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
