My great-grandmother Mary was born on a farm outside Chicago in 1903. Her mother was Cherokee — full-blood, born on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina — and her father was an Irish-American railroad worker from outside Knoxville. Mary spoke English at home and Cherokee with her mother until her mother died of influenza in 1918. After that, Mary said, the language went too. There was no one left to speak it with.
She married my great-grandfather in 1922. They had four children. My grandmother was the youngest, born in 1934. Mary lived to be ninety-one. She died in 1994 in the same farmhouse she had been married into seventy-two years earlier. The farm is still in our family. My cousin works it now.
When I was eight years old, Mary taught me three words in Cherokee. Just three. She said she could only remember those three. She made me repeat them back to her until I had them right. They were the words for water, mother, and home. I still know them. I taught them to my own daughter, who is twelve, who has never met Mary, who looks like her in the eyes.
There is a kind of erasure that happens slowly, over generations, that no one chose and no one stopped. My great-grandmother lost a language because there was no one left to speak it with. Her daughter never learned it. Her granddaughter, my mother, never learned it. I never learned it. My daughter never will.
But I will tell her the three words. I will tell her about Mary, who was born on a farm and died on a farm and never lived more than forty miles from where she started. I will tell her she is Cherokee, even if only in fragments, and that the fragments still matter. This hex is for Mary. For water, mother, and home.