Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

“My heart is made of glass and if I ever lose you, Betty, my heart will break into more hurt than eternity would have time to heal.”

The higher powers had made it the law of the land that the Cherokee must be “civilized” or be taken from their home. They had little choice but to speak the English of the white man and convert to his religion. They were told Jesus had died for them, too.

Before Christianity, the Cherokee celebrated being a matriarchal and matrilineal society. Women were the head of the household, but Christianity positioned men at the top. In this conversion, Cherokee women were taken from the land they had once owned and worked. They were given aprons and placed inside the kitchen, where they were told they belonged. The Cherokee men, who had always been hunters, were told to now farm the land. The traditional Cherokee way of life was uprooted, along with the gender roles that had allowed women to have a presence equal to that of men.

My father used to say that when a child is born, their very first breath is sent on the wind to become a plant or insect, a creature of feathers, fur, or scales. He would say that this human and this life are bound together as a reflection of one another.

“Ground has three good years in it,” Dad told us. “First year will be a spectacular crop. The type you never forget. Second year will be a decent crop, but you’ll only recall certain things about it. Third year will be a crop you don’t remember at all. That’s the ground sayin’ it needs rest. So, you let that ground sleep for each of the years it gave you. Three years of gardening, three years of leavin’ it alone.”

“It isn’t the sun that grows the crop,” he said to us. “It’s the energy comin’ out of the three of you. Imagine what each of you can grow with the power you got inside you.”

What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to.

It was our first time stepping into the church. Dad believed God was in the woods more than He was ever in a building. “Don’t need to sit in a pew to get the word of creation,” Dad would say. “All ya have to do is to walk the hills to know there’s somethin’ bigger. A tree preaches better than any man can.”

You know what the heaviest thing in the world is, Betty? It’s a man on top of you when you don’t want him to be.”

When I had read the books I’d checked out over the years from the library, I used to think—like the stories I encountered—that my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father. Writers like Mary Shelley, who wrote my father to have a gothic understanding of the tenderness of all monsters. It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained. Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing. As for my father’s imagination, I believed God had stepped on Dad’s mind. It...