The Cherokee Rose, page 20
Mr. Gamble leaves the schooling to me and spends his days all about the place, making rounds on behalf of Mr. Hold in his absence and planning for the Sunday message, which he now preaches to a room crowded with Indians and slaves, so that Faith and I can hardly keep abreast of the baking.
June 15, 1815
Our house overflows with scholars. Three more have joined our sundry flock, nieces and cousins of Mrs. Hold, whose parents have become convinced of the good purpose of our enterprise. They squeeze in, head to toe, on cots in the rear sleeping room, while my own little Mary Ann has forfeited her cot to share my chamber, where ample room is to be found, due to my husband’s frequent absences. Faith complains of the washing for our nearly dozen scholars, so much so that I must aid her over the boiling pots. Little Michael assists by hanging the clothing out to dry in the sunlight.
My work in the garden suffers for want of time. It has been weeks since I last gathered wildflowers, which show off their spectrum of color now in the fullness of their beauty. I am kept busy here, so that I have not the time to collect the plants that tempted me to the woods last spring.
July 1, 1815
Patience is with child. The younger Mrs. Hold is in a state of near despair, fearing not that the child is her husband’s, which everyone has suspected, given the occurrences that transpire here, but that her husband might sell Patience away, along with the unborn babe. I have taken the opportunity to have a heart to heart talk with Mrs. Hold, our dear burdened Peggy, for her to know the Savior and find comfort in His Word. She shows great change. She seeks the Savior and is not without the feeling of His love in her heart. She continues to study writing with Mary Ann on Saturdays and to come to service on Sundays, accompanied by Patience, so that we almost have a little church family here in the Indian wilderness.
On Sunday evenings, after Mr. Gamble has gone to walk about the grounds or consult with the visiting chiefs who often stop by the plantation, I find myself settled before the hearth with a small circle of unexpected but beloved companions: Mrs. Hold and Patience, whose belly grows by the day, Faith and little Michael, my protégée Mary Ann, and Mr. Sam Cotterell, who has become like a father to the latter. I read to them aloud from the dispatched diaries of our brethren and sisters in the West Indies mission field. It seems that Patience, Faith, and likewise Mary Ann are most feelingly moved by the stories of people of their own race seeking the truth of the crucified Savior in faraway lands. Mr. Cotterell, who possesses a deep, melodic voice, shares in the reading when I become tired, stokes my tea with freshly crushed leaves, and opens the door to let in the breezes in the warm summer nights. Except for a stubborn one or two who strain to stay awake, our little red scholars sleep through these evenings, rolled onto their mats and cots in the rear bedroom, bare limbs stretched wide in the heat.
July 3, 1815
Mr. Hold has lately returned from an extended sojourn northward, where he traded slaves for cattle with his business partner, a fellow Scot to whom Hold is linked through his late father’s connections. He called for Isaac to play the fiddle, and hence has discovered Isaac’s absence. Mr. Hold presumes him to have run away. Enraged, he acts as if he has lost his mind. The suffocating summer heat only drives him on. Last night, he was in his house shooting, burning, and ravaging, such that no one’s life was safe. I dare not speak a word about my part in this to anyone but the Lord.
July 4, 1815
We heard horrible things about what Mr. Hold had done overnight, especially that he mistreated his wife so badly that it cannot be repeated. When the opportunity presented itself, Mrs. Hold escaped to our cabin. Her tender face was a sea of blue where her husband had struck her. The Cherokee scholars were fast asleep on their mats in the rear of the building, but Mary Ann was alert and stiff in the hemp gown I had sewn for her, attuned like a fawn to the scent of men with muskets. I inquired after Patience. Mrs. Hold shook her head, closing her eyes against a blinding thought. I persisted with my questioning until she reported that Mr. Hold has shut Patience up in the garret, binding her with the steadfast rope of the Annona bark.
I pulled Mary Ann to my chest and covered her ears with my hands. I did not wish her to know the cruelty and tyranny which is practiced in that house. Her small body trembled against mine, damp with sweat. Her long braids fell like open wings around me.
July 6, 1815
We missed Patience for three days and two nights. When we saw her again, she could not stand and support the weight of her protruding belly. It is rumored that Mr. Hold is not beyond torture. He has been known to hang his slaves by fingers or toes from log beams in his garret. Patience’s offense, we learned through Faith, was alleged relations with the absent Isaac. Faith tended the wounds. Mrs. Hold stayed with us until Patience regained strength. And then she returned, God help her, to the prison house of her husband.
It is further revealed with each passing day that Mr. Hold brought us here solely for the betterment of his own position—to educate his children in the English language, strengthen his trading outlets by gaining our brethren as purchasers, and increase his status with the government Agent who oversees the tribe. Mr. Hold does not care anything about our religion, or about our warnings of hellfire and the vengeance of the Lord. Oh, if the Savior would only have mercy on him and free him from the hands of the evil enemy who has him completely under his power!
July 9, 1815
Mr. Hold was drunk again last night. He lit a torch and rampaged through the slave quarters, burning down three cabins of his Negro men, whom he accused of aiding in Isaac’s escape. He would have burned more if his clerk Mr. Geiger had not stopped him with his pistol. We had to listen to the noise of shooting and shouting all through the night. I prayed in the dark on my knees, asking the Lord to forgive me for my part in this travesty and to show Mr. Hold that the Savior died for him as well. My dear Mary Ann prayed beside me, gripping the bed quilt in her hands. Might God free our evil host from Satan’s chains which bind him. Might God free us all.
July 10, 1815
On the breaking of dawn, I sought out my husband to impress upon him the need of our mission for a second Negro woman. A servant is indispensable for milking, laundering, cooking, baking, and the like, and one cannot deny that this work, which is no small matter in our establishment, has hitherto been done incompletely by Faith. An additional servant would aid in getting the necessary work done, which has been much increased by boarding and washing for our eleven Indian scholars. Mr. Gamble sought to persuade me that the Church could not consent to such luxury, but on this notion I would not be moved. We might forgo our monthly supply of coffee, I told him, for I could roast our own from the seeds of the wild Cassia occidentalis (coffee senna) weed. “It is for the benefit of the students. Our crippled Negro woman cannot keep pace with the labor of the mission. We must have Patience,” I said.
Assessing my request with the calm calculation that is his chief strength, my husband narrowed his eyes. “Yes, I see,” he said, observing my ardent state. “You desire a second Negro woman from among Mr. Hold’s stock. But Patience will not do, for her master will never part with her.”
I looked into my husband’s eyes, wondering what dark knowledge he held secret there. Had he witnessed scenes such as that which I endured in the cornfield, during his frequent visits to the Hold house? I saw in his eyes that he had shed the mantle of God and now shared one mind with those thieves of spirits and bodies that polite society refers to as “planters.”
“Patience must do,” I boldly persisted. “She must.” I knew that my eyes were as fierce now as those of the wild cats that live in the corners of the barns here, jumping and biting people at the least provocation. I could feel the sweat damped strands of my hair sticking to my cheeks and tongue. I grasped for my Bible, which is never far from my side. “Our crucified Christ loves all,” I said. “He watches over all, and gave all for all. The Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons.”
My husband glanced at the Holy Book and, I thought, relented. “Yes, I see. I will speak with Mr. Hold,” he said, striding from the room. He turned at the doorway to look at me. “Provided that Isaac can be convinced to return,” he added, and was gone.
His words stopped my heart. I lost my bearings in the swirling space of the hearth room and grabbed at the table for support. The edge was firm in my hands, solid as the pine tree that a slave had carved to shape it. I have never felt the natural love of a wife for her husband. In pursuit of the higher aim of spreading the light of the Gospel, I have endured my husband’s disdain for my feelings and grasping hands in the night. And all the while, he had corrupted his calling, becoming nothing more than a purveyor of flesh, worse, as he is a man of God, than a common Georgia slave trader.
Jinx placed the manuscript pages back in the box, enraged and incredulous. She glanced at her companions. Cheyenne had drifted off to sleep. Ruth had removed her glasses, watching the pictures in her mind as Jinx read the words. Jinx sat up, wondering if the sleigh bed that held them had been crafted by the missing Isaac, wondering what would happen—what had happened—to Patience, Isaac, and Mary Ann.
“What’s that?” Ruth whispered, her voice husky from the nearness of sleep. Her face took on a waxen cast as she stared out the window. She leaned into the glass, elbow pressed against the frame, feeling for her glasses on the end table.
Jinx circled to Ruth’s side of the bed, handed the glasses to her, and peered over her shoulder. She saw nothing but shape and shadow in the light of the full moon. “What do you see?”
“The girl who called me. I think she’s come back.” Ruth flung off the coverlet and slid from the bed. “Cheyenne, wake up.”
Cheyenne lifted her eye mask and snapped open her lids, registering Jinx’s bare feet, Ruth’s crooked glasses, the unkempt hair flying around each of their heads. “What time is it?”
“Four,” Ruth said. “We need to go out to the gardens.”
“What? Why?!”
“Yesterday in the mission cabin, I thought I saw a girl in the doorway, but then she disappeared. I didn’t know what she was at the time, but later, when I could come up with no other explanation, I realized she had to have been a…ghost. Now I’m convinced she was the spirit of Mary Ann, showing me where to find the diary. I think I see her again right now, but I’m too far away to be sure. I’m going down there.”
“You think there’s a ghost in the garden, so you’re running toward it, instead of away? This is exactly how Black people die in the horror movies, Ruth. Investigating when common sense says duck and cover.”
“I feel like she’s calling me, and I have to listen.” Ruth slapped on her clogs.
“This is not real,” Cheyenne said. “Lanie Brevard was full of shit when she hinted the house was a stigmatized property.”
“Reality is a gray zone,” Jinx said, grabbing and flinging on an oversized hoodie and gathering up the diary pages to tuck them under her arm. “And if you want to be a true caretaker of this place, you should probably face up to its haunted past.”
NINETEEN
Ruth’s glasses steamed in the humid morning air. She wiped them, leaving behind blurry streaks. Followed by Jinx, who carried the diary, and Cheyenne, who swore beneath her breath, she crept through the back door, breathing in the fragrance of rose petals. Ruth had heard the shakiness in Cheyenne’s voice, felt anxiety rising from Jinx, and she could smell the pungent perspiration clinging to her own flushed skin. They plunged into the garden. Rambling wildflowers gave way to river cane stalks tipped with open tufts. Ruth wrapped her arms across her chest, wishing she were wearing something more substantial than a flimsy nightshirt. She felt exposed to the elements, and afraid of what might come next.
Out in the canebrake, someone stood beckoning to Ruth from the shadowed opening of the round earth house: a girl on the cusp of womanhood, ribbons dangling from her hair, a floral print skirt banding her legs. The girl seemed to stand within a spidery light. Her ribbons of black, red, and white danced in that light, as though filtered through a kaleidoscope held in the hands of a child. Ruth could not deny her a second time. Mary Ann Battis was really there, leaning against the doorframe, staring at her.
“You see her, don’t you?” Jinx said.
“She’s standing in the doorway of the round house.”
Cheyenne squinted at the shadows. “Bullshit. There’s nothing there.”
Ruth moved forward. Her stomach was a knot. She rushed across the garden, reached the phosphorescent light, could almost stretch out a hand to touch the apparition. And then the girl was gone. Ruth plunged into the gap where the figure had been, feeling a cool mist like the dissipation of mountain clouds.
She heard the uneven rush of Jinx’s breathing behind her.
“Did you feel that?” Ruth said. Inside the dark enclosure, she breathed in the rich smell of silt. “What did she want us to find here?” Ruth paced the tight, dark space—once, again, three times, a fourth, pressing her fingers to the mud walls, squatting beside the fire pit and examining the ground. “I don’t feel anything.”
“What about the diary?” Jinx said. “Maybe that’s how she’s talking to you, and she’ll just keep returning until whatever she came back for is accomplished. And it is you she’s communicating with, or communicating through.”
The mud enclosure echoed with silence until Ruth spoke again. “It’s our mothers,” Ruth said, her eyes filling with tears again. “We both lost our mothers as girls.”
Jinx’s gaze softened as she watched Ruth speak in the darkness of early morning. “She set a fire to reunite with her mother. Instead, the missionaries sent her here.”
Ruth would not say aloud what she was feeling—that she had been a coward compared to Mary Ann. Her father had kept the truth of her mother’s death buttoned down like the broadcloth dress shirts he wore. A drowning accident—that was all Ruth knew, all she had managed to extract from him. Her mother was taken by a wave on her parents’ second honeymoon, the Caribbean escape they had planned to save their rocky marriage. Her father had shielded her from the garish local news coverage. He couldn’t protect her, though, from the lurid whispers that trailed her at school like clouds of gnats—the rumors that her father had her mother’s blood on his hands, that he had snapped from envy of her mother’s professional success. In the twenty-two years since, Ruth had never dared search for answers to the questions of why, how, or who was responsible. Her father’s cloak of silence had been complete—and somehow a comfort. She had willed herself into forgetfulness, until she came to the Hold House, walked through the rose garden, and saw Mary Ann. If Mary Ann had any message especially for her, perhaps it was to dig.
Ruth looked up at her companions. “Maybe she has a message for you too,” she said to Cheyenne. “The Black preacher—Samuel Cotterell—you have to be wondering why you share his last name.”
The vein at Cheyenne’s temple pulsed, but she said nothing. Ruth knew the story wasn’t what Cheyenne had expected. Her ancestor, by the sound of things, was a homeless man who had lived a simple life of faith. Cheyenne slowly lowered herself to the floor, sacrificing her ivory robe to the dirt. She took the flashlight Jinx held out and shone it on the page. Jinx began to read.
July 11, 1815
There was only one man I could turn to with my confidence, a man who had already intuited too much. I sought out Samuel Cotterell and told him all. If he knew where Isaac was, a message must be sent to him. Mr. Hold would continue to torture Patience and terrorize the slave quarters until the day of Isaac’s return. Though Mr. Cotterell consented to help me, his eyes held the sorrow of a million men. I pressed my hand to the jagged white hairs that rose from his face. He leaned his bearded jaw into my palm before quickly, self consciously, withdrawing. He turned on the heel of his travel boots. I touched the offending hand to my forehead. It was hot, as if with fever.
August 27, 1815
Isaac has returned of his own accord. The first few nights after his arrival, he has slept, under cover of secrecy, on the floor of the mission barn. He applied his last free hours to his craft. And before submitting himself to the authority of his master, Isaac presented us with gifts: a chair fashioned of river cane reeds affixed to wheelbarrow casters for Faith to move about in, and an image of the Holy Cross formed in the likeness of sweetgum leaves carved upon the mantel of our hearth.
The Head Missionary to the Cherokees was true to his sordid word. Upon Isaac’s appearance at Hold’s rear doorstep, Patience was released for purchase by the mission. I have this evening penned a letter of explanation of this expenditure to our elders in the Church, of which follows a true copy.
To Our Brethren of the General Helpers Conference, Salem:
This letter confirms that a week ago today Mr. James Hold, master of Hold Hill, transferred to us a Negress who is to be under my direction to help with the housekeeping for the Cherokee mission and school. Head Missionary Gamble has lately received power of attorney over her. Mr. Hold sold this Negress, called by the name of Patience, for only 130 dollars cash, though she is with child and therefore hampered in her work for a time. Once the child is born, however, the mission will acquire another little Negro or Mulatto servant to be added to the credit side of our ledger. Patience, a strong, black one of nearly twenty years, can now be counted among the assets of the Church. With gratitude for your unceasing support of this mission, we continue our efforts in the salvation of the heathen.
