The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles
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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 “garden-level” basement apartment, where not even houseplants fought to survive. Ruth tapped her unpolished fingernails on the mousepad, trying to think of a reason to stay 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 30, 2008:
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 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 Vann Hold, the son of a Cherokee mother and Scottish 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 2002.
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 are 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 in Ask.com 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, more than 170 years after that crime, an economic crisis was going to finish the job of wiping Cherokee history off the Georgia map.
“Lauren!” Ruth called, jumping out of her seat and grabbing pages from the shared office printer. She plunged into Lauren’s office, culottes swirling against her calves. “Am I all set with the carpet story?”
Lauren looked up from her mug of chai tea and the slick proofs fanned across her desk. “Yep. Nice work. Do you have any plans for the holiday weekend?”
“I do now. A new story.” Ruth dropped the printed pages next to Lauren’s proofs. “About a historic house down south, built by Cherokee Indians in the 1800s and run as a house museum since the 1950s. The state of Georgia closed the museum six years ago and is going to sell the land this month in a public auction.”
“And you want to investigate. I can see why. The topic is intriguing, packs an emotional punch. Our readers would appreciate the historic-house focus, and the Indian 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.”
“That’s easy, then. Sold. Take a slew of photos. Good ones. I can’t afford to send a photographer down there.”
“I will. Thanks, Lauren.” Ruth gave her boss a smile, then turned on the heels of her clogs.
Back at her desk, she shut down her MacBook, slipped it into its quilted sleeve, and grabbed her bunchy leather bag. She snatched the travel mug from her desk and stopped to refill it with the dregs of coffee left in the staff kitchen.
As she pushed through the metal door into the clear autumn day, she felt again that hint of coolness. The weather was on the cusp of change. She was going south just in time.
Ruth hurried to her Volkswagen Beetle and plopped her mug into the holder. She would stop by her apartment to throw together a travel bag and ask her upstairs neighbor to collect her mail. She had no one to call, no one who would miss her. Ruth and her father rarely spoke these days. Even if she were to pack up and move away from Minneapolis–St. Paul, her father probably wouldn’t notice until Christmastime when she failed to turn up at his high-rise condo 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 was headed straight down I-75 to a small, rural town in the state where her mother had been born.
4
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.
Sally blew a puff of air through her lips. Not much more now. Just the stairwell and the hallways, the butler’s pantry and foyer. Thank the Lord Eddie Junior takes good naps. Sally had finished the second floor while he slept in his seat. She had mopped and polished the main floor while he rode on her hip in a fancy made-in-Canada sling she had gotten as a hand-me-down from one of the former docent’s daughters.
Sally cooed at her son once, twice, looking into his eyes while he gurgled. She lifted him out of the sling and bent to strap him into the bouncy seat. “Almost finished, Junior. Gotta make it pretty. Somebody’s fixin’ to buy this place.” Sally plopped a kiss on her baby’s cheek and popped a pacifier into his mouth. She pressed the button that made the seat rock back and forth, then wiped a palm across her damp hairline.
Raising the sling over her head and stuffing it into her diaper bag, Sally grasped a fold of her T-shirt and flapped it in and out. She cranked the iron handle of a leaded-glass window, hoping for a breeze. The noise of a construction truck rumbled in. Maybe a digger, maybe a bulldozer. Mason Allen. Beyond the dip of the elegant hill on which the old plantation house stood, the land was being cleared for a condo development.
Sally touched a hand to the paneled oak wall beside her. Its planes and ridges felt like vertebrae beneath her thumb, fragile and hollow, thinning with age. She had begged for this job back in high school—talked her way into it when she heard the previous cleaning lady had quit in a huff, complaining of an odd smell in the attic that just couldn’t be gotten rid of. A dead bat, Sally had thought at the time. She had seen worse around her trailer, even before Eddie Senior moved in. The director of the house museum called an exterminator and hired Sally on the spot, desperate to see the place spruced up in time for the garden show that year. The pay was low, but better than what Sally made cleaning at the nursing home. And she had always wondered about this brooding house on the hill, visible for miles. She had been curious about its history even before her fifth-grade class took the standard tour for county kids. If she had made it to college, or even out of high school, before getting together with Eddie Senior, she would have taken some kind of class on Southern history. But working here had given her the next best thing, a chance to soak in all that drama of the past.
The story went that James Vann Hold, the man who built the plantation when this all counted as Indian land, was the handsome son of a full-blood Cherokee mother and European father. Hold got to be filthy rich