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The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts Paperback – June 13, 2023
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“The Cherokee Rose is a mic drop—an instant classic. An invitation to listen to the urgent, sweet choruses of past and present.”—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century.
At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house’s dark history, the three women’s connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property’s rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe’s racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family’s past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance.
Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
- Publication dateJune 13, 2023
- Dimensions5.22 x 0.68 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-100593596420
- ISBN-13978-0593596425
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Poignant and essential storytelling.”—Jason Mott, National Book Award–winning author of Hell of a Book
“Beautifully written and impeccably researched . . . Lovely.”—Asha Lemmie, New York Times bestselling author of Fifty Words for Rain
“Tiya Miles tackles such a sensitive and complex topic with incredible wisdom, grace, honesty, and research. The Cherokee Rose is a fascinating exploration and enchanting examination of often hidden or misunderstood histories. It’s so real and yet so magical; an extraordinary journey.”—Robert Jones, Jr., author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Prophets, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
“Poignant and essential storytelling. That only begins to describe Tiya Miles’s work. The Cherokee Rose is a book that, with a deft hand, illuminates a little-known, yet vitally important, facet of a past we all share. A wonderful read.”—Jason Mott, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book
“The history of the American slave-owning South is a history of erasures. With this novel, Tiya Miles overwrites the whitewashing, vibrantly imagining a complex and nuanced community within the Cherokee Nation where the lives of African Americans and Native Americans are interwoven in surprising and forgotten ways.”—Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone
“The Cherokee Rose is a great story, a skillfully woven mystery about the way history unfolds in individual lives. It neglects neither the Indian nor African American side of the story.”—Craig Womack, author of Drowning in Fire
“Peopled with richly conceived characters, driven by compelling human dramas that cross cultures and ages . . . [The Cherokee Rose] is an intimate study of the tangled histories and contemporary legacies of slave-holding in Indian country.”—Daniel Heath Justice, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, University of British Columbia
“Dr. Tiya Miles’s fiction contains, perhaps, just as much truth about our forgotten histories as her nonfiction. Her imagination—rendered with intricate and beautiful sentences and clear yet expected indications of her meticulous research—enables our moral imagination to grow. We need this.”—Caleb Gayle, author of We Refuse to Forget
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Jinx Micco walked the path to her Craftsman cottage, breathing a sigh of false relief. It used to be that after work, when she could be alone with her thoughts, was her favorite part of the day. But that had changed around the time her latest column was printed. 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 overflowed with long-lashed black-eyed Susans and heavy-headed sunflowers. But nothing grew in those old plots now except for the odd clump of scrub grass, which Jinx knew her great-aunt would have immediately plucked.
She stepped into the husk of a house, inhaling in the musty smell of plaster. The place was hers now, its walls covered with a faded floral wallpaper, its furniture curve-backed and overstuffed, its rayon Kmart curtains edged in scratchy lace. Photographs of family members, framed and mounted, crowded the walls. Jinx was not a lace-and-flowers kind of person, but she had kept it all anyway. She hadn’t changed a thing in this house since the inheritance—not the curtains, not the dishes, not the harvest-gold appliances. The 1920s cottage looked exactly as Aunt Angie had left it.
Jinx changed out of her cargo pants and slipped into comfy cutoff sweats. She unwound her hair from its braid to let it fall loosely around her face, a shade browner after countless walks in another Oklahoma summer. She sat in her great-aunt’s easy chair and dove into one of Deb’s charbroiled burgers, watching a rerun of Charlie’s Angels on the old rabbit-ear TV. She wished she had strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert. She was sure she had ordered a slice, but instead she had to settle for a handful of Now & Laters, her annoyance rising each time she unwrapped a single candy square.
Jinx washed her dinner plate, switched off the television, and raised the stiff windows. A moist breeze ruffled the curtains as she settled into her great-aunt’s study to start her evening’s work.
Angie Micco had been a pack rat, collecting any and every book on Muscogee history, saving each Sunday issue of the Muskogee Phoenix, and scouting out past editions of old Creek-area newspapers. She had century-old back issues of the Phoenix, the Eufaula Indian Journal, the Muskogee Comet, and the Muskogee Cimeter stacked to the roofline of the terra-cotta bungalow. Leaning over an open book at her great-aunt’s desk, Jinx tried to focus on her research. But she couldn’t shake the nagging sense that something was wrong. Ever since her last column, she had felt out of sorts. The source of her discomfort was not internal, like a stomachache or guilt pang; it was external, like a free-floating irritant. And now she was up against a deadline for her next installment of the “Indian Country Yesterday” column she had created. Her editor, a third cousin through a second marriage, was getting antsy. Read, she told herself. Focus.
She was supposed to be researching the Green Peach War of 1882, a major event in late-nineteenth-century Creek history. “Traditional” Creeks led by Chief Isparhecher, the ousted judge who wanted to maintain a tribal government, had waged a flash battle with “progressive” Creeks led by Principal Chief Checote, who wanted to run the Creek government like the United States. The traditionalists were the heroes of the story, the progressives glorified sellouts. Gray was just not a color she believed in. Back when she was taking graduate school seminars, she had never been one of those hesitant students who had trouble making up or speaking her mind. One professor who she knew didn’t think she belonged there had even called her work “potentially polemical.” She had shot back that he was “potentially racist” and asked why no Native American historians were on his syllabus. When it came to the black-and-white of Creek history, Jinx took a hard line. He gave her a C in the class, tantamount to an F in graduate school, and wrote in the margin of her final paper that her analysis “lacked sufficient nuance.”
Jinx leaned sideways and plucked the folder on Chief Isparhecher from the People drawer of her great-aunt’s filing cabinet. She loved that Aunt Angie had kept paper files on historical figures in the Creek Nation. She skimmed an old clipping on Isparhecher and his motley crew of anti-assimilationist activists, squinting at the tiny print and pushing back a loose skein of hair. She jotted down interesting points on her legal pad. Later, she would turn those ideas into an argument and send in her next column for the Muscogee Nation News.
Jinx’s hand itched. Her legs were cramped. The pen felt awkward in her hand. Something was wrong in her great-aunt’s house that night. Something was out of balance, like a dish off a shelf, a door off its hinge, a weed in the garden.
*
“Morning, Deb,” Jinx said from her perch on a stool at the L-shaped diner counter.
Deb Tom was a big-boned woman with bay-brown skin and silver hair that rolled down her back in waves. Some tribal members considered it unfortunate that she had such prominent Black ancestry, but they didn’t dare show their feelings out in the open. Deb’s words could be sharper than her homemade hot sauce, and the helpings just as generous. And Deb didn’t hesitate to throw offending customers out of her café and on to the street corner. Everybody loved Deb’s home-style cooking too much to cross her. That’s why Jinx was there.
“Well, well, if it ain’t Jinx Micco. Didn’t think I’d see you around ’til dinnertime.” Deb held a coffeepot in one hand, made the rounds refilling mugs, and took her own sweet time circling back to Jinx. “Coffee?” Deb said. She knew Jinx didn’t drink it.
“I’m saving myself for Coke, and I’m here because I can’t shake what you said about my last column.”
Deb was a regular reader of “Indian Country Yesterday” and one of Jinx’s biggest fans. But she had given Jinx flack for the piece on Afro-Creek Christians that mentioned a mission-school student back East. Deb had taken offense—unwarranted offense in Jinx’s mind—at the nature of the subject matter, probably because she was a descendant of Cow Tom, a famous Black Creek interpreter from the nineteenth century. The subject of race among the Creeks made Deb touchy.
Deb placed the coffeepot on the burner.
“Are you going to tell me what pissed you off?” Jinx said to Deb Tom’s back. “If you were mad enough at me to forget my dessert, don’t you think I have a right to know why?”
Deb held her stance for a moment, then turned to face Jinx. “You didn’t have to be so hard on her. Telling the story like Mary Ann betrayed her own mama. The way I read it, you made that lone girl responsible for the entire downfall of traditional Creek religion.”
Sam Sells, a retired breakfast regular who always took Deb’s side, turned his eyes away from his eggs to glare at Jinx.
Jinx lowered her voice. “The story wasn’t even really about her. It was about the Methodist missionaries’ failed attempts at converting Southern Creeks in the early 1800s. I had to explain that Creek traditionalists rejected Christianity, and that the Black people Creeks owned as slaves were the first to accept the faith, because that’s the way it happened. Those first enslaved converts paved the way for Creek conversion to Christianity. Mary Ann Battis was just an interesting example of the larger phenomenon. A part-Creek child of a Native mother and Black father who wanted to stay behind with white missionaries while her mom was removed to Indian Territory? It made for a punchy conclusion. That’s all. I think you should forgive me and let me order pancakes and a Coke.”
Deb was staring, unimpressed with Jinx’s argument and command of the facts. “That’s exactly what I mean. You see her life as no big deal, but she was big to somebody. What you wrote might be all anybody remembers about that girl. They’ll say she was a sellout who rejected her own mama in a nation that reckoned kin along the mama’s bloodlines. And they’ll say she was Black, because that’s the secret sauce of your tribal traitor story.” Deb threw her hand on her hip. “Benny,” she called back to the kitchen, “go ahead and get Jinx’s order up!”
Jinx blinked, diving for cover into the glass of icy Coke that Deb set before her. After a long moment, she looked up again. “I don’t care that Battis was Black. I mean, I do care, but I don’t care. She was just as much Indian as you or me.”
“Don’t you dare try that color-blind crap on me. I know you too well, Jennifer Inez Micco, ever since you was a baby. And I can’t say I’ve noticed you calling any of your other Indian figures, no matter how mixed with white they were, ‘part-Creek’ in your column.” Deb paused, then dropped the grenade she had been hiding in her apron pocket all along. “Like auntie, like niece.”
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reissue edition (June 13, 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593596420
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593596425
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.22 x 0.68 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #421,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Tiya Miles is the author of three multiple prize-winning works in the history of early American race relations: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom; The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story; and most recently, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.
She has also written historical fiction: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), shared her travels to "haunted" historic sites of slavery in a published lecture series, and written various articles and op-eds (in The New York Times, CNN.com, the Huffington Post) on women’s history, history and memory, black public culture, and black and indigenous interrelated experience.
She is a past MacArthur Foundation Fellow (“genius award”) and Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow and a current National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award recipient. She taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years and is currently a Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.
Tiya was born and raised in Cincinnati, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, three children, and three pets. She is an avid reader of feminist mysteries, a passionate fan of old houses, and a loyal patron of Graeter’s ice cream in Cincinnati as well as Dairy Queen just about anywhere.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the plot captivating and revealing the complexities of the times. They also appreciate the well-written prose and wonderfully developed characters.
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Customers find the plot captivating, good, and an education. They also describe the book as a literary achievement by an amazing writer/historian. Customers also mention the story is strange and interesting.
"Great read with a ghostly vibe & historical background. Somewhat predictable in characters final roles - but still quite enjoyable." Read more
"...Still, a novel well worth reading and teaching and one that engages issues too often overlooked." Read more
"Very interesting book - hard to get into at first, but keep reading." Read more
"...contains a wealth of historical information in addition to a well developed storyline that left me captivated, stunned and pleased all the way up to..." Read more
Customers find the book's content revealing the complexities of the times, hard-hitting, and mystical. They also describe it as a stirring, suspenseful, poignant debut, and provocative. Readers also mention that the story within a story is a great way to handle the parallel lives of the characters.
"Much to love about this book. Page turner with real historical impact...." Read more
"...Overall, The Cherokee Rose is a hard-hitting cultural lesson that will linger in my character repository and digital bookshelf for years to..." Read more
"...The novel contains a wealth of historical information in addition to a well developed storyline that left me captivated, stunned and pleased all the..." Read more
"...Easy to read, engaging, and provocative, The Cherokee Rose reminds us that history abounds with amazing characters, some of them really dreadful,..." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book well developed.
"...There are no easy heroes or villains and the Cherokee are not romanticized...." Read more
"...This is a brilliant novel, with well-written prose and wonderfully developed characters...." Read more
"...This book is grounded in a vivid portrayal of our nation's past and its stories of slavery, race, and family...." Read more
"...The way the characters were intertwined was genius and the form - a frame story (story within a story) was a great way to handle the parallel lives..." Read more
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I don’t ride the fence with my racial identity, and neither do many of the main characters in this novel. The paths of protagonists Jennifer “Jinx” Micco, Cheyenne Cotterell, and Ruth Mayes intertwined during their searches for truth, riches, and adventure, leading them to the Chief James Hold plantation in North Georgia’s Blue Ridge territory, once the heart of the Cherokee nation.
Part I of the novel (Our Mothers’ Gardens) opens in 2008 with Jinx, a Muscogee (Creek) Nation historian, columnist, and part-time librarian. Jinx penned a story in her local tribal newspaper about Mary Ann Battis, a mixed-race Creek educated by Christian missionaries.
Jinx takes pride in her research skills. As noted in the story, “she [doesn’t] deal in sanitized history.” Her friend Deb, however, feels that Jinx’s article was shortsighted in her interpretation of Mary Ann’s motivations and loyalties. Deb asks Jinx to travel to Georgia to kill two birds with one stone: to find out more about Mary Ann Battis— a member of their tribe— and to possibly retrieve historical tribal documents from the Hold House.
This is when Jinx meets Cheyenne, a proud debutante from Atlanta who is determined to win the historic Hold House (the plantation manor and a former museum) at auction. Cheyenne is shallow and self-absorbed in many regards, yet astute in her dealing and aspiration for the property.
Ruth, a magazine writer, is sorely unaware of what lies ahead when she jumps into her car and travels to Georgia to kill time and write an article about the Hold House. Once these women are brought together under one roof, mysteries, revelations, and romance unfold in both practical and supernatural ways—which leads to Part II of the story (Talking Leaves).
Here, Miles uses historical figures to weave fact with fiction and infuse readers with the beauties and horrors of the Hold Plantation and the cross-cultural bonds of women living in early 19th century Cherokee country. This part of the story is told through the diary of Anna Gamble, a Moravian missionary sent to the plantation to lead multi-race and Indian heathens to Christ.
Anna reveals that James Hold, the richest and most influential Cherokee chief, was a cruel man who committed atrocities that provoked revenge and murder— a man whose evils against his slaves and wives created a plantation that “was obsessed with emotions of the past.”
By Part III (The Three Sisters), readers will appreciate the multiple layers that illustrate the relationships between Cherokees, free Blacks, missionaries, and slaves— and the influences of Cherokee slaveholding, religion, racism, U.S. and tribal governments, colonization, and capitalism. And when all of this is mixed together, we are reminded that the present can never be unraveled from the past, no matter how much falsification has taken place.
There are a lot of characters to keep up with throughout the novel. (I haven’t mentioned the supporting characters; some help drive the plot). And, a large portion of Part III felt romanticized to me because the characters’ lives (both past and present) wrapped up nicely—as if the writing recipe couldn’t be muddied a bit. Here, I have to note that the author is a historian. But, to me, the facts drove the fiction, which makes chunks of the fiction feel excessive.
Also, Miles could have used Part III to complete initial aspects of the story. For example:
- Deb and the tribal community’s reaction upon learning the full history of Mary Ann Battis.
- Cheyenne—the character who experienced the greatest transformation—could have had more weight beyond being a vessel for the past, and her transformation could have been mirrored in her personal life (i.e., her family and friends).
- Address the multiple acts of vandalism that occurred at the manor.
The African diaspora and Native Americans share a long and painful past, and Miles uses the convergence of Jinx, Cheyenne, and Ruth to convey one thread of 19th century American history. "The Cherokee Rose" pays homage to the spirituality, resiliency, and legacy of both African and aboriginal women— a legacy that Black women should not abuse today to lay claims to their “baby hair” or colorful genealogies.
Overall, The Cherokee Rose is a hard-hitting cultural lesson that will linger in my character repository and digital bookshelf for years to come.
~Review originally posted at the Black Lesbian Literary Collective