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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

AFTERWORD

READERS GUIDE TO CHILD OF THE SOUTH by Joanna Catherine Scott

Praise for The Road from Chapel Hill

“A rich and rewarding journey into the Civil War era, full of historical detail, surprising characters, and all the complexity of the time.”—Thomas Dyja, author of Play for a Kingdom

“Joanna Catherine Scott demonstrates great ambition in her new novel, The Road from Chapel Hill. Here she tackles the dual subjects any writer on the American South must eventually face: the region’s history of race relations and the legacy of the Civil War. Each is tangled with the other in a web of pain, misunderstanding, heartache, loss, and occasionally, redemptive love. And so they are in Scott’s novel . . . She is to be commended for her adept skill with language (especially in her creation of mood), for her ability to enter fully into another historic era and into the minds of three dissimilar characters facing heartrending circumstances.”

—The Raleigh News & Observer

“A story at times disturbing, at times uplifting, The Road from Chapel Hill is at once heart-wrenching and heartwarming. But most of all, it is a story of humanity at its very worst and very best . . . Scott uses three characters to tell a fascinating tale of love, war, valor, wickedness, and the cost we must all pay for what we believe in and hold most dear.” —The (Roxboro, NC) Courier-Times

“Joanna Catherine Scott was born in England and raised in Australia, and that makes this book all the more remarkable. It is a Civil War story, based entirely in North Carolina, and Scott writes in black dialect and white Tar Heel dialect with ease and skill.”

—The Fayetteville Observer

“In sparse, clean prose, Scott weaves together the tangled threads of three lives. She concentrates less on the history of the Civil War and more on the changes in her characters’ lives as disenfranchised people in a world ruled by social class and race. Scott asks readers to think and question not only the world of her novel but our world as well.”—Romantic Times (4 stars)

“On the dedication page of The Road From Chapel Hill are the words ‘For Tom.’ With those two words, Joanna Catherine Scott gave life to a slave whose story is lost to history.”

—The (Southern Pines, NC) Pilot

“A unique perspective [on] those in the South who did not support the Confederacy . . . All the details are historically accurate.”

—The (Durham, NC) Herald-Sun

“A riotous panorama of a society in chaos.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Scott is a master storyteller who writes like the poet she is.”

—Pat Riviere-Seel, former president, North Carolina Poetry Society

“Scott’s writing is gripping and taut, her eye for historical detail sharp, and her characters individual and memorable. Her vivid language and naturally rendered dialogue is as skillfully employed as it is sensitive to race and class. But it is her gorgeous descriptions of North Carolina’s landscape that make this novel not just a fictional account of the Civil War, but a living, intricately detailed portrait of a vanished time and place. When Scott writes about the smell of the forest during a rainstorm, the slip of mud underfoot, or the call of an owl, one feels transported. This is also true of her writing when she describes less pleasant things, such as the stench of hospital rooms or the disease, degradation, and human mess of a Confederate prison. These incredible details, along with Scott’s appreciation for history and her obvious love for the time period, make The Road from Chapel Hill truly soar.”

—The Pedestal Magazine

“When you first read The Road from Chapel Hill, you might think of Cold Mountain—a novel sprawled over the state of North Carolina with a backdrop of the Civil War, a genteel young woman reduced to poverty, a tale of hardship and deprivation and finally triumph—but Joanna Catherine Scott’s novel is different in many ways, not the least of which is that one of her primary characters is an escaping slave. A narrative that captures the Civil War era admirably and brings a variety of characters alive.”

—Fred C. Hobson, coeditor of The Literature of the American South and Lineberger Professor of the Humanities, University of North Carolina

“A truly remarkable novel, The Road from Chapel Hill reveals the human costs and trials of war in ways nonfiction simply cannot. This masterful weaving of stories of heroism and courage amidst the hardships and cruelties of the bitterly divided Southern home front deepens and enriches our understanding of the two great tragedies of American history—human slavery, and the Civil War needed to end it. Joanna Catherine Scott, drawing on broad and careful historical research, has created memorable characters who exemplify the ultimate triumph of love, hope, and compassion. This is a book that will be read—then read again—with appreciation and admiration.”—Robert Anthony, curator, North Carolina

Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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CHILD OF THE SOUTH

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / April 2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scott, Joanna C., (date)
Child of the South / Joanna Catherine Scott.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: The road from Chapel Hill.

eISBN : 978-1-101-02893-3

1. Women, White—Southern States—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—History—1865—Fiction.
3. African American politicians—North Carolina—Fiction. 4. Freedmen—North Carolina—
Fiction. 5. Southern States—Social conditions—19th century—Fiction. 6. Southern
States—Race relations—Fiction. I. Title
PS3569.C638C49 2009
813’.54—dc22

2008039390

For John Lee Conaway,
another child of the South

I think the white man as good as the Negro—
if he will only behave himself.

—ABRAHAM GALLOWAY

CHAPTER ONE

THE train was rickety and jam-packed with what seemed a thousand Negroes. Men and women of all ages, children of all sizes, laughing, shouting, boisterous with liberation, craned their necks to peer around each other at the passing world. With each lurch forward, the luggage racks shook fearfully, threatening to rain down trunks and boxes, buckets, pans and kettles onto unsuspecting heads. Bundles of clothes and bedding filled the spaces in between the seats like stuffing in a mattress and leaked out into the aisle, babies sleeping in the hollows and small children, fly-eyed and runny-nosed, perched triumphantly on top.

A clot of Rebel soldiers stood at one end of the carriage, half a dozen Yankees further down. The Negroes ignored the Rebels, but the Yankees they treated with jocularity, shouting back and forth across them, laughing when their blank faces showed they could not understand a word. I had never seen so many joyful blacks together in one place. The slaves back at the gold mine had been a miserable, suffering lot, intent on running off at any opportunity. These people reveled in each other like a great big family reunion, the few white civilians on the train bearing their noisy company with impassive resignation, only the flicker of a nostril or the turning of a shoulder hinting at emotions more extreme.

Their joy enchanted me, but at the same time it disquieted. All my life, Negro gatherings had been banned for fear of plots and insurrections. They are free now, I told myself, they can gather if they wish.

In the rush aboard I had not managed to secure a seat, and so clung resolutely to a seat back, half suffocated by the mass of bodies, my small bundle of possessions dangling from my other hand. From the conversations going on around me, I gathered that the Negroes were headed for the city in hopes of finding work that did not involve the dawn-to-dark hard labor of the farm. One spoke of signing for the Union army, another of taking ship north to a brand-new life. I slipped my hand into my pocket, fingering my last few tiny bits of gold. With the price so high it was enough—I hoped it was enough—to support me until I also could find paying work.

The train progressed at a lamentable pace, rattling and creaking and heaving itself along the track like an old mule raised from sleep and inclined at any minute to fall back into it. I became breathless from the closeness, nauseated by the stench of bodies. I had eaten but a bowl of thin potato soup the night before and that morning had taken nothing. I let go of the seat back and began to push my way toward a window where I could lean out into the air, but trapped between the backs of two enormous Negroes, I felt faintness overcome me and the next thing I knew I was being passed hand to hand along the aisle and deposited in a broken-bottomed seat beside a window where the rush of air revived me. A woman with a basket on her knees sat on my other side and she was kind, calling out to the jostling legs and backs, “Get on out of the way, this poor thing is like to passed into eternity.”

Here I found myself knee to knee with another white woman, very pale and thin, who gazed about her as though in bewilderment and did not return my nod of greeting. Next to her was a Negro woman with a washboard jammed between her knees and a baby in her arms, the child fussing and coughing and rolling up its eyes, the mother soothing it and humming, although the child was so feverish and sick that the minute I set my nurse’s eye on it I knew that it was done for.

Time rattled on, the train alternating between a crawling pace and a complete wheezing stop while it seemed to contemplate the wisdom of progressing. The sky darkened, the streaming air grew chill, and a rainstorm clattered overhead. The pale woman set up a wail for somebody to close the window. It was broken, however, and no amount of tugging by an obliging pair of strong black arms could get it closed, and all the other windows in the same forlorn condition. I pulled my cloak across my hair and crossed my arms and hunched my body to keep warm, from time to time scratching at myself—greybacks, perhaps, from my companions on the train. Or bedbugs from the rooming house in Goldsboro where I had spent last night bedded with a large fat woman so afraid of being robbed that she packed her bags and bundles into bed around her, forcing me so close to the edge that I spent the night grateful to be barely more than skin and bone.

Now, dazed with sleeplessness, I fell asleep and dreamed about Mama. She stood above me, brushing out my hair with hard, unsympathetic strokes. And then her voice, “Such curl, it is unnatural,” and the wrenching downward stroke, bringing tears into my eyes. Confused sounds, images of faces that I seemed to know, and I was standing by her grave. It was open, nothing there but bones.

A dreadful shrieking startled me awake—a passing train—and I sat shaking and disoriented, my cloak fallen to my shoulders and one hand raised as though to fend off an attacker.

“Lord, Lord, now the poor child is having nightmares,” said the old Negro woman next to me. Shifting her basket on her knees, she took my hand, and bringing it gently down, nudged against me with a sympathetic shoulder.

“Child, ain’t no one goin’ hurt you now.”

For one disoriented moment I wanted to fling myself facedown onto this kindly woman’s lap and weep, but the basket saved me from myself, squatting there as if to say it owned the space and no intruders were allowed. And so I turned my concentration to the window, watching the damply swimming sky grow blue and bluer until all traces of the storm had vanished back behind.

We rocked through countryside where here and there a farmhouse regarded us with melancholy burned-out eyes, as though in mourning for the naked fields, which at that time of year should have been vigorous with newly sprouting crops. Negroes seemed everywhere about, walking, walking, bundles on their heads and children dragging on behind. The pale woman watched them through the window. She looked across at me. “Wandering,” she hissed, “just wandering. It cannot come to any good.”

I did not respond. I was thinking about Tom. Where was he now? Had he made it all the way to Canada? Perhaps, with the war over, he was heading home with all the rest. Perhaps if I watched closely I would spy him. Perhaps if I had not left Chapel Hill so hastily, I might have . . . No, I had to leave. I had to make this journey. I had to know the truth.

CHAPTER TWO

IT was April eighteen sixty-five, and back in Chapel Hill word was out that General Sherman’s men were handing food out to the poor at Durham railway station. The news spread farm to farm as though a telegram had been sent posthaste to every one of them, and pretty soon the road was thick with bone-shanked men and women, their children at their heels dull-eyed from near starvation, hurrying to see if this were true. Negroes, black skeletons almost, and women thrown into the trade of prostitution by the war jostled amongst them, while along the edges clots of Rebel soldiers trudged.

On a farm just south of town, Clyde Bricket lay on a cot beside the kitchen window, fulminating at the pure bad luck of having had his rotten leg cut off above the knee but three days back. When he first heard about the rations he had figured he would go for them. Ma and Uncle Benjamin could heave him up onto the horse and someone at the other end could stuff the saddlebags. But then Doc Berryman came by and said, “Young man, you try a damn fool thing like that and you will purely bleed to death.”

Uncle Benjamin could not go for rations. He was blind, both eyes blasted from his head by a field gun backfiring, and him intending to be nothing but a chaplain, it weren’t right. The hired nigra could not go. He had run off before the war was even done. And Ma, who had a pair of seeing eyes and two whole legs, said, “If I go gallivantin’ off, who will take care of you?”

Clyde said, “Old Mary will, o’ course,” but Ma said, “I would rather starve than leave my boy when he is like to go to heaven while I am away.”

Clyde said, “Miss Genie were supposed to be my nurse, she promised me. But then she up and left me, I do not understand it. She done shoulda stayed, she shoulda. And she coulda gone for rations.”

It was early in the morning. Ma had been out hunting wild turkey eggs in the woods and come back home with two, which she was getting ready to cook up for Clyde. She pulled her clay pipe from the corner of her mouth and spat into a tin.

“Boy, you quit your whining. It were me as told her to be off, we could not feed her, we did not have enough. I said to her, I am his ma and it is me as how will care for him, and that is that.”

At which Clyde quit whining and moaned instead, “But what about the rations, who will get the rations?”

And Ma said, “Why that boy Tom, o’ course. He has come back. He is down there at the cabin with Old Mary.” She stuck her pipe back in, and with both eggs in one hand, cracked them with a quick flick of the wrist into the pan.

“That Tom? He has come back?”

“Large as life. I come behind Old Mary’s cabin and saw her crying on his neck, and him saying, I did not think to find you here, I thought you woulda run, and her saying, I coulda run, I woulda, but I figured you’d come looking for me here.”

Ma jabbed the frying eggs with a knife so that the yolks spread out and hissed on the hot surface. “And after all these years of bein’ good to her, never done her wrong.” She rattled the pan back and forth, loosening the eggs so they would not stick. “Anyways, her boy is here, he has come back.”

“Then I am done for. I am a dead man.”