Last updated: April 12, 2024
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Podcast 153: Cherokee Rose
What is “The Cherokee Rose?”
Photo Credit Tiya Miles
Tiya Alicia Miles: I’m Tiya Miles, I’m very happy to be here, Megan.
Megan: The book “The Cherokee Rose”, can you briefly describe that?
Tiya Alicia Miles: It's a very different kind of book, but there are also many echoes and intersections across these two books. “The Cherokee Rose” is subtitled A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. It is a work of fiction, though very much like “All That She Carried” in spirit. It is a work that is situated in a southern place; it is very much about the environment surrounding a group of people. And in the case of “The Cherokee Rose,” those people are fictional or fictionalized. But the book is also based on quite a lot of historical research. It was inspired by research that I started when I was a graduate student writing my dissertation, and by research that continued in my first two books, which were about the history of slavery in the Cherokee Nation, about African-American, African-descended people who were sadly and unfortunately and immorally owned as slaves, held as property by Cherokee people in the 19th century.
“The Cherokee Rose” is a novel that takes place in two time periods; it's situated in the 19th century and also in our present time. “All That She Carried” is very similar, actually. It is a work of history, but it's also very much about what the history means to us today and about the preservation of the past today, the interpretation of the past today. On “The Cherokee Rose,” I had more leeway, more room to explore, the contemporary period because it was about a fictional set of characters. There are three main characters, all women from different racial and cultural backgrounds, from different parts of the country, who are drawn to one place: The Cherokee Rose Plantation. “The Cherokee Rose” is located in what we now call Georgia, but what used to be the Cherokee homelands and Cherokee territory. These three women come to “The Cherokee Rose” for what they think are their own reasons, but in actuality, they are called there by the ghost of a historical figure, a young girl who used to be a student at a missionary school on the same grounds of The Cherokee Rose Plantation. The women in the present-day time who are named Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne, arrive thinking that they've got a plan and thinking they have their own intentions, and then find themselves drawn into and swept up by a mystery, which has to do with the history of that house and with what took place there 200 years before.
Megan: Wow, that's great. You said you had years of research; I believe you said you had 15 years of research in African-American and Native American relationships that were basically the foundation of how this book created. You wrote it from primaries. What historic sources and ideas that you came during that research that helped you, inspire you to tell this story in the way that you have told it?
Tiya Alicia Miles: The first primary source was the plantation itself. I really do think of places, human-built structures, and natural features of the landscape as being sources. They inspire me, and they also give me information about things that took place in the past and the people who lived in the past, events that transpired in the past. And in the case of “The Cherokee Rose,” that place is the Chief Vann House State Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia. I visited the Vann House many years ago when I was a graduate student, and I went there as I was trying to better understand this history of enslavement in the Cherokee nation, the history of Black and Cherokee, and Black and Indigenous relationships. And back at the time when I first went, which was in the late 1990s, the Vann House State Historic Site was not interpreting the presence of Black people at all.It was in many ways, a typical plantation museum where the focus was on the people who lived in wealth and luxury on that plantation. The focus was on the architecture, and on the furniture, and on the linens, and on the wealth, and the entertainment, and the recreational pursuits of the people who lived in the house. As opposed to on the people whose labor made all that possible. So that was the first tour that I took of the Vann House. I noticed right away that they weren't doing anything about enslaved people, and I decided that I wanted to try to remedy that in whatever way I could. And so, I wrote about the Vann House in the form of a history and some articles. Visiting that house over the years, because I went back many times, always left me with a very strong sense of the presence of the place -- I mean, the presence of the house itself, the presence of the grounds, the presence of the tree, some of which had been there during the time that the Vann family, a Cherokee family, had lived there.
And during the time that the people they enslaved, who numbered more than 100, had lived there. And it seemed as if every time I went back to the house, I noticed something different about the structure itself or about the landscape. One of those things that really stood out to me was the carved roses that actually do exist in the Vann House. I don't think I noticed those roses the first time, maybe even the second time, possibly the third time that I went. But at some point I started noticing them, and they really caught my attention, that level of detail in the architecture. And that detail stuck in my mind as I thought about the history of the Cherokee people, of the Cherokee nation of Afro-Cherokee people, and also the meaning that had been connected up with the flower, The Cherokee Rose flower, in Cherokee cultural life. Cherokee people had connected, The Cherokee Rose, the flower, with the history of removal, and they had a story about how everywhere that a Cherokee mother's tears touched the ground during this very difficult period in Cherokee history, a Cherokee rose would grow.
And so, this place of the plantation, the house, its gardens, were incredibly inspiring for the novel that I ended up writing called “The Cherokee Rose.” And that was just one primary source, but it was a fundamental, foundational primary source for me. I could never have written this novel if I had not walked that landscape and visited that house numerous times. I'll mention another source because I find it very helpful and constructive to pair places with written materials, with documents. So the other source I will mention are the Moravian missionary records. There are a whole lot of them. The missionaries of the Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination, lived in the Cherokee nation for decades. Starting in the late 18th and the early 19th century, they were invited to come to the Vann grounds by the Cherokee owners of that plantation. They wrote diary entries just about every day. They wrote letters back to their home community and around the world all the time, and they wrote reports of what they were doing several times a year. There are hundreds of pages of description and documentation about this plantation and about this place. So marrying those two major sources, I was inspired to write something beyond the history that I had written about the place, to write a novel, which is what we're talking about right now.
Discussion on writing non-fiction versus fiction narratives
Megan: In your first part of your introduction, you mentioned, and I quote, "If history is intended to enlighten readers about change over time, fiction is intended to take readers on an emotional journey through identification with characters." Was that your intention? Because I know you wrote in your previous history, “The House on Diamond Hill,” about the plantation. Was that your intention with trying to convey to your readers an emotional journey in telling these stories in “The Cherokee Rose?”
Tiya Alicia Miles: I had written a history called “The House on Diamond Hill,” which reconstructed the past of that plantation, and that's a nonfiction work. And I had also published an article called “The Showplace of the Cherokee Nation,” which is in The Public Historian journal. I'd given lots of talks -- academic talks, community talks about this place. And I'm very pleased with that work. I was satisfied with what I was able to put together as a scholarly reconstruction and analysis. But, there are limits to what we can do in academic formats and in even public historical forms. We really do have to adhere to the evidence. We really do have to interpret, translate, and share out what it is that we have found in those sources. And we need to be, in my opinion, true to those sources. For me, that wasn't enough. I wanted to go further.
I wanted to be able to think about and to share something having to do with the emotional lives of the people who had lived there. And the existing documentary record wasn't allowing me to do that. There are just places that we cannot go in terms of the interiority of human experience when we're only using historical documents. I wanted to think about feelings and emotional journeys, especially of women who had lived on this plantation in the past, and that includes Indigenous women, African women, and Euro-American women because they were all there together. They were all there, living in very close proximity in the same buildings, and they were shaping each other's lives. But the record couldn't really go into full detail or into great depth about what that meant for them and about whether change was possible for them as they got to know one another when it came to the racial lenses that they wore and walked around with. I wanted to explore that. And once I started to think about the women in the past and how they related, I started to think: these women were people who may have, might have, could have become friends. May have, might have, could have supported one another. I then wanted to kind of time travel and bring that idea into the present time on those same plantation grounds, to bring women together who were, again, very different, who had different backgrounds, who had different racial lenses, who had different class backgrounds, who had different power in relation to one another when it came to societal views about where they stood.
And I wanted to test if, in the present time, if I brought contemporary characters to the same place, to these very same grounds, to the same plantation house that had shaped the lives of women in the past, could they come to know one another in a different way. Could they come to understand each other's deep-seated needs and doubts, and even traumas? Could they come to support each other? Could they come to see each other in a different way? Could they possibly even become friends? And if they could become friends, could they see this place that had made that possible as being worthy of their care and attention, of being worthy of preservation?
Tiya Alicia Miles: I had written a history called “The House on Diamond Hill,” which reconstructed the past of that plantation, and that's a nonfiction work. And I had also published an article called “The Showplace of the Cherokee Nation,” which is in The Public Historian journal. I'd given lots of talks -- academic talks, community talks about this place. And I'm very pleased with that work. I was satisfied with what I was able to put together as a scholarly reconstruction and analysis. But, there are limits to what we can do in academic formats and in even public historical forms. We really do have to adhere to the evidence. We really do have to interpret, translate, and share out what it is that we have found in those sources. And we need to be, in my opinion, true to those sources. For me, that wasn't enough. I wanted to go further.
I wanted to be able to think about and to share something having to do with the emotional lives of the people who had lived there. And the existing documentary record wasn't allowing me to do that. There are just places that we cannot go in terms of the interiority of human experience when we're only using historical documents. I wanted to think about feelings and emotional journeys, especially of women who had lived on this plantation in the past, and that includes Indigenous women, African women, and Euro-American women because they were all there together. They were all there, living in very close proximity in the same buildings, and they were shaping each other's lives. But the record couldn't really go into full detail or into great depth about what that meant for them and about whether change was possible for them as they got to know one another when it came to the racial lenses that they wore and walked around with. I wanted to explore that. And once I started to think about the women in the past and how they related, I started to think: these women were people who may have, might have, could have become friends. May have, might have, could have supported one another. I then wanted to kind of time travel and bring that idea into the present time on those same plantation grounds, to bring women together who were, again, very different, who had different backgrounds, who had different racial lenses, who had different class backgrounds, who had different power in relation to one another when it came to societal views about where they stood.
And I wanted to test if, in the present time, if I brought contemporary characters to the same place, to these very same grounds, to the same plantation house that had shaped the lives of women in the past, could they come to know one another in a different way. Could they come to understand each other's deep-seated needs and doubts, and even traumas? Could they come to support each other? Could they come to see each other in a different way? Could they possibly even become friends? And if they could become friends, could they see this place that had made that possible as being worthy of their care and attention, of being worthy of preservation?
Ghost lore as a way of confronting difficult social history
Megan: That is a beautiful way to put it. And that goes into my next question: how this book, along with another one I think that you had before about ghost lore, and how you were using it as a tool to confronting those troubled, social history, and dynamics. Can you brief it into about how you use the superstition of ghost lore and how you tackle that difficult subject and title?
Tiya Alicia Miles: Yes, a book called “Tales from the Haunted South,” several years ago. In that book, I visited a number of so-called haunted places in various southern cities. I paid attention to whether or not and how enslaved people, how Black people, how Native people were represented in those ghost tours. Now what I found out, Megan, was actually pretty disturbing. These ghost tours tended to romanticize, exoticize, and to paint in violent terms for the titillation of tourists, the histories of slavery. I wrote about that, and I was critical of that in the book. But I also noticed while I was on those tours that a number of people who might not think of themselves as history fans, or historians, or scholars went on those tours. Those tours caught their attention; those tours caught their interests. And on those tours, they were actually going to historic sites.
They were actually hearing about people who had lived in the past. And I thought, "Could there be a way to draw that interest and to take advantage of the spark that people feel when they hear about ghosts and connect it up with a well-researched history that is intending to present people with a greater sense of the realities of the past? That is intending to humanize the representation of enslaved people and to actually bring people together across differences? The figure of the ghost in society and in American culture often represents the past. The ghost is a way that people can connect to the past; the ghost tours are a way that people can briefly visit the past, and that we as public historians can, in a positive way, draw on to present people with a fuller, better researched, more from-the-heart representation of slavery in the South.
Tiya Alicia Miles: Yes, a book called “Tales from the Haunted South,” several years ago. In that book, I visited a number of so-called haunted places in various southern cities. I paid attention to whether or not and how enslaved people, how Black people, how Native people were represented in those ghost tours. Now what I found out, Megan, was actually pretty disturbing. These ghost tours tended to romanticize, exoticize, and to paint in violent terms for the titillation of tourists, the histories of slavery. I wrote about that, and I was critical of that in the book. But I also noticed while I was on those tours that a number of people who might not think of themselves as history fans, or historians, or scholars went on those tours. Those tours caught their attention; those tours caught their interests. And on those tours, they were actually going to historic sites.
They were actually hearing about people who had lived in the past. And I thought, "Could there be a way to draw that interest and to take advantage of the spark that people feel when they hear about ghosts and connect it up with a well-researched history that is intending to present people with a greater sense of the realities of the past? That is intending to humanize the representation of enslaved people and to actually bring people together across differences? The figure of the ghost in society and in American culture often represents the past. The ghost is a way that people can connect to the past; the ghost tours are a way that people can briefly visit the past, and that we as public historians can, in a positive way, draw on to present people with a fuller, better researched, more from-the-heart representation of slavery in the South.
How to encourage other writers to tackle these untold or challenging history topics?
Photo Credit Tiya Miles
Tiya Alicia Miles: Don't avoid it. Don't tell yourself that you can't do it because you don't have the sources or because it's a sensitive topic. We need people and all kinds of people in different positions, from different backgrounds, with different experiences, who are willing to go to these places of pain in the past, to dive into these documents and these oral histories that may be difficult to read, and to help us all to confront them together. Because I really do believe that it's in the past that we find ourselves; it's in the past that we find resources. We're contending with our present experience and our future. We need writers, we need storytellers, we need artists, we need preservationists to help us to go back into that past -- to see it, to interpret it as faithfully as we can, and to save it.
Megan: Thank you so much, Tiya, for being with us. It was great having a conversation with you.
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