Kiana Davenport’s
latest novel is a powerful epic about the American Civil War, which extends
this beloved writer’s vision to an entirely new level. Based on her family
history, it is at once an historical novel, a haunting love story, and a
brilliant expose on the treatment of minorities during the Civil War. Meticulously researched, it is finally a
story of human sacrifice and personal redemption. A magnificent novel that crosses all genres, THE SPY LOVER (Thomas & Mercer;
August 28; $14.95) is a work of astonishing beauty that promises to become a
classic.
Johnny Tom, a
Chinese immigrant, and his beautiful Creek Indian wife, and daughter, Era, live
in Shisan, a Chinese settlement along the Mississippi
River. Their life is simple and idyllic, until Confederate soldiers
invade the town, kidnap the men and force them into service, fighting for the
South and slavery. At the first opportunity, many Chinese soldiers defect to
the Union Army. In revenge, the Confederates return to Shisan to rape and
torture their wives and daughters. Defiled and half-mad, Era sets out to find
her father and is plunged into the full savagery and horror of the War. Lured by Union officials to pose as a nurse
while spying on the Confederate army, she falls in love with a wounded
Confederate cavalryman, and her loyalties become divided between her beloved
father in the North, and the gallant soldier who sustains her in the South.
THE SPY LOVER is ostensibly a novel
about the abiding love between a man and a woman, between a father and
daughter, and the love of a man for his country. Ultimately, it is a meditation
on the ethical choice, on honoring one’s moral obligation.
EXCERPT
Each
night his dreams begin with rice, the taste and texture of each grain aligned
to parallel his hunger. But some nights his dreams are seized by Laughter and
by Rain, two women so merged in his past they run together like mercury. In his
sleep, he calls out to them in words that make no sense in English. At first
light, he sits up and rests his weary head against his arm’s hard cradle. Dawn
lends a greenish cast to his sallow face, and in the cold his lips lo
ok mauve. Around him, wounded soldiers call out to their
mothers; others lie still, so frail the weight of the air can scarcely be
borne.
With stiffened fingers, Johnny scratches
at the earth, lifts a small mound of dirt to his lips, and swallows, remembering
how Raindance loved eating ashes from the fire. Thoughtfully, he pulls up
blades of grass, arranging them to spell out the names of his wives. Laughter. Raindance.
He presses each blade to his lips and thinks of his daughter, lost somewhere in
the madness. If she survives, will her
half-Chinese womb be fruitful? Will she give me immortality?
Wolves howl across the fogged Virginia mountains as a camp
guard approaches, his face raw from the Piedmont cold. He kicks at a Federal
prisoner who has been horribly shot up, then turns his attention to Johnny.
“Say something.” He nudges him with his
rifle butt. “G’wan! Say somethin’…I wanna hear what one o’ you sounds like.”
Johnny hesitates, then speaks in
careful English. “You will…live…long fruitful…life…”
The man guffaws and shouts to his
friends. “Hear that, boys? Hear what the pigtail said?” He unbuttons his filthy
pants and aims at Johnny’s foot, pissing a steaming arc that instantly draws
flies.
Johnny whispers after him. “Dog’s
vomit! Wild pigs will gorge on your liver.”
Breathing in the acrid smell of
sewage, he shudders, as throughout the stockade typhus spreads. There is no
food, no fresh water for prisoners. Corpses lie unburied, slowly becoming their
own moist graves. Men who try to bury them are shot. He crawls inside his
ragged tent and pulls a cricket from his breast pocket, and chirps softly. The
cricket chirps back. Its carapace is lovely, the color of chrysanthemum tea
whose steam is blue. Its ferocious little face is shaped like a hatchet and the
beady eyes shift like a gangster, making Johnny smile. The cricket has given
him hours of pleasure and soon he will let it go. He is less kind to lice,
snapping them between his teeth with a popping sound, swallowing them for
nourishment.
He lies back, thinking how in his
homeland great famines had spared him. Monsoons had clamored over him, bringing
floods that washed whole villages away. Why
I was spared to end like this? He wonders. No one to mourn my death, no
one to wail. No one to offer meats and fruits, or burn paper money at Ching
Ming time so I not starve in the Afterlife.
He rolls over, striking the earth
softly with his forehead, his long queue bouncing down his back. Be brave! Remember was born in Year of the
Boar. He thinks back on all that has befallen him and—always pleased to be
amazed—feels almost grateful for this war, for having cured him of his
childhood.
Is
no worse than drought, which then brought clouds of locusts burying the land. He
remembers how they swarmed to three feet deep, devouring crops, then harnesses
on oxen, handles on farm tools. How they layered the walls of houses until each
house collapsed, then crawled down the throats of humans and laid their eggs, smothering
them to death in the tens, then hundreds, of thousands.
He remembers how the aftermath of
locusts brought famine. Which then
brought madness, people eating their elders, their dead children, while Emperor
smoked opium in jade-lined rooms. It had been rumored by the Emperor’s
enemies that when his eunuchs told him of the famine, millions dead, he dreamily
replied, “Jan Yeh, Jan Yeh.” So it is. His eunuchs had smiled
indulgently, and resumed decoding the secret life of chopsticks.
And
war is no worse than bandits, armies of them growing in famine’s wake.
From
one catastrophe to the next, one generation to the next, his people had grown
to hold their lives as worthless. That part of China
deep in the province
of Shensi became so
destitute and ravaged it robbed their lives of all meaning. Johnny’s village, a
collection of weed-and-mud huts in the backwater swamps of the great Yellow River, no longer attracted rain and so their
fields did not come to fruition. Water became so rare, a mere bucketful was
traded for precious flint and iron with which men had created flames. Without
water or fire, their village began to die.
When there was no dead flesh left to
consume, people ate dirt. Johnny’s mother grew dreadfully thin and yet her
stomach swelled. One day, his father put his fingers down her throat and pulled
out a worm, twisting and twisting until the ball of the thing was as big as a
fist. Fascinated, Johnny and younger brother, Ah Fat, watched as their mother
deflated and the ball of worm grew big as a melon, until finally their father
pulled out the head, wide as his thumb with eyes and a mouth. While their
mother expired, villagers stretched the worm from end to end of the village, then
hacked it in sections to be shared.
Their father looked down at the
swelling stomachs of his sons and whispered,
“Run!
So you not become worm-dumplings.”
The brothers had fled. After months
of foraging and thieving their way through squalid villages, they came upon a
parklike town called Po Lin, Precious
Lotus, outside the great city of Chiangnan,
where scholars and merchants had built summer homes. In Po Lin, the two boys had
squatted in the shadows, watching people languidly repose, eat sugared lotus
seeds, and bathe in scented waters. Even the lowliest citizens spoke in the
scholarly tongue of Mandarin, and even the thieves comported themselves with
dignity.
It was such a wondrously civilized
town that Imperial Censors and District Magistrates from Chiangnan stopped
their palanquins outside the town
gates while retainers trimmed their ear hairs and nose hairs, clipped their
toenails and fingernails and scented their sleeves before they entered. Though
they were swiftly run out of town as famine refugees, it was Po Lin that taught
the brothers to dream, to imagine that one day they could become prosperous and
admired. Looking back, Johnny sees that though his life has been eventful, he
never quite achieved these goals. Yet, I am prisoner of war. Is that not
honorable thing to be?
***
He
looks round the filthy stockade at prisoners huddled together, their
expressions those of old children waiting to die. The Battle
at Kernstown, in Jackson’s
Valley Campaign, had been disastrous for Union forces. Ashamed of their defeat
and capture, a boy gone mad has hanged himself.
But
we will soon win, Johnny thinks. In
Christian God’s eyes, Union Army is right, Confederates wrong. He wonders
if in fact this Christian God has eyes. Does he have a generous American nose? He
cannot imagine such a being; in China
one worshipped only the Emperor. But now Johnny is here, fighting for the
Union, and he has been told that when the Union
wins, he will become an American citizen.
His comrades tell him that to
achieve citizenship it is important to know the Christian Bible that so many
soldiers quote from and sleep with, and carry into battle. Hoping to barter for
such a book, with a sharpened stone he whittles away at branches, bird skulls
and rat skulls, fashioning little brooches and whatnots. Focused on his
carvings, he is not fully aware of how his comrades regard him—some with lazy
curiosity, others with outright hostility. A slender but wiry little man with
smooth yellow skin, a shaven foreskull, and long black pigtail, he looks
alternately playful and threatening.
His command of spoken English is
fair, but when confused or tense he drops his articles, barks out made-up words
that sound like hat tricks. Most irksome to the prison guards is how relentlessly
he smiles, especially when sad or frightened or embarrassed. Just now he thinks
of his wife and daughter, wondering if they have survived. He whittles at a
branch and smiles.
At first, his comrades had
interpreted Johnny’s smile as craftiness; he had defected from the Other Side, perhaps
a spy. Then they saw how ferocious he was in skirmishes with the enemy. And he
was sly, with the movements of a cat. Sometimes he moved so fast he appeared to
be there, and not there. They had seen him drive a sharpened branch straight
through a Rebel’s eardrums, after which he dangled the corpse by the branch
like something hanging from a clothesline. They had watched him strangulate a
man, leap from behind and slash his jugular so swiftly he went down with a
sigh. He once showed them how to render a man a eunuch with their teeth, a
practice swiftly banned by the company commander.
Still, seasoned troopers are wary of
him, his broken English, his sallow skin, the way he slides his glances along
without moving his head. But they are prisoners and desperate, and younger men
begin to look to him, sharing meals of grilled rat he has trapped. And when
there is only grass to chew, they sit close and listen to Johnny’s stories that
sometimes resemble Scriptures from the Bible. He is generous with his memories,
knowing it will be the talking and listening that saves them.
“Busy tongue,” he tells them, “keeps
fear in shadows, hope alive.”
But often he sits alone. Because of
his modest grasp of English, he cannot join in discussions with men who speak a
slangy shorthand; he cannot joke with them like brothers. After years in America, he has
begun to feel nowhere and half-where, a man who still speaks English like a
child, and speaks his Mother Tongue with half a tongue. In his desire to become
American, he has begun to squeeze Chinese from his brain.
One day he strikes a bargain. In
return for his stories, a boy will loan him his Bible for an hour every day. And
so each day at the appointed time, Johnny hunches over the Good Book and
follows words discreetly with his finger. Leviticus.
Deuteronomy. Words that threaten to deform his jaw. When he attempts to
pronounce them aloud, his mouth feels as if it will fall off in his hands. Still,
he perseveres.
Later, he gathers boys hungry to the
point of death and recounts earlier times of hunger in his life: two brothers
in rag-shoes, foraging for food while winds harvested their icicled brows. He
and Ah Fat had finally arrived in Yangchow on the Yangtze
River, but so had millions of beggars, and bamboo yokes nearly
broke their slender shoulders as they carried gourds and roots, begging folks
to buy. When no one bought, they stalked old men, knocking them down for
rice-balls.
“One day, we see public execution of
man who sell his queue. Bald heads against Emperor’s edict. So! Ax flies, man’s
head roll between my legs. Then family of executed man rush forward waving
thread and needles, join head and body back together so his spirit be whole in
Afterlife, so he not wander in little pieces. Even execution have happy
ending.”
Their lives vacillating between
starvation and the executioner’s ax, one day the two boys had stood on the
docks of Yangchow, gaping at big American ships
and their well-fed crews. Cautiously, they approached a ship where long-nosed
men with ruddy faces signed on a crew. They walked up the gangway to beckoning
sailors, but before they could ask about wages, canvas sacks were thrown over
them and they were rolled down to the galleys with a thousand other kidnapped
Chinese.
While Johnny “talks story.” he adds
little asides and footnotes, believing that they give bones and gristle to a
tale.
“Only Chinese tongsee…sugarmasters…treated
well as part of crew. Old experts in sugar refining, they badly needed all over
world wherever was sugar plantations.”
Thus, he and his brother, Ah Fat, had
arrived in the Hawaiian Isles far across the Pacific Ocean.
“After many months at sea, ho! First
gulp of island air so clean, flowers so perfume it make us sick for days.”
And it was here at Honolulu
Immigrations that his name had been changed to Johnny. “My real name Zhong Yi, Needle
Master, for my fingers shaped like such masters who cure illness by pushing
needles into flesh. My poor mama dream one day I become such revered needle
man.”
He holds out his hands, showing
long, slender fingers, so incongruous to his wiry, cunning body.
“Immigration man cannot make tongue
say ‘Zhong Yi,’ so change name to Johnny!”
A boy with gangrened feet leans
forward. “What happened next? Did you meet cannibals in those islands?”
“No cannibals. We taken to outer
island so large was called Moku Nui, Big Island.
Here I meet brown-shouldered girl, Mahealani Hanohano. Her name so ha-full I give
up! I call her Laughter.”
His eyes close, he drifts, hearing
her laughter like temple bells, while he recalls how he and mobs of Chinese
were trucked to sugar plantations as forced labor, and how in time he and the
girl had found each other. Still, Johnny grew to detest the crippling work of
cutting cane—machete wounds, infections, food that left them a hair’s breadth
from starvation—and white plantation owners with their vicious luna foremen.
They had been forced to sign labor
contracts for three years, or be returned to China where they would be swiftly
executed. No matter that they had been kidnapped; the Emperor had not granted
them exit favors.
“No choice but work like slaves or
die. In first year, eighteen men hang themselves.”
Still, when Johnny lay with Laughter
the lion of contentment stretched its paw across his chest. But then the girl
broke his heart and disappeared. He began to hear rumors of California, how streets were paved with
gold. He began looking toward the sea. One day, Laughter’s father hacked his
way through the cane fields, threatening to cut off Johnny’s testicles for
giving his daughter a “yellow monkey” baby.
Fearing for his manhood, he gambled
his wages for passage on a ship and sailed for San Francisco. The day he departed, Laughter
appeared at the dock, holding their child, and as she frantically waved her
uplifted arm, so slender and defenseless, it touched his heart. He pleaded with
the captain to drop anchor, allow him to rescue his wife and child, and take
them with him. The captain laughed. The ship sailed on.
A boy with a helmet of head lice
moves closer, gums gone black, his teeth a rich, rice-paddy green. “What
happened next, Johnny? Did you get to San
Francisco?”
He nods his head, exhausted. “A tale
for tomorrow’s ears.”
Dark now, and cold. Prisoners, pressed
together for warmth, snore fitfully. He wanders to his tent, but it is someone
else’s hour in the tent. He lies down and hunches up, pulls his long queue over
his shoulder, and thinks of Second Wife, Raindance. He has been gone almost a
year, his letters not answered. Perhaps she thinks he deserted her. Perhaps she
thinks he is dead.
Pencils have no purpose here. Paper
has become a source of food; men are eating their Bibles. As boys, he and Ah
Fat had grown their pinky fingernails to long, sharp points, ideal for snapping
lice in half and for digging insects out of ears. Lately, he had adopted a more
urgent application for his extended fingernail—penning letters to Raindance on
the palm of his hand.
Each day he “writes in his journal,”
pressing down hard with his pointed nail so that the letter of each word is
briefly visible on his palm. A process slow and laborious, so the words have
come to feel engraved like scars. In this way, he memorizes each word he
writes: each rice-ball belly of a C, each listing chopstick of an M, imprinted
upon his brain. Thus he is able to read his letters over and over in his head.
“My honorable and cherished Raindance,
To
continue with my story…We fought hard at Kernstown in Shenandoah
Valley. Ah, but even so, they bested us. Speed of our defeat
astounding, hundreds our soldiers turn and ran. Now prisoners, we are dead
weary, dog hungry. Much death before and after dark.
Still
I slaughter many enemy, make many children orphans. For this my dreams are
haunted. In battle I run over dead like logs. Run over many faces. White, red, even
Russian, French. See many hundreds stomachs burst. Strange skins of many hues, but
intestines all same color!…”
Now and then, while Johnny writes, he
pauses, searching for a word.
“We
die for clean water. Here is only sewage. So, are forced to drink our ruin. At
first men turn away, disgusted. I tell them is old Chinese custom in famine and
drought. They watch silent when I drink my ruin. When I not die, they drink
their ruin too.
Most
uncomfortable news. Chinese boy from Kentucky in our brigade, caught as spy for
Rebels. Soldiers pour gasoline down his throat, then light match and stick up
nose. He explode, float down in little rags. Even so, I wonder, would they do
such thing to Rebel spy with white skin?…”
He stops writing and flexes his hand,
softly repeating what he has written, trying to memorize each word. Then he
begins the hard part—deleting in his mind what is not essential. He scribbles
in his palm again, frowning with concentration.
“How
I will remember everything? Am living
so many lives my brain become a stone sinking to forgetful depths. Will you
believe such tales I write? Will our daughter? Is fitting for young girl to
know such things?…”
His daughter is sixteen now, or eighteen.
The war has done strange things to his mind. Is she still beautiful? he wonders. Does she still have special love for books? And does she read to
Raindance?
He moans softly, recalling his wife’s scent,
honeysuckle, wildcat hide, the glow of her copper-colored breasts. Then he returns to his writing, fingernail
busy scratching at his palm, practicing words whose spelling gives him trouble.
Urine. Ruin.
***
Captain
Jenson from his regiment approaches, a young man so weary and gaunt his head
seems too large for his frame. “How are you keeping, Private Tom?”
Johnny jumps to his feet and
salutes. “OK, sir! Everything OK.”
“At ease, man. I want to commend you
for keeping up morale, cheering the boys with your stories. And I don’t want
you thinking on that Chinese boy, Elijah Low. He was a spy and got what he
deserved.”
He straightens up, tightening a
filthy bandage made into an arm-sling. “I’ve watched you on the battlefield. You’re
one of the bravest men in our regiment. I’m proud to have you serving under
me.”
Embarrassed, Johnny nods repeatedly
and smiles.
Jenson hesitates, then offers
something hidden in his fist. “Take it. I’m tired of seeing you whittle with
that hunk of stone.”
Johnny stares at a small,
bone-handled object with a button at one end. When he presses it, the blade
snaps out like a small, slender fish caught in a sheaf of sunlight. He strokes
the blade, remembering a similar knife he had given his daughter because it was
delicate like her. He folds the blade and slips the knife into his shoe.
For weeks, he spies on the captain
while he forages for roots with other prisoners, and while he lectures them to
keep their courage up. He spies on Jenson when he defecates, and squats beside
him while he sleeps, feeling forever attached to this young man because he has
given Johnny something infinitely more precious than a knife: the faint hope of
acceptance, of acknowledgment that he is human and brave, and therefore
significant.
He has observed the confidence of
Americans: that of accepting their lives completely, never wishing they were
anyone else, or that they were born anywhere else, or raised in any other way. Just
now, they may be wounded and starving, but they are secure in a way a Chinese
could never be. Captain Jenson’s pride in Johnny fills him with confidence, the
sense that he is becoming more like them, that he is becoming, incontrovertibly,
one of them. And so his spirits lift.
He presses on through months of near
starvation, of whippings by prison guards, of gangrene and typhus that take
more than half the prisoners. He presses on because he believes this time will
pass. America
is so large and generous it will never abandon or betray him. He has offered up
his life for it, and one day it will reward him by welcoming him as a citizen. He
moves through each day with burgeoning pride, almost with arrogance, as if his feet
had turned to dragon claws.
But on the day of his release, lined
up with fellow prisoners awaiting the exchange, Johnny sees crows darting
overhead in a floating and shifting calligraphy. Hearing their garrulous and
raucous cries, he looks up again and sees they have formed the Chinese
character for death.
The Spy Lover by
Kiana Davenport
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
I have to admit that I struggled to know how to rate this book. I will be up front--this is a very hard book to read. The writing style is fantastic. Kiana Davenport is a very descriptive writer, and you feel as though you are right there experiencing the action as it happens. But that is also what makes this a difficult read. Read on, and you may understand what I mean.
First of all, the story has very little profanity, and it does have some sex scenes (that are not graphic, thankfully). But these are not the disturbing items. The horrors of the Civil War are described in detail, and you may find yourself wanting to look away as though it were a scene in a film. I found myself experiencing cold shivers more than once. But I have to say that I am glad I read those parts. I don't think many of us have any idea of how horrific the Civil War was. And this author does her best to give us a glimpse (and be glad it is only a glimpse)of what it may have been like. And it is told from a perspective I have never considered--Chinese-American. Oh, and Chinese-Native American.
The story is tragic--I will warn you. It is not a feel-good romance that makes you feel all bubbly inside. This is a book full of reality, and you may long for the ending. But I believe I can say I am coming away from this book with a better understandig of the Civil War than I did. I would have liked some light-hearted moments, but it cccurs to me that this period of history was not light-hearted. It is a heavy topic. I found myself reliving some of the images from "Gone With the Wind" even though that movie couldn't do this time period true justice either.
So if you are ready for a history lesson in a chilling story, ths may be the book for you. Don't enter it lightly, but I believe you will come away from the book with a deeper understanding of a tumultuous time in American history.
I was sent a copy of ths book in exchange for my honest review. I was not financially compensated, and all opinions are 100 percent mine.
View all my reviews
About the Author:
Kiana Davenport is descended from a
full-blooded Native Hawaiian mother, and a Caucasian father from Talladega, Alabama.
Her father, Braxton Bragg Davenport, was a sailor in the U.S. Navy, stationed
at Pearl Harbor, when he fell in love with her
mother, Emma Kealoha Awaawa Kanoho Houghtailing. On her mother's side, Kiana
traces her ancestry back to the first Polynesian settlers to the Hawaiian
Islands who arrived almost two thousand years ago from Tahiti
and the Tuamotu's. On her father's side, she traces her ancestry to John
Davenport, the puritan clergyman who co-founded the American colony of New Haven, Connecticut
in 1638.
Kiana is the author of the
internationally best-selling novels, Shark
Dialogues, Song Of The Exile, and
House Of Many Gods. She is also the
author of the collections, House Of Skin
Prize-Winning Stories, and Cannibal
Nights, Pacific Stories Volume II. Both have been Kindle bestsellers. She
has just published her third collection, Opium
Dreams, Pacific Stories, Volume III.
Follow the entire tour
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