Three months later
Autumn arrived and the carpet-thick air of summer slid away, the leaves performed their magic with the yellow and red beauty of changing seasons. I’d brought out the box of thin sweaters from beneath my bed. The past week had been drenched in rain, but each day I felt the world open up a bit more, my heart with it.
My students that semester were a creative lot, full of questions and ideas. Returning to the classroom felt astonishing in the simple but wonderful way it brought me back to myself: the students challenged and enlivened me, reminded me of the thrill of learning and discovering. With the bulk of the curation completed over the summer, and with Augusta’s detailed account offering a road map, the exhibit was coming together like a puzzle. We had the list of survivors and could—for the most part—make tickets for each passenger. Sadly, and horribly, the enslaved weren’t always listed and when they were, it was with only their first names.
I engaged with the world again, in small bits and pieces—practicing yoga and wandering through the riverfront art festival one afternoon with Sophie. I’d felt like the Everly from before, the one who didn’t gasp at the sound of every car and believe that the world, at any moment, would crack open and swallow her.
“Do you think,” I’d asked Sophie, “that fate has anything to do with anything at all?”
She had stopped in front of a tent of pottery made by a student of hers and removed her sunglasses. Under her wide-brimmed red hat she’d eyed me. “Are you asking me if it is fate that killed Mora? No. A drunk man in a runaway car killed her.”
It had been good—no, great—to talk to a friend again, to unload the story of the past months that had altered my view of not only my history but also my life. I’d only talked of it all with Oliver, Allyn and my mom; Sophie was a friend and one who made me feel like I was emerging into life in a larger way, expanding outward.
“And this shipwreck,” I’d told her, “you know I’m working on it, and I’ve found some of the stories. Sometimes it feels like fate is the truth of how someone was saved with something as simple as a floating piece of wood found at the right time. And sometimes fate appears as sheer cruelty—like how some of the enslaved helped the passengers but weren’t given aid in return. It’s awful.” I told her how much I’d read about all of the survivors, of Priscilla and of Lilly, of stories I’d never imagined.
She’d listened as we walked, until we’d come to the statue of Lilly. She’d set her foot on the concrete edge and looked up at the face of a woman carved in bronze a hundred and eighty years ago, and then at me, her skin almost glowing in the afternoon sunlight, but her eyes sad, shadowed even. “Much of that history is awful, Everly. You know that. I know that. Most don’t want to know it.” She’d stood, right there on the riverfront, as if we watched as enslaved people boarded the Pulaski and the owners flounced about with their suits and dresses and trunks of gold. She took a breath. “Listen, the enslaved people who survived, the ones who were sold and resold and torn from their families, can’t go find their family tree like you and Mora; their ancestry was muddy at best and traumatic at worst. Everything about this sinking is just tragedy built on tragedy.”
“I know,” I’d said, which was all I knew to say. I’d hugged her, not only grateful but also feeling the weight of a past I thought I’d understood but now realized was only dimly seen.
She squeezed my hand. “You and I both know there’s a difference between prejudice and obliviousness but sometimes it can have the same result.”
“I hear you.” I thought of the times I hadn’t given prejudice its due. And the child who’d survived this sinking had wrought such horror.
Was the city past it? Over it? Not any more than I was over the loss of my father or my grandfather or my best friend. That grief was part of who I had become, and yet I was choosing to thrive in the face of it. My city was the same—I would hope they would not ignore the devastation of slavery, or cast it aside, not pretend it never existed or didn’t have its echoes. I had no answers but at least I saw the questions I’d never seen before.
“Tell me what to do,” I’d said to her.
“Give the enslaved humanity in that curation. Show them suffering and surviving; not just a name on a manifest.”
“I am. I will.”
And I had done my best to keep that promise.
As with Sophie, I found my pals had been waiting patiently; grief held no real timeline and they knew this. I’d sustained Oliver’s friendship not out of obligation or fear but because we enjoyed each other. Too much had been taken from me—why would I reject a friend who saw me, and knew me? Whatever more intimate feelings I harbored in the recesses of my heart would stay secret, a buried treasure of my own. When the need to reach over and touch his arm, or slip my hand along the nape of his neck, or rest my head on his shoulder, arrived, I shut it down. I would not risk losing him altogether.
I’d started to gravitate back to my trademark phrase—I wonder what happens next? Now, I knew the answer could hold happiness or grief. My belief in the unbroken world was gone, but oddly that revelation made everything more sacred.
Meanwhile, work on the exhibition was in full swing.
I spent hours piecing together a Longstreet family tree, beginning with Lamar and Melody and moving down. It took some digging, but Maureen had shown me how to navigate the ancestry website and search for gravestones and names. It worked—I followed the hints that followed. There I finally found the direct line to Mora: she was Augusta’s granddaughter generations back and Charles’s niece just as far removed. Shared blood. Shared stories. Shared branches.
That November day, lists of the Pulaski passengers, written in calligraphy on huge charts we’d reproduced on Plexiglas, hung on the wall in the room where Maddox and I sat at a long table. We tried out our ideas on computer graphics, jotted ideas on Post-it notes and made careful changes to handwritten cards. Slowly, room by room, it was coming together. With a thunderstorm walloping outside, we huddled over the passenger tickets that would be distributed to visitors as they passed through the front doors.
“The experience will be immersive,” I explained. “When visitors walk in they’ll receive a ticket with their passenger’s name. They walk up the gangplank and onto a deck, and then they learn about the construction of the ship, the weather that day, the city where the person they’re pretending to be came from, and the events of that night. When they’re finished, they can find out if their ticket belonged to someone who survived or perished. For the Longstreet family, they will receive a story card of what happened to their lives. Some of the enslaved people have a lost history. Something I can’t find, and that’s devastating to me.”
“How so?”
“I asked my friend Sophie, who’s a professor of African American studies, and she told me that while Mora and I can trace our heritage to an ancestral tree, while I can argue about who came over on the Anne and who might or might not have shipwrecked with Irish indentured servants, and who came from England and when, while I trace my finger over the branches and the links, she can’t do any of that. Her history gets lost, muddied, with a trail of nothing but names given by owners that had nothing to do with their real names. It is as appalling as it is true. The story we’re telling is about more than who survived, it’s also about what survived: slavery and how the young boy, the Noble Boy, magnified and multiplied the pain by continuing it. Charles survived and he amplified the horrors. How do we possibly explain that except by telling the truth of it? There is no way. There are no words I have to understand it; but we can show the truth.”
Maddox shifted papers and gestured at the walls labeled for display. “We’ll show it, Everly. We will. And its impact will be heightened for its truth. I’m really glad the museum chose to open the exhibition on the anniversary of the ship’s original launch in June. We’re already free of the conservation process for the pieces you’ve chosen.”
“Look what we’ve done,” I said with a grin. “Do you always get this involved in your . . . projects? I mean . . .”
Maddox shuffled through the story cards I’d been writing—one by one I’d drafted narratives for each of the Longstreet family members. “No. But this one feels personal in a way I haven’t felt before. This pile,” Maddox said, resting his hand on a thick stack of papers with notes sticking out every few pages. “You read all of this?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.” Maddox sat back in his chair, exhaled.
“But Augusta’s account is my favorite.”
“It’s amazing you found it . . .”
I opened a satchel and pulled out a rough sketch of a crudely drawn family tree. “And look.” I pointed at Mora’s name. “Direct line to Augusta.”
“My God.” He drew his finger up the tree, along the branches to Charles. “And also to him.”
“Yes. Mora is related to both of them—Augusta and Charles. It’s as if Mora is a living example of all of us—a mix of the light and the dark, a shadowed combination. She is the metaphor for all of us. Nothing all virtuous. Nothing all wicked. This mixture that is life, that is human, that is brokenness and wholeness.”
“Yes.” He reached for my hand and took it, squeezed it. “She is us. We are her. All of us.”
“And cut down in the very moments when all of her life spread in front of her like another adventure.”
“Like the rest of the Longstreet family. Like anyone when devastation hits unexpected in the middle of life.” He spread his hands wide. “Look what you’ve done.”
“Obsession and persistence might pay off?” I grinned. “If Augusta took the time to write of her experience—if others took the time to write what survivors told them—I want to share it.”
“Doesn’t writing these cards make you think of how someone might sum up your life? If two hundred years from now someone made a story card of it. What would it say?”
I looked at the man I had once met in the garden outside, when I’d been as closed off and scared as a rabbit. I thought of his kind face when he brought me up from the bottom of the ocean. “I have thought about that. It’s sobering.”
“I don’t know what they would say about me. It would depend on who did the writing, I imagine. Would it be my ex who would malign my name? A student I set off on a successful career path? Or the parents of the student who died at sea? Or you?”
“If I wrote it?” I smiled. “I’d probably make you sound like Neptune, King of the Sea. As if you were born to save my life.”
“Aren’t you giving me too much credit?” His grin spread to the edges of his eyes.
“Most likely, but that’s my prerogative if I’m writing your story card.”
He glanced back at the papers but his face, always easy with emotion, showed his gratitude.
I took a breath before asking, “What would your ex say, Maddox?” My voice went quiet.
He exhaled and set down the story cards. “Here’s the short version. Vivian blamed me for the death of Alison Morgan. I say her name—Alison—in my sleep sometimes. When the investigation was over, and it was proven that her death wasn’t due to my negligence, Viv was sorry. She said so again and again. But her lack of faith at the beginning, the corrosive doubt and blame and fear, ate through the foundation of our marriage. It was . . . destructive condemnation.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. Of course the rejection fed right into my own self-castigation. When it came back that the tank was faulty, the onus still rested on me, heavy as an anchor. It destroyed us.” He paused as if his next words were coming from far off. Then he said, “Everly, it doesn’t have to be that way for you and Oliver.”
“What?”
“I can see the love between you. I can also see the unnecessary guilt that you must let go.”
“That isn’t why I asked about you.”
“Yes, it is.” His voice was stern.
“Maybe a little. But I also asked because I care.”
“I know you do.” He smiled and the conversation faded into comfortable silence.
Finally, I stood and stretched. “I’m meeting Oliver at the house to pack up those ‘borrowed’ boxes.” I mocked quotation marks with my fingers. “We’re taking them to the Georgia Historical Society. And yes, we did finally get permission from the original owners. They were happy to be rid of what the woman I spoke to called ‘the family detritus.’ I’ll stop back here later.”
Maddox waved me off. At the door I turned to watch him for a moment as he continued to read through the cards that had become to me more than just names on a list.
Rain pelted sideways on the windows, overflowing the gutters and cascading down the eaves of my front door. It had been a week of relentless storms, dark skies, trees losing their hold of the soaked earth and trunks toppling to the ground. Flowerbeds drooped and flattened; streets carried leaves and debris in tiny whitecaps; umbrellas blew inside out and heads bowed.
Cozy and dry at home, I opened my door to a knock and Oliver burst in, dripping wet and shaking his head. “Damn, will it ever stop?”
I stepped back, avoiding the spray. “Don’t you own an umbrella?”
“About ten of ’em. I never remember to put one in my backpack and then I buy another and I forget that one, too.”
He shed his coat and hung it from a hook. I grabbed a pink flowered towel from the kitchen and he used it to rub his hair and face. “Okay, let’s get those boxes out of here for you,” he said, glancing into the kitchen where they were packed up and taped shut.
“They’ve probably left enough mold spores to overtake my house. I’m spraying the kitchen from top to bottom with Lysol after the boxes are gone. I can’t believe how many papers I went through before I found what I needed.”
“If you’d found everything right off, the hunt would have been boring. And God knows, you hate boring hunts.”
I tossed him a look as he walked toward the boxes and then looked out the kitchen window to where the courtyard was in danger of flooding. “Think it will let up?” he asked.
“Weather channel says in an hour or two. Let’s wait it out just a bit? I’ll make some tea.”
“Perfect.”
I clicked on the gas under the kettle; the fire leapt up. I slowly chose two tea bags and set them in ceramic mugs I’d bought with Mora at an arts festival. Oliver’s quiet presence was something I’d grown accustomed to, grown happy with.
We sat at the kitchen table and listened to the plunking sound of falling rain. “I love weather like this. Is that weird?” I asked, and took a long sip of tea. “It’s cozy.”
“Maybe because you were born in water?” His laugh was rich. “Ev, remember when we went to the sand bar?”
My insides rose and then faltered in a feeling as thrilling as it was frightening—like the first drop in a roller coaster after reaching the top. “Oliver.”
He blushed—honest to God blushed. “Not that part. I was thinking about how many times you dove to the bottom. You scared the shit out of me. I lost count. I mean, you and the water, my God.”
“The sea and me.” I smiled. “You know, there’s a sea myth—one of my favorites—about Selkies. It’s mostly a Scottish folktale but as a kid I wanted that to be my name after Papa told me that Father had wanted that for me. I told Papa over and over to call me that, but he would only do it when Mom wasn’t around.”
“Tell me.”
“A Selkie is a mythical sea creature who can change from seal to human by slipping off her seal skin. But eventually she must return to the water—the sea always calls her home. There are several versions: in one a man steals her skin so she must stay with him. In another he returns the skin. Either way—she’s a creature of the sea who is always called back no matter what she must leave behind: love, children or land. She is always longing for her true home, to find her seal skin and return to the sea.”
“I wonder if we have one,” he said. “A true home.”
“I think so, yes. Don’t you?”
“I grew up on the opposite coast, so I know what you mean about being near water. But I don’t have the connection with a single piece of land as you do here in Savannah.”
“There are male Selkies, too. They can shed their skin and not know who they are anymore. I know I belong here, but lately I’m feeling I’d like to get away, find a place where I can be me without Savannah, without the memories.” I took a breath and let it go. “Maybe it’s time to know who I am without the seal skin of Savannah. SCAD has offered to let me teach for a semester in their abroad program.”
Startled, he sat back in his chair and ran his hands across his face. “What? Where?”
“LaCoste or Japan. I can choose . . . both have a history track I can teach.”
“France? Japan? Will you go?”
I nodded, lifted my mug to let the steam rise to my face. “Probably France. I think so. Yes.”
“You think leaving will help?”
“It can’t hurt . . .”
We grew quiet and my cell rang. I ignored it. His rang. He ignored it. We laughed and he stood and placed his mug in the sink. The rain had lessened, trickling in the sound of wind chimes down the gutters. His cell rang again, and this time he lifted it from the kitchen table. He looked at it and then at me. “It’s the detective.”
I glanced at my phone. “That’s who called me, too. Answer!” I jumped up and was at his side, grabbing his arm before I knew it.
Oliver answered and then listened, keeping eye contact with me the entire time. It didn’t last long—maybe two minutes. Maybe three. Maybe months.
“Thank you,” Oliver said and dropped the cell on my kitchen counter. He looked at me and said, “They caught him.”
I dropped into Oliver’s arms and he wrapped them around me. His lips were against my ear. “They’ve been watching the gravesite since you saw him there and he came today. Dropped off more flowers in the pouring rain. Daisies. They took him in; he confessed immediately. He broke down . . . It was like he was waiting for them.”
We stood there, Oliver and I, holding each other as the rain pelted the window and our breaths synchronized. Neither of us needed to let go, but neither of us knew what to do next.
Finally, he eased away, only an inch, and kissed my forehead. “The search is over. They found him.”
“Thank God they have him.”
Oliver let me go, and I almost reached for him again, wanting those arms around me. But instead I wiped my tears and straightened.
He pressed his palms against his closed eyes. “You know”—he opened his eyes—“this is because of you. Because you never give up. Because you’re always looking for the connections in life. Because you loved her so . . .” His voice broke, and I felt as if for the first time our shared sadness didn’t add up to more, but an easing, a lessening of a load. “Let’s get those boxes back where they belong.”
The Georgia Historical Society’s back room was as dusty as the attic on Bull Street where we’d found the boxes. As we waited for the librarian, I whispered to Oliver, “They’ll feel right at home here.”
He covered his laugh as Ellen Treadwell entered the room: the sweet librarian with the bird tattoo who’d helped Maddox and me at the very start of our journey. After years of my digging through her archives, she smiled when she saw me. “Hello, Everly!”
Oliver introduced himself and then told her, “These are letter-books and business papers for the Longstreet family. We thought you would want them for your collection.”
Ellen lifted a top. “Where did you get these?”
Oliver looked to me and I shrugged. “In an attic on Bull Street,” I explained. “I contacted the family and they granted permission to donate them to you. Here’s the signed document. They have no interest in any of it. Honestly, they told me to toss the lot, but there’s at least one important document in there.”
Ellen raised her eyebrows.
“A firsthand, detailed account of the Pulaski explosion written twenty years later by a survivor, Augusta Longstreet, who married another survivor, Henry MacMillan.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am. Gold, isn’t it?”
“Pure gold.” Ellen’s face lit up like we’d brought her true buried treasure. She eyed us both with a grin. “Thank you.”
“Do you have anything on the MacMillan family?” I asked. “Anything else of Augusta’s we might be able to see?”
“A MacMillan box was donated last year, but we haven’t curated it yet. Seems to be repeats of what we already have: business papers. I had no idea that was Augusta’s married name or I would have given it to you. If you look around, you’ll see why I haven’t gotten to it yet.”
The room was crammed end to end with boxes and folders, all waiting to be archived. “May I have a look at it?”
“If you want. It doesn’t have anything to do with the wreck.”
“If the papers have to do with Augusta, they have to do with the wreck. Everything . . .” I said.
“Is connected,” Oliver finished for me with a grin.
Ellen disappeared and returned quickly with a small metal box. “This is it. Family artifacts from a house in New York. They donated it to us because he lived here part time and they didn’t know what else to do with it.”
Ellen scurried off to the sound of a bell, and Oliver lifted the lid of the metal box and reached inside. He withdrew a pile of papers and with a quick glance we both knew they were similar to what we’d already found evidence of: a family who kept meticulous business records. “Looks like her husband took over some of Lamar’s business—it’s all shipping and banking. I don’t believe Henry would have had anything to do with cotton plantations.”
I withdrew a thick leather-bound family Bible that lay at the bottom. Its gold-edged pages shimmered in the light. “My mom has one of these; it’s five generations old. The entire family tree is in the front. As far as I can tell, that’s mostly what these Bibles were used for.”
Oliver opened the Bible and sure enough on the front page was a family tree for the Longstreets and another for the larger family Augusta had married into, her four children’s branches that edged to the ends of the papers. But that wasn’t what caught my eye; it was the stationery that poked out from the middle of the Bible. I flipped to where it lay between the pages of the Book of Ruth. Underlined in dark fountain pen was the verse, “For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” I lifted a handwritten paper that was almost thin enough to see through, the script small and tight. I slowly unfolded the fragile vellum. The crease was so old the page almost ripped. The date on top stated August 12th, 1858.
“‘My Dear Augusta,’” I read with a hitch in my voice.
Oliver stood behind me, placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. Our eyes scanned to the bottom.
Together we read out loud.
“‘With all my love, Lilly.’”