Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (26 page)

“I tell you what, it was the fault of that family from … where was they from?”

“Then they should’ve had better sense than to set down here, seeing how they didn’t belong—a monkey could tell that by looking.”

“They shoulda knowed better than be playing with fire. Pack of fools, what they were.”

But I could tell them it wasn’t like that, wasn’t Bo’s fault or mine or his daddy’s or Bobby’s—not even Mort’s: It was the fault of the Blue Hole, and how it made us forget how things were.

Em still goes back there sometimes when he visits from the West Coast. He says the Hole is most always empty, and the rope swing rotted through. He says the rose still grows where we buried Bo’s ashes, and it still blooms every summer, clear through the hottest of months—like it thrives on the heat somehow, or like it’s found some kind of home deep in the woods by a pool of nearly-blue water.

_________

Roses grow too in the Public Garden in Boston, perhaps one reason I come here so often. Maybe I’m drawn here by the way the willows tickle the pond and swan boats come swimming by, and though I could do with a few azaleas and magnolias, I’m real fond of its bridges and fountains and roses, its children digging in dirt, just like I loved to do with my brother. My brother and Jimbo.

I was there this morning. Between meetings at the State House, where I work. I stopped at the Starbucks on Charles for the espresso I take into the Garden for an occasional break from my black pumps. I don’t ordinarily pay much mind to the folks who pass by: All those baby strollers and diaper bags only make me feel ancient, make me wonder if maybe I forgot to ask for Door Number Three on the way to success. So I take my work with me when I go, and rarely look up except to admire the landscaping, especially the roses, and now and then to pet someone’s golden retriever—they’re everywhere here.

But this morning two people stopped just in front of me and caught my attention. They were both dressed in business getup, had to be from some convention down Boylston at the Hynes Center. The woman was nodding at whatever the man was saying, but she was gazing away, absently—like women do when they’re only tolerating a man. I know the look pretty well.

I was admiring the black—nearly blue—of the woman’s thick hair when she turned. Her skin was the color of homemade hot cocoa, and even though she was small in the frame, she held her head high and back stiff, like a queen or a saint or a general—like Joan of Arc maybe. And her deep eyes sent me falling into my past, way back to where the good caught on fire, and the bad started clouding in thick and spinning on up to today.

I don’t swear that it was who I thought it might be. I sat for a long while like a missing person’s ad artist and tried to sketch in my mind the lines and hollows and swells that age likes to add. Still I wouldn’t swear. People change in twenty-five years.

But here’s what I did, sitting there by the Boston Public Garden pond, truly blue, a thousand miles north of the Blue Hole, which wasn’t: I scrawled a note.

I was late for a meeting already. Because of the face and the two dreams crashing head on, or maybe just because I was imagining things, I’d spilled espresso all down my suit, and me with a power-point presentation at ten. So I didn’t stop to talk—and I know better than to speak to strangers in Boston.

So I just handed the woman with the face and the skin and the eyes and the black-licorice hair a note, and then left. It said only this:

Remember the Blue Hole
.

It wasn’t a question, or a battle cry either. Just words offered out for the taking.

And I signed it:

Shelby Lenoir

Then I crossed that out and wrote
Turtle
. Because one summer when I was too hot to think straight, she made me her friend.

And at the last minute, I added just this one more thing:

I’m sorry.
So sorry
.

Maybe the words, those extra four little ones, couldn’t hold up under the weight of what I wanted to say, didn’t nearly explain about the nights I still saw in my sleep, me standing in the door of the Moulavi house, and not moving. Watching the sky and the lawn and the world turn to fire. And not moving. Watching the white that billowed and whipped through the night, through the black and the red. And me never moving, not until fire shot up into the dark and the roof—and the world—fell in on our heads.

I’m sorry
could never tent over all that, but there it was, at least said.
For things done and left undone
, Emerson would say now—now that he talks liturgy like it was regular English.
Lord have mercy
.

The slip of paper had my office number on the letterhead, but I’ve been in meetings all day. And somehow, maybe, I’m nervous to check.

Anyway, what are the chances?

Maybe—most likely—I handed the note to a stranger, and she figures she got assaulted this morning by a fool in a nice suit. With coffee stains down the front. And black pumps. And maybe I am one—a fool.

Only a fool would think—and I know this—that maybe the phone might ring sometime today and the voice at the end would say—and use contractions to say it, “It’s all right, Turtle. Turtle, it’s okay.”

_________

Maybe, back at the Hole, we were all fools—our whole mangy pack that caught one summer on fire and watched our world fall out from under our feet. Fools, dangerous fools.

And maybe Jimbo was right all along: “
There’s times
,” he once said, “
a fool’s a fine thing, an almighty fine thing to be
.”

… a little more …

When a delightful concert comes to an end,

the orchestra might offer an encore.

When a fine meal comes to an end,

it’s always nice to savor a bit of dessert.

When a great story comes to an end,

we think you may want to linger.

And so, we offer ...

AfterWords—
just a little something more after you

have finished a David C. Cook novel.

We invite you to stay awhile in the story.

Thanks for reading!

Turn the page for ...

• Reader’s Guide

• A Conversaion with Joy Jordan-Lake

• Resources

Reader’s Guide

1. Discuss the scene in which Turtle urges Emerson to stop and pick up the new girl. Turtle quickly feels a hint of regret over her decision, though she couldn’t have predicted what it would eventually lead to. Why do you think she feels that twinge of regret so immediately? Can you recall any moments in your life which felt equally pivotal, and how did you react? What was the outcome?

2. Joy Jordan-Lake created a diverse and most memorable cast of characters. Who do you relate to most, and why?

3. Farsanna says, “In America, it is everywhere the land of opportunity, my father says … ‘It is the ... end ... of the rainbow.’” Farsanna’s journey in this novel reminds her and the Pack again and again about this rainbow. Discuss how this statement could take on different meanings for each character, and discuss whether you believe there was any rainbow to be found on Pisgah Ridge.

4. How did you react to the scene in Reverend Riggs’ church? What do you think is the appropriate reaction for faith-based communities in the face of similar situations, which may have nothing to do with race or ethnicity at all, but instead with differences of all kinds?

5. Mort Beckwith and Bobby Welpler are tragic characters in this story. What are the differences between them? In what ways do you relate to either of them?

6. How did you respond to the way the novel ended? Was what happened to Jimbo a surprise? And, how do you interpret the town’s reaction to his death or to the Moulavis’ departure from Pisgah Ridge?

7. Various characters in this novel have very different approaches to faith in God, from Shelby’s admitting, in response to seeing Mr. Moulavi at prayer, that “Religious practices of the truly faithful have always made me nervous—maybe because I’ve lived my life outside the glass with my nose pressed against it” to Jimbo’s dogged insistence on “scraps of the holy hoped for.” What accounts for the difference in the various characters’ approaches to faith or skepticism?

8. Do you believe any justice was served in
Blue Hole Back Home?
And was there any redemption to be found? How, and where?

9. Have you ever encountered discrimination the way the Mangy Pack did in
Blue Hole Back Home?
Did this novel stir up those memories for you, whether in a new—or old but still—powerful way? If you’re comfortable, tell your story.

10. Do you believe this kind of racially based hatred still exists today in America? If so, why? How do you think this story would be different if it occurred today?

A Conversation with Joy Jordan-Lake

Blue Hole Back Home
is inspired by a true story. How does this novel represent your own story, and what ultimately motivated you to write about it years later?

Honestly, I’ve felt haunted by this story.

All the characters in
Blue Hole Back Hom
e are purely fictional, as is the town of Pisgah Ridge, North Carolina, but the story has its roots in several incidents during my own teen years. One of these incidents involved a family from Sri Lanka who moved to our all-white town in the mountains of East Tennessee. I grew up on Signal Mountain, a small town on top of Walden’s Ridge just outside Chattanooga. The Sri Lankan family’s daughter was about my age, a year behind me in our high school down in the valley, and we became friends. She was beautiful, small-statured and had the thickest, black hair and a smile that knocked you clear off your feet.

I remember her explaining to me that her family had moved to the U.S. because her father was convinced that America was “the end of the rainbow.” She just beamed when she said it, so full of trust and excitement. And I recall even then being uneasy. They were the only dark-skinned family living on our mountain, and my friend seemed happily oblivious to the fact that perhaps not everyone thought it was just peachy she and her family had moved to our town. She began attending my church—and in fact, the church still has some old photographs someone snapped of a group of us teenagers together. So far as I know, she was accepted there, at least, without question. Her family had come from a Muslim background in Sri Lanka, but they weren’t practicing Muslims, and I’m guessing her father allowed her to become involved with a Christian church because it seemed the American, and certainly the Southern, thing to do in order to fit in.

Then one night my father announced he’d been notified that the Klan was burning a cross on the family’s front lawn, and he was rushing there to be with my friend and her family. He and I have different memories of what happened next: whether I went with him that night or desperately wanted to and wasn’t allowed. I don’t suppose it matters at this point, nearly thirty years later, which one of us is right. At any rate, here’s what I recall of what actually happened: the Klan had, in addition to burning the cross on the lawn, also shattered the plate-glass window in front of the house, and burned the family’s car—and generally destroyed, of course, any sense of welcome or safety. In the midst of that night’s terror, my friend’s father turned to my dad and asked, “Which way is Mecca? Please, can you point me toward Mecca?” My father pointed him toward the east, and then knelt beside him to pray.

Immediately after the cross burning, the family decided to move to Washington, D.C., where my own family had moved from ten years before. And when I stood there saying good-bye to my friend, she looked me in the eye and, with tears streaming down her cheeks, demanded, “We thought America was the end of the rainbow—we believed it. Explain this to me.”

And you know, I’d like to tell you that I made an inspiring little speech that revived her faith in God and in the United States of America—with freedom and justice for all—and that I exchanged addresses with my friend and that we’ve been close to this day, emailing and text messaging regularly. The truth is, I have no idea what I said in that moment as we stood there as frightened teenagers. I just remember being so rocked by the whole thing, so embarrassed, so inadequate to say anything even remotely helpful. I never saw or heard from her again.

So maybe that’s why I initially wrote a short story about it that was included in my first book,
Grit and Grace.
The book editor for the Chattanooga newspaper suggested in her review of
Grit and Grace
that I should consider making a novel of that story, “Blue Hole.” And I thought, “Yeah, she’s right. I’d like to do that. I’d like to have another chance to say, through fiction, what I wish I’d actually said to my friend back then.” So even though it took me years to get around to writing the novel, maybe I’ve been trying to get it right all along, trying to make the story turn out differently, with more closure, more healing, more hope.

Interestingly, though, even in writing what I’d intended as a more hopeful version of the story than the reality, things in the fictionalized world still refused to tie themselves neatly into a bow of perfectly resolved reconciliation. Maybe life is just more open-ended and complex than that.

One of my editors with this book, Nicci, who was fabulous to work with, found it disturbing, I think, that justice isn’t really served at the end of the novel—nobody really gets nailed for Jimbo’s death—and she leaned on me a little, appropriately so, to make things happen more justly. I took her input seriously, and just couldn’t do it. Maybe something inside me kind of rebelled—maybe, not consciously, but maybe I couldn’t because historically so many African-American deaths resulting from race crimes went so utterly unpunished.

Any idea what happened to the Sri Lankan girl of your actual experience?

Over the years, I’ve tried to find her a number of times, but so far haven’t a clue. I changed her name for this book to protect her and her family, and also because the fictional Farsanna figure is only inspired by my friend, not a replica. Still, it’s occurred to me to dream: wouldn’t it be incredible if somehow, someone who knows her now and knows something of her early days having settled in the mountains of East Tennessee…. What if this someone stumbled across
Blue Hole Back Home
and gave it to her—and we had a chance to reconnect. The possibilities are more than a little remote, I realize, but wouldn’t that make quite an afterword for a later edition…. An afterword, perhaps, more valuable than the story itself.

Your novel involves the Ku Klux Klan and racism in America in general, and evidence that it still exists today. What specific bits of history are particularly relevant to
Blue Hole Back Home?
How did that history drive your characters and storyline? What did your personal experiences teach you about such discrimination?

In addition to the cross-burning, other elements in the novel that were inspired by actual events, and that occurred during this same time period, the late 1970s and 1980, include the Ku Klux Klan roadblock and the downtown shooting spree that injured several African-American women. During the eight or so years that I lived as a young adult in Boston, if I ever ventured to tell my Northern friends any of these stories, they looked at me like I must be about a hundred and twelve years old. They were convinced that the South remained an illiterate, racist backwater, but it still struck them as utterly impossible that someone my age (I was born on the last day of 1963) could have seen an actual Klansman anywhere outside a history book, or known anyone whose yard had been the site of a burning cross.

The novel’s scene with the KKK road block was inspired by one my family ran into driving back from swimming on the back side of the mountain. My father was driving. To that point, I’d never seen the Klan in person before, and I recall when we saw these figures up ahead all dressed in what looked for all the world like bed sheets and pillowcases, I thought it was a joke—until we got closer. And they were holding fast food chicken buckets. An utterly ridiculous image, you’d think. But there was nothing amusing about these guys. They were collecting money in the buckets, and they poked shotguns in the driver’s-side window to encourage contributions. My father declined to contribute.

At the time, it seemed only natural that he would calmly refuse—exactly what I expected, and I don’t recall being as terrified as I probably ought to have been. But as a parent now myself, I realize how frightened he must’ve been, not so much for his own safety as for the safety of his family there in the car. He was declining to contribute to guys who’d just shoved a shotgun muzzle into a car with his family in it. That had to have quickened the heartbeat a little.

And you mentioned the shooting spree was also inspired by actual events?

Right. The novel’s shooting spree down in the valley was inspired by an incident on April 19, 1980—again, while I was in high school. In response to some Klan members having met with leaders of the NAACP, three local Klan renegades who viewed this as evidence of the KKK’s becoming too soft, drove through an African-American section of downtown Chattanooga with one of the three guys shooting randomly at the sides of the street. One of these guys, I’m told, graduated from my high school, though several years before I did. I’m happy to say we’ve never met.

Four African-American women were shot, though not killed that night, and a fifth was injured by flying glass from the blasts. Incredibly, two of the three men were acquitted, and the third, the one firing the gun, spent only nine months in prison. When the verdict from the all-white jury came down, the city’s African-American population erupted, quite understandably. Again, we were well past what could be considered even the broadest definition of the Civil Rights era, and yet here were these atrocities going essentially unpunished. I suppose it made an early cynic of me about racial hatred ever being entirely eradicated from any part of our country—and at the same time, made me someone who is doggedly, even unreasonably hopeful about the potential for individuals and towns and whole regions of the country to admit screw ups and tragedies and brutalities, and genuinely change.

What about one of the chief villains of the novel, Mort Beckwith? Any basis for him in real life?

Actually, yes. His first name is just a play on the French word for death,
morte
. But the last is a point toward Byron De La Beckwith, the assassin in 1963 of African-American Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers whom De La Beckwith shot in front of his home and then watched crawl, bleeding, dying, to his wife and children. De La Beckwith was set free in 1964 by two all-white juries in Mississippi who failed to reach a unanimous verdict. All this I knew, vaguely, from history courses. But in the 1990s when
Ghosts of Mississippi
came out in theaters, I was living in Boston and sitting by my husband watching the movie. In one pivotal scene, a central character insists that De La Beckwith has gone unpunished all these years, living free and easy up in his home on … and then the character’s voice rises to what I recall as a shout—
Signal Mountain, Tennessee
. Or maybe it only sounded like a shout because of its exploding inside my head.

So the man whom everyone knew was Evers’ assassin had been living on our mountain all those years and none of us knew it? And what was it about my beloved hometown that made it a place where he thought—or knew—he’d be safe, infamous as he was? I called every childhood friend I was still in touch with. Like me, this movie was the first any of them had heard of the fact. So if none of us knew as children or teens growing up there, and presumably none of our parents knew, who exactly
did
know? De La Beckwith apparently did begin to talk, even brag, about the murder. Jerry Mitchell, an intrepid reporter for Jackson’s C
larion-Ledger,
worked with Evers’ widow to re-open the case in 1989, and finally in 1994, to send De La Beckwith to jail, where he died of heart failure. But even now, if you look up my hometown on Wikipedia, it will tell you, essentially, that this is a remarkably beautiful place with a remarkably high average income level, and that it is the residence of Byron De La Beckwith. It’s so sad.

But this wasn’t ancient history—these were my growing up years. And I’m not entirely ancient yet, last time I checked. This wasn’t just any old racist, decrepit Southern town straight out of Faulkner’s fiction; it was our own peaceful, neighborly, dogwood-covered hometown. How could it be that I learned of this particular ugly secret of my hometown thanks to Hollywood speaking through a cinema in New England? Maybe that was when the incidents from my teen years, the cross burning and road block and shooting spree, began to strike me as more than a string of unrelated events.

How did the story behind
Blue Hole
effect your own journey of faith?

My teen and adult years have been a spiritual journey with plenty of ugly stumbles, but a journey, at least, of seeking God, of being, on my best days, knocked-over-grateful for grace.