Ciji Ware (72 page)

“Where are we going?” she demanded when they were heading north of town in Sim’s Range Rover.

“You’ll see. Just be patient,” he shushed her as they pulled up in front of the Natchez Cemetery. When they had exited the car. Sim seized her gently by the wrist and pulled her along the pathway until they reached the convergence of the Whitaker, Gibbs, and Hopkins family plots.

“For a minute, there, I was afraid Bailey was going to make another announcement and blow my surprise. Now, in order to make this really, truly official…” Sim declared, reaching into his pocket while bending down on one knee, “and in front of each and every one of our ancestors, I, Simon Chandler Hopkins, ask you, Daphne Whitaker Duvallon, to be my lawfully wedded wife at some date soon to be determined.” He slipped an emerald-cut diamond up to the first knuckle of Daphne’s left ring finger. “My mother told me the ring is Victorian… from Dad’s side of the family. Who knows? Maybe it belonged to Rachel Hopkins. What do you say?”

Daphne gazed down at Sim, smiling and shaking her head with happiness while she blinked back the moisture rimming her eyes.

“Of
course
I will,” she finally managed to reply as Sim slipped the ring onto its permanent place. Staring at the magnificent stone, she helped Sim to his feet and then wrapped her arms around his waist, tucking the top of her head under his chin. “Was there ever any doubt?”

“In a word, yes,” Sim replied, dryly. “But let’s don’t go there.”

Daphne leaned back in his arms and gazed at the headstones encircling them.

“Natchez it is, then? Home base? Are you
sure
?” she asked dubiously.

“October first through Jazz Fest in May, okay? We’ll put our feathered friends in Leila’s care when it gets so hot you could toast birdseed around here.”

“Deal!” she said happily. “And nice, cool Fog City in June, July, August, and September?”

“Great scenery… good food… and temperatures in the sixties,” he declared eagerly. “Our summer base camp for photographic safaris, agreed?”

“Yep. And fabulous music out west, right shutterbug?”

“The Aphrodites will be a huge hit there,” he assured her. “All the great New Orleans acts cycle out our way during the summer months.”

“It’s so amazing,” she murmured, scanning the cemetery. “It’s all here, isn’t it?”

“The proof that neither of us is crazy?” he teased with a nod to Susannah Whitaker’s headstone.

“That, I suppose,” she agreed quietly. “But much, much more. It’s right
here
!” she emphasized, patting the top of her namesake’s grave marker. “All the endings and beginnings—including us.”

“Amen,” Sim said, kissing her on the nose. “Plus, perhaps a few new branches on our family tree?”

“Amen,” echoed his bride-to-be. “Amen—at least twice.”

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

At the outset of writing a book, every novelist could use a band of guardian angels. With regard to
A
Light
on
the
Veranda
, mine arrived in flocks over nearly fifteen years.

I owe the re-introduction of this novel to a new readership to my ace agent, Celeste Fine of Folio Literary Management, and to the wonderful Deb Werksman, acquiring editor and head of Sourcebooks Landmark—my publisher’s division of historical fiction. There is no finer or wiser or more courteous editor in our business, and I will be forever grateful to have landed on her desk and, through her good offices, for the opportunity to reissue five of my novels, along with a new work,
A
Race
to
Splendor.
In fact, the entire team at Sourcebooks has my admiration and appreciation for all they have done behind the scenes for the six books of mine they have published since 2010.

The publishing history of
A
Light
on
the
Veranda
began in April of 1998, when the dogwood and roses were in full bloom. My close friend and fellow novelist, Michael Llewellyn, then based in New Orleans, urged me to consider the Town That Time Forgot as the perfect setting for the stand-alone sequel to
Midnight
on
Julia
Street
—an earlier novel, also reissued by Sourcebooks, that takes place in the Big Easy.

“If Daphne Duvallon ever dares to show her face again down South,” Archangel Michael advised, “send her to Natchez!”

He promptly arranged for the first of numerous “location scouting” trips that took me to many of the sites described in
A
Light
on
the
Veranda.
Once in Natchez, Michael opened doors to Mississippi landmarks like Monmouth Plantation, Governor Holmes House, Cover-to-Cover Bookshop, and restaurants as wildly various as the Pig Out Inn (“Swine Dining at its Finest”), Pearl Street Pasta, Mammy’s Cupboard, Fat Mama’s Tamales (“Eat In or Haul-It-Home”), Club South of the Border, John Martin’s, the Magnolia Grill, the Under-the-Hill Saloon, and the West Bank Eatery (“Fantastic Cookin’ & Big River Lookin’”).

Bookseller Mary Lou England also served as a personal tour guide through this landscape
and
as an eleventh-hour fact-checker for details a non-Natchezian might miss—although any errors in later drafts are my responsibility. Included among her gifts to me were her first-person descriptions of a tornado, a night on the
Lady
Luck
, and a day spent at the ruins of Windsor picnicking amid the ghostly Corinthian columns of the mansion that burned in 1890. Between them, Michael and Mary Lou introduced me to scores of local experts who were equally generous with their time and knowledge.

Among these, Maggie Burkley invited me to experience “life on the edge” from her veranda—the prototype for “Bluff House”—perched on a cement-blanketed bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The late Bob Pully, owner of The Governor Homes House B&B, and his staff, Thelma Matthews and Lucille Dobbins; Jeanette Feltus of Linden (where overnight guests are also welcome); Ron and Lani Riches, owners of the Monmouth Plantation Hotel (dubbed “One of the ten most romantic small hotels in America” by
Glamour
and
USA
Today
); and Jerry and Betty Jo Krouse, owners of the spectacular private house, Cottage Gardens, all opened their beautiful homes to me as if I were a long-lost relative.

Also, many thanks to the Natchez Pilgrimage Tours and the selfless tour guides at Rosalie, Longwood, Dunleith, and Stanton Hall—the last mentioned a treasure trove of exquisite antique silver for sale and the best fried chicken I ever tasted. Much appreciation also goes to Lynette Tanner, who provided a private tour of Frogmore Plantation, a wonderfully preserved 1,800-acre working cotton-growing operation—open to the public—with its gins, former slave quarters, and eighteen dependencies that offer a glimpse of life when cotton was king.

At dinners hosted by the Riches and other serendipitous encounters, I met local historians Alma Carpenter, Sim Callon, Mimi Miller, Carolyn Vance Smith—along with the Armstrong Library staff and especially Donna Janky, Karen Wilkinson, and Suzanne Ellis—who were excellent sources of past and present Natchez lore. Dr. Tom Gandy, a physician and photo archivist of nineteenth-century Natchez, urged me to make use of the wonderful historic photographs on display at First Presbyterian Church. Activities director Chip Saporiti welcomed me aboard the
American
Queen
, and Riverlorian Clara Christensen provided invaluable background for life on the Mississippi—past and present. The Natchez Opera Festival was truly inspiring.

Nan McGehee, the floral designer at Monmouth, served as my tutor for local flora and the magical world of the Natchez Trace Parkway. En route, she also kindly invited me to visit her planter-style house under construction. On several afternoons I enjoyed cups of tea at the Eola Hotel in historic downtown Natchez and experienced heavenly pampering at Anruss Salon, a beauty emporium in town “where all things are known…”

In the spheres of classical and jazz music, Juilliard alums Cipa Dichter and Sylvia Johns Ritchie, along with chamber orchestra maven Louis DeVries, music teacher Doris Burt, and harpist Rachel Van Voorhees introduced me to the rigorous worlds of student and professional musicians. The incomparable jazz harpist Deborah Henson-Conant traded her CDs for copies of my novels and allowed me to interview her across a continent for hours at a time. Singers Etta James, Diana Krall, and Paula West have my profound admiration, as does songwriter David Frishberg, whose “Peel Me a Grape” knocks me out each time I hear it sung.

Undying thanks also go to Dr. Clifford Tillman and his wife Sarah, who shared with me their love and knowledge of birds along the Mississippi flyway and their concerns regarding the health of citizens in the region. Special appreciation to my cousin Alison Thayer Harris, an R.N. in the pediatric oncology field, and currently co-owner of Peas and Harmony Organic Food Gardens in Folsom, California. She was the first to alert me to GBM, a deadly brain tumor that, in fact, has been linked in some studies to contaminated groundwater in a swath that runs from Texas, north along the Mississippi River Valley. I am grateful, too, for the nonfiction work
A
Civil
Action
by Jonathan Harr for sounding the alarm regarding water contamination in America.

Among the finest photographers of birds is Tupper Ansel Blake. His magnificent pictures can be seen in
Tracks
in
the
Sky, Wild California
, and
Two
Eagles.
These large-format books poignantly alert us to the dire effects of “civilization” on the natural world of plants, animals—and especially birds. Tupper and his wife Madeleine Graham Blake (a wonderful photographer in her own right) devoted a precious day in Mendocino, north of San Francisco, where they explained the intricacies of telephoto lenses, and the peculiar habits of the world’s fastest animal, the peregrine falcon.

The books, manuscripts, letters, and contemporary newspapers I consulted are too numerous to list here, but my research included:
Classic
Natchez
by Randolph Delehanty and Van Jones Martin (Martin-St.Martin);
Natchez: An Illustrated History
by David G. Sansing, Sim C. Callon, and Carolyn Vance Smith (Plantation Publishing Company);
Antebellum
Natchez
by D. Clayton James (Louisiana State University Press);
Lost
Mansions
of
Mississippi
by Mary Carol Miller (University of Mississippi Press);
The
House
of
Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family
by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Oxford University Press);
Daily
Life
on
a
Southern
Plantation
by Paul Erickson (Lodestar);
Sweet
Revenge
by Regina Barreca (Berkley Books);
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
by Raymond B. Flannery Jr., PhD (Crossroad Publishing Co.);
Treatment
of
the
Borderline
Adolescent: A Developmental Approach
by James F. Masterson (Wiley-Interscience);
Concise
Birdfeeder
Handbook
by Robert Burton (National Audubon Society);
A
Natural
History
of
the
Senses
by Diane Ackerman (Vintage Books);
Molecules
of
Emotion
by Candace B. Pert, PhD (Scribner);
Toxic
Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
by Dr. Susan Forward (Bantam Books);
A
Harp
Full
of
Stars: The Journey of a Music Healer
by Joel Andrews;
Healing
Music: Four Pioneers Explore The Healing Power of Music
(Acoustic Research CD Series).