The Cottoncrest Curse: A Novel

Chapter 57

205 Chapter 57 Ganderson had told them to wait. They had followed his instructions , but the sun had risen and set, and they were still in the brokendown cabin with its partial roof and collapsed walls and no real protection from dropping temperatures. They didn’t dare light a fire. The sky was clear, the stars were out, and the glow from the fire would be visible through the open walls for miles. Even the smoke could be seen in the moonlight. The baguette was long gone. They were hungry and thirsty. Sally had fallen asleep, snoring, on Marcus’s shoulder. Jenny was not sure whether Marcus was asleep or not. He was the oldest by far of the trio of traveling companions, but he was the most energetic of them all. Marcus had set the pace, his long legs leading them briskly as they left Ganderson’s wagon and made their way through the woods to the cabin. Maybe Marcus was just resting, ears alert for the faintest noise. Jenny had always been a city girl until she came to Cottoncrest. She still couldn’t read the sounds of the night out here in the forest. She couldn’t tell which creaks were simply the ancient oaks expanding and contracting with the changes in temperature and humidity and which noises signaled the approach of danger. She lay her head back for a just a minute against the rotting wooden slats, intending to be like Marcus and close her eyes to better concentrate on the noises that seemed to surround them. The chirping of the crickets. The crunch of a small animal scampering across the crisp leaves fallen thick on the ground. The faint rustle of the pine needles as the wind gently moved through them. The soft, lilting melody of Louis’s violin as he sat in his office late at night, taking a break and playing a plaintive gospel, the sadness and longing being drawn from the strings and wafting through the closed door to the back room where Jenny 206 slept. She was careful to wash her hands before she went to bed, to remove any ink that might have gotten on her fingers from her scrivener’s work during the day. The legal papers that Louis had her copying were long and complex. Some were in English, some in French. What he had been working on were writs of certiorari to the Louisiana Supreme Court, pleas to the court to hear the passenger car case. She didn’t understand all the legal terminology, but she understood the cause. She understood all too well what this case meant to all the Negroes and Creoles, not only in New Orleans but throughout the South, from Secesh land all the way north to the Mason-Dixon Line and beyond. Louis had said that if and when the passenger car case made it to the Supreme Court, it would fulfill Lincoln’s promise. Lincoln had started a speech over the dead by saying, “Four score and seven years ago. . . .” It would be, Louis said, more than one score and seven years from Lincoln ’s death to get the case to the Supreme Court, but it would be worth it. That was why every word in the briefs that Jenny was copying was important. The Fourteenth Amendment was the heart of the case, according to Louis. The amendment declared that all persons born in the United States are citizens and that no state could deny any person the equal protection of the laws. Jenny knew those words well. Louis quoted them over and over in his brief. A state could not “deny any person equal protection.” Any person! That was the key concept. It applied to any person, former slave or not. It covered any person, regardless of the color of that person’s skin. Each and every person was equal in the eyes of the Fourteenth Amendment. Louis, pacing his office while working on the brief, had tried to figure out how to word it for the maximum effect. Layer upon layer of Jim Crow laws had been enacted since the war, but Washington had grown silent, and a doom descended on the South that hung like a shroud over the once-vibrant hopes of those who had struggled out of slavery only to be legislated back into a status little higher than slavery. That was why this brief was crucial. The Supreme Court, said Louis, had...