Love Beyond Limits: A Southern Love Story

By Elizabeth Musser

Emily Derracott loves her childhood friend Thomas McGinnis, but she cannot marry a man who doesn’t share her strong convictions about the freedmen. Besides, she harbors a secret love for someone else. But the prospect of becoming his wife is not only improbable—it is completely impossible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Jul 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9780529116291

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images/img-7-1.jpg CHAPTER ONE images/img-7-2.jpg

Wilkes County, Georgia

April 1868

THE ROCK SAILED THROUGH THE OPEN DOORWAY OF THE one-room schoolhouse, landing near Emily’s feet. Startled, she bent down and saw that a piece of parchment had been tied around the stone. She removed it and read the words, printed in childlike block letters: KLAN IS ON THE WAY.

Emily stepped out into the encroaching darkness, gathered up her dress in one hand, and took off running toward the cabins of the freedmen, calling out, Sam! Sam!

An elderly Negro met her in the middle of the road, and she thrust the note into his hands. Sam had only learned how to read last year, but he deciphered the words quickly, then looked up at Emily and said, Get outta here now, Miss Emily. Go on!

I’m not afraid of the Klaners, Sam. I’m staying with you.

Sam looked at Emily with wide eyes and shook his head. You ain’t never been afraid a nothin’, Miss Emily. I knowed that. But you ain’t goin’ a stay here. Git yourself on upta the Big House now.

The Klan’s never killed a white woman. Emily lifted her head and squared her shoulders. I’m staying.

The look on Sam’s face changed from surprise to something dark, so dark it jolted Emily. I done seen you come into this world, Miss Emily, and I don’t aim ta see ya taken from it jus’ now.

They won’t kill me!

They’ll do worse. They’ll make you wish you was dead. They’ll make you watch while they kill us! Go on now!

But I care. There must be something I can do.

You is young and brave, Miss Emily. But the only way you can help is ta git yourself back up to the house and fall on your knees and beg our Creator for mercy.

She saw both fear and anger smoldering in Sam’s eyes. And then she heard the thunder of hoofbeats pounding the ground far in the distance. It sounded like death approaching.

With a sweep of his hand, old Sam grabbed her and pushed her toward the little white clapboard church. You cain’t git back to the Big House now. Get into the church and don’t make a sound, Miss Emily. I beg you.

His hands were trembling so hard that Emily grabbed them in hers. I’ll stay here, I promise, she said. You go on home.

She watched Sam leave and felt her heart breaking. He was the oldest of the Derracotts’ former slaves, now a freedman. All of their slaves had stayed, trying to eke out a living on the thousand acres of farmland. Sharecropping was the word Father used. The slave quarters were gone, and now two dozen or more independent cabins formed a small community. With Father’s reluctant permission, the Negroes had built a church and a school on the property.

Even the adults were going to school, educating themselves right along with their children. Every day Emily stood before them in the little schoolhouse they had erected two years ago and taught them to read and write.

And now horrible men, driven by hate, were terrorizing plantations, seizing the freedmen, beating some, hanging others, committing sheer butchery for no reason at all except the one that had plagued their little part of the world for so long: the need for white people to believe they were superior in every way to Negroes.

The hoofbeats grew louder, closer, and Emily fell to the floor, her heart hammering in her chest. Lord God, dear Lord, please protect them. Protect us.

The freed Negroes were not the only ones who lived in fear of these night riders. Many white Republicans were now picked out by this demented group, the Ku Klux Klan, for punishment—beating and even murder. But Emily did not fear for her father. He was a sworn Democrat through and through. Still, he was a fine man who had treated his slaves kindly on the plantation.

Before the war.

Emily collapsed on the floor, brushed her black ringlets of hair from her eyes, and wept. Before the war! she said out loud. Her whole life had made sense before the war. Now the plantation was practically in ruins, her two brothers were dead, and Mother looked frail and old. Father was a fine, good man, but he was weak. And afraid.

In 1867 Congress had divided the South into military districts and registered only voters who could take a loyalty oath to the United States and swear that they had not aided the Confederacy. These conditions had resulted in many white Southerners—including her father—being disenfranchised.

Emily brushed her fists across her face to swipe away the tears. For all those antebellum years, she’d been naïve and young. But at twenty, with three years of caring for dying soldiers behind her and two years as a teacher at the schoolhouse for the former slaves, she was no longer naïve and she no longer felt young. She wanted the freedmen to have all that was due them by the Constitution. Their rights. With the new Reconstruction Act passed in 1867, black men were granted the right to vote. They could learn and own property and even hold political office.

And die simply for being free.

She’d read the stories in the papers, heard the whisperings of raids in nearby Greene County and the horrible beating that Mr. James Corley had undergone, in front of his wife and daughter. Sixty-five assailants, hooded men, some of whom were the aristocrats of the town, had brutally beaten him to within an inch of his life. He would be forever scarred physically and in ways that went much deeper. The Klan had chosen James Corley because he was a black legislator from Georgia.

She felt the bile rise in her throat. And now the Klan was here in Wilkes County, on her father’s plantation. As she knelt on the wooden floor of the church, she wondered who had delivered the warning.

Why had she stayed so late at the schoolhouse? She knew it wasn’t wise to be out alone after dusk. But she loved the stillness after the adults and children headed to their cabins. Alone in that room, she could prepare lessons for the next day . . . and, if she was lucky, get another glimpse of Leroy.

There. She admitted it even as she heard a horse whinny, then the tramping of dozens of hooves. Light from burning torches glowed and blurred in the window as the angry mob rushed past the church toward