How I Became a Ghost: A Choctaw Trail of Tears Story

When the story begins, we meet Isaac, who narrates the book from the first-person point of view. Isaac uses asides, usually in italicized text, to directly speak to the audience. These asides engage the reader and add clarification to things that would otherwise remain unclear. For example, Isaac says in one aside, “I didn’t know it yet, but whenever I felt a warm shiver, I was about to see something no one else could see” (7). This foreshadows Isaac’s ability to see the future and establishes a pattern that helps the reader understand what’s a vision and what’s reality; a “warm shiver” accompanies all of Isaac’s visions.

The fictional events of the novel concern the very real Trail of Tears, which claimed the lives of anywhere from 2,500-6,000 Choctaw and thousands more from other tribes during forced removal and displacement. Tingle’s use of Isaac as a narrator helps to humanize these historical events and simplifies them through a child’s perspective. The fear, upheaval, and eventual death that Isaac experiences is meant to connect to the middle-grade reader more readily than statistics and historical documents. It’s clear that Isaac doesn’t quite understand what’s happening to him and his people at the beginning of the novel, as he describes his mother and father’s conversations in overly simplistic terms. Rather than recognizing the injustice in being displaced, Isaac follows his parents’ simple order that the family will need to leave.

Tingle’s choice of narrator, a ghost who has visions of the future, helps foreshadow the novel’s tragic events in multiple ways. As Isaac is a ghost recounting his story, the readers know that he will die before the novel’s end, and the reader likely suspects that Isaac’s visions foretell multiple misfortunes for the Choctaw people. The narrative does confirm Isaac’s visions are prophetic in later sections, which increases the tension in the novel following each vision.

Tingle explores the idea of home in the scenes of the older Choctaw men and women performing their departing rituals. Isaac considers their houses to be their homes, but his mother explains to him that the land is their home. Tingle emphasizes this by the Choctaws leaving their blood on the land and in the river. As a displaced people, Tingle points out the importance of home and its connection to the Choctaws’ physical being, as symbolized by their blood. The white colonists and soldiers—here called the Nahullo—aren’t merely moving people from one house to another, they’re removing the Choctaws from a land that they consider their own “flesh and blood.” Through Isaac’s mother’s explanation, Tingle underlines the cruelty of displacing the Choctaws even before they’ve met with the tragedies that Isaac foresees.

The rituals also illustrate the Choctaws’ approach to pain and adversity:

The water was blood red, but the women showed no pain. They didn’t squeeze their faces tight, like people do when they step on a sharp stone or stub their toe against a rock. The old women started ahead like they were blind, like they saw nothing and felt nothing (10-11).

This foreshadows the pain that Isaac will experience as his story continues and how his culture suggests he overcome it.

These early chapters also touch on the relationship between the Choctaws and Nahullos. Isaac describes the Nahullos as the “other,” saying, “They were not Choctaws, like us” (3). He also explains that Treaty Talk means that the Nahullos want something. While Isaac’s first description of the Nahullos indicates that the Choctaws don’t trust them, it does not include mention of physical altercations or property damage. By limiting Isaac’s first description of the Nahullos, Tingle makes their later actions more shocking and impactful.