It was unsigned.
The newspaper was printed on low-grade paper, of a dirty gray color, the printer's type undefined and fuzzy along the edges. The newspaper was titled The Rebel Clarion and had sprung to life in Baton Rouge immediately after the Surrender, featuring anonymously written articles and cartoons that depicted Africans with slat teeth, jug ears, lips that protruded like suction cups and bodies with the anatomical proportions of baboons, the knees and elbows punching through the clothes, as though poverty were in itself funny. In the cartoons the emancipated slave spit watermelon seeds, tap-danced while a carpetbagger tossed coins at him, sat with his bare feet on a desk in the state legislature or with a mob of his peers chased a terrified white woman in bonnet and hooped skirts inside the door of a ruined plantation house.
The article Flower was supposed to read was circled with black charcoal. In her mind's eye she saw herself tearing both the note and the newspaper in half and dropping them in the trash pit behind the house. But when she saw Abigail's name in the first paragraph of the article she sat down in Carrie LaRose's rocker on the gallery and, like a person deciding to glance at the lewd writing on a privy wall, she began to read.
While Southern soldiers died on the field at Shiloh, Miss Dowling showed her loyalties by joining ranks with the Beast of New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler, and caring for the enemy during the Yankee occupation of that city.
Later, using a pass from the Sanitary Commission, she smuggled escaped negroes through Confederate lines so they could join the Yankee army and sack the homes of their former owners and benefactors and, in some cases, rape the white women who had clothed and fed and nursed them when they were sick.
Miss Dowling has now seen fit to use her influence in the Northern press to attack one of Louisiana's greatest Confederate heroes, a patriot who was struck by enemy fire three times at Shiloh but who managed to escape from a prison hospital and once more join in the fight to support the Holy Cause.
Miss Dowling is well known in New Iberia, not only for her traitorous history during the war but also for propensities that appear directly related to her spinsterhood. Several credible sources have indicated that her close relationship with a freed negro woman is best described by a certain Latin term this newspaper does not make use of.
She set both the note and the newspaper under a flowerpot, although she could not explain why she didn't simply throw them away, and went inside her new house and fixed breakfast.
SEVERAL hours later a carriage with waxed black surfaces and white wheels and maroon cushions and a surrey on top pulled into the yard. A black man in a tattered, brushed coat and pants cut off at the knees sat in the driver's seat. A lean, slack-jawed outrider, wearing a flop hat, a gunbelt and holstered revolver hanging from his pommel, preceded the carriage into the yard and dismounted and looked back down the road and out into the fields, as though the great vacant spaces proffered a threat that no one else saw.
Flower stepped out on the gallery, into the hot wind blowing from the south. Ira Jamison got down from his carriage and removed his hat and wiped the inside of the band with a handkerchief as he nodded approvingly at the house and the mixture of flowers and banana trees and palms planted around it.
He wore a white shirt with puffed sleeves and a silver vest and dark pants, but because of the heat his coat was folded neatly on the cushions of the carriage. He carried an ebony-black cane with a gold head on it, but Flower noticed his limp was gone and his skin was pink and his eyes bright.
"This is extraordinary. You've done a wonderful job with the old place," he said. "My heavens, you never cease proving you're one of the most ingenious women I've ever known."
She looked at him mutely, her face tingling.
"Aren't you going to say hello?" he asked.
"How do you do, Colonel?" she said.
"Smashing, as my British friends in the cotton trade say. I'm in town to check on a few business matters. Looks like the Yanks burned down my laundry and the cabins out back with it."
"I'm glad you brought that up. My fifty arpents runs into seventy-five of yours. I'll take them off your hands," she said.
"You'll take them off-" he began, then burst out laughing. "Now, how would you do that?"
"Use my house and land to borrow the money. I already talked to the bank."
"Will you pay me for the buildings I lost?"
"No."
"By God, you amaze me, Flower. I'm proud of you," he said.
She felt her heart quicken, and was ashamed at how easily he could manipulate her emotions. She walked down the steps, then tilted up the flowerpot she had stuck the racist newspaper under.
"Read this and the note that came with it," she said.
Jamison set down his cane on the steps and unfolded the newspaper in the shade. Behind him, the outrider, whom Flower recognized as Clay Hatcher, stood in the sun, sweating under his hat. His bottom lip was swollen and crusted with black blood along a deep cut. He kept swiping horseflies out of his face.
Jamison tore the note in half and stuck it inside the newspaper and dropped the newspaper on the step.
"No one will dare harm you, Flower. I give you my wor
d," he said.
"They already did. Three men raped me. They were paid by Rufus Atkins."
"I don't believe that. Rufus has worked for me thirty years. He does-"