Charles Frazier.
Culture
On the trail of tears
by Paula Morris
Charles Frazier follows Cold Mountain with a new epic about the fate of the Cherokee.
Charles Frazier hasn’t been to New York City in five years, and has no intention of going there any time soon. “I have nothing scheduled in New York,” he admits, talking to me on a Sunday morning from his home in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe’s home town and now one of the most popular retirement destinations in the US.
Frazier is usually out on his mountain bike at this time – he never starts writing before mid-afternoon, and has ridden 1000 miles of trail this summer – but it’s a cold morning, and a rare day off, too, in the never-ending book tour for his new novel, Thirteen Moons.
Nine years after the publication of his first novel, Frazier says he needs to do “the public writer thing” and “remind people I’m still around”. Although he’ll be hitting big markets like San Francisco and London, he’s more excited about places like Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi. “The owner brought in 1400 books for me to sign and said he would sell every one. Now, if I went to a book store in New York, would I have sold 1400 books?”
To Frazier, who doesn’t like publishing-company escorts (“all I need is a car and a map”), it’s about knowing himself and knowing his audience. Affable and soft-spoken, he exists outside the New York literary scene, geographically and temperamentally: he went two years without speaking to his publisher, he admits, and goes for months without talking to his agent. One of the first journalists to interview him asked: why Fayetteville or Oxford, Mississippi but not New York? “I told him, those people were good to me when Cold Mountain was just another first novel looking for an audience.”
The days when Cold Mountain was just another first novel seem very long ago. Frazier published it in 1997; he was in his mid-forties and had given up his job as a university lecturer to focus on his solemn Civil War novel. It sold four million copies in the US, won a National Book Award, spent nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and was made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law. In 2002, on the strength of a one-page proposal, Frazier sold the rights to his next novel, Thirteen Moons, for $US8.25m, not counting the $US3m for the movie rights.
That’s an extraordinary investment in a literary novelist, especially one so stubbornly bound to his home turf in the Great Smoky Mountains. Some have tried to explain Frazier’s success by pointing to his subject matter – epic love and the Civil War with his first novel; epic love and Native Americans with Thirteen Moons – and there’s also the potent blend, in this new novel, of two fashionable forms, historical fiction and confessional memoir.
Frazier doesn’t seem fashion-conscious; he’s been too busy, for one thing. “For the past two or three years, I’ve been working so hard on this book, it was like being under house arrest.” He was copy editing in August, two months before the book came out in the US, and “the first journalist came to Asheville 10 days after that”.
Thirteen Moons is the intriguing, adventure-filled story of Will Cooper, a character based on the real-life William Holland Thomas, the only white man ever to serve as a Cherokee chief. Like Thomas, Will Cooper’s life spans the 19th century; he is an orphan who becomes a “bound boy”, contracted to work at a trading post at a raw, remote settlement in western North Carolina. He is adopted into a band of Cherokee, becomes a self-taught legal representative and state senator, and makes and loses several fortunes. He also recruits men for two Cherokee companies during the Civil War, fighting for the Confederacy, and – in a more successful endeavour – helps preserve a homeland for the few Cherokee who escaped eviction by buying land for them in his name.
Thomas was such a public figure that even a research addict like Frazier soon suffered information overload. “He kept journals, and was interviewed many times. I read a few of his journals from his thirties, about 100 pages worth, and then I decided I didn’t want to see any more. I realised they were in the way.”
History, however, gives the novel its shape and provides numerous cameo appearances, including Davy Crockett and treacherous President Andrew Jackson. The novel’s centrepiece is the forced removal, in 1838, of the Cherokee across the Mississippi River to distant Oklahoma. Almost half of the 16,000 on the infamous “Trail of Tears” died en route.
“One thing I was trying to do in this book was give a picture of that time of enormous transition, when the Cherokees had been in contact with white people for more than a century, when the clan system of their culture was being swept away, and even though they were peaceful and adopting white ways, we still decided to remove them,” says Frazier.
One of the ways the richest Cherokee assimilated to ante-bellum Southern society was by owning plantations and slaves. “Around 15 percent of people on the Trail of Tears were black. Indians were taking their slaves. Not many people are aware of that.”
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