Author Stan Rice has just published the third of three novels (Edd’s Land) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This third novel is about four Cherokee brothers in early Oklahoma.
Here is Rice's summary from Kindle:
Four mixed-blood Cherokee brothers, and the white swindler who steals their land and oil allotments, greet Oklahoma statehood in different ways. Edd Hicks loses not just his land but his fiancée to Averd Hargrove, a Claremore banker. Edd remains confident and upright, and brings order to his farmland and family. Frank Hicks learns confidence as he plots his dramatic revenge against Hargrove. Lon Hicks leaves his past behind in pursuit of a failed Hollywood career. William Hicks is ill with tuberculosis when he meets the great Oklahoma socialist crusader Kate Barnard. Frank, to the disapproval of his racist family and friends, falls in love and moves in with Bert Hicks, a black woman descended from slaves owned by Frank’s ancestors. Frank nearly gives up on his plan to scalp Hargrove until he sees Hargrove leading a lynch mob against Bert’s brother. The net effect of the vast wealth of the former Cherokee Nation is that Edd’s daughter Nina finally gets enough money back from the United States government to buy a new pair of shoes.
One very minor part of Rice’s novel is that the fundamentalist Christian Edd Hicks invites the famous Bible-thumper Billy Sunday to lunch, with Stella’s famous fried chicken. Also present is Edd’s traditional-Cherokee religion brother Frank. Inevitably, they get into a discussion about Frank’s inability to see his way to accepting Edd’s and Billy’s version of Christianity.
Many fundamentalists are just itching for a fight. They want to pounce on you and order God to send you to Hell. Not all fundamentalists, but, I know some and so do you. But this is not the kind of fundamentalist that Edd (or, in Rice’s novel, Billy Sunday) is. One minor part of their pre-dinner discussion is, of all things, about the value of pi. Pi is the mathematical ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.
In case you thought the Bible has nothing to say about the value of pi, well, you would be wrong. Mathematicians know that it is 3.14159… with an infinite number of unpredictable digits. Most of us round it off to 3.1416. This is easy for me to remember because my daughter got married on pi-day: March 14, 2016. Or maybe I remember her marriage date because of pi. Whatever. But the Old Testament says that the Temple of Solomon had a big round basin of water that was three cubits wide and ten cubits in circumference. In the novel, Frank uses this as evidence that the Bible teaches that pi is ten divided by three, which is 3.33, and therefore the Bible is wrong.
What happens next is kind of funny, and illustrates one aspect of Bible-science discussions. Edd says the Bible teaches that pi is three. And it is! To one significant figure, that is. As Edd explains to his brother, the Bible is accurate, but not always precise. The Bible, says Edd, is only as precise as it needs to be for its purposes.
And besides, the Old Testament did not say the basin was circular, but just that it was round.
That pretty much shut Frank up. And this might shut some of the rest of us up who have better things to do than to argue about scientific details from the Bible.
This, however, is simply not good enough for some fundamentalists, including many whom I have known. The Bible, they claim, is correct in every possible way. When the Bible says the Earth does not move, that does not simply mean that it does not move relative to us. It means that it does not move at all, relative to anything. When it says the Flood covered the highest mountains, it means Mt. Everest, not just the local hills in Mesopotamia. When it says that Jacob’s sheep had striped and mottled offspring because they looked at a striped and mottled wall, then that is exactly what it means. Fundamentalists build their entire world of astronomy, geology, and genetics based on an interpretation of the Bible as literal as they can make it.
Though I do not agree with it, I prefer Edd’s version of fundamentalism.
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