Dixie Autumn

By Jerry Shinn

October 1962, and a young newspaper reporter, Hilliard Cooper, returns to his racially tense home town of Allston, South Carolina to find out who set off the midnight explosion that killed his childhood best friend, Charlotte Ravenel. By the time he learns the truth, three other people have been killed, and he might be next.
Decades later, as South Carolinians argue about the Confederate flag that still defiantly flies at the state Capitol, Hill Cooper remembers that October and realizes that "Charlotte was another tragic victim of our tragic history, an innocent and unintended casualty of a war that officially ended almost a century earlier. And now, forty years later, I am the only living person who knows who killed her.”
Until now....
Dixie Autumn is an important addition to the literature of the American South – a gripping, genre-stretching mystery within a powerful, philosophically and historically profound novel. It examines the paradoxical nature of good and evil, the ethical ambiguities of law and journalism, the life-affirming but potentially degrading power of human sexuality, the dangerous synthesis of hate and fear. It is also an unblinking but compassionate examination of the burden of Southern history that confounded the South and the nation in the middle years of the 20th century and continues to confound well into the 21st.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jerry Shinn
• Release date: Nov 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310475443

Jerry Shinn

Jerry Shinn grew up in South Carolina, graduated with Honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a former associate editor, editorial page editor and award-winning columnist for the Charlotte Observer. He now lives and writes fiction, poetry, history, biography, commentary and music in the North Carolina mountains.

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Praise for Dixie Autumn

Dixie Autumn is a must read for every Southerner. Jerry Shinn has married his rich experience — as a small town South Carolina youngster, a Chapel Hill undergrad in the late 1950s, a career news reporter and editor, and a keen observer of the racial tensions of the 1960s — with his vivid imagination to devise a plot that will keep you turning pages until the very end. And then his carefully drawn characters — the good, the bad, and the dead — will stay in your head and heart for weeks, making you eager for his next book.

— Jon Buchan, author of Code of the Forest

In Dixie Autumn, Jerry Shinn takes us to Allston in upstate South Carolina and rivets us at the intersection of good and evil, black and white, soul-searching and dogged rationalization. Through a brash (and compassionate) young reporter from Columbia, S.C., who returns home to investigate the death of his childhood friend, the beautiful Charlotte Ravenel, we re-live those dark, harrowing days of the 1960s, when the South’s raw seams were on haunting display. With precise and aching detail, Shinn recreates the interplay of place and time, proving himself once again a noble thinker and now a master story-teller.

— Dannye Romine Powell, author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers

Walker Percy once said that he was in most ways a typical southern boy: he liked fast cars, pretty girls, barbecue, and bourbon. Hill, the narrator of Jerry Shinn’s new novel, Dixie Autumn, possesses many of these same qualities. He also has a basic sense of decency and conscience as well as beguiling sensitivity. While Dixie Autumn is a first rate mystery, it also explores Hill's long friendship-romance with Charlotte Ravenel. Their relationship is told through flashbacks which glimmer with sweet and poetic vignettes summoning a 1950s South redolent of gin and fraternities, pecans and Weejuns, racism, and the remnants of faded glory and gilded manners. The very last image of the story is unique and hard to forget. In fact, you don't want to forget it. Dixie Autumn is lush and suspenseful, as much mystery as history and romance. Jerry Shinn shines.

— Ben Greer, author of Slammer, Time Loves a Hero, The Loss of Heaven and Murder in the Holy City

It is a very effective novel. I was totally immersed in it. The irony of the truth and Hill’s discovery of his own culpability are most effective. I love Charlotte, I love the depiction of the Ravenel family.... I really enjoyed it.

— Anthony Abbott, award-winning poet and author of Leaving Maggie Hope and The Three Great Secret Things

Dixie Autumn

A Novel

by Jerry Shinn

Pinnacle Ridge Books

Copyright © 2013 by Hal Jerome Shinn Jr.

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

The painting on the cover, COMMEMORATION REVISITED, is copyright © 1998 by Leo Twiggs and is used by permission of the artist.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

About the cover painting

The painting on the cover is COMMEMORATION REVISITED, one of a series of depictions of the Confederate flag using the batik process by distinguished American artist Leo Twiggs. Dr. Twiggs is a native of St. Stephen, South Carolina and a graduate of Claflin University. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and New York University and was the first African American to receive a Doctorate in Art Education from the University of Georgia. His Book, Messages From Home: the Art of Leo Twiggs, won an Indie Finalist Award in 2012. Visit his website at leotwiggs.com.

In 2000, by vote of the South Carolina legislature, the Confederate flag was moved from atop the Capitol dome to a tall flagpole adjacent to a Confederate War Memorial on the Capitol grounds. There it remains a subject of racial controversy and the object of an economic boycott of the state by the NAACP.

In memory of Jessie Rehder and Max Steele

But there is a deeper need, to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive to ourselves, to the long journeys of our lives. So much has happened....

– Frederick Buechner

If he had driven up Elm Street that night, by the side of the house, he might have noticed the car in the driveway, and that might have saved his life and two or three others’. But he came down Butler Avenue, turning off his headlights a block away and then pulling to the curb across the street from the house and the streetlight on the corner. He slipped the gearshift on the steering column into neutral and rolled down the window.

It was almost midnight and the time of year in that part of the world when days were still warm but nights could be getting a lot cooler. With the window open he realized he should have worn a jacket. He lifted the .22 caliber rifle from the seat beside him, thrust the slender barrel through the window, pointed it upward toward the streetlight and pulled the trigger. Bang! Missed. Damn, the neighbors surely heard the shot.

His first impulse was to drive away, but then he decided to try one more time. He tilted the rifle up again and sighted along the top of the barrel. The crack of the rifle shot was followed by a soft explosion at the top of the pole and the sound of glass breaking. There were thick clouds overhead, and with the streetlight extinguished the scene was very dark. That was the way he wanted it.

He shifted into first gear and with his headlights still off he drove across Elm Street and turned in the next block down a narrow gravel road that led downhill into the cemetery. When he had gone far enough to believe the car was not visible from the street, he stopped and turned off the engine and got out. He closed the door quietly, opened the back door and took out a fully stuffed large brown paper grocery bag. With the bag under one arm, he closed the back door as quietly as he could and started walking back toward the house, between rows of gravestones.

The darkness was so dense that he stumbled once, then again, not quite falling. He had been taught that it was wrong to walk across graves, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. The important thing was to avoid tripping over one of the gravestones. He tried to place his feet softly and quietly. There was no hurry at this point. Soon he reached the small grove of trees that separated the cemetery from the sidewalk, and he slipped through the trees and across Elm Street and into the front yard of the house.

Then he saw headlights approaching down Butler Avenue. He moved quickly behind the trunk of one of the big willow oaks by the sidewalk, pressing his body against the rough bark, closing his eyes until he heard the car pass, then opening them to watch the red taillights disappear around the next curve. He had walked only a short distance, slowly, but he was out of breath and for a moment felt almost paralyzed. Anxiety pulsed through his body like electric blood. Finally he squatted behind the tree and began moving toward the house, crab-like, on his feet, knees and one hand while the other arm held the bag. Now he was behind the row of boxwoods in front of the house, and he crawled through the mulch to the bay window on that side of the front door.

After he unpacked the bag he crawled back to the corner of the house, rolling out a long fuse behind him. Another car passed, but he felt invisible behind a large boxwood. When he could no longer hear the car, he took a box of wooden matches out of his shirt pocket, pulled out a match and scratched it against the side of the box. He waited a moment until the flame was steady, then touched it to the end of the fuse. It sizzled as he grabbed the empty bag and ran across the street and into the trees.

If he had looked back before he crossed the street he would have seen the light come on inside the house, behind the bay window. He heard the explosion as he emerged from the trees into the cemetery. Breaking into such deep, dark silence, the blast was much louder than he had expected. Even though he knew it was coming, it was so loud that it terrified him. Surely people would start running out from all directions and see him before he could get away. Lordy mercy, he thought; what am I into? I am scared shitless.

Suddenly there was an opening in the clouds, revealing an almost full moon that poured its chalky glow across the cemetery, making the gravestones almost luminous. The light startled him, and he stopped, short of breath. The stones were like bleached bones that had broken through the skin of the earth, and he thought he saw shadowy figures moving behind them. He knew it was his imagination, of course. Maybe his fear was making him crazy. He had never liked graveyards, and he wondered now why he had picked that spot to park the car.

He ran the rest of the way, feeling totally exposed by that searchlight of a moon overhead. When he was seated behind the steering wheel, he listened and looked around. There was no sound or sign of life, only the ghostly pale monuments of the dead spread across the moonlit hillside. He felt a sharp pressure in his chest and wondered if he was having a heart attack.

When he turned the key, the starter squawked once. Please God, he thought. Then the engine rumbled to life and he drove down the hill. He could see in the mirror that no one was behind him. His breath came a little easier now. The car wasn’t running as smoothly as it should, but it was running. Maybe he should get it worked on tomorrow.

Or maybe he should buy a new car.

Chapter One

William Faulkner said that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. He ought to be here now, this bright October noon, almost two years into the 21st century, as I sit in a private club with several other men, having lunch and discussing the latest skirmish in a war that was supposed to have ended long before anyone here was born. They are influential citizens of this city and state, and they are trying to decide what ought to be done in the controversy over the Confederate flag that flies above the Capitol just across the street, a handsome building that still bears the scars of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s unconscionably destructive march through a destitute Confederacy.

The painful, persistent history that is the larger context for this conversation is distracting me with personal memories, and the talk among the distinguished gentlemen around this table fades to the level of chatter from another room. It suddenly occurs to me that this is an anniversary. It has been forty years since October of 1962.

Remember?

October 1962 was the month President John F. Kennedy, in a somber televised address to the nation, disclosed that American reconnaissance flights had produced photographic evidence of Soviet missiles being installed in communist Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. The president demanded that the Soviet Union cease and dismantle the installations and announced a naval blockade of Cuba to prevent further Soviet materials from reaching the island nation. The possibility of a showdown between the world’s two great nuclear powers, with catastrophic consequences, had never before seemed so real or immediate.

It was the month a young man named James Meredith, previously barred from enrolling as a student at the University of Mississippi because he was black, returned to the Ole Miss campus to try again, this time accompanied by United States marshals and soldiers. Some students, along with outsiders protesting the desegregation of the university, clashed with Meredith’s bodyguards. By the time order was restored, two people had been killed and dozens of marshals and soldiers had been wounded.

Meanwhile, as if the violence at Oxford, Mississippi and the impending end of the world weren’t enough to worry about, various and scattered groups of men around our state and elsewhere in the South, apparently desperate for some noble undertaking to justify their mean and meaningless existence, were organizing to resurrect the Ku Klux Klan. Once again, hiding their faces inside pillow cases, they would burn crosses to terrorize insufficiently docile Negroes, protect the creamy white thighs of virginal Southern women, and defend the Southern way of life, which, ironically, had never been very good to them.

And October of 1962 was the month Charlotte Ravenel was killed. It happened in the middle of the night, and I found out about it the following morning. I was in my third year as a reporter at the Columbia Herald and had recently been promoted from general assignment to the state government staff, where I was one of three people assigned to cover the legislature. The Herald was a morning newspaper, and most of the newsroom staff came to work around 10 a.m. and worked until seven in the evening. Copy editors arrived in the afternoon, along with the night reporters and desk editors who put the final edition to bed around midnight. My habit was to come in around nine o’clock, before the phones started ringing and the typewriters began chattering, and have some quiet time to read that morning’s newspaper and plan my day.

My editor, the state editor, Pete Eichel, was also an early arrival most mornings, and he and I sometimes drank coffee at his desk and talked about things other than our jobs and the day’s news. On that morning, he walked to my desk as soon as I sat down.

What’s the latest on the Cuban missile crisis? I asked. Are we going to blow up the world?

Not yet. But we’ve stopped a Soviet ship headed for Cuba and ordered it to turn back. It’s pretty scary.

Then he handed me a piece of yellow paper torn from the Associated Press printer and said, This is about something else.

I read the wire story:

ALLSTON, S.C. (AP) -- A GREENVILLE WOMAN WAS KILLED LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT OR EARLY THURSDAY WHEN AN EXPLOSION KNOCKED DOWN PART OF THE FRONT WALL AND ROOF OF HER PARENTS’ HOME HERE.

POLICE FOUND HER BODY UNDER FALLEN BEAMS AND PLASTER SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, AFTER A NEIGHBOR CALLED TO REPORT HEARING AN EXPLOSION. POLICE SAID THE NEIGHBOR IDENTIFIED THE VICTIM AS CHARLOTTE RAVENEL CALHOUN.

MRS. CALHOUN’S PARENTS, MR. AND MRS. PETER RAVENEL, WERE OUT OF TOWN WEDNESDAY NIGHT, AND APPARENTLY NO ONE ELSE WAS IN THE HOUSE.

POLICE SAID THURSDAY MORNING THEY HAD NO CLUE YET AS TO WHO SET OFF THE EXPLOSION.

I was twenty-five years old, an age at which men, having outgrown their childhood capacity for easy tears, have not yet learned to cry as adults. So I did not cry, and for a moment I could not speak.

Aren’t you from Allston? he asked.

Yeah.

Is that anybody you know?

She was one of my best friends. We grew up together. Her father is my father’s best friend.

Although his was a small newspaper, my father was well known and respected in South Carolina journalism, and my reference to him seemed to have some impact on Eichel. The fact that it involved a friend of my father seemed to give the story more tragic weight.

I’m sorry, he said.

It’s almost like a death in the family, I said. I was immediately trying to relate the news to what little I knew about what was going on in my home town in those days.

Do you need to go?

I have to go, I said. But you might want to send somebody else to cover it.

Nobody else would know the territory as well. But I can understand if you don’t want to be working. Just do what you have to do. I’m not sure we need to send anybody. The wires will keep up with it.

You might want to send somebody, I said. "Rachel Ravenel, the mother, wrote one of the articles in South Carolina Voices. Or maybe her husband wrote it for her." Or, it occurred to me, maybe my father wrote it.

You think it was like what happened in Sumter?

South Carolina Voices was a book of essays calling for moderation in response to the issue of school desegregation. There had been a cross-burning a few weeks earlier in Sumter, in front of the renovated duplex that housed the law office of a man who had written one of the essays. A few nights later a bomb had blown off part of the building. A self-styled Ku Klux Klan group was suspected, but no one had been charged.

I don’t know. And I don’t know why Charlotte was there and they weren’t. She was married and living in Greenville.

Maybe just visiting.

But it says they weren’t there, in the middle of the night. There was nobody to visit. I’ve got to go. I need to get up there.

Sure. Call me this afternoon when you know more about what happened. Let me know if you think we need to send somebody.

It was a gray morning with soggy clouds hanging overhead. I went to my apartment and packed a suitcase and tried to telephone my father. The receptionist at the Journal said he had not come in yet. There was no answer at his home. Probably with the Ravenels, I thought. I put a sport coat and slacks on hangers