Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 37

"Governments do not rule the world Goldman Sachs does" – Trader Echoes Zaibatsu Thriller

Trader Alessio Rastani's wildly popular BBC interview on YouTube shocks the world and echoes the central points in two of my financial thrillers, Zaibatsu which was the sequel of The Delphi Betrayal

(The really good parts of this video begin about 38 seconds in)

Those points are:

That corporations control most of the world's cash, making it impossible for nation states and their central banks to have any real effect on the global economic environment.
That sharp traders make money regardless of whether the markets are going up or down — in other words, recessions and market crashes are a great opportunity to make money.

"Governments do not rule the world Goldman Sachs does."

I had a different name for the global conspirators, but Rastani's is close enough.

One thing he alludes to is the central part of my plots: If you know whether the market will go up or down, that's when you bet everything — and that's one helluva'n incentive to manipulate things.

And if you were a massive conspiracy of global players who decided among themselves that the world would be better off with them in control and with wealth better apportioned from rich nations to poor ones, then you could create one or more global crashes in order to equalize living conditions.

But how do you manipulate the global economic environment to do that?

That's the heart of these thrillers … and the methods were created with help from some of the world's best global traders.

 

Kudzu Madness & A Drive Up Hwy 49 To The Delta – The Uncut Chapter

The following is the complete chapter I wrote for Perfect Killer. Most of this was cut by the publisher who felt that nobody really cared about "all that Southern stuff."

Kudzu covers the landscape like green lava. Right click to view larger image

In fairness, the publisher wanted a straight-forward thriller without "all that Southern stuff" as well as the ethics, science and faith around free will, good and evil and how people do the right thing and — especially — how and why basically good people tolerate evil.

In retrospect, the "Southern stuff" and the good/evil discussions do slow down the action. But Perfect Killer is a very special book to me. It's about my heritage, the culture I was born into and ultimately rejected.

Kudzu will eat all of this house. Right click to view larger image

Why Deal With "Important Issues In Genre Popular Fiction?

I've often been asked why I've chosen to write about "important" issues in genre popular fiction. I certainly could have bagged all the thriller stuff and written a more straightforward Southern novel with all its ethical and cultural implications. Daughter of God was in the same vein as well as Slatewiper, both of which dealt with religion, ethics and the old good and evil thing.

But I feel that popular fiction reaches more people than "serious" fiction. I always set out to entertain, but also try to offer some side trips that educate and make people think.

I parted company with my former publisher over these and other significant issues. In the end, the published version of Perfect Killer was cut by more than one-third. I happen to think that some of the best parts were deleted. So, now that I have the rights back, I can offer those words to you, uncut.

This chapter is the hero's homecoming. His thoughts here are my thoughts from my homecoming. This chapter refers to Vanessa's death. That was described in this previous post.

Kudzu & A Drive Up Highway 49 To The Delta – The Uncut Chapter

Robert Johnson's artfully unadorned guitar notes filled the cab of my rented  pickup as I raced north along Highway 49 through the kudzu-smothered hills south of Yazoo City.

The CD had been on sale cheap airport gift shop on my stop-over. I had loved Johnson's tunes since I was a teenager and had never seen this collection before. The CD faithfully reproduced all the static and scratchiness of the ancient recording, but through the noise came the genius of Johnson's blues guitar and the transcendent depth of the lyrics which were nothing less than philosophy stripped of the usual pretensions. Legendary blues masters like Johnson, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt had a way of owning my imagination.

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving

Blues falling down like hail, Blues falling down like hail

Uumh, Blues falling down like hail. Blues falling down like hail

And the days keeps on worryin' me

There's a hellhound on my trail,

hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.

I thought of the hellhound that had killed Vanessa and laid waste to my life in California. No name to this hound, no breed, no face, it was all fangs and death without form, terrifying in its obscurity. Over and over again in my mind, I walked through the pieces of the puzzle, my boat, Mama's funeral, the attack at home. I ransacked every thought, desperate for some dim unremembered key to the deadly puzzle that was closing in on me as the only logical suspect. So far the links to Talmadge were way too speculative for any logical leap of faith.

A semi rapidly filled up my rearview mirror and, despite the fact that I was hitting almost 80, blasted past me with a shock wave that made my white  Ford F150 shudder and sent my thoughts swerving away from the hellhound and back to the instant moments falling all about me.

Outside, the kudzu-smothered landscape rushed past like  a creeping green shroud draped over everything — utility poles, abandoned barns and houses and everything in between, even the tallest of trees.  To a vivid imagination, the trees looked like giant undead mummies trailing their scattered rags slowly over the hills. The images were especially real on full-moon-lit nights when a gentle breeze would animate the shadows and send a chill through even the most skeptical. In the bright late-morning sunlight, the trees looked merely creepy.

Early this mornin'

When you knocked upon my door.

Early this mornin', ooh

When you knocked upon my door

And I said, 'Hello Satan."

I believe it's time to go

I listened to the beginning of Robert Johnson's Me and the Devil Blues I and imagined how I could see something evil making its way through the landscape here. Even though Johnson was a man of the Delta's flatness, his words and music spoke to more universal fears.

It had been decades since the last time I had driven this road, and back then it had been a narrow, two-lane patchwork of cracked, tar-sealed concrete with no shoulder that slashed through the kudzu jungle, abruptly ascending and dropping like a cheap roller coaster as the highway's thick expansion joints thwapped an endless iambic k-dunk, k-dunk, k-dunk against the tires.

Highway 49 was four-lanes now, with healthy shoulders that led on to a broad demilitarized zone  cleared of the aggressive imported Asian vine that could grow up to a foot per day. Kudzu had been widely planted to control soil erosion back in the 1930s and could invade a farm and occupy it in a single growing season.

Poet James Dickey called it a "Green, mindless, unkillable ghost," and there were legends of unwary farmers found strangled in their beds because they fell asleep with the windows open. I had read once that it was actually a useful plant — a source of Asian medicines and a nutritious forage for livestock, which enriched the soil with nitrogen-fixing roots. Many useful things become toxic when transplanted out of their native environments.

All of these characteristics no doubt contributed to the way Kudzu had grown into a cultural metaphor for Southern society, although no one could quite agree on the meaning. Sometimes I thought the green creeping carpet had to do with manners and sugar-sweet hospitality gone wild.

Other times, I felt  perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the kudzu was like a giant slip cover tossed over the suppurating wounds of grinding poverty. It screened the ramshackle abandoned buildings with a deceptively attractive green mask that hid the deep metastasizing gullies in the red clay hills that burned like raw open sores in the earth. Kudzu was also a relentless, intractable adversary much like poverty and racism.  It was probably all these things and more.

Kudzu rules. Right click to view larger image

As a teenagers we talked endlessly about exploring one of the farms overgrown with kudzu, wading through the green surf to see if there were actually bones laying in old farmhouse beds. I had once read that kudzu was as healthy for the land and for cattle as alfalfa, but the rumors among the gullibly ignorant held that it could reach out and kill an entire herd in the middle of the night.

I went to the crossroad,

Fell down on my knees

Asked the Lord Above "Have Mercy, now

Save poor Bob if you please.

Mmmmmmm

Johnson's raspy voice scratched out Cross Road Blues, supposedly his lament after selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for his supernaturally superb guitar ability.

Mmm, the sun goin' down, boy

Dark gon' catch me here



As I approached the  southern outskirts of Yazoo City, signs appeared pointing to 49E veering off to northeast. The bifurcated Highway 49s would almost parallel each other for another 80 miles, describing a very long, very thin diamond sliver that bounded much of my early life.

Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown

Lord that I'm standin' at the crossroad, babe

I believe I'm sinkin' down

Staying on 49 would take me through Midnight, Silver City and Belzoni to Indianola at the western point of the diamond where Saints' Rest, one of the Judge's plantations was located. Saint's Rest had been sold in the 1950s to a big planter in the oil business. I inherited part the plantation, but I was disinherited when I led that civil rights march at Ole Miss.

A little farther on, 49 would pass through Ruleville where my mother's sister had lived and died and up through Parchman Prison, the Devil's Island of the Delta. Finally, Highway 49 healed itself with 49E up in Tutwiler, just north of Sumner where an all-white jury back in the mid-1950s had acquitted the killers of Emmett Till who had been tortured to death for the crime of being a black teenager. I was about six years old at the time, but I don't remember much specific about all this other than the fact that there were a lot of visitors and hushed conversations behind the  closed doors to the breakfast room in the Judge's house in Itta Bena.

I remembered those meetings very well because at the time, my mother and I were living in a small apartment attached to the main house that the Judge built for us when Mama separated from my father. It was the beginning of a stormy decade in which they divorced and married each other three times before ultimately marrying someone else for the fourth time.

I remember crying for my Papa, absent through separation, divorce and a heavy work travel schedule that kept him away at least two weeks per month even when he and Mama were married. What Papa and I did together was rare and episodic. I went on trips with him to New Orleans exactly four times, two times when he was working and twice to watch Ole Miss win the Sugar Bowl. We went dove hunting three times and once for ducks. I remember those eight events primarily because they were so very special but also because eight things are not all that hard to keep in mind.

My Papa, my sister Suan, me when I was about three months old and in the background, the pecan tree from which Al Thomas saved me about five years later

What I remember about my father is limited but intense. He was a tall thin man with a stiff, almost fragile bearing which never forgot his mostly successful bout with polio in the 1920s. The resulting constant back pain meant that he and I never played toss with a baseball or football or wrestled and roughhoused. That didn't keep him from brave, honorable service in the Philippines in World War II, a time he never liked to talk about.

He was a frustrated contradiction where opposing cultures collided. On the one hand, he was a man's man and wanted me to be sure to be capable, self-sufficient and accomplished in the ways of toughness and self defense, accomplished with force but aware it was a last resort to be employed with victorious regret. On the other hand, he came from a family of academics, professors, doctors and a president of two universities.

The Great Depression and the Faulknerian loss of he family wealth left him with no university education and that hurt him deeply. I also think it accounted for his attachment to his ancestors and his penchant for trying to bask in the aura of their success. In that respect, he was a pretty good metaphor for the Southern Shinto of post-Civil War Mississippi that still annoys me to this day.

Despite that, I loved Papa deeply whenever I was with him. I can remember to this day how he always smelled of Old Spice and Camels. The cigarettes railroaded him into a series of long, dark, painful and humiliating final days living mutely with a tracheotomy where the cancer had eaten his larynx away.

I would like to have known my father better, but he died before that could happen.

While it never made up for having Papa to hug, living in the suite of rooms the Judge built for Mama and me in Itta Bena was pretty exciting. I enjoyed the run of the Judge's big house and yard with the giant sycamores along the street in front, the massive pecan tree out back, the tulips that blazed along the driveway in the spring, a pen full of blue tick hounds, and, of course Lena Gray and Al Thomas, who served as cook/housekeeper and chauffeur/gardener. I owed my life to Al Thomas.

Although I don't remember the exact event itself, Al and I became something of a family legend that was repeated over and over so often that I could almost convince myself that I did have a memory of it. But as the story goes, after going to a cowboy movie matinee, I decided that hanging myself would be cool. So I took apart the rope swing on the pecan tree, tied a damn good noose for a five year old, stood on my tricycle and nearly choked to death.

As the legend was so often retold, Al Thomas watched the entire thing from the screened-in back porch by the door leading to the Judge's kitchen. He called Lena out to watch and she immediately told him to go stop me. Despite her near hysteria, Al steadfastly waited until I was actually choking before rescuing me.

"If I stop him before he gets a taste for things, he'll just try it again some other time when nobody's watching and he'll succeed."

He was a wise man to be sure, but to this day, I fight panic when cinching up a necktie.

All those memories waited for me up the exit for 49E which would eventually get me to Greenwood. Not long after I took the turn in Yazoo City, the four lanes narrowed to two then fell in one single steep grade from a textured land of kudzu-covered hills, contours and modeling to one dominated by the table-flat elevations of a hundred merging flood plains. There was nothing subtle about arriving in the Delta, no mistaking the act of entering another world where the kudzu was gone but its smothering spirit ruled.

Train tracks heavy with long snakes of hoppers, boxcars, flatbeds and log carriers joined up parallel with the highway north of town. The traffic thinned quickly here and I found myself the middle vehicle in a group of three pickups. The patchwork of freight cars quickly fell behind as we accelerated past 75 miles per hour on this old, curvy, tree-lined, two-lane with no shoulders and barely wide enough for two pick-ups to pass without taking off the side mirrors.

The highway and parallel train tracks flirted with the base of the hills until we got to Eden where 49E ricocheted north-northeast, off toward the heart of the Delta. Our new trajectory ran atop a steep berm that would usually keep the road surface above the waters of creeks and rivers that escaped their banks every winter and spring. Below the berm, I passed cotton in various stages of development.

Cotton, late. Right click to view larger image

There was standing water in many of the fields, testament to a period of unusually high rainfall this year. The cotton and soybean fields were soaked with water off the Gulf of Mexico transported by a roaring freight train of ferocious thunderstorms that just wouldn't quit. The rice and catfish farmers had no trouble, but I could see this would be a horrible year otherwise if the fields didn't dry out. The storms also brought tornadoes that scraped the land clean.

In the higher, drier fields, the plants were shoving toward thigh-high and colorful with flowers. As a child, I had marveled how cotton blossoms opened white one day, closed up that night and re-opened the next day all deep reddish pink for the next day or so until they dropped off.

Cotton, early. Right click to view larger image

And everywhere I looked, the landscape was the same: fields of developing cotton punctuated by rows of trees marking streams, sloughs, and oxbow lakes that could not be cleared for crops. We passed over bridge after bridge spanning water carpeted thick with duckweed and still enough to support malaria. Ironically, I could see the dust pointing to vehicles in the higher spots, places where the brutally hot sun baked the surface dry and leaving the standing water around it a warm, perfect incubator for mosquito larvae.

One of Mama's favorite stories she told so often was how, during her early childhood in the late Teens and 1920s, Mr. Durham, who owned one of the two drugstores in town, would mix quinine with Coca-Cola and chocolate syrup  as a "spring tonic" for her and the other children in town as a prophylactic against the mosquito-borne disease.  I do know that the best attempts at mosquito abatement must not have been all that successful because by the time I was a kid, I remember getting vaccination shots for Yellow Fever, a barely better behaved but still nasty hemorrhagic cousin of Ebola.

The first time Highway 49E straightened out, the pick-up in my rearview mirror accelerated past me and the truck I followed. He quickly disappeared around the next curve. I eased off the accelerator then and dropped back a few more truck lengths until I was almost alone with my thoughts and the gathering thunderheads to the northeast which had started reaching for the stratosphere even though it was not quite noon.

More storms, more rain, more misery.

When the highway broke free of the trees, I was struck by how all the thunderheads looked like great angry Confederate privateers with storm-bellied sails filled with the capricious fury of lightning, tornadoes and hail looking for targets. I remembered hikes in the woods when these would gather unseen past the limbs and leaves.

Storm clouds gather. Right click to view larger image

The storms would announce themselves first with the distant low rumble of thunder that said, "head home." That was reason for a fast walk, but it was the  sudden blast of cool air like the opening of God's own ice box that would send me into a dead run, because that was almost always followed quickly on by the sursurrating rush of heavy rain marching through the woods in pursuit. It sounded like some big animal pushing through the leaves and brush and that made me run faster and faster, especially when the interval between the lightning and thunder came like my racing heartbeat.

Sometimes I beat the rain, sometimes not. Once I saw lightning take out a dead tree less than fifty yards away once and almost urinated in my pants. Then, when I was about 16, I huddled in a gully as  a tornado passed overhead and made the ground tremble; it sounded like every B-52 in the world charging down the runway toward takeoff with a full load and every engine straining. I'm fine if I never hear that again.

With the past ringing in my head, I spotted a small settlement ahead scattered on both sides of the highway with a water tower, a gas station and store with a driveway of loose beige gravel. I slowed as my truck passed old black men in blue overalls sitting still on the sagging porches of gray weather-bleached shacks with rusty tin roofs. Three gray-brown pigs rooted along the road shoulder. In the distance, a dust contrail plumed across a field, pointing at the pick-up which had passed me.

Piggly Wiggly. Right click to view larger image

Once past the settlement, I sped up and began a weaving drunk's game of dodging road kill — possums, dogs, skunks, raccoons. In the next ten miles, I marveled at the fact that I had passed more red meat in the highway than you could find at the butcher case at Piggly-Wiggly. Even with the air conditioning on recirculate,  I could tell that some of the animals had been fermenting in the hot sun for days.

I was making good time up 49E, chasing heat mirages that looked like fleeing desert ponds in the road ahead and thinking about how Talmadge was most likely the key to this whole mess when my cell phone rang. I hoped it was Jasmine, but when I looked at the incoming number display I recognized it as Rex's. I reached over and turned the CD's volume down.

"Hey man," I said.

" Hey y'own damn self, asshole. What's the big idea of coming to my town and not stopping by? What am I going to tell Anita?"

As tense as I felt, I couldn't help but smile. They had to be the oddest couple. Rex's wife Anita, originally from India, was an accomplished physician from a royal family which still lived in the old country. Rex was a genius with ready hands, one of the smartest people I had ever met who managed to hide his intelligence behind a rough physical style that, outwardly at least, favored fists over philosophy.

"Tell her I'm buying a big steak dinner when I get back to Jackson."

"That'll be a start," Rex laughed.

Static filled an awkward silence.

"So what can I do for you?" Rex said finally.

"Well, for one thing, I have just gone through the strangest 72 hours of my life and it's made me think I badly need a man of your, uh, talents."

"You need some drywall installed?" Rex followed that with a laugh. In the background I could hear other people talking amid the whine of what I recognized as a screwgun. When Rex spoke again, his voice was low, serious and all business. "Let me step outside before we get into that."

The newly-paved asphalt highway hissed beneath my pick-up's tires. I felt the sun's radiated heat baking my face through the windshield as I passed a cotton gin with a dozen wire-sided trailers beside it with the odd boll tangled in the mesh.

"Talk to me," Rex said finally. "Don't leave anything out."

So I started with the attack on my boat and made my way past the shock at Chris Nellis's house in Topanga Canyon to LAX with Jasmine.

"I've got all her stuff in the back," I concluded as I neared Tchula which was one of those places where, just when you're coming to grips with the grinding Third-World poverty of the Delta, you realize it can get worse.

"I'm supposed to meet Jasmine at her office in Greenwood as soon as I get there."

"Watch your back there my man."

"How so?"

"Her office is right near the Snowden-Jones housing project and that whole area is a drive-by shooting gallery."

"How did you know that?"

"You don't think I've got a turnip for a brain do you? Of course I know where the office is. It was one of the first places I scoped out after the shooting at your Mama's funeral. And Snowden-Jones is infamous; it's always in the news. Makes Oakland look like Beverly Hills."

"I should have figured — "

"Yep, you should have. Did you think that the shooting at the cemetery was just a fluke or some kind of local dust-up?"

"The cops seem to."

Rex snorted. "Of course they do! Those poor bastards have their hands full. A bunch of country boys and they've got more crack and drug murders per capita than the pros in the big city. They have to think that because they haven't got time to think of anything else."

"But you have, right?"

"That's right, pod-nah."

I slowed for a light as I got into Tchula proper.

"And?" I prompted him as the light turned and I followed traffic through the main part of town.

"Well for one thing, all the people who usually know everything about everything don't seem to know shit about nuthin' here."

"Well, that's helpful," I said as I hit the brakes. Just ahead of me, a battered mid-sixties Pontiac land yacht painted in twelve shades of rust and primer came to a sudden stop  right in the middle of Highway 49 as the four occupants spotted a young Black man walking along the shoulder they wanted to chat with. I saw flat, wide fear on the pedestrian's face until he identified the Pontiac's occupants as friends. Oncoming traffic thinned and I managed to steer around the Pontiac. Ahead of me I saw similar conversations along both sides of the road interspersed with people strolling across the highway like it was a bike path. Darwin, I thought, was having a rolling chuckle.

"So did you ever piss off anybody in the military?"

"Sorry? I got distracted," I said as I made my way around the human obstacle course and managed to escape Tchula without hitting anyone.

"Back during your military service or whatever the hell it really was — did you ever piss off anybody high ranking."

"Every day."

"Yeah, well, look who's helpful now."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that the word is that Vanessa Thomas was not killed by anybody in the community. And there are people around there asking questions about you."

The skein of dread in my gut yanked another knot tighter. I told him about my conversation with Vince Sloane

"Well, that's bad enough, my friend, but it gets worse."

"Hard to imagine."

"Yeah, but get this: from what I can gather, the people asking the questions seem to be military types."

I thought back to the helicopter and the military inflatables.

"This really makes no sense, no sense at all," I said more for my own ears than Rex's.

"Like your last three days make any sense?"

I let that sink in as the road sign for Egypt plantation came up. I remembered vaguely that this gravel road had been a short cut my mother used to take to Itta Bena. I was tempted to try and ride this bit of the past, but let the turnoff slide behind me as I thought of Jasmine waiting for me.

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"What do you mean 'we' Kemo sabe?" Rex laughed.

But before my new insecurities could feed on that, he laughed then said, "Keep your head down; keep asking questions. I'll finish up this drywall job here in Eastover by tomorrow and I'll put all my time into helping you."

I thanked him, said I needed a good wing man more than ever then said good bye.

I checked my various voicemail boxes and found multiple, increasingly hostile messages from the LAPD,  and a raft of messages from Sonia, increasingly frightened and indignant. I couldn't think of anything reasonable to say to either of them and decided to think first instead.

More Than "The Help": Ed Kingston, Negro — Landowner and his 42 tenants

The phenomenal writing in The Help along with its powerful story has had me going back through the research I did for Perfect Killer and digging even farther into my family history than I did for that book.

Several days ago, I ran across this undated photo among a number of papers, letters and other photos that belonged to my grandfather, J.W. Bradford and which my Mama passed down to me.

I'd very much like for anyone who knows something about this to contact me and let me know more about the people, the time and the place.

Click the image above for a much larger one.

The only identifying characteristic was the following handwriting on the back:

It was unusual for an African-American at this time to own his own land, much less have such a large operation. If you know anyone who might know anything about this, please have them email me at: lewis.perdue@lewisperdue.com or leave a comment below.

How Lena Gray & Al Thomas — "The Help" — Saved My Life

I am reading The Help right now which is set in Jackson Mississippi where I grew up. Much of the film was shot there and in parts of the Mississippi Delta, and especially Greenwood Mississippi where I was born.

Every page in The Help — indeed almost every paragraph — evokes a memory, many of which I described several years ago in a novel set mostly in Jackson. That novel, Perfect Killer is part thriller and part family history relating my own coming-of-age story.

I thinly disguised my story and the family history: the protagonist, Bradford Stone is primarily me up until he gets kicked out of Ole Miss for leading a riot in 1967 and is subsequently disinherited from his portion in a Delta plantation owned by my grandparents, J.W. ("The Judge") and Mattie ("Miss Sue") Bradford. Get it?  Bradford Stone is really a Bradford — my mother's side of the family.

This undated photo of Lena Gray and Al Thomas was taken at my Aunt Jane Barner's house in Ruleville, most likely in the 1970s

THINLY DISGUISING THE FAMILY HERITAGE

Because of all the historically accurate information — and some of my comments about the life and culture — I had to wait until my mother died before I could write this book. And I disguised two other important people in my life: Lena Gray and Al Thomas got renamed Grayson and Thompson. I did this because I took many fictional liberties with their lives and offspring in the years after I lost touch with them both.

Because  my former publisher wanted a straight-forward thriller (and I wanted to interlace a whole 'nother Delta novel inside it) much of the Mississippi story that means so much to me had to be edited out. I intend to remedy that by providing all the outtakes here on my blog and adding other memories evoked by The Help.

In Perfect Killer, I described how Al Thomas saved my life while Lena argued with him about exactly how he was going about it. Al was my grandmother Bradford's full-time chauffeur and gardener. Lena was the full-time cook and domestic diva.

Both of them provided me with the stability and consistency that were lacking in my early family life: My mother and father somehow married each other and divorced each other three times by the time I was a sophomore in high school. They both subsequently married a fourth time — but not to each other.

INNOCULATIONS AGAINST RACISM

During the family chaos, Al and Lena  were my rocks.

I have no doubt that this helped immunize me in a way that later allowed me to recognize and reject racism. And to get involved on the fringes of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s

I explore that in Perfect Killer as I try to understand how good people can do evil things. Good Germans turned their heads from Nazis and death camps. For their part, good Mississippians turned their heads from the KKK and lynchings. That's haunted me for decades. Still does. A lot of Perfect Killer, including the contemporary thriller, grapple with that.

GOOD TIMES WITH AL

As I read the first few chapters of The Help, Lena and Al's faces kept coming back. And I remembered things: Lena's house, good times with Al.

I went everywhere with Al. And as much as I loved my Papa– and cried for him all the times he was never living with us in Itta Bena — I spent more time with Al, learned more about life from him than I did my Papa. I'd ride with Al out to "the place" (Mossy Island Plantation – still owned by my cousin Billy).

Other times, I remember being in the back of a pickup (back when tailgates were secured with chains and steel hooks). I'd sit back there on the wheel well as we crossed the Roebuck Bridge heading for dusty roads and points east that I don't remember so well now, given that my days with Al were all when I was maybe three to six … and not much afterwards.

I do, however, remember the spicy pungency of the DDT powder sifting down from an old Stearman biplane  crop duster that would pass just over our heads. These were the pre-Rachel Carson days when organophosphates were our friends and helped by killing boll weevils and mosquitoes … but we still got vaccines against  Typhoid fever because the mosquitoes maintained that disease at endemic levels.

Al also kept an eye on me when he was tending bar at the American Legion hutch at the east end of downtown. Mind you, Prohibition was still the law of the land in Mississippi. The saying was that Prohibition would last as long as the Baptists could stagger to the polls. There was even an official Black Market tax on bootleggers and places like the American Legion hutch … which also had slot machines as well. Blind eyes were turned.

I'd play outside on the howitzer, but mostly inside where he could make sure I wasn't getting into trouble, which I did a lot. Like the day I snuck off to the back entrance of the post office with the son of a crop-duster I wasn't supposed to play with  (white trash my Mama said). We were just a couple of five year-olds hanging out and getting in the way of people. I don't remember what kind of trouble we caused that day. However, I do remember my friend managed to escape. And I found myself stuffed in a heavy canvas mail bag that was special delivered to Al. I recall that Al was emptying the change out of the slot machines when I got dragged in.

LENA'S HOUSE, AL'S STREET

Lena Gray's house was in Balance Due, the "nigrah" section of Itta Bena. It was called Balance Due because everybody there owed "The Man" and the balance was always due.

Balance Due was a place where few white folks and no young heirs to plantations ever went. But I must have been with Al Thomas that day.

Lena's house in Balance Due was little more than a shack you reached by walking over a 2X12 board that spanned a ditch that served as an open sewer. That's about all I remember of Lena's house. I am told that Mamie (my grandmother Bradford which everyone called "Miss Sue") deeded the house over to Lena in her will. She also left Al the deed to his house. I hope this is true.

In 2003 and 2004, when I spent a lot of time back in Itta Bena and the Delta doing research for Perfect Killer, I searched for Lena's house. I couldn't find it because the ditches were gone. Homes were still modest, but several cuts above ramshackle and folks had indoor plumbing. There are still way too many shacks where poverty spills from the doors and windows like an avalanche.

I remember looking for Al Thomas Street which was on the map, but had no sign on the ground. When I went to city hall — located in the old marble building once occupied by a bank that Daddy owned part of — the workers there laughed at my offer to pay for a sign.

Judge Sez Go Ahead, Mess With Texas

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) got slapped down for trying to trademark "Don't Mess With Texas" — a phrase that has been in common usage for as long as the Lone Star Republic has existed.

In this case, the TxDOT — who get the idiot of the month, trademark troll award — tried to keep Romance Author Christie Craig from e-publishing a book called … yep, you guessed it … Don't Mess With Texas.

According to the Austin Business Journal, the weak, faint hearted TxDOT bureaucrats objected because, "The book contains numerous graphic references to sexual acts, states of arousal, etc." Guess somebody should tell  TxDOT that's how little Texans get made. (Or do they still believe in storks?)

If this is presidential candidate and TxGov Rick Perry's idea of good governance, then voters better start messin' with that Texan early and often.

The whole story is here.

 

World's Highest-Paid Authors (Damn! Missed The List Again!)

Forbes Magazine has listed the world's highest paid authors.

I can't BELIEVE it, but I missed the list AGAIN! (What? What was that? … My wife just reminded me that our checking account balance is way closer to the decimal point than these folks's.)

First, Forbes gives us the bad news that most authors are well aware of thanks to their intimate relationship with the decimal point:

"The golden era of books is over. Sales of adult hardcovers, the most expensive and lucrative category of books, were down 23 percent in the first half of 2011 after falling 5.1 percent in 2010. Yet the world's top-selling authors — people like Stephenie Meyer, Stephen King, Janet Evanovich and, especially, James Patterson — aren't exactly hurting."

And who are these lucky folk:

James Patterson ($84 million)
Danielle Steel ($35 million)
Stephen King ($28 million)
Janet Evanovich ($22 million)
Stephenie Meyer ($21 million)
Rick Riordan ($21 million)
Dean Koontz ($19 million)
John Grisham ($18 million)
Jeff Kinney ($17 million)
Nicholas Sparks ($16 million)

Ah HAH! I'm looking at the article and realize that I must have just barely missed the list. And I can't understand why my wife is laughing hysterically.

Read rest of the article.

Perfect Killer: Not An Easy Read

 

Many of the posts on Facebook's Murrah-Callaway Class of 1967 have commented on the "sad" state of many things in Mississippi.

Back in 2001-2004 I returned frequently and spent months –  mostly in the Delta where I was born and in Jackson — doing research for Perfect Killer. I was both encouraged by astonishing progress from our high school days and disheartened by intractable problems of poverty and residual racism.

Racism is no longer legally sanctioned, and so many barriers have been lowered. But in my experience there, I found that racial suspicions and hard feelings still exist.

But more than anything else, poverty has become the biggest enemy for the state to overcome.

Our 1967 classmate, Martha Bergmark, founded an organization that's chipping away at some of that poverty and the inequality it brings regardless of race.  Her organization, the Mississippi Center for Justice has accomplished wonderful things. Take a look at the site and see if it would be appropriate for you to support them.

Now on to the book.

First of all, Perfect Killer is not an easy book to read. I do realize that I wrote a complicated book that is actually three books in one:

A coming of age book.
A Southern novel set in the Delta.
A thriller about an actual covert  government project to create a perfect killer by pharmaceutically engineering soldiers.

On top of that, the coming of age and Southern book parts are a thinly disguised roman a clef for my family and by own life up to the point I was thrown out of Ole Miss.

And all of it — every character and their every action — is about free will, moral choices, doing the right thing … and why good people often do evil.

Bringing them all together between one set of covers makes this a complicated book to read.

PROLOGUE

A MOONLESS BLACK-ON-BLACK NIGHT SHROUDED THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA in shades of dark and darker that flattened the feverishly humid world into a two-dimensional caricature.

Heard, felt but unseen, mosquitoes boiled out of the killing fields' stagnant pools like a biblical plague. In the distance, a scattering of lights glowed beyond a low embankment that kept the Columbus and Greenville Railroad tracks above water even in flood season. From beyond the embankment came strains of a church hymn drifting from the general direction of Balance Due, the notoriously impoverished black quarter of Itta Bena, where raw sewage fermented in open ditches along rutted dirt roads lined with battered wooden shacks.

At one with this deepest of nights, Darryl Talmadge squatted in the tall, soggy grass and held his suppressed Colt .45 Model 1911 well out of the swamp water seeping into his boots. He breathed silently through his mouth and listened with his whole body, trying to feel his quarry as much as hear him. A freight train rumbled distantly from the east, and from the darkness near the C&G berm came the sounds of a desperate man making his way through mud and tall grass. Talmadge knew all he had to do was be patient. Like hunting deer, he thought. Bag a big buck. The thought made him smile.

Talmadge had been a hunting guide in the Delta before the Korean War, before the head wound they'd fixed up so well. They'd saved his life, and for that he did what they asked. That and because he needed the medicine they gave him to keep the visions and memories away.

A sucking sound riveted Talmadge's attention. Over to his left, maybe twenty-five yards away. Then another and another. Feet liberating themselves from muck, slowly, cautiously at first, then with a labored acceleration making an angle toward the railroad tracks.

Perfect.

Talmadge stood up and in a single fluid motion aimed the Colt. It took only a split second to spot the faintest of shadows, night modeled on night. He sighted, squeezed the trigger, registered the mild cough of the shot and the shriek of pain as the shadow dropped with a wallowing splash.

"Give it up, nigger!" Talmadge yelled as he crashed through the mud and high grass. Then he picked up the panicked thrashes of a wounded man stumbling away

"Shit a brick," Talmadge mumbled. This was number four in the past ten days, and he was simply tired of tracking down these boys.

Ahead of him, his prey's shadow moved right, reversed course, then sprinted toward the tracks. As the freight rambled closer, Talmadge knew the boy would rush across the tracks in front of the engine and let the rest of the train shelter his escape, or hop a boxcar.

Either way worked for him, Talmadge thought as he swiftly made his way to the edge of the clinker stone at the base of the berm and hunkered down behind a clump of dead grass. He leaned against the slope and aimed the Colt down the berm, steadying it with his left arm.

Behind him the light from the train engine played shadows atop the berm. In moments, Talmadge spotted a shadow maybe thirty yards away detach itself from the brush and start up the slope. In another instant the locomotives headlight lit up a wounded man, red across his shoulder where the last shot had winged him.

Talmadge fired, then cursed when the slug scattered gravel immediately behind the man's feet. The man scrambled faster. Talmadge felt no anger, no emotion, no disappointment. He kept the aim of his last shot and its trajectory precisely in mind as he corrected his sights for the spot he figured the man would reach at the top of the tracks.

Talmadge fired as the locomotive blew its horn. The man with the wounded shoulder froze as his face turned toward the train. The slug punched through the man's torso, bent him forward over the nearby track, and fed him to the locomotive's wheels.

CHAPTER 1

MONDAY LAY ON THE LAND AS GRAY AND STONE COLD AS A CORPSE. Slate clouds, winter-frosted grass, pale headstones, sucked the color and life from the Itta Bena I had loved as a child.

Down the gently sloping field beyond the rusting iron pickets of the cemetery fence, and across the pitted, often-patched asphalt of the access road, the trunks of naked trees waded in the chill, muddy shadows of Roebuck Lake. The day promised little for the handful of mourners due to gather on this raw January morning to say good-bye to my mother.

I stood alone next to a half dozen folding chairs beside the freshly dug grave. Timeworn Astroturf carpeted the ground but did little to mask the pile of dirt next to the headstone carrying the name of Mama's second husband. She'd married him only after previously marrying and divorcing my father three times.

The morning silence gave way infrequently to the occasional car or pickup passing by on Highway 7. A wan breeze brought me faint, episodic snatches of conversation from two distant men whose yellow coveralls lent the day an Impressionistic splash of color. I watched them lean against a muddy yellow backhoe a hundred yards away, smoking one cigarette after another.

When the wind strengthened, it struck my bare forehead like an ice-cream headache and slashed through my brand-new dark wool suit bought for this occasion. The gusts snatched at me with sharp fingers, which sent my testicles climbing tight and desperate against my groin. I turned my back to the wind and shoved my hands deeper into the pants pockets and felt the icy handprints on my thighs. It reminded me of cold evenings in high school when football practice would run until it was too dark to see the ball, and we'd jam our hands right down into our jockstraps to keep our fingers limber enough to function and yell loudly for coach to put us in because no matter how dead tired you were, it was even worse to stand on the sidelines and have the wind refrigerate the sweat soaking your practice jersey.

Where the hell was everyone? I turned in a half circle, taking in the deserted little cemetery. As I did, a sudden movement caught my eye over toward the stately magnolia tree's waxy evergreen leaves. I saw nothing now, but convinced someone lurked near the magnolia, I closed my eyes and tried to recall the brief image flashing across the vague edge of my peripheral vision.

Nothing.

I shook my head. Stress again, I reasoned as I opened my eyes. Regardless, I walked among the dead, heading toward the tree and thinking that even if no one was there, a little walk would get my blood moving, generate some heat.

The headstones reminded me how dead people continue to hold us long after their deaths, binding us with memories as strong as love. I studied these things in my work. I tried to tease through the fabric of neurons and skeins of synapses to determine what makes us conscious, what makes us, us. But none of my scientific conclusions mattered now, only sorrow's dark gravity holding my heart in its irresistible orbit.

I navigated among the graves of children who died too young and the rusting iron Southern Crosses of Confederate soldiers who died for no good reason. So much sorrow here, each grave its own epicenter of pain and loss, each marker a final punctuation mark for a life story increasingly forgotten as its memories faded as those who could remember dwindled.

Death hurts not only because we face the inevitability of our own demise, but also because it opens a hole in our memories and robs us of the warm breathing evidence of who we have been. The loss forces us to redefine ourselves.

When I reached the magnolia, I found an old Ford hubcap, cigarette butts, two used condoms, and enough malt liquor cans to verify this as a major after-hours entertainment spot, life continuing, surrounded by death. I walked on and quickly found myself at the southern end of the cemetery, next to the Stone family plot holding the remains of my grandparents, my uncle William, and my uncle Wester, whom I had never known because, like so many in the rural South of the 1920s, he died as an infant from some now-treatable disease. The small angel on his headstone, meant to imply his innocence and express ticket to heaven, looked vaguely sinister to me this morning.

The low, powerful growl of a truck's exhaust drew my attention to the cemetery entrance. I watched as a limousine-sized, four-door, deep metallic gray pickup truck with a matching shell over the full-size bed pulled in and parked behind my rental. Behind the wheel sat Rex, his shaved head gleaming as if he had waxed and power-buffed it. He was a young contractor who had occasionally worked at my mother's apartment complex and had taken a liking to her sweetness and anachronistic Southern charm.

For the past three years, he'd looked in on her almost every day, taken special care of her, installed all the special bathroom railings and fixtures needed for a woman whose mobility had been compromised by age.

Rex and his wife, Anita, a physician at the nearby University Medical School, had taken care of Mama and always made sure "Miss Anabel" did well. He refused to take my money for any of this and yet kept me posted on Mama's needs and condition and helped me secretly funnel funds and provide some level of extra care Mama would never take directly because she was determined she would never "be a burden to my children."

Rex was a tough man of few words and an uncertain past, which may or may not have included warrants connected with murder and mayhem. By the time I met him and learned enough about his past to confuse and concern me, he had already adopted Mama.

Rex waved at me when he got out of his truck and started toward me. He stood a head shorter than me, with a physique like a muscular tank. In his pin-striped, double-breasted suit, he looked like a dapper Mafia hit man and I wondered if he was packing.

CHAPTER 2

REX CLIMBED DOWN FROM HIS TRUCK AND WAVED AS HE STARTED TOWARD ME.

I returned Rex's greeting and took a last look at the family plot. My mother had often told me she wanted to be buried here, but her younger brother William had beat her to the last available real estate in the plot. She had really wanted to be buried next to her father, whom she called Daddy and others called the Judge even though he had never been elected or appointed to the judiciary and felt those sorts of public office were not for gentlemen like him. It was, he felt, the duty of true Southern gentlemen like him to anoint those who would stand for election and appointment and who would do his bidding once in office.

The success of his theory was attested to by a file cabinet full of personal correspondence from governors and senators and congressmen and lesser elected officials and lower mortals all assuring the Judge they would do his bidding. Mama had inherited the papers half a century ago, and when she'd moved out of her big house into the little apartment across Lakeland Drive from St. Dominic's Hospital in Jackson, she'd passed the papers along to me. Out of respect for her, I had not thrown the papers away, but after one slapdash glance through a couple of the hundred or so file storage boxes (the accreted paper residue of the Judge's forty years of law practice and power brokering), I had stashed them all in mini-storage and forgotten about them until now.

The Judge's elitism and especially his attitude toward public officials formed the basis for his everlasting contempt for my father, whose family tree hung heavy with elected officials including a congressman and a famous U.S. senator, my great-great­grandfather J.Z. Goerge, who, according to history books, was the first to formalize Jim Crow segregation when he wrote the Mississippi state constitution in 1890 and embodied in it the literacy test and the poll tax that disenfranchised half the state's population for the next three-quarters of a century.

For this, they put my great-great-grandfather in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall next to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. I never quite understood the Judge's contempt for my family's dark legacy, since it had produced a masterpiece of constitutional handiwork allowing the Judge to keep the black sharecroppers on both his plantations in virtual slavery.

For all these familial reasons and because my father worked for the governor at the time, I scandalized the family with my expulsion from Ole Miss in the fall of 1967 for leading a civil rights march. The Judge disinherited me from his substantial estate faster than you could say scalawag. They were all thankful when I enlisted in the Army and shipped out.

I turned away from this past – yet again – and headed toward Rex.

He had called me at my office on Thursday, something he had never done before. Mama, he said, had gone to the hospital that morning. Like any relatively affluent and extensively insured eighty-seven-year-old, Mama had a battalion of medical experts she visited on a regular basis. And on a regular basis they sent her to the hospital for in­patient tests.

And likewise regularly, she had her doctors forward copies of her test results to me. She and I would discuss these results extensively. We would have had nothing to talk about had I never gone to medical school. She disapproved of where I lived, how I lived, most of what I believed in, and never failed to complain about my accent and how I sounded "like a blank Yankee." My mother was far too genteel to say damn. Southern ladies, in her mind, never used coarse language.

And make no mistake about it, Mama was a Southern lady of the very old school, an unreconstructed Delta belle born on a plantation who never understood why happy darkies no longer wanted to stay in their place as God had ordained, like bluebirds not mixing with the sparrows. For this reason, our conversations tended to focus on her medical history. She loved me as only a mother could, but she never understood me or why I had turned out the way I had. Neither had I.

Rex and I met now, one hundred hours later, by a headstone bearing the Stallings name.

"Hey, Doc."

I held out my hand, but instead of shaking it, he stepped closer and gave me a bear hug. I returned it genuinely but briefly. Hugs from men – other than from my father, who was dead, and my son, who died far too short of being a man – made me uncomfortable.

"Thanks for coming." I knew it sounded lame even before Rex frowned at me. "Nice suit," I tried. He shrugged and turned to face the gravesite. "I owe you big time, man,"

Rex gave me a curious look.

"If you hadn't called me, I'd never have seen her alive again."

"How's that?"

"After you called me, I phoned Mama at the hospital. She gave me all her usual chatter about how I shouldn't come because my patients surely needed my attention more than she did, and wouldn't it be wonderful if I would take that endowed chair the University of Mississippi Medical School had offered me right there in Jackson."

Rex smiled.

"She never stopped talking about that; that's for sure."

I shrugged.

"Well, I just had a feeling this time. I'm glad you called me."

The religious would say it was a divine message, but I think maybe it was more the tone in her voice, or simply that she was getting old and my own professional medical judgment told me that the accretion of illnesses would soon overwhelm her stubborn grip on life. Regardless, I canceled my patient appointments and hospital rounds and took a red-eye from LAX Thursday night. When I got to her room at St. Dominic's Hospital early afternoon Friday, I sat down with a pale, dry husk of the woman I had seen only months before. It took a moment for her to open her eyes. They were lethargic, flat, and filled with tears when she recognized me. Colon cancer, she said. Terminal, the doctors said. She wanted no special measures, no interim surgeries or chemo.

"I spent the afternoon with her," I said as we walked toward the gravesite. "She was drifting in and out, and the few times she spoke, her voice was so faint I had to lean over the bed and hold my breath to hear her.

"What did you talk about?" Rex's voice had an odd tone, not fear but not simple curiosity.

"Mostly I read to her from the Bible, especially Psalm 121, over and over."

"That's it?"

I nodded and his usual poker face showed me something like relief. Something like a secret that had not been divulged. That confounded me and I put that down to yet another artifact of stress, like the person who wasn't by the magnolia.

"Yeah." I felt the regret. That was it. When the light from the window got too dim to read by any longer, I told her I needed some sleep, because I didn't have any on the red-eye from L.A. I kissed her, gave her a hug, and told her I would be hack in the morning."

He gave me a knowing look, as if he already knew what I had said and what I was about to say.

Movement interrupted my thoughts. In the distance, a hearse turned into the cemetery off Highway 7. It glided to a dignified stop behind Rex's truck.

"Nothing more until the phone call from the hospital at maybe four thirty in the morning to tell me she was dead." I stopped and looked at Rex closely "They told me she had apparently gotten up to get a cigarette, lost her balance, hit her head as she fell in the darkness."

Rex stopped and looked back at me.

"She died all alone on the cold, hard linoleum floor."

I shook my head as the image tore through my heart again. "You cannot possibly imagine how many times I have prayed that she had been knocked out by the blow on the way down. I can't stand to think that she ended up on the floor, conscious for a long time, dying all alone in the dark. I wonder if she called for help or simply gave up, closed her eyes, and let go?"

The detail in Rex's eyes gave my stress-worn nerves the impression that he somehow knew the answer to that.

CHAPTER 3

IN THE DISTANCE, AN OLDER, FOUR-DOOR CHEVROLET SEDAN WITH CLERGY LICENSE PLATES PULLED INTO THE CEMETERY behind the hearse. A bent, old gentleman in a dark suit climbed painfully from the sedan, his ragged white hair stirring in the wicked wind.

Rex and I turned toward him.

"Mama stage-managed everything you know," I said. "Right down to the last detail."

Rex raised his eyebrows.

"Right there in the safe-deposit box with her will," I said.

"She'd paper-clipped a note to the prepaid funeral papers and specified everything she was to be dressed in right down to hosiery and undergarments, which pastor to call, and what Scripture he would read."

I couldn't help but smile as I thought of her lifelong theological rebellion against one of the foundations of Christianity.

"What's so funny?" Rex asked me.

"The note was very clear that when we recited the Apostles' Creed during the service, we would absolutely, positively not say the part about Jesus descending into hell." I shook my head. "No matter how much she ragged on me about my heretical religious beliefs, she never managed to accept her personal savior spending time in hell."

"You mean Hades," Rex corrected me.

I smiled again at the memory. To Mama, hell was profanity and she was always too much of a lady to say those sorts of words.

As we drew closer to the hearse, two large men in dark suits got out of it and met the bent, old man at the rear of the vehicle. I pegged him as the minister rustled up by the local funeral home.

The funeral attendants were well dressed and professionally bland. The minister's face was chapped and red, patched all over with scars I recognized as from a workmanlike removal of skin lesions. I counted at least a dozen more precancerous patches in need of treatment. His left hand clutched a cracked and worn leather-covered Bible. His free hand was cupped gently and trembled faintly like a farmer sowing seed.

I shook the trembling hand and thanked him for coming and introduced Rex.

"I remember your mother," the minister said "And especially the Judge—but then, who doesn't? — particularly during the spring floods of 1929 when the levees threatened to burst, all of them except the ones the Judge built when he was president of the Levee Board. Yessiree, he was a man all right."

The well-practiced funeral home functionaries interceded then and pulled the old preacher back to the present. Rex and I slid Mama's pewter-finish casket—the one she had picked out herself God-only-knew how many years ago—out of the back of the hearse and carried it to the gravesite and placed it on the aluminum structure over the hole. Rex and I stood silently during the brief ceremony. Psalm 121 again, and the usual dust to dust. During the final prayer, as I closed my eyes and tried without success to visualize Mama in any other setting than the hospital or in her casket, I heard a car pull to a halt on the gravel access road behind us.

When the minister said the last amen, the men from the funeral home tripped some hidden lever and Mama descended into the hole.

Rex and I stood at the side of the hole as the sound of the backhoe grew louder. I picked up a handful of dirt and tossed it on the top of the coffin. The impact of the dirt, the hollow, dull sound the frozen dirt clods made as they rolled off the metal, tore a membrane in my heart, and suddenly I saw nothing for the tears. I swiped at my eyes with the cuff of my new suit and cursed at the sky for not showing even a little sunshine for Mama. I thought about cursing God as well, but I've never been much for existentially futile gestures.

Finally, I turned and saw that Rex had walked away and stood with his back to me and head bowed. On the other side of the dirt mound the backhoe idled restlessly. The two men in overalls looked expectantly at me. I nodded, then turned and made my way to the minister, who stood discreetly at a small distance. I thanked him for coming, mentioned that he should have his face looked at closely by a competent dermatologist, then slipped him an envelope containing two hundred-dollar bills.

As he walked away, I saw a tall woman with mocha skin climb out of a bright red Mercedes sedan parked behind Rex's truck.

"Well, I guess the bodies are spinning in their graves now," Rex said as he stopped by my side. He nodded at the woman walking toward us. She looked awfully familiar to me.

"Meaning?"

"Dude. This is a cemetery for white folks only," Rex said. "Even the labor with shovels're white."

I resented Rex's comments, wanted nothing to do with skin-color irrelevancies right now. But I turned toward the backhoe anyway and realized he was right. What's more, the men stood stock-still, their heads tracking the woman as she made her way toward us. Likewise, the two funeral home attendants and the minister were shocked into immobility by the sight of a dark-skinned woman in a white cemetery.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but the disappointment tasted like dirt. I hadn't been here to Itta Bena in twenty years, and that absence from Delta reality had allowed me to construct a convenient little fiction of self-congratulation that my modest efforts in the civil rights movement and the phenomenal dedication of many others had changed things here into a culture of meritorious equal opportunity. But clearly, life here in the Delta, more than in the rest of Mississippi, more than in the rest of the Deep South, and more than most any other where in America, still revolved about a deeply rutted axis of race, class, and misunderstanding.

I started to verbalize this to Rex when my heart stopped: the woman walking toward us was Vanessa Thompson. The Vanessa Thompson, moneyed securities attorney former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose striking face had made the cover of Time magazine when she'd shuttered her lucrative New York law practice to move back to Mississippi almost ten years ago to use her money to provide legal services for the state's poor, because "it was time to give back." But I also remembered quotes in the article from some of the more cynical observers who thought her move was "more like payback than give back." I still had that copy of Time in a drawer in my living room in Playa Del Rey.

But it wasn't the powerful, wealthy crusader Vanessa Thompson who arrested my pulse. No, it was the teenage Vanessa Thompson, my high school heartthrob and the ultimate forbidden fruit, who momentarily flatlined my EKG precisely as she had done more than thirty years before.

Her appearance didn't entirely surprise me because she and I had swapped e-mails over the past month about a strange, cold hate-crime case.

While I kept e-mailing her that I didn't do forensics, Vanessa persisted, attaching her e-mails with file after file crammed with information about Darryl Talmadge, a local white man who had recently been convicted of murdering a black man in the 1960s. I could not fathom why Vanessa wanted me to help save Talmadge from the gas chamber.

 

CHAPTER 4

VANESSA THOMPSON HAD SINGLE-HANDEDLY DEFLECTED THE TRAJECTORY OF MY LIFE from that of privileged, multigenerational son of the Confederacy to a traitorous scalawag, who betrayed his race and turned his back on a heritage filled with statues and oil portraits in public buildings. I met Vanessa in 1965 when court-ordered integration placed her in my Jackson high school as part of a handful of token black students. I'd like to believe I changed way back then because Vanessa showed me how wrong the old system was. But it wasn't that way at all, not that clean and simple.

"You sure as hell know how to piss folks off, my friend," Rex mumbled to me as we made our way toward Vanessa.

I looked around and saw the white-hot hate stares shift from Vanessa to me and back.

"Comes naturally I guess."

"Damn straight," Rex said. "So how is it you know the famed Vanessa Thompson?"

"High school," I said, remembering the wild sweetness of adolescence and the intoxicating hormone rushes. "She was in my history class. She always spoke up—"

"That sure hasn't changed."

"—spoke up and always had something interesting to say. Things I had never considered. Dangerous ideas."

"Y'Mama thought you had way too many dangerous ideas. I imagine one of those started with her?" Rex nodded toward Vanessa.

"Not exactly."

"How exactly?"

"I fell in love with her a long time before her words really mattered."

Rex grimaced and made a sucking sound with his front teeth. "Lordy!"

I nodded.

The meaning of her words would grow paramount as time passed, but at first it was her voice, the tones and timbre of the words, the steel of commitment reinforcing her voice, the energy of her emotions, and mostly the inexorable gravity of her wisteria-colored eyes that pulled me into orbit and made me hers.

And the testosterone.

"Vanessa and the other black students took the same classes, ate lunch by themselves at the same table every day, and pretty much kept to themselves, " I said. "White students ignored them, like they were invisible. I started out the same way until American history."

"Let me guess," Rex said. "You committed the unpardonable sin of talking to them."

"To Vanessa," I said nodding." Sometimes just a few seconds between classes. But that was enough."

"Nigger lover."

The word still hit me like a physical slap. No matter how much hip-hop practitioners gratuitously tossed the word around, it felt like a profanity of the soul.

"Scratched into my locker, painted on my car, spelled out on the front lawn with used motor oil. I think they tried to set the oil on fire, but Papa chased them off with his twelve-gauge.

"The principal called me into his office and told me to stop fraternizing with the enemy, something about 'godless Communists' being behind it all. He called my parents. My mother cried; my father said he'd lose his job."

"So she turned your head around?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said.

The old irresistible rush fluttered in my gut as Vanessa drew closer. How could this be? How could this feeling endure over the distance of so many decades?

"I was in love. Civil rights started out as a way to her heart. It took a while for it to become an end of its own." I nodded at the memories that played out in my head. "I asked her what to read, who to listen to, how to find the subversive literature behind the movement.

"Not surprisingly, Vanessa's dad was one of the leaders. He was a professor at Tougaloo. The whole thing came to a head right before Christmas when Vanessa invited me to a discussion-group party at her house. I told Mama I had to do some research at the library, then drove north on old Highway Fifty-one toward Tougaloo. When I got to Vanessa's house, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. That plain little tract house was packed—I mean literally jammed—with people of every color." I shook my head. "Black, white, Asian, Latino—" I turned to Rex. "I remember that day like it was this morning. I'd never, ever, been anywhere before in my entire life where blacks and whites and everybody else just … just hung around together as equals.

"I wasn't all that surprised to find all three of the Jewish students at my high school or the owner of the only real deli in town. But I was floored to find my physics teacher there, and that was my first indication that there were white people who didn't hate.

"When Vanessa took my arm, I was on cloud nine as she led me around and introduced me to people there. It was almost like the initiation into a secret society."

I felt the euphoria again as Rex and I covered the remaining few steps toward Vanessa. Now, as then, I felt the euphoria turn dark and ugly remembering how all hell had broken loose when she'd introduced me to her parents. Her father was furious, and his deep, booming anger silenced the assembled crowd.

"How dare you step foot in my house!" he yelled at me.

"You of all people! Your entire family and your ancestors have done more damage to my people than anybody else in this state's sorry history!"

He was convinced that at worst, I was there as a spy, and at the very best, a fulminating embarrassment.

He and Vanessa's brother Quincy escorted me to my car and told me never to speak to her again.

Vanessa transferred out of my high school the next week, and I had not seen her face-to-face again until this moment.

CHAPTER 5

NOW ON THIS BITTER DAY, NEXT TO ONE OF THE MANY GRAVES HEARING A RUSTY IRON SOUTHERN CROSS, Vanessa and I met again. She reached out and touched my forearm with her fingers.

Seismic plates moved again in my heart.

"I'm so sorry about your mother."

I opened my arms and she stepped into them as if the past thirty-five years had never rolled by She returned my embrace, then slipped a hand inside my suit coat to make the hug even more intimate. She took a step back then. Reluctantly, I let her go.

"I'm very, very sorry to barge in at a time like this, but this Talmadge thing has gotten out of control in the past few days. We really need your help and I hoped to convince you in person."

As Vanessa spoke, movement from behind her caught my eye. Again, I found myself staring toward the big magnolia tree; this time, I registered movement far beyond, in the trees down by Roebuck Lake.

Before I could react, a rifle shot thundered through the chill air.

Vanessa pitched forward. I opened my arms to catch her and saw an evil void where her left eye had once been. The warm, red-and-gray eruption from the ghastly wound blinded me. I grabbed Vanessa, rolled us to the ground, and covered her with my body as a second shot tore through the morning silence.

Captured By Google Street Views

Most mornings I start book writing about 5 a.m. until about 7:30. Then I begin work on my web site, Wine Industry Insight to produce the News Fetch wine industry daily summary. Afterwards, I go to my office where I handle wine business things as well as promotion, and the other business aspects of the book writing.

Back in March, on a briskly chilly day, I took a late morning walk as I usually do. As I got almost back to my office on West Napa Street, I noticed the Google Street Views vehicle. Ant they snapped a photo.

Notice the street sign and arrow that caught me right in the context: Man walking.

 

Breast Implant Bombs: My Plots Stay Ahead Of The Curve…Again

The Obama Administration's recent warning about terrorists using breast implant bombs reminds me that over my 35 years of writing thrillers, I've frequently developed ideas — including explosive breast implants — that once seemed preposterous, outlandish or impossible — but which have either come true or entered the realm of the dangerously likely.

My first novel, The Trinity Implosion (1976), was repeatedly rejected because editors said it was ridiculously implausible that terrorists could get their hands on a nuclear weapon. And detonate it at the Capitol during the State of the Uni0n address, thus decapitating every branch of the U.S. Government.

Then there was the genetically engineered bioweapon in Slatewiper that could be triggered by specific gene sequences shared by members of a specific ethnic groups. I wrote the book in 1993 and was rejected because of its implausibility. By the time it was published in 2001, the United Nations, Red Cross and others had warned that these weapons probably existed. Slatewiper.com has links to some of those warnings.

Oh, and there were the crop dusters in Slatewiper used to spread the bioweapon (shades of 9/11 preparations).

There was also the gasoline tanker in The Tesla Bequest which was used as a devastating bomb in a tunnel in Luxembourg.

And the secret government program to chemically engineer soldiers to make them perfect killers. After I wrote Perfect Killer, I discovered that the program actually existed.  Read more in this NON-fiction afterword by a retired Army intelligence officer and professor at the U.S. War College about the significance of Perfect Killer.

You can read the FOIA documents at Perfect Killer.Com.

THE HOW-TO OF IMPLANTING TERROR.

Yep. You guessed it. About 2002 or so, I outlined a thriller around women who had implants filled with a liquid explosive that does not require a separate detonator to explode. Nitroglycerine is an example one of these, but is less stable and not as powerful as alternative formulations available.

I've abandoned that thriller because I got a better idea.

But in that outline, I had stunningly attractive women with breasts surgically enhanced to Brobdingnagian proportions, which of course, require commensurate structural support including a substantial underwire superstructure.

The detonation mechanism consisted of two parts, both cleverly constructed to identically mimic bra underwiring. The actual detonator circuit was contained in side the implant was a simple variation on a spark gap. This was capacitance linked to external wiring in the bra.  The connection as I designed it in the outline was a bit like those capacitance switches that work when you touch them with your finger. No direct connection is needed.

Similarly, the electrical charge to initiate the detonation in the breast implant bomb doesn't need a direct connection. Just the closeness through the skin between the detonator and the electrical charge to set off the explosive. The electrical charge in my thriller outline came from a small netbook which had been rewired to route the power leads of the USB port to the earplug port. Very large capacitance charges can be achieved by gradual charging. But the advantage of a capacitor is that t can discharge all its energy almost instantly.

By bringing the slightly modified earplug near the implanted detonator wire and pressing the "PLAY" button on the netbook's music player would detonate the implants.

Are Men Afraid of Wine?

Tom Wark's blog post today — Great Wine Literature…Or Not — reminded me that I've written a bit about wine in my thrillers as well (Good airplane reading, but hardly literature).

One of the very cool things about writing novels is the creation of people … offering them a life, background, emotions, hopes, fears and talents. Create a bunch of these people, then throw them into one situation after another and see how they react, change.

By the middle of a book, they begin to behave in ways I never imagined when I started. Just like real people, every contact with others and the environment changes them. Some doors open, others close. At a certain point, they must react in a given way or they lose their credibility.

Thus, in the following scene from Daughter of God (which was plagiarized by The Da Vinci Code), two women — one who is an expert in art and the other, an archaeologist — drink wine and wonder why it is that men seem to be afraid of its sensuous characteristics and must, rate it, rank it and analyze it to death.

Enjoy the scene.

EXCERPT FROM DAUGHTER OF GOD BY LEWIS PERDUE

Copyright 1999, Lewis Perdue,  all rights reserved.

Thalia closed her eyes and rolled the wine about in her mouth for an instant before swallowing. When she opened her eyes, she said: "One of the oddest things I ran into when I lived I New York City was the way Americans – especially some of the men – took all the fun out of drinking wine."

Zoe tilted her head. "Odd? How?"

"I think they're afraid of it," Thalia said. "They have a problem with the sensuality of wine…sexuality if you will." She swirled her glass and looked at the deep ruby liquid for a moment.

"They want to think about wine, not feel it. The feeling is the part that scares them to death so they de-sensualize wine by quantifying it: they score it with numbers, dissect it into acid and sugar components; they write endlessly about the winemaker, the weather, the inches of rainfall the vineyard got.

"They want to collect it, not just drink it. They have self-anointed priests and holy men — sommeliers, collectors and wine geeks — who speak a jargon that excludes the uninitiated.

"They have dogmas about which wines are good, which are not, which ones to drink with which food, which glasses to use – their fucking rituals put any established religion to shame. They have books and magazines that are like holy scripture that they all memorize.

"They worship the concept of the wine rather than the experience of drinking it – yadda, yadda." She waved her free hand dismissively.

"They're all like a bunch of Moonie cult drones. Problem is they get so wrapped up in all this left-brain, bean-counter bullshit that they never actually experience the sensuality, they never just let themselves feel the pleasure.

"What's more, I think they do this on purpose," Thalia continued. "They're afraid of what they can't quantify because quantification means control. I think this is what was at work in religion too. The fear of sensations, this abject terror over things you feel as opposed to those you can is why male-dominated religions evicted the Great Goddess — she was sensual, sexual.

"The guys needed to cut God down to size just as they do with wine. They had to make God into one gender – male — then anthropomorph him into an old white-haired geezer they could manipulate with rituals and sacrifice.

"Then they broke him down into his component parts, described the parts in nauseating scriptural detail written in words designed to be incomprehensible. Then they locked him away in a mystery where he's only accessible to a privileged priesthood."

Thalia paused to take a quick sip of her wine .

"You get all of this theology out of how guys don't really enjoy wine?" Zoe asked in amazement.

Thalia shrugged. "It's about experiencing the indescribable, about feeling rather than thinking and in that sense, wine and the Creator of our universe are a lot alike. They are both sensual and they both must be felt, experienced rather than understood or analyzed to death.

"Logic built Western Civilization, but logic cannot properly comprehend the infinite or the sensual. The Goddess was about creation – the world, life. Procreation is sexual and from the earliest days it has been a woman's function, something men felt they had no control over. This was a problem. They needed to exert control and since they couldn't really control their own urges, they decided to control the object of the urge.

"Most sex laws control the behavior of women and not men. Men transgress with a wink and a nod; women get pilloried, shunned or burned at the stake.

Over the ages, the male-centric religious spin doctors couldn't handle the incomprehensibly sensual nature of the Great Goddess Creator, so they gradually marginalized her into a local fertility deity and turned sex from a pleasurable, spiritual experience into a dirty little act. It was about the only way their big heads could exercise any control over their little heads."

"Quite a theory," Zoe shook her head and then took another sip of the wine.

"Yeah, well I've had a few years to formulate my unified theory of putzes," Thalia said. "But that's not why I broke into the wine cellar. I want to hear about your forger friend."

"Talk about a putz," Zoe said.

"Too bad," Thalia said sympathetically.

"No. Extremely good, actually." Zoe smiled mischievously. She set down her wine glass and held her hands out like someone describing the fish that got away. "A putz about this big."

Thalia laughed so hard she spilled wine on her dress. She wiped at the spill and when she caught her breath, said: "C'mon, seriously. Tell me."

Zoe picked up her glass and after a sip of wine, continued.

Read the whole book on your Kindle: Daughter of God.

More about Lew's books at: lewisperdue.com