The House on Diamond Hill by Tiya Miles

Author:Tiya Miles [Miles, Tiya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies, African American & Black Studies, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9780807868126
Google: 2_s4eacedUwC
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-08-02T05:35:39+00:00

CHAPTER 6

In My Father's House Are Many Mansions

We are experiencing little pleasure in our neighbor and former pupil Joe Vann. His house is not dissimilar to a den of thieves.

—John and Anna Rosina Gambold in a letter to Reverend Van Vleck, 1817

Going to the Chapel

Peggy Scott's commitment to her newfound Christian faith was heartfelt and absolute. The spiritually effusive letters she sent to Moravians in Salem attested to her personal transformation, as did the many attempts she made to share the gospel with her fellow Cherokees. Peggy viewed her role as evangelist to her people as a special charge: “It is given to me,” she once explained, “to tell them why the Son of God suffered thus.” Peggy often praised the Lord, expressed her deep love for Him, and wondered at her fortune to have been found and saved. “I am the greatest sinner,” she said after taking Communion one summer evening. “How can even I come to such great grace? How indescribably great is the love of our Savior indeed! Oh, I do love Him!”1

Although her Cherokee neighbors viewed Peggy's religious conversion with skepticism, white observers marveled at the change in her. On one occasion, a respected Marylander named Thomas Chase visited the Springplace Mission and commented that “Margaret Ann [Peggy's baptismal name]… had become through grace a true Christian woman.” Another visitor to the mission, General David Meriwether from Georgia, commented that Peggy was “a wonder and a visual proof of God's grace” whose example was evidence that God would enlarge “a congregation for Jesus out of the heathen.” Anna Rosina Gambold was taken by delighted surprise when, upon looking for Peggy one day, she “saw her in a corner of the field, covered with her large silk scarf, on her knees.” Anna Rosina then “hurried away so as not to disturb the praying woman.” She would later write that Peggy lived a “truly edifying Christian life, led in the faith of the crucified Son of God.”2

After James Vann's death, Peggy's religious devotion led her to leave the plantation big house and move into her own home nearby. She gained, through this move, an independent style of life that helped her to heal from the abusive relationship she had experienced with her husband. She managed her own farm, took in Cherokee children, learned to read and write in English, and regularly translated for Cherokees at the mission. Her life was full, and, the missionaries observed, she was content never to marry again. But the same devotion to God and her earthly godparents, the Gambolds, that had helped Peggy find her own place in the world after the death of her husband, also left her subject to a new form of authority. Following her conversion in 1810, Peggy would submit to the will of God, as interpreted by John Gambold and the Moravian Church, in ways that would forever alter her life and the lives of her slaves.

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