The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles
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Deb was Deb; she stood her ground. “Angie Micco was a lot of things, some good and some bad. But one thing she wasn’t was open-minded about people who were different.” She looked intently at Jinx. “Any kind of different.”
Jinx chipped her words off the ice of her thoughts, gripped the sweating glass, empty now of soda. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do, honey. I think you do. Here’s your breakfast. Eat up and get on over to the library before you make yourself late.”
c
Jinx hiked over to the slab cement public-library building and stowed her messenger bag. For a part-time job, it wasn’t bad, even if only schoolchildren and members of the Saturday ladies’ book club found their way into the local branch. The children bounced in like balloons for story time and then were gone in a swirl of color and motion. The ladies’ club read historical romances, which Jinx could probably appreciate if they contained just a sliver of irony. She had taken the job more for the books than the people. Books were constant company and had personality to boot. Spending her days at easy book work kept her mind clear for the evenings too, when she did her writing and cataloged her great-aunt’s files. Her library income paid the taxes on Angie’s house, which didn’t sit on tribal land in their checkerboard Oklahoma town where former Creek Nation lots had gone to white residents over the years. It also paid for her fruit-pie habit at Deb’s, her Twizzlers habit at the 7-Eleven, and her daily Coca-Colas.
When Angie Micco left her house and everything in it to Jinx, no one in the family had minded. From the time she was a tiny girl, Jinx had gravitated to Aunt Angie, circling her ample form like a small moon to its planet. There were photos of Jinx as a sixth-month-old sitting on Aunt Angie’s lap, sucking on the end of her aunt’s thick eyeglasses. At family feeds and cookouts, she toddled behind Aunt Angie, clasping soggy fry bread chunks in her fists. Everyone said it was Angie, not the kindergarten teacher, who taught Jinx to read. At picnics in the arbor, the two of them would settle on a blanket all their own, reading old Indian Territory newspapers and reacting in tandem to the goings-on of historical figures Aunt Angie had taught Jinx to know. Except for Jinx’s mother, who would pause beside them now and then to smooth back Jinx’s hair and refill Angie’s coffee mug, the relatives had left them to their studies.
For Jinx’s twelfth birthday, Aunt Angie gave her a series of early-edition Creek history books that had been sold by the tribal college after it updated its library collection. When Jinx turned sixteen and finally asked Aunt Angie an Indian history question she couldn’t answer with certainty, Aunt Angie had smiled and said it was time for Jinx to leave the nest. At seventeen, Jinx went off to college on scholarship at the University of Tulsa. “That one’s a smart cookie, trained by Angie,” everyone back home had said. Four years later, Jinx set off for graduate school to pursue her doctorate in history. Aunt Angie, then seventy-six with dyed purplish hair and the same oversized eyeglasses, had ridden shotgun next to Jinx on the cross-country trip to North Carolina, telling Jinx what turns to make and which lane to drive in, even though she herself hadn’t driven a day in her life. Eight years later, Jinx had yet to earn her degree. When her mother called to say Aunt Angie was gone, Jinx packed up the notes and files for the dissertation she would never finish and returned straight home to Ocmulgee.
“There you are, Jennifer! I was about to send out the troops!” Emma called when she spotted Jinx in the empty reading room. Jinx’s cheery coworker was dressed in a delicate yellow sundress and flat-soled sandals, her hair neatly clipped with a matching barrette. Emma’s looks whispered librarian, while Jinx’s shouted tomboy. Jinx sported her favorite oversized cargo khakis and the cherry-red Converse high tops that made some of the older patrons blink in surprise.
“Send in the troops?” Jinx said.
“Right! Do you have any plans for the morning? Mindy’s day-care group will be here at ten. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d take them.”
“Knock yourself out,” Jinx said. “I’ve got some returns to process, and the nature section is a mess after that Boy Scout troop rifled through it yesterday.”
“Thanks, Jennifer! I just can’t wait for the school year to start. Then we’ll have classroom visits once a week. All of those kiddies with their new lunchboxes and stuffed pencil cases. They’re just so cute.”
“Too cute,” Jinx said. “I’ll be in the back, if you need me.”
Jinx made her way to the cramped office area where Emma’s cuddly-kittens calendar swung from a bulletin board and her pointelle knit sweater draped the back of a chair. Emma would be busy for a while setting out puzzles and selecting stories for the kids. Their branch director, Marjorie, hardly ever came in on Friday mornings and wouldn’t be the wiser. Jinx plopped down in front of the computer and settled in to surf the Internet.
Mary Ann Battis got no hits when she typed it into the Google search bar, but the name of the mission where she had first gone to school returned a series of articles. Jinx opened a link concerning Alabama state historic sites that blurbed the Fort Mitchell Asbury Mission School, next to the photo of a historical marker. The Methodist mission school in the Creek Nation, located on the Georgia-Alabama border, had been destroyed by fire in the early 1800s. Most of the children were relocated to nearby white Christian homes, but advanced students had been transferred to a Moravian mission school in the Cherokee Nation, housed on the estate of a wealthy Cherokee chief named James Hold. When Jinx Googled James Hold, a score of tourist websites popped up profiling the “devil-may-care” Cherokee “entrepreneur” and describing his “showplace” plantation on the Georgia “frontier.” Jinx clicked on a link about the Hold Plantation museum, this one to a recent newspaper article: “State Cuts Pull Rug from under Cherokees, Friends of the Hold House.”
She skimmed the article. The historic Hold Plantation site was being pawned off by the state like a broken turntable. It wasn’t as bad as when the United States government had put the Creek Council House up for sale in 1902, but it was bad enough. This plantation was the last place Mary Ann Battis was known to have lived. Traces of her might still exist among the auctioned household items. The home would be sold within a month and would probably fall into some rich white man’s hands, just like most Indian land of any value. But maybe the door had not completely closed. Maybe the house was full of old museum documents she could request copies of.
“Story time, children!” Jinx heard Emma sing-songing out in the multipurpose room. “It’s Mary Poppins today! And then we’ll make tissue-paper umbrellas!”
Jinx printed out the pages from her search, then scooped up the pile of book returns. Someone had been on a supernatural-romance binge and was partial to Heather Graham. Someone else—a middle-schooler, she guessed—had finished a summer science project on undersea volcanoes. And someone fond of sticky notes—most likely a gardener—had tabbed several pages in a book called Dangerous Plants.
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Jinx didn’t stop by Deb’s that night. She warmed a can of pork and beans and ate it with toast and a hunk of commodity cheese her cousin had brought over. Then she sat in her aunt’s desk chair and reread her last week’s “Indian Country Yesterday” article. She still didn’t see anything wrong with the argument she had advanced that black and black Indian Christian converts like Mary Ann Battis had furthered the cultural assimilation of the tribe. True, her readers could infer that she questioned Battis’s choice in shunning Creek family life in exchange for the Christian faith. But her facts were correct—of that Jinx was certain. If Deb Tom wanted to claim that her writing wasn’t sensitive enough, that was fine with Jinx. She didn’t deal in sanitized history. That was a job for the Pine-Sol lady.
Jinx opened a dog-eared book on the history of the Green Peach War. She compiled more facts in her notebook, glancing up at the windows and walls, distracted by the strange undercurrent in the air. She sighed, craving pie and feeling uneasy. Maybe Aunt Angie had information on Mary Ann Battis in her collection of papers.
Jinx turned to her aunt’s filing cabinet. Battis was there. The wafer-thin folder had only four microfilmed letters inside, from the Creek Agency records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.