Just found some intriguing letters
from you that my mother saved.
She paused to consider. Was it time yet to play hardball? Probably.
I admit it startled me that a client’s
attorney can have such a close personal
relationship with his client’s wife.
Did that imply enough of a threat?
The American Bar Association must have
instituted new guidelines—I’ll be sure
to check. Looking forward to meeting with you
very soon.
So there.
Snatching up her backpack and plastic motel key card, Kate would have stalked out of the room then—except for the photocopied page at her feet.
It must have fallen from between several of Botts’s letters. She knelt to examine it.
There, staring back at her from the copy of an old photograph, was the sepia-toned image of a man, broad shouldered and dark skinned, propped back against the railings of some sort of ship. His hat in one hand, the man had gray hair, but the compromised quality of the image—a probably three-decade-old copy of an antique photograph—made it hard to determine just how old he might be. Across a thin span of water sat a shoreline of elegant mansions.
Flinging open the motel curtains and holding the photocopy up to the light, Kate squinted at the blurred skyline. The line of mansions with their soaring piazzas and Greek Revival columns only yards from the water had to be only one place: Charleston, the view people called Battery Row—seen from the harbor.
Peering more closely at two words someone had penned on the original photo in the right bottom corner, Kate’s hand went to her throat.
The ink was faded, but she could still make them out, barely. In evenly sized block letters, Kate read: MY TOM.
In any other context, the name Tom, common for a nineteenth-century American man of any race, would mean little. But the fact that Sarah Grace had saved this along with the rest of her research on Tom Russell must have meant something—or at least, she’d suspected some sort of connection and was trying to prove it.
Sure enough, on the back of the photocopied page—in Sarah Grace’s handwriting—were the initials T. R.
Could this possibly be Tom Russell?
But in the remote chance that it was, the fact that someone had taken an early photograph and not a daguerreotype of him had to date the image sometime after the Civil War, didn’t it? And a dark-skinned man propped leisurely against a ship’s rail seemed to suggest that, too. Which meant that if Sarah Grace had been right and this “My Tom” was in fact Tom Russell, he had survived not only the summer of 1822 but also the war and Emancipation.
Perching back on the bed, fingers flying over her laptop, Kate called up websites on the development of early photography. A daguerreotype would have had a more silver, mirrorlike background, the images in the foreground appearing almost to float, like the slave images she’d shown in her catastrophic classroom presentation. This had to be an early photograph, then, although she couldn’t make out enough about the different stages of progress to date the image any more closely than the 1860s to the 1890s. She’d have to find a visual archivist here who could help pinpoint a date.
Still, even assuming the photo dated from just after the war, and even assuming it was Tom Russell—which went against every historical record of the aftermath of the Vesey revolt—why had it mattered so blasted much to Sarah Grace?
And what connection with their family troubles had Kate’s father made in warning her away from this history?
A history that can only hurt you.
Baffled, Kate shot an e-mail to Dr. Ammons with the subject line “Grateful for your thoughts” and only two lines of message:
Found a piece of evidence suggesting Tom Russell may have survived the summer of 1822—and been living in Charleston after the War.
The War, she thought wryly. She was beginning to sound like a Charlestonian: the War meant only one thing here.
Conflicted over how to describe her source—since cardboard boxes of Valentine’s Day doilies and Christmas lights and old photocopies sounded less credible than this probably was—Kate left it at that. And hit “Send.”
After several hours at the South Carolina Historical Society, Kate rose from the desk where she’d fanned out her notes and stretched. Then she clicked on her e-mail again—she’d made herself quit checking every few minutes after the first hour.
Still nothing from Julian Ammons.
She leaned again on the front desk and smiled at the librarian. “It’s kind of you to let me know when Dr. Sutpen comes in.”
“Oh. Right.” The young man looked up from the stack of folders he’d been labeling. “Forgot about that.” With his head, he gestured across the room to where a man was reaching for a stack of books with threadbare bindings. The elbows and knees of his seersucker suit appeared little better, but he held himself with a regal air.
Wanting to bound across the room, Kate made herself walk slowly, casually.
“Dr. Sutpen.” The librarian sighed as if he’d tired of saying what he was about to have to repeat. “We cannot allow pipe smoking here.”
“Mah pipe is not lit,” Dr. Sutpen pointed out. “Why, what sort of barbaric behavior would that be with precious documents present?”
“Or even your walking about with your pipe clenched between your teeth, sir.”
With a white goatee and a string necktie, Dr. Sutpen looked like a Low Country Colonel Sanders. Huffing, Sutpen pivoted on the heel of one loafer. “Soon they’ll be outlawin’ the mere possession of a tobacco receptacle.”
Sarah Grace’s imitation of him had been perfect.
Kate thrust out her right hand and pretended not to see his frown at being waylaid. “Dr. Sutpen, my name is Kate Drayton, and I’m looking for information on a number of things, including information on my mother, whom I believe was a student of yours. I wonder—”
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, I cannot remember students I had last semester, much less decades ago. Now if you’ll excuse—”
“Sarah Grace Ravenel.”
He pivoted back slowly and examined Kate. “Well now. There is a name I do seem to recall.”
Kate’s heart leapt. “I wonder what you could tell me about her. Anything at all.”
Annoyance flickered over his face. “An odd thing to ask, young lady.”
“Maybe you recall a bit about her research—for her senior thesis with you? About the Denmark Vesey rebellion.” Kate took a chance here. “She had some theories about the weapon maker Tom Russell. That perhaps he survived?”
“Unfounded in fact, and I told her just that,” Sutpen railed. “Sheer wishful thinking. An absolute shame for a young woman that gifted to be wasting her life pining and plodding after a theory doomed from the start.”
“But—”
He bent toward Kate and glowered. “Doomed. In fact, now that I recall, she’d never have graduated on time, not after missing that spring semester, had I not been willing to guide her through independent studies one summer, then passed off on her senior thesis, insufficiently supported though her thesis was.” He shuddered. “Good Lord.”
Kate’s head snapped up. “Missing that spring semester? Which year was that?”
He eyed her with disdain. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t track the lives of every student who has passed through the History Department at College of Charleston.”
“Of course. I just . . . that’s the first I’ve heard of that. I don’t suppose,” she ventured, “you’d have any idea why she might have taken a semester off and then made it up later?”
Had she left to conduct her own research, determined to prove her theories, however connected they’d been to her actual life? Had she run off with Heyward Drayton—surely not to the Wayside Inn in Wadesboro—and then come back to marry him?
Something sparked in his eyes—some sort of memory. He shifted uncomfortably and avoided Kate’s eye. Then pic
ked up his pipe again from the table and chewed on its stem. “I’m afraid I cannot assist you.” He turned to go.
“Wait. Please. It’s just that I know so little about her.”
“I was her thesis adviser. Not her counselor or confidante.”
“Of course. I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find a copy of her thesis?”
“There is no such copy!” Sutpen exploded, turning back. “I signed my name to the damn thing only because Sarah Grace Ravenel was so hell-bent to graduate and bury herself in some society marriage. I saw the thesis shredded myself.”
Kate hurried after him, so close that Sutpen glared a warning. “Bury herself? So you knew the young man she was going to marry?”
He waved this away. “I absolutely did not. He was a”—he shuddered again—“business major, not in the liberal arts. I merely knew of him—and was struck with the peculiar fervor with which your mother pursued him. Nothing like the crowd she’d run with her first years.”
“No?” Kate asked, fearing her saying more might remind him he was admitting more than he liked to think that he knew.
“Free spirit, that’s what she was at first. Eager to learn. Eager to experience life. Unafraid to cross boundaries. She cared little for how people talked.” He gestured with his pipe. “But all that changed, more’s the pity. All that changed.”
“For how people talked?” Kate leaned forward again—too far and too fast. Sutpen glared. “Sorry. But I’m wondering what exactly people might have been saying. Or what might have changed.”
He snorted in disgust. “Your mother had a good mind, yet threw it away. Colossal waste. For the record, I never believed her capable of an atrocity.”
“Atrocity?”
He chomped on the pipe. “And then to chain herself to old-money Charleston.”
“Dr. Sutpen, what did you mean by atrocity?”
Glowering at her use of the word as if she’d laid a trap for him, he showed no sign of supplying more.
So Kate took a risk. “Are you referring to her crossing boundaries, possibly back in the late ’80s in the Deep South, possibly racial divides or—?”
“If it only had been that!” He snorted, and his accent deepened. “Ah do not employ words willy-nilly, let me assure you. Ah would remind you that Ah did not believe she was capable of it.”
“Capable of . . . ? The thing is, I know so little. You seem to have known at least some of her personal life and—”
That was the wrong thing to say.
“Ah neveh involve myself in the personal lives of my students,” he blustered.
“Of course not. I only meant—”
“That is all Ah recall. And that is all Ah will say. Ah’ll ask you not to accost me again, young lady.” Gathering his papers, Sutpen stormed from the room. “Utterly unfounded in fact!” he pronounced from the door before banging through it.
Kate stared at the door he’d slammed.
Atrocity? What could he possibly mean?
Suddenly, Kate was seeing the note her father had written in red ink across the portrait she’d sketched for him:
I assume you and your mother do not wish to expose yourselves to yet more public scorn . . .
And Sarah Grace’s response:
He means that for me, Katie. Not you.
Even at the time, it had seemed that more than a lost spelling bee had been on his mind when he wrote the note, its scathing tone unmistakable. Had Heyward assumed Sarah Grace was guilty of this atrocity that Sutpen referred to?
She was still staring openmouthed at the door Sutpen had slammed when her cell—which she should have silenced before coming in—trilled loudly.
Springing to her seat and pawing in her backpack, Kate caught Dr. Ammons’s name on the screen. Snatching the phone with one hand and dashing past the front desk, she burst through the door to the outside steps and answered before he hung up.
“Dr. Ammons. Thank you for calling.”
“Not possible, I’m afraid.”
And that was his opening line.
“Not possible? I’m afraid I don’t—”
“That any of the key leaders of the Vesey revolt would have survived. What is this source you’ve uncovered, if I may ask?”
Kate hedged. “My source is hard to describe adequately.” This latest interaction with Sutpen had made her more desperate than ever to finish her mother’s search—and understand what had driven it.
“Hard to describe, Ms. Drayton?”
Secretive was not something a graduate student could be. She tried again. “It’s a photograph, not a daguerreotype. With identification that would lead me to think it’s Tom Russell. The backdrop is definitely Charleston.”
A beat of disbelief that Kate could hear even across the thousand miles.
“I assume it’s misidentified, then. There are several superb visual archivists there in Charleston. You’ve had it examined for a fairly pinpointed time period?”
How could she explain it was only a copy of a faded picture with the block letters MY TOM and the scribbled initials T. R., which meant only that her mother, who’d barely finished her college senior thesis—and only because her professor had signed off on it grudgingly—persisted in believing that it was Russell.
“I’ll be doing that soon, yes.” And, she nearly added, trying to connect it somehow with my family’s falling apart.
This, though, didn’t need saying aloud.
Atrocity . . .
A history that can only hurt you . . .
Yet more public scorn . . .
“Ms. Drayton, I will await with interest your delving into this matter.”
“Yes, I . . . um . . . look forward to being in touch.”
“One final thing, I assume you’ve begun searching for records there at the Avery Center—one of my favorite venues for research, by the way—of names in the group who came to the newly freed Charleston with Daniel Payne?”
“I . . . was hoping to begin that today,” she assured him. And yanked the pen out of her jeans pocket to write on the back of her hand Daniel Payne—a name she’d not even heard before.
“Again, I’m afraid Tom Russell’s survival past 1822 is simply not possible, but if you’re determined to pursue finding out who this man of color is in a post–Civil War photo of Charleston, it occurs to me you might explore the group that came down from the North with Payne to teach literacy to the former slaves.”
And before she could think what to ask without betraying the depth of her ignorance, he had signed off with an “I do wish you well, Ms. Drayton.”
And her phone’s screen went black.
Downing the Diet Coke she’d been craving as she paced the College of Charleston campus—acres of live oaks forming a canopy of green over winding paths where cyclists spun by her—Kate dragged herself toward the Avery Research Center on Bull Street. It seemed unlikely she’d find anything related to her mother’s life or search, but it was one avenue she’d not tried yet.
On the way, her phone dinged with an incoming text—from a number she didn’t recognize.
Kate, it’s Scudder Lambeth, and before
you hit Delete—I know it’s tempting—
He’d recognized her need for walls—to keep him at a safe distance: well, a point for him on that.
Just hear me out pls. Miz Rose—standing right here—gave me your # if I promised to delete the minute I sent this msg re- something I overheard that might help u. I know u were trying to meet w/ P Botts.
You said it was important. I believe you.
The text ended there.
You said it was important. I believe you.
Something oddly innocent—almost childlike in the trust of that line. Something kind of thoughtful about it, too.
Still . . .
Now another text slid onto her screen.
Press N for NO MORE CONTACT EVER AGAIN FROM YOU, INCLUDING THIS INFO. Press Y for YES PLS CONTINUE WITH MORE INFO BUT NO OBLIGATIONS (that’s 0, our
commitment to you) ATTACHED.
He was inventive—she’d give him that. And the bottom line was that Botts had yet to respond. She’d already been laying plans to find his residential address—which wasn’t listed online, but she’d find it somehow—drive up to his sweet coastal town where he’d semiretired, and jump out of the shrubbery at him.
Short on alternatives, she tapped “Y.”
Immediately, another text arrived:
If you haven’t gotten Botts to talk w/ u yet—hard to catch for me, too—I met him today to finish our talk from the inn. Overheard him say he’d be at Magnolia Plantation for a fund-raising thing Tu night. May not be helpful but thought I’d pass along. No need to respond. Rest easy: am deleting all trace of your # right . . . now.
“So,” she said out loud. “It’s Tuesday night then.”
She kept her response to him short:
Thx. Helpful.
More than that might sound like an invitation to talk—and to know more about her life than he already did, which was already more than she’d planned.
She dropped the phone in her backpack. She would remind herself later to delete his number from her recent calls. Just in case she was tempted later to thank him again. And then he might respond.
Better to keep a safe distance where no one got hurt and no one got left sitting alone at the side of an empty road.
Head aching, she bent alongside the Avery Research Center archivist as they sifted through file after file that might contain something on the African Methodist Episcopal workers—at least one of them born in Charleston, one source had said—who’d sailed down from the North after the Civil War to assist former slaves in beginning their lives in freedom.
A needle in a haystack, that’s what she was looking for, trying to find Tom Russell’s name anywhere in these mentions—and worse, a needle she didn’t even know the purpose of. She might have turned up some interesting clues, but none of them had connected so far. She was no closer to weaving together what role a blacksmith two hundred years ago played in the unraveling of her family than she had been when she’d first come down.
Returning the last stack of folders to the front desk of the Avery Research Center’s Phillis Wheatley Literary and Social Club Reading Room, Kate scanned a final page as she walked: no mention anywhere of a Tom Russell. Or a Tom at all.
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