stance before the unblinking image of Jackson is emblematic of the Cherokee’s ongoing experience of discrimination in white American society.

“‘You’ve never had Cheerwine?’

‘No, sir. I don’t think I have ever seen it.’

‘Well, I just don’t believe that. It’s made right here in North Carolina. Salisbury, I think. Gatlin gun, Krispy Kreme donuts, and Cheerwine. The best of everything right here in our backyard.’

Craig’s backyard was not mine, as much as he apparently thought so.”

In this passage, Jon lists three of the inventions for which North Carolina was most known in the 20th century, inadvertently highlighting the disparity between the state’s Cherokee and white populations. While Jon simply assumes that anything he knows and likes is what defines “North Carolina,” Cowney knows that he has a different “backyard”—i.e., a different identity, experience, and culture, of which Jon is apparently ignorant.

“‘Where was I?’

‘Men weren’t used to Indians,’ I prompted.

‘Right. So, some of the guys used to take the bullets out of the guns belong to the Indians at night. I know how crazy it must sound to you, but people do some crazy s*** during wartime.’

‘Why would they do that? That doesn’t make any sense. Who on earth would that make sense to, no matter what time it was?’

‘Some of the guys worried that the Indians might rebel, shoot them in their sleep. […] Yeah, you should’ve heard some of them talk. They’d say things like, ‘It’s a full moon, the native will be restless.’”

Jon reveals the prejudiced attitudes that existed towards Indigenous soldiers during World War I, despite the whites and Indigenous men being comrades-in-arms who faced a common enemy. Jon’s account reveals the casual racism of the white soldiers, who feared the Indigenous soldiers might “rebel” because of a “full moon.” Ironically, the fears of the white soldiers ultimately endangered the lives of their Indigenous comrades through depriving them of ammunition.

“The fire was jumping treetops, which I had never seen happen before. I had two options: head toward the road and hope someone would pick me up, or head for the waterfall and hunker down in the water or, if need be, the cave. […] The question had become where did I want to die rather than where could I continue to live. The answer was clear. I bundled the quilt under my arm, clutched the suitcase of clothes and memories, and headed into the woods away from the heat. Bud’s rickety old pickup truck spun within seven feet of my path. ‘Get in. We don’t have long.’”

Cowney’s two weeks of solitude in Cherokee turns into a time of confrontation, reflection, and growth. Cowney’s determination to head “into the woods” with one of his grandmother’s quilts and all of his “memories” to escape the forest fire reflects his personal growth throughout the novel: his reconnection with his heritage and his growing sense of his own identity. The final element in this time of growth occurs when Bud helps Cowney escape, leading Cowney to the sudden realization that Bud is the person who has set the fires.

“‘Cowney, your father shot himself. He had planned it well enough to get a bullet first.’

It would have been so much easier if I had thought this man was lying but I knew that he wasn’t. There was a gentleness, and ease, in the way he was speaking that assured me he was telling the truth, and that this was something he had relive dozens of times for himself. I believed him because I could see how damaged he was by this truth, and how badly he didn’t want to damage me. But sometimes not knowing your own story is the most damaging thing of all.”

After a lifetime of wondering why the story of his father’s death seemed incomplete, Cowney, at last, learns how his father died. He learns as well that his father might not have been his father because the uncle he loathes had an affair with his mother. Magnifying the pain of this discovery is the reality that those who knew Cowney kept these truths from him, ostensibly to protect him. In “knowing [his] own story” at long last, Cowney must confront the realities of his identity and learn to live with the truth.

“I felt pity for the man. Pity. These thoughts of the shame of my youth. How could I feel pity for Peter—because he might go to prison after killing an innocent child, stealing her body, denying her the sanctity of burial, lying to the people who loved her, throwing me to the wolves to save his ‘good name’? Had I been trained to react this way? It came so easy to me to want to help him. No one would help that little girl. No one would help her family. I once had to be quiet to survive. I didn’t have to be anymore.”

In this passage, Cowney chooses compassion and “pity” for Peter over hatred, in spite of Peter’s framing of him for the girl’s death. In declaring that he “didn’t have to be [quiet] anymore,” Cowney reaches the culmination of his character arc: he now has both the emotional maturity and the confidence necessary to reject bitterness while also finding his own voice.

“Charlie Chaplin’s final speech of the film, the one in which he stands before thousands of people, the very image of Hitler, and pleads with the world to unite in the name of democracy, well, I’ve never heard a finer speech in my entire life. […] I looked around at the dozen or so movie goers […] I thought about how utterly different everyone seemed […] I wondered if someone might try to take away his voice after they heard what he had to say. That seemed to happen a lot.”

Cowney’s reflections on hearing Chaplin’s voice for the first time come from the fact that the majority of Chaplin’s films to that point had been silent movies. Cowney has recently found his own voice and is no longer willing to be silent about the falsehoods and inequity he experiences; he is enthusiastic in his response to Chaplin’s message of democracy and brotherhood because it resonates with his own hopes for the future. However, his fear that someone might try to silence Chaplin—and by extension, Cowney himself—suggests that Cowney still realizes the dangers in standing against prejudice and hatred.

“When I was a boy I wanted nothing more than to be as far away from here as I could get. Now I want nothing more than to stay in these hills for the rest of my life, and even beyond it. I want my bones to stay here, unbothered. Essie was not altogether different; she just stayed away longer […] That’s why your grandmother sent you, after all. Essie wanted you to hear her story. That’s why the note she left for you to share with me is so specific. She wanted you to hear this story. Her story. Our story.”

This passage reveals that the entire narrative is Cowney telling the story of Essie and their summer at the Grove Park Inn to Essie’s unnamed grandchild. The grandchild has honored Essie’s request to return her body to Cherokee and bury it alongside Cowney’s chosen gravesite. Cowney also understands that Essie wants him to perpetuate the Indigenous American custom of sharing history by telling their story to the grandchild. In proudly calling it “Our story,” Cowney fully embraces his shared identity with Essie and with the Cherokee nation itself.