Suzanna Prescott Clay couldn’t sleep. At least, the woman who used to be Suzanna Clay couldn’t sleep.
She was Suzy Prescott now, she had to remind herself. She and her brother, who lay snoring gently beside her in the loft of the barn, had decided to change their names almost immediately after they left Manchester, Tennessee that morning. As they left the familiar land where they had lived all their lives, her brother, Jackson Lee Clay, suddenly announced, “Suzanna, everything is changing. We need to change our names, too. I think, from now on, my name’s Jack Straw.”
While the area and most of it’s people were nothing to them now, Suzanna was unwilling to sever every tie and so, to honor their dead mother, Suzanna Clay became plain Suzy Prescott.
They decided to leave Manchester after it came out they had been secret abolitionists helping local slaves escape to the North before the war. They might have been able to stick around in the community until people forgot that fact but the other thing that became known around the same time they weren’t sure they could survive, literally. That was the fact that they had assisted the Union forces against the Confederacy during the Recent Unpleasantness.
Suzy suspected it was more than coincidence that both of these secrets came to light about the same time that she had finally, and at the point of a gun, desuaded Virgil Cooper of the idea that she was going to be his wife. She had no idea how he’d managed to find out about the latter, but he might very well have put two and two together and figured out the former. After all, Suzy had helped many of Virgil’s slaves escape over the years.
Unbeknownst to Suzy, her and Jack’s daddy had promised her to Virgil before he joined the Confederate army. Once he returned and tried to collect his bride, he was quite put out that Suzy refused to have anything to do with him. At first, she politely tried to ignore him, but Virgil was never a man to take to being ignored. He eventually got so worked up over Suzy refusing his attentions, he tried to take her to his place by force. That’s when Suzy had to convince Virgil once and for all that he needed to get that idea out of his head. He swore he’d make her sorry she’d refused him. And now they were forced to leave the only home they had ever known, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing how upset she was.
Suzy had known Virgil since they were children and had always disliked him. He had always been arrogant and rude to anyone he felt was beneath him and that included Suzy and Jack. He was a cruel child and grew up to be a cruel master to his slaves. He treated them worse than his animals and that wasn’t saying much. Unfortunately, even though he acted scornful and superior toward Suzy, he had also fancied her from the time they were young adolescents. Suzy could only imagine why her daddy had promised her hand to him. except that William Clay probably saw something in it for himself and had never cared what Suzy thought, but Daddy was dead now and there was no way Suzy was going to become that insufferable prick’s wife.
In some ways it did not surprise Suzy that her daddy had done to her what he did. He had always liked Virgil and, unlike most, Virgil had never shown William Clay anything but respect. It was also true Daddy Clay could be as arrogant as any man alive. In fact, his arrogance had finally gotten him killed when he refused to give his best Tennessee Walker to a Union officer whose horse had
gone lame. The officer shot William Clay, apologized to Suzy and Jack, but took the horse anyway.
Admittedly, Suzy and Jack were more shocked than sad at the death of their father. William Clay treated his slaves humanely but still thought of them as property. He only treated Suzy and Jack marginally better and thought of them as his property as well. He believed completely in the succession and had he not been too old when the war started, he would have joined up.
As soon as Daddy Clay was in the ground with Suzy and Jack named as heirs to all the property, they gave all the slaves still on the farm their freedom. Even with that, all their older slaves chose to stay with Jack and Suzy. With ol' Massa Clay gone, they knew Suzy and Jack would treat them well and keep them safe from those who would resent their freedom. The few young men that Suzy hadn’t already helped escape decided to go North and try and join the Union forces.
Suzy and Jack, once he was old enough to be trusted, had, for a number of years, helped any slave in the area who wanted to, to run away. No one ever suspected anything because of the Clay family’s prominence in the community of Manchester.
Once the news got out about the Underground Railroad work and the spying, Jack and Suzy decided pretty quickly to leave. The last piece of business they had to attend to was signing over all two-hundred acres of their farm to their mammy and her husband, Henry, who had been slaves of their daddy since they were young. That was the final slap in the face to all the fine, upstanding citizens of Manchester that were now treating Jack and Suzy like so much manure on their shoe. It gave them both a particularly satisfied feeling to do that for Mammy and Henry and do it to their former friends and neighbors.
Suzy suggested Henry and Mammy, whose name she finally learned was Hannah, ask some of the newly freed slave families to come and live on the land and sharecrop. It would help Henry and Mammy manage the land and also provide for a number of people to be around in case their was trouble. And Suzy warned Henry as they left to expect trouble.
Suzy lay in the dark of the barn and smelled the sweet straw as she thought about all that had transpired over the last year. She wondered where she and Jack should go now and what they should do. She finally fell asleep with all this on her mind and it seemed like no time before Jack was shaking her awake.
“The cows are starting to stir around, Suzy. I think it might be getting toward daylight.”
Sure enough, when they peeked out the barn window, there was the faintest glow in the East. Fortunately, no light shown at the house yet. They quietly saddled their horses, filled a bag they found with sweet oats for the horses’ breakfast later and walked off, leading their horses toward the road they had been on last night.
After they had been riding for an hour or so, they found a quiet place in the trees where a stream passed through. There they stopped to let the horses rest and feed while they ate some of the delicious biscuits and jam that was part of the huge hamper of food Mammy prepared for them. They tried to tell her she needed to hang onto as much food as she could until the crops started to come in later in the summer, but Mammy wouldn’t hear of letting Jack and Suzy go off into the unknown without knowing how they would eat.
Suzy finally brought up the subject that had been dwelling in her mind since they got free of Manchester, “Where we gonna go, Jack? What’re we going to do? Our $300 will hold us for awhile but we need a plan.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that, Suzy. I think we should go to St. Louis. It’ll take us a while to get there but I think we could earn us some money, save up and head out West.”
“How, Jack? You and I don’t have any real skills. I suspect our Southern gentility and manners won’t exactly be in high demand as job skills go.”
“Depends on what you’re talking about, Suzy. I didn’t say it had to be honest money. Look, you and I have been deceptive and sly since we were in our teens in the service of other people and causes we believed in. I think it’s about time we put some of that deceit and guile to work for our ownselves. It’ll take two and half, three weeks to get there. We’ll have plenty of time to come up with a plan.”
The three weeks it took Jack and Suzy to reach St. Louis passed quickly. Suzy remembered it as the last innocent period of both their lives, despite the occasional egg stealing and barn loft trespassing to escape the rain. Mostly, they slept out under the stars, taking time to hunt for dinner when they found a suitable spot and talked about the different ways they might go about supporting themselves when they reached St. Louis.
They agreed they should use several different means to separate people from their money. The primary way would, of course, be a widely played card game called Bluff, or as it was starting to be known; poker. Suzy and Jack learned how to play Bluff from Henry when they were young. They rapidly improved their skill with the game and used it as a means to gain information from the Grays and to barter that information for resources they needed from the Blues.
They became quite adept at both winning and losing when it served their purposes.
Once arrived in St. Louis, they quickly found an inexpensive set of rooms in an undistinguished part of town and started to work. One day they might set up at a busy corner in a well-to-do section of town and collect money for Civil War widows and orphans. The next day, Suzy would pose as the sister of a gold miner who had hit a rich vein, but needed cash in order to stake the claim and start mining operations. This was their most successful bit, as everyone wanted a chance to get in on the opportunity to own shares in a gold mine. They even had shares printed up, along with a fake map to the fake mine location. They didn't need to do this one too often, as it often netted them a month's worth of expense money for just one or two days work. That suited Suzy just fine. She thought it was too easy and found no challenge in the deception.
Along with the different frauds they were employing, they also started using a variety of identities and costuming. This made it much easier to work the same areas time and time again. Suzy liked being able to dress up and play different parts. Sometimes it was such a relief to be someone other than herself.
They played Bluff in various card parlors and saloons two or three times a week. At first, this was uncomfortable for Suzy. As a proper Southern lady, she had never ventured into one of these places, but as she kept telling herself, “You have done all sorts of things you never thought you could, this is just one more thing and it's for your survival this time.”
In playing Bluff, they each had their own strengths. Jack was excellent at being able to shuffle and deal any cards he wanted from the deck. When he was feeling full of himself, he would boast, “I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines.” Suzy, on the other hand, could tell who was bluffing and who was holding a winning hand as if they were showing her their cards. They had also learned and agreed on certain subtle signals to pass each other information. They played carefully, each slowly building their bank, but not winning so often it raised suspicion. It was all going very well.
Until Shannon O'Dell came into their life.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
The Fugitive in American Culture - Intro
Like so much in my life, the Grateful Dead defined this project for me. It came from my deep love for their music and from my identity as a Deadhead. The idea to write back stories based on the lyrics of their music came to me almost fully developed shortly after the assignment was made.
Just as a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, I wanted to choose three songs to represent the beginning, middle and end of my story cycle.
Considering the conventional fugitive motif of someone running to escape, two songs from the Dead’s repertoire were immediately obvious, while the third one took some deliberation before being decided upon.
The clear choices were Jack Straw and Friend of the Devil. Both of these songs have distinct fugitive themes written around the idea of escape.
Jack Straw has two characters, who are traveling together. One, Shannon, is obviously the bad guy. We don’t know much about Jack’s moral character, except he’s not very happy about the actions of his traveling partner. The song is full of ambiguity. We don’t know why they are traveling together. We don’t know what score Shannon wants to go to Tulsa to even. We don’t know why he hides under cover of darkness. The song continues the ambiguity to the end. Does Jack cut his buddy down, as in kill him, or does he cut him down after he is killed? The story I chose to write answers some of these questions and raises a few more. In particular, I leave open the question of what Jack does and where he goes after he buries Shannon but before he shows up in Reno at the start of the third story.
Friend of the Devil is also a song full of ambiguity. We don’t really know why the character is being chased by the sheriff and twenty hounds. We don’t know much about the character at all, except the name of the woman he loves and that there were at least two other women in his past. One of whom has possibly had his child. In the story I chose to write, we know why he is being chased, but nothing else is made any clearer about the lost time between the end of the second story and the beginning of the third. It does, however, clear up and create an additional mystery lingering from the first story, which is the fate of his sister, Suzy.
The choice of the third song was a more difficult decision. Several good candidates were considered and discarded. In the end, I decided to go with Loser. While there is no obvious fugitive theme, the strong ambiguity of it is the tie that links it thematically to the other two songs.
This song is obviously about someone trying to wheedle a stake out of a woman named Suzy, so he or she can gamble with it, sure they will win at the game this time. Perhaps they have done well in the past. Perhaps they are overconfident of their true ability to win. In the end, we are left to wonder whether the person wins or loses. This song was open ended enough to develop a story that could be about anything as long as gambling was the theme.
I created the fugitive theme in this story by having the main characters work for the Underground Railroad and spy for the Union during the war. When the story opens, the war has ended, their activities have been revealed and they feel it’s no longer safe for them to continue to live in the community in which they grew up. So, they become fugitives running from their past.
Choosing which order to present the songs and their stories was also a difficult decision, because at this point I wasn’t sure about what I was going to write. Eventually, I decided that Friend of the Devil seemed to have more of an air of finality to it than the other two, while Loser, with it’s more wide-open
interpretation could serve as the beginning song for the stories as well as a natural lead-in to Jack Straw.
From the beginning, I knew that Jack from the song Jack Straw would be the character I would carry through the three stories. I felt the ambiguity of his role in the song allowed me a lot of flexibility to write his character.
I attempted to highlight the ambiguity in these songs within the stories because I think that ambiguity is a strong theme that runs through any fugitive tale. In the case of fugitive slaves, for instance, ambiguity defined their existence. Slaves were sold off away from their families or ran away. In either case, often never heard from again. If they worked for an erratic owner, they might not know from day to day whether their actions would cause them to be threatened, shipped or sold.
A fugitive of any sort has a measure of ambiguity in their lives. If they are doing something illegal or are on the run, will they be caught? Who can they trust? If they are simply living outside of the norms of the dominant culture, will they be allowed to live in peace or will they be harassed by other members of society? Who is it safe to confide in? Who can they turn to for help?
The use of gambling as a leitmotif throughout the stories also gave me another type of fugitive theme to work with - that of gamblers being outside the usual norms and values of the rest of society. It also serves to show that people are often not what they seem and a fugitive can be anyone and anyone can become a fugitive under the right circumstances.
A minor device I employed , unrelated to the fugitive theme, was the use of ten gold dollars and the twenty dollar bill to represent good and bad. Because money is mentioned in each of these songs, I decided at some point in the writing process to use the money as a symbol throughout all the stories. Ten gold dollars is always handled by Suzy, and is used in a positive or, at least, neutral way, while twenty dollars, especially a twenty dollar bill, is used by Shannon, usually giving it to Jack. The scene at the end of the first story where Jack takes the twenty from Shannon and gives it to Suzy serves as a metaphor to sever the essential goodness of Jack and the tie between Jack and Suzy, in order to taint Jack with, and tie him to, Shannon’s corrupt nature. The use of twenty’s also serves to set Shannon up to represent the devil in the last story, while establishing Jack as the friend of the devil.
Just as a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, I wanted to choose three songs to represent the beginning, middle and end of my story cycle.
Considering the conventional fugitive motif of someone running to escape, two songs from the Dead’s repertoire were immediately obvious, while the third one took some deliberation before being decided upon.
The clear choices were Jack Straw and Friend of the Devil. Both of these songs have distinct fugitive themes written around the idea of escape.
Jack Straw has two characters, who are traveling together. One, Shannon, is obviously the bad guy. We don’t know much about Jack’s moral character, except he’s not very happy about the actions of his traveling partner. The song is full of ambiguity. We don’t know why they are traveling together. We don’t know what score Shannon wants to go to Tulsa to even. We don’t know why he hides under cover of darkness. The song continues the ambiguity to the end. Does Jack cut his buddy down, as in kill him, or does he cut him down after he is killed? The story I chose to write answers some of these questions and raises a few more. In particular, I leave open the question of what Jack does and where he goes after he buries Shannon but before he shows up in Reno at the start of the third story.
Friend of the Devil is also a song full of ambiguity. We don’t really know why the character is being chased by the sheriff and twenty hounds. We don’t know much about the character at all, except the name of the woman he loves and that there were at least two other women in his past. One of whom has possibly had his child. In the story I chose to write, we know why he is being chased, but nothing else is made any clearer about the lost time between the end of the second story and the beginning of the third. It does, however, clear up and create an additional mystery lingering from the first story, which is the fate of his sister, Suzy.
The choice of the third song was a more difficult decision. Several good candidates were considered and discarded. In the end, I decided to go with Loser. While there is no obvious fugitive theme, the strong ambiguity of it is the tie that links it thematically to the other two songs.
This song is obviously about someone trying to wheedle a stake out of a woman named Suzy, so he or she can gamble with it, sure they will win at the game this time. Perhaps they have done well in the past. Perhaps they are overconfident of their true ability to win. In the end, we are left to wonder whether the person wins or loses. This song was open ended enough to develop a story that could be about anything as long as gambling was the theme.
I created the fugitive theme in this story by having the main characters work for the Underground Railroad and spy for the Union during the war. When the story opens, the war has ended, their activities have been revealed and they feel it’s no longer safe for them to continue to live in the community in which they grew up. So, they become fugitives running from their past.
Choosing which order to present the songs and their stories was also a difficult decision, because at this point I wasn’t sure about what I was going to write. Eventually, I decided that Friend of the Devil seemed to have more of an air of finality to it than the other two, while Loser, with it’s more wide-open
interpretation could serve as the beginning song for the stories as well as a natural lead-in to Jack Straw.
From the beginning, I knew that Jack from the song Jack Straw would be the character I would carry through the three stories. I felt the ambiguity of his role in the song allowed me a lot of flexibility to write his character.
I attempted to highlight the ambiguity in these songs within the stories because I think that ambiguity is a strong theme that runs through any fugitive tale. In the case of fugitive slaves, for instance, ambiguity defined their existence. Slaves were sold off away from their families or ran away. In either case, often never heard from again. If they worked for an erratic owner, they might not know from day to day whether their actions would cause them to be threatened, shipped or sold.
A fugitive of any sort has a measure of ambiguity in their lives. If they are doing something illegal or are on the run, will they be caught? Who can they trust? If they are simply living outside of the norms of the dominant culture, will they be allowed to live in peace or will they be harassed by other members of society? Who is it safe to confide in? Who can they turn to for help?
The use of gambling as a leitmotif throughout the stories also gave me another type of fugitive theme to work with - that of gamblers being outside the usual norms and values of the rest of society. It also serves to show that people are often not what they seem and a fugitive can be anyone and anyone can become a fugitive under the right circumstances.
A minor device I employed , unrelated to the fugitive theme, was the use of ten gold dollars and the twenty dollar bill to represent good and bad. Because money is mentioned in each of these songs, I decided at some point in the writing process to use the money as a symbol throughout all the stories. Ten gold dollars is always handled by Suzy, and is used in a positive or, at least, neutral way, while twenty dollars, especially a twenty dollar bill, is used by Shannon, usually giving it to Jack. The scene at the end of the first story where Jack takes the twenty from Shannon and gives it to Suzy serves as a metaphor to sever the essential goodness of Jack and the tie between Jack and Suzy, in order to taint Jack with, and tie him to, Shannon’s corrupt nature. The use of twenty’s also serves to set Shannon up to represent the devil in the last story, while establishing Jack as the friend of the devil.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Cars, Cars, Cars
1/21/07 -
Found my new car last Friday. I love my cars, or at least every one I’ve ever picked out. Interestingly, the only one I grew to hate was the one my dad picked out for me. Wonder what that says? Not counting that one, which, for the record, was a 1970 lime green Plymouth Duster that drove like a truck, I’ve owned only 4 other cars until Sat. My nearly new Chrysler PT Cruiser is my 5th car. I have owned:
1975 med. blue Datsun B-210 - bought brand new
1976 med. blue Datsun B-210 - bought used 3 years after the previous Datsun got creamed 3 months after I paid it off
1986 red Honda CRX Si - bought as a yearling, but with only 900 miles on it, some rich dude’s toy
1991 teal Honda CRX Si - bought off the internet in 1997 after getting the settlement from my mother’s estate. The ‘86 was gonna start needing some work and I unloaded it.
and now I own:
2006 black Chrysler PT Cruiser GT - another rich man’s toy. It has 4700 miles on it and 2 yrs left on it’s warranty. I got a hellava deal!
As I said, I love my cars to death. I buy them, pay them off and then drive them till they’re nearly dead. Cars are a personal statement for me. I sticker them up. I fill their insides with personal momentos to decorate them. I also take care of them. Except for the 1st B-210, which met an untimely death, all my cars have ended up having over 100M miles on them and were running great when they were sold. Or, in the case of the second B-210 donated, because it was nearing the end of it’s useful life and then it was stolen, found and was in much worse shape for it.
The current CRX is still in very good shape with *only* 127M miles on it, but there are several reasons I want to get another vehicle. The CRX is a hard car to carry the dogs around in. We are going to get a truck to replace Eddie’s Mazda 626 and we’ll need something else to drive besides a truck all the time. I’m tired of sitting so low in traffic and also how dangerous it is because the big, honking SUV’s don’t see you. Related to that is updating to a car that has more modern safety features like airbags and ABS brakes.
The PT Cruiser is incredible! It was some rich private pilot’s toy that he bought last Jan and traded back in this Jan. for a truck. It only has 4700 hundred miles on it. It has all the bells and whistles but weirdly enough no seat heaters for the leather seats. It has the Turbo engine, too. In short, it has nearly everything I would have wanted if I’d been picking it out. I say nearly, because I almost didn’t even bother to look at it because it’s black. Not my favorite color for a car. I had also wanted to go to an automatic after a standard tranny for over 20 years. But ce’ la vie. It was such an incredible deal for such an incredible car that I couldn’t let those minor issues stand in the way.
See some pics of the new auto-mo-bile at the Flickr link, to your right--->
Found my new car last Friday. I love my cars, or at least every one I’ve ever picked out. Interestingly, the only one I grew to hate was the one my dad picked out for me. Wonder what that says? Not counting that one, which, for the record, was a 1970 lime green Plymouth Duster that drove like a truck, I’ve owned only 4 other cars until Sat. My nearly new Chrysler PT Cruiser is my 5th car. I have owned:
1975 med. blue Datsun B-210 - bought brand new
1976 med. blue Datsun B-210 - bought used 3 years after the previous Datsun got creamed 3 months after I paid it off
1986 red Honda CRX Si - bought as a yearling, but with only 900 miles on it, some rich dude’s toy
1991 teal Honda CRX Si - bought off the internet in 1997 after getting the settlement from my mother’s estate. The ‘86 was gonna start needing some work and I unloaded it.
and now I own:
2006 black Chrysler PT Cruiser GT - another rich man’s toy. It has 4700 miles on it and 2 yrs left on it’s warranty. I got a hellava deal!
As I said, I love my cars to death. I buy them, pay them off and then drive them till they’re nearly dead. Cars are a personal statement for me. I sticker them up. I fill their insides with personal momentos to decorate them. I also take care of them. Except for the 1st B-210, which met an untimely death, all my cars have ended up having over 100M miles on them and were running great when they were sold. Or, in the case of the second B-210 donated, because it was nearing the end of it’s useful life and then it was stolen, found and was in much worse shape for it.
The current CRX is still in very good shape with *only* 127M miles on it, but there are several reasons I want to get another vehicle. The CRX is a hard car to carry the dogs around in. We are going to get a truck to replace Eddie’s Mazda 626 and we’ll need something else to drive besides a truck all the time. I’m tired of sitting so low in traffic and also how dangerous it is because the big, honking SUV’s don’t see you. Related to that is updating to a car that has more modern safety features like airbags and ABS brakes.
The PT Cruiser is incredible! It was some rich private pilot’s toy that he bought last Jan and traded back in this Jan. for a truck. It only has 4700 hundred miles on it. It has all the bells and whistles but weirdly enough no seat heaters for the leather seats. It has the Turbo engine, too. In short, it has nearly everything I would have wanted if I’d been picking it out. I say nearly, because I almost didn’t even bother to look at it because it’s black. Not my favorite color for a car. I had also wanted to go to an automatic after a standard tranny for over 20 years. But ce’ la vie. It was such an incredible deal for such an incredible car that I couldn’t let those minor issues stand in the way.
See some pics of the new auto-mo-bile at the Flickr link, to your right--->
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