The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      c

      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. Jinx shifted toward a shelf and pulled down the general Creek history books, searching for Battis in the indexes. She found her listed in two studies. The authors disagreed about whether the girl’s mother or father had been black and whether her black parent had been enslaved or free. But the authors, like Jinx, agreed that Battis chose to remain with the missionaries while her Indian family suffered the trial of compulsory removal. It was the only conclusion that could be reached from the documentary record. There was nothing new here—nothing Jinx could see.

      She closed the file on Chief Isparhecher, opened the top drawer of her great-aunt’s metal filing cabinet, and slid the folder back inside. Then she opened the second drawer to put the Battis folder in place. Jinx looked from drawer to drawer, realizing for the first time that these files were not in alphabetical, chronological, or even thematic order. She slung open every drawer then, running her fingers along the razor-edged folders like a blind person speed-reading Braille. Could it be that her great-aunt’s biographical files were organized by race, full-bloods positioned at the top, mixed-bloods placed in the back, and black Creeks stuffed into a segregated second-tier drawer? Could it be that Jinx with her almost-Ph.D. had come along two generations later and maintained the same color-coded filing system? Deb Tom’s accusations against her great-aunt—against her—rang in Jinx’s head.

      “Holy smokes,” Jinx said to no one. She abandoned the study, snapping off the painted floral lamp. She brushed her teeth in the subway-tiled bathroom and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts. Her bedroom—her great-aunt’s bedroom—was shadowy and still. And then a cool breeze floated through a window, tangling with the flat interior air. Jinx turned in surprise. It was early September in Oklahoma, where even nighttime breezes were sticky and warm. The curtains fluttered as she watched. Jinx had never taken those curtains down, never washed them or dusted the rods. She reached out, gently touching a lace-edged hemline that left a faint trail of dust on her fingertip.

      c

      When Jinx walked into Deb’s Diner early the next morning with her messenger bag slung over her shoulder, Deb just looked at her for ten still seconds. “Sit,” Deb finally said, gesturing toward the counter.

      She set a glass of Coke beside Jinx, along with a napkin and fork. Sam Sells was having sausage and biscuits smothered in gravy. He nodded a silent greeting at Jinx from beneath the rim of his John Deere baseball cap. Jinx breathed in relief.

      “Nobody talks about Mary Ann Battis much these days, among the freedmen descendants,” Deb said. “There’s some pain there, I guess, pain still felt from a story long forgotten. Mary Ann’s daddy—they called him Battis—was a black man who took his own freedom. I always heard he came through Alabama Creek country on a forged government passport back in the 1790s. And her mama, well, she lost touch with the girl once the family came out here to Indian Territory. Her mama got one letter and never heard tell of poor Mary Ann after that.”

      “That’s some story, Deb,” Jinx said. “Sad.”

      “That’s only part of the story. The rest of it, we don’t know. But you could find out for all of us. You could head back east. Go to Alabama, where Mary was from. Find her grave. Sit with her for a spell. Get your information from the real source instead of some book.”

      Jinx didn’t dare cut into the fluffy blueberry pancakes that Sadie, one of the waitresses, had delivered to the counter. Deb was looking at her too intensely, waiting to see if Jinx would accept her assignment. Communing with the dead to corroborate a loose oral story was not one of Jinx’s usual research methods. But there was that plantation for sale in Georgia, and there were those hypothetical house-museum documents.

      “Wait here,” Deb said, having made some mysterious decision. “I might have something for you.”

      Jinx was left to worry and wonder while she packed in mouthfuls of pancake.

      When Deb returned, huffing and puffing from her exertions, Jinx was sure she had walked all the way back to her shotgun house down the alley from the restaurant. Deb was holding a wrinkled manila envelope twined shut with a thin red cord.

      “What is it?”

      Deb leaned forward on the counter, exposing cleavage in the deep V of her neckline. “This was part of my great-grandfather Cow Tom’s papers. The family kept them stashed away in a cardboard box all these years. I take them out from time to time and read them, share bits and pieces with the freedmen’s descendants groups. I never could make heads or tails of this letter. But I bet you could if you set your mind to it.” Deb paused. “It might just be the push you need to finish that dissertation.”

      Jinx snapped her head up. “I didn’t finish because my great-aunt died. I had to come home.”

      “No, baby. You didn’t finish because once things got tough out there, once those university folks challenged what you thought you knew, you tucked tail and ran. Your auntie’s death was hard on you, that’s true, but it was also a ready excuse for you to give up. You were born to study history, Jinx, born to write about it. You’ll soon find out that life’s too short not to chase your dreams. Here, hon, open it.” She handed the envelope to Jinx.

      Stung by Deb’s blunt words, Jinx hesitated, but she couldn’t resist the call of that envelope. She untwined the thin cord and drew out a saffron page. The paper was cracked and brittle, flaking at her touch like the salted surface of a pretzel stick. She worried about the oil of her fingertips damaging the document. If this had been an archive, she would have been asked to wear white gloves before handling something so fragile. Down the counter, Sam Sells waved to Sadie for a refill of coffee. Behind the counter, Benny fried eggs and wiped his brow with a forearm. Jinx scanned the paper, taking in its prominent features: shape, texture, date, script. Antiquated cursive loops, beautiful in form, trailed across the page.

      April 18, 1826

      Dear СКАЧАТЬ