Uneti — Connecting the Dots

I’ve been singing a song I learned to sing in Cherokee.

My great grandfather taught it to me

A long time ago.

I never knew what the lyrics meant,

Although I felt I got a sense of 

What the song was about.

I felt a sense of connectedness

When my great grandfather sang the song,

When he taught it to me and my brothers

In his backyard 

While we played croquet.

My great grandfather was a stickball player,

And he said he and his nephews sang that song.

It was about one of our forefathers 

Who was a stickball champion, 

Long before him.

But he didn’t know much Cherokee.

The teachers at the seminary 

Wouldn’t allow his mother’s mother,

Who went to school there

In Talequah,

To speak Cherokee,

Or tell the old stories,

Or sing any Cherokee songs.

Now we play the civilized game,

But while we hit the brightly colored, striped balls

Through the wickets with our matching, 

Brightly striped mallets,

We sang a song about a man who took a hickory stick

And wrapped it with deer hide,

And made a ball filled with horsehair,

And ran a violent roughshod over

The competitors in a game as important as war,

Most similar to what we know now as lacrosse or rugby.

They said my great grandfather played football once,

But not at school.

One night when he and his friends were home

From World War One,

They got drunk and then later on,

A neighbor’s dog

Drug a dead skunk up in the yard.

They started tossing it around and throwing it at one another,

When a rowdy game of football broke out.

But on that day, we played the civilized game

Called croquet,

And the wildest thing around

Was the voice of my great grandfather singing  loud,

The praises of the great Uneti.

Sometimes this song comes back to me,

And I instantly sing it all the way through.

Usually, it’s something I do 

When I’m alone, driving in my car

Down some hilly farm to market road.

My great grandfather taught it to me

And my two brothers

Over fifty years ago,

On a beautiful day in Lindsay, Oklahoma,

While we played croquet

On the perfectly manicured green grass of his sprawling back yard lawn,

Which he still mowed himself up on Murray Hill.

I still remember all of  that song,

And as I sang it, today,

I noted the repeated phrase “Uneti.”

And today, with the capabilities of my very civilized cell phone,

I was able to look it up,

And see the definition of that word is “Freckles.”

And so I don’t know now,

If what my great grandfather taught us is true.

Maybe the song is not about a great stickball champion.

But from what I can tell,

It would be a very Cherokee thing to do,

To offer such a humble, friendly, intimate nickname 

To someone great.

Like the name we called my great grandfather: 

“Gramp,”

When he was so kind as to get out there 

And set up all that croquet game

In the hot summer day

And play along with us,

When he was over eighty years old,

And teach us a song that his mother’s mother 

Had very quietly taught to him.

But Gramp didn’t know much Cherokee.

The teachers at the seminary 

Wouldn’t allow his mother’s mother,

Who went to school there

In Talequah,

To speak her native tongue,

Or to tell the old stories of creation,

Or sing any of the Cherokee songs.

-jenn