Excerpt: Race

It didn’t take Cal long to find his sister. She was on the sleeping porch, reclining on the back legs of a white rattan chair with her feet up on the wooden rail, smoking a cigarette and reading from her battered first edition copy of Gone With The Wind. “So what are we supposed to do?” she asked her brother when she noticed him. “Did Silver have any sage advice for us after I left?”
“No,” Cal answered her plainly. “No advice at all.”
“Filthy bastard,” Dixie drawled, taking a long drag off of her cigarette as she did. “Has the nerve to drive up here in his brand new Cadillac to let us know we’ve practically lost everything that he swore to us as little children we would never ever lose. He’s ready to turn us out in to the street like a bunch of common hobos and he thinks it’s somehow appropriate to wear his new car on everybody’s nose. Chosen people of God or not: that particular Jew is going to hell for sure.”
“From your lips to God’s ears, Dixie,” Cal affirmed. He was hating that man and his shiny new Caddy a little bit more every minute. Picturing him suffering eternal damnation somehow lessened the anger in Cal’s gut at the thought of him.
“And no idea what it is that we might do about it?” she half asked/ half assumed.
“Not one,” he said back.
“You gonna get a job?” she asked him dryly. Dixie had to stop herself from laughing at that prospect. John Calvin Marbury Davenport, Jr. had not been raised to live the life of a working man. The Davenports had lost just about everything when the cotton crop was burned in the march of eighteen sixty four but they had done well in recovering what assets they had lost. It seemed that the Georgia pine that had grown over their decimated cotton fields was of the perfect quality to be of substantial benefit to the rebuilding efforts in the islands and all through Savannah and Charleston throughout the eighteen seventies and beyond.
Sherwood Plantation had done quite well ever since. The lumber business had boomed for most of the years since the initial success of the eighteen seventies save a few rather lean years during the great war. Cal Jr. had been raised to run this family’s business, administer the plantation, mind the price of lumber, and otherwise live the life of a southern gentleman. The idea of him trying to work for someone else would have been positively laughable had it not been so tragic.
“Sure,” Cal answered back with a chuckle, as aware as his sister was of just how preposterous a suggestion she had made. He set his glass down on a nearby plant stand and withdrew his cigarette case from his shirt pocket.
“I could get a job,” Dixie suggested. She would be finished with teachers’ college in a month and it had always been her intention to work for a living once she was finished. It was coming on to the end of the school year, but perhaps there might be an opening at the local elementary school, or maybe at the Baptist Bible Academy. She certainly preferred the thought of working at the Episcopal Day School, but was willing to enter into any port in a storm.
“You could,” Cal allowed, putting a cigarette in his mouth. “But that would presume that there were jobs to be had in Beaufort County,” he added. “Which by all indications, there are not. You’d be in the same boat as me, only it might be harder, seein’ as you’re a girl and all. Unless,” he added, “ that is you intend to leave Beaufort County?” Cal thoughtlessly took a match from his pocket and struck it against the wood frame of the porch screen, lighting his cigarette before shaking out the match and letting it fall to the ground.
“You know I intend to stay right here at Sherwood,” she answered back with a frown, puffing again at her ever shrinking cigarette.
“Then I don’t think that you’d have any luck finding a job as a teacher or otherwise,” he answered. Dixie frowned, but nodded her head. He had a point. Schools all over the area had been closing due to lack of money and teachers had been laid off by the scores. “What would Scarlett O’Hara do in this situation?” Cal asked her.
“Scarlett O’Hara was in just this situation,” Dixie reminded him of a scene in the middle of her book.
“And what was her solution?” he asked in reply. Dixie shrugged her shoulders and grimaced.
“She tried to whore herself to Rhett Butler and then sold herself in to marriage to a man she didn’t particularly care for. Neither of these are exactly viable options for us under the circumstances,” she answered.
“What do you mean, ‘not viable options’?” Cal asked her with a chuckle. Dixie shook her head.
“I suppose I could get married,” Dixie joked wryly. She had absolutely no intention of even entertaining that possibility. She had been engaged once, several years back. But her fiancé had been killed in an unfortunate automobile accident and Dixie had had very little to do with men ever since. She figured herself destined to be one of those women who taught school, did work for the church, and spent her twilight years alone but adored by her entire community. Getting married was nowhere to be found in that life plan.
“Wouldn’t do anybody any good,” Cal said back to his sister by way of assuring her that he was not even considering such a thing. Desperate times may call for desperate measures, and getting his sister out of the house and married to someone who could provide for her would certainly help the situation at Sherwood, but he would never so much as dream of forcing her into a marriage now or ever. “No one in Beaufort County has any more money than we have,” he added by way of further leavening the moment.
“Well that’s a relief,” Dixie sighed, flicking ashes onto the floor of the sleeping porch. “We’re not dirt poor- we’re middle class.” Cal chuckled. The depression had done that to people: turned the middle class into the suddenly poor and the long time poor into the middle class. The world; well, South Carolina at least, had more and more in common with every day that went by. Everyone was broke now days.
Everyone, that was, except the bankers. Cal frowned again at the memory of Mr. Silver’s damnable new Cadillac. He took a pronounced drink from the glass in his hand and leaned against the door frame.
“The hell is that you’re drinking?” Dixie asked him. Damn. He hadn’t thought ahead to the look that might be on his face when the first sip of Georgia Lightning passed his palate. He might as well come clean now, there was no way he could get away with lying to Dixie; he never could and he was sure that wasn’t about to change now.
“Whiskey,” he answered truthfully. There was no use in keeping this a secret from his sister, anyway. The only likely fallout would be Dixie’s wanting a nip of her own, and she’d surely never think to look for the half full mason jar in the kitchen flour bin. He didn’t have to tell her there was more in the house and he hoped she wouldn’t ask.
“That don’t look like any whiskey I’ve ever seen,” she said back to him, her eyebrows raised in much the same way that she always did when she knew she had caught him at something. Cal nodded and grinned widely at his sister.
“It’s local,” he commented with pride, regarding closely the clear liquor in his little glass.
“Bathtub gin?” Dixie asked, letting the front legs of her chair down and frowning at her brother. Her eyebrows were still raised as though something truly dubious was going on in front of her. Cal chuckled.
“I doubt the hillbillies who brewed up this stuff have ever so much as seen a bathtub,” he answered her. Dixie laughed at that.
“Fair enough,” she said back, taking another drag from her cigarette and shaking her head. “Where in hell did you get it?” she asked.
“Mija keeps a few little jars behind the counter,” he answered. It was the truth without having to tell her to look in the flour bin. Mija was the old Mexican woman who ran the general store adjacent to the filling station. She had somehow come into possession of a few derelict mason jars full of the stuff and had them behind the counter for purchase by certain select customers.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Dixie answered back. “I’d not have taken her for a criminal. Is she in with organized crime?”
“Just a little civil disobedience,” Cal joked back at his sister. “It’s no big time liquor racket, but it’s enough to keep a gentleman adequately lubricated in these lean times.” He raised his glass in a one- sided toast to the little shop and its keeper. Dixie shook her head. She wasn’t going to get anywhere and she knew it. Cal had never made any secret of his disdain for prohibition and it should have been no surprise at all to anyone who knew him well that he had some supply of unlawful spirits about and the ability to procure more of the stuff had he the need in the future.
“It’s a wonder,” she continued, “things that are illegal…” she shrugged her shoulders and stamped out her cigarette against the bottom of her shoe, tossing the butt into a nearby ashtray. “And yet people with no money are spending what money they don’t have on it.”