Three Short Independent Stories
(Linking to: “The Cotton Belt”)
Jamaica, Ned (from Cuba) and Haiti
Ashley Walsh:
The New Orleans Kid
((An independent sketch, short story for book: “The Cotton Belt”) (1866))
“Don’t kid me, kid!” said Rosalina suspiciously.
“Why should I try,” said Ashley.
“What you got?” asked Rosalina Tapi.
“The Mayor,” I had him today, “why?”
“Bring it out?” Rosalina said to Ashley harshly.
“Take it easy,” Ashley said. “Why do you try to get so tough?” she stepped over Rosalina’s nightgown, as she walked forward.
As Ashley had come to New Orleans a year ago looking for a job, she got involved with Rosalina Tapi, a prostitute, they had their own business now, and shared all the monies: fifty, fifty, and they shared everything else equally. Ashley was a pretty black girl, lightly colored black girl with blue eyes, from Ozark, Alabama, the cotton belt. Rosalina was nearer forty years old and it showed, a white girl that had left home at fourteen, just like Ashley, and started her own business; Ashley was fifteen now.
“You got the money?” asked Rosalina, “I know the Mayor pays well, he used to be my customer.”
“I tell you, if you make a mistake with me, I’ll leave you (but what she really meant is what she didn’t say, and the threat was: if you really bother me, I’ll kill you, like I killed Josh Washington Jefferson.)
“Oh shut up. You’re greedy. Every time you get a good customer you want to keep it all.”
“Have a drink,” said Ashley, looking out across Bourbon Street from the second story window.
“The hell with it,” said Rosalina, “you think because you’re young and pretty you can get away with it, but I’ll get even someday with you. I don’t want any of the mayor’s money, but you better pay me the fifty percent of everyone else’s…!”
“I’ll make more money later, don’t worry,” Ashley said. She sat at the end of her bed, the light on now, it was twilight and she was holding her two one-hundred dollar bills in her hand, and she had never seen so much money before, at any one given time except for the thirty pieces of gold she stole from the Hightower plantation in Ozark, Alabama.
“It would be a pretty night to walk the streets,” suggested Rosalina. “As soon as this afterglow is gone,” meaning her scotch whiskey, she liked her drinking as much as Old Josh Jefferson from the Hightower plantation like his, back in Ozark, which got him, killed.
“Damn,” said Rosalina, “this is better than that crappy moonshine you niggers get up in Alabama,” Rosalina was white.
“That’s a rough mayor,” said Ashley, “He wants me again tonight, later on.” She lit a cigarette and smoked in the half dark.
“You’re doing all right,” said Rosalina, “you’re doing better than I expected, I don’t want to fight with you, just be careful of the mayor. The smoother everything goes the better.”
“Bring me back a sandwich?” asked Ashley. Rosalina was getting ready to go find a new customer.
“I’ll bring two, give one to your partner, if it’s the mayor!” said Rosalina. “Remember he likes his drinking. He won’t eat perhaps but, give it to him anyway. What about you?”
“After having sex, I get seasick,” and Rosalina started laughing, and said “I ain’t never heard of that before.”
“I enjoy it,” the girl said. “If it wasn’t for being seasick, I could do it all day long, without a rest.”
“Just be careful, and don’t get yourself killed in the process,” and Rosalina got laughing again, the scotch was getting to her.
“I hope not,” said Ashley.
“How did that Josh character you were talking about, who liked to drink as much as me, get him-self killed? I remember you talking about him before, that he was one hell of a good lover?”
“I guess you can imagine,” the girl said. “He was very different, I feel badly about that. He didn’t mean to do wrong, but it’s just what that phase of life does to a man, and he was old, had a heart trouble, and died on top of me.”
“I guess he’s probably a good fellow,” Rosalina said, and thought.
Ashley got thinking: ‘…listen to what my mouth is saying, it will say anything, get me in trouble.’
“We are the only true revolutionary whores is town, since the end of the Civil War. The War did away with most of the old politicians, now we see American imperialism on the rise, and we can become rich,” but Ashley had thought she was already rich; she had saved up $1000-dollars. “We ought to start clean and give every politician a free toss in the hay, a chance to get to know us, and then charge them the next time, kind of a pulling in gift,” said Rosalina.”
“Slavery ended a year ago for me, the peasants, is on the move, and I want to be an owner of a big cotton or sugar estate someday, like the Hightower’s or Smiley’s up in Ozark. I don’t want to end up like Old Josh and those folks out by Ozark, picking cotton every year for pennies.”
Rosalina looked up from her watch, a gift from the old Mayor, before this new one. And she got thinking of how Ashley comes on; like she used to nearly twenty-five years ago, but there was a danger in Ashley she figured.
“To raise money like you’re talking about,” Rosalina said “to do that you have to use means that later on would never be use. Also you have to use people we would not normally use.”
“But the end is worth it,” said Ashley.
‘She’s a radical,’ Rosalina told herself. ‘And she’s telling me too much, she thinks I agree with her, let her go on, and she’ll tell it all.’
“I guess you got some good plans,” she said to Ashley.
“If you’re out to helping me…” and she hesitated, thinking, she only needed her help now, she’d not need it in another year, so she hushed up.
“Lots of people I know would help us,” said Rosalina. But because of the state of movements she wanted to take—referring to Ashley—she could not trust her, plus she knew she had saved $1000-dollars up, and had $200-dollars tucked into her dress, close to her small bosoms.
“I guess they’re plenty bad men out there,” said Ashley.
“Oh, yes, plenty, absolutely murderous tyranny that goes over every little street in this city. Everyone in this city is out to make their fortunes, even private soldiers, and ship captains.”
“Bully for them,” Ashley said condescendingly (having heard that expression from some English customer a week ago or so).
“You cannot realize how bad it is,” said Rosalina.
“I hated Ozark and the cotton country, that is the worse of all being a slave,” said Ashley.
“Do you think you’re from tyranny now? You do things you hate a thousands time more, do you not?”
“I want a drink,” said Ashley, who normally didn’t drink, and Rosalina fixed her a scotch and water, put a little dab of something in it, and gave it to her.
“Are you sure,” said Rosalina, “you usually don’t drink.”
“It’s only 11:25 p.m.,” the girl said. “He’ll not be here until 1:00 a.m., or so.”
It got dark and there was quietness to the place. She went down to the dock area, found an old friend, Captain Ashton Tyron Peron, who was headed out to sea at 3:00 a.m., fishing in the gulf for a long spell. A dear friend and customer of Rosalina; the captain sat with his feet on a wooden large barrow of wine, “What can I do for yaw, Rosalina?”
“Let me have some of that wine you’re drinking,” she said, and sat down with the Captain.
He was a big-faced fellow. “All right, what is it?”
She drank a few more swings of the wine, and said, “Now is a good time to tell you, no sense in waiting. That Little girl I hired a year ago, I found out she killed an old man up in Ozark, I hired someone to go check on her about six months ago, some old cottager they call the Ghost told my man that, and I gave him a $20-dollar gold piece for the information. I get the feeling she’s using me and going to kill me first chance she gets. I gave her a drop of an old paralyzing formula, in her drink, it knocked her out, take her out to sea with you, I’ll sell her to yaw for $500-dollars, and you don’t bring her back, when you’re done with her, throw her over into the sea. Keep her on that ship until you’re tired of her. I want to have a good night’s sleep. And there ain’t no one going to miss that little nigger whore, noway.”
The captain walked with Rosalina on board the vessel, opened the hatch, and stepped own, looked about, made some room for a bed, and brought a cot now into the hole, “This will have to do I guess…I’ll have to pay you when I get back, ain’t got the money now, but you know I’m good for it.”
Walking off the ship, he looked back at the hatch, “Come on now, let’s go get her, quite stalling,” she said.
“I ain’t stalling,” said the Captain, “just doing a heap of thinking!”
No: 596 (2-8-2010)
A Donkey Load of Troubles
((An independent sketch, short story for book: “The Cotton Belt”) (1866))
Amos was in the cotton field and the cotton was loaded on the donkeys.
“I’ll take them back and try to unload them,” said Amos. “You got the other cotton stowed?”
“Yes,” said Silas.
“Pick some more cotton first,” said Silas.
“I want a good swig of moonshine!” he remarked, adding, “I ain’t got time to do anymore picking, I’m too old, too tired today.”
“That’s right, before lunch and cotton picking this afternoon, we all need a good mouthful of moonshine,” Silas said.
Jordon, Toby, Todd, and Granny Mae Walsh, were between the cotton rows picking cotton, overheating from the drenching sun overhead, when they heard a noise that sounded like moonshine, they looked over the cotton and saw Silas with Amos—and Amos gulping down some good corn mash whiskey and come rushing out of the cotton field. Then Amos was out of sight, bringing the Donkeys back to the barn to unload them.
Two men came to the front door of the Hightower Mansion one with a leather brief case; one was the sheriff, toting his rifle. The sheriff looked at Amos busy unloading the Donkeys. The second man, the little one, walked up to the door as Amos watched, holding a piece of paper in his hand, the Sheriff’s rifle in front of him, and as he backed out of the way for Mrs. Emma Hightower to open the door, Amos saw the rifle muzzle lowered as not to scare Emma. The short man, stuttered, he was the youngest of the two Ritt boys (a Harvard man), J.R. Ritt’s sons, Pick Ritt, he stood there stern, “I need to talk to Ella,” he said. “By gosh, what for?” asked Emma.
“What can I say Emma, I just need to talk to her, that’ all,” said Pick. Ella saw the men at the door, out of the side door of the kitchen and saw Pick talking to Emma, walked up to the doorway.
There were three other workers living in the huts now (the Civil War had been over for a year, it was 1866), all three of the workers were Caribbean Negros, blacks from the Caribbean Islands, one Haitian, one from Jamaica, and Cuban called Ned.
“Where’s my donkey to ride to the field?” yelled the Haitian, who was sharecropping, for a wage.
“Over there, you fool,” said Amos, pointing at the corral.
“That’s not a donkey,” said the Haitian, “that’s a mule!”
“No,” said Amos, “that’s a big burro!”
“Oh,” said the Haitian, a bit teed off.
“Get on out of here and go to work, you’re sleeping the day away, you niggers from Haiti and Jamaica are like Cubans, give us folks down here in Alabam’ a bad name!”
And the Haitian stood beside the mule and the fence he was behind; he put his hand inside his pocket, pulled out a knife, ripping the lining inside his pants pocket, then dropped it back in, and pulled it back out, in and out of his pants pocket, looking at it, then looking towards Amos, who was pert near eighty-years old. He put it so hard back into his pants pocket, for the umpteenth time, it almost slit his pants to his knee. He yanked the trousers up, tried to tie them back together.
“Get going,” said Amos. The big one, the Jamaican, came out now, from his hut.
“Come on, Jamaica,” said the Haitian. “Let’s go.” They lived together in the same hut, less rent.
“Take it easy,” said Jamaica. “Keep that knife in your pocket, or I’ll shove it up, where the moon doesn’t shine.”
“Grab that bridle around this mule; we’ve got to ride him out to the picking place.”
“Wait a minute,” said Jamaica. “Don’t start giving me orders.” The bigger Jamaican had turned face to face with the smaller Haitian, “Hay, don’t! Don’t!” He said. “Don’t get on my bad side today, the old nigger over there he’s already got me pissed.
They were so close to one another, near chest to chest, they could feel the breath and the heat of the other person’s body, like bullets slapping into each other’s guts, eyes wide, as if the Haitian wanted to say “Don’t” again but dared not to.
The Sheriff and Pick, along with Emma and Ella were watching the happening from the front porch steps.
“I don’t need a roommate,” said the Jamaican, “if you’re going to start trouble around here, I need a job more than trouble.”
“Grab those reins and let’s get on out of here, the old nigger got me mad, sorry if I’m taking it out on you,” said the Haitian.
Then all of the sudden the Sheriff was in back of the Haitian, put a gun against his back, and in hard spoken English said, “Come on, let’s go, or I’ll blow your head off.”
“Go where?” said the Haitian and the Jamaican stepped back quickly.
Amos was holding onto the donkeys, standing against the side of one of the barn doors. The muzzle of the Sheriff’s gun, in the spine of the Haitian, as he swung around to face the Sheriff, almost in a spin, with his right arm, and a stern blow to his face, he knocked the sheriff to his knees and then halfway onto his back, his head jerked sidewise now, and the rifle went off—almost by impulse, it shot the ankle—out from under the standing man—that is, right off the Haitian, right off its stem during the fall, now his hands above his head, as the sheriff aimed his rifle at the Haitian and pulled the trigger (a second time)—and all you heard was the drumming sound of the release of the bullet from its chamber, the Jamaican looking at the Sheriff, and at the dismembered limb, his mouth opened up wide, the Haitian for a moment unaware of what too place, he was one foot less, and not much of an ankle.
“Come on nigger, do it again!” yelled the Sheriff, and then he looked at the Jamaican to see if he was willing—or whose side he was on (The Haitian had fallen like an axed timber, to the ground).
“Put the gun away,” Pick said, “you’re scaring Emma and Ella.”
“This nigger was thinking he could run me in with his knife,” said the sheriff, I plugged his ankle though.”
The Haitian sat up, looked at his ankle and foot, the knife lay by his side, it had fallen out of his hand and pocket, he had been reaching for it, in his left pocket as he hit the sheriff with his right hand.
“No boat fare back to Haiti, hay, is that right?” said the sheriff. Pick noticed the heavy look in the Haitian’s face, his swirling eyes, as if he was going to pass out.
“Jamaica,” said the Sheriff, “how fast can you drag this man into the thickets, and get on out to the cotton picking, what you’ve been hired for?”
“How fast you want me to go?” He asked the Sheriff.
“About as fast as a crow soars,” he muttered, with an angry face.
They were all watching: Amos, Pick, Emma and Ella, as the Jamaican threw the body over the mule, even the Ghost, who lived at the end of the huts, who was suppose to be dead, but kept on living, over a hundred years old. “But what should I do when I bring him out there, he can’t walk and the wolves and other wild animals will get him?”
“Nothing, you can’t do nothing because there ain’t nothing for you to do, just look at that dead man, that’s all you can do,” said the Sheriff, to the nice-speaking Jamaican. “Look, just look, that’s all you can do.” And the sheriff got back onto his feet.
The Jamaican brought the Haitian a long way back into the undergrowth, so far you could hardly see the mule and all, just a little shoot out of a head, could be seen, which was that of the dying Haitian.
“He should have shot me,” said the Haitian, “you’re coming back aren’t you,” he said, “maybe if you bring my foot back you can sew it back on.”
The pleasant-speaking one said, “That’s silly.”
“For a Christian’s sake,” the Haitian said, “have some pity brother!”
“No,” said the Haitian, “I’m O.K., with it now.”
“I ain’t O.K., with it,” said the Haitian. And as the Haitian looked deeper into the woods, he saw a man standing, “Who you be,” said the Haitian, “but the Ghost did not answer, and the Jamaican had taken off.
Pick said nothing to Emma, it was all so traumatic. He was keeping the Sheriff on the left side of him, and put that piece of paper back into his right pocket.
“What’s the matter Pick with you, what you wanted, can you tell me?”
“Yes,” said Emma, “what were you going to ask ma?”
“Nothing right now,” he said.
“What do you think?” ask Pick to the sheriff as they started walking away. The Sheriff did not answer, and Pick pulled out that letter, that piece of paper from his pocket—that he had just put back into his pocket, it was an IOU, Ella’s late husband, Charles T. Hightower, owned R. T. Ritt, the Ozark bank owner, when he had bought a slave some years back, and he done run off, it was for $200-dollars. And he ripped it up, threw it way, got into his buggy and rode off. He had a liking for Emma, a few years older than her but not many. Looking back, Emma was picking up the pieces of paper he had just thrown.
No. 595 (2-8-2010
A Violent Style
((An independent sketch, short story for book: “The Cotton Belt”) (1867))
During the last weeks of harvesting, or picking cotton, 1867, Jamaica, who had been hired by Ella Hightower a year earlier to work on the plantation, sharecropping for a wage, had done his wash, this one weekend, and this other fellow, called Ned Harlow, who lived in the hut next to Jamaica, a Cuban, he was working on his second season also, was also doing his wash, and Ned’s wash ended up on top of Jamaica’s, he done took his wash and moved it on over some, because Ned had too much to wash, and not enough from to hang them on his own clotheslines, a wind picked up, and Jamaica’s wash landed on the ground, dirty now, needed to be washed all over, and Ned’s was dried from the sun and wind.
Jamaica said, “Let the thing remain so, I will use your clotheslines,” and he moved Ned’s cloths over some to fit his in, putting his dirty cloths the ones he picked up from the ground on his clotheslines now, and now Ned was angry, had objected—wouldn’t have it so, so he went on into his hut brought out a revolver, and told Jamaica he was going to shoot him dead, and get this argument over with.
“I’m goin’ to kill yaw,” said Ned, and proceeded for his revolver, and aimed it at Jamaica, and Jamaica said, “I’m not armed!” So Ned took his revolver and threw it on the ground, and said, “I’m a fair man, have it your way, I’ll just cut you up, like a fish,” and he pulled out a bowie knife, and cut halfway around Jamaica’s neck, for some odd reason, he avoided the jugular, and Jamaica dropped to the ground, got away from Ned, struggling to stop his bleeding, and saw the revolver where Ned has thrown it, and picket it up and shot Ned in the heart, dead as a doornail. And the funeral was that very next day. Jamaica recovered from his wounds, and the following season he was back out there planting cotton.
There was some gossip down in Ozark, that the nigger was dangerous, but Ella put it to rest, said, he was a good nigger tenant, and worker, and he reminded her of old Josh Jefferson.
No. 598 (2-9-2010
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