Corn Mother: Genealogies : Part 3

Tori Amos: Piece by Piece
by Tori Amos, Ann Powers

(Page 3 of 3)

I somehow knew that this was where I had to learn and train. Poppa would talk about shape-shifting, the practice of shifting the containment of the human condition in order to open it up to other forms of consciousness. We'd take walks every day, and he would communicate the way he saw the world, which was that there was life in all things, that there was a kind of knowing in all things. Like anyone, according to Poppa, I'd have to retune my own receiving information system, in my own being, to be able to hear the unique harmonics-thereby understanding the language of the spirit world. What I do know is that he knew this language. I cannot tell you I quite understand how he did, but I watched with amazement as he would communicate with nature, and he seemed to understand it-he seemed to bask in his relationship with it.

I did not have this ability and somehow I knew I never would, but at age four I began to feel something else. I began to feel the music inhabiting me. I'd say to Poppa, "Songs are chasing me," and he would say, "Shug, slow down and let the song's stories talk to you. Tell them ya've got room around the fire for 'em and their friends. And ya listen to 'em, Shug, ya listen up now, and they'll teach ya things ain't nobody on this earth can begin to think about even tryin' to blow in those kind of trade winds." He'd say, "Don't be afraid, Shug, my grandmother Margaret Little told me the same thing when the stories started bendin' my ear as a little rascal. She'd say, 'C.C., if the stories don't knock the fire out of ya, then they just might warm that little rascal heart of yers.' " He told me from the beginning, "The stories have always come a visitin'. And the stories have always said, 'C.C., this is who we are and you'll use your own language to tell folks about us, but this is our framework.' " And he said he could see them. I have the same experience, even to this day-I can tell you how I see mine. I see the songs sometimes in light filaments. It's a light filament of architecture. The light resonates with a musical tone, but it is a definite structure. Then I translate the light structures into a musical form.

Poppa would talk to me about how there were just certain places that we are called to, all over and around the world. You can't explain it, but you just feel for whatever reason that you have access. You know when you're comfortable walking down those streets and knowing you're not going to get mugged. The place knows the codes that you carry. And your codes know the place instinctively. So point being, when Poppa was learning how to access different vortexes, he was in his power center. He'd learned the power of embracing the land from his own grandmother, who had insisted that they stay within Cherokee land, which was thousands of square miles. So her whole life she spent circling Cherokee land; that's where her turbulent yet compelling story broke away from the root, in north Georgia, north of the Cherokee capital, Echota. It's still there.

Both Nanny and Poppa inherited colorful but complicated and difficult family histories. Poppa's grandmother Margaret Little survived the Trail of Tears. In 1838 and 1839, she was hearing about the roundups of Cherokee families whereby they would be taken to internment camps. This devastation of the Cherokee and other Eastern tribes had been cemented in 1830 when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. Chief Junaluska of the Cherokee tribe pleaded with Andrew Jackson, yet even though that chief had driven his own tomahawk through the skull of a Creek warrior and saved Jackson's life at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1813, Jackson's greed for Cherokee land was stronger than any sense of debt or moral or ethical principles. The modern Cherokee Nation had founded its own constitution in 1827, after Sequoyah (also known as George Gist) had officially written down their oral constitution and official records, using a syllable-based lexicon consisting of eighty-five characters.

By 1828, the first Cherokee newspaper, the Phoenix, was publishing articles. The Cherokee people believed they had built the necessary bridges to integrate into the modern world, but white soldiers and civilians soon began to destroy everything that the Cherokee had created. Once gold was discovered near Dahlonega, Georgia, white folk exhibited a lascivious desire for Cherokee property. An ethnic cleansing that had been looming for the past two hundred years was now on Margaret Little's doorstep.

The Cherokee Phoenix was burned to the ground in 1834 because its editors were speaking out against Jackson and the Indian Removal Act, and so the oral history that Poppa passed down came from Margaret Little, who knew at sixteen that she had to flee. In Poppa's words, "Certain animals know before there is an eruption of a volcano, it's time to run for yer life. Margaret Little said, 'The white soldiers called us Indian dogs; better the instincts of a dog than a white man. That's what saved my life and why yer here eatin' up my vittles today, C.C.' "

Poppa was brought up by Margaret Little because his mother had a stroke at a very young age. Poppa only ever referred to her as Margaret Little, never Grandma Margaret, never Granny Maggie. She would tell Poppa, "Some of the older Indians would be arguin' that we should give the white man the benefit of the doubt. Now, unfortunately the ones who did ended up walkin' the excruciatin', torturous eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile walk to the dust bowl-where there were no green fields, no Corn Woman, no lakes, no mountain streams-toward what the white man called Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. That was the white man's idea of a fair trade; their 'God has given them this land', that's what they kept sayin'. Did their God have the right to give them this land? Did their God give them the right to subjugate us? Who is their God? It cannot be the one called Jesus."

Copyright © 2005 by Tori Amos.

About the Author

Tori Amos is foremost among the artists who have redefined the role of women in music in the last decade. Her piano-based music revived that instrument in rock and roll, and her complex yet accessible songs have pushed the parameters of songwriting. Since the double-platinum success of her solo debut, Little Earthquakes, in 1992, Amos's albums and tours have reached millions of listeners worldwide. She is the co-founder of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN). Her latest recording is The Beekeeper.

Ann Powers has been writing about popular music and society since the early 1980s. She is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America and co-editor of Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap. She was a pop critic for the New York Times from 1997 until 2001 and an editor for the Village Voice from 1993 until 1996. She has written for most music publications and her work has been widely anthologized. She is currently a curator at the Experience Music Project, an interactive music museum in Seattle, Washington.