“En she took her sass

Down to the Notary

Don’t you know—

Ma Baby,

Over the monthly cash

Down to the Notary!

My sweet Baby,

Servin’ my ass

Up to the NBA.”

He stood, not stoically as he wished he had, but in a state of curiosity according to his nature, wondering at the nature of the man beyond the yellow door; the coal black mastermind who was essentially the unseen CSA senator for all of the Negroes residing in Baltimore County, Maryland. The man, who served by appointment the will of the President himself, was a member of that one most curious institution of the Southland, The Negro Bond Association. Every full Negro grew up in sure knowledge that the NBA would protect him against false imprisonment, colonial shipment, and public lynching.

Even for a brown boy like Whiff, the NBA was the stuff of legend; at once the merciless whooping agent of the Whiteman, and also the CSA President’s most trusted agency. There were many a tale about backsass-whooping and President-saving NBA heroes. But what had always intrigued Whiff about this pillar of the South was its very existence. With the Northern Negro famously exploited by the Manhattan Money Traders that ran the Union, Whiff had treasured the idea of the NBA as an institution for dignity, even though the enforcers, such as Marshal Talbot, had forever given light-skinned boys like him a hard way to go. Then again there was that dark murderous undertone to the NBA—colored men disappeared in the night for overstepping their bounds—as it was rumored that his own father, Big Daddy Gleason, had met his end on a lonely country road, an NBA flashlight upside his head! If a white man of good standing appealed directly to the President or a Notary over some such matter as a daughter for instance, the ‘Black Ghosters’ of the NBA were dispatched in the night…

Whiff had always striven to avoid appearing before this door, yet here he stood, absently recalling in an instant what he had known since boyhood about the curious Southern institution he had now apparently joined.

A Southern Negro had precious few rights, mostly separate from the white idea of rights. But he did have his assurances of separate status, mostly insured through the NBA—the same organization so feared by shiftless husbands and bastard-makers. He would also be avenged if lynched—according to the ‘one-for-one’ pact signed by ‘Old Most’. President Nathan Bedford Forest, who, upon founding the ‘Lynch-law Posse’ in 1878—widely regarded as the precursor to the NBA—had declared to the white men who worshipped the ground he strode on, “Every Negro in this here South is My Negro, bonded to call up on public works, to bend back with shovel and pick to fortify the Ohio Lines. For any of My Negroes what lynched, I send one white, choosed and proved, to the colonies—with no return.”

Those words were memorized by every Negro school child by third grade, and essentially gave the NBA its moral stature among the entire colored community, even as that same organization ran so many forced labor projects as to make the CSA President something of a modern Pharaoh. A white criminal rotted in prison. A Negro criminal lived in a tent and worked all the live long day, and sometimes into the night.

“Boy” rumbled the voice of Marshal Talbot, “step to it already. The Man don’t have all day.”

Being a colored boy rather than a full Negro—or what passed for one—gave him pause. Would he enter this door never to return as Big Daddy never returned for Whiff’s eleventh birthday party having gone out for the party favors?

The door had no knob, no ancient pull ring as one’s fanciful imagining might conjure, and no handle either. One simply pushed he supposed, and so he did, pushed on through to the other side, into a room that had known generations of cigarette smoke until just standing within burned the eyes of a pipe smoker and made a cigar smoker think twice about his habit, even when they were one in the same person.

His greatest sense was that Marshal Talbot had not followed him, which struck him as surprising. Before even having a first look around he turned and looked over his shoulder wondering where the big man was. The door on this side appeared ornate, was inlaid with a deep rich mahogany, and had a handle of yellowed ivory. Whiff had never seen such a thing—had never even heard tell of such, curio enthusiast though he was. This door evoked their African origins, seemed the sanctum of some inner temple. There were no Christian motifs carved therein, but something more…voodoo, which struck a chord in his heart; a chord that he had not previously known was there.

A slight smooth voice sounded behind him from among the unevenly lit stacks of books, for he had noticed that he seemed to be in a hermit’s library, not a legal office of any worldly kind. “The carvings are implicit not explicit. Do not tire yourself with worry Mister Gleason. Come, have a seat, my nominally Christian friend.”

Whiff turned about to look into the shadows, and saw there a smallish, slight shadow, big-headed and in a reclining pose, seated in what appeared to be a dentist’s chair between a heaping stack of books and a desk piled with documents. A wooden ottoman sat at the foot of the dentist’s chair. As he approached to take a seat he noticed that the occupant of the dentist’s chair was a high yellow octoroon who suffered from some muscular condition, for his feet and the left hand were curled up. His astonishment must have shown.

“Yes Sir Mister Gleason, I could have been a gimp attraction in your carnival tent of the amazing. Have a seat please, and do mind to make yourself at home. We are brothers you and I, if my man Talbot blooded you in as instructed.”

“He did Sir—why you’re damned near white!”

“It is the Cause, not the Color that matters Mister Gleason. We strive for what is right in our separatist way. I take no offense at your outburst as I so enjoy the company of men who speak their mind baldly. Let us cut to the chase Sir, as the Aristocrat said to the Fox. You Sir are in a rare and unique position to serve the Southland, and most particularly the future of its children, Negro and Caucasian.”

“Say what? My ass has just been lynched, and then cracked to the ground, and then whooped on by your big-ass Negro so-and-so!”

“I do remain sorry for the regrettable nature of that last bit; a necessary bit of subterfuge, as will be your assignment to the White Side. You must be seen as our victim, our adversary. Your penchant for backtalk shall serve well there.”

The man then hefted an indigo envelope with his one good hand and drew it to his shrunken breast where he used his gimp hand to page through the contents. His face was pinched and indistinct in the yellow lamp light, his eyes big, sallow though somehow bright, and piercing.

“I see Sir, that you are licensed by the Confederate State of Maryland, as a Negro barrister, in which capacity you have represented our kind before the sheriffs and captains of its municipalities in summary judgments. We must not overwork our Caucasian judges after all, particularly where our internal squabbles are concerned. I have reviewed some of your case work when it was sent up to me for notarization. I am particularly enchanted by that novel stroke of yours in which you had Judge Hekman out in Alleghany County certify one of your carnival booths as a courtroom and he indulged your shams of justice for some consideration I can only wonder at, though I dare say it was of the flesh.”

He raised his eye-brows in admission of guilt and shrugged his shoulders indicating that he was quite comfortable occupying the moral low ground that Notary Council had just placed him on. The Notary cleared his small throat with some deliberation, as if he were preparing to speak at greater length than his chords could accommodate. Although weak chords were not among Whiff’s failings, he recalled doing the same at the end of a heavy week of barking, back in the day when he ran the ‘booty tent’ for Captain Sam’s Candy Cane Carnival. One could only describe butts and boobies in so much variety, and the constant auctioneering speed of such barking had tended to stress the chords as they continually strained at the same vowels.

“You are aware of the Matamoros Affair?”

“I only follow news pertaining to sports, entertainment, and Cuba—I have dearly looked forward to my visit to Cuba, and imagined sitting reading the news paper with the gentleman who has invited my for a stay.”

The small man’s voice strained, “Sir, Cuba is held by the Second Division of the CSA Marine Corps, who mostly do contract work in Southern Africa. Puerto Rico, of course is the home of the Marine Airborne Regiment, the President’s go to foreign policy tool. Matamoros is the home of the First Division—call themselves ‘The Foresters’. Those boys have their backs to the Rio Grande. When we were boys ourselves they were the scourge of Central America. For the past decade or more they have been working with the Chicago Fruit Company—you are personally acquainted with Saul Mays, the owner of that concern—and the Pinkertons to advance Yankee interests. While you sold candy canes and cotton candy the Richmond Legislature has voted to disband The Foresters, and has overrode the President’s veto. You are at least aware that Marines are sworn colonials and not permitted to return to Confederate Home Soil. The CSA will soon have a landless army on its border.”

Whiff blurted, “Let Hanging Texas have them!”

Notary Council squinted his tired eyes and whispered, as if full talk gave him pain, “The Yankee drug concerns out of Tijuana have them in their pocket. They have long served as enforcers for various Mexican drug concerns. Even as we speak their last spies make their way to Pittsburg for a conference with Saul Mays and his associates. Our brass belted brothers have murdered—and been murdered—in a grim war of shadows up from Texas and across the Southland, in their attempts to stop these Thirty Foresters. Three have eluded us. One of these has fallen to the Whiteman and will be remanded to Puerto Rico for summary execution. The North reels under the weight of drug addiction. Their moneyed interests mean to bring the South to its knees by that very means. We are not talking of military war, but of an invasion by addiction. Whiff Gleason, a South ordered along the lines of Mexico—run as it is by Yankee-financed drug concerns, will be no place for one to operate a carnival. You will be among the first to fall, you and your free-wheeling kind.”

The man was now wheezing and coughing pathetically.

Notary Council cleared his throat softly and continued. “Whiff, your dubious status as a carnival man, your personal relationship with Saul Mays, and your recent misfortune, has made you the man of the hour.”

“Notary, I would dearly like to help—hating drugs as I do. I have put a few men by the side of the road—good operating men—due to this drug addiction. If it grew to Yankee proportions I could not operate profitably. But, here my brown ass sits, about to be thrown to the white dogs!”

Notary Council answered with a weak whisper, “Precisely!”

“Precisely what? With all due respect, that is, Notary Council.”

“The man who killed your lynch party, we believe, was apprehended before you were recovered. He sits now, on the White Side. Within days he will be spirited away and our one chance lost…”

Notary Council was racked by a coughing fit, which was made all the more pathetic by its soft nature. Why the poor man could not even break a rib with a hard cough he was so weak. He raised a finger for time, grabbed a pen, and wrote with swift flowing strokes, and gave over the note paper to Whiff, laying a cigarette lighter over top of it, and motioning for Whiff to pick it up, indicating with his one good hand in pantomime that he should read and then burn the missive.

As he lit the missive with the lighter he thought caustically, I do not set store in this notion of ‘brother this’, ‘my brown brother that’, ‘my black brother this’ and such. For it is a lie. There is no brotherhood other than through the mother or father on this earth of backstabbing deal makers and soul traders! But I will do it, because it is a way to stick my finger in the eye of the high and mighty Saul Mays!

“Notary Council,” he said, as he held the man’s squinting big-eyed gaze, “I’m not your brother but I will do this thing for my own heart-felt reasons.”

The Notary then dipped his chin solemnly, and said weakly, as he pointed with one palsied finger at the mahogany door, “Big Daddy split the black oak as often as the white boy. Talbot, and your other half-brother Sojourn, who fell just yesterday in the death grapple with a Forester—one that got away mind you!”

The shrunken gimp man was racked now with a terrible fit in his chest which did not emerge to the level of a cough but seemed somehow worse on him. He took a wheezing breath and continued, “Those boys were adopted by the NBA as wards when we put down your Daddy. You at least knew the warmth of his belt. All they had was ‘lonely mamma at the window’ waiting for the return of that Big Daddy that never came. Get out of my sight Cracker-jack, and rise up to this grave occasion despite your vile self!”

He felt his chin hanging loose as his butt rose from the ottoman, felt the tears running over his fat cheeks as he stared wide-eyed at the little palsied gimp who had just judged him so, and had put a knife blade in his soul, just so, and now sat twisting it with his judgmentally jaundiced eyes.

To be continued in The White Side: Hurt Stoker, Chapter 5, bookmark 7