Story by Wiley Cash | Photographs by Mallory Cash
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s Even As We Breathe is the story of a young Cherokee man setting out in the world and discovering that he might realize his full potential through returning home to North Carolina. Behind that story is the story of a debut author — the first enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to publish a novel — who did much the same.
There’s a lot of digging in Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s debut novel, Even As We Breathe. Pine coffins are lowered into graves after a Cherokee child named Cowney Sequoyah loses his father during World War I and his mother not long after. Later, as a young man, Cowney leaves the reservation for work as a landscaper at Asheville, North Carolina’s famed Grove Park Inn, where foreign diplomats are being held in isolation in the early days of WWII. By the end of the summer, Cowney will see the bodies of his beloved grandmother Lishie and his hostile uncle Bud lowered into the earth as well, but not before finding a body of his own — at least what could be part of a body — when he digs up a bone while working on the Grove Park’s grounds.
The discovery of the bone is what opens the novel and carries its themes of identity and connection, but it also serves to drive the plot. When the daughter of a foreign diplomat goes missing, stories begin to circulate about the Native American man who’s rumored to be lugging a bone around the resort grounds, through the halls, and inside the secret rooms of one of Asheville’s most famous landmarks. Even though he was born and raised just a short Model T drive away from Asheville on the Qualla Boundary (the Cherokee Indian Reservation in western North Carolina), Cowney is the ultimate outsider and therefore the usual suspect, despite the fact that his ancestors have been buried for centuries beneath the earth where America’s enemies — albeit more moneyed, more esteemed, and better dressed than Cowney — walk the Grove Park grounds like everyday guests.
While western North Carolina’s history of holding foreign diplomats and prisoners of war has been written about before in Ron Rash’s novel The Cove (2012) and Terry Roberts’ novel A Short Time to Stay Here (2012), the history has never been written about through this lens or from this perspective, namely because Clapsaddle is the first enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to publish a novel.
Clapsaddle grew up on the reservation and attended public schools in Jackson County, North Carolina. The first substantial time she spent living outside the reservation was when she left to attend college at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s not hard for one to imagine that Clapsaddle might have felt the same awe when she first laid eyes on Yale as Cowney does when he first lays eyes on the Grove Park Inn, a stone behemoth that “looked as if it had been forcefully extracted from the rocky earth by some red-gloved god.”
Clapsaddle’s novel takes place in the historic Grove Park Inn (now the Omni Grove Park Inn) in Asheville, North Carolina, in which diplomats and prisoners of war were held hostage during World War II.
Nestled into Asheville’s Sunset Mountain and now overlooking a vibrant downtown that glimmers like a pearl in the distance, the Grove Park Inn opened in 1913 and, along with the Biltmore House, ushered in Asheville’s Golden Age, a time when the well-heeled and well-connected swarmed the tiny mountain town that had become synonymous with fresh air, luxury, and a wilderness experience that catered to elites like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
By the summer of 1942, when Cowney first beholds the Grove Park Inn alongside his crush Essie — a young Cherokee woman who was also born and raised on the reservation and has traveled with him to take a summer job as a housekeeper — Asheville’s boom has gone bust, and the Grove Park is more rambling rock barn than Gilded Age jewel. Cowney can’t help remarking on the fact that he and Essie are arriving at a sacred site, but he delineates that the Grove Park Inn is “not sacred to my people, but to the people of Asheville — or, more accurately, to the wealthy whites of Asheville.”
“The Cherokees think of what is sacred differently than what people from Asheville think is sacred,” Clapsaddle says. “Anything that is man-made like the Biltmore House or the Grove Park Inn and is also inaccessible to certain people for financial reasons could never be sacred to Cherokees, because in our culture we believe the sacred must be accessible to everyone from the community.” She cites Kituwah as an example, an earthen mound in Cherokee that marks the sacred site of the original Cherokee settlement that was founded nearly 10,000 years ago. “That is our most sacred space,” she says. “Cowney’s observation of the Grove Park’s prominence is a commentary on how communities in such close proximity can value different things and hold them sacred.”
Kituwah Historical Marker US 19 (between ZJ Hyatt Rd. & Galbraith Creek Rd.) NW of Bryson City, Swain County, North Carolina. Clapsaddles says “… in our culture we believe the sacred must be accessible to everyone from the community.” She cites Kituwah as an example, an earthen mound in Cherokee that marks the sacred site of the original Cherokee settlement that was founded nearly 10,000 years ago. “That is our most sacred space.”
While the Grove Park Inn and the manicured landscape surrounding it may be held sacred by locals and the tourists who once flocked to it, a number of profane things befall Cowney almost immediately after he begins work as a member of the grounds crew. One of his white co-workers constantly berates him with ethnic slurs, calling him “wagon-burner” and “mongrel,” and the troops who are stationed around the resort seem hell-bent on chasing him out of the inn if he dares pass through the lobby.
Even Cowney’s friend Essie, with whom he’s been infatuated since they were children, is pulling away from him, despite the hours they spend locked away in a secret room inside the inn, conjuring a fantasy world the two of them never could have imagined back home on the reservation, further proving to him that the two of them are “a promised pair of sameness in this strange place.”
For Cowney, things aren’t any easier or more stable back home in Cherokee. When his beloved grandmother Lishie dies, Cowney returns to the reservation and discovers that his Uncle Bud is as antagonistic and distant as ever. The mountains surrounding the reservation are being destroyed by wildfire, and Cowney, who has just lost the one person who connected him most to his past, is beset by questions about his father, who died mysteriously on a foreign battlefield during WWI.
In true liminal fashion, Cowney feels himself caught betwixt and between two separate worlds: the constricting environment of the reservation where everyone knows his family’s tortured past and the relative freedom of the Grove Park Inn where, after the workday ends, he and Essie can lose themselves in a fantasy world of their making. Between home and Asheville, Cowney understands that “each held something for me that the other did not,” but he also understands that each comes with a price: the reservation offers peace and familiarity with very little opportunity for growth, while the outside world offers him a chance to spread his wings and attempt to fly against the winds of bigotry and prejudice. He is, in short, being forced to “forfeit certainty for opportunity.”
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle looking through family albums at her home in Swain County, North Carolina. She once believed that she needed to look beyond places like Cherokee, Bryson City, Sylva, and Asheville to have something worth writing about. After returning to Cherokee, places that once felt constricting now felt expansive.
When Clapsaddle left home for Yale, she too worried about the major shift her life was about to take in her decision to forfeit her own certainty for opportunity. College had always been an expectation that her parents had for her. In high school, she had been a star student, an athlete, and a leader both in student government and on local issues. “I am fortunate that I had parents who raised me to know that I would go to college,” she says. “But that’s not always true for people in this community. It wasn’t true of Cowney. But I had the ability to take that risk. I was prepared to take a risk at Yale.” Her father sought to ease her worry. “I remember a conversation with my dad one day. I was saying that I was nervous, and I wasn’t sure how I’d even been accepted to Yale. I remember he looked at me and said, ‘All you have to do is pass. Don’t worry about anything else.’ That took a lot of pressure off me, and that was how I went into it.”
Clapsaddle did more than pass. She earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Yale and a master’s in the same field from the College of William & Mary, eventually returning to Cherokee to teach English and Cherokee studies at nearby Swain County High School. It was also the place that had first encouraged her to try her hand at writing.
“I always had teachers who encouraged creative writing,” she says. As a young writer growing up in Cherokee, she felt that she had to look beyond her experience to discover something worth writing about. “The first book I ever tried to write was set in a lighthouse in Maine,” she says. “And it didn’t take long to realize that I had no idea what I was talking about.”
She did know about the people and culture in western North Carolina, particularly the people she’d grown up with and around in places like Cherokee, Bryson City, Sylva, and Asheville. After returning to Cherokee, places that once felt constricting now felt expansive, and Clapsaddle realized that she didn’t have to look far to find something worth writing about. “There’s always the question of, ‘If you experience another culture, does that supersede the culture you were born into, or does it enhance it?’” It seems that her time away from her culture in Cherokee definitely enhanced her embracing of it.
The Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina works “to preserve and perpetuate the culture, history and stories of the Cherokee people.”
Clapsaddle’s unpublished first novel, Going to Water, is a fictionalized retelling of the life of her grandfather, Osley Bird Saunooke, a two-time Chief of the Eastern Band who, at 6 feet 6 inches tall and 350 pounds, was also a professional wrestler who became the Super Heavyweight Champion of the World in 1937 and went on to hold the title for 14 years, fighting over 5,000 matches across the country. The novel won The Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native Literature Symposium in 2012 and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2014.
After the novel went unpublished, Clapsaddle sat down one day in the library and gave herself a prompt to write about the most elemental thing she could consider, and she recalled a quote from James Baldwin that had long hung on the wall by her writing desk: “Write a sentence as clean as a bone.” As Clapsaddle’s Cowney notes in the opening pages of Even As We Breathe, “bones could teach.”
The bones in Clapsaddle’s debut certainly teach, educating Cowney about his connection to his ancestors, both the recent dead he witnesses being put in the ground in Cherokee and the long dead over whom he walks on the grounds at the Grove Park Inn. The bone he uncovers teaches him about identity, about who he can become and who he is expected — perhaps limited — to be. And the bones teach the reader, too, and that’s why Cowney tells us, “you need the stories of this place” to understand something about life in Cherokee.
After her first novel, Going to Water, went unpublished, Clapsaddle sat down one day in the library and gave herself a prompt to write about the most elemental thing she could consider, and she recalled a quote from James Baldwin that had long hung on the wall by her writing desk: “Write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
Cowney Sequoyah’s story eventually found its way to best-selling author and fellow Appalachian Silas House. Clapsaddle and House had met at Kentucky’s Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and had worked together when the nonprofit Narrative 4 visited Swain County to foster literary and cultural relationships between area high school students and students from New York City. Clapsaddle and House became friends because they saw the world and their region’s place in it in similar ways. “We have a lot in common in terms of representing unique parts of Appalachian culture that are often misunderstood,” Clapsaddle says.
House had just agreed to work as an editor for Fireside Industries, an imprint of the Hindman Settlement School and the University Press of Kentucky, when poet and editor Rebecca Gayle Howell asked him if he would be interested in working on Clapsaddle’s novel. “I jumped at the chance,” he says. “I knew this was the first book I wanted to tackle because it was so good, and I could clearly see how we could expand it just a bit more. And I knew Annette, so I already admired her mind and was excited to work with her.”
Clapsaddle’s Even As We Breathe is the story of a young Cherokee man setting out in the world and discovering that in returning home, he might finally realize his full potential. And behind that story is the story of a debut author who did much the same.
Where will Clapsaddle go to find her next story? Another lighthouse in Maine? That’s unlikely. “There’s so much to say about life here in the region,” she says. “I don’t see my moving away from it anytime soon.”
Clapsaddle has more digging to do, and who knows what she and her characters will uncover.
Correction 10/6/2020 9:40 a.m. An earlier version of this story said that Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle was from and attended school in Swain County. She teaches in Swain County, but she grew up in, attended school in, and now lives in Jackson County.
Wiley Cash is the author of The Last Ballad, This Dark Road to Mercy, and A Land More Kind Than Home. He serves as the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their two daughters.
Mallory Cash is an editorial and portrait photographer based in North Carolina. Her work has appeared in the Knoxville Museum of Art and numerous publications including the New York Times and Oxford American.
