A Question of Mercy
Read A Question of Mercy Online
Authors: Elizabeth Cox
A QUESTION OF MERCY
STORY RIVER BOOKS
Pat Conroy, Editor at Large
OTHER BOOKS BY ELIZABETH COX
Familiar Ground
The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love
Night Talk
Bargains in the Real World
The Slow Moon
I Have Told You And Told You (Poems)
A QUESTION OF MERCY
A Novel
ELIZABETH COX
Foreword by Jill McCorkle
The University of South Carolina Press
© 2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
25Â Â 24Â Â 23Â Â 22Â Â 21Â Â 20Â Â 19Â Â 18Â Â 17Â Â 16
10Â Â 9Â Â 8Â Â 7Â Â 6Â Â 5Â Â 4Â Â 3Â Â 2Â Â 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at
http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-722-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-723-7 (ebook)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
This book is dedicated to all my students in Special Education classes
during the 1960s. They taught me about living out of the heart.
To my Aunt Pearl,
who died in the Milledgeville asylum in the 1950s.
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
Robert Penn Warren, “A Way to Love God”
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
William Shakespeare,
King Lear
, act 5, scene 3
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
T
he writer Elizabeth Cox has an accomplished literary career built on the solid foundation of giving voice to those who, for whatever reasonâclass, race, accusation, afflictionâhave been denied an adequate opportunity to speak. This was true in her stunning debut novel,
Familiar Ground
(newly reissued by the University of South Carolina Press), and the compassionate and memorable portrait she painted of a mentally challenged man known as “Soldier.” Though he was not the central character in that novel, Cox's astute attention to Soldier drew him into the fabric of a place and time in ways both necessary and important. This vision that captures all the members of a family or society, drawing the lines that both connect and separate them, is one of Cox's greatest strengths as a writer. She has successfully explored divorce, rape, prejudice, and injustice without sounding topical or climbing on a soapbox or into a pulpit. Rather, she allows those unheard voicesâthe children, the accused, the mistreated and betrayedâto tell their own stories with great clarity and satisfaction.
Cox's novel
Night Talk
won the Lillian Smith Book Award for its attention to racial issues and inspired conversations about race in churches both in Cox's native South and in New England where she was living at the time. The award is one given to a book about the American South with emphasis on racial and social conditions with “a vision of justice and human understanding.” Cox shares this honor with other highly accomplished literary and socially present authors, among them Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Will Campbell, Cormac McCarthy, and Henry Louis Gates.
This new novel,
A Question of Mercy
, once again brings to the page that
vision of justice and human understanding
as Cox takes us into society at a time when there were institutions for the “feeble-minded” where prison-like conditions were not unusual, nor were compulsory sterilization and other surgical procedures to render these people, deemed not suitable for society, harmless and easy to manage. This is a troubling history that appears
occasionally in the news but in many ways has remained a dark secret closed off and avoided. With this new novel, Cox is opening that door and venturing in, and beyond writing a powerful novel about family ties and abiding love, she has also created yet another forum that I hope will once again spur important and necessary conversations about the moral ethics of our society. I met Elizabeth Cox when her first novel came out and I have had the great honor over the years of both teaching with her in the Bennington College MFA program and hearing her read and speak on many occasions. Any student who has ever worked with Cox has been encouraged to venture into and explore those places in their fiction that they fear or that make them uncomfortable. They have likely been told they need to go into that dark hole and stay there until they see something, learn something, find comfort within the discomfort. Cox is a master at this great feat and her awareness of the most fragile and fleeting aspects of life is what propels her fiction.
When we first meet young Jess Booker in
A Question of Mercy
she is being interviewed in a law office and we are presented with a mystery. What happened to her stepbrother, Adam Finney?
Then Cox takes us back in time to the day Jess runs away to escape what has just taken place. It is 1953 and Cox paints that era vividlyâthe music and dress and language of the time. Jess's journey, hiding in the woods, seeking rides along the way, provides ample time to learn more about her history, her mother's early death, her father's remarriage to Clementine Finney, and her meeting and growing attachment to her stepbrother, Adam, a boy we are told people crossed the street to avoid, mothers warning their children not to wave or speak. Jess's physical journey through this vivid landscape not only establishes Cox's love and mastery of the kind of intricate storytelling familiar in the southern literary tradition, but also sets the course for a personal odyssey that leads her to confront and deal with matters of the heart. Throughout the novel, she is writing letters to her sweetheart, Sam, a young man serving in the war who is forced to question his own sense of mercy. Jess's destination is a boarding house she once visited with her mother, and that place and her mother's friend who lives there provide a safe landing spot, a respite for Jess, if only for a brief time. The boarding house also provides the reader with a colorful cast of characters and wonderful comic relief in the midst of this tense and suspenseful journey.
No one writes children better than Cox and she has a special affinity for the voices of young boys. She grew up with brothers and on the campus of an all boys' school so perhaps that is the source but it is a strength she has perfected. The young boys Jess encounters in the boarding house, Shooter and Ray, bring humor but they also serve as foils to Adam's childhood and all that has been deprived him. These boys are orphans and have endured
extreme unhappiness and yet, compared to Adam, we see them as lucky in their current circumstances.
This novel places the reader right in the heart of an ethical situation, weighing out right from wrongâthe human heart and the laws of society in conflict with each other. It is about extreme practices and ethical questions in the broadest sense, but it is also about trust and faith and compassionâthe guiding factors that tend to lead Cox's characters forward. There is romantic love. There is familial love. There is humor. There is grief. Ultimately, it is a novel about mercy and a level of love and devotion worthy of sacrifice.
Jill McCorkle
PROLOGUE
J
ess Booker already knew how life could change in a momentâa car disappearing over the crest of a hill or sunlight slipping behind a dark cloudâshe knew this, but did not know what lay ahead for her. She sat close to her father in the lawyer's office, a long, narrow room with shelves of books that rose high to the ceiling. For a moment, Jess studied their shapes and the patterns of their colors and their placements, and wondered about the sheer volume of information they must contain. Yet she also knew that the answers to the questions that brought her and her father into this office today would not be found on those pages.