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lady knows how to be strong, Kate—and is also smart enough to be sweet, for when just being strong won’t roll the stone.
the world at its core, shadow and light.
“Never was a city more sweet on itself than Charleston.”
“It’s what my daddy says about Charleston.”
“Says it’s the folks say they’re not lonely who’d be the saddest of all. ’Cause they hadn’t grown the insides big enough yet to admit it.”
The boy spoke in a whisper. “Your momma’s crossed over, too?” It was a phrase—from the Low Country maybe—that Kate remembered her mother using, and hearing it now, Sarah Grace’s death washed over her in a wave.
A routine occurrence, that’s what slave auctions were, as much a part of the fabric of this city as the unloading of silks at the wharves.
“What I believe in is facing the truth—and not getting strung up by the neck for a cause bound to fail.”
“You make sure you do something good with your life, you hear? Something that puts more beauty and more kindness into the world. And be a
person of courage, my Kate. With a tender heart but a lot tougher hide.”
On the same page? She cringed. Like she thought they were equals. Which graduate students and full professors were decidedly not.
From St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, the church bells tolled curfew.
Which is how, ladies and gentlemen, our former poverty gave us the largest and architecturally richest historic district in the United States.”
Kate sketching on through the night and lining out what she had seen so far of the world: most of it more dark than light, more pain than peace.
the mess people can cause themselves.
What I was trying to say—” “Was that our world’s not always a fair place,” she suggested quietly. “Less fair and less safe for some people than others. And sometimes, some of us need reminding of that. Like maybe I did tonight.”
Greed, it turned out, could be made to work in one’s favor.
got honey in the voice and steel in the eye.”
“It’s called a joggling board, sugar, and every home—of any import—here in Charleston has
one on its piazza that was passed down at least five generations. They’re part of a game, a mating ritual here. One lowers oneself onto the board—gracefully, of course, and with poise—in such a way as to joggle oneself closer to whichever beau one has strategically arranged to sit nearest.”
Kate could still see him so clearly, the way he’d sat ramrod straight in Legal
Sea Foods in Boston—preferring
And I feel like the Denmark Vesey revolt—all the people swept up in it, all that it represented—was the pivotal moment for Charleston. In a way, for the whole South. For the whole nation.”
Let me assure you of this, Katherine: it’s a history that can only hurt you.”
South of Broad. Home to
the oldest families.
Angelina Grimké? She was such a prominent abolitionist, an early
advocate of women’s rights—the first woman to speak to a legislative body in the United States.”
“Trust, my dear, is earned over time. Wouldn’t you agree?”
THE ONLY THING NEW IN THE WORLD IS THE HISTORY
YOU DON’T KNOW.” —HARRY S. TRUMAN
In fact, there were more antislavery societies in the South than in the North before 1830.
Here lived the people who, with the thousand years of rice-growing knowledge they’d brought from West Africa, had made the fields yield gold in every sense—gold-husked rice that had made generations of the planters rich.
believe the creeds, dear.” Kate peeled herself off the passenger door. “The creeds?” “Of the Episcopal Church. Which assures me we are all quite capable of most anything.”
“Those were Draytons who owned that place. And thought
they owned those people in that burying ground.”
“My God, the Low Country and its rumors!”
rice and peas and corn and ham mixed together, the scent of it wafting around him. “Hoppin’ John. This still your favorite, Son?”
“Now you listen to me. You hang on to hope. Don’t matter
what trouble come roaring in. No buckruh, no gun, no kind of cruel can take that away.”
“I fear no evil.”
“Fear no evil. No evil. For thou art with me.” Then a gunshot.
The Sound and the Fury
“That you perhaps believe, as William Faulkner did, that”—she lowered her voice to her best Mississippi male drawl—“‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
I’ve read Morrison’s Beloved more.”
“Descent through the male line is apparently where the better matching would be on the STRs—short tandem repeats, the markers on the Y chromosome. Apparently, ninety-five percent of it doesn’t change one generation to the next, father to son. That’s why it’s so good at tracking who’s descended from whom. Although it’s possible to track
a matrilineal descent—through the mother’s line.”
They look scared, Emily thought of the white men in charge. Guilty and scared.
Dying, she thought, with such courage.
Vesey, was the only man present who wasn’t afraid.
