My Life on the Road (24 page)

I tell him that he just took that power. Now no one can ever take it away. I also tell him that the rain forest is beautiful, like where his family came from, that Father Egan would be proud of him, and that I am proud of him, too. The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.

As I watch him trudge off in the snow, I think for the millionth time:
You never know.

It’s the fall of 1995. I’m at the Columbus, Ohio, airport, waiting at the baggage claim as instructed. I’m going to speak at a conference of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a national group that teaches Native students science and engineering by using Native examples—thus allowing them to excel without feeling they have to abandon their history and cultures. Since Native students often prosper in cooperative rather than competitive classrooms—as do a lot of female students, regardless of where they come from—I’ve been asked to talk about the feminist movement and efforts to change classrooms into learning circles. Actually, boys, too, often do better when they aren’t always in a hierarchy, so the ideas of this group could improve education in general.
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After a few minutes of waiting, I notice a heavyset man in a windbreaker leaning against the wall. I walk over and ask if he’s waiting for me—and he is. Holding up a sign seemed like an invasion of privacy, he says, so he’s been waiting patiently for the crowd to thin out.

On the long drive to the conference center, we pass a turnoff with a small sign:
SERPENT MOUND
. I ask what this is. He doesn’t seem surprised, but he just explains that it’s an ancient earthwork, one of the many around this country. Some are shaped like enormous birds and animals, others are circles or pyramids, some are as tall as a three-story building and surrounded by a hundred smaller mounds you can see only from the air. This one is a snake about three feet high and a quarter of a mile long; the oldest surviving mound of its kind, maybe two or three thousand years old.

I’m into my third decade of traveling around this country, and I know none of this. I tell him my family comes from southern Ohio, yet the Serpent Mound is news to me. As if to make me feel better, he says he has friends who went to England to see Stonehenge, and when he asked if they would like to see even older sites here, they said no. He says this not with an edge but with a smile.

Because I ask, he tells me that the mounds around this country were spiritual centers or astrological observatories or burial sites. Most are pyramids, with openings inside for viewing solstices and equinoxes, but others are flat mounds at global magnetic points where seeds were spread out to make them more fruitful. All were centuries in the making, with digging up and moving tons of earth. Sometimes those basins were turned into lakes or fish hatcheries. Burial mounds tell us the most, because they contain seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, or obsidian from Wyoming, or carved mica from the Carolinas, or even the teeth of Rocky Mountain grizzly bears inlaid with pearls—also bowls and jewelry made of silver and copper from Canada, turtle shells from the Atlantic, carved semiprecious beads from Central America, and textiles from everywhere. They tell how far the ancients traveled or traded.

By now I feel like I’m in an alternate reality. He says the mounds were such feats of construction that Europeans didn’t believe people they regarded as savages could have ancestors who created them. One popular theory was that the Egyptians lived here—and then mysteriously left. Another was that the Chinese, the first sailors, had come and gone.

I ask if the mound builders were
his
ancestors. He says they might have been, but with all the mixed heritage in this country, they could be my ancestors, too. Nobody knows what they called themselves—the mounds are named after the places they were found: Adena, Hopewell, and so on. Most of the big mounds were along the Mississippi River. People on this continent then known as Turtle Island had cultures as advanced as any on earth.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.” If you’ve been genocided and left out of history, as they explained, you need a sense of humor to survive. When I tell my host this, he looks at me as if I’m just beginning to get it.

Though I’ve been assuming this kind and patient man was sent to pick me up, I realize I don’t know his role. He says mildly that he’s one of the conference organizers. If I hadn’t asked, he would have been content to remain a driver. So much for hierarchy.

As we pull into our destination, I ask how he keeps on working, despite ignorance like mine on one hand and all the commercial imitations on the other.

“In Indian Country,” he says, “we have a different sense of time. I’m learning and you’re learning—and more will.”

W
HEN
I
TELL THIS
story to my friend Alice Walker, I discover that she too has always wanted to see the mounds. Like so many African Americans, Alice has Native Americans in her family tree. As William Loren Katz, a favorite historian of Alice’s, once wrote, “Europeans forcefully entered the African blood stream, but Native Americans and Africans merged by choice, invitation and love.”
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Her friend Deborah Matthews, who grew up near these Ohio mounds and had a Cherokee great-grandmother, offers to show us what she learned in her childhood.

In the summer of 1997, I leave my home in New York, Alice and Deborah leave their respective homes in California, and we meet at the motel where Alice and I will be staying—though with the added comfort of meals in the nearby homey kitchen of Deborah’s mother, a generous woman Alice calls by her middle name, Magnolia.

On the first day, Deborah shows us the mounds in her small hometown of Newark. One is a round, slightly raised grassy area about the size of a city block, with ancient curved edges still visible under bushes and refuse. Surrounded by working-class houses with families sitting on front porches in the August heat, it is an open space with kids playing near public restrooms. A second is Moundbuilders Golf Course at the Moundbuilders Country Club, just outside town. A third is the Great Circle Earthworks, which is protected as a state park. Its thirty acres are surrounded by a wall that even after two thousand years of erosion is still fifteen feet high. At the center are four mounds in the shape of a bird, its beak pointing toward the entrance. Deborah says excavations have revealed an altar inside the bird’s body, and dowsing has identified energy lines along the top of the wall. She came here as a little girl on family outings. “If we ventured outside the wall,” she remembers, “our elders would say, ‘Just follow the circle and it will bring you back to us.’ ”

In Magnolia’s kitchen, we eat homemade peach cobbler and talk about differences in the way countries treat their past. At Stonehenge in England, there are guards and tape-recorded tours. Modern Greeks picnic among the ruins and are intimate with their ancient history. Both can count themselves as descendants of past glories. Here, people arrived from another continent and, by war, disease, and persecution, they eliminated 90 percent of the residents. From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed. A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
3
From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs. Whether out of guilt or a justifying belief that the original occupants were not fully human, history was replaced by the myth of almost uninhabited lands.

Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.

The next day Deborah drives us to Flint Ridge, an ancient quarry that once yielded flint for Native tools used in hunting, farming, and building. By local legend, Indians hurled themselves to their deaths from this ridge rather than be slaughtered by the enemy.

We need some healing, and find it at the Serpent Mound.

There it is, a grass-covered, undulating serpent stretching out for a quarter of a mile on a plateau above a valley. It seems to emerge from the earth, rather than to be built on it. From a globe or comet in its mouth to a tightly coiled tail, its direction was thought to be random until astronomers realized that the head points to the sunset at the summer solstice, and the tail to the sunrise at winter solstice. Radiocarbon dating traces its age back to at least two thousand years ago, not the few centuries originally thought. This is the largest of the effigy mounds surviving here, and also in the world. Like so many other mounds, it would have been destroyed to make room for construction if money hadn’t been raised to save it, in this case with the help of a group of women at the Peabody Museum of Massachusetts.

There is a small wooden viewing tower, and pamphlets from the State of Ohio, but they focus on facts—for instance, the Serpent Mound is as long as four football fields—not on meaning. In
The Sacred Hoop,
Paula Gunn Allen, a Native poet, mythologist, and scholar, explains that Serpent Woman was one of the names of the quintessential original spirit “that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind…she is both Mother and Father to all people and all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.”
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In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

In books we brought along, we read about earlier grave excavations here that revealed a young couple laid out side by side, wearing jewelry and breastplates, their noses shaped in copper to keep them after the fragile cartilage was gone. Their bodies were surrounded by buttons made of copper-covered wood and stone as well as more than a hundred thousand pearls.
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That night we join Deborah’s mother, her eighty-six-year-old grandmother, and teachers and neighbors at a community potluck supper in the school gym. It’s a welcome for us. With the slow-paced humor and warmth I’ve come to cherish, they talk about the history of small-town Ohio, and are delighted that we are interested. Deborah’s grandmother has lived her entire life near Adena mounds that may be even older than the one we just saw. They reminisce about everything from romantic outings in the Great Circle Earthworks to the connection they feel to people they just call “the ancients.” We tell them about the young couple in copper and pearls. All of us light a candle for them.

What I don’t tell them is a feeling I don’t understand myself. As a child, I went to Theosophical meetings with my mother, and to a Congregational church where I was christened. I’ve enjoyed many years of Passover seders, rewritten with scholarship and poetry to include women. But not one of them felt as timeless and true as Serpent Woman.