Thirteen Moons
Frazier, Charles. Thirteen Moons. New York: Random House, 2006.
She seemed full and complete. Though the rational, unraptured part of me figured that no one, man or woman, gets to be full and complete ever. We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people. It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living.
- Will Cooper in Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons
*~*~*
Like Charles Frazier‘s previous best-selling novel, Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons is a beautiful, enthralling novel embracing multiple genres, enveloping a tale of frustrated love in naturalism, history, and politics. We first meet the novel’s hero, Will Cooper, as a 12-year-old orphan sold into indentured servitude at a frontier outpost by his aunt and uncle. Will rides west alone, save the companionship of his horse, Waverly, along the way encountering the girl who will both fill and break his heart, Claire, and his nemesis, Featherstone. Upon arriving at the store he must keep, Will meets Bear, the Cherokee who later adopts Will as his son.
I expect the Will-Claire-Featherstone love triangle has already captured the attention of filmmakers. Will first meets Claire after winning her from Featherstone, her husband in name, at a late-night card game, only to have her stolen back that same night. Will finds her again as a teenager, and together they indulge in a season of hormonal hedonism that eventually ends in a rather comical duel between Will and Featherstone. But Jackson’s Indian Removal policy soon takes effect, and Claire, a mixed-blood, heads west to Indian Territory, while Will makes the tortured decision to stay behind and aid his adopted family, Bear and the Cherokee of Wayah.
The Cherokee of Thirteen Moons are refreshingly human. Unlike the noble but destined-to-die Uncas and the savage Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, the inhabitants of Wayah live lives characterized by pastimes other than the shedding of tears and blood. They hunt and farm. They drink. They throw bawdy parties that feature costumed caricatures of the English, French and Spanish with wooden heads and fake phalluses. And, most importantly, they realize the need to innovate in order to ensure their survival and maintain control of their ancestral lands. Bear recognizes the authority of paper deeds and private property in the white civilization enveloping his people and begins buying the land on which Wayah is built before Will arrives. Will in turn uses the profits from the stores he acquires in his late teens to finance the purchase of additional tracts, thereby expanding Wayah’s holdings slowly, deliberately, and legally, eventually merging the land and its people into the one unassailable American institution: the corporation. The Cherokee thus employ the whites’ own devices against them. In addition, Will employs his skills as an autodidact lawyer to thwart the U.S. government’s many attempts to move the Wayah Cherokee westward. Under the joint leadership of Bear and young Will, the tiny Indian empire grows, its vast square mileage dependent on a tenuous balance of loans, debts, trades, and the whim of the War Department. Though less racy than the affair with Claire, the politics of Indian Removal dominate Thirteen Moons, as Frazier incorporates historical figures from Andrew Jackson (whom Will calls the Old Possum after forming the opinion that Jackson’s hair resembles a dead opossum) to Elias Boudinot to illustrate the callousness with which Indians were forced west and, in some cases, betrayed by their own wealthier advocates.
As Will ages and Eastern politicians, most of whom have never encountered an Indian, implement Removal, the exuberance of Will’s youth gives way to actuality, and, after years of chasing a woman who will not marry him and fighting for an Indian nation the whites in power would just as soon exterminate, the energetic hero of Thirteen Moons arrives at the unfortunate reality of his own limitations and moral flaws. While Will suffers perennial guilt for sacrificing an Indian rebel to the U.S. military in exchange for Wayah’s continued existence, he views his ownership of slaves with unapologetic ambiguity. As a Confederate colonel, Will leads his Cherokee soldiers into admittedly stupid skirmishes that cost lives and achieve nothing. And, while constantly travelling in an effort to escape his heartbreak, Will allows his business interests to crumble, thus endangering the livelihood of the very community he worked so long to save.
As the years progress, the whites keep coming. They arrive in never-ending waves. The world Will sees as an old man only faintly resembles that of his youth, as the railroad and the logging and the immigration have transformed and broken and scarred the land. After a lifetime of effort, the aged Will feels the weight of his own inefficacy, similar to though lesser than the feeling of loss and futility most 19th-century Indians must have felt after decades of broken treaties, renegotiations, Removal, and outright warfare. Thirteen Moons concludes with an old man ritualizing his own powerlessness, firing bird shot at a train it will not penetrate or impede, feebly demanding attention without effecting change. Will continues his fight for justice — ironically, weakly, but nonetheless noticeably — reminding us in short yet violent bursts of the human price of nation building.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comments (3)