The Cherokee Rose, page 5
Cheyenne’s thoughts flowed with the music as she drove. She felt on the verge of a great discovery, one that could change her life. She had always been interested in her grandmother’s stories about their Native American heritage, but she hadn’t started tracing her roots until after her grandmother’s death. There were so many things she wanted to ask, now that it was too late. To compensate, Cheyenne had become an avid participant on the AfriGeneas and RootsWeb genealogy sites, posting queries and checking compulsively for the latest additions to the Cotterell crowd-sourced family tree. She could trace her family history back to the 1860s, but then the trail went cold. That’s where her grandmother’s stories came in. They explained the gap.
Her grandmother used to say the Cotterell family line had started on a Cherokee plantation two hundred years ago with a female ancestor who married a local man. The couple’s children hadn’t been enrolled in the tribe because of their mixed-race ancestry, but the children’s names, along with those of all Black Indians on the plantation, were recorded on a secret list that no one had seen since. The Hold Plantation in the North Georgia foothills, the heart of former Cherokee territory, was the only site Cheyenne had found during her genealogical research that matched the details of her grandmother’s story: a Cherokee-owned plantation near the mountains that once had Black residents and still had secrets.
Cheyenne’s parents thought she was obsessed with genealogy because she hadn’t found the right man to distract herself with. Her father humored her with fabricated interest in the charts that filled the pages of her Black Indian Genealogy Workbook. Her mother didn’t even pretend to care, waving away Cheyenne’s grainy prints of family census records. To them, genealogy was a hobby, but to her, it was a quest. In her family history she could find the missing pieces of the puzzle, answers to the elusive questions: Who am I? and What is my purpose? Cheyenne was a throwback, her grandmother used to say, to a lost branch of the Cotterell family tree.
She fully intended to find that branch and brandish it.
THREE
Ruth Mayes stared at the ocean liner floating across her computer screen unbidden. Apparently, Holland America had slashed its Jamaican cruise fares to drum up ticket sales for the fall season. Pop-up ads nettled her, especially when they were animated to stealthily catch her eye. She edited the images she allowed into her head at every opportunity.
She x-ed out the picture of the long white boat, blocking the thoughts it elicited. Reaching for her travel mug, she took a sip of bad office coffee, then pulled off her tortoiseshell glasses and tugged a corkscrew of thick, dark hair. She leaned back into her seat, aligning her butt with the padding, shifting her swivel chair with the movement of her body. Wheeling the chair in close to her desk, Ruth dug her clogs into the floor and glanced at the architectural photographs taped to the backbone of her cubicle. She needed a house muse to help her generate a story idea.
Ruth rested her head on her forearms. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, one hour until the start of her forced vacation. She had nothing to do and nowhere to go for the next six weeks. What she absolutely could not do was hole up in her basement apartment. When she had too much time on her hands, the pictures swarmed into her mind, forming a cloud of memories that overtook her.
“Ruth, are you okay?” It was Lauren, Ruth’s eternally empathetic, India-print-skirted creative director.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ruth straightened her back and popped her glasses onto her nose, taking care not to catch them in her thicket of curly hair.
“Just checking.” Lauren scanned Ruth’s blank computer screen as if to make a silent point. “The sisal-mat photo spread didn’t come through. You clearly need an assignment. And we need a filler story on floor coverings by end of day—something trendy, natural fiber-y. I’m thinking—hand-woven carpets!”
“Carpets?” Ruth repeated. How much lower in the story assignment pecking order could she fall?
“Five hundred words. And don’t miss the deadline just so you have a reason to come in Tuesday. As much as we love you around here, we don’t want to see you until the leaves have turned. Take your vacation and save the company some money.”
Abode was suffering, and everyone on staff knew it. Advertising had plunged in the last year, and subscriptions had slowed as readers started cutting back on their leisure-activity budgets in the recession. For the first time in its eight-year run as a sleek Minneapolis-based shelter magazine, Abode was in the red. Instead of cutting staff or shutting down, senior management was asking writers to take accrued vacation time without pay by the end of the calendar year.
Ruth was an office junkie who barely alighted at home, so she had saved up six weeks of vacation in her four years with the magazine. The lost pay would devastate some of her co-workers, but Ruth’s mother had left her an ostrich-sized nest egg in the form of a trust fund and shares in a company that, so far, was persisting through the downturn. Her passive income was robust enough that she could contribute monthly to a domestic violence shelter in the city.
For Ruth, it wasn’t the money that kicked her heartbeat into high gear when she contemplated a forced march to vacation time, it was the yawn of open days with nothing, and no one, to fill them. She thought she should consider this internal battle with time in her journal, but she knew she wouldn’t. The regular writing she did in notebooks with droll covers that she drew herself recorded what she saw and heard, not what she felt. She was making the KDP people who had started selling blank books on Amazon last year an undeserved fortune.
“Carpets are cozy. Carpets are colorful. Carpets are cocooning,” Lauren was saying. “All those comfy C-adjectives that set the mood for fall. Six hundred words with an ethnic twist. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You said five hundred,” Ruth protested, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m thinking six hundred now that we’ve had a brainshower session,” Lauren said, smiling in encouragement. Lauren thought brainstorm was too forceful a descriptor for the collaborative creative process.
When Lauren moved away to make her office rounds like a peppy bohemian candy striper, Ruth stood to stretch, hoping the physical movement would help spark ideas about rugs. She walked to the wall of windows at the far side of the industrial loft, touching her hand to the brick and gazing out at the skyscrapers. She cracked one of the windows that had been sealed all summer to trap in the air-conditioning that irritated her sinuses. The breeze outside was cooler than she expected. She pulled together the three buttons of her soft, cropped denim jacket over her tangerine T-shirt that read “Probably Late for Something” in cursive script.
“Ruth! Got a minute?” The voice came from behind her.
She turned her back to the window, brushing pale dust from her fingertips.
It was Justin, the magazine’s eco-stylist who had been eyeing her for months. He was one of those thirtysomething white guys with feeling eyes and attractively rumpled, longish hair. She had observed a whole tribe of his nouveau beatnik poet kind at Carleton College when she was in school.
“So…” He took a breath. “Since you’ll be on vacation for a few weeks, and I’ll be out for a few days, I thought maybe we could get together for dinner.” He paused, running a hand through his messily styled hair. “And it’s okay if you’re late,” he added with an entreating grin.
Ruth gave him a half smile, fully aware that her jacket was buttoned, which meant he had read the saying on her chest earlier and memorized it. Justin was cute, she supposed. Any woman with her head on straight might at least bargain him down to a coffee date, but she didn’t meet that criterion. Where romance was concerned, she had always considered herself an outlier, not because she was bi, but because she subscribed to the X-Files motto: “Trust no one.”
“Sounds fun, at some point, perhaps.” She tried to sound optimistic. Justin really was a nice guy who sometimes brought boxes of bagels to work. “But I’m probably going out of town during my leave…to research a story.”
“The carpet thing? Did you find an angle? I’ve been thinking of doing a piece on floor coverings made of recycled rubber. There’s a growing industry down in Dalton, Georgia, the U.S. carpet capital.” He smiled and leaned in, but not close enough to crowd her. “Maybe we could report it together. Pitch a feature story idea to Lauren.”
“My carpet piece is just a filler for the November issue. Nothing special. The carpet capital, though, there’s a ring to that. And Lauren’s into the letter C today. Thanks for the lead.” Ruth flashed him half a smile before walking away from the open window.
She could feel Justin’s eyes on her ginger-colored culottes as the soft cotton shaped to her ample hips. It was one of her best features, she knew—her hip line to rump line to firm, strong thighs. The thighs came courtesy of many a long-distance weekend run, the hips and butt from her mother. Try as she had to lose weight back when she was in summer camp sharing a cabin with a Black Barbie lookalike, or when she was at Carleton rooming with stick-figure girls who fake-complained that the size twos were the first to go from the sales rack, she found that running never quite canceled out strong maternal genes. She was a comfortable size fourteen, which meant she was edging toward sixteen and just a tad slimmer than her full-figured mother had been. She still recalled the rounded lines of her mother’s generous shape, the comfort she found in that constancy of softness. But the positive memory was immediately hijacked. “My Gold Coast,” her father would say with a proprietary, knowing smile, tracing the curve of her mother’s hips with cool blue eyes. Watching her mother’s expression cloud, Ruth would frown, too, and, for reasons unclear to her small child’s mind, cling to her mother’s leg or hand.
Ruth shut the memory down with a willful precision born of practice, slid into her desk chair, and typed “Georgia, rugs, carpets” into the search bar. The first few links were carpet-company websites. She scrolled through their menus, jotting notes. Then she opened a link to a newspaper story about the carpet industry in northwest Georgia, the influx of Latino workers and arrival of Mexican groceries and taquerias. Thank you, Justin. This was the kind of material she needed to type up six hundred words of cotton-candy copy for Lauren.
If Justin was Abode’s eco-stylist with a regular column to his name, Ruth was its ethno-stylist, but without the title or highlighted byline. She was assigned virtually all the “ethnic” stories—on drapery inspired by Somali fabrics, the Hmong kitchen garden, new directions in outsider-art furniture design. Ruth ignored the obvious pigeonholing of her de facto job description, which she knew fell to her only because she was Black. So far, Lauren had been willing enough to keep her busy on assignment, which Ruth accepted as unspoken recompense for the narrow topical scope.
Ruth had by now developed a rote method for her filler stories. She started with online research, made a few phone calls, conducted lightning interviews, and dashed off a feel-good piece. It took her just under an hour to pound out her text on how workers in the Georgia carpet industry incorporated hints of their Latin heritage into textile designs. It was claptrap, and she knew it. The real story was labor exploitation in the heart of the industrial Sun Belt. But that wasn’t the kind of story that would suit the readership of a glossy magazine like Abode, with its sleek photos of flawless homes, emerald lawns, and wraparound porches as lacy as push-up bras.
Ruth skimmed her draft of “Aztec Influence Colors Georgia Carpet Kingdom” before pushing the Send key to whisk it off to Lauren. It was five o’clock, but a few of her fellow writers still hunched over their desks. She dreaded going home to her too-quiet “garden level” (translation: basement) apartment, where not even potted succulents could grow. She would never explore in her journals that maybe she had selected the low-light dwelling for that very reason. Houseplants did not respond well to her. Neither did anything that grew, perhaps because she would not make the effort necessary to tend to them. But Ruth told herself she chose the place for the savings on rent, which left more of her monthly stipend for donating to women in need.
Ruth tapped her unpolished fingernails on the mousepad, trying to think of a reason to stay at the office late. As she scanned the results of her previous search one last time, her eyes fell on an odd blue link. It was an article in the Dalton Daily Citizen dated August 2008, just last month.
State Cuts Pull Rug from Under Cherokees, Friends of the Hold House
Local residents were saddened to learn that a beloved institution is being dissolved.
Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) officials said Wednesday that the state-owned Hold Plantation, along with the Moravian Church mission building on the grounds, will be sold due to the budget crisis.
The Chief Hold House was built in 1804 by James Hold, the son of a Cherokee mother and Scottish-Irish father, who rose to become one of the Cherokee Nation’s most prominent leaders. The house served as a political and economic center for the Cherokee people until they were forcibly removed from the area by the federal government in the 1830s. It was restored and opened as a state historic site in 1952 but was closed by the DNR in recent years.
The DNR has announced an auction of the Hold House, its contents, and its surrounding land for September of this year.
Local volunteers who hoped to raise funds to reopen the Native American house museum are calling the impending sale an “outrage.” John Cook, a Tribal Council member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, agreed, saying, “The Trail of Tears was an effort to eliminate the Cherokee people, and now they’re trying to eliminate our culture.”
Other tribal members echoed this sentiment. “If there is no interpretation at our Georgia historic sites, who will tell that story?” said Stuart Pickup, a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees. “The Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing. The state of Georgia is adding insult to injury by refusing to tell the public about it. If you don’t understand history, you’re doomed to repeat it,” Pickup said.
Ruth pushed her glasses up to the broad bridge of her nose. She opened a new window to confirm what she thought she recalled from her ethnic studies courses. The Cherokees’ grueling forced march along the Trail of Tears from the hills of Georgia and North Carolina to Indian Territory in Oklahoma had taken place in the winter of 1838–39. Now, 170 years after that crime, an economic crisis was going to finish the job of wiping Cherokee history off the Georgia state map.
“Lauren!” Ruth called, jumping up from her seat and grabbing pages from the shared office printer. She plunged into Lauren’s office, culottes swirling against her calves. “Am I set with the carpet piece?”
Lauren looked up with a smile from her mug of chai tea and the slick proofs fanned across her desk. She nodded. “Nice work. I’ll handle the edits and proofs. Have any plans for the holiday weekend?”
“I do now.” Ruth dropped the printed pages next to Lauren’s proofs. “A story about a historic house built by Cherokees and run as a museum. The state of Georgia closed the place down and is about to auction it off.”
“You want to cover this?” Lauren said, her face brightening at Ruth’s enthusiasm. “The topic packs an emotional punch. Our readers would appreciate the historic home focus, and the ethnic minority group angle is something they would expect from your byline.” Lauren sighed, handing back the pages. “But you know Abode can’t afford—”
“I’ll pay my own expenses.”
“In that case, sold. Take photos. Good ones. I don’t have the budget to send a photographer down there.”
“You’ll be showered with images of formal gardens and white-pillared porches,” Ruth promised. She gave her boss a genuine smile and a pass for the outmoded reference to minorities. Native Americans were citizens of Indigenous nations. And Lauren, who was of Swedish descent and brought kanelbullar cinnamon buns to the office monthly, was as much a member of an ethnic minority group as anyone Ruth would encounter in Georgia.
Back at her desk, she shut down her MacBook, slipped it into its quilted sleeve, and grabbed her bunchy leather bag. She snatched the pink floral travel mug that read Fuck This Shit from her desk and stopped to refill it with coffee dregs left in the staff kitchen.
As Ruth pushed through the metal door into the clear autumn day, she felt again that hint of coolness in the air. The weather was on the cusp of change in Minnesota. She was going south just in time. She strode to her Volkswagen Beetle and plopped her mug into the holder. She would stop by her apartment to pack a bag and ask her upstairs neighbor to collect her mail. She had no family members to call to tell she was leaving. She and her father rarely spoke. Even if she were to move away from Minneapolis, he might not notice until Christmastime when she failed to turn up for their awkward annual dinner. Her grandparents on both sides had passed away. She had no siblings.
Ruth programmed her GPS with the address of the Chief Hold House and waited for her route to upload. The digital map glowed green in the dashboard. She blinked at it and breathed. She was headed down the interstate to a small, rural Georgia town near the city where her mother had been born.
FOUR
As she stretched to wipe the window ledge, Sally Perdue hiked up the baby. Her dust mop, dulled by the grime of countless cleanings that never seemed to make this old house shine, flopped on the end of its stick. From his seat on her hip, the baby lunged for the mop, reaching sideways with a chubby fist. “No, no, baby.” Sally’s voice was gentle. “This is Mama’s, and this is Junior’s.” She handed him a rattle. He reached again for the mop, his blue eyes tracking dust set in motion by his mother’s hand. Dust motes rose like dandelion seeds where they stood on the staircase landing, a space one-third the size of the trailer Sally shared with Eddie Senior.
