Swimming Between Worlds Read online

  Praise for Swimming Between Worlds

  “A perceptive and powerful story told with generosity and grace. The struggle of its deftly drawn young characters to navigate the monumental changes—cultural and personal—that the civil rights movement brought to the South is rich and compelling.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Charles Frazier

  “A smart and tender tale. I was left with admiration for Orr’s exquisite prose, along with an awareness of one simple truth: Sometimes it takes living in another culture to better understand your own. A beautiful book.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Diane Chamberlain

  “An original and important novel certain to take its place in American literature on race. The narrative unfolds with urgency and power, in graceful prose rich in sensuous detail. [Orr’s] finest work to date.”

  —Angela Davis-Gardner, author of Plum Wine

  “A blistering story told by a gifted writer. From the moment I began this compelling novel, it followed me around; the riveting plot and real-life characters would not let me go.”

  —Anna Jean Mayhew, author of The Dry Grass of August

  “Lush and sensuous. This poignant and triumphant story shows two Americans emerging in a complex time from their own sorrow and displacement to take on political unrest and the turmoils of love.”

  —Peggy Payne, author of Sister India

  “A touching love story . . . [and an] intelligently written and vivid evocation of a civil rights struggle that has heartbreaking relevance to the here and now.”

  —Eleanor Morse, author of White Dog Fell from the Sky

  “Poignant and agonizing, the novel captures the South the moment before the gun went off, prefiguring our current national trauma around race and society.”

  —Fenton Johnson, author of The Man Who Loved Birds

  “A captivating narrative about race, sex, nationality, generations, and romance, Orr’s expansive new novel fulfills the promise of her debut tour de force, A Different Sun. Her keen sense of historical impact and geographical detail keeps us reading and hoping for a sequel.”

  —Valerie Miner, author of Traveling with Spirits

  Also by Elaine Neil Orr

  A DIFFERENT SUN

  GODS OF NOONDAY:

  A WHITE GIRL’S AFRICAN LIFE

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Elaine Neil Orr

  Readers Guide copyright © 2018 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Excerpt from A Different Sun copyright © 2013 by Elaine Neil Orr

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Orr, Elaine Neil, author.

  Title: Swimming between worlds/Elaine Neil Orr.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024292 (print) | LCCN 2017019831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780425282731 (print) | ISBN 9780698406384 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Race relations—Fiction. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.R58843 L63 2018 (ebook) | LCC PS3615.R58843 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024292

  First Edition: April 2018

  Cover photograph of pool by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

  Cover design by Sandra Chiu

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Scarlett

  And in memory of

  Samuel Adegoke Adeniji

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank all those who helped me and supported me through the writing of this book.

  My family—mother, father, sister—for the sweet American year we shared in a foursquare on West End Boulevard. And then again, my mother, who encouraged my writing even as she left this sphere. My husband, Anderson Orr, who was my constant and best consultant on how to fashion this novel.

  My fabulous agent and friend, Joelle Delbourgo, who sold the proposal early and then served as the book’s best friend as Random House and Penguin merged and we experienced a number of tremors. My wonderful editor, Katherine Pelz, who caught this book on its fourth bounce and “got it” and loved it and told me exactly how to make it better and better. Thanks also to Natalee Rosenstein, Kendra Harpster, and finally and wonderfully Kate Seaver. And everyone else on the Berkley team who enthusiastically ushered my novel into the world.

  Those who offered significant research assistance—to them I am profoundly grateful: Yomi Durotoyo, my Yoruba guru; George Williamson, who participated in the Woolworth’s sit-in in Winston-Salem; Katherine Foster at the New Winston Museum; my colleague Jason Miller; tour guide Laura Giovanelli; and crucially, Fam Brownlee, renowned Winston-Salem historian, as well as Edwin F. “Abie” Harris, Jr., university architect emeritus, NC State University, who submitted to being interviewed and then read a draft of the book, commented, and offered important insight.

  Rebecca Walker and Rachel Harper, who spent an afternoon talking me through my beginnings. Wilton Barnhardt for important early conversation. My friends and early readers Nell Joslin, Angela Davis-Gardner, Virginia Ewing Hudson, Kate Blackwell, Dana Lindquist, Peggy Payne, and Jane Andrews. Later readers Deb Wyrick, Katy Yocom, Molly Beck, Marc Dudley, Nancy McCabe, and Fred Hobson. Tony Harrison, my department head, who championed my writing and offered every assistance possible.

  All my friends in the Spalding University low-residency MFA in Writing program, beginning with Sena Jeter Naslund, for their brilliance and cheer and encouragement. They are my writing village, my writing home.

  Friends and fellow writers of the North Carolina Writers’ Network and the North Carolina Writers Conference.

  The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences for significant time to write in beautiful and generous environments. I am also grateful to Cedar Cross Retreat Center for meditative writing time and to Toni and Dave Phillips at urbanpioneer.net for a week in a beautiful, historic quadriplex right on First Street, just around the corner from the foursquare in Winston-Salem.

  The “Do you remember Winston when . . . ?” Facebook page for entertaining many historical questions.

  Sister and friends who tended my spirit in a time of personal grief: Becky Albritton, Lynn Rhoades, Laura Murphy Frankstone, Nancy Osborne, and Kathryn Milam.

  Kathryn Stripling Byer for inspiration, invitation, example, and belief.

  The ones I love in their own precious lives: my son, Joel Orr, clear-eyed Scarlett Orr, and her mother and my dear friend, Dominique.

  Zachary Lunn and Blair Donahue for assists at the very end.

  And finally, thank you, readers, for indulging the liberty I have taken with Hanes Park. To my knowledge, th
ere never was a pool.

  Contents

  Praise for SWIMMING BETWEEN WORLDS

  Also by Elaine Neil Orr

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1959 Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Southwestern Nigeria, 1957 Chapter Six

  Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Late Fall 1959, into 1960 Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Osogbo, Nigeria, 1959 Chapter Twenty

  Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1960 Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Readers Guide

  Excerpt from A Different Sun

  About the Author

  Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

  Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

  —Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

  “This is just a geography lesson.”

  —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

  Prologue

  January 1958

  Ibadan, Nigeria

  EARLY MORNINGS ON the university compound were quiet as the dawn of the world. Tacker sipped his coffee. At the first distillation of light, a bird trilled. It was harmattan season and temperatures dipped into the sixties. Tacker pulled on his college sweater, the one his mother had thrown last minute into his duffel bag. He wasn’t thinking yet, only feeling the air, the hot cup in his hands. He stepped from the porch into the yard. A woman appeared on the road, and then another, cutting through the compound to the market. Their voices rose like bicycle bells.

  He thought about Jill, her long, smooth legs, the way she sat in the grass and later got up and dusted off the back of her skirt, bits of grass and leaf still sticking to the fabric as she walked off unawares. Did his college girlfriend still love him? He didn’t miss her. There was too much over here, too much every day pulling him like a magnet, life brighter and fuller than anything back home. He couldn’t explain the pull to his mother in letters or to his father the few times he had telephoned. It wasn’t like the pull of a girl. It was like a god.

  Winston-Salem,

  North Carolina

  1959

  Chapter One

  July 1959

  TACKER HART CAME home from Nigeria to discover a town he almost knew. The Winston-Salem of his youth was branded by Ardmore Methodist, Reynolds High, and shopping at Davis Department Store on Fourth Street, his youth green with creeks and football fields, turning white in winter with sledding and the Sears Christmas display. And then there was the depot of his father’s store, Hart’s Grocery, near the intersection of First Street and Hawthorne, right where Peters Creek ran. The grocery existed out of time, smelling of onions and floor wax, blooming with color in fruit displays and on cereal boxes, and sanctified by the community of regulars who stopped by for a special on ham hocks or conversation with Tacker’s father or the full week’s shopping and a drink from the Coca-Cola machine. Everyone was welcome, or so Tacker had thought.

  Almost two years later and the air still carried the high, sweet smell of tobacco, but there was an expressway through town that nipped at the heels of West End, the neighborhood where he’d grown up, and that occasionally—where an elevated section curved near Hawthorne—threw a car over the guardrails and passengers to their deaths. Thruway Shopping Center had grown up in his absence like a film set temporarily installed, only it wasn’t temporary. Tacker’s mother drove out there almost every day. Wake Forest College was the new boast of the city, which was fair enough, though Tacker had no investment in it, having studied architecture at State College in Raleigh, flourishing in the competitive atmosphere of design studios housed on a huge courtyard on the north side of campus.

  More changed than Winston-Salem was Tacker. He had left home a minor American hero and returned disgraced. The thought of his violent dismissal from an international assignment with the Clintok Corporation hollowed his chest even now, four months after his return.

  When Tacker first got home in March, he stayed up late and slept until midmorning. On and off in the night, he woke to a perception of malignant doom, a feeling in his chest like a container filling with terror. There was no escape as the vessel filled, the sensation taking over his entire chest—filling and filling—until he thought it would explode, and then just as the container of his heart was about to burst, it did not. The terror held, containing him rather than he it. He wondered if he was having a heart attack. He would sleep and awaken and the episode would recur, as if he were coming out of nightmare into nightmare. During the day his face felt heavy. He marveled at a blooming red crepe myrtle across the street that appeared at midday to burn like fire, and yet it seemed to him that the inner light of things had dimmed. Perhaps it was merely the contrast with the tropics that he sensed, but Tacker suspected the dimness had more to do with what he had learned. The world was not just and neither God nor any teacher or coach or sponsor was going to save him. Occasionally he felt angry instead of depressed, overcome by righteous indignation. He’d done nothing wrong. But the fire flickered out pretty quickly.

  There wasn’t anything he wanted to do.

  After dinner one evening in July, his father spoke up. “Get your architectural license. I can make a connection for you.” They were in the family den. Tacker stood by the mantel, gazing at a picture he had sent from Nigeria, the country of his assignment. He had gone to help design the prototype for a high school to be replicated throughout the country and to establish American goodwill in an African nation on its way to independence.

  “I don’t want to do architecture right now,” he said. In the photograph, he was posed with his Nigerian teammates, ten in all, graduates of Nigeria’s first university, in front of a banana tree grove. His hair was below his ears because he hadn’t found a barber. Tacker was the tallest, his arms saddled around his best friend, Samuel Ladipo’s, shoulders, a smile on his face. A local photographer had taken the picture and sold it to Tacker for a shilling. Tacker marveled that his clothes, and not just his skin, were so much lighter than the others’, his figure ghosted. He turned to his parents, neither of whom was looking at him. His father wore a look of pained disapproval.

  They were in a quagmire and Tacker had put them there, but he was too sunk to pull anyone out. Even with his father kindly opening a door, he could not walk through it. He left the house for a walk around the block but walked much farther than that, all the way to th
e tobacco warehouses at the end of Trade Street, where he lay back on an overflowing bag of tobacco leaves, half intoxicated by the scent, and looked up at the stars. Why couldn’t he feel proud? He’d stood up for what he’d believed, hadn’t he? But Tacker was accustomed to triumph. An inglorious sacking left a man wholly alone. When he got home after midnight, the lights in the den were out but his mother had waited up for him. She picked up just where he thought he had escaped.

  “What are you going to do?” she said, peering through her new wing-tipped glasses. When Tacker was a boy his mother had worn nylon dresses with pearl buttons all the way down the front and he’d thought she was the most beautiful person in the world.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have been home all spring and half the summer. People are beginning to wonder what’s wrong.” She rose from her seat. “You have to move out and get a job. This is too hard on us.”

  “Maybe I could work at Hart’s.” Tacker rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe I could manage the store.”

  “I don’t know about that.” His mother’s lips wrenched to one side of her face. “You haven’t demonstrated very responsible behavior lately. What happened to you over there?”

  Tacker looked at her. “I learned that there’s a world outside this town,” he said. “That we’re not the be-all, end-all of the universe.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “This country, the way we live.”

  “How do we live?”

  “Superficially.”

  “Well, Mr. Universe, I’ll leave the question of your employment to your father. I don’t much like being called superficial. I gave birth to you, in case you’ve forgotten that particular tidbit.” She smacked the door open on her way out of the room.

  * * *

  • • •