Horrible Harvest

New Orleans in ’69 was a cesspool of scoundrels and scalawags. Weren’t just carpetbaggers from up North that had planted seed in the Crescent City. Sumbitches with piss-poor schemes and bad intentions crawled into town from every part of the world. Weren’t none of them as sharp and toothy as Bobby Bunning. He was smarter and more cunning than any fella with intent on growing rich off the misfortune and desperation of folks burnt by a country shit-canned into the deep-dug trenches of history. He could sell stink to a skunk.

The Bunning Brothers firm sold fear. Fear of what was to come if you didn’t invest in the countless made-up opportunities in Bobby’s portfolio. What white Southerners of any stripe feared most was the newly freed Negroes. So, without their consent or consideration, Bobby invented black-owned companies, organizations and investment firms that were always weeks away from setting up shop in whatever state or territory the Bunning Brothers had made their pitch on that particular day. Invest with us, and you’d be saved the humiliation of being lorded over by the unyoked class of former slaves flooding into your neighborhoods. There was plenty of simple-minded folks to pick clean in New Orleans, and he sold a lot of stink to near every skunk in town.

Our biggest competitor on selling such a lie to the Cajun shitheads was none other than the Ku Klux Klan. ‘Cept they made out the Negroes to be something else altogether. They had a whole different fear entire they was selling. Freed slaves was frothing beasts bent on murdering white men and raping white women. Some of ‘em is good, they’d say, but most by a lot weren’t nothing but wild niggers off their chains.

Both lies was deadly. White folks ain’t natural saints. Our instincts are bent toward strike and take. It’s a European thing. Handshakes and sharing are hard turns for us to make. The only thing that saves us from being the defilers and thieves we was born into is a heavy dose of something we don’t have a whole lot of. Patience. More times than not, we give into our European heritage. That’s what made The Bunning Brothers firm rich and the KKK popular.

The KKK presented themselves as a private Southern police force. They was self-described Christian knights wholly committed to protecting God’s only truly chosen people – Southern whites. It was a brand they’d come to call Christian nationalism, and beat down crackers made up of war widows, defeated vets and parents with dead sons flocked to them like flies on shit. The Klan couldn’t sell stink to skunks, but they’d sure as shit beat Eskimos into buying ice.

Bobby didn’t want us to take our usual tact when dealing with the Klan. They was competition of a whole other sort. He knew from his spies that the wealthiest members of Southern society were members, so he thought we was better served steering clear of the Klan. Any other occasion when we arrived into town, I’d make it clear with blade and bullet that we set at that the table first to get our fill before the other chiselers would be allowed to pick at the crumbs we left behind.

Such an arrangement in the Crescent City was fine by me. Being the muscle for a conman grinds on you most days. Making threats is easy enough. Carrying them out is another thing altogether. I’d come to leave a lot of bad behind working for the Bunning brothers by the time we’d hit New Orleans, and my opium habituation was about the only thing that brung me peace – Or a whisp of a taste of peace thereof. It didn’t last, but it was something. When you sport a mind of racing thoughts of all your maleficent behavior, any quiet you can get is divine time.

It was a meeting of a man in the French Quarter that squirreled things up all to hell for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but things would unravel toward violence and chaos because of who he was. I didn’t recognize him at first. I was looking for an opium den I’d heard tell of when I come upon him. We’d know’d each other a long time, but I ain’t seen him in years when he called out my name. I didn’t ever want to set eyes on him again. He reminded me of the darkest day of my life, and I didn’t know if I owed him gratitude or damnation.