Raleigh, N.C. – There are many things Charles Frazier would like to preserve in his home state of North Carolina, but right now two in particular loom large in his mind: independent bookshops and the Cherokee language. Chances are “Thirteen Moons,” his much-anticipated new novel – after “Cold Mountain” – could make a difference with both.
Sitting in Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, Frazier has begun to set this plan in motion. Rather than hit the road and barnstorm big cities and morning talk shows, he has chosen to unveil “Thirteen Moons” – perhaps the most hotly desired second novel in America in the past decade – at this tiny independent book store.
The mood in the back room at the shop is jubilant, as Frazier methodically signs his way through a stack of books the width and density of a Land Rover. Clerks stand around handing books to create a human conveyor belt. A publicist offers him whisky but he says no thanks, it being just after nine in the morning.
“They took a chance on me when I was just some first-time novelist,” Frazier says, by way of explanation, the shop’s owner beaming from behind him like a proud mother. Frazier has the sheepish, soft expression of an easily embarrassed son. He wears acid-washed jeans and a black silk shirt. His beard is white and trimmed close; his face has an outdoorsy flush.
Research amid Cherokees
Frazier’s gratitude could seem forced, were it not so real. This is, after all, a man who quit his job as a university professor in his mid-40s to write a first novel about a soldier coming through the Civil War. That was “Cold Mountain,” which sold millions of copies worldwide.
“Thirteen Moons” tells of the destruction of the Cherokee Nation – once a country within a country in the United States – as seen through the eyes of Will Cooper, a 90-year-old man who was adopted at age 12 by a Cherokee chief. At the same age he meets a girl, falls in love and chases her the rest of his life.
When not pining for his true love, Cooper fights against the tide of unfair treaties and westward expansion unleashed by President Andrew Jackson, through the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and carried out by the Army in 1838. Cooper ultimately helps secure a small piece of ancestral land for a group of Cherokees that still exists today, called the Eastern Band.
Frazier has done a lot of work trying to re-create the texture and feel of the time as it was lived on Cherokee lands. He learned recipes for bear soup and yellow-jacket stew. In one brief scene, Will plays a kind of Cherokee ball game, which Frazier spent several days researching without getting a clear idea of how it was played. Finally, one day he stumbled upon some local Cherokees playing it at dusk.
“The ball is so little – it’s the size of a ping-pong ball,” Frazier says, “so you can’t tell when there is a big pile-on, if someone breaks off, if they really have the ball or not. It’s small enough it can go in your mouth. And then the great thing is, two or three people tackle each other and they wrestle, and the ball may have gone on, but they’re still wrestling.”
For all their original culture, the Cherokees had begun to assimilate by the time the Indian removal acts were passed. “They had a council house, a Supreme Court building, they were starting a museum, a newspaper, all that. It was indistinguishable from how people were living on white plantations in Georgia,” Frazier says.
“Country boy” credentials
The son of a high-school principal and a school librarian, Frazier grew up within spitting distance of this region when it was still not uncommon to see farmers plowing by mule, and went to high school with some of its residents. “I still remember when there were people farming the old way,” he says.
In this part of the state, where vending machines still sell fried pork rinds and train conductors call people ma’am, these things count for something. “He’s just a country boy,” one local leader said of him. When Frazier first got readers’ copies of the book, he didn’t send them to writer friends, but brought them to the Eastern Band to see what the tribal council thought.
“I gave them to some of the elders on the tribal council and Chief Hicks and other people in the community to read. Then we had a lunch just to talk about it,” Frazier says. “One of the things I said that day is, ‘what I’m trying to do in this book is not tell your story, I’m trying to tell our story – this land that we’ve all occupied together.”
The significance of this gesture has not been lost upon the Eastern Band. Frazier’s relatives, after all, were among the white settlers who displaced many of the nearby Cherokees.
White, Indian lives entwined
“My ancestors came (to North Carolina) soon after one of those treaties, after the Revolutionary War opened up land west of Asheville to white occupancy. What happened is what usually happened: Some well-to-do people came in and bought big chunks of land and leased them to less-well-to-do people.”
“Thirteen Moons” was in many ways born out of this legacy. Sold for a now-infamous sum of $8 million on the basis of a few pages and an outline, Frazier initially planned to follow the life of William Holland Thomas, a white Confederate who was adopted by the Cherokees, and went on to represent them before Congress. He later died in an asylum for the insane.
As he began to study Thomas, however, Frazier began turning up documents that showed he was not an anomaly, that settlers’ and Indians’ lives were more intertwined.
“When the Army came to throw out the Cherokee,” Frazier says, “they kept ledgers of possessions because the Cherokee were going to be reimbursed when they got out West. So you can go through farmstead after farmstead and see what they all owned. Over and over, the lists would have been exactly what my ancestors had back then: a little cabin, some fields, a few animals, a plough, axes, kitchen equipment.”
Saving a dying tongue
In some ways, Frazier is trying to make reparations of a sort with this book. Not only is he telling the Cherokees’ story, he also has started a fund that will funnel some proceeds of the book into preserving the Cherokee language. “At the rate that it’s going, it’s going to be a dead language in 20 or 30 years,” Frazier laments. “And it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Frazier still lives in Raleigh, while keeping a house in Florida and a horse farm nearby. He and his wife drive BMWs, but both are several years old. And as for new activities, Frazier says his life has hardly changed. He watches “South Park” and readily admits that his daughter is “way smarter than I am.
“Somebody asked me the other day what I do for fun,” Frazier says, breaking into another big sheepish smile. “I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.”
These were the only activities Frazier allowed himself in the past 10 years as he tried to finish “Thirteen Moons.” The first chunk of time was spent researching, but once he began writing, things went very slowly.
“I’d say like a paragraph or two was a good day,” he says.
Reception in the literary community has been pretty unanimous on the difference between “Thirteen Moons” and “Cold Mountain.”
“Whereas the narrative in ‘Cold Mountain’ was rich and dense as a fruitcake,” wrote New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “‘Thirteen Moons’ – despite its often sombre subject matter – is a considerably airier production: reminiscent, at times, of Thomas Berger’s ‘Little Big Man’ and a lot closer to Larry McMurtry than to Cormac McCarthy.”
Frazier seems to know what people want from a storyteller, and how to give it to them. But most of all, he knows the woods will be waiting for him when he comes home.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
