Grave Misgivings

About the Book

Set in the alluring mountains of western North Carolina is the historic village of Harrow.  Here is located a traditional liberal arts college, once limited in enrollment solely to privileged white students.  But its new president is black.

After a long and successful career as a professor at a university in the eastern part of the state, Dr. John Scott Bell hoped to placate his restless and ambitious wife, Lydia, by applying for this college’s presidency.  He never considered that he would be appointed.

Westminster, he was told, was always “simply a finishing school for wealthy white women.”  But recently that situation has changed; and change itself can be traumatic in a part of the country where people still refer to “the wah,” meaning the Civil War, and “the late President,” when discussing Jefferson Davis.  

Westminster College has a dynamic new chairman of its Board of Trustees, and is now “knocking on the door of the twenty-first century even before it has become decently acquainted with the twentieth.”  The same can be said for all of Harrow.  Future shock is a problem every leader in the community has to contend with, including Scott’s newfound  friends in politics and on the police force.

The couple and their outgoing golden retriever, Mustard, appear to make friends easily, and seem at first to have charmed the entire community.  At the same time there is something almost pathological about the preoccupation of the people of this village with its history, and especially with the antebellum period.  However, Scott has a love of history as a pastime, and chooses to repress thoughts of its local morbidity from his thinking.  Meanwhile, Lydia, or “Dee” as he calls his wife, is serving almost as a barometer of the subtle pressures of the community.

Dee is a warm-tempered and sensitive musician.  Then, too, she is an antique collector whose “finds” are very intriguing.  Long before her husband wakes up to it, she becomes aware of a strong latent racism in the community and on the faculty which could destroy his leadership and what progress the college already has made.

With campus crises erupting almost from the moment he takes over, it is a rash and loveless affair which distracts Scott the most and threatens their marriage.  Then Dee’s sister arrives in town to “give her aid and comfort,” and to bedevil Scott whom she has long despised.  Her arrival could not have come at a worse time.  The “mounting crises” are becoming serious.

A rare consolation to Scott is the anthropological research he and an older man in the community undertake in regard to a strange group of mountaineers known as “the Melungeons.”  But what Scott discovers about them and about his “bosses” on the Board of Trustees ultimately launches him deeper into despair.

Suddenly a body out of the dark past is uncovered, then a murder is revealed, and another.  Both victims are found on campus, and both are black  Having had forensic experience, Scott is asked by the authorities to help them solve the riddle of at least two murders in a community where, seemingly, no significant crime had ever before taken place.  At this time his wife appears to him to be almost paranoid, and he plays along with her “eccentricities” fearing that if he does not she will break down entirely or will leave him.

Dee and two other woman are attacked on three occasions.  Crime, litigation and sex scandals rock the staid campus, while Scott is made the scapegoat.  Finally, it is necessary for him to come to grips with his own ethnic awareness, and save his marriage as his highest priority, while bringing the guilty at last to punishment.

About the Author

Joseph Suppiger, now living in Montana, was raised in Princeton, New Jersey. He grew up there “in those exciting days when Einstein and Oppenheimer strode the streets, and the Age of McCarthyism was in full hay fever bloom.” Naturally enough he gravitated into the world of higher education, teaching and serving as a dean and vice president in three colleges. Much of this academic career was spent in the South. Having been a professor of American history, and having taught courses on the Civil War, the author also became “acutely conscious of the distinctly different awareness of that war and the years which led up to it which makes history part of the lifeblood of the South.” This book reflects that awareness and the sensitivity to a dark time of slavery and oppression which sets the South apart from all other sections of the country.