One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians

thirteen moons: A Novel
Charles Frazier
Random House
Hardcover
October 2006

I have to admit I didn’t know this was a new book when it was given to me. The cover doesn’t have the sleek highly composed over wrought design other novels trend to and it feels worn. You usually don’t put the feel of the cover in a book review but I’m apologizing here: this is the Old Book review not the Just frikkin Published review and I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t know.

It took me a while to buy into this book. I tend stay away from westerns and civil wart trope. I didn’t even like Tishamingo Blues because the Civil Wart re-enactment stuff just turns me off. For the record no Civil Wart re-enactment scenes occur in thirteen moons. It’s about Indians.

Specifically one Indian, Will Cooper, who isn’t actually an Indian. Cooper is a ‘bound boy’ which amounts to a white slave in the southern frontier country in the years well before the Civil Wart. You don’t read much about this in history books in school or anywhere else. Given the sheer tonnage of books I’ve consumed, I figure I would’ve skimmed over it at least once but Frazier surprised me with some history. I didn’t know people sold their adolescent and even pre adolescent boys into a kind of indentured servitude as shop keepers for trading posts in the far reaches of settled territory. Cooper winds up inside the Cherokee nation in the hills of Tennessee. He is befriended by a Chief, Bear, who’s tribal identity is indistinct except to say that his tribe is his tribe and that’s about as far as it goes.

Frazier, a man who carefully chooses detail, wisely stays away from the literary black-hole of Indian tribal identity. He obviously has done a master’s degree worth of research into the history of Indians in America but he sprinkles the details and the knowledge carefully so that it enhances the story and intrigues the reader instead of attempting to educate them on every maddening point.

Cooper is adopted by Bear and grows up as a member of the tribe, eventually traveling to Washington on their behalf, and securing vast holdings of property and land and a monetary entitlement that guarantees their future to a degree.

13 Moons rambles. Frazier capably writes a if he’s an old man in 1871 writing in long loopy cursive with a quill tip pen on the front porch of his antebellum home. The story rolls through the landscape of the Tennessee hills and valley like a creek and he paints a vivid, glowing picture of the land before it was dammed and paved. His depiction of Indians may surprise some people—unless they’re Indians. First, his use of the word Indian in place of Native American. I am great friends with members of the Alabamu-Couschatta tribe and I can tell you, they call themselves Indians. I have performed the most minor research on the Alabamu and have studied their Smithsonian records and history. They are a singular and tiny tribe, bouncing back and forth between their ancestral lands along the Coosa river in . . . see how easy it is? You start talking about Indian history and pretty soon you have literary diarrhea. Frazier avoids that.

The Indians in 13 Moons are real. They aren’t always noble and they aren’t always distinct from the settlers. They build mansions and own slaves and drink fine French wine. They also hunt bear with a hatchet and gleefully overhunt their game for money. The whites fare no better—though Frazier has a soft spot fir the Scottish Highlanders that settled Tennessee and mentions them in terms that come close to mythic more than once. I suspect Frazier has an erudite and passionate love of small batch whiskeys.

Still, I had a hard time getting into the book. Part of it, in fairness, can be attributed to my typical dislike of Southern History, Civil Wart bullshit, and trapper dialogues in general. All I have to see is buckskin fringe and I write it off. The problem is that a lot of buckskin hacks write their very best version of a made for TV movie which rewards the attentive reader with a solid ‘thunk’ when it hits the bottom of the garbage pail and not much more. Frazier, genius that he is, finds the original, or forgotten, in this old trope and makes a great story out of it.

Most of Frazier’s language is undecorated and free from affectation. Where it isn’t, when Cooper deviates into a kind of gently ornamented frontier twang or when he sounds a little like Mark Twain’s version of a backwoods scholar, it mostly works.

While Cooper is by turns funny, bawdy, grim, and wistful, he is also kind of light on his feet. Everything that happens to him generally kind of works out and even the parts that ought to be terrifying and cruel are observed from horseback from a distance. This is partly due to Frazier writing a memoir. It has to be written in past tense and loses some urgency there.

Cooper spends a considerable portion of the book on the back of a horse, going up and down the trails of his homeland, never getting a scratch on him and the reader begins to tire of it a little. The character recedes and recedes. Like the book, Cooper is like a beautiful painting that fades the longer you look at it.

.:[G]:.