Five Miles to Paradise

25

Belle Aure, pronounced 'bell or', means lovely breeze.

Built along the great river, the mansion's high ceilings and wide halls caught any breath of wind that floated off the vast waters. The plantation house was a vestige of a by-gone era. The Sebastians, proud owners of Belle Aure, had been a powerful presence in LafayettahCounty for generations.

Sumter Sebestian, Senator of the state of Mississippi and current owner of Belle Aure, had learned the lessons of his ancestors well. Sumter, who bore the name of the place where the War for Southern Independence started, had one sister, Early, named for General Lee's hard-cursing, eccentric, 'bad, old' general, Jubal Early.

Early Sebastian was a bit of a recluse, living in the shadow of her handsome, older brother. She dwelt within the protective confines of Belle Aure and her family's fortune, a beautiful flower, fragile and as delicate as the breezes which wafted off the GreatRiver.

For his part, Sumter lived up to his name. He was a brash, fiery man, given to strong drink and even stronger opinions. In Sumter's world, there seemed to be little room for compromise. If you did not agree with him, that was perfectly alright. Sumter entertained the notion that everyone else had the God-given right to be absolutely and unmistakably wrong.

For those who had known him all his life, it seemed that the boy had been born under a lucky star. It didn't hurt that the young man's father actively promoted his son among his circle of influential and flush contemporaries like a veteran pimp promotes a two-dollar whore who had no fleas, no lice, and no sores to hungry sailors just arriving in port after a very long voyage at sea.

Never one to let opportunity pass, Sumter took every advantage of his father's proselytizing and enhanced his political fortunes, widening his own web of prominent connections beyond the elder Sebastian's influence. As a young man, Sumter was ambitious and seemed to have a natural knack for sticking his thumbs into any prospective pie that might turn a buck.

Despite the hardships of the era, the two children grew up in relative comfort. Sumter's family fared better than most after the war, having refused to invest the bulk of their wealth in Confederate currency, and benefiting from a few highly dangerous, yet profitable, blockade runs during the first years of conflict. 

The Sebastians, unlike so many of their Southern neighbors, were not wiped out financially after the war's end, but they had certainly fallen from the noble pedestal they inhabited during the decades when cotton ruled the southern economy.

The family was flexible in many other ways, willing to adapt when necessary to insure their survival. Thus, they were one of the first families to embrace the concept of sharecropping. 

Sharecropping seemed to be one answer to the dilemma caused by the loss of free labor when slavery ceased. Sumter's ancestors were quick to utilize their vast land holdings, letting poor farmers till the fertile soil, while providing them with tools, seeds, livestock, and a small line of credit. The newly freed slaves and poor white 'peckerwoods' in the area became forever indebted and chained to Belle Aure.

Since only Sebastians kept the books, the sharecroppers inevitably ended up owing the great family, and no one, save the Sebastians, could ever seem to turn a profit.

It also did not hurt one bit that Sumter's father's only brother, Roland Bill, was one of those fortunate few who struck it rich at Bonanza Creek in the late 1890s. But Roland Bill's star fizzled as quickly as it had sparked. 

Uncle Rolly died in a freak accident on the Alaska frontier before he was able to enjoy much of his new-found wealth, but luckily for Sumter's family, not before making the appropriate legal arrangements that left the bulk of his fortune to Sumter's father back home in Mississippi.