Last night there was either shooting or thunder down the bayou. The dead were took out of the back of the church and laid on the grass under a oak tree. There were flashes of light in the sky and a loud explosion in the bayou. A free man of color say a yankee gunboat was blowed up and fish rained down in the trees and some hungry people picked them up with their hands for food to eat.
Miss Abigail ask me why I come back from New Orleans when I could stay there and he free. I told her this is my home and inside myself I'm free wherever I go. I told her I want to stay and help other slaves escape up the Mississippi to the north. I have been telling myself this too.
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 those who sought her advice and the service of her girls and sometimes the opium she bought from a Chinaman in Galveston little realized she often listened to their confessions and manifestations of desire and infantile need by putting her ear to a water glass she pressed a
gainst the walls of their rooms. On Saturday nights her brothel roared with piano music and good cheer. On Monday mornings a New Orleans export-importer might discover a profitable business deal had been stolen from under his feet.
Flower stripped the sheets from the mattresses in the bedrooms and piled them in the hallway. Outside, the western sky was streaked with gold and purple clouds and under an oak tree in the dirt yard three paddy rollers were drinking whiskey at a plank table. The wind puffed the curtains and blew through the hallway, and Flower could smell watermelons and rain in a distant field. She thought she was by herself, then she heard a board creak behind her and turned around
and saw Carrie LaRose sitting in a chair, just inside the kitchen door, watching her, a contemplative expression on her face.
"Why you want to do this shit, you?" Carrie asked.
"Ma'am?"
"I could set you up in your own house, make you rich."
Flower wadded up the dirty linen she had thrown in the hallway and the dresses of Carrie LaRose's higher-priced girls and tied them inside a sheet.
"Don't know what you mean, Miss Carrie," she said.
"Don't tell me that, no. In a week or two this town's gonna be full of Yankees and all you niggers are gonna be free. A pretty li'l t'ing like you can make a lot of money. Maybe you t'inking about selling out of your drawers on your own."
"You don't have the right to talk to me like that, Miss Carrie."
Carrie LaRose looked at her nails. She wore a frilled beige dress, her hair piled on top of her head, a silver comb stuck in back.