The Cottoncrest Curse: A Novel

Chapter 20

67 Chapter 20 Cooper was out in his garden, picking fall tomatoes and pinching the green, leafy suckers off the plants, when Jake rolled into Little Jerusalem . Cooper stopped, the muscles rippling in his massive arms as he held up a ripe tomato in his hand. “I’ve been done growin’ the finest tomatoes you everest did see, Peddler Man. Sweet like a woman’s kiss and moist as a woman as well.” Jake halted his cart and stopped to mop his brow. “It’s as big a tomato as I think I ever saw, Cooper. And it’s as red as the face of a white man telling a lie so big even he’s embarrassed after saying it.” Cooper gave a big grin. “Could be. But since you seen my crop, then I believes you’ll be wantin’ to trade somethin’ for such fine eatin’ as this.” “Cooper, if I ate all that I traded for, I wouldn’t have anything left to trade and wouldn’t be able to buckle my belt, much less push this cart, except with my stomach.” Cooper’s grin only got larger. He liked the Peddler Man, with his black curly hair cut close and his wiry little build. If the Peddler Man was getting any extra flesh on his bones, it had to be the thinningest flesh ever. “If you don’t eat, how you gonna push that cart of yours?” asked Rossy, coming out of the tiny cabin, holding a baby on her hip. “Cooper, ain’t you gonna just give the Peddler Man one of your tomatoes?” She gave a sly smile to Cooper. “‘Moist as a woman?’ If you keep talkin’ like that, you better get all your ‘moist’ from that tomato and don’t come lookin’ to get any from me.” It was always like this when Jake came to Little Jerusalem. Cooper would try to get him to trade for food, and eventually Cooper and the others would come up with something more substantial, and they 68 would work something out and have a meal, for Cooper and Rossy and all the rest had no money. It was a miracle the little community of Little Jerusalem was surviving at all. The Colonel Judge had told him all about it. Sixteen families sharing a half-section of land, 320 acres, acres that they had financed during the seventeen days in the mid-1870s when C. C. Antoine was the acting governor of Louisiana—the second black ever to hold that position in Louisiana and only because of the presence of carpetbagger blue-belly troops during Reconstruction. C. C. Antoine did things that the first black governor, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, could not. P.B.S. Pinchback, the Colonel Judge had told him, had a white father and a black mother, and Pinchback could have passed for white had he wanted to, but he refused. When he was asked which race he more closely identified with and of which he was most proud, Pinchback said: “It is far more important to be evaluated by the worth of one’s friends than measured by one’s pedigree, for the former involves self-determination and mutual admiration, while the latter is a mere involuntary attribute. To deny one’s pedigree would be as vain a folly as denying the sun to rise tomorrow; however, it should never be the cause to create or circumscribe a man’s opportunities.” The Colonel Judge would quote it word for word because he had thought this was, as he said often, “the height of arrogance for an adulterous bastard of miscegenation.” Of course, that was before . . . but by then it was hard for the Colonel Judge to change his ways. Pinchback was one of many blacks, both former slaves and free men of color, who had been elected to the Louisiana legislature during Reconstruction . Pinchback had survived threats, taunts, and attempts on his life when he was elected to the state senate, and he had to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to retain the post as acting governor. But Pinchback, despite the success of his legal case, was kicked out of office in less than eight months. C. C. Antoine, who, a few years later, served as acting governor, had seen what happened to Pinchback and had no illusions about what would happen to him as the second black to hold the state’s highest of- fice. The Colonel...