When I last posted to Carrying Capacity in July, I was sitting on a porch in the Flathead Valley of western Montana. Last summer I realized that front-porch-sitting is one of my favorite activities. Back decks are nice, too, but something about the outward-facing attitude and protective cover of a proper porch feels distinctive. On the porch, you can be immersed in the energy of your street while taking comfort in the setbacks of railings and rain-shields of rooflines.
Over the last weeks, as I finished drafting a manuscript on Harriet Tubman and made my way by car back to Massachusetts from Montana, I have been storing up notions to share with you. Those thoughts will be coming soon in the form of “Hope Notes” and with an announcement about my forthcoming book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. For this post, which feels like a transition piece from summer to fall, and from west to east, I want to offer two bits related to my novel, The Cherokee Rose, which was released in a revised edition last June. (Thank you for ordering copies and for sharing your personal reactions!)
Those of you who have read The Cherokee Rose know that it takes place over the Labor Day weekend. It is a summer-autumn mystery, which feels fitting for month.
First, a Flash Q & A:
During a virtual book club conversation with readers in Michigan a few weeks ago, I was asked who my favorite character is in the novel. I feel attached to all of the characters, especially after spending quality time with them during the revision process for this new edition. Still, my reaction was immediate: Jennifer “Jinx” Micco! Jinx is a scholar at heart who feels like a misfit in graduate school like so many talented women of color I have worked with over the years. As the story unfolds, Jinx has the chance to learn that she can define what it means to be a historian while being open to constructive critiques that, in the end, confirm her calling.
Second, a Flashback Fairy Tale:
When I was in college, I worked as a summer camp counselor in Roxbury, MA, under the auspices of the Phillips Brooks House Association. I had five exuberant grade-school-aged girls under my charge of Haitian-, Puerto Rican-, African-, and Euro-American backgrounds, and I tried to keep them engaged with fun and challenging activities. One project was rewriting a fairy tale to reflect their identities and values. They chose Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a new release back then (1989). (Now, over thirty years later, we have a Black Little Mermaid in a live action version whose casting spurred reactionary criticism.)
I liked this assignment, and I tried it myself years later while researching the historical plantation where The Cherokee Rose is set, now called the Chief Vann House State Historic Site. Borrowing from historical figures who appeared in the archival record, I devised a fictionalized cast of characters to reimagine “Jack and the Beanstalk.” That story appears at the end of this newsletter. Before posting it, I refreshed my memory on the difference between fairy tales (magical stories, typically in writing), folktales (oral stories about real human situations), and fables (stories with moral lessons, usually featuring animals). I am convinced that whatever their shape, culturally familiar recurring stories have the potential to perform social magic.
Read on for my attempt at a fairy tale re-write with a fable twist set in the past world where The Cherokee Rose takes place. (I kid you not when I add that as I write these lines, The Little Mermaid song “Under the Sea” is blasting from the bathroom where my youngest is getting ready for school. Mood music!)
Jack and the Bean Plot
Two hundred years ago, in the southern lands of the Cherokee Nation, a little boy named Jack lived with his mother and grandmother in a snug wood cabin. One day, strangers appeared at the door, a tall English man with a reed pipe nose and silver eyeglasses, and a Black girl with woven hair tucked beneath a faded blue cloth. The man addressed Jack’s mother by way of the girl, who turned the man’s English words into the Cherokee language.
“We have a school for the Indian children in Vann’s Town,” the man said through the girl without once looking at her. “We call it Springplace. I am the teacher. Boys like yours can learn to read and write, manipulate numbers, keep accounts, and study the Word of our Lord.”
Jack’s grandmother, who had quite a different notion of what a boy should learn, turned her back on the man. But Jack’s mother listened to what the man said. She wanted Jack to go away with this teacher, fill his mind with new ideas, and learn the language of the Americans whose country had surrounded the Cherokee towns.
Jack’s grandmother was sad, but wise. She was prepared to play her part. After packing a change of clothes and tucking a hunk of corn bread in the bundle, she went out to her garden, calling Jack. There, she opened her hand so Jack could see the seven beans.
“When you need to find a way through trouble, these beans will be your helpers,” she said. “But first you must learn to show them care.”
Jack slid the brown beans into his pocket and hugged his grandmother.
“Trust me, my boy,” she said to him. “And be brave.”
Inside the cabin, Jack kissed his mother goodbye. He would be brave and go off to this school in Vann’s Town. Then he could help his family talk with the Americans and maybe someday become a leader for the people. Climbing inside Teacher’s wagon, Jack tried not to cry. He stared down at the dirt path leading to the cabin door as the bay horse clip-clopped, clip-clopped away. His home grew smaller and smaller. He blinked away the tear-misted scene, feeling the girl in the blue cloth take his hand.
“What is your name?” he asked her in Cherokee.
“Sky,” she said.
“Do you study at the school?”
“No,” she answered. “I am kept there.”
Jack shared a room at the school with four other boys. At night he lay on his cot staring at the logs above and listening to the lone calls of wolves and owls. It was not long before Jack discovered that the school had been built on James Vann’s plantation. Mr. Vann owned large buildings and many fine things, and he even owned many people whom he called “slaves.” Sky, Jack learned, was one of these. She toiled away in the schoolhouse kitchen, stooping over the burning oven or the wash-pot filled with lye.
Jack did not like this place. Teacher was strict with the Indian children, who studied at stiff, wooden desks lined up in a row. Jack was told to stand still, sit straight, pray hard, and read his religious books until he grew weary. He was not allowed to go home or play in the woods. Months passed. Summer leaves changed their colors. Winter cold froze the earth and sent the animals into burrows. Spring rains kicked up mud and washed-out roadways. Jack felt lonely. He missed his warm straw bed and the earthy smell of his mother’s skin. He missed playing outside his cabin and chasing toads beside the river. He pulled out his seven beans, which he kept carefully tucked away, and rolled them inside his palms. His grandmother had said these beans could be friends if only he cared for them first.
The next day before morning prayers, Jack crept out of the sleeping room. He slipped past the orchard and past the pigpen. He climbed the fence and made for the woods. Jack moved quietly among the trees, looking for a spot that was right. In a hidden clearing, deep within the forest, he saw a gentle rise of ground. It reminded him of the planting hills inside his grandmother’s garden, where she grew her corn and beans together like sisters. Jack knelt beside the slope and buried his hands in the soil the way he had seen his grandmother do it. He arranged his seven beans, covered them with a blanket of dirt, and then sat back on his heels to rest. The sun was high overhead. He had missed the midday meal. Jack started back on the tracks he had made.
When Jack reached the forest’s edge, he saw Teacher pacing behind the fence, digging his boots into the ground like hooves. With glasses dangling from a nose thin as the twig that has snapped in the cold, Teacher scolded Jack and sent him to bed without supper. Jack was assigned extra chores for breaking the rules. Now he had to wake in the dark and assist Sky at her tasks.
He knelt beside her and held the pail as she milked the cow in the yard. He held up the heavy pots that she scrubbed in the steaming kitchen. He watched as she washed the Indian children’s mud-streaked shirts and pants by hand, then handed her pins to hang them with. He chopped the wood, and made the soap, and cleaned the fireplace ash alongside her. Sky showed him how to rub beeswax into the sore skin of his palms and sneaked him treats of wild strawberries from the school garden. She helped him to bear the burden of his punishment. With all these grueling chores added to his studies for weeks, Jack found no time to slip away. He worried about his seven beans, left alone in the forest. But he did not worry about Sky.
One spring morning, a boy named Isaac lit out, having been sent by Mr. Vann to carry a bundle of letters to the teachers. He took a shortcut through the woods on his way to the mission school, knowing the Overseer would be angry if he tarried. While Isaac was treading the winding trail and whistling to himself, he spotted something strange: tiny sprouts in a smooth, raised plot. Isaac was curious by nature, so he slipped into the clearing to get a better look. The plants were not even as tall as his bare ankles. Their buds curled inward like crescent moons. Was this a secret garden struggling to grow in the deep of the woods? Isaac wondered who had planted it and if that person was unfree, like him. Then he continued on his way, clutching the letters that must be delivered.
At the mission school with his task completed, Isaac got an idea. He paused by the spring beyond the gate and filled his drinking cup to the brim. On his return trip through the woods, he stopped at the plot and watered the seedlings. They tipped their leaves as the droplets rolled off and onto his feet. Isaac felt a tug in his chest. He wanted to watch these seedlings grow. As the weeks passed and Isaac was sent to do this chore or that one, he found a way to help them.
Spring warmed into summer at the mission school. As Jack’s punishment came to an end, Joe, the son of James Vann, took to sneaking away at night, wrestling bears in the woods and diving into the river. It was all that Teacher could do to keep Joe Vann on the premises; he dared not assign this boy the work of a household slave as punishment. So Teacher monitored Joe closely and forgot about watching Jack, who took his first chance to steal away.
Jack was surprised when he reached the hill. His beans had grown into healthy plants. And a boy was there watering the roots. A Black boy.
“Hello,” Jack called out in English.
“Siyo,” the boy answered in Cherokee.
“I am Jack, from the Deer Clan.”
“I am Isaac, one of Master Vann’s boys.”
“Wado,” Jack said, “for watering my plants. If it wasn’t for you, they might have died.” Jack tried hard to think of something to give the boy, something that would show his appreciation. He looked at Isaac’s rough, bare feet, the skin cracked open like thirsty ground. Jack felt a tug in his chest. “Take these,” Jack said, not quite meeting Isaac’s eyes. “As my thanks.”
Isaac eagerly reached for the shoes and fit them onto his smaller feet. Picking up his drinking cup, he flashed a smile and hurried off.
Jack stared after the other boy until he had disappeared in the trees. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack thought he saw a flash like fireflies. He turned to look at the plants, watching them wink and glow as if he had just showered them with sunshine. He walked a mile back to the school in the dusty tracks of his former shoeprints with his grandmother’s words bumping about in his head.
The next day Jack could hardly wait for his chance to see Isaac and the plants. He borrowed a pair of shoes from Joe Vann, who had more than enough of everything, and set off for the bean plot. Isaac was waiting on the hill instead, Jack soon learned, of following his master’s orders to shoo wild pigs from the woods. The two boys talked, a little in English, a little in Cherokee. They told each other stories and raced along the treeline. The bean plants seemed to listen in, attuned to their games and laughter. Conscious of the passing time and fearing they would be missed and punished, the boys parted, promising to return.
As often as they could that summer, the two boys met at the bean plot. They grew as close as the vines that twined along the fertile ground, flourishing in the light of their friendship. But toward the end of August, as harvest time approached, the boys played with heavy hearts. Soon Isaac would be unable to sneak away. Plantation work was heaviest at harvest time. No one, not even a boy, would be overlooked. On their last afternoon together, Isaac brought a half-strung banjo and Jack brought a hefty spelling book. Absorbed in singing, strumming, and sounding out the difficult words, they did not realize the woods had grown dim.
“Isaac!” A blunt voice tore through the darkening air like thunder. “Come here, boy!”
Isaac trembled. And then the overseer’s feet trampled down the underbrush, making a crashing, crushing sound that cut through the clearing. When the man stomped out from behind the curtain of watchful trees, Jack could see his dark beard, full as a massive storm cloud, and his terrible, empty eyes.
Jack had never felt so afraid. “Run, Isaac, run!” he shouted.
Both boys lunged into the thicket of tall bean plants. And it was as though the stalks became a path. They ran along the twining growth, following where the green stems led. The boys kept their footing as they sprinted and grasped at the vines and each other’s arms. But the overseer stumbled while trying to capture the boys. When he threw down a hand to break his fall, thick roots encircled his wrist.
Jack and Isaac half-ran, half-climbed through the vines, sucking in the earthy smell of leaf and pod. They blazed through the clearing and into the woods, through the fields and across the meadows. They ran that way for fifteen miles holding their sides and sucking in air. By midnight, they reached a bend of the Coosawatee River. Jack sensed, but could not see, the shape of his town ahead in the darkness. Panting and straining, they finally reached the cabin. At the desperate sound of pounding fists, Jack’s grandmother flung the door open. She looked at Jack, and then at the boy gasping for life’s breath beside him.
“Dear boys,” she whispered, stroking Jack’s sweat-dampened hair. “Giyvha, quickly. Come inside.”
In the cocoon of their cabin, Jack’s mother wept at the sight of him. She held him close to her belly, pushed him back to look him over, then brought him close into the cloud of her scent again. Jack’s mother re-started the fire beneath the soup pot. But his grandmother lingered, keeping watch. She slipped outside while Jack’s mother stirred broth at the hearth, promising he could stay home now and never go back to that mission school.
After the boys had a good meal of soup and bean bread, but before the sun had replaced the moon in the sky, Jack’s grandmother returned. She closed the door behind her and leaned her walking stick beside it. She gestured for Isaac to come close.
“You must go now. Trust me, my boy. And be brave.”
Jack watched as Isaac nodded, fearing for the fate of his friend.
Jack’s grandmother touched the door, pushing it slightly ajar. A man Jack remembered from Chota Town, the Mother town of peace, waited patiently there with leathery skin and warm brown eyes. Gently, the man patted Isaac’s shoulder and pointed toward the mountains. Isaac followed the man's movement with his eyes. North.
Jack waved goodbye to his friend, feeling too many ways at once -- sad, hopeful, and grateful. His grandmother’s words had come true. The vines had helped in a time of trouble, but only after he had cared – not only for the bean plants, but also for Isaac, who had done the same. True friendship, Jack realized from the safety of his family cabin, must be reciprocal.
An image of Sky arose in his mind like the breaking of the day. He pictured her faded blue head-cloth and weary smile. He remembered how she had taken his hand and helped him to bear his heavy burden. And he knew he could not stay here in the warm comfort of the cabin with the pleasing smell of his mother’s soup simmering in the pot. He would return to that school where the rules were strict and the punishments harsh, and where he could press seven beans into Sky’s open hand.
Historical Note
This story takes place in northwest Georgia on lands that once fell within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. In the early 1800s, a Cherokee trader and politician named James Vann developed a plantation there. He and his family grew wealthy from their agricultural surplus and business dealings. James Vann’s favorite son, Joseph Vann, inherited the plantation and built a grand brick house that still stands. In the 1830s Joseph Vann and his family lost the plantation due to policies enacted by the state of Georgia and United States government that forced Native people from their homes. The Vanns relocated to Indian Territory of present-day Eastern Oklahoma.
Prior to the Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act, the Vann family attained far more wealth than most citizens of the Cherokee Nation. Their financial success was due in great part to their enslavement of human beings. Nearly one hundred people of African descent lived and worked on the Vann estate in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Enslaved people on the Vann plantation experienced similar hardships as enslaved people across the U.S. South. They were overworked for no pay, sold away from family members, deprived of sufficient food and clothing, punished with beatings and whippings, and treated with a profound lack of dignity.
James Vann invited German-American Protestant missionaries from the Moravian Church in Salem, North Carolina to build a Christian school on his grounds. The Moravians formed a settlement called the Springplace Mission, which included a church building, boarding school buildings, missionary living quarters, outbuildings, agricultural fields, and gardens. The missionaries at Springplace kept diaries and letters, which indicate that Cherokee children enrolled at the school and Black children enslaved on the Vann grounds were playmates. The Moravians disapproved of the children’s friendships and warned their Cherokee pupils not to run “wild” in the woods with Black slaves. Nevertheless, the children found common ground, especially in the forests.
The main characters in this fable were inspired by children mentioned in the Moravian missionary records: Jack and Little Isaac. Jack was a Cherokee boy who had attended the Springplace Mission boarding school since early childhood. Called “our runaway Jack” by the missionaries, he absconded from school more than once to stay with his mother in the town of Coosawattee, nearly fifteen miles away. The missionaries were distressed at Jack’s behavior and wrote in a June 1819 diary entry that Jack “had run away from here secretly, to our pain.” Little Isaac was a Black boy owned by James Vann. One of Little Isaac’s jobs, as recorded in the 1806 and 1807 missionary diary, was searching the woods for stray pigs. Little Isaac knew the woods well and once returned from an assigned chore with parts of a deer he had hunted himself. Although the real Jack and Little Isaac might not have crossed paths on the historical Vann plantation, many other enslaved and Cherokee children did.
The character Sky is not based on the life of any single person. Rather, she is a composite character based on several Black girls mentioned in the missionary diary and letters as well as in Euro-American traveler accounts. Most of these girls were owned by James Vann and assigned to labor at the school doing household chores, outside work, and caring for the missionaries’ children. In at least two historical examples, Black girls and women worked as translators between English and Cherokee speakers. A Black girl is recorded as the sole interpreter for a Cherokee slaveholder (also named Jack), and a Black woman traveled with U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins to translate his conversations with Cherokees.
The historical figure Joseph Vann, who attended the mission school as a boy, also makes an appearance here. Like the fictional character, young Joe Vann was a dare devil, reportedly wrestling a bear cub and often playing with boys his age who were enslaved by his father, James Vann. On one occasion in 1808, Joe Vann disappeared from school all day with two classmates. The frustrated missionaries later discovered that he had visited a slave cabin, encouraged his Black friend, George, to join them, and gone swimming with the group in the nearby river. The pupils lied to hide their activities, claiming that they had gone blackberry picking. Their behavior, the missionaries wrote, was “extremely punishable.”
The Springplace Mission boarding school was an early example of a social movement to educate Native American children in the cultural values, academic practices, and applied skills of Euro-American society. Across the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s, social reformers and U.S. government policy makers compelled Native families to send their children to schools that were sometimes many miles distant. When children like Jack or Joe Vann ran away from the Springplace Mission school, missionaries searched and brought them back, scolding them and speaking with their parents. In boarding schools across the country for Indigenous children in later years, children who ran away were punished more harshly. They were ordered to do extra chores, subjected to whippings and paddlings, or locked in small rooms or jails.
This friendship fable was inspired by European, African American, and Cherokee cultural sources. The imprint of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale about a boy’s triumph over a giant with the help of a magic vine is obvious. The idea of magical beans and vines was also inspired by the African American folktale, “The Goophered [or bewitched] Grapevine,” written in 1899 by the classic Black writer, Charles Chesnutt. The notion of magical bean plants is likewise anchored in the traditional Cherokee practice of blessing the green bean crop. This ritual was recorded by Moravian missionaries in 1821, who wrote in their diary: “The Indians here in this country do not eat green beans until after they have had them purified by a sorcerer or story-teller.”
Further Reading
Brenda J. Child and Brian Klopotek. Eds., Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indian Education. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2014.
Rowena McClinton, ed. The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees, volumes 1 & 2. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
William G. McLoughlin. Cherokees & Missionaries, 1789-1839. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Tiya Miles. The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Theda Perdue. Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979.
John Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
thank you for this lovely and magical retelling of the beloved fable. I also agree about the magic of a front porch, and have often mused about the isolation of modern architecture, houses designed from the inside out, and the loss of community that has occurred with the advent of attached garages, privacy fences, and back decks. The front porch offers shelter but also opportunity for observation, communication, and neighborly interactions. Nothing like sitting in a gliding chair, drinking an iced tea and lemonade, watching a storm.
Wado Tiya!