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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 108: Brown 321
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 117
The scene in Derek’s vision whirled away, and he was back in the clearing with the Creole Lady, and a man with a tall hat was beating her as she begged him to stop. Darkness was on the scene, and he could not see the man clearly. Derek shouted out in anger, and pulled his laser blaster out, and aimed it at the man. The man turned to him, and with a flash of lightning thundered out words while fully revealed.
It was Uncle Sam.
“Are you a traitor, boy? Or a good American?”
“I don’t know which way is up right now, but I’m not going to let you beat that woman,” Derek cried as the massive figure grew and loomed over him, and certain death reached for him, and he knew his laser blaster would be useless but fired it anyway. Without sound or light, with no notice, the man was gone.
Dawn broke, and the lady was sitting there. Her eyes knew the suffering of war, but she seemed grateful.
“Your journey is almost done.”
“What is the meaning of this?”
“I am New Orleans,” she said, and now he could see history unrolled.
Standing beside her, for she had grown to giant size and had her tender arms about him in a motherly way, she showed him a scene. Abraham Lincoln was smoking cigars with some rich men who complained that the South was richer and more profitable than them. Lincoln nodded, and replied. “I can fix this.” Handshakes were made, and a couple years later Lincoln was on the way to the White House.
Another scene was shown of the tall raw-boned frontiersman who was talking to a green eye-shaded accountant. Lincoln looked startled and dismayed.
“It’s that much?”
“Yes, sir. Tariffs give the Federal Government ninety percent of the money it makes. And two thirds of that money, which almost exclusively comes from the South, is spent on Northern projects. Sir, Louisiana is the richest state in the Union.”
Then there was yet another scene.
“Don’t get me wrong. Unlike the South, where they live side by side with their Blacks, and treat them as children who must be ruled, I propose no such thing. The best thing to do is to send them to a place in Africa I’m thinking of calling Liberia. Of course, the Whites in the South are tainted by being around Blacks.” Lincoln spoke quietly to someone out of sight. His reputation as Honest Abe was getting quite a shellacking. It turned out he was a typical politician who said one thing in public, and another in private.
Derek knew this was wrong. ‘A man’s a man, for ah that,’ he quoted to himself. He knew from the many stories of Southern abuses of Black slaves by White masters he had heard that it was not as simple as Lincoln had made it to be. But those tales he had heard a thousand times. This tale was new to him. Perhaps the simplistic tale of North and South he had been told over and over again was not right, or at least not the whole story. He also had heard that history was written by the victors.
It also occurred to him to wonder whose story this was. Someone was arguing that he did not know the truth because what he had been taught had been tainted by the fact that he had been raised in the northeast, but now the story he was being told was that told by the spirit of the City of New Orleans, whose perspective was equally warped by the fact that she had been raised in the south and considered all that made the South what it had been was good and indeed great. This was not exactly a vision from the King; nor was it a taunt from the Devil. It was a chance to hear the voice of the city, what New Orleans believed the truth to be, but not the truth.
It was also a different world, not his world despite the calling to protect it.
Yet another scene unfolded.
“Mary, the idea is simplicity itself. I promised I would relinquish Fort Sumter, but I lied. And if the Southerners find a way around that, I have a US Navy ship heading right now to Mobile to blockade the harbor unless they pay tariffs. I know war is a dreadful thing, but we absolutely have to have the money. Imagine me firing nine out of ten federal workers. I’d be assassinated for sure.”
“One more in two parts,” the Lady said.
He saw Black slaves picking cotton in the field, along with their White master who worked alongside them. The farm was not that large. The men and women finished for the day, and some went to town to work on other projects on which they could earn money for themselves. The slave owner reprimanded his son harshly for taking too much interest in a certain slave woman.
“Hector, you can’t rule if you fornicate with her. And if you do, some of them will rightly be angry with you, and you might end up dead. All it takes is to swing one hoe one time at the right time, and your blood could be fertilizing the cotton. Now, don’t do this again, or I’m going to have to ship you to England early for your University schooling.”
Time passed, and the farm was burnt, and everything stolen by men in blue. They came back several times to make sure they got everything. The freed slaves were promised ‘forty acres and a mule’. This never materialized. The freed slaves tried to walk through the woods, but this time they made sure to take a White Southerner with them, and so the Union Bluecoats did not slaughter the Blacks.
With all the various unpleasantries put on them, the White master and the Black slaves had no choice, and began to sharecrop near each other. Now instead of a pleasant farmhouse for the master, and good slave cabins, the shacks were unkempt with leaking roofs and sagging walls. Every year their home changed, and none kept theirs up, for why fix a house you’d be in for only a year? On good years they made enough to get by. On bad years they went further into debt. With farming there always are bad years. Blacks were free, it was said, but in truth both the Whites and the Blacks were now slaves to Yankee bankers.
The freed Black slaves no longer had shoes, or good food. Before, when they were slaves, they had turned up their nose at eating pork as being too common. Now they wished for dog. The former master grew sick, and the freed slaves, out of the goodness of their hearts, collected money for him. It was a kindness that confused Derek until he remembered Pierre saying Cajuns were braver than he. Perhaps the Blacks were more generous in a way beyond his own understanding. He knew this was not every Black or every Cajun, or Creole, or Chinese, or White, for he had seen enough in the city, and in prior worlds, to know that not every man was stronger than every woman, or every woman prettier than every man. Just last week, at the music hall, he had seen The Meadowlark, who astonished by being prettier than half the girls in the hall, and capped it off by whistling impeccable imitations of a dozen bird songs.
The visions faded, and he stood beside the Lady who was now his size. She looked weary and pained, and bruised, and her fingers were in splints, and her lip split.
“I will go--” He wanted to say he would go to war with Uncle Sam, for the dread savagery, the looting, the burning, the killing, he had visited on the Southland, but she put a finger on his lips.
“The Lady of Atlanta, burned, might say different, but I am the Lady of New Orleans. No more war, please. Do not destroy in my name. Instead, play your trumpet, eat a slice of that lemon meringue pie, and have a cup of chicory coffee as the shrimp boats come in.”
“Le Bons Tempes Roullez,” he said, and she nodded, ever so gracefully. He looked at her as she faded away, and a timber beam fell out of his right eye to thunk on the sitting stone in the clearing. That was the moment he saw himself. He had been so eager to change New Orleans that he had wanted to pick the small bit of a branch out of their eye, while he held a timber in his own eye. He still did not agree with all that the South had done, but perhaps there had been a better way than burning cities and starving children to solve the problem. What that way was he was not sure. In fact, he was less sure than before, but now he was content with that.
It occurred to him once more that this New Orleans, this Civil War, or as the locals would call it this War of Northern Aggression, was not the world in which he had grown up. The truth of the matter in his first Earth might be different than the truth here. The knowledge of this being an alternate Earth only highlighted the fact of the limits of his knowledge. He thought this world was very like his, but perhaps intelligent kraken swam its deep oceans, and the moon might be inhabited by Selenians. It looked like his world, but he did not know it was, and indeed the wall between the natural and the supernatural seemed much thinner here than at home, which served as a good reminder to him. The Earth he had come from did not have a thirty foot long three hundred year old alligator, or alternate spirit lands where incarnations of cities lived. No one could run from New Orleans to near Atlanta in one hour. His Earth certainly had held its share of monsters, but they could usually be dealt with by a shotgun blast or a gas chamber. Creatures that laughed off laser blasters had not been a feature of his first Earth, or so he thought.
Suddenly, he was standing back in the street in front of a schoolhouse named for a great man, and he saw that no time had passed. But now, instead of outrage, or cries for justice, he felt compassion. Instead of demanding they change, of speaking full of opinion without knowledge, a tyrant in truth, he instead bowed his head.
“My friends, indeed I have greatly sinned against you. Instead of telling you what to do, I am going to pray for love, divine love; for wisdom, divine wisdom. And I am going to ask you for forgiveness. Please.” He was surprised to be group hugged so hard that he almost fell to the sidewalk, and it was sweet to his ears the cries of ‘of course, brotha’ and ‘mon ami’ and something in Cantonese that he almost understood but sounded very pleasant along with his wife saying softly ‘my hero’. But best of all was the words he heard in his heart.
I have refined you with a great fire, and made you a precious ornament to Me.
He still stood against segregation, and racism, and discrimination, and bigotry, but he had begun to realize that things were more complicated than he had formerly assumed. What that meant he was not sure. But how could he preach unity amongst the races when he was disunified inside his own by his pride? He still felt that the King wanted racial unity, but how to get there, or what exactly that looked like, he was not at all sure. That was okay, he figured; one step at a time, one note in the song at a time, and he’d get there. Strangely, his soul felt more expansive, as if there were greater room inside of himself than before. An odd feeling to be sure, but he put that to the side as Maurice dragged everyone off to a late night dancehall for Ragtime music, drinks, and enough of a cigarette smoke cloud that Derek, after a few soft drinks, began to suspect why everyone else could tolerate hot spices. Cover your tongue with a layer of tar, and you could eat anything. The next morning, he awoke still tired, but despite a headache, his heart felt more at ease.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #511: Characters Change. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
