“My son,” she says, “your father was not a good husband, but that was not because I feared him or the things he did. Even when he was drunk, he never lost his gentle nature. Our marriage could not last because he cared so much about other things that there seemed to be no space in his life for his family. Now it seems he is a better father than he was back then. I have heard how devoted he is to your half sister. And if he has shared these . . . markings . . . with you, I do not believe that he intends any harm. I believe he is trying to be a father to you as well.”

I nod my head. My eyes are moist. “That is what I believe, too,” I say, my voice a little choked as I do so.

“Osdadu,” my mother says. “Good.” She taps her finger on the paper that lies on the table between us but has not come between us. “Now tell me about these markings.”

“Gahgayyouee, Etsi!” I say. “I love you, mother.” And then, like a stream that was dammed and has finally broken through, my words spill out so fast I can hardly stop talking. I share with her my father’s belief in the importance of writing and reading our own language. I explain how each design stands for a sound in our language just like the English alphabet. How my little sister, Ahyokah, is helping my father. How I have become determined to help him, too. I tell her how I have managed to convince my friend Yugi that it is not witchcraft. But there are still so many of our people who do not understand, who think my father, Sequoyah, is insane or doing evil magic.

And that is why I have come to her.

“Nothing good,” I say, “can ever be done among our people if our mothers do not understand and help us,” I say.

I’ve probably said too much. For one, my mother, intelligent as she is, has never been interested in reading and writing English.

“All those sounds in English are so strange,” she has said in the past. “I can speak some of their words, but those scratches like little insects on their talking leaves look too hard to learn for an old woman like me.”

So my comparing my father’s writing to the English alphabet probably meant nothing to her. But the look on my mother’s face is not one of confusion. There is agreement in her eyes that I should try to follow my father’s path. She believes—because I believe it—that his work can bring good to our Tsalagi people! And there is also this other look on her face that I know very well. She is looking up at the ceiling—not to see what is up there, but because she is making a plan.