Even though I was very young then, I remember my father’s soft voice telling that story. It was not long after he told it that he left us when my mother ended their marriage.

I wish I had heard more of his stories, stories that I am sure he has told the daughter he had with my stepmother, Sally Guess. The thought of him telling her stories instead of me makes me feel sad—and also jealous of this half sister I’ve only seen but never met.

Next to the house is my stepmother’s store. Sally Guess has run it by herself for several years. Until he lost interest in it, my father worked there with her. Sequoyah was known by everyone as a friendly trader who would trust people and give them credit. He kept track of everything in a book. Because he never wished to learn to write English, he drew a sketch of each customer and then made little marks—circles and lines of different sizes—to indicate how much they owed him.

Storekeeping was something he had learned from his mother when he was a boy in Taskigee. Taskigee was one of our biggest and most important upper towns, located north and east of here on the Little Tennessee River. This was before the white men came and burned Taskigee, before our people were forced to give up our upper towns and move here. It was at Taskigee that my grandmother had met the white man named Guess who is said to have been my grandfather. I have heard that it was a brief romance, and he moved on without knowing that she would give birth to his son nine months later. I know little about him except that some say he was a soldier and others that he was a traveling trader. All he left behind him was the white name that my father has always used. George Guess.

I never met my grandmother,Wuhteh. She left this life and went to the Darkening Land before I was born. But I feel as if I know her from what my mother shared with me about her.

My mother told me about my grandmother six years ago, not long after my father left us. We were outside, sitting next to the fire, and she was making stew from the squirrels I’d shot with my blowgun. Even then, at the age of eight, I was putting Uncle Red Bird’s lessons about hunting into practice.

“Wuhteh, your father’s mother,” my mother said as she stirred the pot, “she was a true Tsalagi woman, strong and independent.”

I remember smiling when my mother said that because she might as well have been describing herself. Even as a small child, I knew how strong my mother was.