Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay
Mrs. Thalia Ludlow deeply admired her husband's increasing discipline in both meekness and self-control. Time was that it would have been a “Hell to Pay Ludlow” Saturday when folks already jealous of her husband realized the success he and his mostly non-white business partners were having and sharing fairly.
It was 2020 in southern Virginia, in Lofton County that clung fiercely to the old ideals.
It was not that Capt. R.E. Ludlow was making money with Black and Latino workers – that idea was as old as the day his family set foot in the country nearly four hundred years prior.
It was that “sharing fairly” with the Trents, Duboises, and Gonzalezes that was the first problem, and the second problem was that it was working all too well.
The Ludlow Bubbly had made a bold move at the Lofton County Chamber of Commerce Virtual Business Expo: it had given a dozen or two bottles of soda to every registered business at the conference as an introductory gift. That kind of confidence in the product, during the pandemic, got business people's attention.
Already, through working with Dubois on the Road and Dubois and Friends, the Ludlow Bubbly was an increasingly asked-for item with a number of delivery orders, and gave the Dubois circle of restaurants an edge.
Already, because Sgt. Tito Gonzalez was a master of his business in vending, the Ludlow Bubbly was being sold out of machines almost as quickly as it could be loaded in.
But then the Ludlow Bubbly reached into that business-to-business market across all available sectors. The key was that people tasted it first – people who loved soda or loved money were perfectly willing, even in a conservative county in an election year – to overlook exactly how the white-haired Lee-looking man with his grandmother's recipes was working with his darker-skinned partners.
“Ev'rybody ain't gotta be a slave owner or Southern planter now,” one old bigot had said to another. “It's 2020. Ludlow is still in charge, and the way he runs things gives us diversity, and there's money in diversity too.”
Not everyone could look past their bigotry even that far. Capt. Ludlow's Slocum-Bolling relatives were incensed. Time was that three of his uncles killed men like Sgt. Vincent Trent, Major J.P.P. Dubois, and his father Jean-Luc Dubois in the street – they had actually done it while one of them was holding Baby Bob Ludlow in his arms in 1967.
Baby Bob had been five and his mind had blocked this trauma out … but when he had grown up, he had remembered at almost 58 years old and turned his uncles in, because there was no statute of limitations on murder – so, almost 53 years delayed but not denied, justice had felled the Slocum-Bolling family.
That was bad. What was worse was suddenly realizing that Baby Bob was still going to die richer than all of them put together, repudiating the old way in his burgeoning business. Even he did not see that in 2020, but they, who knew money well, did.
Every family number that Capt. Ludlow did not know he had not blocked rang him on Saturday.
Capt. Ludlow took the calls with his color wheel in hand, working his fingers from the reds back to the calm blues, while his wife just admired him … his grandchildren, playing in and out of the house, were not alerted by his tone that anything was wrong, although the words sometimes were chilling. Capt. Ludlow was not to be trifled with.
“Look, I tell you what … your little cousins are all playing on the cul-de-sac, meaning the backyard is clear to the foothills of the Blue Ridge. You can take that whole load of horse manure you are talking and fertilize all of it for me. Horse manure. Cow patties. Bull excrement. Excrement. Not an “extra mint,” although your breath certainly needs one after the excrement you have been talking …
“... Oh, look, cousin, I have some trees back there. You know how Uncle Simeon thought it was so good to just murder a man in front of me? I need some blood and bone meal for my trees, so come on by – or be thankful the Veteran's Lodge won't even let you in because you have got to be Covid-positive, talking tough to me in the middle of veteran's housing like that. I am a professional killer; your ilk just kills unarmed men in the street.
“Oh, see, now you don't like it! You don't think as a white man you should have to be subject to what you cheered putting other men through when y'all wanted to shape me into the same kind of murderer, but you haven't yet thought through what that means. You don't get to turn that off when you want to. Y'all wanted to make Baby Bob into this kind of man, remember? Beware that I don't show y'all what that really means. Stop calling me and tell the rest to stop calling me. I only have so much patience.”
Click … and the phone did not ring again, all day, while Capt. Ludlow's grandchildren played on, undisturbed.