Secret Fox: A Nineteenth Century Indian in West Virginia (Final Research Phase)
My name is Secret Fox Burden. I just turned 18 and am about to be married. It’s 1866. The Civil War has just ended and our men are still returning home. I have been hidden for most of my youth, no school, only family and friends even knew I existed. My family has a secret even I didn’t know and I’m at the heart of it. My father, John, was a light-skinned mullato in Buchannon in the new state of West Virginia. He died in the war fighting against the Confederates in guerilla raids nearby. My mother, Delilah Male, is also mullato and struggling to make ends meet renting out the two back rooms to freed colored men and women working in the nearby timber mill.
My family’s history began to unfold as my mother told me this secret on my wedding day. I am not mullato, not black. I’m Indian? I don’t even really know what that means. Does that mean the “whoop-whoop” feather in hair kind of Indians, the villains the army is dealing with in the Dakotas? My journey through this secret becomes more dangerous when my husband, a well-meaning colored saw operator, joked about his “squaw” at work. Everyone heard him and that’s when my real problems began. Jokes became harassment became violence. I began digging into my history and found more secrets in their hidden native lineage. I stepped into the stories of my grandparents, stories of Indian removal, race and racism, and white Indian-hunter hero worship. What do you do when you shouldn’t exist? What do you do when you can’t hide that you don’t fit in?
Set in turbulent mid-nineteenth century Appalachia, this novel delves into the crisis in one woman’s life uncovering the mysteries of her family. Her identity threatened to destroy the uneasy peace in a small industrializing rural town. Despite her anger and fear, she faces the uneasy past at a time of racial, geographic, political and economic upheaval.
