by Lynn Shurr
The chapter ended with a disappointing segment on the development of the yam industry, which restored Port Jefferson to some of its former glory. Even Miss Mouton could not rave about the yam.
Around eleven, a mother and child entered the library to get some picture books. The small boy filled every inch of the building with his noise, and the mother, briefly introduced as a second cousin to Miss Clara, began a long conversation about Aunt Tillie’s surgery. Suzanne asked for permission to check out the history book. Miss Clara allowed this after a short call to George confirming her identity. She gave her address as “Magnolia Hill,” and that was sufficient.
Concluding a morning spent hunched over Miss Mouton’s book, Suzanne welcomed the mile walk down Main Street to the bayou. She stayed on the right side where most of the public buildings with the exception of the school had sprouted on St. Julien property. On her side of the right-of-way, she sauntered past St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and its appendage, the parochial school, where idle swings and dejected seesaws sat unmoving under the gray skies like sinners doing penance until recess. Stepping off of the high, broken cement sidewalk, she crossed a grassy patch fronting a private home set back among its live oaks and veiled by Spanish moss. An old-fashioned shingle on the gate of the white picket fence read, “Jefferson Sonnier, M.D.—Office in Rear.”
Suzanne clambered up and across the boardwalk of a destitute dress shop with “Gone Out Of Business” soaped on its window. The buildings across the street shared the same erratic paving and just slightly more prosperity. A single car sat before a store and faced in the wrong direction along the railing where mules once munched corn on Saturday afternoons. Protruding bricks on the façade spelled out “Sonnier’s—1854”, but a metal sign screwed into the wall informed the public the building was now the Purvis Pharmacy.
She paused for a moment to watch an old black man sitting in the window of the last and only occupied store along her side of the boardwalk. He leaned toward the grimy glass to get more of the day’s watery light on his work. In and out, he wove white oak splints into a basket of immense size, choosing a cane now and again from a heap at his side. Behind him like a wicker mountain a pile of finished products rose—cotton baskets, egg baskets, flower baskets, and lidded hampers, a wide selection for a small clientele. The shop had no name. It lacked a doorknob and latch as if no one would come here to steal, and if they did, they would leave in disappointment. The weaver never looked up though Suzanne stood close enough to the window to see the spaces amid the tight, white knots of his hair.
Thinking those baskets would add a nice touch to Magnolia Hill’s kitchen collection, she crossed Main at St. Julien Street to get to the First National Bank of Port Jefferson. The old building, solidly supported by six stumpy columns, still gave off an affluent Victorian air, though no other person stood in line before the teller’s wrought iron cage. Just inside the door, an anxious manager sprang from his desk behind a railing and seized her hand.
“Welcome to Port Jefferson. Ernest Prevost, branch director. How may we serve your banking needs?”
“I believe Mr. St. Julien called yesterday. I’m Suzanne Hudson. I came to check the records in his safety deposit box.”
“Oh. Yes.” The small mouth under the thin moustache quivered with disappointment. “I’ll get my keys. Perhaps you would care to open a checking account while you’re working in town,” he suggested as they walked toward the vault over chipped but highly polished marble floors. Mr. Prevost paused and nodded at the view from one barred window.
“We’ve never closed, not even during the Depression. Only a few incompetent farmers lost their land. Port Jefferson really had no need for that.” He pointed across the street.
The window framed another bank, the Farmer’s Savings and Loan Association. The competition housed itself in an Acadian-style cottage with a shake roof and deep porch under the overhang. A few unoccupied rockers painted the same gray as the railings and uprights gave the building a comfortable rural atmosphere. An incongruous electronic sign on a thick pole flashed the time, then the temperature, then the message, “Farmers—we understand your business.”
“I’ll only be staying a short time, and I do have a checking account in Philadelphia. Will I have any trouble cashing checks locally?”
“No, oh, no. Glad to serve you in any way we can.” Mr. Prevost unlocked the gates separating the safety deposit boxes from the rest of the room and seated her in a cubicle for privacy. He placed a rather large box in front of Suzanne and backed away with a salaam-like bow. “Happy to help. Glad to help. Call when you want to leave.” The gate clicked behind him.
Within the box lay a treasury of documentation. The first pieces, yellowed with age, were bills of lading from the Jefferson Steamboat Line. A marvelous brown-inked script described the contents of each crate brought up the river over several years to furnish Magnolia Hill. As she suspected, the Renaissance dining room set and the Belter settee and side chairs were original to the house along with most of the imported goods designed for the public rooms of the mansion. No mention of bedroom furnishings, which had most likely been in the family or produced locally. Several tester beds, trundles, armoires, miscellaneous washstands, and chamber pots were mentioned in the inventory at the time of the sale to Victoir St. Julien.
Suzanne believed her transitional bedroom harbored what remained of the oldest furnishings. The St. Juliens in a burst of redecorating and bad taste had purchased the ornate gothic half-tester. Yes, a bill of sale confirmed that. The rest of the papers were contemporary, copies of purchases, some Xeroxed, made by Virginia Lee St. Julien over twenty years as she built her collection. She’d bought the Jenny Lind crib as one of her first acquisitions. In the bottom of the box, Suzanne found a curiosity—a sales receipt for the gilt clock on the parlor mantel. That object had been sold ten years ago to Dr. J. Sonnier for the sum of $10,000 and repurchased for $1.00 five years ago. Both amounts seemed extreme, one inflated and one gratuitous. The story of that clock might be a piece of local history to be had from the great-aunts.
She summoned Mr. Prevost and asked his permission to use the office copier to photograph the oldest and most interesting documents. He refused any offer to pay for the service, despite a longing look thrown at the few dollars she held out. The bank manager assisted with the copying personally and gave directions to George’s office, as if any were needed. All that mattered in Port Jefferson lay along Main Street.
The clock on Farmers Savings and Loan read 12:10. Suzanne jaywalked across the road where a few cars and a pickup truck had come to life at the noon hour. George stood locking the door of a prim little dwelling with a lace of gingerbread trim hung across its eaves and a once red tin roof, its paint fading off into a gentle pink. The office sat on its own patch of lawn, brown from a late frost at this time of year, but showing promise around the roots of a naked althea bush where the first tips of narcissus pushed out of the soil. Charmed by the idea that the flowers would bloom in February, she remarked on the buds, but George passed if off as “nothing special about that.” She thought he might be angry about her tardiness and apologized.
“Doesn’t matter. The aunts are happy to have the company. It’s not too far to walk.”
She had to concentrate on keeping up with those long legs and got only an impressionistic look at the other end of Main Street. They passed one exceptionally old house with whitewash flaking off the mud and moss bousillage between the crossed timbers of the walls. A sign designated it as the Port Jefferson Museum, but George, looking back over his shoulder, called it the old St. Julien place. Just when it seemed as if he would stride at top speed into the bayou, her guide took an abrupt right turn on Front Street. To the left, she could see the Roadhouse Restaurant with its curiously Dutch-looking stepped façade and beyond that, a row of red brick warehouses. The drawbridge on the bayou rose upward for the passing of a pleasure craft, and delighted, Suzanne paused to watch. George strode on, ignoring another �
�nothing special” in his life. She scurried to catch up.
He arrived ten paces before her on the porch of another of the white gingerbread houses abounding in varying states of repair all over the town. This one, freshly painted, had a broad-bosomed verandah and a congenial lap in the form of a porch swing. It held the hem of its skirt above the mud on brick pilings discreetly hidden behind latticework. The dry brown stalks of hydrangeas promised more camouflage of the bricks by summer. George knocked while Suzanne seated herself, panting, on the swing. The shade covering the etched glass panel in the front door fluttered upward, and the two aunts flew outward grabbing George’s collar and pulling him down to peck at his cheeks like tiny sparrows attacking a hawk. Then, they turned on Suzanne.
“Oh, Georgie, you’ve winded her. Poor child!”
“It’s all right,” Suzanne puffed. “Aerobic exercise, good for the heart.” A summer as a tour guide and a winter as a student had left her in worse condition than during her earlier lifeguarding days.
“Come in, come in. Dinner is ready. Sally will serve as soon as you’ve caught your breath.”
Though one had aged thin and bowlegged and the other obese and humpbacked, each aunt grasped an elbow to raise her from the swing. As an afterthought, George, who was erasing little smears of pink and orange lipstick from his face with a white handkerchief, introduced the ladies.
“My great-aunts, Miss Esme St. Julien, Mrs. Letty Dugas. Aunt Esme, Aunt Letty, this is Suzanne Hudson, the student who is doing a history of Magnolia Hill.”
He pushed his enormous glasses back up the bridge of his nose, raked his creamed, disheveled hair into place, and opened the door for the women to totter through. They went directly past the parlor and into the dining room where four places were set at a mahogany table, not as old, but every bit as massive as the one at the Hill.
“Shall we talk while we eat? I do love good dinner conversation,” said the spare, spritely aunt in the pink polyester pants suit. “Ring the bell, Letty.”
Plump Letty in her blue polyester pants suit clinked a small silver bell by her place at one end of the table. The louvered door to the kitchen opened slowly as a black maid with limbs as thin and twisted as licorice whips backed in holding a serving tray. She appeared to be as ancient as the great-aunts.
Suzanne jumped up. “Let me help you!”
“When I can’t do my job no more, I’ll up and quit, go home and die, you hear?”
The aged servant pushed out her flabby lips over toothless gums. Her yellowed eyes glared from red-rimmed sockets. Suzanne sat and allowed Sally to serve her.
Fortunately, a brisk dinner conversation covered her faux pas and gave her an excuse to pick at the food and take large gulps of instant iced tea between mouthfuls. Pieces of the dry pot roast stuck in her throat, and she could not bring herself to do more than push the grayish canned peas with their flecks of salt pork around on her plate. The best of the dinner, a mass of sticky candied yams, made the sweet tea seem sour. Each time she finished her beverage ancient Sally reappeared with a pitcher to fill the glass. She figured the elderly servant must spy through the kitchen louvers. Asking questions helped to cover her lack of appetite for the meal.
“I noticed this morning that most of the commercial development is on the old Jefferson property, while the St. Julien side is mainly public and residential property.”
“The St. Julien side. Oh, that describes it perfectly, doesn’t it, Letty?” Miss Esme said.
Letty nodded her large head into her double chin. “That’s just how it was. You see the outsider, Eli Jefferson, came here around 1840 looking for a place to grow and ship cotton. He went to Pierre Huval who owned the inn and the ferry and said, ‘Let me buy your land, and you’ll get rich off the steamboat trade when my gin starts operating and shipping.’ Then he went to the Sonniers who had a nice, well-run place and said, ‘Sell me your land, and I’ll set you up to run a store since I can see you’ve got the talent for it.’ And he went to the Patouts and said, ‘Your mules are the best shod in the parish. Sell me your land, and I’ll help you get a smithy started. A lot of trade will come with the wagons bringing cotton, the women coming to shop, and so on.’”
Miss Letty paused to shovel up some yams, and Miss Esme stepped into the narrative like a scrawny tag-team wrestler. “Well, Josephe St. Julien saw what was happening, and when Eli Jefferson came to him, he said, ‘I got six living children and six healthy slaves to work my land. I don’t need your help. And one more thing, my Phillippe is to marry Babette Huval. Where are they going to farm with you buying up all the land?’ ‘They can farm in hell for all I care,’ said Jefferson. That started the feud. Phillippe and Babette had to share the St. Julien land and house until they could build one of their own. The two wives arguing made Josephe’s life a misery. They say he sent two daughters off to the convent just to prevent their marrying into any of the families who had sold out. The other two he drove to dances in Opelousas to be sure they would find a husband elsewhere. The younger son drowned in the bayou, and that let Josephe pass his property on intact to Phillippe, but he made his son swear never to sell to a Jefferson. Phillippe let his hogs and chickens dust on Main Street and never whitewashed his house to spite all the merchants that Jefferson controlled, but his son, Victoir, got the revenge.”
“Yes,” agreed Miss Letty, “but it was not revenge, just a sharp head for business, I say. Victoir studied Eli Jefferson’s methods all his life, and when the time came he knew what to do. Both his brothers died in the War of the Rebellion, his sister was carted into Opelousas and married off. He had land in the center of town. First, he donated some to the Catholic Church, and all the priests told the people how devout he was. Then, he gave his former slaves small holdings on the edge of his property and asked the priest to marry them to his Negresses exactly like white people. At the wedding, he said, ‘You are free men and women now. Go and be thankful.’ They were so thankful all four families took the name St. Julien.”
“Not because they shared our blood, you understand. They were merely being grateful,” interrupted Miss Esme.
“Yes, well. So Victoir St. Julien built a political base?” Suzanne prodded.
“Exactly.” Miss Letty took over. “When he ran for mayor at the very end of Reconstruction, he had the black vote and the Catholic vote. The only folks left to vote for Jefferson’s grandson were a few Americans, the non-French, you see, and a handful of Methodists.”
“Do you know anything about the big railroad deal?”
“Victoir St. Julien worked his way up to state senator. He had power, but not the kind of money Eli Jefferson had in the bank. Victoir ran the town, but Eli Jefferson owned it, and at nearly eighty years of age, showed no sign of giving it up. Then, through his political connections, Victoir got wind of the new railroad. He knew the lay of the land, knew the tracks would pass on flat country to the south not up here in hill country. Rail is faster, rail is cheaper than the steamboat, you see. He bought the right land and made a fortune when the tracks crossed it.”
“He put Eli Jefferson out of business?”
“Oh, yes! And out of his house, too.” Miss Esme clapped her frail hands with joy. “And then, he gave Magnolia Hill to his own son, the second Josephe, for a wedding gift. Wasn’t that marvelous?”
“But didn’t he ruin the town as well?” Suzanne questioned. Feeling on shaky ground, she looked across to George for support, but he seemed absorbed in chewing a bite of the leathery pot roast into a digestible mass and stirring his peas and yams together with a fork. An old story heard many times held no interest for him.
“Oh, no! The railroads and the boll weevil ruined Port Jefferson,” Miss Esme asserted.
“Now that we’ve got yams, times are better,” Miss Letty added, forking more of the orange potatoes between her jowls.
“We were both born at the Hill. Granddaddy Josephe would not have it any other way,” Miss Esme chimed in, shooing the subject away from yams and back
to happier times. “I do believe we spent more time there growing up than we did in this house. Granddaddy gave elegant weekend parties, all those politicians and their ladies, fancy dress in the evenings, rowing on the bayou in the afternoons, picnics, riding, all so fine.”
“If Daddy had lived, we would have gone to stay on the Hill permanently, but he passed on of pneumonia when he was still only the mayor. Brother, that’s Georgie’s grandfather, got to the senate. He got the big house, too.” Miss Letty savagely sawed at a piece of the pot roast.
“He was a personal friend of Huey Long, you know,” offered Miss Esme.
“He dragged the family down to Huey’s level, Esme. The St. Juliens ‘just plain folks’, indeed! Those dreadful dresses Beatrice bought at Sonnier’s and having themselves photographed eating in the kitchen, horrible, just horrible! All the money in the world, and they let the Hill go to pieces.”
“Now Letty, you’re still sore because Fred cut you off when you insisted on marrying Henry Dugas.” Appealing to Suzanne, Esme said, “He called it a traitorous act to marry into one of those families who sold out to Eli Jefferson.”
“At least I had the spine to do it! I didn’t let Fred or Granddaddy turn me into a nun or a spinster school teacher.” Miss Letty’s round face turned a dangerous shade of purple.
“That’s just not true! My beau died in the World War.” Miss Esme paled. She tugged on the zipper at the throat of her pink tunic, but it seemed to be caught in the fabric.
Again, Suzanne looked to George for help. He’d cleaned his plate. He rose and bent over Aunt Esme, brushing her sunken cheek with his lips. He did the same to Aunt Letty, pressing his lips to her fleshy jowls.
