The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

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      Also by Tiya Miles

      The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story

      Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

      The Cherokee Rose

      A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts

      Tiya Miles

      John F. Blair, Publisher

      Winston-Salem, North Carolina

      John F. Blair,

      P u b l i s h e r

      1406 Plaza Drive

      Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103

      www.blairpub.com

      Copyright © 2015 by Tiya Miles

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, address John F. Blair, Publisher, Subsidiary Rights Department, 1406 Plaza Drive, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103.

      Excerpt from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker. Copyright © 1983 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Miles, Tiya, 1970-

      The Cherokee rose : a novel of gardens and ghosts / by Tiya Miles.

      pages ; cm

      ISBN 978-0-89587-635-5 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-89587-636-2 (ebook) 1. Cherokee Indians—Georgia—History—19th century—Fiction. 2. Plantations—Georgia—Spring Place—History—19th century—Fiction. 3. Plantation life—Georgia—Spring Place—History—19th century—Fiction. 4. Chief Vann House (Spring Place, Ga.)—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3613.I532243C48 2015

      813’.6—dc23

      2014040639

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      In memory of

      Peggy Pascoe, Josie Fowler, and Helen Hill:

      dewdrops from the sky”

      For my sisters and our daughters:

      Erin Miles, Stephanie Iron Shooter, Maryanna Rose Gone, Nali Azure Gone, Noa Alice Gone, Baylee Rain Iron Shooter, and those yet to come

      Contents

      Prologue: Dust to Dust

      Part I: Our Mothers’ Gardens

      Part II: Talking Leaves

      Part III: The Three Sisters

      Epilogue: The Song of the House

      Author’s Note

      “The Cherokee were driven from their homelands in North Carolina and Georgia over 100 years ago when gold was discovered in their lands. The journey [was] known as the ‘Trail of Tears.’ It was a terrible time for the people—many died from the hardships and the women wept. The old men knew the women must be strong to help the children survive so they called upon the Great One to help their people and to give the mothers strength. The Great One caused a plant to spring up everywhere a Mother’s tears had fallen upon the ground.”

      “The Legend of the Cherokee Rose,”

      Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource Center,

      Tahlequah, Oklahoma

      “We don’t just live in a house, but with it. The houses and rooms in which we live and lived stay with us. Hopes and dreams are buried in them, as are cries of love and the bruises of violence.”

      Joy Harjo, “The Song of the House in the House,”

      A Map to the Next World

      Prologue

      Dust to Dust

      She failed to heed the warning when the men began to dig in the Strangers’ Graveyard on the outskirts of town. Negroes were buried there, and Indians, too, and Indians who were mistaken for Negroes. The man with hard, iron eyes and hair the color of river sand was the first to break ground. Wielding his blunt-edged shovel like a knife, he tore into the tender earth, displacing soil and sediment heap by heap. He was the leader, the master, the maker. The others simply followed, plunging into the people’s bones with lock-jawed excavation machines.

      The Strangers’ Graveyard had rested in peace for more than a century, floating out of place and time. It had been forgotten, an island of brambles and spindly trees, except by those who cared for it and those who cared nothing for it. Once, many years ago, the graveyard trees were sentries with bottles of colorful spun glass suspended from their branches. But now their powers of protection were lost, and the burial ground lay naked. It was open land, good land, valuable land in the sand man’s eyes.

      Trucks dumped mounds of dirt into adjacent refuse piles, the faded bones of human remains churning beneath the wheels. A collarbone, bleached and brittle. A skull with sunken sockets for eyes. The far-flung skeleton of a small slave child. The sand man, unperturbed, instructed his crew to lay a foundation. While workmen mixed thick cement and cut the flesh of trees to size, the man began to prowl and prod the vast perimeter of his property. His daily walks spread farther and wider until he reached the line. He eyed the river and the cane beyond his acreage, the hill and sun-kissed fields. On the day his crewmen poured cement on the site of the gutted burial ground, the sand man crossed the border and entered the dwelling place. He strode the Cherokee Rose Plantation, land not his own, grasping a shovel and brittle map, stomping white roses to force a pathway.

      She had crossed a border, too. She had crossed the bridge. Watching him closely from beside the attic dormer, she peered down the slope of the overgrown hillside. Beyond the graceful brick façade and covered rear veranda, beyond the yard where slaves had toiled and medicinal plants had grown, lay buried the dreams of her foremothers. The sand man consulted his map, shifted his shovel, and plunged it into the ground. She feared the worst. Matricide. A way must be found to gather descendants—bone of her mothers’ bone, flesh of her mothers’ spirit. To call upon them—the ones who came later and had no memory—to know and protect the past.

      Dust motes floated like cottonwood spores in the dappled sunlight around her. She breathed softly against the house and felt the attic walls expand. Reaching for the brass latch that sealed the half-moon window shut, she turned its rigid thumb and pushed. Warm, sky-born air sprang into the garret. The dust of two hundred years flew into a shifting wind.

      Part I

      Our Mothers’ Gardens

      “I began to look about me and saw instead the most beautiful roses I ever beheld, another of these exquisite southern flowers—the Cherokee rose. The blossom is very large, composed of four or five pure white petals, as white and as large as those of the finest Camellia, with a bright golden eye for a focus.”

      Frances Anne Kemble,

      Journal of a Residence on a

      Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839

      1

      Jinx Micco walked the path to her Craftsman cottage, breathing a sigh of false relief. After work, when she could be alone with her thoughts, used to be her favorite time of day. But that had changed with the column. She fumbled in her messenger bag for her keys, ignoring the ugly garden beds beside the doorway. If her Great-Aunt Angie had still been tending them, the beds would have brimmed this time of year with long-lashed black-eyed Susans and heavy-headed sunflowers. Nothing grew in those old plots now except for the odd clump of scrub grass, which