Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

  One day Abel arrived just as Kate and Marilyn had returned from the clinic where Marilyn cared for orphaned children.

  “Please, mah,” he said, pulling Kate’s arm. “A man is asking for you. He will be here soon.”

  Kate’s hands went to her hair. Who in the world?

  “A Nigerian man,” Abel said.

  She waited on the front veranda drinking Squash cooled by two precious ice cubes when she saw a man approaching in the traditional costume of voluminous robes, the sun catching the upward-slanting scars on his face. He had a wife with him and a baby. Wives generally carried their babies on their backs but this man held the infant as if he had given birth to it. The little tot was a boy, she presumed, since he was dressed identically to the man, only a smaller version. She rose and walked to the steps and then she saw.

  The photograph of Tacker with his friend that she had kept on her windowsill in her kitchen on Glade Street, with the goat in the foreground, the one she had now in a frame beside her bed. Tacker’s long hair and the man beside him, his face tilted upward. Samuel.

  A sudden smell of frangipani in the air and a rustling in the bamboo and she was down the stairs, running across the brown yard.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Chapter One begins with the line “Tacker Hart came home from Nigeria to discover a town he almost knew.” Do you think Tacker ultimately understands the town more or less by the end of the novel? What are the factors that shape his changing consciousness?

  Tacker and Kate meet Gaines on the same day but respond to him in very different ways. How does each character see Gaines initially, and why? How does this view of Gaines change over the course of the novel? Whose friendship surprised you the most?

  The novel’s title, Swimming Between Worlds, emphasizes the important role that water plays in the story. How does water shape the lives of the main characters? What significance does the act of swimming hold in relation to the novel’s themes?

  Why is a grocery store such a surprising yet likely setting for the unfolding of this particular story? How do houses and architecture play a role in all of the characters’ destinies?

  In many ways, this is a coming-of-age story—we see Tacker, Kate, and Gaines searching for their places in the world. What one thing does each character seek most dearly, and why? Has each character achieved his or her goal at the end of the novel? Did their wants and desires resonate with your own memories of being a young adult?

  Tacker experiences the minutiae of day-to-day life in both Nigeria and North Carolina. In what ways does each place fulfill the idea of “home” for Tacker? Do you think he would be happier living in one place over the other?

  Tacker and Kate’s romantic relationship undergoes numerous ups and downs. What did you think of their courtship and its challenges? Did their romance develop the way you expected? How did each character have to grow and change to achieve a loving relationship?

  Throughout the novel, the reader is invited back to experience the full backstory of Tacker’s time in Nigeria. How does Tacker’s experience in West Africa frame his perception of the emerging civil rights movement? Have you read any other work that connects West Africa and American civil rights in this way?

  Examine the scene in which Kate nearly faints and is helped to the lunch counter by Gaines. Why do you think this is the moment when her beliefs and perceptions truly change? What is its significance?

  Discuss the ways in which Kate changes over the course of the novel. How does photography enable her to come to terms with the past and her choices for the future? Consider the line “This seemed, finally, the clear truth of the camera: that the eye sees what it expects to see.” How is this true not only for Kate, but for other characters in the novel?

  Tacker’s choice of whether to design the bathhouse places him at the center of a difficult moral dilemma. Do you think he ultimately makes the right decision? What would you have done in his place?

  What did you think of the novel’s ending? Were you surprised by Kate’s decision at the conclusion of the book? What do you think her future holds? Do you anticipate that her friendship with Gaines and Valentine will endure?

  How would this story be different if it were set in the Winston-Salem of today? What similarities exist between then and now?

  Read on for an excerpt from Elaine Neil Orr’s

  A Different Sun

  Available now from Berkley

  Chapter One

  Greensboro, Georgia

  1840

  IN GRAY MORNING light, Emma Davis stood before the old slave’s garden at the back of his cabin, looking upon the precise rows of cabbage planted for fall. The gentleman she called Uncle Eli had taught her to count by fours and she was quick to note he had four rows, sixteen cabbages apiece. “That will be sixty-four,” she whispered. When she looked up, the sky had emerged pale blue, still too early, she knew, to impose herself on the old man. Emma felt a sense of guarded expectancy, enough life behind her to know hope could lead to disappointment. She was not that old. Eight years today.

  Uncle Eli’s cabin stood thirty paces from her own family home, a nice big house on a corner lot, creamy white, two-storied, with stairs leading up to a broad back porch. It was built in 1832, the year Emma was born, and always she thought the house was for her. By now she knew everything it had to offer, from the bedrooms upstairs on either side of the hallway—she and Catherine each had her own—to the stairway with the landing and the picture of the wild turkey, to the downstairs hall with the parlor and the sewing room on the right and the dining room and the breakfast room with the butler’s pantry on the left. Papa’s library opened at the very end of the hall.

  A ruffle of wind came up the hill from the creek and Emma hugged her chest. She hopscotched to the center of her backyard and turned in a circle. Now she smelled biscuits and cast her eyes toward the kitchen where Uncle Eli’s daughter, Mittie Ann, was making breakfast. The windows of the small building glowed as the woodstove inside it burned, and Emma knew that when Mittie Ann opened the oven, little sparks would fly. She let her feet follow the dirt path between the kitchen and back stairs. A low stone wall ran along the perimeter of the house for flower beds, and rather than step up and into the house, Emma launched herself onto this elevated path, taking it all along the side of the house parallel with the street and to the front yard, watching her feet, her arms extended straight out at her sides. In a moment, she caught sight of her mother moving across the grass with her red scissors and a flat basket. Emma stepped down, her arms still out.

  “Good morning, missy. You’re mighty early. Are you warm enough?” Mama said. “Come. I’m making a nice chrysanthemum bouquet for you.”

  The house faced to the southeast and the sun struck here first, just as now. Emma leaned over the blooms, catching their sharp, oily scent as her mother cut the stems long, each one curved in its cutting, and laid them in the basket. They would go in the tall crystal vase at the center of the dining table.

  “Quick to put them in water,” Mama said, placing a hand at Emma’s neck. Then she was gone, the rustle of her dress behind her.

  Emma looked down the road toward the center of town two blocks away. In winter, she could see the courthouse but the September leaves were still full, just beginning to color. Half aware she was taking the full circuit of her home, she meandered into the side yard, a corridor deep shaded by pines, floored in pine straw, almost dark at this early hour. Midway in her passage she came upon a long light-colored feather—an owl’s, she considered—stuck at an angle into the straw. She bent to take it like the gift she wanted. I can make a writing pen, she thought and slipped it into her pocket just as Mittie Ann called for breakfast. Emma skipped around to the back steps, galloped up the stairs and into the house.

  “You seem in a hurr
y,” Papa said. “Give us a kiss.”

  A ceremony had occurred in the breakfast room when Papa brought in a new clock and placed it on the slate mantel. “Repeating brass, eight days, clock, manufactured by Davis and Barber, Greensboro, Georgia,” he read from the bottom, “warranted if well used.” Emma’s family was not related to the Davises of Davis and Barber, but she felt proud anyway. Her father taught her to say “warranted if well used.” When she performed for him, it didn’t matter that Catherine was the pretty one. Papa would tell Mama things Emma liked to hear. “She drums her fingers because she has places to go,” he would tease. “Just watch when I teach her to ride.”

  Here came Catherine, late as usual, and they could start. The biscuit shaped like a heart was for Emma. “Thank you,” she said when Mittie Ann laid it on her plate.

  And then it was fully day, breakfast over, and Emma could go, as she did most every day, to call on Uncle Eli. This habit came out of her life—Catherine several years older, Mittie Ann and her husband Carl, who lived with Uncle Eli, occupied with work, task by task, day by day. “The old African,” as Emma’s mother called him, was favored because he was an artisan. His carpentry, carried out in the yard, allowed him sitting time; his age gained him some leisure. Emma found him a good talker. Her mother said his English was better than most because he had been for several years the companion of a well-to-do white boy in Savannah. Uncle Eli called Emma his white bird, meaning, she knew, he had chosen her as special. It was the first reason she loved him. That and the way he threw his feet out when he walked, as if clearing a path.

  “One tomato two tomato three tomato four,” she said, winding her steps across the same yard she had traveled at daybreak, scratching at her neck where her hair was rolled up.

  The old man was settled on his bench at the stoop of his back porch, his hands busy inside a basket. But he was looking away out into the distance where the morning sun lit the hill. She stood a moment, twisting her hair roll so it began to come down.

  “Morning, Miss Emma. What you bringing?” he said.

  “This,” she said, pulling the feather from her pocket, running her fingers against the grain. She sat next to him on the bench. She had bitten her cheek at the breakfast table and if she pressed her tongue to the sore place, she could still taste blood. After a while, she leaned right over the basket where Uncle Eli was occupied. It smelled like a cow yard. Maybe there were dried eyeballs in there. She began to see: old corncobs and something that was innards or roots, snatches of dogwood with berries. He bundled his collection this way and that until at last he took a bit of twine from his hat brim and tied it all up. “What is it?” she said, a prick in her palms.

  He didn’t answer.

  “It’s a star,” she said.

  “Not a star,” he said.

  “What’s it for?”

  “You still have that feather?”

  “You see I do.”

  He stuck the silky frond into his arrangement like a last stem into a nosegay. “Keep out bad spirits,” he said, his eyes opening so she could see into them. They were like a dark space in the woods.

  A rush of fear came up from Emma’s stomach. “Don’t scare me,” she said, feeling everything go slant. When she stood she fell straight over from her leg falling asleep. She waited there on the ground, smelling the earth, seeing his broad feet. Uncle Eli pulled her up and dusted her skirt. He pressed her head between his hands.

  “You gonna be all right,” he said.

  Something steadied in her, as if her bones were now solid and she were real.

  “I have to go,” she said, “for my lessons.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” Uncle Eli said.

  Emma slipped into the library. Papa’s large desk sat before a window and on it a brightly colored globe. She had a habit of spinning the globe to see where her finger would land. Mostly it landed in blue Africa, where the pyramids were. She loved the shape of the continent and how mysterious it seemed.

  Right now she was a little sorry she had given up the owl feather. She peered back into the hall for a sign of her sister or anyone, but the house was quiet. It took no time to unstop Papa’s inkwell, press her frilled sleeve back to her elbow, dip the pen, and drag the bright nib up the pale underside of her arm, leaving a brilliant black trail and sending a wave along her skin all the way to her chest. She blew quickly to dry it, replaced the pen, and stoppered the well. Emma caught a reflection of herself in a glassed picture on the wall. Then she looked at her arm, determined it dry, and pulled the sleeve down. In this cocoon of her self, she opened the text she was supposed to read, The Girl’s Own Book, a gray volume all about correctness of principle. After a bit, she pulled out her Greek mythology. It was better, offering the story of Romulus and Remus, which made the whole world alive. Finally, she dipped into Cousin Lucy among the Mountains. Emma could tell it was not a very good story. It was too unlikely. She itched for her own paper.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEN FALL CAME. Emma was in the backyard playing marbles. She looked up to see a girl from her father’s plantation. Emma knew little about the farm three miles out of town and the forty slaves who worked it. She was familiar only with Carl because he lived in her yard and this one girl who came to the house on errands, riding in the back of a wagon when someone came into town. She might carry a basket of blackberries or deliver news that a baby had died.

  “Watch,” Emma said, as the girl stood close. “Watch how I do it.”

  “What your name?” the girl said.

  “Emma. You call me Miss Emma.”

  “What it mean?”

  A tightness gathered in Emma’s stomach. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s my name.” But the girl pointed with her cinnamon fingers to the sky.

  “My name Hannah. Mean Jesus loves me,” she said.

  Just then the back door opened and Papa came heavy down the stairs.

  “What you doing here, girl?” He was talking to Hannah, who was now looking at her toes in the dirt. Emma watched her father. His hands rested on his belt. He was close enough to reach out and touch the other girl’s head. Why didn’t Hannah speak up?

  “I was showing her marbles,” Emma said in a rush. But her father kept looking at Hannah and Hannah at the ground. What if he hit her? Emma felt wild, as if a frightening world lurked nearby that might open to things she didn’t want to know.

  “How old are you?” her father said.

  “I’m nine year old.” Hannah swayed in her hips.

  “Almost like me,” Emma said, trying to reach the girl and her papa, trying to stay clear of that other, scary world.

  “Old enough to be in the field with your mama,” her father said, ignoring Emma. “Next time you tell your folks to send a younger child. Now you go on.”

  Right then Emma knew there was something wrong with the way they lived: Hannah with the creamy skin whose name meant Jesus loved her wore only a shift you could see through while Emma was layered in more clothes than she cared for. The wrongness was so bad she wanted to pinch someone.

  “Go on,” her father said, and Hannah turned, her dress slipping down one shoulder. Something fell away. Emma wanted to cry, not weep, but cry, like the Bible says: someone crying in the wilderness. Instead, with the heel of her boot, she stomped the shooter marble into the sandy yard and then the others. “I don’t care about marbles,” she muttered under her breath.

  The next morning when Papa came into the library, Emma was in her place, a seat at the round table in the center of the room. “I want some paper,” she said.

  “You use your slate for arithmetic,” he said.

  “I want to draw and write,” she said.

  “I don’t know as girls write,” he said. “Let’s hear your multiplication tables in elevens and twelves.”

  Emma rolled it out. She loved her father.
/>
  “That’s my girl,” Papa said. “Come with me now. I need to talk with Mr. George at the bank. Get your gloves.” At the front door, Emma claimed his hand. To a point, he seemed to know her worth, and beyond that, what he could not fathom, was a fault in her or a fault in him. She was not sure which.

  * * *

  • • •

  EMMA STUDIED THE print in her dress. Papa had said he would not come to the revival. Now she pressed closer to Mama. The coal stove against the wall was not enough to warm her. Something shook in the preacher’s voice although the voice was smooth. She looked up at him and felt a power coming at her. It licked her feet and rose all through her into her neck where it seemed to wait for her to remember taking up her father’s pen without permission, envying Catherine, letting Hannah walk away, all her other wrongs. When the man called for them to come, to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, she almost stumbled in her hurry, pulling her mother, or was her mother pulling her, and Catherine. They knelt and he blessed them and a hundred more, so many that the walls of the church seemed to bend out, blessed them in the light of their sin.