The Story About the Rose —2020

Music by Robert Maggio / Lyrics by Justin Warner

The Cherokee Rose (Rosa laevigata) is a fast-growing, hardy flowering shrub native to China and Southeast Asia.  It was imported to the American South in the early 1800s and marketed as an ornamental hedge.  It soon became attached to a Cherokee legend about the infamous “Trail of Tears,” a brutal, decades-long forced displacement of Cherokee and other indigenous people to the area west of the Mississippi River.  It was selected as the state flower of Georgia in 1916.  You can find versions of the story on websites operated by Northern Cherokee Nation, the First People of America and Canada, the National Park Service, various university agriculture and history departments, gardening clubs, and Appalachian Country Living Magazine, among others.  The story is presented here by an elementary school teacher, a park ranger, and a gardener in the course of their jobs.  None of them have any personal connection to the story.

 

TEACHER

(spoken) All right, kids, settle down, recess is over.

Come sit criss cross applesauce.

So Monday is a holiday.

That’s right, no school!

Some people call this holiday Columbus Day.

Maybe your parents call this holiday Columbus Day.

Or your grandparents

And maybe you do too.

But now we call this Monday Indigineous People’s Day.

It honors the Native American people.

So I found this song on YouTube,

That honors Native American people,

Called the Cherokee –

And a flower that became a sign of hope:

(spoken) And it goes like this:

Soft white petals greet the sun

Bringing cheer to everyone

From the rain of falling tears

A new sign of hope appears

A blossom with a heart of gold

Tells a tale that must be told

We can learn how goodness grows

From the story of the Cherokee Rose.

(spoken) Isn’t that pretty?

TOUR GUIDE

(spoken) … It’s a very pretty flower

And it’s got a very special place

here at Trail of Tears State Park.

It was winter, eighteen thirty-eight

In this place where you’re now standing,

Where the Native people passed through on their

forced relocation

They came to cross the Mississippi

But the river was frozen solid,

So they waited here for weeks,

and many died in the waiting.

That majestic river view

Is the same as it was then

So much horror in the face of all that beauty –

If you saw the movie in the Visitor’s Center—

(It’s a twenty-minute movie in the Visitor’s Center)

Then you know they’d walked six hundred miles already.

They were driven west through snow and rain,

Through hunger, death, disease, and pain,

By a government that felt no shame

That’s how the Trail of Tears got its name.

(spoken) and the story goes:

TEACHER/TOUR GUIDE

Along this Trail of Tears

The Great Spirit looked down with sorrow

TOUR GUIDE

He promised the Cherokee that the tears they shed

TEACHER/TOUR GUIDE

Would not be forgotten,

TOUR GUIDE

So every drop that fell took root in the ground,

And bloomed into a flower,

One that blossomed and spread

And reclaimed the Native land:

TEACHER & TOUR GUIDE

Soft white petals greet the sun

Bringing cheer to everyone

From the rain of falling tears

A new sign of hope appears

A blossom with a heart of gold

Tells a tale that must be told

We can learn how goodness grows

From the story of the Cherokee Rose.

GARDENER

It’s a thorny climbing shrub

It can grow 30 feet high

If you buy a cutting, look out

This plant’s got a mind of its own.

‘Cause if you don’t prune it right

It’ll spread to your neighbors’ yards

Which they may not take too kindly to

So don’t say I didn’t warn you

People ask about the story,

So I tell them, it all starts in China

Yep, the Cherokee Rose,

The Georgia State Flower,

Was brought to this country from China.

See, this guy, Thomas Affleck,

Who himself came here from Scotland

Had a sugar and cotton plantation

Out in Washington, Mississippi

Later on he moved to Texas

And let the Confederate Army use his farm as a military camp,

But that’s another story. Anyway…

He had a nursery kind of like this

And he sold exotic plants

And he thought these Chinese roses

Looked real nice on those plantations…

And, here’s where people say, “That’s not the story.”

They want the Cherokee Rose story

With the tears and the magic

And the suffering and the hope

(spoken) The one like this:

TEACHER/TOUR GUIDE               GARDENER

Soft white petals greet the sun

But it’s a plant from China

Bringing cheer to everyone

Brought by a Scottish guy

From the rain of falling tears

Sold to Southern plantation owners

A new sign of hope appears

And went wild and spread everywhere

A blossom with a heart of gold

And became the Georgia State Flower

Tells a tale that must be told

And part of a Native legend

We can learn how goodness grows

And to this day you might get in trouble

if it gets in your neighbor’s yard.

From the story of the Cherokee Rose.

GARDENER

People want something beautiful

That’s why folks come to me

If you landscape it right,

Put the pieces in place

It leads the eye to what it wants to see:

TEACHER
Not the sadness,

TOUR GUIDE

Not injustice,

TEACHER

Not the bad parts of our history

That aren’t suitable for children

TOUR GUIDE
Not what makes folks feel uncomfortable

TOUR GUIDE/GARDENER

People like a happy ending

TEACHER

Soft white petals greet the sun

GARDENER

Bringing cheer to everyone

TEACHER/TOUR GUIDE

Capturing the spirit of America.

ALL THREE
Where goodness always grows

In the Story of the Cherokee Rose