The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, Jinx was sure. “Are you calling my aunt a racist?” Jinx wasn’t afraid to use the race card either. If Deb could deal it, she could play it.

      But 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 СКАЧАТЬ