The Trial Of Summary James — Chapter Five
A great African nation has risen in North America. But something is… wrong. Chapter 5 of 20 in the novella.
Chapter Five
Seminole City is a sprawling megalopolis in the far southern reaches of Florida. It is the home of a deeply woven mixture of people from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean who blend with the Seminoles and Carolina Union Africans who have lived in the Seminole Nation for two hundred years. The Caribbean culture is so intertwined with the Seminole in this part of Florida that one gets the feeling that some Caribbeans consider Seminole City to be part of the Haitian Republic and its thriving tourism and tropical agricultural industries.
I researched enough to discover that the Seminole Caribbean Protestant Voudoo Congregation was insignificant in the eyes of the locals, so I was surprised at how many business interests it had. I was equally surprised that the African Methodist Episcopal Congregation had made a bid for it, although my vision wasn’t clear that it was this specific voodoo congregation the AME bid on. But how many voodoo congregations could there be?
The largest congregation in the Seminole City area was the Mikasuki Baptist Congregation, which was started in the early 1900s by some Mikasuki-speaking Seminoles. I quickly discovered that they not only had no association with the voodoos, but wanted no part of them.
I found myself some comfortable Seminole clothing consisting of a patchwork long shirt paired with white cotton trousers. Then I found a hotel run by a small congregation near the voodoos called the Brotherly Smiles Congregation. They seemed to be into hotels, restaurants, and surf shops.
I walked to the front desk of the place I was staying; a small beachfront hotel called the Winddrifter. I was so used to wearing my pork pie hat that I almost yanked off my turban, which I was wearing instead, more in honor of local culture than for blending in. My hand swiped across the wide feather on top before I remembered what I was wearing.
The man at the counter looked up. “You be the Texan comin’ our way,” he said. I thought he’d be friendlier, given that his congregation seemed so focused on the hospitality industry.
I tried to smile, but couldn’t. “I’ve never been called a Texan before.”
He nodded. “Accent gave you way on the phone mon. What are you looking for here?”
“Alligator soup.”
The man smiled broadly and laughed. He had a great smile, one that should have been posted all over Selfie Magic. He was wearing a simple blue work shirt unbuttoned almost to his navel. It was draped over a pair of brown shorts with about a hundred pockets, half of them with zippers. Two long seashell earrings dropped from each ear lobe, and a big looping nose ring almost got in the way of his mouth. His wild braids of hair were flying all over the place as he ran my credit card. “You will like our restaurant in the back. Turtle soup. Much better than alligator. Je ne sais pas on ze alligator. Maybe another place.”
“It’s okay. I’ll try that turtle soup.”
“That’s good!” He gave me my room key and pointed to my room on the small building map taped to the counter. I was glad his apparent hostility was my imagination. I began to wonder if I was in over my head considering that a local hotel counterman was already freaking me out.
I started to walk away, but stopped myself after a few steps. “Hey,” I said to the guy, who was already involved with some other minor project at the counter. He looked up. “Do you like baseball?”
The man smiled widely. “Thériault Mawlings, my friend, from Port-au-Prince. He is the greatest baseball player who ever lived.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of him.”
“Of course not. He is a new guy. Center fielder for the Kumina Kingston Congregation in Jamaica. Just started a couple of months ago but you watch him. Watch him and see how great he will be.”
I nodded. “Why is he playing in Jamaica? Why not for a congregation in Port-au-Prince?”
“I do not know mon. Life it is not fair is it?” he was grinning ear to ear.
“I’ll keep an eye out for him.”
He leaned over the counter and sent for me with his finger. When I approached, he whispered, “There are a few gambling establishments here where you can invest a little money on him.” His eyes darted around a little as he nodded and smiled. “You let me know after you check him out. I get you his card for a discount.”
I nodded. “I’ll do that. Thanks for the tip.”
I went to my hotel room and called Trace for an update and to let him know about what Sonata and I had learned about Horse Luemba.
“I checked out your new friend, I hope you don’t mind,” Trace said. “She’s got a pretty outstanding reputation. And she’s cleaner than a tub of bleach at a convent.”
“If she’s so clean, why didn’t she take me down like a normal congregational barrister would?”
“Maybe she likes you. Besides, times have changed. Congregational barristers don’t seem to have so many wild hairs these days.”
“She did say I’m one of the good guys.”
“Praise the Lord for delusional thinking. The only possible area of conflict I could find is the Campeche Apostolic Congregation — that’s who she works for…”
“Yeah, I know,” I interrupted.
“Well, they have a somewhat competitive relationship with Texas Light. They weren’t initially very happy about a Houston congregation grabbing a slice of Campeche Island and setting up what her people call prisons. But nothing big happened. No litigation.”
“Okay. What about Luemba, Trace? What do you think he’s up to?”
“He’s a drug runner, I imagine, just like your girl suspects.”
I wanted to remind him that I was the one who had suggested the drug aspect to this, but it didn’t seem important.
“Why are you down there, anyway, Jones?”
“I’m trying to learn more about this voodoo cult — I mean, congregation. I think it’s the key to whatever this guy is doing, and maybe, if nothing else, I can find out the name of whoever is running this whole show. Sonata already tried to check their payroll and couldn’t find anything. And I mean, she didn’t find anything. No payroll records at all.”
“That alone is a crime, isn’t it?” asked Trace.
“I don’t know. I think it depends if they’re registered.”
“Yeah, probably. There are tons of little congregations that nobody cares about. This one seems a little large not to be registered. We should check into that.”
“I suspect Sonata already did, but I’ll ask. Joshua Brand’s congregation tried to acquire the assets of a voodoo congregation. He wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t registered.”
Trace told me to hold on a few seconds, then said, “It was them. Who’s the head cleric?”
“The tribune is some guy with a French name. I can’t remember it off the top of my head. I need to talk to him, show him a picture of our guy, find out what he knows. It’s a small enough congregation and Luemba has a big enough job that they ought to know who he is.”
“It’s small by the standards of some of the mega congregations, sure, but big enough that he isn’t going to know every employee by name or face, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Too bad that I hate clerics.”
“And they hate you, Jones. Let me know if you need anything.”
So I did. I told him I needed a vestment. Trace hooked me up the next morning with a delivery. I unboxed the thing and felt weird as I tried it on, amazed that Trace was able to find, within the space of what couldn’t have been more than an hour, something that fit. We finished talking in the afternoon, and the vestment arrived the next day mid-morning. How was that even possible? If I was normal-sized, I could see it, but I was six feet nine.
The weird feeling disappeared after I tried it on. I looked rather dapper. Trace even included a gold ring, and a parchment with my name on it, along with a digital ID card that was synced up to my phone. Unbelievable. The parchment said, “The Very Reverend Euston Malloy. Navasota Episcopal Congregation.” I would be paying the Eminent Philippe Alon a visit in the morning in my dapper outfit, inquiring about a certain square-headed man who had been snooping around “our” congregation.
As I understood tradition, and I wasn’t sure I did, so I looked it up on the Net, it was customary for congregational leaders to welcome visiting clerics from other congregations, even if it was a surprise visit. I wondered if that was also a female influence. The Southeast had a preponderance of male clerics, but female clerics dominated the West, and most of the East Coast and Midwest were evenly split.
I figured that the worst that might happen could be that I’d be handed off to a secondary cleric, but that wouldn’t change the mission at hand. The goal was to identify the murderer of Sonoma Williams. Navasota was a good choice by Trace. It was a big outfit. It could, I thought, even be useful that it was the same congregation associated with the accused killer of Sonoma Williams.
Alternatively, if the clerics at Seminole Caribbean Protestant were involved in some scheme, my impersonation of a Navasota cleric might create problems. I was confident that if that was the case, however, they’d find a way to verbally throw Horse Luemba under the bus rather than threaten me directly.
Sonata had discovered in her research that Williams’s murder was the first murder of a congregational tribune in more than a hundred years. I wasn’t impersonating a tribune, just a lower-level cleric, but I should be safe, especially within the boundaries of another congregation.
I was intimately familiar with Nzâmbi City, where Navasota was headquartered. I had spent much of my youth there playing in the Karankawa River.
I was there as the city underwent a remarkable growth spurt, and I remember when the Karankawa Episcopal Congregation merged with Navasota. There were huge celebrations in the streets along the river, truly amazing rituals and dancing, drum lines along the shore for miles battering the thickly wooded riverbanks with percussion sounds I’ve never forgotten. It was an almost impromptu festival celebrating the merging of African and First Settler traditions, filling the dense growth along the river with delightful scents of pepper and maize and the smoking meats of buffalo.
When I harkened back to those days as I fell asleep, I realized I would be drawing on the fuel of those energizing moments from my past. I thanked Trace in my mind as I fell asleep, thinking of Nzâmbi City, of river sounds, and the spirits of people finding camaraderie within the utter purity of separate but vital traditions that blended music, song, and food into a culture I’d forever consider home.
End of Chapter Five
NOTES
You can find Chapters One and Two and the current table of contents here:
Thanks for reading!
““I’m trying to learn more about this voodoo cult — I mean, congregation.”
Me too! Cleaner than a tub of bleach at a convent was a great line. I’ve never had turtle soup. You? You’re in the South, so I figured it’s possible. I had alligator sausage gumbo in New Orleans. I liked it.