PART VIII THE SECRET EMPIRE
PART VIII
THE SECRET EMPIRE
Louisiana State Penitentiary
Angola, Louisiana
Three hours later, we arrived at Angola.
Once again, Cyrus Barbin allowed us to see him and once again we found ourselves being led by Officer Higgins through D Block to Death Row.
Curtis Gardner was still in his cell and still my biggest fan.
‘Sammy fucking Speedman! When I get outta here, I’m comin’ for you!’
We came to the right-angled airlock chamber connecting D Block to Death Row. There Officer Higgins left us, again remaining with the two guards while we stepped through.
Dwayne Folcomb Jr was still on Death Row and he remembered us.
‘Hello. So nice to see you both again. Since we met, I’ve dreamed of beating the sins out of your earthly bodies many times.’
We kept moving and arrived at Cyrus’s cell with its massive white supremacist slogans on the walls.
We found Cyrus once again reading on his bed, shirtless, all of his tattoos clearly visible.
‘My, my, you’re not dead yet,’ he said, not looking up.
Then he raised his eyes. ‘Although I can’t imagine that will be the case for long. It’s a pleasure to see you both again.’
‘We’ve learned a lot since we saw you before. Will you answer some more questions for us?’
Cyrus grinned. ‘If it’s as much fun as last time, certainly.’
I dived in.
‘I went into the LaSalle mausoleum at the priests’ graveyard. Saw the bishop’s baker’s dozen. Were they slaves? Thirteen slaves kept by the bishop?’
Cyrus gave me a single knowing nod.
‘The bishop owned slaves?’ Audrey said.
Cyrus said, ‘The Church was always close with the old families and its bishops saw nothing wrong with owning slaves.’
‘The LaSalle mausoleum had your lynching tree image on it, the Tree of Fear. Why?’ Audrey asked.
‘The LaSalle family was one of the oldest French families in Louisiana. Owned a lot of land and a lot of slaves before slavery became illegal. The Tree of Fear is an actual tree. Their tree.’
‘There was a fourteenth dead body in that tomb, an investigator by the name of Hillerman,’ I said.
‘I imagine he found the slaves so they killed him. Like they’ll kill you, as I keep telling you,’ Cyrus said amiably.
‘I don’t know this Hillerman fellow. The investigator named Brewster, I heard about him.
He got real close back in the 80s and early 90s.
That’s why they had to destroy his reputation, scare him off. ’
Audrey said, ‘So are you telling us that a cabal of prominent Southern families are keeping slaves now, in the present day?’
Cyrus smiled. ‘Owning another human being is the greatest joy in life. It is the closest one can get to feeling like God.’
I said, ‘When you hunted those boys twenty years ago, you told the police that killing them was your “right as a white man”. Were they your slaves?’
‘Now you’re getting it.’
‘How many slaves—captives, enslaved people—are we talking about here?’ I asked. ‘Dozens? Hundreds?’
Cyrus shrugged. ‘I don’t know, they’re scattered across properties all over the South, held by twenty or so wealthy families. If each family has four or five properties and we estimate forty or fifty slaves at each property, I’d say there are maybe four thousand.’
Audrey gasped. ‘Four thousand enslaved people?’
I asked. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘Since the war,’ Cyrus said.
‘Which war?’
‘The War of Northern Aggression. The War Between the States.’
‘You mean the Civil War?’
‘We don’t call it that.’
‘It ended over 150 years ago.’
‘It didn’t end for us.’ Cyrus shook his head.
‘You see, this is where people like you fail to understand—fail so miserably to understand—the Southern mindset. The War Between the States wasn’t a physical fight of men against men.
It was a fight of ideas, ideas about a way of life, where the pure white race rules and all other races are subservient to it, just as the Bible says.
‘Families like mine have been waging this war of ideas -quietly and constantly since the war ended, in subtle yet powerful ways, like raising statues in courthouse squares, keeping the old names of military bases, erecting the Ten Commandments on public land, sanitising history textbooks in schools—all of it achieved via dragged-out litigation and by installing judges, governors and congresspeople who are sympathetic to our cause.
‘And it’s worked.
‘Our secret empire thrives across the South, at the same time out of sight and in plain view. It pulls the strings of power from governors’ mansions to the United States Supreme Court, yet it remains gloriously invisible.
‘We’ve owned Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi for over a hundred years. They were easy, since all of those states are too poor for the North and its liberal media to care about.
‘Florida was always ours but our power there has recently become so strong, we now openly rewrite the history books.’
I said, ‘You’re talking about the middle-school history books that the Florida board of education approved, the ones that say slavery wasn’t so bad since slaves acquired useful skills while they were enslaved.’
‘That’s right.’ Cyrus snorted contemptuously.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Audrey breathed.
‘Texas has been our greatest achievement of late,’ Cyrus said.
‘With its near-total abortion ban, border laws and standalone power grid, it’s all but a separate country from the United States these days.
Why, did you know that Texas and Louisiana built the Toledo Bend Dam without any federal funding so the water would be independently theirs?
‘This upcoming wedding between the Kingmans and the Dearborns, the greatest families in those two states, is a union of two dynasties. That marriage will join Louisiana with Texas, making them for all practical purposes one state.’
‘What about the citizens of those states?’ Audrey asked. ‘The people?’
‘The white ones are poor, stupid and ignorant. We give them red meat via cable news networks, but mostly we keep the white trash happy by keeping all the Black folks economically enslaved through abortion laws and gerrymandered voting districts. The poor white crackers of the South are satisfied because it gives them someone to look down on, someone to kick.’
Audrey asked, ‘How does banning abortion help your empire?’
‘One reason is historic, the other is practical,’ Cyrus said.
‘In the antebellum South, abortion was illegal since having a breeding slave gave an owner generations of newborn slaves free of charge. Abortion could not be tolerated. On the practical side, well, in these modern times, if you give a woman control of her body, you give her power. Black women control Black men and we can’t allow them to have power, so we ban abortion.
This is common knowledge across the South and in all the states that ban abortion.
It’s the key way we keep Black folks down. ’
Audrey just stared at Cyrus, speechless.
I was looking at Cyrus’s wall, at one particular scrawl on it:
‘colossians 3:22 – the 11th commandment’
I said, ‘You mentioned erecting the Ten Commandments on public land. And you call Colossians 3:22 the eleventh commandment. I looked it up. “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.” What do you mean by it being the eleventh commandment?’
Cyrus grinned meanly. ‘To a true-believing Southerner, putting up the Ten Commandments in a public place means secretly honouring the eleventh.’
‘No way . . .’ Audrey gasped.
I ploughed on. ‘What about the women like LaToya Martyn? The four sex workers taken every twenty-five years or so?’
Cyrus gave me a look. ‘Come now, Doctor Speedman. I thought you were clever. You haven’t figured that out yet? I can’t tell you everything.’
I paused, thinking.
‘They weren’t taken to be breeders?’ I asked.
‘Not at first,’ Cyrus said.
‘At first . . .?’
I recalled what I’d figured out about the 1877 case: it had been a bachelor party. The young men had acquired the four prostitutes from Tallahassee for a night of partying and then kept them—
And it hit me.
I saw it all: what had happened in all of the missing women cases over the last 150 years.
But since I was inside Angola, I didn’t have my phone, whiteboard or laptop with me. I’d have to check the dates when I got outside, but I was sure I was right.
I looked at Cyrus and changed tack.
‘The Kingman estate in Victorville is the source of Dead Man’s Creek. We went up that creek and killed a patsy named Eli Gage. If we went further up Dead Man’s Creek and onto their property, are you saying we’d find . . . slaves . . . there?’
Cyrus returned my gaze.
‘You’ll have to find that out for yourself. I mean, I’ve told you several times now, knowing even the small amount that you know, you cannot possibly be allowed to live, so you might as well find out.’
At the exact moment he said this, I heard something in the distant reaches of the prison.
A soft rusty squeak.
I turned, looked down Death Row’s corridor of cells.
Officer Higgins and the two guards who had been stationed in the airlock were no longer there . . .
. . . and the barred doors of the airlock leading back to D Block swung open, their rusted hinges squeaking.
Then I heard a distant heavy chunk-chunk.
The sound of locks unbolting.
From beyond the airlock.
From D Block. Cell doors were being unlocked remotely.
Then, right in front of us, the lock on Cyrus’s door unbolted.
At the same time, the locks on all the other cells in Death Row unlocked.
I spun. ‘Audrey, we’re in trouble.’
At that moment, the lights above us flickered and . . .
. . . went out.
Death Row was plunged into dim darkness, the only light coming from a few slit windows high up near the ceiling.
I heard angry shouts from D Block, followed by running footsteps.
I grabbed Audrey’s hand. ‘Go! Now!’
We fled down the darkened cell block.
Behind us, Cyrus yelled gleefully: ‘I told you they were gonna kill you! I told you! I’ll see you both in Hell and very, very soon! Hahahahahaha!’