Let Me Tell You About My City
Limited Time Availability for Black History Month: Another free excerpt from my novel, Restive Souls
This is a repost of a previously deleted post. It, too, will disappear soon. I’m reposting it as part of Black History Month because none of my “Black History Month” drafts are ready and we need to somehow counter the actions of the enemies of social justice, so this is my current effort.
Restive Souls is an alternative history novel in which the Brits win what in our timeline is called the Revolutionary War, and emancipate North American slaves in the wake of the war. Still in final edits, so there may be goofs and grammatical unpleasantness.
This excerpt is narrated by Shyllandrus Zulu, a female cleric whose adventurous South African ancestor was found in the wrong place at the wrong time in West Africa and shipped off to North America.
In this excerpt, the Brits have won the war, emancipated the slaves, and Charleston, North Carolina, has become the capital of a new nation, but still a part of the British Crown.
“Bolo’s Notes” are annotations provided by the fictional historian who introduces major portions of the novel.
Note: The novel has been edited since this excerpt was first cut from the text. This is an older copy, but it’s not that much different.
Permit me to describe my city during these times.
Charleston was a city of churches and worship. It was a place of celebration.
Like songbirds announcing the sunrise, drum circles appeared spontaneously, even sometimes late at night, in the center of the town at the edge of the peninsula between the two rivers, the Cooper and the Ashley. These often became marathon festivals of singing, dancing, and worship.
Taverns and pubs, those rotten European dens of frustration where men working for a pittance spent their evenings unleashing or hiding their anger over squalid lives of toil, were rare in Charleston. The few that existed were usually filled with colonials. In their place was revelry, which was done in front of a greater presence than fruitless labor can provide.
Even Boree's outdoor music café quickly became imbued with more tea than wine as the realization hit me that most of its customers were the unhappy people who had enslaved us. Food, music, and dance became its focal draw. Eventually, alcohol disappeared completely from the café, and so did most of the European men who depended on it.
In the city center, nobody waited for reconstruction. Market stalls staffed by congregational merchants lined every street, sometimes three rows deep.
The sandy streets were adorned on each side by wide footwalks inlaid with brick and lined with trees along their edges. Mulberry trees mixed with magnolia and elm. Asian imports, like chinaberry and other mahogany, offered berries to cardinals and thrush and bluebirds. The trees were surrounded by tall grasses that provided nourishment for resting horses.
Congregational workers volunteered their time to pound cedar posts adorned with African mosaics into the ground between groups of trees planted long ago. Artisans crafting small sculptures to decorate the tops of the posts became as common as robins plucking worms from the ground after a lengthy Carolina rain.
City leaders had promoted the importance of trees for the good health of the community long before the Colonial Rebellion1 because trees absorbed bad air fouled by industry and returned it as good air, to nullify the effects of the sun’s hot rays and to keep the ground cool.
Some of the trees were cut for wood during the war’s beginning, when shortages of everything ruled the behavior of the entire eastern seaboard. Others burned during riots fueled by colonials during the days that followed the British victory. But the trees were quickly replanted.
Merchants sold everything from hand-crafted fishing lures to live bait, from cured meats to fresh corn, from rawhide belts to deerskin hats adorned with colorful displays of feathers and fur. They sold pottery and textiles and glassware. They sold yams, rice and flour, seeds and musket ammunition, pigments and dyes, equestrian equipment, and pig food. Sometimes the chaos of the market stalls blocked the streets, forcing carriages to detour.
Pigs once roamed the streets but were later confined to large pens. Local First Settlers discouraged pig farming.2 They claimed that they ruined the soil and bred too quickly. We acquiesced to their influence, so the sounds of pig grunts were replaced by the hysterics of wandering roosters.
Dried chickens hung from slender ropes, shirts hung from clotheslines; watercolor, pastel, and oil paintings hung from the sides of tents full of other artist wares, such as ceramics, figurines, and statues.
It was as if the artistic energy of the homeland, long suppressed by slavery, exploded at once into a wild and beautiful mess, splattering its heaving, pulsing rhythmic soul into millions of smaller parts, like progeny, grown and nurtured by the energy itself into a lively, lovely organism with utter contempt for quiet and servitude.
The roots of our labor transformed from the oppression of masters who wielded whips into a celebration that produced things ranging from great murals on walls of newly constructed buildings to the most delicious rice and legumes and edible seeds in the world.
Our congregations presided over large cattle ranches on the outskirts of Charleston and beyond that were attended by expert hands who once worked under the merciless tutelage of bloodless savages.
Many First Settlers were living in Charleston, as well. They found homes in two of the largest congregations, All Saints and The Vanguard of Mary. Their influence on our spiritual awakenings was profound. They controlled much of the woodlands surrounding our cities, but they welcomed freed slaves seeking lives outside of urban realms.
They also established congregations, accompanied by an interpretation of scripture borrowed from ancient spiritual beliefs.
First Settlers were not so welcoming to Europeans trying to settle in their lands. European excursions into the West were frequently met with violence. I rued this, but there was little I could do. These conflicts did not all meet the same end. There were European victories and First Settler victories. But the European victories became increasingly rare. Although they broke the yoke of their kings by arriving on North American shores, Europeans brought the ways of their kings with them, which handicapped them in ways they could not understand.
Their main advantage involved gunpowder, but we and the First Settlers were wresting that advantage away from them.
Most of the city's few large buildings were owned by one of the city's two largest congregations. The All Saints Congregation House was the largest, grandest structure in the city. It was built by the Europeans before the war and acted as a seat of governance, and even a jail, at times, before its transfer to the All Saints Congregation.
Much of the rest of the city was, to one degree or another, undergoing a state of repair and reconstruction. The colonials of the city had not taken well to their loss in the rebellion. The city burned for days afterward. The British banished many of the sorest losers. To this day, I don’t know where they are. Some say they hid, living in the forests as bandits. Others say many attempted to move west into First Settler territory and were met with unkind fates.
Many British loyalists remained in Charleston and helped with rebuilding efforts. The British established a Board of Police, headquartering themselves in the Craven Bastion, a large brick edifice that served as the first section of what was known before the war as The Exchange, and which later became the All Saints Congregation House. The Board of Police wasn’t actively involved in criminal apprehension. They existed for the sole purpose of silencing the rebels who were determined to raze the city.
The Board of Police built a dungeon for incarcerating rebels who could not be tamed. Eventually, the rebel cause mostly died out, although bands of rebels occasionally raided Charleston to try to burn us out of our homes and stores.
The Board of Police enacted an addressing system for the growing city’s street buildings and homes. After Diderot’s All Saints Congregation confiscated many privately owned homes, street addresses were grouped into parishes, with local churches responsible for sidewalk and other maintenance, such as scavenger services, and later for assigning residents to homes. The residents, in turn, became responsible for individual residential upkeep.
The Board of Police was disbanded just before the turn of the century in acknowledgment of the growing importance of congregational militias, which were designed primarily to protect congregations from hostile forces. The source of hostility was generally limited to rebel activity.
British loyalists who joined our congregations helped repel attacks from rebel arsonists and thugs. Nevertheless, the city frequently sustained heavy damage. Rebuilding became a challenge. But the city bulged with eager workers.
John Dunmore, the 4th Earl of Dunmore who was appointed governor of South Carolina by the crown at the turn of the century, appointed Charleston’s first mayor, a Shawnee and Afriker named Elston Turner.
Bolo’s Notes
Dunmore’s appointment of a man with Shawnee heritage was significant because of Dunmore’s role as governor of Virginia during “Dunmore’s War” against First Settler nations, and the Shawnee Nation in particular. His attempts at reconciliation were symbolically successful, but not personally so. He was assassinated by a Shawnee in 1803.
When Turner ordered a census of Charleston, the final tally showed some 30,000 souls in Charleston. Approximately 20,000 of these were Afrikers. Most of the others, including Europeans, were eager to rebuild Charleston into the greatest city on the East Coast. The rebels were few, but their large footprint of destruction and waste belied those numbers.
A small group of Germanic immigrants skilled in stone cutting also moved into Charleston. They were hungry for the freedoms offered on a new continent, away from the Prussian and French battles that seemed to haunt the Rhine. They brought a sense of religious freedom that had been instilled by the tolerances of two Prussian kings named Frederick.
A Tsărăgĭ, Ahyoka of the Ani’-wa’`ya clan, had met with Diderot ten years after the war in a longhouse along the Cooper River not far from where Diderot’s All Saints Congregation had begun to spread its dominance.
Bolo’s Notes
Diderot had left his Monrovian Congregation shortly after Washington’s capture. He migrated south to Charleston in 1790.
Diderot inquired about the possibility of an alliance of sorts with the Tsărăgĭ, which had broken off from a loose confederacy forged by war with the French against Muskhogean nations such as the Chickasaw and had begun to dominate the northern reaches of the Cooper River after the war.
The Tsărăgĭ had been avid supporters of the British during the Colonial Rebellion. There was considerable interest among the new generation of leaders in Carolina to establish peaceful relations with as many First Settler nations as possible.
I never asked Diderot what he said to her, but somehow Ahyoka converted to Christianity shortly after meeting with him.
I sensed that her attraction to Diderot was more commercial than spiritual. She returned to her nation’s towns with exaggerated, in Diderot’s words, stories of the All Saints Congregation’s attributes. My instincts were confirmed shortly after she established a Christian congregation of her own on Tsărăgĭ lands and quickly lured Prussian stone cutters and other masons to build a cathedral near the northern shores of the Cooper River in Moncks Corner, some forty miles north of Charleston.
Bolo’s Notes
Shyllandrus Zulu is referring to the birth of the Tsărăgĭ Congregational Union, which today has worldwide reach and is considered one of the ten richest Christian congregations in the world. Moncks Corner, on the Southeastern edge of Tsărăgĭ lands, had been a slaveholding stronghold dominated by landowner Thomas Monck, who branded his slaves with his family name. Shortly after the Colonial War, Monck’s landholdings were captured by freed slaves. Major plantations in the area, such as the Lewisfield and Mulberry plantations, were also seized.
The freed slaves, in turn, were overrun by Tsărăgĭ forces soon after, although many were invited to stay on to help work the land as indentured servants. When Ahyoka ended indentured servitude, many freed slaves interbred with Tsărăgĭ and other local people who fell under Tsărăgĭ dominion in the area, such as members of the Etiwan, Edisto, and Catawba tribes.
The cathedral was destroyed in 1815 during the Western Tsărăgĭ (Cherokee) Wars. Moncks Corner was renamed the Wassamassaw Autonomous Region and incorporated into what we know today as the Eastern Tsărăgĭ Prefect. Eventually, the Cooper River was dammed, which created the Great Wassamassaw Lake.
The Tsărăgĭ Congregational Union came into conflict with a growing freemason movement that originated in Europe as a collective of masons. The movement in North America grew into a loose confederation of like-minded individuals dedicated to liberty and God. George Washington was a master of a freemason lodge before the war. The Germans that the Tsărăgĭ imported were freemasons, some of whom eventually revolted against congregational rule.
Rather than ruthlessly put down the rebellion, the Tsărăgĭ summoned freemason leaders to a tsunelvdiya digadlohisdii (religious meeting) that lasted two weeks.
The long-term result of the meeting was that by the 1820s, most freemasons included as part of their charter an oath of loyalty to a congregation as part of a member’s declaration of belief in a supreme being.
Ahyoka lured the stone cutters with key roles in her congregation amid promises of substantial rewards for their difficult labor. To accomplish this, she followed Diderot’s model of congregational economics.
While stone cutters were cutting stone, other members of the Tsărăgĭ congregation were building commerce. They even established their own bank that traded foreign currencies, a strange affair, I thought. But the Tsărăgĭ quickly matched, then exceeded, Diderot’s All Saints Congregation in economic might, engaging in every kind of commerce imaginable. And, like the All Saints, these were no European-style capitalists. The Tsărăgĭ and All Saints congregations were run like trading corporations, but the funds were distributed equitably among everyone, regardless of their role within each congregation. Each congregation itself received a tithe of ten percent of all revenues, which were applied to administrative costs, research, and investment.
At first, the egalitarian nature of revenue sharing meant that everyone within their congregation was a pauper. But that quickly changed. People needed to eat, so the Tsărăgĭ Congregation opened restaurants. They needed butcher services, cattlemen, barbers, and the occasional tavern for the unhappy Europeans. The congregation established businesses in all these domains. The confiscation of plantation lands from colonial rebels after the war did much to push all the various congregations forward because freed slaves and First Settlers became the owners of real land.
As the congregation’s finances thrived, people needed homes, so the congregation built increasingly luxurious longhouses and brownstone row houses.
Much of the Tsărăgĭ Congregation’s earliest efforts were born of Diderot’s All Saints Congregation template. But Ahyoka took things further, faster, and Diderot’s competitive spirit led him to follow suit.
Theirs became a friendly rivalry.
Diderot’s Monrovian congregation in New England had begun with ice houses, ferries, and livestock insurance. He applied the same process to the All Saints Congregation. Ahyoka’s congregational business affairs knew no boundaries. It didn’t take long for Diderot to replicate her approach.
It all worked because the hard labor required for such things as cutting and transporting ice, moving cattle, growing rice, and harvesting cotton was amply rewarded. Everyone in the congregation shared profits equitably, but the hardest labor was compensated at bonus rates so that the workers received not only a share of the profits but a premium for the gallons of sweat involved.
The Tsărăgĭ Congregation even started what Ahyoka called a research university in Moncks Corner. It was a modest establishment, with few teachers at first.
Bolo’s Notes
Wassamassaw Research University is now famous, of course, as the birthplace of numerous modern technological innovations, including the computerized roll-up and modern wireless wearable communicators. As the university expanded and Tsărăgĭ wealth grew, the university began to offer premium wages to European teachers who were willing to join the congregation. There were few religious stipulations for joining, aside from signing a document. Other congregations observed this model. Thus, although it began as a national weakness, education thrived under the congregational system. By the end of the 19th century, universities throughout the Carolina Union were magnets for instructors from across the globe.
I first met Ahyoka at her unfinished monastery in Moncks Corner shortly after I founded the Vanguard of Mary Congregation. At that time, I was unsure of myself, unaware that a woman could even consider leading a church. My expectations had been colored by European ways. I began my congregation with little confidence that it could succeed. Ahyoka convinced me otherwise.
Notes
You’ll find out more when the novel is released. The novel is finished. I don’t know quite yet when it will be available to purchase. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll be among the first to know.
Those of us who live in cities like Atlanta and Chicago (and many others) recognize that there is an emerging Black Renaissance. This novel simply imagines it beginning a wee bit earlier.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
This is true in our timeline, as well. Charleston city leaders were aware that trees sucked in the bad air and cranked out good air.
Also true from a historical standpoint in our timeline.