by Attica Locke
“Penelope Deschamps.”
“Your girl,” Marcus said teasingly, as if Darren were a fanboy who’d bought a much hyped baseball card instead of a photo of a slave mistress. Darren didn’t know why he’d done it other than being unnerved by what he’d seen in his room, wanting to make sense of it by holding something tangible.
“So what’s the deal with Rosemary King and Sandler Gaines?” Darren said, switching subjects and getting to the real reason he’d come by this morning.
“You talking ’bout ol’ boy rolled that glorified duck boat into town?”
“The Jeffersonian, yes.”
“Huckster,” Marcus said, blowing on his coffee before taking another sip.
“He’s got a development company out of Longview. Seems legit.”
“You have any idea how many men have come through here believing they could return Jefferson to its former glory or at least try to tap into its tourism industry with a surefire moneymaker? Outlet malls, racetracks, bingo halls, casinos, amusement parks, you name it and somebody’s tried it.”
“Gaines seems to be in the pocket of Rosemary King, or she’s in his, can’t quite figure which,” Darren said. “Maybe she’s someone who can finally make things happen.”
“She is queen bee around these parts.”
“So what’s this Marion County Texas Historical Society she’s running?”
Marcus tilted his head and made a face. “Never heard of it.”
“You sure?”
“We got the Jefferson Historical Society, the Historic Jefferson Foundation, and the Marion County Historical Commission—could you mean one of them?”
“No,” Darren said, pushing back a little in the chair he was sitting in. He felt the coffee burn in his stomach, felt flushed throughout his whole torso. Had he gotten it wrong?
“This is Rosemary’s deal?”
“The Marion County Texas Historical Society is supposed to be buying up Hopetown, out on the lake—”
“I know exactly where it is,” Marcus said, a grave expression on his face. “I wrote my dissertation on freedmen’s communities in the state of Texas. Hopetown is part of a larger historical story of what black freedom looks like.”
“Rosemary is setting up the land in some kind of a trust, or at least that’s the deal Leroy Page said he was signing.” Documents his daughter said he hadn’t bothered to sign, even as Leroy was saying they didn’t have much time. For what, Leroy? “But I’m fairly certain the thing is a ruse, that she’s going to turn around and sell or give that land to Sandler Gaines.” In exchange for getting her son out of prison maybe. “What I don’t understand is why Leroy would do that, why a man who’s lived most of his life shut off from white folks would make a deal with Rosemary King. What’s the connection there?”
“Well, you were holding it in your hand,” Marcus said.
Darren actually looked down at his empty hands, which had held nothing since he walked in but the coffee cups. And this made Marcus laugh, a short little bark followed by a wide grin; he was enjoying the tale he was about to tell.
“Penelope Deschamps,” he said, “is Rosemary’s great-great-grandmother. She bought the Cardinal Hotel just after the war and spent years building it up, helped along when her daughter married a timber magnate named William Thaddeus King. Once her daughter was set up with a proper marriage and home, ol’ Penny Deckard ate the business end of a pistol.”
Darren sat stock-still for what felt like minutes, heat beading into actual sweat across his brow. He remembered Marcus’s story of what brought Penelope to Texas from Louisiana, the tragedy that struck on the water, the deaths of most of the Magnolia’s crew and passengers, including her mother and son, and the loss of property. Six of her favored slaves presumed perished along with the others. And he remembered Marcus’s talk of rumors that the slaves ran. Swam. For there was land dotted all through Caddo Lake if you could just get to it. Margaret Goodfellow’s words about hiding in plain sight found him again, as did Leroy Page’s profession that he owed Margaret and her people everything.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Darren said.
Marcus’s smile widened. “History is a funny thing, ain’t it? So much more interesting in the flesh than what passes for truth in this state’s history books. This is the thing your uncle Clayton either doesn’t get or isn’t capable of understanding. He lives his life’s work in a college lecture hall, inside a world of brilliant, purposeful ideas not tested in the heat of the real world.”
Since his uncle William’s death, Darren hadn’t heard anyone criticize Clayton’s comfort in the world of academia. He might have scolded Marcus if not for the strange feeling of pride rising in his own chest. Say what you would about Darren’s struggles with what the badge meant to him, he was at least living out the question every day. He was in the struggle right now.
“So there were Caddos on one of the islands on the lake?” he said.
“Gogo Island,” Marcus said, nodding. “So named for what folks heard from the Indians living there if they tried to trespass. Screams of ‘Go, go.’ Followed sometimes by a shot from an arrow or, later, a pistol they somehow acquired. They actually traded with some white folks living on the water out there, locals who kept their secret, who had a live-and-let-live attitude. It was a change in leadership in Austin that later started the trouble. The Indians, yes, they took in the small family of Penelope Deschamps’s slaves. The old-timers in Hopetown, some I interviewed myself, talked about it freely, how the Caddos felt a kinship of circumstance with the black slaves, had a shared understanding of the reach for true freedom, the Indians from being shipped out of their homeland and into Indian Territory in Oklahoma and the blacks from being returned to enslavement.”
The slaves stayed for years, Marcus said, sharing agricultural ideas and learning to build housing from the scantest resources. They shared everything, and there was some mixing, of course, new bloodlines carved into the land, creating a love and trust that had endured for five generations. “They owe each other everything.” Which was why Leroy Page would do anything for Margaret and her family.
But in the summer of 1865, word reached them that the war had ended, and many of the former slaves wanted to leave the island, an option the Caddos didn’t feel was available to them. There were new families that were split as the blacks migrated to the land where Hopetown sits now, eventually using the Homestead Act to acquire the lakefront property. But they still ran supplies out to Gogo Island, still protected the Indians from the outside world. These were Leroy Page’s ancestors. And over time, they built a thriving community that existed outside of the white world completely. There was a school, a church, a small bank, a community garden, and small businesses. For years, they went into town, into Jefferson, only out of absolute necessity, to file papers or to purchase goods they couldn’t grow or get on their own in Hopetown. The old-timers told Marcus there was a deep and maybe not-so-irrational fear of having their lives stolen from them again. Even though the war had ended, they had committed a crime, and they weren’t sure that Penelope Deschamps and her people would easily forget that. No one likes to admit the fear that was built into Hopetown from the very start, the sense of their freedom being as fragile as the shell of an egg, something that would crack if you held it too tightly, if it weren’t handled with the utmost care.
“But how did the Caddos end up there as well?” Darren asked.
“What you got to understand is Caddo Lake, back in the day, was just buck-ass wild, a playground for all manner of criminals, rum-runners and thieves and murderers, but Texas law couldn’t really do much about it, or it simply didn’t choose to. But in the late 1800s, the state created what would eventually become the fish and gaming commission in order to stop the overfishing of catfish and bass and the men who were making a fortune harvesting oysters for pearls till there wasn’t hardly none left. Whatever started it, there were suddenly lawmen on boats, combing every bayou and strait, every island and c
ypress stand on the lake. It was Page’s people that got the Caddos of Gogo Island safely out of there, inviting them to make a home in Hopetown. Ain’t another bit of history like it. I believe them when they say they are descended from a band of Hasinai Caddo Indians who never left the state of Texas, no matter the white man’s laws.” Marcus slapped his knee, pleased with the outcome of his tale.
“So selling to the trust,” Darren said, “assuming it’s real—”
“Big if.”
“That would have been Leroy’s way of honoring his ancestors, the ones who were saved by Margaret Goodfellow’s people. His way of making sure, like he told me, the Caddos would have a home where they always should have been, in this stretch of East Texas. He would have made Rosemary promise that was part of the deal.”
“But you think Gaines is trying to get his hands on the land?”
“Yes,” Darren said. “He admitted he tried to buy it and got outbid.”
Marcus sucked his teeth and stood suddenly. He walked to the windows at the front of the store, looked out toward the railroad tracks. “It’s a shame, really, to lose all that history to lakeside housing.”
Darren shook his head. It no longer rang true to him. “So he builds vacation housing and people spend, what, sixty, seventy thousand dollars to live by the water and go into town to look for ghosts? There has to be some bigger attraction.” He pictured the steamboat replica docked out on Cypress Bayou. What had the brochure said? Come see Jefferson’s newest attraction, something like that. He saw the brochure again in his mind, the cheap photography. There had been a couple smiling, toasting before a sunset on Cypress Bayou. But there had also been images of blackjack tables, roulette wheels. Darren stood too now.
“Before, you said something about casinos,” he said.
“Just rumors,” Marcus said. “Like I said, folks have floated all kinds of ideas about drawing people back to Jefferson from Dallas or Shreveport, something besides historical tourism. But I never put any stock in that one in particular. Gambling’s been illegal in Texas for as long as I can remember.”
“Right,” Darren said. Unless.
22.
HE’D HEARD they tried something like this in Louisiana once, Darren thought as he stood on Margaret Goodfellow’s front porch, hoping she was home and not still at the hospital. He’d texted Greg to ask about any change in Mr. Page’s condition and got back a terse Holding steady. On the drive into Hopetown, Darren had tried to remember the details of the scandal that erupted when the tiny Jena band of Choctaw Indians attempted to establish a reservation in Louisiana for the purposes of applying for a gaming license from the National Indian Gaming Commission; their reservation had to be recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington before they would be granted a license. The infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff pushed senators and congressmen to whom he and his firm had made generous campaign donations to write letters to the Department of the Interior accusing the tiny group of Choctaw Indians of “reservation shopping,” trying to set up shop miles from their actual homeland. It turned out that the real reason for Abramoff’s push to end their gaming bid was that his lobbying firm already represented rival Indian casinos in the area. The only Indian casino in the state of Texas that had slots and table games was the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino, all the way down in the border town of Eagle Pass, where you could sneeze and your DNA would land in Mexico. But if Sandler Gaines established one in Jefferson, he’d have a monopoly on casino gambling across the entire eastern part of the state.
Darren knocked again on the screen door with the chipped yellow paint, listening for the sound of footsteps. The baby was home, at least. Darren could hear his squeals and the cheerful chirping of some children’s TV program. He hoped it would be Margaret who opened the door and not Donald or his son. But it was Virginia, Donald’s wife. She had her sister-in-law Sadie’s baby on her hip. She gave Darren a terse smile, and sucked her teeth as she said, “E’-nah is inside.” She stepped back to let Darren through, eyeing him as he took off his hat inside the house. The dining-room table and every piece of furniture in the front parlor were covered in fabric in some stage of transformation. Dresses nearly done, shawls with fringes being mended, the baby’s moccasins that his mother was sewing up the toes on. Even Ray, Donald’s son, had a sewing machine in front of him and was carefully sewing a strip of ribbon across a man’s turquoise shirt. He looked at Darren but didn’t speak. The colors—oceanic blues and buttercup yellows, rose pinks and the red of life itself, of the dirt of East Texas—and the bustle of activity looked festive at first. But it was the slow, mournful tuning of Donald’s guitar that kept the energy in the house down to a low pitch. Margaret’s son was tucked into a corner with a few other cousins and friends, preparing instruments, waiting for something to start. Margaret emerged from a back room wearing a brick-red dress and carrying a fringed white shawl embroidered with red flowers and bits of blue and green. Her graying hair was pulled into a single braid that was crowned by a round silver comb that wrapped around the back of her head. The braid itself was threaded through with ribbons, bits of leather, and beads. She looked at Darren and put her hand to her chest. “Leroy is okay?”
“Last I heard, yes.”
“If he will hold on, the spirits are coming. We start the Vine Dance at sunset, borrowed from our Cherokee brothers and sisters to bring health and wholeness for Leroy, the last of his tribe. We will dance for days in prayer.”
“Mrs. Goodfellow.”
“Margaret, please. Or tayshas . . . for friend,” she said with a smile.
“Tayshas,” he repeated, hearing his whole world in that one word. Texas. Friend. “What exactly did Leroy tell you about the sale of this land?”
“That we would be protected.”
“By having the land established as a Caddo reservation?”
Margaret turned to Donald and said, “Go get the papers from above my bed, son.” As he stood, the notes of his guitar faded like fog at dawn.
Darren heard the buzz of Ray’s sewing machine and also someone banging pots and pans in the kitchen. He smelled roasting squash and again the smoky scent of those black-charred beans, the onion and chili powder.
When Donald returned to the room, he didn’t retreat back to his corner but instead crowded his body near his mother’s, as if whatever she and Darren were discussing, it damn sure involved him too. His mother took a sheaf of paper from his hand. “It was the woman who explained it all. She came to us from Leroy, who I guess got her name from Rosemary.”
“Monica Maldonado.”
The name didn’t immediately register for Margaret. But her son nodded.
Darren said, “Latina woman, about five six, long black hair.”
“That’s her,” Donald said. “She walked us through the paperwork.”
Darren took the document from Margaret and saw a petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for federal recognition of the Hasinai band of Caddo Indians of Marion County, Texas. Attached was a historical narrative of Margaret Goodfellow’s family and their connection to the land. The word ancestral was used more than once. Darren flipped through the pages, which held a story similar to the one Marcus Aldrich had told him but with a great deal less emphasis on evading the Texas law that had required them to relocate to Oklahoma. The whole thing seemed like a long shot, and yet someone had hired Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene, a firm that Lisa had assured him still had enough ties to Washington to push something like this through.
But none of the pages were signed.
Darren asked why.
“She said she was coming back,” Donald said.
“We sat right in this room and drank hibiscus tea with honey,” Margaret said. “A sweet little thing but nervous-like, fiddling with her watch, looking at the papers over and over like she was sure she was forgetting something.”
“It was something on the last page,” Donald said. “She kept asking us were we sure, saying she wouldn’t feel right if she left and t
hen found out we didn’t really understand what we were signing. That’s why, she said, she wanted to talk to us first, and then she said she would come back with a notary in a few days. Maybe, she said, maybe some things in the document could be changed.”
“She kept looking at the document and shaking her head,” Margaret said. “She actually asked to use the washroom and came back looking like she’d been sick.”
“Or like she’d been crying,” said Virginia, who had wandered into the room.
Darren asked if it was okay if he sat down. He didn’t want to mess up any of the preparations for the Vine Dance, as they had called it. Virginia lifted a bundle of fabrics and clothes, and Darren sat in a leather armchair, brown but for the worn spots on the arms, which were as pale as the belly of a farm hog. He opened the document to its very last page, his eyes falling to a section at the bottom. BE IT KNOWN THAT EACH MEMBER OF THE HASINAI BAND OF CADDO INDIANS OF MARION COUNTY, TEXAS, RENOUNCES ANY CLAIM TO FUTURE INCOME AS A RESULT OF INDIAN GAMING RELATED TO THIS TRIBE. ANY APPLICATIONS MADE ON OUR BEHALF TO THE INDIAN GAMING COMMISSION DO NOT NULLIFY THE INTENT OF PARAGRAPH 11.2. Darren looked up from the petition to the Goodfellow family. “And did you understand what this means?”
“Of course,” Margaret said, “but we told her we were happy to renounce gaming if that helped our petition get approved. We only want the land. That’s what we told the woman lawyer, but she didn’t want us to sign this.”
“This was never about money for us,” Donald said.
But it was about money for somebody, Darren thought. And Monica Maldonado knew it, knew she was helping to cheat them.
“And what do the actual terms of the sale say?” Darren asked. “In terms of which part of the parcel would belong to you and which parts might have been set aside for other use?”
They were all standing over him now, sensing something was very wrong; even Sadie or Saku had come in from the kitchen. She was holding the boy, had a tea towel draped over her shoulder. Margaret actually dropped down on top of some of the dresses Virginia hadn’t moved from the couch.