A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  She turned toward the judge. “I’m ready,” she said, “to hear the rest.”

  Chapter 47

  1822

  Evening only thickened the smell of brine and fish and mildewing wood, the air gone acrid.

  Emily Pinckney stopped and sniffed the air. She would not let herself think about the smell of death and rot she could make out these days—she would not let herself think. There was smoke in the air, too. Something burning. She raised her face to the sky.

  Angelina brushed a hand across her own cheek. “Ash. Little bits of it falling all morning.” Her eyes blazed. “They burned it, you know. The church.”

  No answer, Emily’s attention elsewhere.

  “I don’t understand, Em. Why did you send the message to my house to meet you here at the wharves, of all places?”

  By way of answer, Emily linked her arm through her friend’s and pointed to a clipper docked at North Adger’s Wharf, passengers boarding. But she did not explain.

  Emily’s stomach had not been steady since Vesey’s hanging and all that followed: the ropes and gallows and strangulations and the pistol shot through the head—and the blood. Dinah’s blood. And Tom’s.

  Emily’s monogrammed handkerchief, stiff and dry now and nearly black, sat on her dressing table. As her father never came in her room and she would not be seeking him out, no one would try to force her to throw it away.

  The last hangings were over, thirty-five dead in all, and the last set to be killed, the ones after Tom, left swinging stiff on their ropes as a warning to others. For days now, turkey buzzards had torn at their bodies, and the stench carried on the night breeze. But city leaders thought it a good lesson.

  Heat and fear still roiled the city, as if a lid had been clamped over a boiling pot. Today, the ash hung in the air, on top of the sweet, salty scent of the mud. The smells of the fish and the rot, putrefied and thick, wafted through, too, and churned inside her. She kept a flat palm on her waist as she asked, “What did you say was burning?”

  “You didn’t hear? About the church?”

  Emily frowned. “There’s too much to hear these days. I’ve tried to stop. Hearing, I mean. Any news of any kind. What church?”

  “That church in the Neck—Vesey’s church. They’ve burned it; a mob did. To the ground.”

  Emily met her friend’s eye. “Where the Bennett slaves were members, too.” She folded her arms over her stomach to try to still the nausea. “And Dinah.”

  As Emily focused on the line of passengers walking up the ramp, her stomach churned harder. Faster.

  Nina faced her. “How is Dinah today? And the baby?”

  Emily hardened her face, then shrugged. “It’s Sunday. She’ll have the day, nobody looking for her.”

  Nina’s brows drew together.

  “No one expecting her to do much,” Emily clarified. “So she can rest.”

  “And the baby?”

  Emily met her friend’s eye. “Tom’s fine.”

  Nina’s hand went to her mouth. “I didn’t know she’d already named him. Hard even to hear that: Tom’s fine.” She bit her lip. “Poor little innocent Tom.”

  Silence from Emily.

  Nina drew her mouth to one side. “Was there a reason we needed to walk here to the wharves in such a hurry? Or,” she added bitterly, “are we just bored with no public hangings to gawk at today?”

  Emily swatted angrily at the tear that escaped down her cheek. Now another. “It’s barbaric. No matter what they’ve done.”

  “The hangings? Or the system that caused the revolt in the first place?”

  “Hush, Nina. Someone will hear you.”

  “Good! It’s time we spoke up, time we quit being so proper and nice—and so afraid. I tell you, if we don’t—”

  Emily spun toward her. “Hush!”

  Nina stepped back, startled at the ferocity of it.

  “I may not be you, Angelina—I will never be you—and may never do another brave or rebellious thing in my life. But today of all days, do not tell me what I ought to do.”

  Eyes wide, Nina searched Emily’s face. Took her friend’s hands in her own. “You see the same things I do. I know you do. Even when you don’t want to.”

  Emily kept her eyes on the wharf. A familiar figure, the young woman Penina Moise, hurried by with a sweetgrass basket of bread and pies for the shop she kept on East Bay. Penina paused as she recognized the two girls and looked as if she might like to talk. But one glance at their faces seemed to make her think better of that, and she ran on.

  Gulls called to each other from above and beside and under the wharf. Bales of cotton swung overhead. Waves slapped the wharf pilings.

  “The ship,” Nina mused. “I wonder where she’s headed.”

  “Boston.” The answer slid from Emily Pinckney too quickly.

  Angelina stared at her friend. “How did you come to know that?”

  “Harbor schedule published in the Courier. Don’t you read it?”

  Nina frowned. “Why do you know today’s harbor schedule?”

  Emily crossed her arms over her chest like she was suddenly cold, the wind whipping whitecaps across the harbor. “We were scheduled to sail to Newport, you know—my father and I. In mid-June. We’d be there right now in Rhode Island if all this had not happened.”

  “But that’s not why you know the harbor schedule, is it?”

  Silence.

  “Why are we here, Em? Why would you want to come out here today with the rotting fish and the buzzards and mud—and the smoke drifting all over the city?”

  Emily rubbed her hands briskly up and down her upper arms. “Maybe it makes me feel less odd, less alone, when I see people coming and going to places other than this.”

  Together, the girls watched the passengers board the Heron. Crates of indigo and rice swung precariously over their heads, the ship’s hull sinking steadily lower.

  Sailors hauled on the ropes that secured the Heron to the wharf cleats.

  Stevedores piled trunks and valises higher, their hands swinging and tossing in rhythm. Black hands.

  Black, Dinah had cried. Thank you, Jesus. His hands are black.

  Walking briskly, the Spanish-looking gentleman in the morning coat swung the black valise by his side—swung it forward and back like a swing. A bandage covered his neck and jaw and one side of his face. He looked neither to the right nor the left.

  Except once. Just once. When he made eye contact with Emily.

  And Emily, who never made eye contact with strange men, nodded to him. Then turned away quickly, eyes welling.

  The Spanish-looking gentleman waved away the porters who attempted to take his bag from him. Black curls oiled into ringlets dropped over his eyes as he set down the valise a moment, dug with his good hand into his inside coat pocket, and pulled out a sheaf of bills.

  In a cluster of passengers behind him, a white woman in billowing satin boarded the ship with a bawling infant. Red-faced herself and flustered, she patted the baby’s back. And when that failed to help, she gave the child a quick shake. Which made it shriek louder.

  “A little wine,” observed Nina, “would help that child sleep. With my mother’s bearing fourteen of her own, I’ve heard her say she tried . . .” But here Nina’s voice slowed. Stalled. As if something were just occurring to her. “Every method there is. No matter how fraught with risk.” She looked hard at her friend.

  Emily Pinckney said nothing but kept her arms hugged over her chest.

  The ship’s captain, cheeks leathered to the color of an old saddle, passed in front of them and doffed his cap. Rum wafted from his clothing and beard as he leered at the two girls.

  “Fair winds and following seas!” he said to them as he strode up the gangplank.

  “Yes,” Emily murmured. “Indeed.”

  The captain stormed fore and aft, dispatching curses and orders. “Have we all boarded, Mr. McIntyre? I’ll not keep Boston waiting much longer.”

  “Aye, Cap
tain. We’re set to sail.”

  “See to the crew, McIntyre. You bloody mole of a man.”

  The five-story sails commenced in defiance, snapping their halyards into the wind. But then the sails smoothed, white squares checkered against the blue like a tablecloth tossed to the sky. Sails swelled. Waves rolled out from the bow of the ship, the sea parting.

  Emily hummed several lines from a song the servants sang when they washed. And perhaps out in the fields. “Ain’t got long,” she whispered, “to stay here.”

  Nina stared at her friend. Then at the dark-haired, slender man on the deck with the valise, his face set not on the city like the other passengers as they waved good-bye, but on the open sea—as if by keeping it constantly in his sights, he could draw the ship faster toward the horizon.

  Nina reached for Emily’s arm and clutched it. “It can’t be.”

  Emily felt as if she were speaking from the bottom of a deep well. “She would have gone regardless—with or without my help. And she wasn’t afraid. I trembled all night, jumping at every sound. Told me she’d come back here someday when she was free and show Tom where his father had died.” She shook her head. “And she wasn’t afraid.”

  Nina gaped, taking this in. Then she spoke in a rush. “Let’s leave Charleston. Let’s go to my sister in Philadelphia. We can’t stay here, Em, where—”

  Emily pulled away. “I’m not you, Nina. I never will be. I did what I did. But I’m not you, with your boldness and studies and way with words.” She passed a hand over her eyes. “I will never leave Charleston—it’s all I know. All I love. But how I will stay in Charleston after what I have seen”—her voice broke—“I don’t know.”

  Neither spoke for a long time.

  Her knees giving out, Emily sank to the wharf’s planks and clung to her friend’s sleeve. But her eyes stayed on the Spaniard at the ship’s bow, who was clutching the valise now to his chest, his face toward the sea, full of hope and of trust—and lifted up, like he was listening.

  With no breath and no courage left, Emily’s words did not sound above the squall of the gulls. But her lips made their shapes: Forgive me.

  Angelina knelt by her, and the two girls huddled there on the wharf, silk skirts puddled on splintered boards smelling of fish, as the ship slipped silently out of Charleston Harbor.

  Chapter 48

  2015

  Letting the others walk on ahead, Kate and Elijah Russell stopped at the end of the bridge, where they could still see the lights winking all down the Cooper River and into Charleston Harbor, still hear the boats honking beneath the bridge. Behind them, walkers tipped heads together for selfies, consulted watches to make dinner plans.

  Elijah Russell spoke slowly. “Scudder mentioned to me he showed you this picture.” He pulled out a copy, more creased than Scudder’s, but the same picture of the four people running on a beach toward the camera.

  “Daniel has his daddy’s smile,” she said—flatly. A statement. But also a question.

  The judge nodded. “Daniel came to us from a foster home.”

  Together they studied the photo of the four laughing people there on the beach, as if the picture itself might speak up and explain.

  “Allow me to back up, Kate, if I may. Your father, from one of the oldest and proudest ancestor-worshipping white families in Charleston, fell in love with your momma her last year at the College of Charleston.” He sighed. “But before that she had other friends.”

  “Including Chloe. And you.”

  “First Chloe, actually. They became close right away that first fall. Then a group of us formed. Chloe was dating someone else in our group. I saw a lot of”—he met her eye—“Sarah Grace.”

  Kate nodded. Waited for him to go on.

  “It was a generation ago in the Deep South. Even when your momma and I were seeing each other, I’m not sure a future together seemed like a real option to her or to me. We were eighteen, the whole pack of us friends, young and wild and not thinking of much but the day.”

  Kate waited. Trying to breathe.

  “She just disappeared that first spring, our freshman year. Wouldn’t answer anyone’s letters while she was gone—and no way to call before cell phones. None of us even knew where she’d gone. Came back the next fall, but it put her a semester behind. Would have nothing to do with me or Chloe or anyone from the crowd of that first year.”

  He shook his head. “By that time, that second fall, I’d been spending a whole lot of time with Chloe. And I’ve wondered sometimes if word ever leaked back to your momma while she was gone. What I know for certain is what happened when she came back: passed us on campus like we’d never met. Seemed hell-bent to let everyone know how happy she was and carefree—like she’d made some sort of decision while she was gone to reinvent her whole life. And she was hell-bent to make friends with old money. Old family names.”

  “Including Heyward Drayton.”

  “Including Heyward. Like an orchid deciding it wanted to grow inside an ice castle.”

  “Only the castle didn’t stand long.”

  “I don’t imagine they were ever much happy. He might have been, in his own way, for a time. Not Sarah Grace. I’d taken up with my Chloe by then, but I watched Sarah Grace from a distance. And I think, God forgive me, I think I was glad—still struggling to find a place for a smart, angry young man of color in Low Country Carolina—to see how unhappy she was in latching onto the safety of old white Charleston money.”

  “You were glad she was miserable?”

  “Not in the end.” His tone dropped still lower. “But you’d just as well know the kind of young man I was then. I was no saint, Kate. Lord knows, still am no saint. Some days I’m not a very good wretch.”

  He faced her again. “But I’m not the bitter young man I was then, selfish and smashing up people and things.”

  She met his eye. Saw something there so honest, so without guile or meanness, she wondered if maybe it was only the ones who thought they were furthest from being a saint who had some sort of shot at the role.

  “They were married the spring she finished college—Heyward was one year ahead and already making good money by then. It was a couple of years maybe before your daddy somehow caught wind of those missing months from your momma’s first year at the college. He’d been studying abroad when she was a wild thing of a freshman, when she and I ran together. Wasn’t ’til all that time later that he heard the rumors.”

  Kate’s throat swelled shut. “The rumors.”

  He paused. Looked her straight in the eye. “That she’d been pregnant that spring.”

  “And rumors that the child was . . . yours.”

  He nodded. “That his pretty, young wife, poor as a church mouse but with old Charleston blood running way back in her family line, in that name Ravenel, might’ve had a child out of wedlock with a black man as the daddy and delivered it . . .” He examined her face, as if to see whether she was ready for what had to come next. “All by herself.”

  Kate closed her eyes and pictured the postcard of the run-down motel paper-clipped to her own birth certificate—the closest her mother had come to being able to gather the proof of her bearing two children. “The Wayside Inn in Wadesboro, North Carolina.” Opening her eyes, Kate met his. “Did she tell anyone?”

  “I don’t think a soul. Not sure the baby left in the room that day—”

  “Left?” Kate echoed, barely able to speak.

  He gave a small single nod. “Listen to me now, Kate—”

  “She abandoned a baby in a motel room?”

  “She ran away, yes. She was terrified and all alone, Kate. Didn’t get but a few miles away when she stopped at a pay phone and called the police to go look for a baby left at the Wayside. Listen to me: she made sure he was safe.”

  Kate dropped her forehead to her hands. “She didn’t at least take it to a hospital or a crisis pregnancy center or . . . anywhere? She left a newborn on a bed and just drove away?”

  “A
nd,” the judge returned sternly, “spent the rest of her life paying for it.” His tone softened. “Kate, she was eighteen and scared and poor—and with a daddy out in Goose Creek who’d have killed her, she thought—and probably was right. This is why she didn’t want you to know the whole story. It was enough, she probably thought, that it ate away at her life—that it gave Heyward cause to call her a monster. She couldn’t stand to have it hurt you. Or make you see her differently.”

  Kate rubbed her forehead, which was pounding. “So people knew?”

  “There were a couple of articles in the North Carolina papers about a baby left in a motel room by a white teenage girl who paid cash for the room and snuck away in the night in an older sedan with South Carolina plates. And there were speculations back on campus about where your mother had disappeared for a semester and why. Some people tried to put it together. Far as I knew, nobody ever put it together for sure. And when your momma came back, all laughing and not a care in the world, using her family name for the first time to wedge open the door to the old-money crowd, people quit talking so much.”

  “But the rumors found their way back at some point. To my father.”

  The judge leaned forward and watched the boat that was passing beneath them. “The rumor alone was bad enough for a man like Heyward. But by that time, he and your momma had already learned they were different as tropics and Arctic blasts. There were storms. Any marriage not tended with care, Kate, can blow all apart. Then there was nothing but storms—with no rebuilding after. They had a toddler by then.”

  Head reeling, Kate gripped the bridge for support. “Which would have been . . . me.”

  “Which would have been you. They were living in Charleston. By the time you were getting on to two or three or so, Heyward had not only convinced himself your momma had been the girl from the Wayside Inn who’d left a baby after having a love affair with a black man—I’m not sure which was more awful to him—but convinced himself, too, she’d been for some time after whoring around. Forgive me: your daddy’s words.”