Grandmother Corntassel from the rolling Cherokee woods had known seventeen summers when she married John Bradley, grandson of an immigrant from Yorkshire to Virginia. When I was young I thought all ancestors lost,* shadows on a dusty cart-path that decades effaced and centuries built over. But are they not here, encircling uslike we are the spirits they summoned, and is this not their dust on our soles? Ancestors may even be tricksters, laughing at our fresh feet in the corpse-soil, our fresh eyes on the old stars, our fresh fears in the anxious human-harassed world where they fucked and sang their way through things […]