Читать книгу The Cherokee Rose - Tiya Miles - Страница 12

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Ruth Mayes stared at the ocean liner floating across her computer screen, wanting to squash it like a bug. Holland America had slashed its Jamaican cruise fares to drum up ticket sales for the fall season. Pop-up ads nettled her; so did movie trailers. She tended to edit the images she allowed into her head, resenting any loss of control.

She x-ed out the picture of the long white boat, blocking the thoughts it conjured. Reaching for her travel mug, she took a sip of bad office coffee, then pulled off her tortoise-shell glasses and tugged a corkscrew of thick, dark hair. She leaned back into her seat, aligning her butt with the padding, shifting her swivel chair with the movement of her body. Wheeling the chair in close to her desk, Ruth dug her clogs into the floor and glanced at the architectural photographs taped to the backbone of her cubicle. She needed a muse, a muse who knew houses. She needed a story idea.

Ruth rested her head on her forearms. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, one hour until the start of her forced vacation. She had nothing to do and nowhere to go for the next two weeks. What she absolutely could not do was lounge around at home in her basement apartment. When she had time on her hands, the pictures popped into her mind, forming a cloud of memories that overtook her like a storm.

“Ruth, are you feeling all right?” It was Lauren, Ruth’s empathetic, India-print-skirted creative director.

“Just fine. Thanks.” Ruth straightened her back and popped her glasses onto her nose, taking care not to tangle them in her thicket of curly hair.

Lauren scanned the blank face of Ruth’s computer screen. “Good, because I’ve got an assignment for you. The sisal mat photo spread didn’t come through. By five, we need a filler story on floor coverings—something trendy, preferably natural fiber. Look for carpets; see what’s new.”

“Carpets? Are you kidding me? Fudge, Lauren.”

“I only need five hundred words. And don’t miss the deadline just so you have a reason to come in Monday. As much as we love you around here, Ruth, we don’t want to see you next week. Take the vacation that’s coming to you and save your company some money.”

Everyone on staff knew Abode was suffering. Advertising had plunged in the last year; subscriptions had slowed as readers started cutting back on their leisure-activity budgets. For the first time in its eight-year run as a sleek Minneapolis-based shelter magazine, Abode was in the red. Instead of cutting staff or shutting down, senior management was trying an intermediate tack. All of the writers had been asked to take accrued vacation time without pay by December. Ruth, an office junkie who barely alighted at home, had saved up six weeks of vacation in her four years with the magazine. The lost pay would devastate some of her coworkers, but Ruth’s mother had left her an ostrich-sized nest egg. For Ruth, it wasn’t the money that kicked her heartbeat into high gear, it was the yawn of open time.

“Carpets are cozy. Carpets are colorful,” Lauren was saying. “Just the thing for fall. Six hundred words with an ethnic twist. That’s all I’m asking.”

“I thought you said five hundred.”

“Six hundred,” Lauren said, patting Ruth’s shoulder in encouragement.

Ruth shrugged off the touch. “Got it.”

When Lauren moved away to make her office rounds like a chipper, bohemian candy striper, Ruth stood to stretch. She walked to the wall of windows at the far side of the industrial loft, touching her hand to the brick and gazing out at the skyscrapers. She cracked one of the windows that had been sealed all summer to trap the air conditioning. The breeze outside was cooler than she expected. She pulled together the buttons of her denim jacket over her Barq’s Root Beer T-shirt.

“Ruth! Got a minute?”

The voice came from behind her. She turned her back to the window, brushing dust from her fingertips. It was Justin, the magazine’s eco-stylist. He had been asking her out for months. Justin was one of those thirty-something white men with feeling eyes and attractively rumpled, longish hair. She had observed a whole tribe of his nouveau beatnik poet kind at Carleton College when she was in school.

“So . . .” He took a breath. “Since you’ll be on vacation for a few weeks coming up, I thought maybe we could try to get together.”

Justin was cute, Ruth supposed. Any woman with her head on straight might at least toss him a bone. “Thanks, Justin. That’s a sweet idea, but I’m going out of town for work.”

“I heard about the late-breaking carpet story. Did you find a good angle? I’ve been thinking of doing a piece on rugs made out of recycled rubber. There’s a growing industry down in Dalton, Georgia, the U.S. carpet capital.” He smiled and leaned in. “Maybe we could do the research together. Pitch a feature-story idea to Lauren.”

“My carpet piece is just a filler for the November issue. Nothing special. The carpet capital, though, there’s a ring to that. Thanks for the lead.” Ruth flashed him half a smile before walking away.

She could feel Justin’s eyes on her ginger-colored culottes as the soft cotton shaped to her ample hips. It was one of her best features, she knew—her hip line to rump line to firm, strong thighs. The thighs came courtesy of many a long-distance weekend run, the hips and butt from her full-figured mother. Try as she had to lose weight back when she was in summer camp sharing a cabin with a Whitley Gilbert double, or when she was at Carleton rooming with stick girls who complained that the size twos were the first to go from the sales rack, she found that the weekend runs never quite canceled out strong maternal genes. She was a comfortable size fourteen, just a tad slimmer than her mother had been. She still recalled the rounded lines of her mother’s shape. “My Gold Coast,” her father would say with a proprietary smile, tracing the curve of her mother’s hips with cool blue eyes. Watching her mother’s expression cloud, Ruth would frown and, for reasons unclear to her small child’s mind, cling to her mother’s side.

Ruth shut the memory down, slid into her desk chair, and typed “Georgia, rugs, carpets” into the Google search bar. The first few links were carpet-company websites. She scrolled through their menus, jotting down notes. Then she opened a link to a newspaper story about the carpet industry in northwest Georgia, the influx of Latino workers and arrival of Mexican groceries and taquerias. Thank you, Justin. This was the kind of angle she needed to type up six hundred words of cotton-candy copy for Lauren. If Justin was Abode’s eco-stylist with a regular column to his name, Ruth was its ethno-stylist, but without the title or highlighted byline. She was assigned virtually all of the “ethnic” stories—on drapery inspired by Somali fabrics, the Hmong kitchen garden, new directions in outsider-art furniture design. Ruth ignored the obvious pigeonholing of her de facto job description, which she knew fell to her only because she was black. So far, Lauren had been willing enough to keep her busy on assignment, which Ruth accepted as a trade for the narrow topical scope.

Ruth had a rote method for her filler stories. She started with online research, made a few phone calls, conducted lightning interviews, and dashed off a feel-good piece. It took her just under an hour to pound out her story on how workers in the Georgia carpet industry incorporated hints of their Latin heritage into textile designs. It was claptrap, and she knew it. The real story was labor exploitation in the heart of the industrial Sun Belt. But that wasn’t the kind of story that would suit the readership of a glossy magazine like Abode, with its photos of lovely homes, emerald lawns, and wraparound porches as lacy as push-up bras.

Ruth skimmed her article, “Aztec Influence Colors Georgia Carpet Kingdom,” before pushing the Send key to whisk it off to Lauren. It was five o’clock, but a few of her fellow writers still hunched over their desks. She dreaded going home to her “garden-level” basement apartment, where not even houseplants fought to survive. Ruth tapped her unpolished fingernails on the mousepad, trying to think of a reason to stay late. As she scanned the results of her previous search one last time, her eyes fell on an odd blue link. It was an article in the Dalton Daily Citizen dated August 30, 2008:

State Cuts Pull Rug from under Cherokees,

Friends of the Hold House

Local residents were saddened to learn that a beloved institution is being dissolved.

Georgia Department of Natural Resources officials said Wednesday that the state-owned Hold Plantation, along with the Moravian Church mission building on the grounds, will be sold due to the budget crisis.

The Chief Hold House was built in 1804 by James Vann Hold, the son of a Cherokee mother and Scottish father, who rose to become one of the Cherokee Nation’s most prominent leaders. The house served as a political and economic center for the Cherokee people until they were forcibly removed from the area by the federal government in the 1830s. It was restored and opened as a state historic site in 1952 but was closed by the DNR in 2002.

The DNR has announced an auction of the Hold House, its contents and its surrounding land for September of this year.

Local volunteers who hoped to raise funds to reopen the Native American house museum are calling the impending sale an “outrage.” John Cook, a Tribal Council member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, agreed, saying, “The Trail of Tears was an effort to eliminate the Cherokee people, and now they are trying to eliminate our culture.”

Other tribal members echoed this sentiment. “If there is no interpretation at our Georgia historic sites, who will tell that story?” said Stuart Pickup, a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees. “The Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing. The state of Georgia is adding insult to injury by refusing to tell the public about it. If you don’t understand history, you’re doomed to repeat it,” Pickup said.

Ruth pushed her glasses up to the broad bridge of her nose. She opened a new window in Ask.com to confirm what she thought she recalled from her ethnic studies courses. The Cherokees’ grueling forced march along the Trail of Tears from the hills of Georgia and North Carolina to Indian Territory in Oklahoma had taken place in the winter of 1838–39. Now, more than 170 years after that crime, an economic crisis was going to finish the job of wiping Cherokee history off the Georgia map.

“Lauren!” Ruth called, jumping out of her seat and grabbing pages from the shared office printer. She plunged into Lauren’s office, culottes swirling against her calves. “Am I all set with the carpet story?”

Lauren looked up from her mug of chai tea and the slick proofs fanned across her desk. “Yep. Nice work. Do you have any plans for the holiday weekend?”

“I do now. A new story.” Ruth dropped the printed pages next to Lauren’s proofs. “About a historic house down south, built by Cherokee Indians in the 1800s and run as a house museum since the 1950s. The state of Georgia closed the museum six years ago and is going to sell the land this month in a public auction.”

“And you want to investigate. I can see why. The topic is intriguing, packs an emotional punch. Our readers would appreciate the historic-house focus, and the Indian angle is something they would expect from your byline.” Lauren sighed, handing back the pages. “But you know Abode can’t afford—”

“I’ll pay my own expenses.”

“That’s easy, then. Sold. Take a slew of photos. Good ones. I can’t afford to send a photographer down there.”

“I will. Thanks, Lauren.” Ruth gave her boss a smile, then turned on the heels of her clogs.

Back at her desk, she shut down her MacBook, slipped it into its quilted sleeve, and grabbed her bunchy leather bag. She snatched the travel mug from her desk and stopped to refill it with the dregs of coffee left in the staff kitchen.

As she pushed through the metal door into the clear autumn day, she felt again that hint of coolness. The weather was on the cusp of change. She was going south just in time.

Ruth hurried to her Volkswagen Beetle and plopped her mug into the holder. She would stop by her apartment to throw together a travel bag and ask her upstairs neighbor to collect her mail. She had no one to call, no one who would miss her. Ruth and her father rarely spoke these days. Even if she were to pack up and move away from Minneapolis–St. Paul, her father probably wouldn’t notice until Christmastime when she failed to turn up at his high-rise condo for their awkward annual dinner. Her grandparents on both sides had passed away. She had no siblings.

Ruth programmed her GPS with the address of the Chief Hold House and waited for her route to upload. The digital map glowed green in the dashboard. She was headed straight down I-75 to a small, rural town in the state where her mother had been born.