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but her sometimes not knowing
what a lap child knows about life—how it’s struck through with good and with hurt. How the good and the hurt of last year and all the years past didn’t go away ever, not really: they’re just what you got to build on top of.
‘The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.’
This journal has been waiting for nearly two hundred years to be found. It can wait a bit longer to be thoroughly read.”
“Here’s how it was, folks. There were Catholics running from Ireland.
Huguenots running from France. Baptists running from Maine. And Jews running from a whole world that would not leave them alone. So the Catholics and the Huguenots and the Baptists and the Jews all raised their synagogues and their steeples”—he
“to punctuate a s...
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“Dan likes to point out there was some irony in the name Holy City from the beginning. Charleston had a reputation as a place of tolerance. And a
fair shake of hedonism.”
“Figured. I don’t need to tell you, Kate, it was a major port for entering slaves. The workhouse. Brothels. Steeples. All here together. Holy City. God help her.”
Whatever troubles we’d had, whatever ugly past the South had, it let go its hold, like the future had flung open its doors.”
“Ours,” she breathed.
“Black,” she said over and over again. “Thank you, Jesus. His hands are black.”
He did not understand its people’s refusing to return violence for violence.
That shooter did not calculate on a love and a strength that could live on after gallows and floggings and flames and a barrage of hollow-tip bullets. He did not understand.
the front page of the Post and Courier propped there. Its headline read, Hate Won’t Win
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
—Jackie Robinson
Rose arched one eyebrow. “The truly great thing about aging is how much credit one gets simply for showing up and not drooling onto one’s chin.”
“The most important votes, dear, that one ever places—” “Are with one’s feet,”
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . . Every day. Every day. Every day.”
There’s a beauty, and there’s a strength, you know, that grows only in a long walk together in the same direction.”
Black, Dinah had cried. Thank you, Jesus. His hands are black.
“Fair winds and following seas!” he said to them as he strode up the gangplank.
“Your momma had a soft heart. Sometimes the people with the softest ones can’t quit beating themselves for any hurt they’ve caused somebody else. Keep things churned up like that, there’s no place forgiveness can take a deep root.”
How she’d never quit hoping she could create some sort of unbroken thread for her son from his present—through her, broken link that she was—back two hundred years.
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.
“That it was okay. That love never let go.”
“I’m glad we get to be family, Katie-Kate.”
“Someone,” he said, “should have told that young man . . . he wanted to start a race war. But he came to the wrong place.”
“If we can find that grace,” he told the crowd, “anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.” Chapter 49
the Vesey revolt’s architectural contribution to the city.
In this single summer, Charleston had become a city forever stripped of what it thought it had been.
“This is so very Charleston.” “What’s that?” “A time for every season, you know—a time to mourn and a time to dance. Only here in the
Low Country, we sometimes do both at the same time.”
the infernal beauty of this place steeped through with pain.
“Lesson number one from my grandmother’s azaleas. A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears.”
“To the past,” said a deep voice beside Scudder. Julian Ammons had raised his glass, his pipe curled in one finger. “And what we learn from it. But also to the future. To hope.”
“To a forgiveness that saved a city.”
“And astounded th...
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“Lots,” he whispered.
I have family here.”
“And if you look heah, y’all will notice the buhd’s very holes give it its remahkable strength
“My Lord. It really did. Thought I’d see the Atlantic run dry before I’d see that flag coming down. One more time.”
