“Now come with me,” he says. He leans forward, resting his weight on his one good leg, and then rises from his chair in one easy motion. As always, despite his disability, there is such grace in everything my father does.

We go down the stairs together and walk the few paces across the yard that it takes to reach his unused smithy.

Is he going to teach me something about blacksmithing? I’m so excited that I find myself biting my lower lip.

He ducks his head to enter the low building, and I follow close behind.

“You know,” Sequoyah says, picking up a hammer, “we are surrounded by the white men. Everywhere we look we see them and we think we have to copy them. We have to be like them to survive. Is that not what people say?”

“That is so,” I agree.

“That is what I thought, also. So I learned the things they know. I traded as they trade. I learned to work metal the way they do. And I made things that were of use. Like this.” He turns the hammer so that I can see the handle. “And then I marked them this way.”

I read the words carved in English into the hickory-wood handle.

GEORGE GUESS.

My father puts his finger on those words.

“Your name,” I say.

“That is my name as the white men would have it,” he replies. “I learned how to write that name from my friend Charles Hicks, the one who is now the head of Willstown.”

He passes the hammer to me, and I heft it in my hands. It fits my palm perfectly, and it feels good. It is so solid and perfectly balanced a tool that it seems to be speaking to me, begging to be used, ready to be of service.

“I should put my name on each thing I make. That is what my friend Charles told me. Then everyone will know who the maker is. When they want something like that, they know who to ask to make it. And his words were wise. It happened just that way. Soon many people were coming to ask me to make hammers and other useful tools such as this.”

He picks up a knife and hands it to me. I put down the hammer on top of an anvil and take the knife. It, too, is marked with his English name. It feels even better in my hand than the hammer did. This knife is so well made that it balances in my hand perfectly. I observe the way it has been sharpened, not as the white men do, but in our Tsalagi way. Rather than honing both edges on the cutting side of a knife, we only sharpen one.