Southern Republic (The Downriver Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramsay, Lex

  Patrick’s head snapped up from his nightmare at hearing the crunch of the tires on gravel.

  The driver pulled into the semicircular gravel lined entrance to the house built by Easton and Olympia in 1860 and Patrick thought he saw movement in one of the turreted windows of the third floor. Clarissa was home. Now the plot was coming into view. Whenever his mother and his older sister joined forces to lure Patrick home, it could only mean one thing—he was being fixed up with some woman who was “just too perfect” for him and whose name he would forget by next week.

  Given the gravity of the problems he faced, Patrick mumbled to himself, “this is the last thing I need.”

  • • •

  Regina Duquesne Edgerton presided over dinner that evening in regal fashion. Seated at end of the table, Regina was framed by the arched doorway with its intricate crystal chandelier and grand staircase, as if posing for a portrait.

  Dressed in a muted lavender silk shantung suit that complimented her salt and pepper chin length sweep of hair, she announced herself for exactly who she was: a successful and respected lawyer, the life partner of her proud husband, the mother of four talented children, and the matriarch of an old and prominent family.

  Regina was a slightly darker shade of chestnut than her son, with large, probing black eyes that both engulfed you and examined you all at the same time. She had never been a large woman, maybe 5’5” or so, but her posture and her bearing made her appear, not just taller, but more formidable.

  Tonight, she sat at one end of a large dining table, her husband at the other and Clarissa to her right with Patrick seated across the table from Clarissa on his mother’s left. Regina surveyed the table, nodded to the head of her household staff, Mrs. Dougherty, to begin serving, and sat back to enjoy dinner.

  Whenever his mother was in her “queen of the castle” mode, as Patrick called it, he thought back to the times he had witnessed her decimating some witless adversary who had made the mistake of underestimated her in court, and he had to smile inwardly at the contrast. As a young child, Patrick had known his mother was a lawyer, and had some vague ideas about what that meant in her case—courtrooms and judges and juries and such.

  It wasn’t until Patrick had actually witnessed his mother in action, though, that he appreciated the two very different sides of her personality. When at home, his mother was very even-tempered, patient and rarely raised her voice. Of course, the fact that she had always had a staff to handle the details of running a house and raising children doubtless helped her equanimity.

  But when in a professional setting, which, because she was a litigator was by definition adversarial, Patrick instead beheld a woman who was clearly smarter, tougher, more wily and cunning than the vast majority of her adversaries and had no hesitancy in making those facts entirely clear to them at the slightest provocation.

  One time Patrick was sitting in the gallery of the courtroom during one of his mother’s more celebrated trials involving the fallout from a hostile takeover between corporate behemoths. Patrick had noticed his mother’s opposing counsel kept interrupting her questioning of a witness. This other lawyer was openly rude and disdainful of his mother, and was trying desperately to undermine her credibility in front of the jury.

  His mother had calmly waited for the judge to intercede in response to her objections, and when he didn’t, took matters into her own hands. The next time the lawyer made a snide comment about Regina’s questioning, she leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Whatever she said to him permanently silenced him for the remainder of the trial.

  Later over dinner several evenings after his mother’s victory, Patrick asked her what she had said to the man that had made such a difference. Regina laughed at first and tried to wave the question off, but when Patrick pressed her, she relented and said, “I told him that if he interrupted me one more time, I’d tell his partners that he was embezzling from his firm.”

  She delivered the line in a low, menacing voice, and when she finished, raised one eyebrow at Patrick’s obvious surprise.

  “Always know your adversary, Patrick.” Regina had said, and turned to continue the conversation she was having, morphing back to his loving mother without missing a beat.

  Now, looking over at his mother, Patrick understood the fact that sometimes you had to compartmentalize your life in order to survive. Look at his own life, he thought, he was hardly who he appeared to be on one level, yet exactingly true to his inner self on another.

  Patrick’s thoughts were interrupted by his sister Clarissa. “So, Patrick, have you met anybody special lately?”

  Jerome piped up for one of his rare forays into dinner conversation. “Clarissa, you might as well get to the point, the boy’s got you figured out. Who’re you trying to fix him up with now?”

  Patrick grinned at his father, and waved his hand magnanimously, “It’s okay Dad, I understand Clarissa’s fixation on my love life. But why don’t you tell us about yours Clarissa. I’m sure that’s so much more interesting … isn’t it?” Patrick may as well have rung the opening bell in a 15 round boxing match. Patrick knew he was pushing her buttons, and he knew Clarissa couldn’t help rising to the bait.

  Clarissa had the broad brow of their father with their mother’s eyes. And right now that brow was furrowed between her thick, prominent eyebrows as her eyes squinted daggers at Patrick.

  At 44 she had attained the polish and poise that she had always admired in Regina, yet there was an underlying restlessness that bloomed to the surface of her every gesture.

  Tall and rather angular, Clarissa moved with the loose-limbed grace of the gymnast she had been until she grew too tall to compete with the “munchkins” as she called the wunderkinds who had overtaken the sport. She was a golden brown shade found in no one else in the family, with light brown eyes flecked with gold and reddish hair that she typical had tied up in twists or braids in homage to her ancestry.

  Married then divorced from a fellow University of Chicago M.B.A. student in her 20s, Clarissa was a successful investment banker in New York and had a life many envied from afar.

  Yet Clarissa longed for the kind of soul-melding intimacy she had witnessed all her life between Regina and Jerome. She had never found it, and was tormented by what she perceived as her life’s most bitter failure.

  “Patrick, you have no love life… that’s the problem. And the fact that you’re a single, relatively presentable, upwardly-mobile male descendent of Africans living in America who is not already married to some white girl means that I am duty-bound as said male’s older sister to steer you in the right direction at every given opportunity. And have I got an opportunity for you.”

  Clarissa customarily spoke in rapid-fire, complex sentences that sounded like she rehearsed them for hours, but had been flowing out of her mouth unrehearsed and unabated since she almost before she could walk.

  “Clarissa, please don’t go off into that ‘do it for the race’ stuff … I’ve heard it all before. What you need to understand is that your issues are not my issues, and your problems are not mine.” Patrick tried to quash the inevitable course this evening’s conversation was going to take, knowing the futility of his effort even while he made it.

  “You’re right Pitty-Pat, your problems—unlike mine—are massive, and leading the pack if you don’t mind my pointing out is the desolate landscape that you call a life. When’s the last time you had a relationship with a non-silicon-based life form?” Clarissa only reverted to her childhood nickname for Patrick when she knew she was on a roll and nothing was going to stop her—least of all her little bothersome twerp of a brother Pitty-Pat—from having her say and getting her way.

  “You know how hard it is to find descendents of our original culture who even know where they come from, Patrick? Do you know that our meager numbers in this country are dwindling even further because of intermarriage? You know I have nothing against white people, it’s just that I believe in preserving our heritage, t
he way our family has always done. But if we don’t continue that tradition, we’ll have no family left. We’ll just blend in to oblivion, and what will our family’s sacrifices mean if there is no family left—if there is no ‘people’ left to show what we fought for all these years?”

  Even Clarissa had to take a breath sometimes, and when she did, Patrick thought he’d wave the white flag by agreeing to meet whomever or whatever she’d arranged for him this time and put an end to the skirmish.

  “Okay, you win.” Patrick said as quickly as he could. Not about to be interrupted when she’d gotten wound up on her favorite subject, Clarissa blew past him as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “We don’t even identify ourselves as a people anymore. At least when we were identified as ‘niggers’ it meant something. I mean, I guess after the Civil War we were called ‘negroes’ for a while; but even that didn’t last. We’ve gone from Negroes to Colored to Africans in America to Displaced Persons of Color to I don’t even know what else we’ve been called. But I do know this: when you lose your name, you lose your identity.”

  “You know, Clarissa, why the people in the South stopped calling their slaves ‘niggers’ don’t you?” Regina asked in a voice that made it clear to Patrick that whatever she had to say on the subject enhanced rather than diminished the point Clarissa was trying to make.

  “What they learned was that although the policy of subjugating the slaves by calling them a disdainful, demeaning name was appropriate for one stage of slavery, it was actually counterproductive to the next. Under the Rules as amended in the early 1900’s, the use of the word was strictly forbidden. By that time, they’d learned that a name that identifies a group of people, even a name that is associated with the basest treatment imaginable, has the effect of unifying those people.

  “Well of course that was the last thing they wanted,” Regina continued, “rather than risk the slaves identifying with one another, banding together in strength and defying the system, the Rules instead dictated the use of division as the most effective tool of oppression. So the field worker became the Servant of the Field, the house worker became Servant of the Protectorate and so on. The mixed breeds figuratively and literally became buffers between the whites and the unmixed African slaves.

  “As evil as those people were and are, they figured out a fundamental truth: if you establish social stratas and class distinctions between people you want to dominate, they spend more time fighting each other than the real enemy.”

  Regina picked up her fork and paused before resuming the meal, gazing at Patrick as if in a silent plea. Jerome, as he so often did, provided a quiet summation for his wife. Perhaps without the passion, but with the steady, heartfelt earnestness that he had passed on to his oldest son.

  “All the way back to Euphrates and Livonia, son, our family has held on to our African roots. From the time of Lelia Manning, our children have been tutored on African history, both ancient and modern, because we’ve known these were not lessons they would learn otherwise. Lelia’s passion for our people was the beginning of an unbroken covenant between our family and the mission of liberation. What good is it to preserve a people only to lose them in the end?” Jerome finished his statement—his sole contribution to the topic—and everyone knew the matter was closed.

  Regina turned to look over at Clarissa, then across the table from Clarissa to Patrick marveling for the millionth time at the differences between her children. She had tried for so many years not to question her son’s solitary habits. All those years when her other children married, sometimes happily other times not, Regina had suppressed the urge to meddle in Patrick’s life.

  Knowing that he was the designee of the family’s most weighty obligation, she instead tried to understand the enormous pressures on him and not add any more. Now she looked at Patrick and wondered why he seemed to have no interest in having the kind of close, intimate relationship that had been her salvation with her marriage to Jerome. She understood Patrick so well on some levels, and not at all on others.

  Patrick interrupted the silence by relenting. “All right, Clarissa, you win … as always. So tell me all about her.”

  CHAPTER 18

  ‌Olivia stepped off the train onto the platform, and shrugged off the last vestige of apprehension she’d been struggling with all morning, when she saw Emmaline waving her over, grinning her crooked grin and looking truly happy to see her. Olivia had practically convinced herself that she’d never have been allowed a travel pass if the Confederacy—or the Assembly, whoever they were—suspected her of spying. But even though the facts seemed to support the relief she knew she should be feeling, she still couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that she could be walking into a trap.

  She’d half expected to be greeted by uniformed police, or even worse, plain clothed agents, on her arrival in Atlanta. The fact that Em was here, the daughter of a prominent senator and herself a rising powerhouse in the Confederacy, meant that no one could possibly have suspected Olivia. There was no way they would have let Em close to her if that had been the case.

  “Hey there, sister, wanna have some fun?” Em said in her best imitation of a catcall as Olivia approached her in the waiting area.

  “I think you’re missing at least one essential appendage, honey … but do you have a brother?” Olivia responded.

  “I was supposed to be the brother, chile,” Em lowered her voice in mock seriousness “which is why I’ve always been such a disappointment to my Daddy.” Em giggled at her own exaggerated drawl. “Yeah, yeah, I know, full earnest and half jest, right?”

  “Speaking of being a disappointment to one’s pater, my sweet, can’t thank you enough for getting me the hell off that damn Protectorate, at least for a little while. I swear I was about to lose what little bit of sanity I’ve got left.” Olivia responded as they headed toward the main entrance where Em’s car was waiting under the grand portico.

  “Oh, aren’t we just the important person these days.” Olivia teased Em as they were helped into the back of the limo by the driver. “You used to hate being driven around, girl, how’d they convince you to run around with a minder?” Olivia asked.

  “Well, I’ve discovered that sometimes it’s better to let folks keep tabs on you … it gives them the idea that they can control you.” Em answered while the driver walked around to the other side of the car. “There are times when I want to be ‘official’ and times when I don’t. And when it serves my purpose to be visible, I might as well be visible in style.

  “One big benefit of being chaperoned around is that I get to have the car swept for listening devices whenever I want—it’s part of the budget.” Em said as she pressed the button on the ceiling that slid the privacy panel between the passenger compartment and the front seat in place.

  “Can’t do much about the tracking gizmos, though, they’re supposed to be some sort of security device in case li’l ol’ me is kidnapped or something … but at least I know they can’t hear me, too.”

  “Stop kidding yourself, girl,” Olivia jumped in. “They don’t need a bug in your car to hear anything they ever want to hear, they’ve got it now where someone can be across town pointing a thingamajig at you and can pick up every word you say.”

  “All true, all true, except for one thing. They kind of outsmarted themselves when they armored the car against attack. My tech guy tells me that they swapped their ability to eavesdrop by remote because they can’t penetrate the armor. And I’m not dumb enough to use their sweepers, I use my own. Trust me honey, we’re safe here for the moment.”

  “What about the driver?” Asked Olivia.

  “Kind of cute, huh? He’s on payroll, though—theirs, not mine—need I say more? Which is why the passenger compartment is completely soundproofed. He probably thinks we’re back here having kinky sex or something.” Em snorted.

  Olivia glanced out the smoke colored windows and saw that they were only a couple of miles from Em’s office. “What have you found out
?”

  “Enough to scare the snot out of me, that’s what. I’d always heard a rumor that a particular Legislative Aide served one of the Assembly members and was none to careful about who he talked to, so I sort of happened my way over to his favorite hang-out and struck up a conversation.

  “This Aide is as weasily as they come, you know the type, he probably calculates the odds on what to have for breakfast. Anyway, he was trying pretty hard to impress me, probably figuring he could use me to advance his career—I don’t know how he got that idea …” Em winked and shrugged her shoulders. “But anyway, after more than a few drinks, he hinted that his senator was, how did he say, ‘More powerful than people gave him credit for.’

  “So I started doing some more digging, you know, background profiles, who the senator went to school with, who his major contributors were, travel records, that kind of thing, and the next thing I know I’m getting a call from Daddy.” Em visibly stiffened at the memory.

  “He ‘requested’ the pleasure of my company at dinner that night, and went into his ‘You’re my daughter and I know what’s best for you’ routine. That’s when I knew he was really scared. He told me that he’d gotten word that I was messin’ with stuff that I had no business in, and to stop it if I valued my ‘career.’

  “I kid you not, he even crooked his fingers to make quotation marks when he said ‘career’ so you know they got the message to him loud and clear that if I valued by life, I’d better back off.”

  Em finished her story in a rush, still reeling from the fact that this Assembly, whoever they were, had no qualms about threatening a Confederate Senator or his daughter, who just happened to be Assistant Director of the Domestic Products Committee.

  • • •

  Olivia and Emmaline caught up over lunch at the City Club in the Flatiron Building around the corner from the Capitol.

  They sat up in the balcony overlooking the noisy lunch crowd, replete with cigar-chomping fat cats and glad-handing politicians.