The Common Word Community Read brings the UNC Asheville community together each semester around a shared text to engage in a collective educational experience that features lectures and discussions in a welcoming and respectful environment. The program is curated by Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author, alumnus of the class of 2000, and UNCA’s Executive Director of Literary Arts.
My introduction to Charles Frazier’s fiction was different than it was for many readers. Most people were introduced to him via Cold Mountain, his blockbuster debut novel that won the National Book Award in 1997. The novel would go on to sell several million copies worldwide and be adapted into a 2004 film that was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Although I’ve since read everything Charles Frazier has written and now consider him a close friend, I first met him when I began reading his sophomore novel Thirteen Moons.
The paperback of the novel was released in the summer of 2007, and I read it while sitting on my parents’ screened-in porch in Oak Island, North Carolina, where my mother still lives. My parents had left my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1998 and moved to the coast, and I was “home” visiting them that summer from Lafayette, Louisiana, where I was attending graduate school and working on a novel that would become my own debut. In fact, that’s why I was reading Thirteen Moons.
You might have noticed that I put the word home in quotations when referring to my parents’ house in Oak Island. That’s because the little coastal town — and even Wilmington, where I’ve lived full time since 2013 with a family of my own — has never quite felt like home to me. I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with ancestors who’d left western North Carolina and the South Carolina upstate for the mills in Gaston and Cleveland Counties, and I’d spent years in Asheville, learning to be the writer that I would eventually become. Now, living in Louisiana by way of Oak Island, I was reading Thirteen Moons to put me back in the mountains I’d left behind so I could write about them.
But reading the novel made clear to me that those weren’t my mountains, nor were they the mountains of the many people who currently and have historically called them home. The mountains do not belong to the descendants of the White settlers who colonized them, nor do they belong to the people who’d more recently moved there and made their homes among the hills, myself among them. The mountains have belonged to the Cherokee people going back at least 12,000 years, which puts into stark relief the fact that the first Europeans trudged through the Southern Appalachians in the mid-16th century. Picture a ruler that symbolizes the length of those thirteen millennia. Hernando de Soto, the first European to encounter the Cherokee in the Southern Appalachians in 1540, is standing right at the edge of the stick.
Regardless of how much time preceded de Soto’s arrival and the wave of European and British settlers and settlements that followed, contact would have incredible ramifications. This is one of the themes in Frazier’s Thirteen Moons. The novel opens with our narrator Will Cooper, a merchant and attorney, looking back on his life as it intersected with the Cherokee people, tracing his evolution as a protean American with the tribe’s struggle to maintain its homeland and way of life in what is now a new country. Cooper is loosely based on William Holland Thomas, himself a merchant and attorney who assisted the Cherokee in resisting removal under the hand of President Andrew Jackson. This eventually resulted in the establishment of the Qualla Boundary, where 14,000 enrolled members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians still live.
Recently my wife and I were having dinner with our friend Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle in downtown Wilmington. Clapsaddle is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band and the author of the novel Even As We Breathe. Over dinner I was going on and on about how old Wilmington is, about its history as a pirate town, a Revolutionary War town, and a Civil War town. But soon enough I realized how ironic it was that I, a White citizen of a city founded in 1739, was boasting about its age to a Native woman whose family has lived in the Appalachian Mountains for thousands of years. I caught myself and pointed out how Euro-centric my comment was. Annette laughed.
“The part about pirates sounds cool,” she said.
Please join us this semester at UNC-Asheville as we take a deep dive into Thirteen Moons and discuss the history of the Cherokee people in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. We’ll hear from author Terry Roberts about his research into Hot Springs, North Carolina, long a site of the Cherokee people and home to a succession of resorts that feature prominently in Thirteen Moons. We’ll take a trip to Cherokee for a curated experience led by Shana Bushyhead Condill, Executive Director of the Museum of the Cherokee People, that will feature a tour of the museum’s special collections; a trip to Kituwah, the Cherokee “Mother Town”; and a Native meal that might surprise you. We’ll close out the semester with a special event featuring Charles Frazier in-conversation with Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, when they’ll discuss Frazier’s research and the story of Thirteen Moons being the first literary work to be translated into the Cherokee language and syllabary.
Happy reading, whether you’re joining us from the Appalachian Mountains, a porch somewhere on the coast, or anywhere else in this world that is so much older, richer, and more complicated than we often realize.