Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

By Tiya Miles (University of California Press, 2005)

“Being in possession of a few Black People and being crost in my affections, I debased myself and took one of my black women by the name of Doll, by her I have had these children named as follows...” So begins an 1824 petition by a Cherokee man named Shoe Boots, requesting tribal membership for his and Doll’s Afro-Cherokee children. In this book, Tiya Miles reconstructs Doll’s biography, nothing less than a prism on nineteenth-century America.

Race was complex among the Cherokees. The tribe had mixed-race and full-blood factions, free black members, traditional forms of captivity, and African slaves purchased from slave-traders — like Doll. Shoe Boots, a full-blood Cherokee, bought her as a maid for his first wife (the one who “crost” him in love), a white Kentucky teenager he kidnapped in 1793 and allowed to return home a decade later with their children. Doll, however, remained among the Cherokees, sharing their fortunes during several turbulent decades, and joining their deportation from Georgia in 1838, the Trail of Tears. Outliving both Shoe Boots and a later owner, she died in 1860, a free woman and landowner in Oklahoma.

Miles tells Doll’s story with care and simplicity. Sometimes frustrated by the opaqueness of Doll’s inner life, she reaches for analogies in other slave narratives, as well as (less effectively) in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She is at her best in close readings of the few available documents, such as an account of Doll sitting next to Shoe Boots at the dinner table, which Miles points out a traditional Cherokee wife would never do. Miles ends the book with Doll’s “Negro” descendents’ frustrated attempts to establish Cherokee citizenship, framing her story in contemporary struggles over authentic Native American identity. Along with a fascinating biography, this book offers an utterly original angle on American history itself.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.

Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey

By Philip Lutgendorf (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Primates are our animal cousins, but most of us know them only on a photo-album basis. In India, people and monkeys live cheek by jowl, and relations are strained. Monkeys are dirty, aggressive pests, pelting pedestrians with nuts and climbing into open windows to grab anything not nailed down. Yet one of the subcontinent’s most beloved divinities is the monkey-god Hanuman. The hero Rama’s sidekick in the national epic Ramayana, Hanuman is revered in his own right in temples and household shrines throughout India.

Philip Lutgendorf, professor of Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, has written a fascinating study of Hanuman. Unlike traditional scholars of Hinduism who focused on theological texts, Lutgendorf is interested in everyday religious experience, where so-called “minor gods” such as Hanuman often loom larger than major ones (such as Shiva and Vishnu). Lutgendorf pursues the monkey-god through religious practice but also films, television, comics, and the garish Technicolor prints that small businesses distribute as complimentary wall-calendars. (One of these adorns the book’s cover.) He also includes Hanuman’s biography from popular legend, analyzing the many variants of each episode. According to one version, when the infant Hanuman decides to swallow the sun, the earth is cast into darkness until he coughs it up. In another version, he swallows it and is destroyed, but the gods reassemble him from tiny pieces, and in a third he puts it in his mouth but spits it out because it tastes like meat and he is a vegetarian. (His powers extend to his monkey-mother, who destroys a mountain with a jet of breast-milk.) At times, Hanuman seems an Indian version of Godzilla, a fearsome, destructive, but lovable creature, blurring the boundary between animals, humans and gods. Hanuman’s Tale brings him in his many forms to a western audience.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.