The Cherokee Rose, page 18
Beyond Mr. Hold’s home and fields, his mill at the creek, and his ferry at the river, lies a wild mountain vastness. We are sequestered at a far remove from Christian civilization. And Mr. Hold behaves like a heathen lord of his manor.
April 5, 1815
In need of a proper place to begin our work in the virgin field of the Lord, my husband requested assistance in building a house of our own. Mr. Hold determined instead to remake his separate log frame kitchen into a mission station whilst building a new kitchen in the cellar of the brick house. He lent ten of his slaves, who proved to be able workmen, to accomplish the task. They added two rear rooms to the one room kitchen, complete with cut glass windows.
They whitewashed the inner rooms until our cabin glowed like a single star of civilization in the firmament of this heathen land.
I have set myself to the task of making our cabin into a house of God. Oh, how I long to bring the light into this little domicile. For surely from our hearth Good News will flow, and a light will be set upon this darkened country. Our public meeting space has been established in the front of the structure, within the former kitchen. The bedchamber that Mr. Gamble and I are to share is situated toward the back of the cabin. The second rear room will be used to house our scholars until such time as it becomes overfull, whereupon the students will be moved to board in the garret of the main house under the care of Mrs. Hold. Our wide brick oven, fashioned to my specifications by Isaac, one of Mr. Hold’s most highly skilled slaves, occupies the front room sidewall, where a sleeping enclosure was also fitted for Faith, the crippled woman, and her son, our mission’s servants. We procured our furnishings from Mr. Hold’s storehouse, where he kept several pieces carved by his former master craftsman, a Negro lately sold for a hefty price to the Nathaniel Russell family of Charleston. The Negro Isaac was the artisan’s protégé.
I have sewn curtains of blue cotton produced by the slave women in the weaving house, arranged the woolens we brought with us inside the carved blanket chest, lined our beloved books along the poplar shelving, and hung sage and rosemary from the front room window. The young Mrs. Hold has supplied us with gourds for carrying water and serving. To these, we have added proper dishes sent to us by our dear brothers and sisters back in Salem. The mail is slow to arrive in this part of the country. Mr. Hold has the only contract in the region with the U. States government to deliver it, which he fulfills with the labor of his slave boys, whose minds become distracted, or whose legs cannot go the distance from settlement to distant settlement. But oh, the joy of receiving packages from our old friends, with their accounts of the mission stations around the world, shoes for Mr. Gamble and our servants, fabric for my sewing, and robust coffee beans. We should want for medicines too, for my latent cough and Mr. Gamble’s joints, but our crippled slave woman Faith has turned out to have a very fine working knowledge of herbal remedies. Mr. Hold may find in time that he has undervalued that one.
April 9, 1815
On this the second Sunday of the month, the sun rose high and clear above the eastern mountains. I instructed the slave woman Faith on how to bake the potato buns of our traditional Home Church Lovefeasts. She kneaded the dough on her knees and worked at a bench foreshortened by Isaac to accommodate her malady. The cabin smelled of hot bread baking and the fresh butter that I have taught Michael how to churn. I was sorely reminded of home and longed to look upon the faces of my dear countrywomen. Mr. Gamble need not have reminded me that we are here in this darkened land to do the work of the Lord, that our sacrifices are nothing when compared to those of our suffering Savior, who gave all for our sins.
After the praying of the Church Litany, we held our first public service in the mission cabin. Mr. Gamble presided, delivering an enlightening message on the Holy Trinity and leading the singing in German. I stood behind and held a Bible aloft to symbolize to those gathered the sacredness of the book. Sunlight glinted through our single pane windows, casting the light of a thousand angels over the modest room. Our audience consisted mainly of slaves who are not required to labor on Sundays, that being a day that Mr. Hold does not trade or manage the affairs of his plantation, so that he can drink and carouse. Old and blind, young and ignorant, women and men in the full strength of youth, all came of their own accord to hear my husband preach the Gospel. They managed, despite the limitations of their daily working attire, to piece together colorful dresses, deerskin leggings, and hair decorations fashioned, I suspect, from the grosgrain ribbon ordered for Mrs. Hold’s bonnets. The eagerness in their shadow-rimmed eyes quelled my disappointment at the absence of many Indians among the congregants. It has long been a mission of our fellowship to minister to the blacks as well. That work was begun seventy years before in the West Indies missions, about which I often read in the Church dispatches that arrive by post.
One of the black congregants at our mission, Samuel Cotterell, a self-described free Ethiopian preacher, at times during the service translated my husband’s words into an African language, which he appears to know as well as English. Mr. Cotterell can read the Bible and carries one of his own in a leather pouch at his side. He is white haired and distinctive despite his color. Patience attended along with her mistress, the young Mrs. Hold, who, I observed, listened feelingly to Mr. Gamble’s words. Mrs. Hold has taken to Patience and seems to love her like a sister. For Patience is a woman just out of girlhood, close to her mistress’s own young age, and possesses, like her mistress, a light behind her almond eyes that shines brightest in the absence of Mr. Hold.
After the service, I served to all of those in attendance the sweet rolls Faith had baked, together with our Moravian coffee, thick with milk and sugar. At the forbearance of her generous mistress, Patience, who possesses a deeply kind heart, stayed behind to help our crippled Faith scour the iron pots. I put the chairs in order, cleaned the floor of grit, folded and stored my husband’s white shirt and kerchief. I permitted Faith to feed little Michael the last of the buns, which he ate with early season wild strawberries, having always an eager stomach. I retired to the rear bedchamber with a little book of nature poems lately sent by my former students in Bethlehem. A warm evening breeze drifted through the open window, flickering the flame of my beeswax candle and carrying into my awareness the sharp scents and muffled sounds of the nearest slave quarters. I should have wanted someone with whom to share my observations—of the steady awakening of Mrs. Hold, the rumbling voice of the itinerant preacher, the slave girls dressed in their vibrant hues, the rounded Lovefeast buns. But my husband, with a mind set toward the next day’s labors and the importance of making our mission integral to this place, had gone to survey the plantation grounds alongside Mr. Hold.
“Stop,” Cheyenne said, raising a hand with spread fingers and breaking their concentration. Her eyes shone in the artificial light with a dazed sheen. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”
Jinx looked up from the half-read page to find the portrait of James Hold hanging like a threat before her. His penetrating eyes bore down on the three of them from the cobalt-colored wall. His velvet riding jacket, a deep maroon, brought to mind Anna Gamble’s description of slaves lined up like a trail of dried-up blood.
“You mean you don’t want to hear it,” Ruth said. “Wanting to and being able to are different things.”
“I didn’t buy this house to dig up dirt on all the shit that happened here. Do you hear who James Hold was? Abusive. A tyrant.”
Ruth’s head jerked up at Cheyenne’s words, an involuntary action that drew Jinx’s eye.
“If they could live through all that, don’t you think the least we can do is learn about it? We honor their memory by being witnesses for their lives. Leave if you have to, but I’m going to keep on reading. Mary Ann Battis is bound to show up sometime soon.”
“Battis,” Cheyenne repeated, her eyes sharpening, her voice slowing. “As in Adam Battis.”
“Exactly,” Jinx said.
SEVENTEEN
April 22, 1815
The last frost has melted away, and I can finally dig in the ground, setting in place the lines of my garden between our mission cabin and the big house. Each plot shall have a path leading to its center, so that I might tend the plants separately, according to kind. I have brought with me seeds and cuttings from Bethlehem and Salem. I have likewise collected seeds from the Indians who come calling at our mission in the hopes of receiving food or supplies at no expense. My garden shall soon have varieties of peas, large-leafed lettuce, beans, squash (prickly cucumbers), ornamental flowers of various kinds, and a few rows of cotton. It shall also have a supply of medicinal plants. For Faith has proven most knowledgeable in this arena and has already used her skills to treat visiting Indians with salves and teas. Beyond my garden is the mission’s large cornfield, which we will soon sow. Mr. Hold, being generous according to the custom of his people in the use of land, apportioned to us a fifth of his cleared fields and peach orchards.
When he is not preaching, leading liturgical service, or secluded in Bible study, Mr. Gamble spends hours traveling with Mr. Hold. He has become in some ways an advisor, keeping a record of Mr. Hold’s legal affairs and accompanying him to the nearest Cherokee villages. He hopes that through such careful ministrations and the establishment of trust between them, he might lead Mr. Hold, along with his dependents, to an abiding belief in the Lord. As we yet have no scholars, and I am often on my own save for Faith and her son, I have taken to walking about in search of plant life, as I once used to do along the Lehigh River. Here, the Conasauga’s loamy banks afford a home for a vast array of plants. Eager to set my eye upon each one, to sketch them in pencil, describe them in words, and harvest their seeds for planting, I tramp freely about the place with my white cap tied at the neck, hanging loose on my shoulders.
I have begun to assemble a list of plants in the Cherokee area and have commenced sending samples to my northerly brethren in Christ, Rev. Henry Muhlenberg, Rev. Henry Steinhauer, and Rev. Elias Cornelius, who likewise subscribe to the study of Linnaeus’s principles of botanical schema and are eager to hear my thoughts. If they knew of my husband’s disapproval of my scientific pursuits due to my sex, they might withdraw their interest. I therefore desire to send my specimens and accompanying notes as soon as I collect them so as not to draw his suspicions. I have found Mr. Hold’s mail system so sluggish, however, that I grow impatient. I have therefore enlisted his most trusted slave, Isaac the craftsman, to carry these samples as far as Kentucky on my behalf, where he will post them to Pennsylvania forthwith. In the Cherokee nation, no passes are required for Negro slaves in transit, but for his smooth passage through Tennessee I have fashioned him a letter of allowance.
April 30, 1815
Having become accustomed to this place and its natural shape, I pulled on my husband’s boots and set out for the woods earlier this day. Great was my anticipation. A fresh spring rain had fallen, and newborn seedlings are already sprouting. I wore a burlap seed pack on my waist looped about the ties of my skirt and petticoat and carried a wax-bound sheath of papers in my hand. The spring air was warm on the bare skin of my neck. The sun shone above like a beacon. Coming over a rise in the Holds’ freshly sowed cornfield one mile west of the main house, I scanned the dense wood below. Pine, hickory, oak, chestnut, walnut, mulberry, poplar, and sourwood trees thrive there, thick and inviting.
The Negress Patience was ambling along the forest’s interior edge, seeming to take pleasure in the natural scene about her. She did not observe me on the hillside above as she went about her quiet task, gracefully circumventing the sassafras and sumach underbrush while pausing to touch one glossy leaf that beckoned to her. Barefoot, buckeye skin glistening in the afternoon light, Patience hiked her muddy skirt up about her hips, bending low to collect the wild potatoes and onions that are a staple of the Indians’ diet. It was then with a lightning speed that Mr. Hold appeared beside her, together with a thundering herd of five other men. They were each of them members of the Lighthorse brigade lately authorized by the Cherokee Council to track and punish horse thieves. Mr. Hold is known as a passionate judge of his fellows, whipping his tribesmen with a fury that even the heathens see fit to question. I lowered myself within the field, sensing that I should not draw notice.
The contingent below became a blur of motion and sound as they dismounted and stomped their thick heeled boots. One man wore a traditional scalplock of knotted hair; another bore a strand of red turkey feathers dangling from his hat. Mr. Hold, in his cleanly knotted blue silk cravat, was the most civilized in appearance among them, and the most brutal. As if to display his power before the others, he knocked Patience to the ground without a word of warning, as if felling a sapling on a field he intended to clear. Her basket of gathered onions tumbled to the forest floor. She grasped for it. But the basket rolled away, and then she had nothing to reach for. When Mr. Hold defiled her, he forced her eyes open, pressing her lashes apart with his thumbs as he crushed her with the weight of his body. Daring the men who esteemed his leadership in the political arena to interfere, he searched her gaze, hunting incessantly for the light which must dim still more each time he looks at her. As her master and possessor, he had and took free reign. Once sated, he threw his servant to her knees, sending her skirts to the treetops. Following this wicked act, he abandoned her in a pool of filth that seeped into the blameless ground. I gathered my skirts about me, fleeing the young woman’s shame, which had somehow become my own, scattering my notes and sketches, in which I had taken such delight, to the far corners of the cornfield.
May 1, 1815
Today, as I dug in my kitchen garden, tending the wild transplanted strawberries and looking up from time to time at the penetrating sunlight, Patience emerged from the rear door of the brick house. I watched her approach from the slaves’ work yard, it being the only boundary between the Hold family home and our mission cabin. On legs that bowed weakly like violin strings, she passed by the slave women making soap and scalding bed linens. She wobbled into the little gate that marked the entrance to my garden, cut for me from fallen timber by the itinerant preacher Mr. Sam Cotterell. With her slender arms wrapped around a broad bottomed basket woven of river cane dyed a deep crimson with the roots of the Sanguinaria canadensis (bloodroot), she approached me. Her countenance was withholding, her skin everywhere marred by pulpy wounds. She reached inside the basket and drew out handfuls of wild onions and potatoes. “My mistress wishes you to have these, Mrs. Gamble, for next Sabbath service,” she said. How, oh how, had she managed to gather each curled onion again? How had she stood? How had she moved? How had she commenced a new day? I accepted the offering. The wild potatoes were small and clean, free of the loose dirt and leaves that should have clung to their skins, given the circumstances of their collection. But the basket Patience carried was well constructed, made to shed grime through its fine grained sifting seams.
Patience reached inside the basket a second time and withdrew my lost papers and seed bag, placing them beside me on the garden ground, speaking not a word about where she had found them. I ducked my head in sorrow for her suffering and guilt for my failure to come to her aid. We were, both of us, helpless members of the weaker sex. The papers had come loose from the thin wax mooring; nothing held them together now. Only the dissected drawings of plant parts showed how the pages had connected before—the stem of a Tradescantia virginica (spiderwort) on one page, its striped, oval leaf on another, the likeness of its seedpod buried at the bottom of the loose leaf stack. I stared at the words and shapes I had formed and began to blindly rearrange them in my mind.
A Beginning List of Plants found in the Neighbourhood of the Conasauga River, (Cherokee Country) where Hold Hill is situated; made by Mrs. Gamble.
Aesculus pavia—The nuts pounded, are used in poultices.
Asarum virginicum—The leaves; fresh, they are applied to wounds.
Cornus florida—The bark of the root is used to heal wounds, and in poultices.
Saururus cernuus—The roots roasted and mashed, used for poultices.
Liriodendrum tulipifera—Of the bark of the root, a tea is made and given in fevers. It is also used in poultices.
“Patience,” I whispered, withdrawing my focus from the solace of plant life, “I am sorry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” was her only reply. Her eyes remained fixed on her basket until she noticed Faith, who with great effort had appeared at the cabin doorway.
Faith’s frost-gnawed feet still made it necessary for her to crawl to each destination, but she never complained of this difficulty. Neither did her features reveal surprise at Patience’s lamentable condition. Faith hears and learns things through a network of Negroes and poor Cherokees who seem to place their trust in her maternal wisdom. From her knees, Faith extended a hand toward Patience and pressed a vial of acorn balsam into the young woman’s palm. “This will ease your pain, daughter,” she said. Patience nodded, bowed to hug Faith’s waist, then left again with her river cane basket, into which she placed the vial. I watched her pass through the gate and move across the slaves’ work yard, her lovely neck long and dark above her overburdened shoulders.
