A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  Taking her hand, he spun her away a few feet.

  A cluster of others dancing around them, they linked hands, the music pulling them in and back out, then into a slow, shuffling spin. Daniel was there, and Rose, who allowed herself to be spun, her silver chignon perfectly sleek and in place. Mulligan and the platinum-haired waitress from Penina Moise. More and more, the crowd grew. And Mordy Greenberg weaved his way in and out, spinning to hug a newcomer.

  “A brother’s job,” Daniel said as he and Rose revolved sedately past, “is protecting a sister from bothersome men.” Nodding toward Scudder, he winked back at Kate. “Just say the word, and he’s gone.”

  Gabe appeared now, ducking into the ebb and flow of the dance.

  “Would you, young man,” Kate asked the boy, “care to dance?”

  Bending so that his arm could swing over her head, she spun and he spun, and they missed not one beat.

  The lights on the harbor shimmered there in the dark, the waves swelling and cresting, splashing the light into glitter just as they had for centuries now. And tomorrow, the sun would come up over long-armed live oaks and stocky palmettos and jasmine climbing over wrought iron, and it would find all of them dancing, still dancing, the past and its pain all around them, but hope rolling out ahead with the sea.

  Acknowledgments

  I hardly know where to begin in listing all those who’ve contributed to and supported this book in its formation and writing.

  My agent, Elisabeth Weed of The Book Group, has earned my undying gratitude and admiration for her championing of this book and her many wise and insightful readings of it. Thank you, Ariel Lawhon, for connecting me with Elisabeth and for being a steady and selfless voice of perseverance. Thank you, too, to Dana Murphy at TBG, whose incisive comments helped sharpen this book.

  Danielle Marshall at Lake Union Publishing has been in every way the editorial director I was most hoping for: warm, wise, consistently encouraging, brave, and straightforward. Her enthusiasm for this story and wisdom in how to make it stronger have made all the difference. Tiffany Yates Martin, you are an editorial genius who can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Your humor and calm in the midst of technological mishap and your insight into the very heart of a story bring out the best in a writer. I am grateful to Jaime Wolf, too, for all his guidance—and for his kind words. The editorial and design teams at Lake Union—including Miriam Juskowicz, Sara Addicott, Kimberly Glyder, Janice Lee, and Katherine Richards—are an honor to work with and they make a writer look better and smarter than she deserves. Thank you for your endlessly hard work in fact-checking a thousand obscure details—and being a pleasure to work with.

  This book is dedicated to the people of Mother Emanuel AME Church, and please let me add that each time I have been there, I have been touched and humbled by the welcome this community offers a stranger, including at a study in the downstairs fellowship hall just weeks after the tragic 2015 shooting in that very place. The arrival of yet another white stranger wanting to be part of a Mother Emanuel study could understandably have been viewed with suspicion or anger or resentment or fear. Instead, I was treated like a fellow pilgrim—part of the family. The Reverend Eric Manning, pastor of Mother Emanuel, Reverend Dr. Brenda Nelson, Maxine Smith, and Cathy Bennett have all been so gracious with their time in hearing about this book’s evolution and offering their thoughts and support.

  Also from the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, Senior Bishop John Bryant spoke eloquently not only at the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s funeral but also at the university where I teach part-time. I was and am so grateful for his warm and wise thoughts in reaction to my describing this book and its oddest of journeys. Longtime friends and mentors Ray Hammond and Gloria White-Hammond, AME ministers and medical doctors, guided my husband and me through premarital counseling and officiated our wedding. They continue to be among the individuals I most admire.

  Thanks to Alphonso Brown of Gullah Tours (which offers a fascinating van tour and inspired this book’s carriage-based Gullah Buggy), I was fortunate enough to get to see renowned Charleston blacksmith Philip Simmons’s ironwork before his death a few years ago. Philip Simmons’s grand grates and grilles all over Charleston helped serve as a model for how I described the work of the historical blacksmith Tom Russell, about whose work we know all too little.

  Steve Hayden and Monica Philbin, my cousins and friends, were the inspiration for Daniel Russell’s raku ceramics and iron sculptures. Hayden Arts in Meredith, New Hampshire, produces stunning, unique furniture and art, and if I have described the raku process imprecisely, it is solely my fault. Thank you for the detailed tour of your studio and workshop.

  I would love to list whole pages of cherished friends, but since I would surely leave someone out and be horrified with myself, I will limit mentions here to friends who’ve contributed directly to this book and to friends who are professional writers who’ve shared their time, hard-won knowledge, and even their homes for writing retreats. For reading and commenting on a draft of the novel—what a gift of time!—thank you to Diane Jordan, Ariel Lawhon, Milton Brasher-Cunningham, Ruth D’Eridita, Suzanne Robertson, Elizabeth Rogers, Susanne Starr, Christine Doeg, Bonnie Grove, Joyce Searcy, and Walter Searcy. For supporting this novel in its earliest days, beginning in Boston and continuing when I lived in North Carolina and Texas, thank you to Susan Bahner Lancaster, Ginger Brasher-Cunningham, Kay Brinkley, Elizabeth Cernoia, Anne Moore Armstrong, Kitty Freeman, Kelly Shushok, Christy Somerville, and Laura Singleton, who more than once over the years mailed historical books she’d found relevant to the novel. Benita Walker shared her amazing strength with me in a season when I’d put this novel aside. Blake Leyers, your editorial eye and developmental instincts on this book’s earlier stages were invaluable. You are a gem. Paula Smith, a wordsmith in her own right as a gifted preacher, gave encouragement and wisdom at a particularly crucial point in this book’s final stages.

  I am thankful for writer friends (not previously mentioned) Lisa Patton, J. T. Ellison, Bren McClain, River Jordan, Patti Callahan Henry, Paige Crutcher, Dana Carpenter, Allisa Moreno, Marybeth Whalen, Tamera Alexander, Laura Benedict, Anne Bogel, the amazing Lake Union community of writers, and many others for understanding the crazy-making life that is writing books and for all the ways you toast the good news, rant over the bad, provide unfailing support, and freely share information.

  A number of historians, librarians, and archivists in Charleston gave generously of their time and wisdom as I asked a boatload of obscure questions. Thank you to Georgette Mayo, processing archivist at Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston; Harlan Greene of the College of Charleston’s Special Collections; and Celeste Wiley and Molly Inabinett of the South Carolina Historical Society. Nic Butler at Charleston County Public Library knows, I do believe, pretty much everything there is to know about historic Charleston, including which roads were cobblestone and which were sand. He took time to explore several issues with me, including whether or not there were any Quakers left in Charleston by 1822. Karen Emmons of the Historic Charleston Foundation (HCF) was so kind in helping me pursue details on Tom Russell and figure out where to find other answers. Karen dutifully informed me of a late-breaking discovery by an HCF summer intern that Tom Russell, weapon maker of the Vesey revolt, may have been owned by a Sarah Russell other than the one married to wealthy merchant Nathaniel Russell of what is now the Nathaniel Russell House Museum. Of all the marvelous historical tidbits she provided, this one alone was too late to change—so we will chalk that up to artistic license.

  Dr. Elizabeth Ammons of Tufts University was my dissertation adviser during my own doctoral process (although in English literature, not history like Kate Drayton’s degree), and Dr. Julian Ammons in this book is named in her honor, although he is depicted as considerably more gruff than she ever was in her gracious patience with me. She, along with Dr. Carol Flynn and Dr. John Fyler of the Tuft
s English Department, set a memorable example of scholarship that does not lose touch with social justice and compassion.

  Thank you, too, to those who’ve read earlier books of mine and in some cases chose them for the Common Book at your university or for your book club selections or for your classroom reading. I am picturing your names and faces as I write this and am so grateful for the fine and fascinating people I’ve been privileged to meet through the books we’ve read or written.

  Some of the books that have been helpful for background research include those listed below, in no particular order. My thanks to the authors and editors of the following titles:

  The Classic Slave Narratives edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Bernard E. Powers Jr.’s Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885; Mark Perry’s Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders; Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage; William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease’s The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828–1843; Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team’s Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation; David Robertson’s Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It; Douglas R. Egerton’s He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey; Lacy K. Ford’s Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South; The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (introduction by John Oliver Killens); George C. Rogers Jr.’s Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys; Robert Rosen’s A Short History of Charleston; John Michael Vlach’s Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons; Alphonso Brown’s A Gullah Guide to Charleston: Walking Through Black History; Tom Blagden Jr.’s Lowcountry: The Natural Landscape; Charles L. Blockson’s Hippocrene Guide to the Underground Railroad; Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq’s An Antebellum Plantation Household: Including the South Carolina Low Country Receipts and Remedies of Emily Wharton Sinkler; David Doar’s Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Low Country; Gerda Lerner’s The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition; Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made; Sarah Jane Foster, Teacher of the Freedmen: A Diary and Letters edited by Wayne E. Reilly. I also stumbled upon Rebecca Lee Reynolds’s article in Slate on the Places with a Past exhibit at the 1991 Spoleto Festival, which was a helpful piece in providing Kate Drayton with one of the clues to her mother’s past.

  Thank you also to my mother, Diane Jordan; my brother, David; his wife, Beth; and their kids, Chris, Catherine, and Olivia, for their kindness and encouragement and for never betraying when they asked about this book’s progress that it had been way too long in the making.

  Last but so completely not least, I want to thank my husband, Todd Lake, and my kids, Julia, Justin, and Jasmine Jordan-Lake, for their unflagging love and enthusiasm on this long, hard slog of a book—from solely a historical novel to solely a contemporary story to a dual timeline to an already-complicated story that now needed to include a devastating recent tragedy. Through all the twists and turns of this book’s formation, they shared an admiration for this history and these people with me. They made me laugh, inspired and encouraged me, painted pictures of Charleston, walked every block of the historic district in the searing summer heat with only a small bottled Coke as a reward, and kept me (marginally) sane. I am grateful beyond words for who they are and for the great gift of their lives.

  Author’s Note—and Some Background on the Writing of the Book

  First, please let me say thank you for the chance to talk with you about how I came to write—and be obsessed for years by—the story of 1822 and present-day Charleston, South Carolina, and why this story, for me, is one that needs to be told: how the historical characters have changed the course of American history and why their message still matters today, particularly in a cultural moment in which people of common goodwill but different racial and ethnic and political backgrounds and perspectives are trying to hear and understand one another—and move forward together.

  This is a work of fiction, which, contrary to what any reader paying attention to recent events might assume, I began writing more than twenty years before its publication. It has been a most unusual journey.

  Before I tell—briefly—the story behind this novel and the remarkable people who inspired it, let me add that while this novel does feature some real people, places, and pivotal events, they are handled in a fictional manner. My intent is not only to tell a story worth reading but equally—or, to be honest, more importantly—to honor the memory of those in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Charleston who have set an example of courage, conviction, and a spirit of love far stronger than hate.

  In the late 1990s, twenty years before this book was published, I was a young PhD student living in Boston, and though I’d grown up in the South and loved American history, I’d just learned for the first time of the Denmark Vesey slave revolt and of the white abolitionist Grimké sisters of South Carolina—and I was more than a little rattled that I’d never even heard of these people or events before. I was supposed to be continuing research for my dissertation, but as I slogged through archives of writings by formerly enslaved and slaveholding women, I found myself taking more notes for a novel I’d like to write than for my dissertation. So I packed up my eight-month-old daughter and my ever-up-for-adventure husband in our tiny Dodge Colt and drove to Charleston, where I fell hopelessly in love with a city: the way the past bleeds through the present at every corner—as one character in this novel says, like a camera shutter left open for two hundred years. I was hooked by the Low Country’s beauty, its charm, its turbulent and often horrific history, and its complicated present that in many ways represented to me the racial landscape of America: painful, often raw, yet also living proof of real transformation and hope and a hard-fought, still-in-progress unity.

  I should probably mention at this point that I am white and grew up in a nearly all-white small town in the East Tennessee mountains, so I ought not even be a candidate to tell this story. But please let me add that my very first memory as a child is of my mother sitting on our living room floor, rocking to and fro and sobbing in front of the television news: Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Her reaction then and a hundred other such moments taught me early that the color of your own skin ought not to be the thing that determines what shatters your heart.

  If you and I were sitting over coffee together, I’d like to tell a few stories, like another childhood memory: my family being stopped at a KKK roadblock on the back side of our mountain, and how one of the men wearing a bedsheet tapped with a rifle on the driver’s-side window, poked its muzzle inside the car, thrust a KFC bucket at us, and asked if we’d “like to donate.” And how the Klan rocked the car back and forth so violently we were sure it would flip, and how, even though in my seven-year-old mind at the time we were clearly about to die, how comforted I’d been to know for certain what my father would say before he said it: No. We would not like to donate. And, no, we do not need to reconsider the answer.

  I could go on and on, including the story of my teenage friend Shyama Haniffa, a Muslim from Sri Lanka who’d moved to our all-white town, and the cross burned in her yard, but let me skip ahead to my early twenties, not long before my first trip to Charleston. I’d come to share a friendship with a couple my husband had known since his first year at Harvard. Gloria and Ray, both medical doctors and both ordained African Methodist Episcopal ministers, had been mentors for him and quickly became that for me, as well. With multiple graduate degrees from the finest universities and a vast circle of influence, Gloria and Ray were (and still are) among the first people the Boston Globe called to find out “what African Americans thought” ab
out any given issue—which they chuckle over, as if two people could speak for a diverse community of perspectives. But one Saturday when we’d scheduled to get together on a rare morning off for all of us, Gloria showed up dressed immaculately from head to toe. In a ratty sweatshirt and jeans myself, I teased her about trying to show the rest of us up. She replied simply that she’d had to drop by the hospital to get a quick head shot made for an ID. When I laughed that surely a head shot didn’t require this level of sleek and polished gorgeousness, she let me know bluntly, matter-of-factly, that, yes, if I were to show up in a ratty sweatshirt and jeans, hospital personnel would assume I was a doctor on my day off. But if she, as an African American woman, showed up in the same clothes, the same people would assume she was a maid.

  It was not the first or the last time I’d been caught up short by my own shortsightedness, but it’s a moment I use to challenge my students when they push back at me or at another student that white privilege is just a term tossed around by liberals and academics.

  Through the next several years, between finally finishing my dissertation and teaching classes and publishing other books, I returned—now hauling three children and a still-willing husband with me—for more research on the Charleston novel, which had come to include Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Calhoun Street, where Denmark Vesey and several of the slave-revolt strategists had been leaders. The church, I learned, had suffered incredible racial violence in the nineteenth century, including many of its members being hanged and its building being burned to the ground by an angry mob. From the beginning of this novel’s historical story line, the church appeared in several chapters. Similarly, when about three years ago I began weaving a present-day thread into the novel, the now-rebuilt Emanuel AME Church appeared as a key element in the story, and as I chose from among prominent Charleston family names, I gave one of the main characters the last name Pinckney.