The White Road

The Civil War devastated the lives of the Charleston aristocracy, as it did the structures of the city itself. The Larousses were protected somewhat by their foresight (or perhaps by their treason, for they retained most of their wealth in gold and had only a small fraction tied up in Confederate bonds and currency). Still they, like many other defeated Southerners, were forced to watch as the surviving soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, or “Shaw’s Niggers” as they were known, paraded through the streets of Charleston. Among them was Martin Jones, Atys Jones’s great-great-grandfather.

Once again, the lives of these two families were about to collide violently. The night riders move through the darkness, white against the black road. It will be many years before an olive-skinned man with slave marks on his legs will claim to have seen them as they will become, figures in negative, black on white, a reversal that would sicken these men were they to know of it now as they go about their business, their horses draped, guns and bullwhips banging dully against saddles.

For this is the South Carolina of the 1870s, not of the turn of a new millennium, and the night riders are the terror of these times. They roam upcountry, visiting their version of justice on poor blacks and the Republicans that support them, refusing to bow to the requirements of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They are a symbol of the fear felt by the whites for the blacks, and much of the white population stands behind them. Already, the Black Codes have been introduced as an antidote to reform, restricting the rights of blacks to hold arms, to hold a position above farmer or servant, even to leave their premises or entertain visitors without a permit.

In time, Congress will fight back with the Reconstruction Amendment, the Enforcement Act of 1870, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Governor Scott will form a black militia to protect voters in the 1870election, further enraging the white population. Eventually, habeas corpus will be suspended in the nine upcountry counties, leading to the arrest of hundreds of Klan members without due process, but for the present the law rides a draped horse and brings with it vengeance, and the actions of the federal goverment will be too late to save thirty-eight lives, too late to prevent rapes and beatings, too late to stop the burning and destruction of farms and crops and livestock.

Too late to save Missy Jones.

Her husband, Martin, had campaigned to bring out the black vote in 1870 in the face of intimidation and violence. He had refused to repudiate the Republican Party and had earned a whipping for his troubles. Then he had lent his support and his savings to the nascent black militia, and had marched his men through the town one bright Sunday afternoon, no more than one in ten of them armed but still an act of unparalleled arrogance to those who were fighting the tide of emancipation.

It was Missy who heard the riders approaching, Missy who told her husband to run, that this time they would kill him if they found him. The night riders had not yet harmed a woman in York County and Missy, although she feared the armed men, had no reason to believe that they would commence with her.

But they did.

Four men raped Missy Jones, for if they could not harm her husband directly then they would hurt him through his woman. The rape was without any physical violence beyond the violation itself, devoid, it seemed to the woman, even of an element of pleasure for the men who committed the act. Instead, it was as functional as the branding of a cow or the strangling of a chicken. The last man even helped her to cover herself up and gave her his arm as he escorted her to a kitchen chair.

“You tell him to behave himself, y’hear?” said the man. He was young and handsome and she saw in him something of his father and his grandfather. He had the Larousse chin, and the fair hair common to that family. His name was William Larousse. “We don’t want to be coming back through here again,” he warned her.

Two weeks later, William Larousse and two other men were ambushed outside Delphia by a group of masked assailants armed with cudgels. William’s companions fled but he remained, curled into a ball, as the blows rained down. The beating left him paralyzed, able to move only his right hand and unable to eat any food that had not been mashed to the consistency of paste. But Missy Jones was unheeding of what had been done in her name. She had barely spoken to her husband when he returned from his hiding place, and rarely spoke again thereafter. Neither did she return to her husband’s bed, but slept instead among the animals in their small barn, reduced in her own mind to their level by the men who had raped her to hurt her husband, retreating slowly and irretrievably into madness.



Elliot rose and poured the remains of his coffee into the sink.

“Like I said, there were some who wanted to forget the past, and some who never forgot it, even to this day.”

He let the last words hang in the air.

“You think Atys Jones might have been one of those?”

He shrugged. “I think that some part of him liked the idea that he was fucking Earl Larousse’s daughter, and fucking over Earl by extension. I don’t even know if Marianne knew about the history between the two families. I guess it meant more to the Joneses than it did to the Larousses, if you catch my drift.”

“But their history is common knowledge?”

“There’s been some reporting on the history of the families in the newspapers by those with the energy to go digging, but not much. Still, I’d be surprised if some of the jurors don’t know about it, and it may come up at the trial. The Larousses have a name and a history that they safeguard religiously. Their reputation means everything to them. Whatever they might have done in the past, they now contribute to socially responsible causes. They support black charities. They supported integration in schools. They don’t decorate their houses with the flag of the Confederacy. They’ve made up for the sins of previous generations, but could be the prosecution will use old ghosts to claim that Atys Jones set out to punish them again by taking Marianne away from them.”

He stood and stretched.

“Unless, of course, we can find the person who did kill Marianne Larousse. Then we got us a whole new ball game.”

I put aside the copy of the photograph of Missy Jones, dead by her forties and lying in her cheap box-coffin, and sifted through the documents on the table once again until I came to the final cutting. It was a newspaper story dated July 12, 1981, and it detailed the disappearance of two young black women who had lived near the Congaree. Their names were Addy and Melia Jones, and after that night, when they were seen drinking together in a local bar, they were never heard of again.

Addy Jones was Atys Jones’s mother.

I held the cutting up for Elliot to see.

“What is this?”

He reached out and took it from me.

“This,” he said, “is the final puzzle for you. Our client’s mother and aunt disappeared nineteen years ago, and neither he nor anybody else has seen them since.”



That night, I drove back to Charleston with the radio tuned to a talk show out of Columbia, until the signal began to fade into hisses and distortion. The owner of a chain of barbecue restaurants had taken to flying a Confederate flag over his outlets. He was arguing that it was a symbol of Southern heritage, and maybe it was, except that in the past, the barbecue guy had worked on George Wallace’s presidential campaign and had found himself in federal court for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after he refused to serve blacks in his restaurants. He even managed to win his case at trial level, only to be forced to integrate by a higher court. Since then he had apparently enjoyed a religious conversion but old habits seemed to be dying hard. I thought of the flag as I drove through the darkness, about the families of Jones and Larousse, and the weight of history that was like a lead belt strapped to their bodies, dragging them always down to the bottom. Somewhere in that history, in the living past, was an answer to the death of Marianne Larousse.

But down here, in a place that seemed alien to me, the past assumed strange forms. The past was an old man draped in a red-and-blue flag, howling his defiance at the moon. The past was a dead hand on the face of the living. The past was a ghost garlanded with regrets. The past, I would come to learn, was a woman in white with scales for skin. III I seemed to move among a world of ghosts

And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “THE PRINCESS”