Author Stan Rice has just published the third of three novels (Edd’s Land) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about four Cherokee brothers in early Oklahoma.
Frank Hicks, Edd’s brother, lost his land because a white government official declared him mentally incompetent. Unlike Edd, Frank was not willing to just make the best of it. He wanted revenge. When he found out who had taken control of his land—the same man who had stolen Edd’s original fiancée—he decided to take matters into his own hands and plot a traditional Cherokee revenge—by scalping.
In the process of planning his revenge, he discovered that it was not just a technical matter of figuring out how to scalp the evil man. (Note, scalping is not necessarily killing, since it just removes the scalp and does not hurt the brain. The intact brain can then spend a lifetime of anger for being scalped.) It required a whole philosophy of life, of how to carry out an act of war without hatred, an emotion that just gets in the way of doing the job right. It takes Frank many years to prepare, and decades before he finally gets the opportunity to do it. Frank is a pharmacist.
Another issue that the author has to confront is white racism. Not, in this case, against Native Americans, since in Oklahoma a lot of people had Native ancestors, but against Blacks. Rice invents (he admits in his author’s notes it didn’t really happen) an intense love affair between Frank Hicks and Bert (Alberta) Hicks, a freedman descendant in the Cherokee tribe. The freedmen were descendants of slaves owned by Cherokees before Emancipation. In this, Frank fights against his family’s deep prejudices. It is a beautiful and touching love story.
