I bite my lip. So many thoughts are going through my mind now. What if, no matter what my father says or does, he is not able to convince Agili? Agili may be my father’s cousin, but he is still the village chief. I do not think that Agili believes my father’s work is black magic. At least I hope that is so. But what if Agili decides that my father’s work is false and foolish, or that my father really is crazy or, worse, that Sequoyah is just trying to deceive him? What if he decides to banish my father from our village and sends him back to Arkansas? What will I do then?

But my father does not look worried at all. He had not expected to win a victory that easily.

“No,” my father says, “I do not remember what I have written. And these marks stand for the sounds of our talking. Those marks make different words depending on where I place them.”

Agili looks confused.

My father sees that confusion, but it still does not trouble him. “I have a better way to show you how this works.” He looks back at us. “Ahyokah,” he says.

My little sister shoots up from her seat on the other side of our table like a partridge bursting out of a tree when someone gets too close. She skips to my father’s side, her eyes shining with excitement. She knows what she is about to be asked to do.

My father picks up the page on which the eighty-six marks of the syllabary are written. “Read this for your uncle,” he says.

Ahyokah takes the page firmly in both of her small hands, straightens her back, takes a deep breath, and begins to read.

“A, Ga, Ka, Ha . . .”

She reads them rapidly, but speaks each sound clearly and well. When she reaches the end, my father pats her on the shoulder.

“Now read it one more time. But start at the bottom. Then your uncle may hear that it is just the same.”

Ahyokah presses her lips together, nods, and recites the list of syllables yet again, starting at the end of the list.

“Yv, wv, tsv, tlv . . .”

Again, she speaks every one of the eighty-six marks without a mistake.

“Yah!” Agili says when she is done. There is surprise in his voice. “That is interesting, indeed. But what was she saying? I could not understand. Was it another language? That sounded like Muskogee.”

Sequoyah shakes his head. “No, my cousin. It is our language. But it is not our words. It is our sounds. You just need to put them together. Now look.”

My father writes out three of those signs on a blank page, carefully pointing to each one with the stem of his long pipe before he writes it.

“Read this,” he says to Ahyokah.

“,” she says without a moment’s pause. Tsalagi.

“Ah,” Agili says, nodding, “perhaps I see.”