Chapter 11 This Blood and Soil
The plate-glass windows of Val’s Beauty Spa on Main Street looked out on Jackson Square. The downtown park was the reason Troy had been named one of the prettiest small towns in the South ten years running. Oaks and magnolias lined walks that all led to a moss-covered marble fountain right smack dab in the center that sprayed cool jets of water into the air eight months out of the year. Every summer, pranksters would dump a bottle of Dawn dish detergent into the water and a magical dome of glistening bubbles would rise up to the heavens. In front of the fountain stood the handsome, mustachioed statue of Augustus Wainwright, the general in the Confederate Army who’d owned Avalon, an enormous plantation on the outskirts of town. Sherman had marched out of his way to burn the mansion, sparing the town of Troy from his wrath. Temporarily bankrupted, Wainwright had risen again, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the United States less than five years after he signed his oath of allegiance. On the far side of Jackson Square stood the county courthouse he’d built—the pride of Troy, if not all of Georgia. A giant brick layer cake of a building, complete with Doric columns, Juliet balconies, and topped with a gleaming golden cupola. In private, Wainwright had called it his personal fuck you to Ulysses S. Grant.
Growing up, Beverly Wainwright Underwood had heard the courthouse story told a thousand different ways. It was meant to make her feel proud of her heritage, her town, and her state. And it had—until she started to learn what it all really meant. But that revelation had taken young Beverly a while to reach. When she was a child, she’d been taught things were simple. The War of Northern Aggression had been a barbaric invasion—an attack on the Southern way of life. Before everything went wrong, all the rich families who’d settled the land had been lifted up by God himself, who’d blessed them with good brains, excellent breeding, and a Puritan work ethic. The Black folks who’d toiled in their homes and on their farms—first for free, then for next to nothing—were every one of them lucky to be there. They were all so happy they danced and sang in the fields. Meanwhile, the poor whites who drank and stole and spread venereal diseases only had themselves to blame for their misfortunes.
These ideas had been hammered into Beverly’s head from the time she was old enough to listen. There hadn’t been anyone around who could set her straight—or was even the slightest bit interested in doing so. In school, she’d learned her ancestors had fought for states’ rights. No one mentioned that the “right” they were so keen to defend was the institution of slavery. The historical markers around town recalled the heroism of Confederate soldiers defending their homeland. She attended parties thrown on the lawns of old plantations where girls dressed in hoop skirts and floppy Georgiana hats that tied in velvet bows under their chins. She’d followed tour guides through magnificent old houses and never noticed the humble shacks out back. She’d listened to the older generations tell stories passed down about the years before the war and come away enchanted by a South that was Camelot, Eden, and Tara all rolled into one.
And even if none of that had made an impression—even if she’d slept through history class and skipped all the parties—the inscription etched beneath the statue of Augustus Wainwright would have been impossible to miss. People believed the man had composed it himself, and every citizen of Troy knew it by heart. They set it to music. They recited it before football games. They had it hammered into the granite that marked their own graves.
Bow Not Before Tyrants
Fight for Your Freedom
Sacrifice All but Honor
And Die with Dignity
This, she’d always been told, is what it meant to be a citizen of Troy. It was a way of life—a dedication to honor—that her ancestors had given everything to defend. What was there to argue with in those four simple lines? Beverly might have gone to her grave none the wiser if her mama hadn’t gotten sick.
When the diagnosis was first made, Beverly took a leave of absence from Vanderbilt. It was first semester of her freshman year, and she assumed she’d be back after Christmas break. By then, however, the cancer had infiltrated her mother’s lymph nodes. Trip told her there was no rush—she could return to school whenever she was ready. But Beverly had known there would be no going back. Her mother needed her in Troy. If she was going to expand her mind, she’d just have to educate herself.
Of course in those days there were no bookstores near Troy. No Amazon to deliver. No streaming documentaries to watch. So Beverly turned to the local library. The librarian back then had been a woman named Jeanette Newman. She never wore a spot of makeup or ironed out her natural curls. These eccentricities, along with a degree from some school in Vermont and the kudzu-eating goats the librarian kept in her backyard, inspired many of the town’s fancier types to refer to her as that hippie.
“Don’t let that hippie try to sell you any reefer,” Beverly’s mother ordered when Beverly mentioned she was walking over to check out some books.
“Oh, I won’t, Mama,” Beverly promised. Correcting her mother was out of the question. It just wasn’t done. “I only take reefer if it’s free.”
“Beverly!”
“Don’t worry, Mama. If I get some, I’ll be sure to share with you.”
Her mother shook her head, but Beverly could tell she was struggling to stifle a laugh. Beverly had always gotten away with saying things no one else would have dared. Everyone knew a girl with dimples and perfect white teeth and a blond ponytail with the ends curled just so could never do any wrong. Beverly sometimes wondered if anyone other than Trip could see the real her.
That was before she got to know Jeanette Newman.
The librarian had three number-two pencils stuck in her hair that morning. Beverly couldn’t tell if they were there on purpose or how long they’d been there.
“Well, I wasn’t expecting to see you today,” the librarian said as Beverly approached the desk. “Aren’t you supposed to be off at school?”
“God had another plan for me,” Beverly told Jeanette. “Looks like I’m gonna need to educate myself.”
Nothing seemed to surprise Jeanette. She’d heard it all over the years. “I’m happy to help. What interests you these days?” she asked.
“Everything,” Beverly told her. “That’s the problem. I don’t even know where to begin.” Then her eyes landed on a book that was lying on the counter. This Blood and Soil. “What’s that?”
She’d seen the way Jeanette took her measure before she spoke. Years later, Beverly remained amazed that the librarian had decided to trust her. Ms. Newman had seen something in her that few people had ever bothered to look for.
“It’s a book about the plantations of Georgia. It won all kinds of awards when it came out last year, but it’s not what you’d call a lighthearted read. It’s history as seen through the eyes of the enslaved. You might learn a few things about your ancestors that aren’t all that flattering.”
“Are they true?”
“Yes,” Jeanette told her. “They’re true.”
“Then I’ll take it.”
When she finished the book, Beverly finally understood the phrase ignorance is bliss. Her world was different. It was shattered, it was sullied. It was turned upside down. She saw things now that no one had shown her. The vastness of the fields outside of town. The mortar between the bricks in her family home—mixed and spread by enslaved human beings. The hand-hewn tombstones huddled together at the edge of the woods, miles away from the perfectly manicured cemeteries where Troy’s Confederate veterans were laid to rest.
And when she reread the inscription below Augustus Wainwright’s statue, she was overcome by shame at her family’s role in it all. The audacity of a man like her ancestor—claiming words like freedom, honor, and dignity when he’d deprived so many people of those very things.
Beverly walked through this new world in a daze. She had no idea what to do with the information she’d gleaned. She wondered how anyone could live with the knowledge that their forefathers had enslaved other people. That they’d beaten them. Raped the women. Stolen children from their mothers and sold them. How did you live with the fact that the descendants of the people who’d suffered still lived all around you? That you likely shared DNA with many of them? And finally Beverly realized you couldn’t make peace with it. She knew why so many who’d gotten a glimpse of the horrible truth had chosen to turn away.
Beverly didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t sure what to fix—or if fixing was possible. But she knew she wouldn’t flinch. She took the book back to the library.
“What did you think?” Jeanette asked her when Beverly slid it across the desk.
“I’m not sure who I am anymore,” Beverly confessed. “I was always proud of being a Wainwright. Now I know I’m descended from monsters.”
“Every human being has their share of monsters lurking in their family tree. Millions of people around the world can trace a family line back to Genghis Khan.”
“I’d rather be one of them.”
“Augustus Wainwright was your great-great-great-grandfather?” Jeanette asked.
“Four greats,” Beverly said.
“Well, you have sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents,” Jeanette told her. “I promise you, they weren’t all monsters.” Then she leaned forward across the counter. “You get to choose whose footsteps you’ll follow. Find a set that went in the right direction. Somewhere out there, you have an ancestor who made the world better. Whoever they are, decide to take after them.”
“Where do I look?”
“Does the Wainwright Bible have a family tree in it? Maybe start there. Or ask your parents what they know. There are sure to be plenty of folks in your history who’ve been waiting to step out of Augustus Wainwright’s shadow.”
“Seems like I should be doing a whole lot more.”
“The first thing you need to do, Beverly, is keep learning. There are people in this town who are stuck. There are some that insist on going backward. You want to make up for what your ancestor did? Learn everything you can and do your best to lead the way forward.”
That day, Beverly went home with three new books.
Now Beverly sat in the chair in Val’s salon, staring out the window at Jackson Square and the statue of Augustus Wainwright as she got her blowout. By the 1860s, Wainwright had purchased and sold thousands of souls. Those who toiled in his fields were beaten, tortured, and worked to death. In 1860, he joined the Confederate Army and fought a war to keep the enslaved in shackles. After he recovered his fortune, he toiled day and night to prevent Black citizens from exercising their hard-won rights. Before he expired, he commissioned a statue of himself. The young man atop the pedestal was far more regal than Augustus had ever been—and bore no resemblance to the disease-ridden drunkard he’d become in late life. When the statue was erected, it was common knowledge he’d stolen the epitaph off a monument to Revolutionary War heroes. But no one remembered that anymore.
A van with a satellite dish on top and a giant blue 4 painted on the side pulled up across the street, blocking Beverly’s view of the statue and the courthouse behind it. Val switched off the blow dryer that had been howling in Beverly’s ear for the past twenty minutes and began fluffing her creation with a comb. “You suppose they’re here about Skeeter?”
“Can’t imagine who else,” Beverly said just as a second van arrived and parked behind the first.
Less than twenty-four hours had passed since Darlene Honeywell had published her post on Facebook. For legal purposes, she hadn’t named any names. But everyone in Troy knew exactly who she was accusing. And more than a few of them knew it was true. Randy Sykes had resigned as mayor the previous evening. Now it seemed all the local news stations had picked up on the story, too.
“Better late than never, I guess,” Wanda Crump piped up from the chair beside Beverly’s.
Beverly tried to look over without moving her head. Yvette Jones was still at work touching up Wanda’s grays. “Sure was looking like it was gonna be never,” Yvette said. “You know that rat bastard thought he wouldn’t have to answer for what he did.”
“’Course he thought he’d get away with it,” Val said. “Rape was hardly even a crime back then.”
“Well, ’least we did what we could to put him on a righteous path,” Yvette said. “We showed him hell our senior year.”
“I see the man every day,” Wanda added. “He still can’t look me in the eye.”
Val cackled. “Like they say—don’t fuck with cheerleaders.”
“Nobody ever says that,” Beverly told them.
“Well, they should!” Val insisted.
Of the ten girls on the cheerleading squad that Beverly Underwood had captained, only four had stayed in Troy. Val inherited the salon from her mother (Big Val), and Yvette rented a booth from Val on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She specialized in braids and extensions, though she was just as gifted when it came to color and nails. Wanda worked for the registrar of deeds over at the courthouse. Beverly and Wanda had standing appointments with Val and Yvette every three weeks—whether their hair needed a touch-up or not.
“I heard that Bella Cummings has picked up our torch.”
“Umm-hmm.” Yvette’s second job was assistant cheerleading coach. “Girl is kicking butt and taking names. And she’s got the best pike I’ve ever seen.”
“So what was it made Darlene go public after all these years?” Wanda brought the conversation back around. In high school, Wanda had encouraged Darlene to go to the cops. A white girl might see some justice, she’d argued. But Darlene had refused. To people in uniforms, trailer trash was still trash, no matter what shade their skin was.
“She told me she was inspired by a book,” Beverly said. “Something her girls found while they were visiting town over the weekend.”
Yvette yelped when Wanda unexpectedly spun her chair around. “What do you mean, a book?”
“A book,” Beverly repeated, surprised to find herself the subject of Wanda’s laser-like focus. “What’s so strange about that?”
“Where’d the girls get it?”
Beverly shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Was it Lula Dean’s library?” Wanda asked.
“Naw,” Val chimed in. “Couldn’t have been. I looked on Saturday. Only books in Lula’s library are about cakes and Newt Gingrich. I don’t know how she manages to be evil and boring, but damn, if Lula ain’t killing it.”
“I dunno.” Wanda wasn’t satisfied. “Something’s up in this town. I can feel it. Delvin borrowed a book from Lula’s library and that man hasn’t been himself since. Keeps talking in his sleep about fighting the forces of evil like he’s Black Panther or something. I mean, I ain’t complaining. It’s got him out of the funk he’s been in, but I’m telling you, it’s weird.”
Yvette lifted an eyebrow. “Delvin Crump—your hermit husband—borrowed a book from Lula Dean? What’s he going to do next? Put in an application for the Daughters of the Confederacy?”
“Who the hell knows!” Wanda cried. “This is the same Delvin Crump who once called Lula a boil on the ass of humanity. Now he’s swapping books with that bitch.”
“You know what? I hadn’t thought about it before now, but you’re right,” said Val. “This town hasn’t been the same since Lula’s library went up. First that Nazi gets dragged out of the closet, then Darlene spills the beans. Shit that’s stayed settled for decades is getting all stirred up.”
She was right, Beverly thought. Things hadn’t been the same. “What was the book Delvin borrowed from Lula?” she asked.
“Something called Our Confederate Heroes.”
Yvette snorted. “Yep, that sounds like a Lula Dean book.”
“I know, but it sure put a bee in Delvin’s bonnet. Now he’s even talking about trying to get the Confederate statue pulled down,” Wanda said.
“Delvin wants to demolish old Augustus?” Val pointed out the window with a roller brush. “Good luck with that.”
“He says it’s an affront to every person who’s ever served in the United States military.”
“Not to mention every Black person in the state of Georgia,” Yvette added.
All eyes turned to Beverly. “No offense,” Wanda said. “I know y’all are related.”
“And I’ve spent the last twenty-five years wishing I wasn’t,” Beverly said. “Hell, I’d have that damn thing knocked down tomorrow if I could. Unfortunately, the school board doesn’t decide which statues get to stay.”
“Who does?” Yvette asked.
“The mayor,” Wanda replied.
The room may have gone quiet, but their thoughts couldn’t have screamed any louder.
“You know, it’s a funny thing,” Val said, savoring every syllable as she whipped the black salon cape off Beverly with a flourish. “I think this town might be in the market for a new one of those.”
Beverly looked in the mirror and saw them all grinning back at her. “No, no, no.” She slid out of her chair, adjusted her pearls, and straightened her pink oxford shirt. “I got more than enough on my plate right now. If I let Lula Dean take my seat on the school board, the only things left to read in this town will be the Bible, Green Eggs and Ham, and Our Confederate Heroes.”
“You think Lula’s going to let Green Eggs and Ham stay on the shelves? It’s got a dog driving a train,” Yvette said. “We can’t let dogs drive trains. That’s goddamned dangerous!”
“Betcha the mayor could do something to stop her,” Wanda said. “You want me to look into it?”
“This town has never had a woman mayor,” Beverly argued. “That office has been passed down from one good old boy to another for the last two centuries. Hell, Skeeter’s uncle was mayor for thirty-five years!”
“Mmm-hmmm. You’ll be the first woman mayor.” Wanda was already acting like it was a done deal. Once she got an idea lodged in her head, there wasn’t anything short of brain surgery that could get it back out again.
“The timing sure seems to be right,” Yvette offered, “considering the last mayor turned out to be a rapist and all. I think some ladies round here might be ready for a bit of a change.”
“Think of everything you could do for this town,” Val said.
“Bet your daughter would be proud to know her mama was a force for good.”
Damn, Beverly thought. Of course it was Wanda who had to bring out the big guns.
Beverly walked up to the mirror and freshened her lipstick. She wished she were just a little bit taller—and that she’d chosen an outfit that lent her a little more gravitas. She looked like a forty-four-year-old former stay-at-home mom, which on most days was exactly what she was. She’d never dreamed of holding any office higher than school board—and she wasn’t sure she was qualified. Though a lack of qualifications certainly hadn’t stopped Skeeter or any of the men who’d held the office before him. But her friends were right. An opportunity had presented itself—a chance to bring real change to Troy. Maybe she’d fail. But she had to give it a try.
“If you don’t run, you can bet your butt Lula will,” Wanda said.
“Fine.” Beverly turned around. “I’ll do it.”
“Great. Then let’s make it official.” Val headed straight for the door.
Beverly rushed after her. “What? Now?”
“You just got your hair and nails done. You look gorgeous, and there are three television crews right outside waiting to ambush the slimeball who just resigned as mayor. And you think there could be a better time to announce your candidacy?”
Val threw open the front door of the salon and stood on the threshold. With two fingers in her mouth, she whistled at the crowd across the street. “Y’all come on over and meet our next mayor!” she shouted.
No one took her up on the offer.
“She’s gonna battle the book banners!”
A few people turned around, but none of them bothered to head across the street.
“And she’s gonna pull down that damn statue!”
Suddenly they were all looking. But they still weren’t moving.
“Did I mention the statue is her great-great-great-great-granddaddy!”
All at once they were rushing toward the salon. Reporters, camerapeople, and assorted hangers-on.
“Well?” one shouted. “Where is she?”
“Who is she?” asked another.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Val called out to the growing crowd. “I give you Troy’s next mayor, Beverly Wainwright Underwood!”