The fall of the year is upon us again and that mean it is time for Solomon’s Secret! In 2012 the longstanding drama of Solomon Osborne’s tale of escape from The Trail of Tears was absent from the lineup of the Golden Delicious Festival and it’s celebrants due to illness.
This story is based on overcoming hardship and the love of family for each other and their love for their home-no matter where that home may be at the time. The Cherokee Indians were moved to Oklahoma as a people on the Trail of Tears in 1838. Several of our ancestors here in Clay County made their way to West Virginia to avoid this move. Solomon was one of them and the play tells his family’s story.
Many of the children of the people who hid from the Trail of Tears were told to hide their heritage from their friends and neighbors. If they were taught the ways of the Cherokee it was behind closed doors or up the hollows as they were never quite sure whether the United States Government had realized they were not where they should be. And they could not ever really be sure that someone from the government would not show up to force them to move to the reservation. They slowly joined the white society, and when they did they introduced themselves as white men. This went on for generations even in the 1960’s my own father was not keen on anyone knowing we had Indian blood. He taught us all how to count in Cherokee though and how to walk in a straight line through the woods “like the Indians”.
All of this hiding caused great pain to some and it meant that others would not ever see family that they left behind again. Many and more Cherokee would die without ever reaching the Oklahoma Reservation. Solomon’s Osborne’s wife, Seaberry was a born again Christian but she was buried on Twenty Mile Creek in the Indian way of not telling her gravesite, at her own request.
There is still much illness and there is grief in the Solomon’s Secret Family with the loss of cast members but they have decided that the show must go on. Performances will be given on Saturday September 14th, Friday and Saturday, September, 20th and 21st, and Saturday, September 28 at the JG Bradley Campground. Performances begin at 8:00 p.m. each night and admission is $8.00, children under 5 are free. Please bring a chair and join us for a performance!
