Salted with Fire

Salted with Fire is a 2001 novel written by Grif Stockley and published by Rose Publishing Company of Little Rock (Pulaski County). The novel centers upon the murder of a Black history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the research he had been doing on the history of racial oppression in the state. While editing the initial draft of this novel and attempting to get it published, Stockley began his own research into the Elaine Massacre, which culminated in the release of Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 by the University of Arkansas Press the same year Salted with Fire was published.

Attorney Miller Holly and wife Laurel, who live in Jeffersonville (Lee County) in the Arkansas Delta, have just returned from a trip to France when he receives a call from childhood friend Cormorant Ashley, a white history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Ashley fears he is about to be charged with the murder of fellow professor Damascus Meriweather, an African American man and author of the recent Coming to Terms with Slavery: Torture and Rape in Arkansas. Damascus lived with his brother, Ezekiel, a pharmacist who paid for the publication of his book, and was known to be dying of cancer, raising the question as to why anyone who knew him would bother to shoot him. But Cormorant was the last one to see Damascus alive, and his pistol, which he claims was stolen a few weeks before the murder, was found near the scene and turns out to be the murder weapon. While visiting with Miller, Cormorant is arrested. Although he is not a criminal attorney, Miller immediately signs on to represent his friend.

The case stokes racial animosity in Little Rock, especially with Ezekiel holding press conferences to discuss his brother’s murder, but it also sparks tension between Miller and Laurel, who has been reading Coming to Terms with Slavery and confronts Miller about his own family’s past. Aided by Cormorant’s sister, Raven, who runs an advertisement agency in the Lafayette Building, and hired investigator Steve Crisp, a Black man with ties to Little Rock’s African American community, Miller begins his work. National press gets wind of the story, which makes the local white population defensive about the state’s image. Miller begins by inquiring if others in Damascus Meriweather’s circle might have had a motive for murder, starting with Rafe Kennedy, the university student who found the body; it turns out that he has an uncle who is a member of “The Resurrection,” a militia-type group trying to establish an all-white nation in the Ozark Mountains.

Steve Crisp uncovers that Damascus had reportedly been having an affair with Dominique Marsden, a Black teacher at Central High School who had served as his editor, and that her husband, a self-employed locksmith, discovered the affair. Marsden denied that she had had any sexual relationship with Damascus. However, it also turns out that Damascus was prepared to allege that Cormorant’s great-grandfather had fathered one of the children of his slaves, and that Cormorant had threatened him with a libel suit if he printed that in his book. Ezekiel publicly reveals that, before he died, Damascus had put the finishing touches on a second treatise, called Salted with Fire, that is even more provocative, comparing the likes of the Elaine Massacre with the worst atrocities of Nazi Germany. This book even implicates Miller Holly himself, describing as “hapless” his work to settle local tensions during the Marianna Boycotts of 1971–1972.

After the trial begins, Laurel confesses to Miller that she had had an affair with Cormorant two summers before, during a major bankruptcy trial of Miller’s. Distraught, Miller focuses upon the trial, using his closing argument to weave a story in which Damascus, upset at Cormorant’s constant dismissal of the WPA slave narratives as oral history not confirmed by tangible proof, killed himself in such a way as to pin the blame on Cormorant because “he wanted to teach his white colleague how important it is to be believed.” Before the verdict is rendered, Cormorant confesses to Miller that on the “afternoon when I went to see Damascus, he accused me of hitting on Dominique,” but he insists that he did not commit murder. The jury returns, and Cormorant is found not guilty.

For additional information:
Stockley, Grif. Salted with Fire. Little Rock: Rose Publishing Company, 2021.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas