Pile-Up on Tobacco Road

November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.

My father, whose ancestors vanquished Native Americans from the Virginia shore all the way back to Texas, slaved miserably for decades in a shipyard, just a short drive away from a wealthy and world-famous casino started by the Pequot tribe. I like to call that King Philip’s Revenge.

He was to have two grandchildren who were part Pequot, whom he didn’t get to know, because he was killed by Madison Avenue driven consumption of a Native American product called tobacco. I call that one Chief Powhatan’s Revenge…

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October 3, 2003.

I was lucky on two counts when the call came: 1) my bags were already packed and under my desk; and 2) the call came before I left work. I was separated from my wife then, and every Friday night, I’d bolt to the Port Authority bus station and hop on a coach which would take me upstate to visit my kids. By upstate I don’t mean Sing-Sing. Plenty of time for that later. At the moment, their mom was in grad school at Cornell so I would get on this bus that would take me through the beautiful Catskill mountains, land of Thomas Cole, Rip Van Winkle, and James Fenimore Cooper (and thus the Mahicans), and then Northwest to the college town of Ithaca, at the base of the Finger Lakes where I would spend the weekend. Every weekend.

And you know, in those days, we were supposed to always be packed, anyway. It was two years after September 11, and those were the days of Go Bags. You were supposed to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice with all the underwear and road maps and duct tape you might require as you fled New York City. Nowadays I think the authorities would take one look at all that stuff in a bag and think you had a Murder Kit there, but back then they were telling you to pack this stuff. But like I say, my valise, my grip, my portmanteau was not for outrunning Armageddon, or kidnapping women at truckstops, it was just for visitation. Visiting children upstate thankfully not in prison.

And so when the call came that my father was shortly to be drawing his last breath, I was prepared. Not for that, but I was prepared in a more general way, for any type of emergency. All I needed to do this time was grab my bags — and go in a different direction.

My father had been drawing his last breaths for about six months by that time, so I didn’t know how seriously to take this news. He was a bit of a drama queen. Minor things were always exaggerated to a heroic scale. I got in the habit of taking everything he said cum granis salis. But this time he was right. His lung cancer was advanced. The end was imminent. I remained skeptical right up until I got to his deathbed, which was surrounded by relatives, and saw him.

It wasn’t pretty. Every breath was a Labor of Hercules. He couldn’t talk or even open his eyes. He had to summon every ounce of strength every few seconds to accomplish a shuddering, whistly whiny wheeze. It was agony to witness his agony. The cause was lung cancer: as advertised. He wasn’t the first in my family to die of the demon weed. My dad’s mother, an old hillbilly woman from the Smokey Mountain country had actually CHEWED tobacco, or chaw, as it was called. She took it on the sly and then spit it into coffee cans, which appalled my mother. Grandma died of mouth cancer, an equally horrible way to go because the towards the end you can’t even eat. Can’t breathe, can’t eat. What a product of perfect selfishness tobacco is.

In a way, the English and the Native Americans had collaborated to kill my father. The natives had discovered the mildly intoxicating effects of tobacco and first cultivated the plant, but it had been the English of Virginia and North Carolina who had mass produced it and created a market for it and invented insidiously efficient new delivery systems to colonize the human blood stream. The names of the brands tattle on the culprits: Raleigh, Viceroy, Kent, Marlborough, Winston, Pall Mall. These marks are the most prominently British product names in all of American culture. Cancer-like, the products these names are associated with shortly eclipsed their origins. When you hear those names now, do you ever picture the London skyline or Big Ben? No, you think of behind the counter at the convenience store.

To the Native Americans, tobacco had been a sacrament; the Europeans managed to convert it into an obscenity. The indigenous people would pass a pipe around during a tribal meeting. Each person would take ONE hit and pass it around, and that one hit was considered and had significance. The smoke was believed to contain their prayers or aspirations or thoughts or decisions, which would drift off to be heard by the spirits. Not dissimilar from the ancient Latin idea, where breath and spirit were the same word, so that inspiration and respiration come from the same root. Tobacco was also used as medicine, believed to cure everything from stomach woes to toothache. WhenJohn Rolfe and others were trying to create a European market, they too made medicinal claims for tobacco, and such claims were made by advertisers well into the 20th century. Calm, relaxation, a sense of well-being. For a while in the 1920s there were even Listerine cigarettes for curing bad breath. Gee, I wonder why that’s no longer on the market?

But ultimately, I think it’s less the principle of falsehood, than the industrialized scale of it that has done the greatest damage in the end. If consumed in the quantities and with the frequency that the Native Americans brought to it, smoking tobacco was on balance pretty harmless and even benign. Then the Europeans got a hold of it and turned it into a menace to the human race. Why share a pipe? Here: take the whole thing! As far as that goes, why refill a pipe? That could take four seconds of valuable smoking time! The way you people are doing it is very inefficient! Look, we’ll roll it in paper.

Soon each individual is smoking enough for 100 regional tribal meetings a day. It’s not just profane and irreligious but obscene in its selfishness. The industrial revolution didn’t stop at lengthening our lives. It has turned us all into Neros and Henry VIIIs. As a consequence, what should be medicine becomes poison.  We do that with everything in this country. Anyone who’s ever witnessed SantaCon can tell you that. One Santa Claus: magical. 10,000 Santa Clauses running amok through the streets of New York: a menace. Or consider all of the foodstuffs we subsidize. Like Corn. Corn comes from the Americas. Everyone knows that story about the Natives teaching the Pilgrims to grow corn so they wouldn’t starve. That’s kind of at the core of the Thanksgiving myth. Now, there’s corn syrup in EVERYTHING and America is the most obese nation on the earth. If corn syrup had come to the surface of the earth as glops from outer space like the goo in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then suddenly everyone doubled in weight, you’d consider it a real life horror movie. The alien menace must be thwarted. When the menace happens to be ourselves, we’re like “Okay, whatevs!”

Tobacco may well be the most widespread, most pernicious swindle in history (next to the various forms of totalitarianism; let’s be real). Let’s say it’s the biggest CAPITALIST swindle. The Virginia company founded Jamestown, discovered no gold, struggled for a while, and then simply created a market for a product that had NO value (other than “satisfaction”, which is a euphemism for “the absence of withdrawal symptoms”.)  At their founding, Virginia and North Carolina were actually LITERALLY narco states. We’re filled with revulsion at drug cartels in Central America. I’m at a loss to know how the earliest Southern States of the U.S. were any different, other than the fact that their drug was legal. Tobacco growers created millions of addicts, and to grow their insidious product, they relied on slavery and indentured labor. People were actually forced upon pain of death to labor their entire lives so that rich men could get richer by killing other people. That is literally what happened. Later, cotton became the main cash crop, and slavery grew worse and worse (a topic for another project and another day). But you must admit that there is a stark difference here. Massachusetts was founded as a City on a Hill. Virginia was founded as a Swamp of Despond. Those two strains have been doing battle for the soul of this nation ever since. By the 20th century the North was fully complicit as Madison Avenue hawked this pernicious product to the world.

At any rate, many of my father’s earliest American ancestors were complicit in this evil cultivation across the generations. Growers, plantation owners, overseers, merchants. But Chief Powhatan got his licks in. My father started smoking when he was eight years old; he stopped breathing when he was 68. I was there at the end, when his entire form froze, and his soul left his body, leaving him in a nightmarish pose, with his eyes rolled back into his head and his mouth agape in a yawn of terror, like the victim of a vengeful spirit. I’ll never unsee it.