Cherokee Names

In the economic circumstances of my childhood, I might have envied many things. I suppose I did, but there was nothing I wanted as much as a family. After my grandfather died, I had a conversation with my grandmother in which she warned me that she was unlikely to live to see me graduate high school. I could not break the news that I did not expect to graduate high school, but I took her point.

My elderly grandparents did the best they could with their limited resources and the years they had left, but I lived in the shadow of the cold fact that they would be gone before I was educated and I would be alone, my only inheritance their constant reassurance that I was smart and I could make something of myself.

While that reassurance conflicted with virtually all of the feedback I got elsewhere, it turned out to be an inheritance of such value that I wanted to pass it on. Still do. That’s why my recent cancer diagnosis kick started a choice to spend the last months of my life writing about how I managed my material and emotional needs. Both of those accomplishments seem improbable without the legacy from the elders named Russell.

In their honor, the name I wished to pass on when I got a family became Russell. By the end of my Air Force hitch, I had decided I was unlikely to disgrace the name, and my Cherokee father was Cherokee only when convenient. He had taught me little besides the meaning of “useless as the teats on a boar hog.” I carried nothing from him but the name Teehee and possibly a gene for schizophrenia.