Known for its history and beauty, Charleston, South Carolina, is one of my favorite places in the United States. My favorite Charlestonian of all time (besides my wife) is Denmark Vesey, who led a failed slave revolt in 1822. He left my church in Charleston (Second Presbyterian Church) to help found Mother Emmanuel AME Church – the same church that hosted a horrific Bible study in 2015 that ended when a white racist murdered nine people. Yet the race riots that he sought to provoke never happened; instead, the families, the church, and the city responded in love and forgiveness. All this captures Charleston in a nutshell: great history, scarred by human failures yet triumphant in virtue.
This book alternates back and forth between storylines – one modern, one older. In one vein, it tells the tragic story of the 1822 revolt, including the skilled but enslaved blacksmith Tom Russell, and these old-time affairs engage with one family’s modern ones in 2015. Faulkner’s oft-quoted line makes an appearance in this book as a theme – “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This novel dives deeply into issues of race, so deeply that I had to take a two-day break to process before finishing. Jordan-Lake reminds us that our histories, presents, and futures are all “tangled” – that is, intertwined with each other. Such human entanglement is true whether through DNA, historical interactions, or movements of the heart.
In this narrative, Kate is a Harvard PhD student in history who was recently placed on probation. Her mother recently died, and her father, long absent from her life, is also deceased. Kate came to Charleston to understand her mother’s hidden yet haunting past. She becomes entangled in a series of suspenseful dramas that eventually all come together. The uniting of themes almost strains credulity, but they sure make for a good story! Much Charleston history is shared – the “tangled” story of Draytons, Rutledges, Maingaults, and Pinckneys, family names that span the skin-color divide (both because of naming newly freed individuals as well as because of horrific rapes). The history is respectful to the gothic-ness of southern history in that it is truthful about painful issues but also appreciative of the cultural beauty subsequently created. Anyone looking to confirm simple stereotypes about southern racism, ignorance, or bigotry will be disappointed by this tale’s complexity.
Of course, this book spins good yarn that keeps the reader engaged in suspense until the end. There are detailed issues that the author did not write perfectly – for example, the area code of Charleston in the 1990s was 803, not 843 – but most readers will not catch those details because of the intriguing storyline. This tale presents a newer type of Southern Gothic, in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and William Faulkner. It plumbs the depths of the region’s Christian religion to show simultaneously the depths of its historical bondage and the heights of its forgiving hope. In an era when America is discovering how to talk constructively about race in light of fraught history, this book deserves to be on the reading lists for those interested in the conversation.
A Tangled Mercy: A Novel
By Joy Jordan-Lake
Narrated by JD Jackson and Angela Dawe
Copyright (c) 2017
Brilliance Audio
ASIN B075TJZ7L6
Length: 14:44
Genre: Historical Fiction
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