XXXIV

A deep examination of the records might reveal that Branse Havelock may indeed have been a prince of the Greek blood, and not just of the planter elite of Athens. He understood the Havelocks first arrived in Limestone County by way of South Carolina. His great grandfather, James Havelock, fought against his own kin at Kings Mountain, then he killed Redcoats at Cowpens. This was during America's first civil war, which was the Revolution. James Havelock settled over the Appalachians after the war where he was given a bounty of land next to Cane Creek near Petersburg, Tennessee. That is how the Havelocks first arrived in the Nickajack, before Branse's own grandfather resettled in Limestone County.

Numerous Havelocks remained in South Carolina where they had settled up the backcountry as far back as the Great Buck War against the Yamassee Confederation. This was years before the Revolution. South Carolina was still a young colony. Charleston itself was threatened with being overrun by Indians. The frontier was ravaged by the Confederation. Plantations were burned, settlers and slaves were murdered. It took a tough and ruthless sort of settler to push out from the city burning Indian villages, slaughtering all males and enslaving the rest. When they had wiped out the natives, they would hunt out the skin of deer from the countryside and move on, for this war was about the almight "Buck," from which we derive the slang. These were the Havelocks, whose kin pushed the frontiers of white South Carolina deep into the interior in a war of annihilation.

The mysterious origins of the Havelocks, however, reaches even further into the mists of time. The name first appears as the Englishization of Paleologos, affixed to a petition for settlement submitted from Barbados to the Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina. The colony of Carolina itself was granted by King Charles Stuart I to the Lords Proprietor, which was a roll call of Royalist supporters of the King against Parliament. Most of the settlers were induced to resettle from the English island colony of Barbados by way of tax exemptions and generous land grants.

Anthony Havelock was born Anthony Paleologos, the illegitimate son of Ferdinand Paleologos, a Royalist cavalier who fled to Barbados to avoid Parliament's executioner. His mother was rumored to be a Portuguese mulatto and a slave of the Paleologos estate. Ferdinand himself was known as the "Greek Prince of Cornwall," for the Paleologos had been the last imperial dynasty of the Eastern Romans, known as the Byzantines. Ferdinand's ancestors had come to England by way of Italy where the imperial kin and kith had resettled after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Perhaps no place in the history of slavery did that vile institution manifest greater evils than in Barbados of the mid 17th century. The first plantations were worked by white indentured servants, mostly Irish whose debt contracts were transferrable and effectively made them white slaves. The European was wholly unconditioned to the pestilential tropics of its environs. Both the plantation proprietors and their white slaves died in droves from diseases as they hew indigo and tobacco from the rich volcanic loam. If these indentured servants survived their five year contract, they were given a 'freedom due' worth ten pounds in goods and some land.

As unpropitious as these prospects may seem, many took it. The need for labor soared, so the growing Barbadian elite contracted privateers to prowl the Atlantic looking to impress whites to work on the plantations. They included Ferdinand Paleologos's son and Anthony's half-brother Thomas, who raided the Caribbean aboard the privateer Charles II. In the years before the 1650's, two-thirds of all whites from the British Isles travelling to the Americas were settling into Barbados, voluntarily or involuntarily. The island quickly overcrowded in conditions that seemed like they couldn't get worse. But they did, and for a whole new class of arrival.

Sugar cane was introduced to Barbados in 1640 by a band of Sephardic Jews from Dutch Brazil and it completely swept the island over. It ushered in an agricultural and labor revolution, and not for the better. Because of the intensive labor required to cultivate and refine sugar, the Barbadians began to import slaves by the tens of thousands. African slaves were hardier than white indentured servants. They could survive the tropical climate better. They were also less inclined towards the inconvenient individuality by being completely uninformed about the culture and society into which they were thrust.

Barbados had grown into one of the most densely populated places in the Western Hemisphere. Thousands were still dying in droves, even the hardy African slaves, but the Dutch slave ships still anchored off shore to deliver more human cargo. They arrived in the most wretched conditions and were sold by the hundreds at the dockside slave markets. The densely cultivated island was intersected by straight roads where tudor-style plantation homes were hedged like the English countryside. Each held dark secrets like mass graves and slaves being whipped to death, hung, or even boiled alive for their intransigence. Meanwhile, the white Barbadian elite held social court among themselves. A portrait of Ferdinand Paleologos himself shows him dressed in a ruffed damask doublet and silk trunkhoses wearing a black velvet capotain, still very Elizabethan in habit.

Anthony Paleologos himself grew into a small landholder of 100 acres and twenty slaves until he was bought out by a Consortium of English investors. That is when he decided to emigrate to the Province of the Carolinas, which was being solicited by the Lords Proprietor. And as he prepared to sail aboard the galleon bound for the settlement of Charleston, he parted from his father for the last time. He had neverminded his mulatto heritage. The cruelty of Barbadian Master had known no color, but his father impressed upon him to keep it a secret unto the grave, then pressed into his hand a ring.

Inset into the bezel of the ring was a red jade. Inscribed upon it were the Greek letters Alpha and Kappa. Anthony was confused and asked his father about it. It stood for Adelphon Kuklos. It was an ancient crusading order of the Eastern Roman Empire, sworn in kanly, or Turkish for blood revenge, against the black Mamluks of Egypt. Its sinister imprecations reach back into the clouded annals of time. White Christians against Black Moslems. Anthony did not know what to think about all this. He did not know any Moslems but for the few that crewed his half-brother's ship. But he certainly knew a lot of blacks. And so he kept this ring and brought it with him to the Province of the Carolinas where its secrets were related down the Havelock line, and it infused them with a cursed fury, first against the Yamasee, and then again against the race upon which their family was cursed to loathe.

XXX

One of the great rivalries of the Nickajack was that between Lyman "Haw Haw" Resnick, editor of the Limestone Democrat, and the improbably named Wilbur "Whip" Masters, editor of the Limestone Whig.

 
Lyman Resnick had been a war correspondent with the Richmond Enquirer. He had been there at the end when they drove old Dixie down, and he used his column to pen out weekly hagiographies of Confederate heroes and missives about the Cause. He was incredibly handsome, a real patrician of judicious manners. The ladies gossiped favorably about his relations to the Dukes of North Carolina, and his dry, witty sarcasms. The Republicans chided him as "Haw Haw" for his imperious snigger. There was great frustration by Bourbon George over what he considered Resnick's drolling style. He wanted an attack dog on his side. Dr. Licinius Prentiss, however, fawned over him, and the only time he would be seen to chuckle is in reading Resnick insult his rival in the most clever and scintillating manner. Dr. Prentiss would keep the best clippings in a scrapbook and touch them unnaturally.

 
Wilbur "Whip" Masters, on the other hand, was an outright carpetbagging muckraker. An abolitionist from Greenwich Village, New York, he wore a silk bowtie and ruffled cuffs below a velvet stovepipe hat. Compared to the intellectual and circumspect style of Haw Haw Resnick, Whip Masters was profane, vulgar and bombastic. He loved to whip up furor and indignation among the Republican constituency he held in thrall with the most outrageous claims. A peddler of sinister conspiracies, he would lambaste the Democrats as racists and traitors to America who planned to take away guns and usurp power over the state government.

 
Knowing most of his readership couldn't even read, he told them nonetheless how it was. He would slant news from a clapboard podium in Strangetown, accepting cash in exchange for adverting plugs on stuff like snake oil and other quackery. But Whip Masters was not stupid. He was a graduate of Hillsdale College and read Schopenhauer and Marx. He had written for The Nation. He had a very careful understanding of the power of oratory, something not seen among many journalists.

 
Barry Hogan, Chairman of the Limestone County Republican Party, was grateful to have such an attack dog on his side. Barry knew he could round up the black vote with the aide of Maw Possum. What he needed was buy in from skeptical white voters. Whip Masters had enormous influence among the Whig yeomanry who were resentful of the Greeks, despite his queer Yankee ways. He was also wildly popular among the poor white trash, who loved his lewd and blustering style. Most Democrats were so disgusted with the man that they wondered why someone hadn't shot the sunnabitch.

 
At length someone did. It was just a flesh wound, and the would-be assassin was killed in a shootout with Sheriff Royal Bill at a farm near Pettusville. He bore the ring of Adelphon Kuklos and was traced to the Pulaski Klan. When he returned to the podium, Whip Masters was more irascible than ever, accusing the Democrats of trying to silence the voice of the free people of Strangetown. He successfully stumped for the election of James Thomas Rapier, who was called "Jimmy Dickel" for his love of drinking and throwing dice in his youth.

 
When James Thomas Rapier became the first negro elected to the United States Congress for the Nickajack, Whip Masters was insufferable. He invited the Republican Congressman to speak at his podium while Barry Hogan passed out sweets and liquor. Crowds would stretch all across the boardwalks that lined the creekside of the Strangetown while Haw Haw Resnick would sneer and rebut from his office on Washington Street. He would never dare to step down into Strangetown.

Haw Haw Resnick approached what he perceived as the racial and Christian paradox of black suffrage with the basic truism that the negro was unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom. It was a seductive premise to embrace for former Confederates who wished to avoid charges of sedition or treason after having so recently been enfranchised again. And so Haw Haw wrote lengthy epistles cementing this premise to the original tenets of the old Cause to create a new post-war ideolog. He called it the Lost Cause. It was genius. For a war that evolved into the great crusade of liberation from human bondage, the Lost Cause rebranded secession as a heroic act to preserve self-determination and a paternalistic order of the human race. It was a compelling argument to white veterans who lost everything, even for some of the whites who lived among the blacks in Strangetown.

 
And so six o' clock would come around in Athens, and the Democrat's evening post would hit the stands with Haw Haw Resnick's latest encyclical while Whip Masters would straighten his bowtie, clear his throat, and open his mouth in gesticulating philippic behind his podium in Strangetown. It was the daily battle for the mind soul of Limestone County.

XXI

Guster Ledbetter trusted only two white people in his life, and one of them was dead. The rest of them he could take or leave. He thought about this as he thumbed through his copy of the Holy Bible and found the verse in 1 Corinthians.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

He had a lot of trouble with that one.

Early in the war his slave quarters had been aswirl with rumors that the Yankees had just marched into Limestone County and occupied Athens. Does that mean we're free? Apparently not since the Yankees didn't seem eager to free anybody. They ended up pillaging the town instead. The rumor now was that they were raping slaves. What kind of liberator was this? Then the Emancipation Proclamation came and went and still there wasn't any freedom. Can we leave now? Is someone supposed to come and get us? Tired of waiting, he fled Cowford Plantation with the aide of Maw Possum. Her underground railroad ran up the creeks and bottomlands into Limestone County's interior towards freedom - Strangetown contraband camp.

Strangetown was then a filthy bottomland crowded with tents. Brothers and sisters were sleeping out in the open. Everyone was sick and coughing and wearing masks fashioned from kerchiefs. Typhoid and dysentery were rife. It was nothing short of an open air refugee camp. The Yankees were completely apathetic. Worse yet, they kept everyone under guard in Strangetown so as not to antagonize the very white people on the Hill who kept them as slaves. What the hell? Guster's mistrust of white people deepened.

They weren't completely helpless. There were teachers and missionaries. They seemed sincere, especially Mary Fletcher Wells, who was white and taught him to read and found him 'oh! so bright!' There was also Brother Jessup Floyd, a black preacher from Boston who preached to the freedman in the Sea Islands. He warmed to Brother Floyd and his Christian ministry, but he kept back a devilish secret. With Mrs. Wells, however, he was hesitant. The only white woman he interacted with was Mrs. Zeigler, who was a complete b***h to her slaves. But Mrs. Wells was persistent, and she loved everything she could do for him, and he sensed it.
Things took a bad turn when he was approached by his old master, Mr. Zeigler , who held a rag dramatically to his face as he walked Strangetown contraband camp looking for his fugitive slaves. He had the Yankees apprehend Guster. His arrest was greatly protested by Mrs. Wells, who sought the assistance of other sympathetic whites around her. Only one white man stepped forward in his defense. His name was Abraham Stone.

The rub was that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in regions in the South in open rebellion against the Union. Since Limestone County was occupied by the Union and rather pacified after a good pillaging, Guster's master argued his property was not beholden to Mr. Lincoln's proclamation. Rather than being consigned to his master, Guster was jailed instead until the case could be decided. He was extraordinarily bitter about this.

Abraham Stone had come to Limestone County from Maryland as a carpetbagger and established a practice on Market Street where he turned a tidy profit from representing drunk Yankee soldiers in civil court. He used to pass the slave markets of the Baltimore every day on the way to his clerkship. They disgusted him. So he gave pro bono legal work to the freedman. When Guster was apprehended and threatened to be dragged back into human bondage, Abraham acted on his moral instincts. He immediately walked to Limestone County courthouse and obtained a stay. The judge agreed.

Abraham Stone felt he had met God's calling in securing the freedom of this one man, Guster Ledbetter. In a sensational case followed by the Yankee press, Mr. Stone was jostled between the civil and military courts until he made the long trek to Washington D.C. by the cars. He waited in a long line of petitioners for six hours at the White House before he was ushered into the presence of Mr. Lincoln. After stating Guster Ledbetter's case, Mr. Lincoln related the parable of the Frog Who Wished for a King and drafted an order declaring the Limestone County subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. When Abraham Stone returned to Limestone County, he was met with cheers in Strangetown. The Darlings of Strangetown were now free!

Guster Ledbetter was released into freedom and he returned to Strangetown to resume his studies with Mrs. Wells. He had placed his trust in Abraham Stone, and in doing so had helped secure the permanent freedom of all the contraband slaves collected around Town Creek. And now that they were free, they had to find out how to move on with life in this world without chains. That was a long road ahead, and one that would last for a hundred years.

Abraham Stone did not live long after. He was shot dead in his home in front of his wife on East Street by a single man in a scarlet robe and hood, who was Adelphon Kuklos. Guster Ledbetter wept at his funeral, like he had wept for his brothers and sisters who had died in the fields. And he recalled the passage from 1 Corinthians, and may have glimpsed some of that One Spirit. And then it would pass, and he would remember that name - Adelphon Kuklos. And then he never wept again.

There was only one white person he had left to trust, and Mary Wells Parker went on to found the Trinity School for freedman with funds she had procured from The Major. She collected her 'oh, so bright!' students from among the freed negroes of Strangetown and taught them to read and to write and to stand proud on their accomplishments. And though Guster Ledbetter had joined the army and had come back and gone out into the County from the racist tumult of Reconstruction Athens, he found it just as bad out there. The Klan was beginning to surge, guided by the invisible hand of Adelphon Kuklos. So he took up his musket that the Yankees let him keep, and practiced with his Colt Walker until he was ready to face them all.

Historical Seal of Adelphon Kuklos

 

XX

When he arrived in Mexico, Burnside Lee had never in his life imagined such a place. Before he ended up in the Land of Moctezuma, he had never been further away from his home in Limestone County than Nashville, Tennessee. That's where he swore his oath and he was given a rifle and told he was going to Mexico to fight Mexicans. He could not have been more eager. This was exactly what he needed - adventure to mollify a long bout of melancholia.

War with Mexico had been roundly supported by slaveholding Democrats, who wished to expand their extraordinary voting privileges into new lands where they could import slavery. George Smith Houston, that penultimate Greek of Limestone County, was then representing the Nickajack in Congress. He voted for the war after a pantomime speech, and then sat the rest of it out at home.

 
Burnside had long been a widower, having lost his first wife and child in childbirth years before. He kept his mind active by abjuring from alcohol and studying history. Longing for adventure to assuage his perpetual grief, he placed his hardware store on Jefferson Street in stewardship when war was declared against Mexico. Then he made the trip to Nashville to enlist in the army. There he was enrolled in the 1st Tennessee Regiment, which drew a wild swashbuckling type from here on to all over. Most of the soldiers thought this was the big ticket. Mexico! As far as Southerners were concerned, that place was next on Manifest Destiny's hitlist. Many of them thought they would get land in Mexico out of the deal, and recruiters weren't eager to dissuade them with the truth of it. There were so many volunteers that they couldn't take them all.

 
The army hit the beaches at Vera Cruz, Mexico and laid siege to its ancient walls of coral. They were cheerfully led by that old War of 1812 hero, General Winfield Scott, who was nicknamed "Old Fuss and Feathers." After capturing the ancient city, they marched inland into the jungle towards the distant mountains. They followed the old invasion route of the Conquistador Hernando Cortez. Burnside was amazed to observe jaguars and ocelots prancing among the babbling trees. There were birds that burst in carnivals of color, and there were tarantulas that grew as large as his fist. Spider monkeys would climb down and rob him at night of the fruit he foraged from the jungle. It was quite a remarkable encounter with the alien and exotic for just a boy from Limestone County!

They began to ascend the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Madre Orientale, where the wind blew like furies and the mornings were blanketed with frost. Somewhere up there in the mountains was the Mexican Napoleon, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was the butcher of the Alamo. He held a strong position with ten-thousand Mexican soldiers guarding the jagged defile of Cerro Gordo. In his first action, Burnside Lee's regiment was sent against the enemy's center. They blundered into a crossfire among the slopes of chapparal overlooking the gorge and tumbled back behind whatever defilade they could find.

 
This was a terrifying experience for Burnside Lee. This was not what he expected. Enemy musket fire barked through the scrubs with every volley. Fuego! Artillery smashed into the rocks sending shards everywhere. Curling with abject terror and having urinated himself, it took quite an effort for Burnside to pull himself back together again. It helped when an Irish sergeant kicked him in the ass screaming foreign obscenities and pulled him to his feet. Somehow he mustered the mental enterprise to fold himself back into the ranks and return fire. It was not until a bright young captain named Robert E. Lee had personally reconnoitered General de Santa Anna's left flank that the whole position could be turned. And when it had, the Mexicans suddenly broke. So calamitous was the retreat that the Mexican Napoleon left behind his wooden leg and wine chest. Both brought great glee and cheers to the American ranks.

 
Burnside Lee swore he would never go into combat sober again. The experience was entirely too suffuse with terrors surreal, too phantasmic. It wasn't worth the glory if he had to endure it. So he broke his embargo on spirits and around a campfire asked for a swill from another soldier named Luther Lang. He passed along a flask filled with hot bourbon that went down hard. Then they got to talking about where they'd come from.

Limestone County, Luther asked? Why I'm from Giles County, Tennessee. I reckon we're neighbors.
Luther eyed him queerly when Burnside said he was a Whig, as though he were untrustworthy. He asked him if he had slaves, which was a rude question. Two.

 
I've got eight, Luther said. He gazed quietly. I got my eyes set on becoming a grandee here. These people can work. They built pyramids! Unlike our n*****s, they understand a hierarchy. They understand class and racial distinction. Did you know they grade their mestizos based on how white or Indian they are? As far as I'm concerned, your either white, a redskin or a n****r. What a strange country this is. It will take some getting used to.

Burnside didn't know what to think of all that. It really took him aback.

 
I got me near 80 acres near Prospect, Tennessee. Say when this is over, we'll need to visit one another. Burnside thought not.

 
He noticed Luther thumbing his ring, and he thought to ask. Did he go to college?

 
No sir. That's the ring of Adelphon Kuklos. He took it off and tossed it to Burnside, who looked it over. A red jasper was inscribed with white gold letters - AK. Is this some fraternity, Burnside asked?
Yes sir, but not of the college type. We're a band of brothers... white brothers. Our aim is to spread white culture across the Western Hemisphere, to build an empire where white Americans of the South can prosper without the interference of those devilish Yankees. And that starts right here in Mexico. These people are a wasted and degenerate race, ripe for the picking.

 
Burnside was disturbed, but he let the man talk. And so he did into the evening about how Adelphon Kuklos was funding filibuster expeditions to undermine Hispanic governments around the Gulf and Caribbean. By installing white dictators, they could apply for statehood or otherwise thrive with the support of Southern slaveowning investors. It was a vast conspiracy, though none too secret. A lot of poor whites and yeomen were buying into it. A lot of them were there in Mexico. But Adelphon Kuklos seemed especially sinister in its organization.

 
Burnside was absorbed, and took his mental notes long into the night.

XVII

For his courageous actions as a messenger at the Battle of Shiloh, Branse Havelock was recommended by Fighting Joe Wheeler to the signals staff of General P.G.T. Beauregard, whom they called Little Napoleon. Pierre Gustave Toutont-Beauregard was a Louisiana Creole with grandiose tactical visions - a breathtaking prima donna. From this vantage Branse gained marvelous insight into the gods and generals that moved the destinies of nations. After General Beauregard withdrew the Confederate Army from Shiloh the Yankees had amassed a mighty host of over 120,000 men and followed him to lay siege to Corinth. Facing such a grandiose army, General Beauregard ordered an evacuation. He placed Branse in charge of a fantastic ruse to mask the withdrawal lest they invite an attack at a critical moment.

As the trains arrived to evacuate the countless wounded from the Battle of Shiloh, Branse had the 19th Alabama cheer around the railroad station to make it sound like they were welcoming reinforcements. Beyond the earthworks it gave the Yankees pause, who were now under the studious command of Henry Halleck, and who was nicknamed "Old Brains." Branse had so-called "Quaker Guns" made of logs installed around the perimeter to replace the real guns they evacuated by rail. Every night Branse had more campfires built to create the appearance of swelling numbers. Old Brains scratched his elbows and continued to hesitate, perhaps even expecting to be attacked by overwhelming numbers of rebels. Then one night they were all gone.

The Yankees mounted the earthworks kicking over Quaker guns and rummaging through empty tins looking for food. They had been bamboozled! The rebels slipped away! Indeed they had towards Tupelo, and for much of the summer of '62 the two great armies stood facing each other across the Mississippi hill country. At length, P.G.T. Beauregard was relieved after a scuffle with Mr. Davis in the press and was replaced by the General Braxton Bragg, who looked like a terrier. Branse was retained on Bragg's staff, but he found the general aloof and pugnacious. Still, the general planned a bold invasion of Kentucky for the autumn that raised the army's spirits after an inactive summer. The army was now called the Army of Tennessee and would remain so-named throughout the rest of the war. 

Branse helped organize the railway schedule to entrain 50,000 rebel soldiers from Tupelo to Mobile to Columbus to Chattanooga in a tortuous journey for the soldiers. The Army of Tennessee took this enormous geographical detour on account of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad being occupied by federals from Memphis to Huntsville, Ala. When they stepped off north into Kentucky they had high hopes of being welcomed as liberators, swelling their ranks with volunteers. Instead they were met with indifference, even derision.  They tarried for awhile until the grains were harvested and clashed in a sharp fight called the Battle of Perryville, in which the 19th Alabama didn't even participate. It was about that time that Branse Havelock received a letter from Virginia.  

It was marked with a return address to Richmond, but had no name for the sender. At his camp table in his field tent, he sliced open the envelope beneath the glow of a paraffin lantern. A ring had fallen out. He read the letter that was enclosed.

Dear Branse,

It is with great heartfelt condolence that I must convey to you the news that your father was killed in action at Sharpsburg on September 17th. He bravely withstood several Yankee charges made across the Antietam Creek bridge. His body was recovered and with General Lee's intervention was forwarded through to our lines. He is being advanced to Athens for burial.  Your father and I shared deep bonds of affection and politics. I have never had the pleasure of meeting my dear friend's son, but we must soon. Perhaps duty soon will bring us within reach, for I have much to tell you of your father's remarkable legacy. 

I Am Your Most Obedient Servant, Henry Lewis Benning, Brig. Gen., C.S.A.

His father was dead. They were at odds when they parted. Branse had voted against secession, one of the few Greeks to have done so.  His father, however, was a vehement secessionist - a real Fire Eater.  He had never been warm.  Indeed, he was harsh and domineering. He was too absorbed in the management of his plantation, Barbados, where he farmed a thousand acres with over a hundred slaves. He was gone often on business. As the country slid towards the secession crisis, he cursed the Yankee race and told Branse this war was for the salvation of the white race.  It will be like Haiti, where the n*****s killed ten thousand whites... women, children. They dashed babies against rocks and crucified white women after raping them. 

Whatever the truth may or may not be, these rants offended Branse's political sensibilities.  He believed slavery would eventually be extinguished of its own accord, but it must be within the Union and involve compensation to the owners for their pains.  Branse's father was appalled by his son's Whig-ish sentiments.  He called his own son a n****r lover, which wholly offended Branse. When they last saw one another, it was on the platform of the Huntsville Depot. They did not embrace. His father simply looked at him and said to 'look to your kind,' whatever that meant. Then he was off to Virginia to fight.

In spite of all this, Branse began to weep. His father was a very renowned and respectable aristocrat among the Greeks. They were all embarrassed when the elder Havelock enrolled to fight, though they fully expected it from the fanatical Fire Eater. They commented that they would remain behind to aide the war effort with their tills, never mind the slaves that actually worked them.  Cotton was still going to pay the bills for the war.  Now Branse inherited a towering legacy, for Barbados was an expansive estate, and there was the mansion on the Hill. Dr. Prentiss and the Greeks would be looking to him to fill in his father's shoes when it came to the elaborate system of patronage that kept the Democrats in power.  

As he dabbed his tears with his hankerchief he noticed the ring again.  It looked like a class ring, perhaps from the University of Georgia where his father had attended. He picked it up and rolled it with his thumb.  Inlaid into the bezel was a red jasper stone inscribed with white gold initials. They read - AK.  

VII

Black vigilantes were not unknown in the South during Reconstruction. Somebody had to stand up for all the brothers and sisters. Guster Ledbetter learned long before that it ain’t gonna be a white man who does that for them. He’d been under their thumb all his life and he found them all untrustworthy and duplicitous. If human bondage hadn’t reinforced this impression enough, service in the Union Army had.

A fugitive of Cowford Plantation, he enlisted with the 55th Colored Infantry at the Strangetown contraband camp in the Spring of ’63. They shipped him out to Corinth where he and his brothers were trained by white drill sergeants who called them n*****s to their faces. Despite all this, they gave them guns anyway, which no brother could believe until it happened. White people giving us guns? This war must be some serious s**t. And so, it was. But whatever it meant to white people, it meant one thing for certain for the brothers… they weren’t going back to slavery now that they had guns in their hands.

He and the brothers of D Company, 55th Colored were shuttled up and down a series of camps along the Memphis and Charleston protecting the vital railroad. They engaged in tough guerilla fighting with an elusive rebel enemy, who came out at night to launch hit-and-run attacks on isolated outposts. They’d go out themselves to poke around a countryside devastated by war looking for Johnny Reb. Sometimes they’d find him, and a firefight would erupt and somebody would get hit and a brother would go down. And they’d grab him by the collar and drag him back behind cover as the bullets went whizzing all by. It seemed like none of the white officers knew what they were doing. When his unit got orders to ship to Memphis, they marched off the train to crowds of white people who threw bottles and spit at them and hurled slurs at them. It was hate that would make you cry.

When he returned to Limestone County he took to professional vigilantism. It was the only work he could do well. Besides, Royal Bill was one of those duplicitious Republicans who may have freed the slave, but forgot the negro. His greed and hunger for fame was too entangled in Strangetown to care for all the little freedman hamlets in the County. That’s where Guster Ledbetter made his legend.

He grew better with the pistol, but his preferred first shot came from afar using a Lorenz Model 1854 musket. He knew it best. Most anyone shot by Guster Ledbetter never knew what hit them. That made it easy if the job only called for one kill. But if more than one man needed killing, Guster could rely on his pistol and his knife. On occasion of having to use a pistol on a Klansman he had run down, he pointed his Colt Walker at the man’s face and asked “so what do you think about a n****r with a gun?” For a black man with a gun was the stuff of nightmares to white people back then. Just about everyone who heard this query quivered and wet themselves before they were shot… everyone but an Adelphon Kuklos.

V

The Darlings of Strangetown all loved “Royal Bill” Marmaduke, Sheriff of Limestone County. The man was a living legend, and a deep thorn in the side of the Greeks. He was a Republican. Among their councils on the Hill they sneered him as a scallawag, traitor to his class, traitor to his race. But he was a war hero. He swore his oath to the Confederacy in Huntsville, Alabama and mustered into the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. He fought under Fighting Joe Wheeler at Shiloh with the 19th Alabama, and rode as a guerilla fighter with his friend Frank Gurley, who became Sheriff of Madison County. When John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee in the winter of ’64, he came down out of Hurricane Valley to fight with the 19th Alabama one last time. When he mustered back in, there wasn’t anybody left he knew. And when he fought at Franklin, he lost all the new friends he’d made too. He was a changed man after all that. But that’s a whole another story.

 
He ran on the Republican ticket, which was roundly viewed with cynicism by his fellow Greeks and suspicion by Strangetown. Maw Possum brought in the colored vote and helped elect Limestone County’s first Republican. Royal Bill ran down the Klan’s operations out of Dogwood Flats while getting his take out of Strangetown’s tables. The Klan was bad enough. There were a lot of people coming home from the war with everything gone, and then being told it’s the negro’s fault, it’s the Yankees’ fault. They’re told that they might have lost everything, but at least they are still white and they should be grateful. And people actually believed that stuff and joined the Klan because they just ate it up. The Klan’s problem was that most of them were stupid, but they provided a pool of useful idiots for the real enemy of Strangetown.

Adelphon Kuklos was a secret society of absolute white terrorists. They were a committed few willing to do violence on their fellow man for a white world. No one knew who its members were. Rumors and gossip abound about the AK. They controlled the Klan from the shadows, and possibly the Greeks themselves. All anyone really knew is that Royal Bill Marmaduke shot one of them dead saving the life of Drake Shoney down in Belle Mina. The Adelphon Kuklos had strung Shoney up by the noose when Royal Bill pulled out his Navy Colt and shot down a figure in a scarlet robe as the others fled. No one recognized the man who Royal Bill shot, and the investigation into this curious episode is a story for another time.
After that, Royal Bill grew beloved in Strangetown. He had taken on the terrorists himself. His popularity snowballed from there. He ran parades and rodeos and raced wagons around the track. The crowds in Strangetown cheered Royal Bill who rode along like a king on his wagon. He became a powerful political force that was resented by the Greeks, admired by The Major, and profitable to Maw Possum.