The Cherokee Rose: Tiya Miles on Fiction, Ghosts and Difficult History

Historian Tiya Miles spent years researching slavery in the Cherokee Nation — the African-descended people who were held as property by Cherokee slaveholders in the 19th century. Alongside her histories, she wrote a novel, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. In episode 153 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT), she talked with Megan Reed about why fiction can help people understand difficult pasts. What follows summarizes the conversation in our own words.

The episode: "Cherokee Rose", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

The novel

The Cherokee Rose moves between the 19th century and the present. Three women of different racial, cultural and regional backgrounds — Jinx, Ruth and Cheyenne — are drawn to the Cherokee Rose Plantation in what is now Georgia, on former Cherokee land. Each believes she has come for her own reasons, but they have really been summoned by the ghost of a girl who once attended a missionary school on the plantation grounds, and they are pulled into a mystery about what happened in the house some 200 years earlier.

Miles sees the book as a close cousin of her history All That She Carried: both are rooted in a Southern place and its environment, and both ask what the past means today and how it is preserved and interpreted. Fiction gave her more room to explore the present day.

Two kinds of sources

The place itself. Miles treats buildings and landscapes as sources that both inspire and inform. The novel's setting is based on the Chief Vann House State Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia, home of the Cherokee Vann family and of more than 100 people they enslaved. When she first visited as a graduate student in the late 1990s, the site said nothing about Black people at all; like many plantation museums, it focused on the architecture, furnishings and pleasures of the wealthy family rather than on the people whose labor made that wealth possible. She set out to change that, writing a history and articles about the house.

Returning many times, she kept noticing new details — notably the roses carved into the house. They brought to mind the meaning of the Cherokee rose in Cherokee life: a story tied to removal, in which a Cherokee rose grew wherever a Cherokee mother's tears fell during that terrible time.

The written record. Miles pairs places with documents. The Moravian missionaries, a Protestant church invited onto the Vann grounds by the family in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, lived in the Cherokee Nation for decades and wrote almost daily diaries, frequent letters and regular reports — hundreds of pages about the plantation.

Why fiction

Miles had already reconstructed the plantation's past in a nonfiction book, The House on Diamond Hill, and an article, "The Showplace of the Cherokee Nation," in The Public Historian. She valued that work, but scholarship has to stay faithful to the evidence, and the documents could not reach the inner, emotional lives of the people who lived there.

She especially wanted to imagine the lives of the Indigenous, African and Euro-American women who lived side by side on the plantation and shaped one another — and whether they might have come to see past their racial assumptions, support one another, even become friends. So she carried that question into the present: could three very different modern women, on the same grounds, come to understand each other's needs, doubts and traumas, and become friends? And if so, would they see the place that made it possible as worth caring for and preserving?

Ghosts as a doorway

In an earlier book, Tales from the Haunted South, Miles took ghost tours in Southern cities and paid attention to how enslaved, Black and Native people were portrayed. She found the tours often romanticized, exoticized and sensationalized slavery for tourists' thrills, and she criticized that.

But she also noticed that the tours drew people who wouldn't call themselves history fans — and brought them to real historic sites to hear about real people. Ghosts, in American culture, often stand for the past. Miles believes public historians can use that spark to offer a fuller, better-researched and more humane account of slavery in the South, and to bring people together across their differences.

Advice to other writers

Her message to writers facing painful or little-told histories: don't turn away, and don't talk yourself out of it because the sources are thin or the subject is sensitive. We need people of every background — writers, storytellers, artists and preservationists — willing to enter those painful places and difficult documents and oral histories, interpret them as faithfully as possible, and save them, because the past is where we find ourselves and the resources to face the present and future.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training: "Podcast 153: Cherokee Rose," Preservation Technology Podcast, with Tiya Miles, hosted by Megan Reed. The guest's remarks are summarized here, not quoted; the episode's photographs are credited to the guest and are not reproduced.
• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.