Discovering the magic of the Wichahpi Wall, a Trail of Tears memorial

An alert pings on my friend Amy’s phone as we march through the Alabama countryside on a warm spring day. She scans it, then abruptly stops.

“Someone read my Facebook post about our hike and said we must stop and see this wall,” she says.

See a wall? That doesn’t sound the least bit enticing to me. For the past two weeks we’ve been hiking along the Natchez Trace, a parkway and National Scenic Trail stretching 444 miles through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. The scenery is gorgeous, and the path is loaded with historical sites. Why stop to see some wall?

But Amy’s already googling it, and says it definitely sounds worthy of a visit. The Wichahpi Commemorative Stone Wall, as it’s formally known, was built by Alabamian Tom Hendrix to honor his great-great-grandmother, Te-lah-nay, a member of the Yuchi tribe. Te-lah-nay and her sister were removed from their home along the Tennessee River in the 1830s as part of the Trail of Tears, a forced migration of some 60,000 Native Americans to designated “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River.

Te-lah-nay’s sister was content to stay in Oklahoma, where they eventually landed. But Te-lah-nay was not. She ached to be back near the Tennessee, which the Yuchi dubbed the Singing River because they believed a woman lived in its waters and sang beautiful songs to them. Here in Oklahoma, all of the rivers were depressingly silent.

So one day, Te-lah-nay snuck away and headed home. Five years and 600 miles later, after enduring many hardships, she reached the Singing River, where she remained for the rest of her life.

Inspired by his great-great-grandmother’s life, and a recurring dream in which an Indian woman appeared to be encouraging him to tell Te-lah-nay’s story, Hendrix decided to build a stone wall in her honor.

For the next 30 years, Hendrix hauled some 9 million pounds of stone to the woods surrounding his home, eventually constructing the nation’s largest unmortared wall. Today the Wichahpi Wall is registered in the Library of Congress and considered a prime example of environmental art. It’s also the world’s largest memorial to a Native American woman.

After learning this impressive story, I’m now eager to visit the milelong structure. A plus: It sits just off the Natchez Trace Parkway in the northwestern corner of Alabama. It’s open daily from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

During my visit, I slowly walk between its two parallel stone walls, which range in height from 4 to 6 feet. In one spot, a jumble of stones appear to have faces naturally chiseled into them. Do they represent the Native Americans who died along the Trail of Tears? There’s a prayer circle in another area, carved owls sitting on a stone bench and a smattering of mementos that visitors have left behind. But what does it all mean?

Back home, I’m nagged by the feeling that there’s so much more about this place I should know. Since Tom Hendrix is deceased, I contact his son, Trace Hendrix, who is now caretaker of the Wichahpi Wall and a weekend docent.

Trace begins spewing facts. People have visited the Wichahpi Wall from all 50 states and well over 100 countries, including Tibet. He once hosted more than 300 people in a single day. The wall is featured in the documentary “Muscle Shoals,” and after Rosanne Cash visited, she put the wall in her song “A Feather’s Not a Bird.”

It was a Lakota medicine man, Trace says, who inserted into the wall the stones that appear to be faces. The stones represent Native American ancestors, and face west to ward off bad spirits. He also placed sacred medicines into the Wichahpi Wall to make it a spiritually and physically healing place.

After this recitation of facts, Trace starts telling intriguing stories of the Wichahpi Wall’s deep impact on visitors. Some feel a strong, enveloping force throughout, while others feel cool air where the wall has been blessed, followed by a feeling of euphoria. Others find their hair standing on end.

A Choctaw couple once visited as a means of reclaiming their Native American heritage. The man stepped into the prayer circle and let out a cry, so his wife followed. Soon both were weeping, saying they felt reborn.

“They said, ‘This place is incredible, this is beyond description,’” Trace says. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I hear that a lot.’”

Both Trace and his father witnessed numerous military veterans exploring the site, often tucking their Purple Hearts and other awards between the stones. One man visited weekly for several months, walking walk back and forth with his hands outstretched, sometimes with his eyes partially closed.

One day he pulled a rock out of his pocket and placed it in Trace’s palm, saying he’d picked it up in the South China Sea during his first tour in Vietnam. The rock represented all of the trauma he’d brought home with him.

“He said, ‘Coming here has given me back what I had before I left to go to Vietnam,’” Trace recalls. The veteran instructed Trace to place the rock somewhere in the wall.

And Trace has an incredible story of his own. A few years ago, he frequented the prayer circle with his daughter, a four-time cancer survivor who was told she’d never have children. One day, Trace felt Te-lah-nay tell him his daughter would have a son, born around Christmas. And she did, giving birth to a boy 32 minutes before Christmas dawned.

After speaking with Trace, I vow to return to the Wichahpi Wall. And when I do, I’ll take Trace’s advice.

“You have to gaze upon the wall with your Third Eye, which is the heart,” he says. “Open yourself up to what’s there, and you will feel things you’ve never felt before.”