The Seraph

Is it right to use a lie to tell the truth? This is the dilemma for Cora Page as she sits in a séance circle in the Lincoln White House, just twenty-two years old, already scandalously divorced and one of the most famous women of her day.

A committed Spiritualist, Cora relies and thrives on the voices of her guides, the spirits of deceased friends and unfamiliar others she has heard since childhood when she was thrust by her elders into her unusual vocation. Traveling from New York to New Orleans and appearing on stage before huge audiences, Cora lectures while in a trance, repeating the comfort and advice of the spirit words she hears.

Unlucky in her choice of husbands, the first who is an unrepentant grifter, and the second a staunch abolitionist who nonetheless plots to steal her freedom, Cora is fortunate in her circle of friends. Among them are reformers Sojourner Truth and Sophia Winslow, two women of color whose own experiences of being Black in America could not be more surprising or different.

Vacillating from the glamour of the limelight to darkened séance parlors, Cora moves in the world of frauds and true believers, political radicals and charlatans. She is tempted to use her fame and uncommon platform to express her personal ideals by replacing the words of the spirits with her own to advocate for marginalized peoples. Yet, she is wary of falsehoods and only too familiar with the failures and hidden motives that often come with good intentions.

After a harrowing personal tragedy and while navigating the tumultuous years of the Civil War and reconstruction, Cora’s beliefs about herself and her mission unravel and re-weave. With the help of her friends, both spectral and corporeal, her own voice triumphs, and she learns that although the world of spirits may be strange and obscure, it is in the land of the living where the mysterious truly abounds.

***Read an excerpt.***

As was her custom, she fixed her eyes on one man. An older gentleman, it always had to be an older gentleman, seated in the middle distance. Like the others he was to be a man unused to female admiration. Like the others he was defenseless. Yet he would be her guide.

The hall was a large one, blind-windowed and tiered, and filled on the main level with an audience of hundreds. In the curved balcony, decorated with cupids and flowers, even more faces appeared; rows of pale smudges in a darkened cave. When the door to the vestibule opened, admitting a latecomer, it blazed with a slow explosion of dazzling light. Somewhere above her an organ played softly, a tune in B flat.

She sat, straight-backed, in the ornate chair which had been provided her in the center of the stage. She kept her face composed and calm, with the tiny smile she had practiced. Her loosely clasped hands lay in her lap. From her raised position the smells of the audience came to her. They were always the same: leather, perfume, sweat. The room was full of a velvety heat and if she had held out the palm of her hand she believed she could have measured the weight of it. It was anticipation, she knew, the same way she knew the audience would shortly shift in their seats all at once, in unison, as flocks of birds do when they bolt from a single tree all at the same time. Just after this moment is when she stood.

She stepped forward to the apron of the stage, her gown gathered around her in an air of careless grace. The limelights before her hissed in their little chambers, making the glow she moved in luminous and overprecise. It fell slanting and resplendent upon her. She turned her head slowly, knowing this brightness highlighted her golden hair.

The voice came in a dark blur, the way it always did. She never knew whether the voice grew from the low murmur of the audience, or out of her own head, but the sound shaped and reshaped the words she was going to say, forming itself into sentences, phrases, even rhymes. She could feel the presence of the sound behind her eyes. In her mind she could see the letters of the words she was going to say, hear the resonance they would make in her throat.

She closed her eyes, and listened for a mere moment, then took a step forward and raised her arms toward the audience with her palms upright. The organ played a little louder and faster. She opened her eyes and placed them again on her chosen gentleman. He had already begun to fluster under her gaze. Then she began to tell the lie.