The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ late that night, after first stopping to fill the gas tank of her silver sports coupe. She planned to hit I-75 at dawn and beat the other drivers as they headed to quaint inns and cabins in the Blue Ridge Mountains for Labor Day weekend. The Hold House was waiting. She wanted to get a feel for the property before it was auctioned on Tuesday.

      Opening the door of her condo and slipping off her pumps, Cheyenne sank her feet into the white shag carpeting. Her glass-walled townhouse in Candler Park was sleek and modern, boasting views of the city skyline. She looked around at the Eames side chairs and angular cranberry couches. Maybe she was 100 percent city, as Toni claimed, but who said she couldn’t bring city to the country? The Hold House could be completely redone in a modernist style—straight lines, nickel fixtures, shagreen finishes, textured throw pillows. The contrast between nineteenth-century architecture and the clean look of her interior design would be to die for.

      Cheyenne dropped her dress in a tent on the floor, showered, and blew-dry her hair until it fell arrow-straight. She changed into silk pajamas, stepping over the crumpled dress. Gretchen, the domestic help whose visits were a gift from her parents, would be in tomorrow afternoon to tidy up. Cheyenne settled onto the leather couch, tucked her feet beneath her, and turned on Lifetime. The made-for-TV drama about a divorced couple’s new lease on marriage after taking in an orphaned child was a repeat. It was Friday night, after all. Nothing was on. Cheyenne flipped through last month’s Cosmo, then picked up the racy urban romance she was in the middle of. She plunged back into the story of Diamond, the pretty girl who grew up too fast in the Chicago projects, and Jay, the would-be poet turned drug dealer who sold crack only to satisfy Diamond’s gold-digging appetites. Cheyenne tried to ignore the hungry ache she felt in the pit of her stomach. A salad at Aria and a Nutri-Grain bar were all she had eaten that day. As she often found in the dim hush of her luxury condo at nighttime, she was starved for more.

      c

      Cheyenne had been fooling herself when she pledged to hit the road at dawn. She never woke a minute before nine o’clock. She packed her suitcases and makeup bag, dressed in a skirt and fluttery blouse, then waited in line for ten minutes at the nearest Starbucks drive-through. Damn holiday travelers. She sipped her light latte as she peeled onto the highway behind a line of cars. It took her thirty minutes just to clear the city sprawl on the way to her dream house in the foothills. Cheyenne sped up I-75 with the top down on her Mercedes-Benz and a Jackie O–style scarf tied around her head. The view of closely congregated buildings gave way to green space; flat land rose into hills and dipped into shallow valleys.

      Cheyenne felt on the verge of a great discovery, one that could change her life. She had always been interested in her grandmother’s stories about their Native American heritage, but she hadn’t started tracing her roots until after her grandmother’s death. There were so many things she wanted to ask, now that it was too late. To compensate, Cheyenne was an avid participant on the AfriGeneas and RootsWeb genealogy sites, posting queries and checking compulsively for the latest postings to the Cotterell crowd-sourced family tree. She could trace her family history back to the 1860s, but then the trail went cold. That’s where her grandmother’s stories came in. They explained the gap. Many times growing up, she had heard her grandmother tell the tale that traced their family’s origins. Her grandmother used to say that the Cotterell line had started on a Cherokee plantation two hundred years ago with a female ancestor who married an Indian man. The couple’s children hadn’t been enrolled in the tribe because of their mixed-race ancestry, but the children’s names, along with those of all black Indians on the plantation, were recorded in a secret list that no one had seen since. The Hold Plantation in the North Georgia foothills, the heart of former Cherokee territory, was the only place she had found during her genealogical research that matched the description in her grandmother’s story.

      Like most other kids in Atlanta, Cheyenne had toured the Hold House once or twice in grade school. But having a chance to own it, to hold it for herself, was only a fantasy until this week. Her parents thought she was obsessed with genealogy because she hadn’t found the right man to settle down with. Her father humored her with fabricated interest in the draft charts that filled the pages of her Black Indian Genealogy Workbook. Her mother didn’t even pretend to care, waving away her grainy prints of family census records. To them, genealogy was a hobby. To her, it was a quest to find the missing pieces of an inner puzzle that could finally tell her who she was. Cheyenne was a throwback, her grandmother used to say, to an unknown branch of the Cotterell family tree. She fully intended to find that branch and brandish it.

      3

      Ruth Mayes stared at the ocean liner floating across her computer screen, wanting to squash it like a bug. Holland America had slashed its Jamaican cruise fares to drum up ticket sales for the fall season. Pop-up ads nettled her; so did movie trailers. She tended to edit the images she allowed into her head, resenting any loss of control.

      She x-ed out the picture of the long white boat, blocking the thoughts it conjured. Reaching for her travel mug, she took a sip of bad office coffee, then pulled off her tortoise-shell glasses and tugged a corkscrew of thick, dark hair. She leaned back into her seat, aligning her butt with the padding, shifting her swivel chair with the movement of her body. Wheeling the chair in close to her desk, Ruth dug her clogs into the floor and glanced at the architectural photographs taped to the backbone of her cubicle. She needed a muse, a muse who knew houses. She needed a story idea.

      Ruth rested her head on her forearms. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, one hour until the start of her forced vacation. She had nothing to do and nowhere to go for the next two weeks. What she absolutely could not do was lounge around at home in her basement apartment. When she had time on her hands, the pictures popped into her mind, forming a cloud of memories that overtook her like a storm.

      “Ruth, are you feeling all right?” It was Lauren, Ruth’s empathetic, India-print-skirted creative director.

      “Just fine. Thanks.” Ruth straightened her back and popped her glasses onto her nose, taking care not to tangle them in her thicket of curly hair.

      Lauren scanned the blank face of Ruth’s computer screen. “Good, because I’ve got an assignment for you. The sisal mat photo spread didn’t come through. By five, we need a filler story on floor coverings—something trendy, preferably natural fiber. Look for carpets; see what’s new.”

      “Carpets? Are you kidding me? Fudge, Lauren.”

      “I only need five hundred words. And don’t miss the deadline just so you have a reason to come in Monday. As much as we love you around here, Ruth, we don’t want to see you next week. Take the vacation that’s coming to you and save your company some money.”

      Everyone on staff knew Abode was suffering. Advertising had plunged in the last year; subscriptions had slowed as readers started cutting back on their leisure-activity budgets. For the first time in its eight-year run as a sleek Minneapolis-based shelter magazine, Abode was in the red. Instead of cutting staff or shutting down, senior management was trying an intermediate tack. All of the writers had been asked to take accrued vacation time without pay by December. Ruth, an office junkie who barely alighted at home, had saved up six weeks of vacation in her four years with the magazine. The lost pay would devastate some of her coworkers, but Ruth’s mother had left her an ostrich-sized nest egg. For Ruth, it wasn’t the money that kicked her heartbeat into high gear, it was the yawn of open time.

      “Carpets are cozy. Carpets are colorful,” Lauren was saying. “Just the thing for fall. Six hundred words with an ethnic twist. That’s all I’m asking.”

      “I thought you said five hundred.”

      “Six hundred,” Lauren said, patting Ruth’s shoulder in encouragement.

      Ruth shrugged off the touch. “Got it.”

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