Three women uncover the secrets of a Georgia plantation that embodies the intertwined histories of Indigenous and enslaved Black communities—the fascinating debut novel, inspired by a true story, of the National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of All That She Carried, now featuring a new introduction and discussion guide.

“The Cherokee Rose is a mic drop—an instant classic. An invitation to listen to the urgent, sweet choruses of past and present.”—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century.

At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house’s dark history, the three women’s connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property’s rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe’s racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family’s past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance.

Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.

Prologue: Dust to Dust

She was a vision of ribbon and light standing before the attic window. Her spirit was unsettled. Her work was not yet done. Because she had failed to heed the warning when the digging first began, now she had to find a way to open the book of the past.

The place where the shovels tore the ground was known as the Strangers’ Graveyard. Negroes were buried there, and Indians, too, and Indians who were mistaken for Negroes. The man with hard, iron eyes and hair the color of river sand was the first to break ground in the burial place on the outskirts of town. Wielding his blunt-edged shovel, he tore into the tender earth, displacing soil and sediment heap by heap. He was the leader, the master, the maker. The others simply followed, plunging into the people’s bones with lock-jawed excavation machines. The Strangers’ Graveyard had rested in peace for more than a century, floating out of place and beyond time. An island of brambles and spindly trees, it had been forgotten, except by those who cared for it and those who cared nothing for it. Once, many years ago, the graveyard trees had been sentries with bottles of colorful spun glass suspended from their branches. But now their protective powers had worn away, and the graves lay exposed. The burial ground was open land, good land, valuable land in the view of the head man with the shovel.

Trucks dumped mounds of dirt into adjacent refuse piles, the faded bones of human remains churning beneath the wheels. A collarbone bleached and brittle. A skull with sunken sockets for eyes. Even the chalky skeleton of a small slave child. The shovel man, unperturbed, instructed his crew to lay a foundation. While workmen mixed thick cement and cut the flesh of trees to size, the man began to prowl and prod the vast perimeter of his property. His daily walks spread farther and wider until he reached the line. He eyed the river and the cane beyond his acreage coveting the supple hill and sun-kissed fields. On the day his crewmen poured cement on the site of the gutted burial ground, the shovel man crossed the border and entered the land of the Cherokee Rose. As he strode the plantation, grasping a shovel and brittle map, he stomped upon the white roses to force a pathway.

She had crossed a border, too. She had crossed the bridge of time. Watching him from the attic dormer, she peered down the slope of the overgrown hillside. Beyond the graceful brick façade and covered rear veranda, beyond the yard where slaves had toiled and medicinal plants had grown, lay buried the freedom dreams of her foremothers. The shovel man consulted his map, shifted his tool, and broke tender ground. Even she, who was without form, shivered.

She feared the overturning of secrets. She feared the abuse of the land. She feared the worst. Matricide.

She had but one hope. There were descendants -- bone of her mothers’ bone, flesh of her mothers’ spirit. A way must be found to call them home to a tainted house. She would gather the scattered defenders. They would gather the buried memories. The memories would bind them together or tear them apart.

Africans once enchained on these lands believed the dust of the dead had the power to heal and the power to harm. She trusted this dust also had the power to wrest unsuspecting souls from their illusory, earthbound moorings. She held fast to the view beyond the window: garden, cane, river, roads. Dust motes floated like cottonwood spores in the dappled sunlight around her. She breathed softly against the house and felt the attic walls expand. Reaching for the brass latch that sealed the half-moon window shut, she turned its rigid, rounded thumb and pushed. Warm, sky-born air sprang into the garret. The dust of two hundred years flew into a shifting wind. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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