Heresy Read online

  Copyright

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

  Copyright © 2018 by Melissa Lenhardt

  Author photograph by Amy Freshwater

  Cover design by Crystal Ben

  Cover photographs by Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Redhook Books/Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

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  First Edition: October 2018

  Redhook is an imprint of Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group.

  The Redhook name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Lenhardt, Melissa, author.

  Title: Heresy / Melissa Lenhardt.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Redhook Books/Orbit, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018019893| ISBN 9780316435352 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316435338 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Westerns. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Western stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.E529 H47 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019893

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-43535-2 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-43533-8 (ebook)

  E3-20180823-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE: THE LEGEND OF HATTIE LACOUR

  1 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  2 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  3 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  4 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  5 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  6 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  7 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  8 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  9 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  10 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  11 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  PART TWO: THE DUCHESS

  Colorado Woman Suffrage Association

  12 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  13 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  14 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  15 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  16 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  PART THREE: THE PINKERTON

  17 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  18 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  19 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  20 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  21 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  PART FOUR: THE KILLER

  22 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  23 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  24 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  25 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  26 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  27 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  28 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  29 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  30 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  PART FIVE: FAMILY IS THICKER THAN BLOOD

  31 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  32 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  33 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  34 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  35 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  36 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  37 Margaret Parker’s Journal

  38 Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  PART SIX: THE AFTERCLAPS

  39 Margaret Parker’s Final Journal Entry

  40 WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  Forgotten Women Podcast (Transcript)

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Meet the Author

  By Melissa Lenhardt

  Newsletters

  For Jenny, without whose support and encouragement this book would never have happened

  “Men have been faithful about noting every heroic act of their half of the race, and now it should be the duty, as well as the pleasure, of women to make for future generations a record of the heroic deeds of the other half.”

  —Susan B. Anthony

  Introduction

  DR. STEPHANIE BAILEY

  PROFESSOR OF WESTERN AMERICAN HISTORY

  UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER

  This story starts, like so many others, in an attic.

  One thing I’ve learned as a historian is that stories, especially ones about the forgotten, are rarely told in a straight line. It would be wonderful if, in the process of cleaning out the house of a dearly departed elderly relative, an heir disgruntled with the enormous task of sifting through decades of memories discovered a treasure trove of correspondence, journals, and newspaper articles bundled together in order, with extant copies of letters both to and from to give clarity to the story. That rarely happens, most often because the heirs either don’t understand the importance of the brittle bundle of letters bound by a faded red ribbon, or they don’t care. They may keep the letters with the intention of reading them, but shove them in the back of a drawer for the next generation to discover, and wonder at whose faint scrawl covered pages and pages of a dry, cracked leather journal. Or, more often, they toss them, and one more person is lost to history.

  Being a historian who focuses on women in American history, I have a vast network of friends and colleagues who love history, who see it slipping through our hands as our society moves ever faster away from our heritage and into the digital age. These estate agents, antiques dealers, amateur historians, collectors, and librarians want to see our history preserved as much as I do. When they come across something that might be of particular interest to me, they give me a call, or sometimes an unexpected package arrives at my door. The latter is how I came to be in possession of Margaret Parker; or, Saints and Outlaws: A Tale of the Old West.

  A friend of mine with a penchant for antique books, first editions, and obscure literature found the penny dreadful at the Round Top Texas Antique Fair. The antiques vendor told her it had been found in the attic of a Galveston mansion that was being turned into a bed-and-breakfast. She knew what it was, and how valuable it might be, despite being only a fragment of the whole story, the moment she saw it. She paid $150 for the brittle, yellowed pages with print so faded in places as to be unreadable. When she got home and did some research, she realized that its publisher had been a penny dreadful writer himself, and had made his fortune by writing an Old West blooder loosely based on real events. She could find no reference to Saints and Outlaws online. On the off chance this one might also be based on actual events, she copied the pages and sent them to me
.

  Penny dreadfuls, also known as penny horribles, penny bloods, penny awfuls, and blooders, were popular in Victorian England, having their heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. With roots in Gothic novels, these sensational serials offered outlandish tales of adventure, villainy, horror, and romance. Printed on cheap paper and sold for a penny apiece, they weren’t made to last, which is why so few copies exist. This particular dreadful was published in 1890, at the tail end of the penny dreadful glory days, and published in the States, which never had the same appetite for the outlandish as the British Victorians.

  I read the incomplete blooder and almost immediately dismissed it as total fiction. Saints and Outlaws is the story of a young female adventurer traveling through Colorado who gets caught up in a stagecoach robbery. The robbers kidnap her, for no reason other than that the author needed a kidnapping in the first few pages, it seems, and our heroine soon discovers they are women disguised as men. The adventurer joins the gang, and over the five surviving chapters, the gang is portrayed as Robin Hoods of the Old West, master con artists, lovers, and, finally, revenge-seeking horsemen of the apocalypse. It was entertaining, and I longed for the complete blooder, but the story and characters bore no resemblance to any historical figures I’d come across in my study of the Old West. I filed it away, moved on, and forgot about it.

  It wasn’t until five years later that I came across an essay about Opal Steele Driscoll, a prostitute turned miner’s wife turned society lady, and the throwaway mention that she played the accordion. It was such an unusual quirk that it reminded me of the penny dreadful I’d been sent years earlier. I pulled it out and discovered that there had indeed been an accordion-playing prostitute in the penny dreadful. The essay stated that Opal Steele Driscoll had claimed to run with the Spooner Gang, but she was a notorious liar, and her claims were dismissed.

  You may think this is a very thin connection, and you’re right. But the idea that this fictional female gang might be based on truth had firmly planted itself in my imagination, and no respectable women’s historian would ignore such a possibility. Bigger histories have been uncovered from less. I put the word out to my fellow historians to be on the lookout for anything related to a group of female outlaws, and decided to start the search with the penny dreadful’s eponymous outlaw. Margaret Parker was too normal a name for the heroine of such an outlandish adventure story. The census records for 1870 and 1880 turned up no good matches, but that isn’t surprising. Emigration was constant, and Margaret Parker could have lived in Colorado for nine years and not been included on the census, so I turned to newspapers and found her obituary.

  I will elide the details of the next five years (my editor says no one’s interested; they want to read the story). Research takes time, and when it’s a side project it takes even longer. It’s been ten years since I received the unexpected package from my friend, and I think I’ve finally pieced together the story of Margaret Parker, Hattie LaCour, and their gang through a journal, an oral history, a detective’s case file, newspaper accounts of the time, telegrams, and specialty histories of towns, prostitutes, and the suffrage movement. You’ll also note that while the journal and oral history are similar enough that you know there were three women experiencing the same events at the same time, the “official” accounts tell a quite different story. It’s up to you, the reader, to decide which is more likely—that the same story told by three women sixty years apart would tell strikingly similar false stories, or that the newspapers at the time told the truth. The whole endeavor was eye-opening in a way I never expected, and I’m forever thankful to my friend who saw a brittle antique blooder about the Old West and thought of me.

  Margaret Parker and Hattie LaCour were real, they existed, and they were magnificent.

  Dr. Stephanie Bailey

  University of Colorado

  December 15, 2017

  PART ONE

  THE LEGEND OF HATTIE LACOUR

  1

  WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  Second interview with Henrietta Lee, by Grace Williams

  Saturday, September 5, 1936

  Henrietta Lee is a ninety-two-year-old former slave from New Orleans. She was interviewed in July by Gerald Coleman and told him the story of her life in slavery, of her service in the Buffalo Soldier regiment disguised as a man, and of being discovered and discharged. Having completed his brief, Coleman ended the interview. I transcribed his notes, noted her parting comment, “The story is jus’ gettin’ good.” Curiosity got the best of me, and I returned to finish her story. Below is a word-for-word transcription of my multiple interviews with Mrs. Lee. —Grace Williams

  “I didn’t expect anyone to come back to talk to me. Got the impression Mr. Coleman wanted to be doing anything but talking to an old slave. Oh, I’m sho Mr. Coleman is a busy man. Everybody’s busy these days, driving cars, staying out until all hours. Nobody knows how to sit silent with yourself anymore. If they’re not going, they’re listening to the radio. Lots of racket these days. I miss the silence of the mountains, I’ll tell you that.

  “You want to know about my life after the army, huh? This for the project? Come on, girl. I can spot a liar a mile away and blindfolded. You’re getting something out of this. Screenwriter, huh?”

  Mrs. Lee laughs for a long while, so long that tears start to come down her wrinkled face.

  “No, no. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the damn perfection of it. Sixty years on, and I’m right back where I was in 1877.”

  Her laughter dies off.

  “Except I’m alone now.

  “You know, it’s funny, I was a slave for twenty-one of my ninety-two years, just a drop of time when you think of it. But that’s still all anyone wants to talk about. As if I didn’t exist in the seventy-one years between then and now. Why do you think that is? Times are changing and they want to remember? But why do they want to remember? To do better in the future, or to remind themselves of the good ole days? It can always get worse. Every time we get a bit of progress, things get worse. One step forward, a dozen steps back.

  “Between you and me, most of the stuff I told Coleman were lies. What he wonta ’ear, how he wonta ’ear it, chile. If I told what really happened to me? The beatings? The midnight visits from the master? Hell, he wouldn’t believe me. He wanted all benevolent masters and sweet-as-sugar mistresses with happy slaves smiling as we picked the cotton, so that’s what I gave him. I never picked a boll of cotton in my life. You really think the government is going to keep honest accounts of what was done to us? It’s up to us to keep our oral history passed down between the black folks. We won’t forget, and maybe someday our real story will be told.

  “Nah, that’s going to be lost like so many other stories have been lost. Or changed. Because the white men are writing the history, child. They aren’t going to show themselves in anything other than a heroic light. Uh-huh. You know what I’m saying is right. You want a truth, I’ll give you a truth, Grace Williams.

  “I knew a Grace once. Back in Colorado. Did I like her? At times. You like everybody all the time? Your husband? Child, you are a liar. But don’t worry, everything I’ll tell you will be the God’s honest truth. You heard of the Parker Gang? Didn’t think so. The Spooner Gang? Tsk, that damn movie. Not a word of it was true, though Gary Cooper is a pretty good likeness of him. Jed was handsome, and knew it. He could just look at a woman and she’d drop her bloomers. Not me, no. I wasn’t the one with a relationship with him. That was Garet. Margaret Parker, was her Christian name. A British lady, and a duchess. Had the prettiest voice of anyone I’ve ever known, though she tried to hide it most of the time. Weren’t a lot of British ladies in the West and even fewer British lady bandits. Yes, I said bandits. Outlaw is probably a better word. I’m getting there, don’t worry. Are you going to listen, or are you going to ask questions? That’s what I thought.

  “As to Garet and Spooner, not sure when she and Jed started up, if it was before Garet’s husband died
or after. But it wasn’t too long after, I know that. Jed and his gang used our ranch as a hideout when they’d done a job, the Poudre River ranch at first, then the one in the Hole, Heresy Ranch we called it, after Thomas died and Garet’s place was stolen by the colonel.

  “Did I work for Margaret Parker? Hell no. We were friends. Guess it was fate, me ending up hiding in her barn in 1869. I was on the run, you see. After the army found me out for a woman, I couldn’t very well disguise myself as a man and go join somewhere else. That was done a lot in those days. But there were only a few regiments I could go to, being a Negro. I didn’t much like pretending to be a man anyways. I had freedoms women didn’t, but clothes couldn’t change the color of my skin. I liked the men I served with and they liked me. So I became a camp follower. Laundresses, we were called. It was pretty much what it sounds like, but a lot of us also serviced the men in other ways.

  “It was a good living for a while. Until a cracker couldn’t get his johnson to work one night and decided it was my fault. I wasn’t a little woman, not like I am now, but he was big as a bull. Didn’t have much of a chance. He tied my hands up on the center tent pole, took his belt off, and tore my back up good. Guess it reminded him of days gone by. He didn’t have equipment problems after that. Left me a bloody mess, tied to the pole. You OK there, Mrs. Williams? This too much for you?

  “Took me a few weeks to heal up. The other laundresses, they took care of me. Mainly a woman named Sue. She’d lost her sister to some violence some years back, she never said what or how, but I suspect it was at the hands of a man. We didn’t get along, generally. I took too much business from her. But she looked past everything to make me better. Women do that, you know. Take care of each other when the chips are down. The good women do, anyways.

  “When I was able to get around and my lashes had stopped seeping, I took my revenge. Sue, she knew what I was going to do. We never talked about it, but one morning I found a big Bowie knife hidden under my pillow. You know what a Bowie knife is? Named after Jim Bowie, hero of the Alamo. Big knife, blade about yay long. This one wasn’t much to look at. Yellow bone handle wrapped with a leather cord, to give it grip, you know. Had to change that cord out after. Soaked through with blood. Damn right I killed a white man. Slit his throat. Quite a mess. Never killed that way again. What do you think Mr. Coleman would’ve done if I’d told him that?” Laughs.