Free THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT by Sarah Vowell Page A

In that picture, Columbia, the barely dressed mythological female representation of America, floats west over the prairie, stringing telegraph wire as a train, stagecoach, and various settlers also head to the Pacific beneath her. The man couldn’t have been more pleased, swooning over the little covered wagon, the little farmer plowing, the Brooklyn Bridge near the eastern edge, the quivering Indians looking over their shoulders in fear. He was smiling as I took his credit card, told me he was going to hang it over his breakfast table. Personally, I wouldn’t want to look at those shivering Indians as I munched my corn flakes. Why wake up to original sin? The only picture I can see from my breakfast table is a strategically placed snapshot of my baby nephew taking a nap with a puppy.
    In his Manhattan gallery, I once watched Graham show a sixteenth-century book to one his favorite clients. The book was filled with beautiful engravings depicting the natives of the English colonies. “So this was the beginning,” Graham says. “This volume was from the voyage that John White took in 1585, and it was published in Frankfurt in 1590, and it really is the first image that Europeans had of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws.” He turns a page, pointing. “That’s how they had smoked alligator and lizard. Here’s how they caught the deer. Look at that. That’s cool.”
    And it is cool. It’s a lovely book. It is exciting to see the first image of the Cherokees. But the other voice in my head keeps saying, “Trail of Tears, Trail of Tears, Trail of Tears.” There’s something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving—an old map—for another—American money. What could be more perfect than someone paying for that book with all the Cherokees with a big fat roll of twenty-dollar bills, exchanging the graven images of Andrew Jackson, Mr. Trail of Tears himself, for the story of the tribe he sought to destroy?
    The hardest part about working around all those ambiguous American artifacts was biting my tongue. I would be showing a client an early map of South Carolina, and he would be looking for his hometown or talking about color and out loud I would say, “Hmm, delightful,” but my brain would be droning, “Slave state.” I couldn’t believe someone would want to hang that on his wall, though now that I think about it, the man probably looks at that map all the time and the only thing it reminds him of is how he really should call his mom.
    I could have filled a history book with things I couldn’t say to the buyers. I couldn’t tell the bird-watcher beaming at Audubon that Audubon had to shoot a lot of those birds to paint them. Or tell the couple admiring the Bodmer lithograph of the Mandan ceremonial dog dancer that the guy in the picture was probably dead soon after he posed because smallpox wiped out 90 percent of his tribe. Or tell the fellow spending all afternoon deciding whether or not to buy Catlin’s buffalo hunt picture for his office that in Catlin’s first letter about the natives he was drawing he wrote that the “means of their death and destruction have been introduced and visited upon them by acquisitive white men.” Can I wrap that up for you, sir?
    Graham Arader’s America is a prettier picture than mine. And he believes in it. That is why, as he would say, he is the best, the finest, the most successful antiquarian map dealer in the history of the world. His is an easier picture to sell. But it’s also a lovelier, less sarcastic one to buy. I want to buy it. I like the telegraph and the railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge. Graham’s map of America has an elementary school quality that I admire. How many times have I wished to go back there, to live once more in the country I thought I lived in as I stood on the stage of the second-grade Thanksgiving pageant, singing “This Land Is Your Land” in a cardboard turkey suit?
    I think the reason I wasn’t cut out to be a good