For the past few weeks in Molly’s American History class they’ve been studying the Wabanaki Indians, a confederacy of five Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Penobscot, that live near the North Atlantic coast. Maine, Mr. Reed tells them, is the only state in the nation that requires schools to teach Native American culture and history. They’ve read Native narratives and contrasting contemporaneous viewpoints and taken a field trip to The Abbe, the Indian museum in Bar Harbor, and now they have to do a research report on the subject worth a third of their final grade.
For this assignment they’re supposed to focus on a concept called “portaging.” In the old days the Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and everything else they possessed across land from one water body to the next, so they had to think carefully about what to keep and what to discard. They learned to travel light. Mr. Reed tells students they have to interview someone—a mother or father or grandparent—about their own portages, the moments in their lives when they’ve had to take a journey, literal or metaphorical. They’ll use tape recorders and conduct what he calls “oral histories,” asking the person questions, transcribing the answers, and putting it together in chronological order as a narrative. The questions on the assignment sheet are: What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind? What insights did you gain about what’s important?
Molly’s kind of into the idea of the project, but she doesn’t want to interview Ralph or—God forbid—Dina.
Jack? Too young.
Terry? She’d never agree to it.
The social worker, Lori? Ick, no.
So that leaves Vivian. Molly has gleaned some things about her—that she’s adopted, that she grew up in the Midwest and inherited the family business from her well-off parents, that she and her husband expanded it and eventually sold it for the kind of profit that allowed them to retire to a mansion in Maine. Most of all, that she’s really, really old. Maybe it’ll be a stretch to find drama in Vivian’s portage—a happy, stable life does not an interesting story make, right? But even the rich have their problems, or so Molly’s heard. It will be her task to extract them. If, that is, she can convince Vivian to talk to her.
MOLLY’S OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE SCANT AND PARTIAL. SHE remembers that the TV in the living room seemed to be on all the time and that the trailer smelled of cigarette smoke and the cat’s litterbox and mildew. She remembers her mother lying on the couch chain-smoking with the shades drawn before she left for her job at the Mini-Mart. She remembers foraging for food—cold hot dogs and toast—when her mother wasn’t home, and sometimes when she was. She remembers the giant puddle of melting snow just outside the door of the trailer, so large that she had to jump across it from the top step to get to dry ground.
And there are other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them over with a large black plastic spatula. “Not so fast, Molly Molasses,” he’d say. “Easy. Otherwise the eggs’ll go splat.” Going to St. Anne’s Church on Easter and choosing a blooming crocus in a green plastic pot covered with foil that was silver on one side, bright yellow on the other. Every Easter she and her mother planted those crocuses near the fence beside the driveway, and soon enough a whole cluster of them, white and purple and pink, sprang annually like magic from the bald April earth.
She remembers third grade at the Indian Island School, where she learned that the name Penobscot is from Panawahpskek, meaning “the place where the rocks spread out” at the head of the tribal river, right where they were. That Wabanaki means “Dawnland,” because the tribes live in the region where the first light of dawn touches the American continent. That the Penobscot people have lived in the territory that became Maine for eleven thousand years, moving around season to season, following food. They trapped and hunted moose, caribou, otters, and beavers; they speared fish and clams and mussels. Indian Island, just above a waterfall, became their gathering place.
She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you. She learned that they lived in wigwams, not teepees, and that they made canoes from the bark of a single white birch tree, removed in one piece so as not to kill it. She learned about the baskets the Penobscots still make out of birch bark, sweet grass, and brown ash, all of which grow in Maine wetlands, and, guided by her teacher, even made a small one herself.
She knows that she was named for Molly Molasses, a famous Penobscot Indian born the year before America declared its independence from England. Molly Molasses lived into her nineties, coming and going from Indian Island, and was said to possess m’teoulin, power given by the Great Spirit to a few for the good of the whole. Those who possess this power, her dad said, could interpret dreams, repel disease or death, inform hunters where to find game, and send a spirit helper to harm their enemies.
But she didn’t learn until this year, in Mr. Reed’s class, that there were over thirty thousand Wabanakis living on the East Coast in 1600 and that 90 percent of them had died by 1620, almost entirely a result of contact with settlers, who brought foreign diseases and alcohol, drained resources, and fought with the tribes for control of the land. She didn’t know that Indian women had more power and authority than white women, a fact detailed in captivity stories. That Indian farmers had greater skill and bounty, and more successful yields, than most Europeans who worked the same land. No, they weren’t “primitive”—their social networks were highly advanced. And though they were called savages, even a prominent English general, Philip Sheridan, had to admit, “We took away their country and their means of support. It was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?”
Molly had always thought the Indians rebelled like guerrillas, scalping and pillaging. Learning that they attempted to negotiate with the settlers, wearing European-style suits and addressing Congress in the assumption of good faith—and were repeatedly lied to and betrayed—enrages her.
In Mr. Reed’s classroom there’s a photo of Molly Molasses taken near the end of her life. In it she sits ramrod straight, wearing a beaded, peaked headdress and two large silver brooches around her neck. Her face is dark and wrinkled and her expression is fierce. Sitting in the empty classroom after school one day, Molly stares at that face for a long time, looking for answers to questions she doesn’t know how to ask.
ON THE NIGHT OF HER EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, AFTER ICE-CREAM SANDWICHES and a Sara Lee cake her mother brought home from the Mini-Mart, after making a fervent wish, eyes squeezed shut as she blew out the tiny pink-striped birthday candles (for a bicycle, she remembers, pink with white and pink streamers like the one the girl across the street got for her birthday several months earlier), Molly sat on the couch waiting for her dad to come home. Her mom paced back and forth, punching redial on the handset, muttering under her breath, how could you forget your only daughter’s birthday? But he didn’t pick up. After a while they gave up and went to bed.
An hour or so later she was woken by a shake on the shoulder. Her father was sitting in the chair beside her bed, swaying a little, holding a plastic grocery bag and whispering, “Hey there, Molly Molasses, you awake?”
She opened her eyes. Blinked.
“You awake?” he said again, reaching over and switching on the princess lamp he’d bought for her at a yard sale.
She nodded.
“Hold out your hand.”
Fumbling with the bag, he pulled out three flat jewelry cards—each gray plastic, covered in gray fuzz on one side, with a small charm wired in place. “Fishy,” he said, handing her the small pearly blue-and-green fish; “raven,” the pewter bird; “bear,” a tiny brown teddy bear. “It’s supposed to be a Maine black bear, but this was all they had,” he says apologetically. “So here’s the dealio; I was trying to think of what I could get for your birthday that would mean something, not just the usual Barbie crap. And I was thinking—you and me are Indian. Your mom’s not, but we are. And I’ve always liked Indian symbols. Know what a symbol is?”
She shook her head.
“Shit that stands for shit. So let’s see if I remember this right.” Sitting on the bed, he plucked the bird card out of her hand, turning it around in his fingers. “Okay, this guy is magic. He’ll protect you from bad spells and other kinds of weirdness you might not even be aware of.” Carefully he detached the small charm from its plastic card, unwinding the wire ties and placing the bird on her bedside table. Then he picked up the teddy bear. “This fierce animal is a protector.”
She laughed.
“No, really. It may not look like it, but appearances can be deceiving. This dude is a fearless spirit. And with that fearless spirit, he signals bravery to those who require it.” He freed the bear from the card and set it on the table next to the bird.
“All right. Now the fish. This one might be the best of all. It gives you the power to resist other people’s magic. How cool is that?”
She thought for a moment. “But how is that different from bad spells?”
He took the wire off the card and set the fish beside the other charms, lining them up carefully with his finger. “Very good question. You’re half asleep and still sharper than most people when they’re wide-awake. Okay, I can see how it sounds the same. But the difference is important, so pay attention.”
She sat up straighter.
“Somebody else’s magic might not be bad spells. It might be stuff that looks real good and sounds real nice. It might be—oh, I don’t know—somebody trying to convince you to do something you know you shouldn’t do. Like smoke cigarettes.”
“Yuck. I’d never do that.”
“Right. But maybe it’s something that’s not so yucky, like taking a candy bar from the Mini-Mart without paying.”
“But Mommy works there.”
“Yeah, she does, but even if she didn’t, you know it’s wrong to steal a candy bar, right? But maybe this person has a lot of magic and is very convincing. ‘Oh, come on, Moll, you won’t get caught,’” he says in a gruff whisper, “‘don’t you love candy, don’t you want some, come on, just one time?’” Picking up the fish, he talks in a stern fishy voice: “‘No, thank you! I know what you’re up to. You are not putting your magic on me, no sir, I will swim right away from you, y’hear? Okay, bye now.’” He turned the charm around and made a wave with his hand, up and down.
Feeling around in the bag, he said, “Aw, shit. I meant to get you a chain to clip these on.” He patted her knee. “Don’t worry about it. That’ll be part two.”
Two weeks later, coming home late one night, he lost control of his car, and that was that. Within six months, Molly was living somewhere else. It was years before she bought herself that chain.