The Cherokee Rose (2015) by Tiya Miles

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts(2015)

by Tiya Miles

Diamon Hill, Georgia

Georgia: 8/26

  The subtitle, A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, made it hard to take The Cherokee Rose seriously, and there is no mistake that is a work of fiction written by a historian, but I can see why editor Susan Straight would pick it because it talks about a little mentioned group: people with mixed African American and Native American lineage.  As recounted by this book (and something I knew independently before reading this book, but presumably something the "average" reader would be learning for the first time by reading this book), the Cherokee tribe had gone a long way to assimilation before they were forced off their developed lands in the southeast and forced west at gun point.

  The conventional whoa-is-me narrative surrounding the trail of tears does a particular disservice to the Cherokee nation by focusing on the least fortunate among them.  Wealthy landowners, often of mixed Cherokee/white heritage (but identifying as Cherokee) were able to relocate with their possessions, including slaves, intact.    After the removal, some African American slaves with mixed parentage were left behind for various reasons, and then the convention became to identify as wholly African American.  Finally, in the 20th century, there was a double reckoning, first among the remaining Cherokee people in Oklahoma, who had taken affirmative steps to disenfranchise those of mixed African America/Cherokee blood AND by African Americans in the Southeast who "rediscovered" their native roots in the 20th and 21st century.

  Miles awkwardly accommodates all these experiences in the context of a novel about a wealthy but frivilous African American woman from Atlanta with "mixed roots" who buys the plantation of a famous Cherokee landowner who left as part of the removal process.  There, she reconnects with a childhood friend with her own racial identity issues and a Cherokee journalist who mixed racial identity.  There is also, yes, a ghost, and an appropriately menacing white local.  Besides the very real and interesting historical perspectives, The Cherokee Rose is basically an LGBT friendly Hallmark movie plot.