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12 Great Mischief As Josephine Pinckney’s star ascended in the Viking Press firmament, she felt herself being dragged deeper into the artistic netherworld where literature and commerce merged. She wondered if in her reach for fame she had unwittingly made a Faustian bargain. At least a dozen literary agents hounded her to sign with them. Her Viking editors barraged her with pestering letters urging her to begin another marketable manuscript double-quick. Pascal Covici announced that he expected to have three titles on the Book-of-the-Month Club list in 1947 and that her next book would be one of them. Viking founder Harold A. Guinzburg pressed her to churn out at least a barebones outline to huckster directly to movie producers. “There is nothing to lose, and maybe a good deal to gain, by trying to wangle a little easy money out of Hollywood before the fact,” he wrote Pinckney in December 1946.1 Pinckney, who had once been accustomed to the reflective tranquility of the poet, had shifted into high gear with the rest of American society after World War II. In record time, she hammered out “the bones and gristly parts” of a story set in Charleston during the 1880s. Taking a holiday from the rational world, Pinckney indulged in a fantasy and spiced her story with magic rather than morality. “The Blue-Eyed Hag” chronicled a young Charleston pharmacist’s ill-fated quest to learn the truth about good and evil. His spiritual journey is complicated not only by the conventional tensions between science and faith but also by the animism of Gullah traditions taught him by his nurse Maum Rachel. Drawing from the stories first told her by Victoria Rutledge, Pinckney adds another dimension to the evil forces at work in the world. She torments her protagonist with plat-eyes, hags, witches, and incubi; things that went “bump” in the Low Country night. “Without the assistance of motivations and build-ups, it sounds pretty ham-y . . . Southerncured by an old recipe,” she warned Guinzberg when she mailed him a draft, “but MGM shouldn’t boggle over a little of that flavor.”2 Pinckney’s initial plan for her third novel had been a “personal subjective narrative ,” but she soon dismissed that strategy as “too autobiographical and selfrevealing .” The “hag story,” which became Great Mischief, she believed, “will free me of certain complications of Three O’Clock Dinner—the names, the correspon- dence to living people, the applications to myself.” The magical nature of the story also lent itself to a poetic treatment, “which is my stuff, my contribution.”3 Pinckney had been playing around with the idea of a fantasy since 1923 when she wrote a story in her very correct school-girl French as an exercise for Charleston ’s Alliance Française. Her satirical tale set in the early twentieth century blends two Charleston traditions, aristocratic pride in family and Gullah mythology of voodoo and witchcraft.4 In the mystical world of the Gullah imagination, the wrongs suffered by the poor, oppressed, and downtrodden were righted by magic. With this story of the three Peronneau sisters, the last remnants of an impoverished but distinguished old family, living frugally together, Pinckney first began cultivating her fascination with black magic as a source of female power. The youngest of the three fears she is picking up old maid habits from her domineering sisters and makes a scandalous break for freedom from their suffocating presence. The only place she can afford is in a tiny old building, once a tavern, with tile roof and dormer windows in the heart of a disreputable, dockside neighborhood. As she is enjoying solitude before her fire, bits of mortar fall, followed by puffs of soot. Then, out pops a hag in search of a vulnerable soul to ride. The self-possessed Miss Peronneau naturally asks if the hag is a native Charlestonian, and who her people were. The wraith proudly announces she is a descendant of Landgrave Smith, one of the early founders. On learning they are kin, the hag spares the woman and sits down for a chat. The hag complains how difficult Charlestonians are to deal with. One snobbish woman refused to carry the hag north of Broad Street. The Charleston men, dissipated by high living, were hopeless mounts. Trying to be helpful, Miss Peronneau suggests that the witch try the sober, sturdy French Huguenots of the city and provides her with a roll of...

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