After close to a decade of armed war between pro-slavery and free-state forces, Kansas joined the Union as a Free State on January 29, 1861. This led an enraged South to fire on Ft. Sumter and secede from the Union three months later.
My family moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1951, when I was four. Our first few nights in town were spent at the Eldridge Hotel, which had been the headquarters for the anti-slavery leadership – it was twice burned to the ground by so-called border ruffians.
I grew up on the legends of the free state. In 1954, for the centennial of the founding of Lawrence, we acted out the bravery of the free-state women. They sewed bullets into their crinolines to smuggle ammunition past the slavers, and they held onto homesteads in the face of arson and horrific assaults at the hands of slavers.
That history has always haunted me. I’ve continued to read about it, and write about it, through a number of short stories and in three previous novels. Pay Dirt brings VI Warshawski to my hometown, far outside her comfort zone, although the crimes she faces are all too familiar to her.
As I immersed myself in Kansas history for Pay Dirt, my reading included the diaries and letters of anti-slavery women. My novel is set in the present, but the backstory dates to the Civil War. Characters in the present-day novel have ancestors who trace their history to those violent times.
In all the books and stories I’ve set in Kansas, I’ve used members of four families: the Grelliers, who were idealistic abolitionists; the Schapens, who were anti-slavery but also wanted their own farm; the Perecs, who were professional people – lawyers and the like – and not farmers; and the Everards, who had farmland but also were professional people in the town.
As I worked on character studies for Pay Dirt, I created a number of diaries and letters, particularly those written by Sophia Grellier, the character I keep coming back to in my Kansas writing. In the end I cut most of the 19th-century diaries and letters I created for the book. This was a hard decision, because these diaries were what drew me deep into my story.
I’m sharing here excerpts from Sophia’s journal, written in the aftermath of the destruction of her idealistic father’s school. The school served people of all races, genders and previous conditions of servitude – in 1867 as in 2024 that roused some people to terrifying violence.
29th September 1867
The past two weeks have been a blur of horror piled on top of horror, with nothing but desolation in their wake. The murder of Father, Miss Carruthers, and two of our dear pupils came just as I was approaching the school.
Father had received ugly letters condemning the school, and condemning him for “conserting with a n- whore.” The letters ordered him to close the school or pay with his life. “We don’t need n- here, and edicated n- is the worse.”
The day of the murders I was approaching the school with a supply of milk and bread so that the children could have a nuncheon, when I saw the cowardly demons throwing kerosene on the building and setting it ablaze. I screamed and ran, scattering milk and bread. The monsters fled, but by the time I reached the school it was a bonfire. Father and Miss Carruthers were heroic, sacrificing themselves to move the children to safety. I smothered their smoldering clothes in my skirts, which fell to rags around my legs by the time we were finished.
Kind Mr. Schapen saw the blaze and drove over with his wagon. He and I stood helpless in front of the conflagration. As soon as the flames had died near the entrance, we saw the bodies of our dear ones, charred and contorted from the fire, with the last two of the children.
Mr. Schapen took the surviving children to their parents in the settlement the town’s Colored folk have built near the hill they call Yancy.
I could not bear to leave Father or Miss Carruthers, although I knew I must find the strength to break the terrible news to Mother. If there is indeed a God, I pray he reward Mr. Schapen for his support and friendship throughout that terrible day, for he went to Mother, came back with more men and a wagon to carry the bodies to the undertaker to be fitted with coffins, and then stayed with Mother and me until the worst of her overwrought nerves could be calmed.
Once the funeral was over, Mother announced her intention to return to New York state. She needs more support than I can provide, alas. It is a sad reversal of roles, her need to return to the Auburn district. Twelve years ago, she was alight with a different kind of fire, kindled with the desire to loose the bondsman’s chains. It was I, eight years old, who cried bitter tears at leaving my grandparents, my friends, my little bedroom hung with white muslin curtains. But poor Mother – she lost one babe on the journey to Kansas, and five more little bodies are now joined by their Father in this prairie cemetery. She can take no more sorrow, no more hardship. Grandmother Entwistle may purse her lips up in displeasure, and cry that she has her reward for marrying a man with more ideals than common sense, but she and my aunt Hypatia will nurse Mother back to health.
I helped her pack her trunk, and saw her safe into the cars taking her east. And then went to pay my respects to Mrs. Carruthers. I had not approached her at her daughter’s funeral. She was wrapped in the bosom of her family and friends and I confess I was worn to the bone by the events of the week, and of Father’s funeral. Today, when I went to see how she was getting on, and if there was anything I could do, I found only empty houses. A strange white man, missing so many teeth I could barely make out his speech, cackled in a horrible way and said, “The n-‘s had all made tracks, and a good thing, too. They’d a disappeared in the night afore we could burn them down.”
May 30 1867
Mrs. Wheelock has built herself a fine house – rather, mansion, I should say. Five bedrooms, with a fireplace in the main bedroom, and three more fireplaces on the ground floor. All are tiled with elegant porcelain imported from the Netherlands, and the mantels themselves carved from walnut. Water is pumped into the house from a deep well.
Mrs. Wheelock had an at-home this past Sunday so that the rest of us could admire her new dwelling. We were let in through an ornate double-door inside the veranda that covers the north half of the house. The mistress sternly instructed us to scrape our shoes clean on the scraper and mats inside the door.
When she saw I was among the party, albeit not truly in the party, she first wanted to deny me entrance
All is richly furnished and appointed. An oaken staircase, wide, carpeted in burgundy drugget, rises from the entry hall to the second story. The banister is carved with oak leaves.
Draperies from the best of the English mills hang at the parlor windows. To my mind, the most luxurious feature was the intricate system of pumping water into the house. There is a water fountain in the second-story hallway where water pumped from the deep well issues from a silver-plated tap recessed into the hall wall. Water from the same pipes issue into a washbasin in the bedroom on the other side of the wall. However, there is no mechanism for heating the water, so our hostess admitted, reluctantly, that bathing must still be done by heating buckets on the great range in the kitchen.
Alas, poor Papa never had a mind to make money, and so I continue living in the small house we built when we first arrived in Kansas. I say, “we,” but truly it was the work of Mr. Schapen and other abolitionists with more practical skills than Papa possessed. The first bitter winter, when snakes and rodents came freely into our single room through the wide spaces between the boards, remains a terrible memory. Mother and I fled into town for the winter, which was our salvation, as two of the neighboring ladies actually had their feet amputated when the frost from the unfinished floors penetrated their boots and socks. The next year, Mr. Schapen, Mr. Ogle, and Mr. Edwards built a proper house for us, with three whole rooms!
Mother secretly pined for the house in Skaneateles. She had chidden me so many times for my mourning my own lost bedroom and its muslin curtains that she was ashamed of complaining aloud over our three rooms. They were well sided, though, and our second winter we were able to remain in the house, and protect our land from marauding border ruffians.
I will confess that the visit to Mrs. Wheelock left a bitter taste behind. Not from envy, although I do envy the luxury of such a home. No, it is the location. Mr. Wheelock has by one means or another acquired five thousand acres of land in the Wakarusa and Kansas River Valleys. He could have built a stately mansion on any one of those acres, and yet chose to use the site of the Freedom School that Papa and Miss Carruthers worked so hard to create. Could that little scrap of land not have been left as sacred ground?
PAY DIRT by Sara Paretsky
V.I. Warshawski #22
A Novel
Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a mystery with roots dating back to the Civil War in this edge-of-your-seat thriller from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky.
V.I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her sardonic humor, and her unflinching courage. All that changes when a case ends with a father killing the child she’d been hired to find. She’s second-guessing herself, forgetting to eat, forgetting her workout.
Her worried friends send her down to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball; Angela, one of her protégées, is a Northwestern star. And that’s when V.I.’s troubles really begin.
Sabrina, one of Angela’s roommates, disappears and V.I. agrees to stay behind to try to find her. Finding a missing person in a town where she doesn’t know anyone and has no snitches is hard, but not as hard as the local reaction to the detective. When V.I. finds Sabrina close to death in a drug house, the mother’s gratitude quickly turns to suspicion. V.I. finds herself in the FBI’s crosshairs, and the young men running the county’s opioid distribution are not happy.
When V.I. discovers a local troublemaker’s dead body in the drug house a few days later, she is pitched headlong into a local land-use battle with roots going back to the Civil War.
Today’s combatants are just as willing as opponents in the 1860s to kill to settle their differences. V.I.’s survival depends on keeping one step ahead of players in a game she doesn’t even know she’s playing.
Mystery Hard Boiled | Mystery Woman Sleuth | Thriller [William Morrow, On Sale: April 16, 2024, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063010932 / eISBN: 9780063010956]
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About Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world with her fictional detective, V I Warshawski. In addition to her best-selling series of crime novels, Paretsky has edited three short story collections and written the memoir Writing in an Age of Silence. Paretsky’s deep-rooted concern for social justice, the hallmark of her novels, has carried her voice beyond the world of crime fiction. As a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The Guardian, and a speaker at such places as the Library of Congress and Oxford University, she is an impassioned advocate for those on society’s margins.
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