A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  And then when she’d heard from Chloe about the adoption, even then once she’d known he would be cherished, she must have wondered about the little boy’s life—whether he was playing Little League baseball, whether he liked math or Legos or books. If he’d learned to tie his shoes yet.

  And all that time there was Kate, sitting just inches away, wondering where her momma had slipped to and who it was she was missing so hard.

  Sarah Grace’s and Heyward’s refusal to forgive her for what she’d done, how deadly that had been for them both.

  Kate calculated the years: 1989, when Sarah Grace posed on the pediment of Emanuel, would have been a year or two after her mother came back from delivering Daniel and not long before she married Heyward. And the 1991 exhibit of the Vesey memorial in black marble that she’d come to at the church, that must’ve been soon after their marriage.

  Both times, maybe it wasn’t a connection with Elijah himself so much as the place, what it had stood for over the course of two hundred years. So it wasn’t a hunt for a lost love that had drawn her back so much as something she’d sensed there: a courage or forgiveness or strength that she lacked.

  Kate drew her fingers through Gabe’s curls. Her nephew. Hers. And closed her eyes against the pain of Felicia Sanders, who’d lost her son Ty in the church, the young man who’d had his mother’s name tattooed across his chest when she was battling cancer. A poet, he faced down rounds of hollow-tip bullets and found words of calm and reason to try and talk down the killer. Then died a hero trying to shield his aunt from the shots. All the families who’d had part of themselves ripped away that same night, mothers and sisters and fathers and husbands . . . all those bright years ahead that could never be given back. All that horror and outrage.

  And yet . . . all that love that had been planted and had grown in that place of courage and beauty and pain—centuries of it, all that love that flowed in from all over the globe, all that love that pushed back, defiant, unbending, against all that hate.

  Daniel lifted his head. “I wish she could have known.” Gently, he laid a large, calloused hand on Kate’s arm. “That it was okay. That love never let go.”

  His eyes filling and his voice hoarsening to just a splinter of sound, he used the name for her that Gabe had coined the day they’d driven Gullah Buggy to Emanuel Church, and he laid an arm around his son’s shoulders. “I’m glad we get to be family, Katie-Kate.”

  Charleston sparkled today, hot and clear and bright colored—just as it had for the other funerals. Which struck Kate as cruel. The world ought to look bleak and broken this week. Instead, the pastels of its mansions and gardens glimmered and shone.

  Even in the midst of the fog in her head, Kate was aware of the sound of the big black wooden wheels going round and round on the asphalt, the horse’s hooves like hammers as the caisson hauling the casket rolled forward.

  “Gabe wanted you to know,” Dan offered as they walked down Meeting Street together, “the Gullah for times like this is groan in the spirit—for the nine that crossed over and everybody involved.”

  “Groan in the spirit,” Kate murmured. “That fits exactly. Thank you, Gabe.” He leaned toward her, and she marveled: her mother’s forehead, her mother’s impossibly long lashes—over brown eyes that filled as she looked into them.

  He buried his face in her rib cage and did not move until it was time for the procession to start.

  From the gardens on both sides, roses climbed up wrought iron and spilled into the street, their red flowing together as Kate’s vision swam. Meeting Street was filling with red in her mind, rising up now to the horse’s hocks, reaching to the harness traces, up to Kate’s waist. She saw red flowing into a harbor lined with gallows, the water smelling of blood.

  Kate shook her head to rid herself of the image. She rubbed her temples. Something brushed the backs of her hands. Her mother’s silver herons dangling there. She must have slept in the earrings again last night. If she’d slept at all.

  The silver herons must have symbolized for Sarah Grace the passion she’d known as a young woman, the longing for that. And they must have symbolized, too, a way of living in freedom that she’d always wanted to know but hadn’t. All those years of searching for the connection between her life—and the baby she’d given up—and Tom Russell and the Vesey revolt had ended with her thinking she knew but perhaps didn’t know for sure.

  Or maybe, Kate thought, her eyes on the sidewalks where the mourners were spilling fifteen across, maybe she had been convinced. Even if she’d lacked some of the pieces to prove Dinah’s story, and Tom’s, somehow she’d sensed the truth: that the “failed” slave revolt won out in the end and the church that was burned and outlawed and attacked could not be crushed.

  All along the route, crowds filled the sidewalks: block upon block of mourners in broad Sunday hats and baseball caps and dreads and bobs and blond highlights and pink tips and braids and weaves and buzz cuts—all heads bowed as Clem Pinckney’s coffin passed on its caisson.

  The College of Charleston’s arena was overflowing, a swelling sea of black and white, men and women, clergy in clerical collars, surgeons with blue scrubs peeking out from under the suits they’d thrown on, big-ribboned, wide-brimmed straw hats and black pinstripes and black cotton patched at the knees and white linen and white polyester and black vintage lace. All the Low Country was here. Most of the South Carolina statehouse. And a good portion of Washington, DC.

  Mordecai Greenberg, who’d shut down Penina Moise for the day, stepped from the column where he’d been waiting, flung open both arms, and wrapped them around first Rose and then Kate. “And did we ever think we would see this day come to Charleston? How could we know? And yet, ‘man is born to sorrow.’ This we do know.”

  Behind her, someone enunciated, “Katherine Drayton.”

  A head, brindled gray, rose from where it had been bowed over a dark argyle vest: Julian Ammons.

  Before she could stop and remember New England reserve, Kate threw her arms around his neck—only vaguely aware of how he stiffened.

  Hesitantly, he patted her shoulder.

  She pulled back to look him in the eye. “Dr. Ammons.”

  “I had to come,” he said simply. “I’d decided to postpone my research trip to Morris Island. However, the Thursday morning I opened the Globe and read the headline, I knew I had to come down.”

  Dr. Ammons stood beside Kate and Mordecai Greenberg and Rose Pinckney and the judge and Daniel Russell and Gabe and Scudder Lambeth as they sang, as they clapped for speaker after speaker after speaker, as the senior bishop of the AME Church, John Bryant, leaned over the lectern.

  “Someone,” he said, “should have told that young man . . . he wanted to start a race war. But he came to the wrong place.”

  Thunderously, the crowd leapt to its feet.

  And the crowd would leap to its feet again when the president of the United States stood behind the pulpit not long after that to deliver the eulogy, which he would end by singing a song more than two hundred years old and by pointing to what the nine victims shared.

  “If we can find that grace,” he told the crowd, “anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.”

  Chapter 49

  1822

  The crowd stomped down the long gangplank and swarmed the jumbles of trunks and cases piled high. They groused and grumbled over the ship’s arrival—a full three days later than someone with a first-class ticket ought to expect—and remarked on the stifling heat and shouted for someone to carry their bags.

  But there in the midst of the swarm, Emily stood alone on the wharf.

  To her left on a parallel pier, another crowd stood waiting for another ship. But these passengers did not stomp—did not budge at all. Their ankles shackled together, a long line of men were being deported—suspected of collaboration in the Vesey affair but not convicted to hang. They were the lucky ones. Who would likely die within the year on a sugar plantation in the Car
ibbean.

  It had been ten days since the last set of hangings—the last, at least, until today’s.

  And three days since she and Nina had stood here together, watching the Heron be loaded. And the passengers board. The Spaniard and his valise.

  Three days since Dinah had disappeared from Meeting Street. From Charleston altogether.

  Ash from Morris Brown’s church still fell sometimes from the sky when it rained. Razed, the mayor had announced triumphantly to the Mercury and the Courier—and to whomever would stand still long enough to listen. Destroyed. Last of it we’ll ever see. Done away with for good.

  But Emily had her doubts.

  Tasting ash now in her mouth—though it couldn’t be this many days later, could it?—she stumbled away from the wharf toward the tip of the city where Charleston sank into the sea: her own home, a witness. Along the way, workmen teetered on ladders above the wrought iron fences and gates of a number of her neighbors’ homes. They were adding long, menacing spirals of iron with spikes spinning out: chevaux-de-frise, these were called. Iron hair. Protection against future slave insurrections, the Vesey revolt’s architectural contribution to the city.

  Her father had contemplated such an addition to their fencing.

  “No,” she had said, the first time she’d ever opposed her father. And the first time he’d ever been cowed.

  Emily swept up her home’s entryway stairs to her bedroom. Paused on her way at her dressing table to look in the glass. Let her fingers slide over the sterling sheen of her hairbrush.

  Lifting the brush to her scalp, she pulled the pins from her tresses, letting the chestnut weight of it drop to her waist. These past ten days, for the first time in seventeen years, she’d brushed her own hair. And made clear to her father she would keep doing so.

  No, she had informed him, she would not accept a new maid.

  And, no, she had said, she could not imagine what had happened to Dinah after last Sunday when she’d disappeared.

  “With her baby,” Emily added, looking directly at him. “Such a beautiful baby.”

  He’d railed at her. He’d suspected treachery. Treason.

  She passed through his tantrums like the moon through a storm.

  He would place ads, she knew. But in local papers. Probably not in far-flung cities like Boston.

  She thought of Dinah’s face, serene and strong, as she’d slipped on the suit she’d secured from someone in the African church. So Emily heard the shouts of her father and walked on.

  She let the brush drop with a clatter now from her hands to the dressing table, and she walked through to the second-story piazza. She’d left out paper and a quill this morning when she’d slipped out here to write a letter. Then found she’d no words she had the courage to put into ink.

  But she would try again now.

  First, though, she would remove the box from her sight. She opened its small cedar lid, just once. Took one last look at the monogrammed ERP of the silk handkerchief, gone black with Tom Russell’s blood. Closing it quickly, Emily knelt and pried up the loose floorboards that ran the length of her bed.

  In the hollow beneath the board lay a few private treasures dating back to her childhood: a tiny, hand-painted oil painting from her one trip to France, a dinner-guest list in the handwriting of her mother, the gloves Emily had worn on the night of the Bennetts’ ball when John Aiken had handed her into the carriage, a nosegay of roses he’d sent her the next day.

  Lifting her diary from her desk, she ripped its back cover and final pages from the rest. Tying the cover and final pages with a pink ribbon, she laid them carefully into the hollow.

  Now she reached for the box with its bloody handkerchief. She could not throw the repulsive thing away. But also could not bring herself to bury it under the floor yet—as if somehow its presence on her dressing table stood in Dinah’s place beside her. For the time being, it would stay there, the box in plain sight. The blood of a dead man inside.

  Emily eased the plank back into place.

  Perching at the edge of a chair, she lifted the quill. Perhaps now she could write.

  Meeting Street lay unusually quiet, its late-afternoon lull when the heat smothered all movement. Charleston had grown weary of nooses and death. Today, it sat not only silent but scared. No longer a place where whites congratulated themselves, preening, proud of their benevolence and protection of inferior peoples. In this single summer, Charleston had become a city forever stripped of what it thought it had been.

  Emily dipped the quill and began to write—rapidly, as if the speed of her fingers might outrun the breadth of her fear. And she spoke aloud each word as she formed it:

  My dear Nina,

  I write this knowing I may well never mail it to you—I am frightened even to write it.

  You saw my crime. You saw a ship sail away toward Boston with a Spaniard who was no Spaniard and a valise clutched for dear life.

  You care little for the opinion of our city, and I envy you. I do care; I am no Joan of Arc—or half the brave soul you will become. And yet what else could I do?

  Here, Emily paused to glance back toward where she’d concealed the final diary pages beneath the plank. Then her glance swept to her dressing table. She dipped her quill again.

  You should know that I have kept something from the day of the largest hangings, the day Dinah’s baby was born. You would be horrified to know what I kept.

  And, Nina, you would be proud.

  Emily redipped her quill.

  You are right to be willing to leave.

  You are right that you must leave Charleston—and I firmly believe you will do important things for what you believe.

  I will stay here, and do nothing important in the ways that you will—and to you, I must seem a coward, willing to be part of an evil system. It is true that I will overthrow nothing and make no brave public protests as you will. It is true I haven’t the courage to break with my city.

  But know that in my own small way, I will continue to help where I can. If ever in your Northern home someday you should meet a fugitive slave from the Low Country, you might smile to yourself, suspecting you know an old friend from your girlhood who might have had a small, secret hand in helping with the escape.

  Know that someday, somehow, I wish to be of service, of some sort of tangible, material good, to Dinah and her son—or to her son’s son, if it comes to that—if ever through the years I am able.

  I am, as always, your friend,

  Emily Rhett Pinckney

  Now Emily held the paper up for the sea breeze to dry the ink.

  To mail this letter would feel like a betrayal of her own father. But she’d had to write it; she knew that much. She’d had to watch the words flowing from her own hand. Her confession. Her shame. And to destroy it now would be a betrayal of her own eyes—what she’d finally seen.

  Perhaps if her courage gave way and she did not mail the letter to Nina just now, she would do so in a few days. Or she would hide it somewhere for a time—perhaps with the tattered piece of the journal, its pages that recounted these past terrible days.

  But for now, she folded it neatly. Sealed it. And tucked it into the cedar box on her dressing table, just beside the sterling brush.

  Chapter 50

  2015

  Several weeks had gone by, tender and tearful and hard, when Kate joined Rose on the bench swing where she’d perched in Waterfront Park and laid a sterling brush in the older woman’s lap. Rose’s eyes still out ahead on the sea, her long, delicate fingers closed on its handle and traced the swirls of its sterling back.

  “So Emily’s brush came down in your family,” Kate said. “It certainly took me long enough to make the connection.”

  The crowd in the park milled all around them, but Rose looked far past the noise.

  Closing her eyes, she ran her frail fingers over the sterling as if she were reading Braille. “My wedding gift to your parents.” She sighed. “I do not normally give item
s of this import for marriages I do not expect to last.”

  “Rose!”

  “I had eyes, did I not? Not to mention a functioning set of ears. Your father, Kate, was a handsome man—with a fine pedigree, of course—but as brittle and controlling in his ways of approaching the world as your mother was a free spirit, with not an assertive bone in her body. It was like watching a Prussian soldier choose a butterfly for a pet.” She shuddered. “I am gratified that Sarah Grace had the good sense to keep the brush. Perhaps it helped bring you home.”

  She squeezed Kate’s hand, and Kate squeezed hers back. “I was just sitting here, thinking, sugar, about Emily and Dinah—as real to me now, heavens, as actual flesh and blood. More so, in fact, than some of the flesh and blood I know.” Primly, Rose rolled her eyes. “You seem to have proved that our Dinah did in fact come back with Daniel Payne and the others right after the War to help the freed slaves and that she brought her son Tom with her, who would have been a grown man by that time.”

  “Proved might be a little strong still, Rose. But it’s the start of a decent paper for a scholarly journal, for sure. And Dr. Ammons is willing to help us with the publication of Emily’s journal, if you’re still willing. It’s a fascinating example of a Southern slaveholding woman who saw the system for what it was and didn’t take the most admirable road of the Grimkés but also didn’t pretend like so many others just not to see.”

  Rose met her eye. “So you’ll be going back, then? To New England?”

  Kate shook her head. “Didn’t I make that part clear? I’m so sorry, Rose. No, I’m staying here. Since I finished my doctoral course work already, and since the department doesn’t exactly relish my coming back as a teaching assistant”—she cleared her throat—“to say the least, I can research and write my dissertation from here and consult with Dr. Ammons via e-mail. I can probably pick up some part-time adjunct teaching while I write the dissertation—along with helping Dan out with the gallery.” She flushed. “And the gallery’s selling my art—if it sells.”