III

Bonwit Vrooman was a Dutch New Yorker and a carpetbagger through and through. No man knew how to bilk the government better than this grinning, obnoxious, fun-loving Yankee. He had served as a federal captain of volunteers during the war where he became a virtuoso in the surreptitious art of government contracting. As a regimental quartermaster he built a tidy side income on contract kickbacks. At outrageous prices he bought boots that became un-soled on the march, and cardboard haversacks that melted in the rains. For his efficient labors they awarded him a pension after the war, and a permanent rank of major in the New York State Guard.

 
Taking his skills to further task, he outbid his competitors for a post from President Johnson to run the Freedman’s Bureau of Limestone County. He was viewed with great suspicion by the locals when he arrived by the cars from Nashville. That is until he walked out of the Western Union with his fat leather-bound checkbook. Not only did this Yankee have real money, but he knew how to get it, he knew how to squirrel it, and he knew how to spend it.

 
He settled into a mansion on Lee Street known as Grand Coeur and dressed it with fancy furniture and plush linens no one had ever seen before. Then he got to work spreading the wealth from an office he rented on Pryor Street, which became the Freedman’s Bureau headquarters. He hired a battery of scriviners to dictate grants and draft contracts from that fast-moving mouth of his. All of his old war buddies were in Washington controlling the spigots, and the dollars came flowing down an odious chain of custody straight into the Heart of Dixie.

 
Everyone was getting in on the cut, starting with Maw Possum, who pulled all the strings in the little freedman hamlets that were springing up all around the County. No one was getting paid enough to work the plantations they used to work as slaves. What gives? So, Maw Possum got contracts to build cisterns, livestock fencing and schoolhouses for all the freed negroes. Vrooman, who soon earned the nickname The Major, was pleased by the public progress and personal profits. He then worked over the Greeks on the Hill, mostly Democrats who found him abrasive and faux refined. But they gracefully tolerated the quick-tongued foreigner in their midst because he paid exorbitant prices for their wares, and they still controlled much of the local politics.

 
He rode around town in an imported Italian chaise with his mistress, the wealthy widow Bright Marin. She was a raven-haired femme fatale rumored to have poisoned her physician husband. They frequented Wang Fu’s laundry where they reclined on cotton divans, smoked opium and laughed into the night to the music that wafted across Strangetown. Bright Marin was no Greek, nor The Major a man of good Southern graces, but they were richer than just about anyone else in the County. They were resented by many on the Hill because of that wealth and because they were Republican, anathema to the old Democrat elites. These two stuck around for a time until the election of Rutherford Hayes, when the Greeks cut their devil’s deal with the Klan and Jim Crowe brought the hammer down on Strangetown. There might be more to tell about these two kids later.