White Doves at Morning by Burke James Lee

Author:Burke, James Lee [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-01-13T03:46:48+00:00

I cannot be sure this is exactly truthful. This is my thoughts for this morning.

Respectfully, Flower Jamison

She looked back down at her words in the lamplight, then gazed out the window at the blueness of the dawn and a calf wandering out of the cane field. The calf caught a scent on the breeze and ran toward a cow that stood on the lip of the coulee in a grove of swamp maples.

Flower picked up her pencil and wrote at the bottom of the folded-back page in her tablet:

Post Script-I know I should hate him. But it is not what I feel. Why would a man not love his own daughter? Or at least look at her the way a father is suppose to look at his child? All people are the same under their skin. Why is my father different? Why is he cruel when he does not have to be?

LATE that afternoon Flower filled the caulked cypress tub behind the slave quarters with water she drew from the windmill, then bathed and put on a clean dress and began her pickup route, stopping first at the back door of Carrie LaRose's brothel.

Carrie LaRose could have been the twin of her brother, Scavenger Jack. She was beetle-browed, big-boned, with breasts the size of pumpkins and red-streaked black hair that grew on her head like snakes. She wore a holy medal and a gold cross around her neck, a juju bag tied above her knee and paid a traiteur to put a gris-gris on her enemies and business rivals. Some said she had escaped a death sentence in either Paris or the West Indies by seducing the executioner, who bound and gagged another woman in Carrie's prison cell and took her to the guillotine in Carrie's stead.

Flower paid little attention to white people's rumors, but she did know ont thing absolutely about Carrie La Rose, she either possessed the powers of prophecy and knew the future or she was so knowledgeable about human weakness and the perfidious and venal nature of the world that she could predict the behavior of people in any given situation with unerring precision.

Cotton speculators, arms dealers, munitions manufacturers, and slave traders came to her bordello and had their palms read and their lust slaked in her bedrooms and gladly paid her a commission on their profits.

Early in the war a Shreveport cotton trader asked her advice about risking his cotton on a blockade runner.

"How much them British gonna pay you?" she asked.

"Three times the old price," the cotton trader replied.

"What you t'ink them textile mills in Mass'chusetts gonna pay?" she asked.

"I don't understand. We're not trading with the North," he said.

"That's what you t'ink. The cotton don't care where it grow. Them Yankees don't, either. They rather have it come up to the Mis'sippi than go t'rew the blockade to the British. The blockade runners gonna bring guns back to the Confederates."

The cotton traders who listened to Carrie increased their profits six - and sevenfold.

But

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