The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles
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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 like scrapbook pages. Jinx was not a lace-and-flowers kind of girl, but she had kept it all anyway. She hadn’t changed a thing in this house since the inheritance—not the throw pillows, not the dishes, not the harvest-gold appliances. The cottage looked exactly as Aunt Angie had left it.
Jinx changed out of her khaki pants and slipped into comfy cutoff sweats. She unwound her hair from its braid to let it fall loosely around her face, toasted now after countless walks in the Oklahoma summer sun. Jinx settled into her 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 set. She wished she had some strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert; she was sure she had ordered a slice. Instead, she settled for a handful of Now & Laters, annoyed at having to unwrap each candy square. Jinx washed her dinner plate, switched off the television, and raised the 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 in the air. 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. When it came to the black-and-white of Creek history, Jinx took a hard line. Gray was just not a color she believed in. She had never been one of those hesitant students who had trouble making up or speaking her mind back when she was taking graduate-school seminars. 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. 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 points into an explanatory argument and send in her column for the Muscogee Nation News.
Jinx’s hand itched. Her legs felt cramped. Something was wrong in her great-aunt’s house. Something was out of balance, like a dish off a shelf, a door off its hinge, a weed in the garden.
c
“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 a flaw 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, 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, took her own sweet time circling back to Jinx. “Coffee?” Deb said. She knew Jinx didn’t drink it.
“No thanks. I’m saving myself for Coke. I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, about my column on Mary Ann Battis. What didn’t you like about it? Why were you so pissed off?”
Deb was a regular reader of “Indian Country Yesterday” and usually had positive feedback. But she had given Jinx flack for that piece on black Creek Christians, the one that mentioned a mission-school student named Mary Ann Battis back in the East. As a descendant of Cow Tom, a famous black Creek interpreter from the nineteenth century, Deb had taken offense—unwarranted offense—at the nature of the subject matter.
“Maybe you should leave poor Mary Ann alone. She was just a girl.”
“Maybe I should, and maybe I shouldn’t. I can’t tell yet. You were mad enough at me to forget the dessert in my carry-out last night. Don’t you think I have a right to know why, Deb?”
“How come you had to be so hard on Mary? Telling the story like she betrayed her own mama? The way I read it, you made that girl responsible for the entire downfall of Creek traditional religion.”
Sam Sells, a retired breakfast regular who always took Deb’s side, turned his eyes away from his eggs to glare at Jinx.
“Come on, Deb.” Jinx lowered her voice. “The story wasn’t even mostly about that student. It was about the Methodist missionaries’ failed attempts at converting Southern Creeks in the early 1800s. I had to write that Creek traditionalists rejected Christianity, and that the Creeks’ black slaves were the first to accept the faith, because that’s the way it happened. Those first slave converts were the ones who laid the groundwork for Creek conversion to Christianity down the line. Battis was just an example. Who would have thought that a part-Creek child of an Indian mother and black father would want to stay behind with white missionaries while her mother was removed to Indian Territory? It made an interesting ending for the column. Is it really that big a deal? Can’t you forgive me? And could I have some Coke, please, and some pancakes with bacon?”
Deb was staring, apparently unimpressed with Jinx’s argument and command of the facts. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You see her life as no big deal, but she was big to somebody. Didn’t your auntie, the great tribal historian, teach you that words can be swords, that words can be scalpels—and saving graces, too? What you wrote is the last impression anybody has, the last thing anybody might remember, 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 be citing you. Oh, yeah, and they’ll say she was black—that’s the essential ingredient of your 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 dove into the glass of icy Coke that Deb set before her. After a long moment, she looked up again. “Deb, come on. 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 colorblind crap on me. I know you too well, Jennifer Inez Micco, ever since you was a baby. And I can’t say as 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, I guess.”
“What?” Jinx exploded, causing Sam Sells to slosh his coffee over the top of his chipped ceramic mug. Deb’s other morning diners were craning their necks to get a look at who was making the commotion. Her mother would hear about this before ten o’clock,