Secret Agenda by Rochelle Alers

Author:Rochelle Alers [Alers, Rochelle]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Kimani Arabesque
Published: 2009-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

“Samuel was twenty-six in 1924 when he booked passage on a freighter to Havana, Cuba to negotiate the purchase of a sugar plantation. What he hadn’t known or anticipated was the anti-American sentiment among Cubans following the Spanish-American War. It wasn’t his color as much as it was his nationality that preempted his purchasing the property. He’d framed a quotation from the man who refused to sell him the plantation: Never go to a country to negotiate a business deal without prior knowledge of that country or its people. That quotation has hung on the wall of ColeDiz International Ltd. for eighty-five years.”

“Why didn’t he buy a plantation here in the States?”

“He knew running a plantation in the States would be risky, because he believed it would be viewed unfavorably by blacks and whites. He’d fought with the 369th Infantry, the first black U.S. combat overseas unit that the Germans called “Hell Fighters.” He was one of 171 who’d earned a Croix de Guerre, or a Legion of Merit, France’s highest military medal, but no U.S. medals of honor were awarded to any black troops. He’d been a black soldier returning from World War I, and he refused to march in the back of the victory parade because a segregated parade seemed completely at odds with the principles they’d supposedly fought for.

“He didn’t get his Cuban sugar plantation, but got something he hadn’t expected—a wife. He met Marguerite-Josefina Isabel Diaz, the daughter of a Cuban aristocrat at a formal dinner and as they say the rest is history.”

“Her father approved of her marrying an American?”

“José Luís Diaz was going to marry her off to a man more than twice her age because of her unbecoming behavior, given her station. Apparently she’d posed in a skimpy garment for an artist, and the photographs were circulated all over Havana, which proved an embarrassment for my great-great-grandfather. He saw Samuel as a wealthy American willing to marry his willful daughter, and take her to America where she wouldn’t be able to bring shame on the family.”

“Was her behavior really that shocking?”

“It was for upper-class Cubans in the 1920s. M.J., as she referred to herself, was too modern for what was deemed modern Cuba.”

“Samuel never got his sugar plantation?”

“No. What he did was go to Costa Rica and purchase a banana plantation, and several years later he became involved in growing coffee in Costa Rica, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.”

“Did he speak Spanish?”

“No. He hired someone who did speak the language. Samuel met Everett Kirkland in Costa Rica and hired him to act as his interpreter and accountant. He and Everett worked well together until a woman and the Great Depression came between them.”

“Was that woman Samuel’s wife?”

Diego expelled a lungful of breath. “No. It was Samuel’s mistress. My great-grandfather slept with his secretary and got her pregnant. Meanwhile M.J. was pregnant with her third child. Somehow Samuel and Everett conspired to pass the child off as the accountant’s and he convinced Teresa Maldonado to marry him.

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