The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts by Tiya Miles (review)

In the author’s note at the end of her novel The Cherokee Rose, Tiya Miles writes, “The circumstances and characters described in this novel are drawn from my research on African American and Native American relationships, conducted over more than fifteen years. The predominant context for the story is Cherokee slaveholding” (246). In order to deal with this complex, and often ignored, historical reality, Miles creates a work of fiction modeled on actual events, locations, and people. The setting, in both contemporary time and the early 1800s, is on a large plantation owned by the fictional James Vann Hold. The real plantation house and grounds are located, like the fictional ones, in Georgia, and it is there where Miles brings her three main characters together. They explore the history of the place and discover secrets that challenge their notions of who they are and how they relate to a complex past that connects them.

The first section of the novel is devoted to introducing these three characters and provides the motivations for their separate journeys to the Chief Hold House. Jennifer (Jinx) Micco is a historian of the Muscogee Creek Nation, a resident of Oklahoma, and a writer for the Muscogee Nation News. After being accused of providing a skewed sense of history in her portrayal of a young Creek girl who had lived on the Hold Plantation in the early 1800s, Jinx decides to take a trip to the site to discover what she can about Mary Ann Battis and the life she led. Cheyenne Cotterell is a wealthy young woman from Atlanta who decides that she will purchase the Hold plantation, since it is being sold by the state of Georgia. She believes that her stunning beauty comes from her mixed heritage of African American and Cherokee ancestors, and she feels tied to this Cherokee plantation in ways that she can’t explain. Ruth Mayes is a writer for a magazine in Minneapolis, and her interest in the Hold plantation is piqued when she reads an article about its impending auction. Since her mother was from the area where the Hold house is located, and since she had visited there as a child, attending a summer camp for African American children, she decides to travel back to Georgia and visit the plantation grounds once more.

As the novel progresses, the three women face the actual history of the plantation as manifested to them through the pages of a long-hidden diary. The author, Anna Rosina Gambold, was the wife of the Moravian minister sent to the plantation in 1815. Through the words of this document, the characters gain a new understanding of life on the plantation from 1815 to 1816, a life that was often cruel and violent, one in which slaves, especially women, were treated horribly at the hands of the ruthless James Vann Hold. They come to realize that many of the things they thought (or wanted) to be true, whether about historical figures like Mary Ann Battis, their own personal ancestries, or their contemporary ideas of self and society, are actually quite different. Through their conversations, arguments, and epiphanies, the reader is also asked to reevaluate notions of history, society, and race.

In many ways, a novel like this is a perfect extension of Miles’s notable career and scholarship. However, the novel is not without its flaws. Though the first part of the novel serves its purpose in establishing the historical context and bringing the characters together at the plantation, the plot sometimes feels contrived, and the dialogue can seem stilted and merely functional. It is indeed convenient for Jinx to stumble across a history book with information about the lost diary of Mrs. Gamble on her way to Georgia. And the character Sally Perdue seems only to serve the function of providing characters (and the reader) with pertinent historical information. Some of the other...