He tilted his head at her. “The white chick scores a point. Hurricane Hugo in ’89—took the thing clear off.”
Kate sat back heavily against the bench. “Any idea when it was rebuilt?”
“Yep, 1990. That May, I think.”
So Sarah Grace had not only been here in 1991 to view the memorial sculpture as part of the Spoleto exhibit. But nearly two years before that, she’d apparently crawled from one of those upper arched windows onto the empty pediment and been photographed in her cutoff shorts at this church, Denmark Vesey’s.
And put one of those pictures, with a kind of farewell note on its back, into an envelope meant for someone who knew more about her, apparently, than her own daughter.
Chapter 21
1822
Making his way down from the Neck and passing Morris Brown’s church, Tom paused as its front door cracked open. His head still ached from the blow the patroller had landed on him with the butt of his gun the night of the funeral.
Or not funeral, Tom corrected himself, burial.
From the door of the church, Brown himself was emerging, shoulders a little hunched—which was unusual for this man—his brows drawn together in worry.
Seeing Tom, he stopped. For a moment neither of them moved or said a word.
With only shreds of daylight clinging to the tops of the palmettos and myrtles and oaks, Spanish moss hanging like cobwebs from this forgotten corner of town, whispers seemed to stir with the breeze.
Morris Brown broke their silence first. “Tom.”
Tom shook his head, his way of saying they shouldn’t speak.
Morris Brown lowered his voice and spoke quickly. “Let me say only this. I am here if I can assist you in any way. And I know others who are willing to help. Inside this congregation”—he paused—“and outside it. Should there be a need.”
Checking behind him to see if anyone was following him, Tom only nodded. And walked on—faster this time. Heart pounding.
The City Market was already beginning to rouse. He breathed in curry and citrus and cloves brought here on ships that had only to raise their square sails and skim away to be free.
Pelicans and gulls flapped and squawked on the seawall. Russian kopecks and French specie and Dutch rix-dollars passed from palm to palm, a steady jangle that kept time with harness rings rattling. Some of the merchants were free blacks from the Sea Islands who’d steered their boats into harbor before dawn, their Gullah lilting above the rumble and clang. Turkey buzzards kept their morning appointments with merchants who staggered, groggy and cross, to the brick bays and the flimsier wood stalls with their pyramids of coconuts, their pineapple towers, their mountains of oysters, their bananas beginning to rot.
Rot. In the days before he’d signed on to Vesey’s wild scheme of a plan, Tom had often pictured himself rotting inside.
Silent beside the dawn hubbub of the market, the mansions that lined the harbor slept on, indigo dreams fleeced in cotton and rice. Buzzards dove for their plunder of discarded fish. Vendors waved brooms at the big birds. The Gullah women selling their sweetgrass baskets on the corners shouted at them. But the buzzards provided the public service of removing the refuse left at the close of each day. Tom hardly looked where he walked, toppling stacks of papayas, catching them before they hit the ground, handing them back to glowering merchants.
“Qué bella, qué bella!” one vendor called to her neighbor, nodding in Tom’s direction. She held out two peaches to him.
Tom shook his head and pulled out one empty pocket from his trousers.
Waving away the mere suggestion of money, she maneuvered her hips in two swoops around her table, which was heavy with fruit. Taking first one of his hands and then the other, unfurling first one palm and then the other, she positioned a ripe peach gently on each palm. She smiled up at him, her earrings bobbing.
Tom pressed the peaches back into her hands and walked on.
“Molds. For fishing-net weights, supposed to be,” a voice whispered behind him as he paused at a stack of crates bulging with pineapples. “Now for bullets.”
Tom did not turn. He knew the voice.
“One of our men slipped it from the farm where he works. Nobody missing it yet. What you make, we hide strategically all over town. Ned dropped off a barrel of rice, mold deep inside, at your shop before dawn. Behind the ash heap in your alley.”
“What!” Tom spun on the man they called Gullah Jack. Then turned back away. “Too risky. What would that look like if the wrong person goes to open the barrel?”
“We’re needing ammunition down Battery way. Got nothing so far down to the tip.”
Tom did not stay to hear more. Hurrying, without calling attention to himself by actually sprinting, Tom reached his shop on East Bay and dragged the barrel through the door on the side alley.
He labored all day over his forge, mostly on hoes and shovels. Rebolting the side entrance and keeping one eye on the front door, Tom crafted one bayonet head after the next—always with a hoe propped at the edge of the forge as cover. The newly cast bullets he stashed in a box of hand-cut nails under a set of fleur-de-lis gates.
Just as dusk neared but before the curfew bells, Tom dropped the box of nails—and bullets—into a large cotton sack full of hammers and handsaws he could claim he was delivering and strode south, meeting nobody’s eye, toward the Battery.
In the shadows of the last lot on Meeting Street, its outbuildings surrounded by brambles and weeds and a circle of young oaks, Tom Russell looked right and looked left.
No one.
Taking three steps from the base of the largest of the live oaks, he dropped to his knees. With a trowel he’d slipped into the bag, he dug a shallow hole and dropped the box of nails and bullets into it. Hastily covered it with a thin layer of crushed shell and dirt.
Looked right. Looked left again.
Heart pumping, he slipped back through the shadows and the warren of outbuildings back to a clearing, and from there to East Bay.
A few blocks north on East Bay, the water’s edge just steps away, sailors leaned against a tavern, its stucco clinging thin and wearied to its walls and its walls no longer perpendicular to the street, as if they had taken in a few flagons too many themselves.
The tavern’s sign swung on its wrought iron bracket—which Tom Russell had crafted.
Spilling out from its door were sailors of all skin colors, speaking every language Tom could imagine and more, sweat mixing with drinks and drinks passed all around.
A red-haired sailor with an Irish accent lifted his pint to Tom. “You’re a man looking in need of a drink.”
Tom shook his head but took a place leaning against the stucco as he and the sailor looked out over the harbor.
“It’s not making much sense to me, that much I’ll say, the way things would be working down here. For example, it’s not legal exactly, I’m told, for a man such as yourself”—the sailor’s eyes fell to the badge at Tom’s neck—“to be drinking alongside the whites. Yet I’m reading in your newspapers those who’d write in to complain of it happening, which tells me it does. And I see it with me own eyes. Sometimes, a white man complains. Sometimes, nobody does.” He paused for Tom to comment, but Tom, stiffening, kept his eyes on the harbor and said nothing. “’Tis inconsistent, I’d say.”
The sailor was gauging Tom’s face. Abruptly, Tom turned his head away toward the harbor’s mouth.
But something in the line of his mouth or some spark of defiance the sailor must have caught in his eye—or just the fact that Tom had come here to the tavern and did not march away from this conversation—must have told the sailor that he could go on.
“Or here’s another I’ve heard since me ship sailed in from Boston last night: a man who’s a slave can purchase a lottery ticket and, just saying for instance he won, could be purchasing his own freedom.”
The sailor was speaking as if he knew something of Vesey. As if he were hoping Tom would acknowledge some sort of code.<
br />
Tom had heard rumors through Gullah Jack that a handful of whites—three or four at the most—had been trusted with the plans for the revolt. Everyone knew that sailors heard the news of a port faster than anyone. Maybe this sailor was speaking only in general terms and knew nothing specific.
Still, this conversation was dangerous. It could be a trap, set by the likes of James Hamilton.
Heart pounding, not meeting his eye, Tom took one step away. And checked to be sure no one was close enough to be listening.
But if the sailor was aware of Tom’s unease, he took little notice. Pitching back his head, he pointed into the sky. “Looks different here, that it does, than below the equator, you know—the constellations. Not dark enough yet to be making out, but there’s one star that’s brightest.”
Tom shook his head. Better to appear not to know what he meant. “Always lived in the city. Never needed to be watching the stars.”
The sailor lowered his voice and plucked out a folded paper from his pocket. “There’d be a store in Boston, there is, where I just bought these fine pants, a couple named Hayden that owns it, and they’d be making a point of sticking these pamphlets in all of the pockets, especially of seafaring men like meself. ’Tis their way, I s’pose, to get their point spread round.”
Tom did not have to give the pamphlet more than a glance to see that it was abolitionist propaganda—the kind that could get a slave beaten here or even a free man arrested. “Put. That. Away.”
“’Tis no one close enough to be hearing me whisper, lad.” But with the shrug of one shoulder, the sailor stuffed it back in his pocket. “They say there’s people can escape by the North Star.” He shook his head. “Not that it makes any difference if you live this far to the south.”
Tom’s hands gripped the brick behind him, but he said nothing.
“It’s one thing, they say, trying a run from a border kind of a state where a skiff across a river at night could be all that’d be needed. But down here this far into the South, ’tis not a bonny pig’s sense in trying, I’m thinking.” The sailor let his head topple toward Tom. “Or is there?”
Laughter, raucous and loud, from inside filled the silence for the next moment.
Not a bonny pig’s sense in trying.
But we are! Tom wanted to shout. We are.
Instead, he turned to the sailor.
Something in his face must have said more than he’d meant it to, because the Irishman’s eyes grew wide.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he breathed. “God help you, lad.” The sailor lifted his pint high in a toast. And he tossed back the rest of its contents.
A few yards away, a man stepped from behind the corner of the tavern.
Tom froze, eyes straight ahead on the harbor. Teeth clenched, he waited for the man to speak.
Could he possibly have heard anything?
The man walked past them slowly, his simple gray coat and dark, round-brimmed hat hardly more than a shadow here at the daylight’s end. He turned, his face toward Tom. The man stroked his beard.
An occasional customer at the blacksmith’s shop, the man was a Quaker. One of the handful left.
People said they spoke out against slavery—the reason they’d left the Low Country in droves. But this one was still here, which could mean he was more sympathetic to Southern law.
Tom had been careful to say nothing that could incriminate him. But he’d stood there too long and too close and listened. That alone could be viewed as sedition.
The man walked on without speaking.
The sailor turned to Tom. “It’s not trouble I’ve gotten you in now, have I?”
But the curfew bells clanged into the dusk.
Tom’s only answer was breaking into a run.
Chapter 22
2015
The light just beginning to edge through the crack in her motel curtains, Kate reached for the photo on her bedside table and studied the face in it. Even in this little light, she could see her mother’s head thrown back, her long, tanned legs dangling from what must have been the just-emptied pediment of Emanuel AME’s steeple. Just as Gabe had noticed that first day on the seawall, her young face stretched into a smile that seemed too big or too forced—for display only—as if to announce to the world, See? I’m smiling.
Kate reached for the light and sat up in bed, papers and photos and a sterling hairbrush tumbling from the paisley bedspread where she’d fallen asleep studying them. She googled the date that Hugo hit Charleston: September 21–22, 1989. Kate calculated: the fall of her mother’s senior year at the College of Charleston. By June of the next spring, Sarah Grace would have married Heyward Drayton—and as far as Kate knew, the kind of defiance and laughter that showed on her mother’s face in this photo had ended with her marriage vows. So this photo must have been taken sometime between the fall of 1989 and the spring of 1990.
And the note on the back: I beg you to hold close what only the three of us know—and I wish to God it weren’t even three. When had Sarah Grace written that? And to whom?
On a whim, Kate reached for her phone on the bedside table and scrolled through her recent calls to the number she’d found at the bottom of the Places with a Past brochure. A half dozen rings and still nothing. Kate dropped the phone to her lap to tap “End.”
“Hello,” said a man’s voice suddenly.
Kate popped the phone back to her ear. “Yes! Hello. Yes, my name is Katherine Drayton, and, forgive me, this may sound very odd, but I found this number in—”
Click.
The line went dead.
Kate stared at the phone. Had the man thought she was a telemarketer and hung up, annoyed? Or had there been something about her name that had spooked him?
Screwing up her courage, she called back—better to risk being a nuisance than never know. But this time the line rang with no answer.
Easing herself out of bed without knocking more of her mother’s memorabilia and Kate’s own research notes to the floor, she peered through the parted curtains. The motel’s parking lot lay glittering with glass, its asphalt erupting. It reminded her of the wood-veneered frame, broken on two sides, which had at one time held a picture of her parents together. Most of her growing-up years, though, it hung empty against a bare wall.
Maybe, she’d thought as a kid, her mother had left the broken frame empty so Kate could imagine something cheery to fill it—a deliriously happy family, perhaps, gathering hermit crabs in a tidal pool at the beach.
Or maybe Sarah Grace’s rage and defiance had lasted only long enough to rip the picture out of the frame, but not the frame from the wall.
Showering quickly, Kate dressed, and a glance in the cracked mirror showed the glint of the silver herons still in her ears. She must have slept in them.
She shrugged at her own image. Time someone wore them, since they may have sat in that box unused ever since her father had given them to her mother.
At the edge of the mirror, where she’d wedged it between glass and cheap plastic frame, was the postcard of the Wayside Inn in Wadesboro. She’d yet to find anything even remotely resembling a clue about that. Maybe it was, in fact, only the place where she and her mother had stayed the first night after leaving Charleston and, for Sarah Grace, represented that step.
Frowning, Kate wedged the postcard back into the frame.
An e-mail appeared in her in-box. From Julian Ammons. Only one line:
Have you found the Avery Center quite helpful?
Cringing, Kate googled to see what exactly this was—apparently something obvious for any real scholar—before replying. Up came links for the website of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, located on Bull Street and operated by the College of Charleston. The museum specialized, Kate read, on the African diaspora, with an emphasis on Charleston and the Carolina Low Country.
Just walking distance away. Very nearly under her nose.
Kate typed back a few lines of her own:
Actually headed there today, as it happens. Will apprise you of any developments.
Thank you for checking on me!
It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Not since she would now spend the day there.
Gathering some notes and her laptop into her backpack, Kate knocked a manila envelope onto the floor from the bed. One of several from the last of her mother’s boxes, this one was marked in red ink Car Deeds—SAVE. Since no car of Sarah Grace’s had survived the wreck of her Ford Taurus, Kate had not opened the envelope. But now, for some reason she could not have named, she tore open its seal.
Inside were letters, dozens of them, with the return address of the law firm of Rutledge, Wragg, Roper & Botts.
Kate fanned them out on the bed and opened one toward the bottom. Here was a typed letter from the firm signed by Percival Botts. And another. Several of them.
Plucking letters from random years, she found the same in each: a letter from Botts—the only difference that the attorney’s tone became more familiar—affectionate, even, as the dates wore on, and he signed his name Percy in later years. Kate opened several more letters.
Let me help you with your secrets, Botts wrote Sarah Grace in one.
A strange tone to take with the wife of a client.
Kate tore open several others from the succeeding months. But Botts’s tone turned more formal again. With no more mention of secrets.
Botts. Whom she’d called every day since he’d disappeared from the inn. She left messages every time that they would meet soon, if she had to track down his home somewhere near Beaufort—she’d found out that much already—and show up on his doorstep some evening in the near future.
What had Botts meant, trying to help Sarah Grace with her secrets? What secrets? And why would her husband’s attorney care?
Kate picked up the photo of her mother with long, tanned legs dangling from the church steeple’s pediment.
“What was going on?” she demanded of the young woman in the photo.
She hurled a stack of the letters across the room and shot another text to Botts:
A Tangled Mercy Page 19