Poor Banished Children of Eve

Carol Morgan

Description

In the tradition of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, Poor Banished Children of Eve is the haunting saga of the Duval/Leveque clan of Maringouin County, Mississippi, a family tormented by a history of incest and insanity. The story revolves around beautiful, tempestuous Angelique Leveque whose mother Solange Duval Leveque had spent the past twenty-one years, since Angelique’s birth, locked in an upstairs bedroom “mad as a hatter,” as the townspeople said, a fact that no one seems to find peculiar. After all, doesn’t everyone have an insane woman locked in an upstairs bedroom? As the story begins, Angelique is about to be married to Charles Carrington, a “suitable young man,” with a secret and twisted torment of his own, and her impending marriage is breaking the hearts of the town’s young swains, not the least of which, two of her brothers. To add fuel to the fire, Antoine Babineaux returns from prison still in love with Angelique and determined to win her back. Thus begins the first tremors of a tidal wave of tragedy that sweeps over the family and the residents of Jezreel, Mississippi in a miasma of murder, insanity, incest and suicide, to finally reach and explosive and unorthodox climax where they find peace at last. Or do they?

Sujets

• Eve
• Banished
• Exile
• Carol
• Gothic
• Morgan
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669864363
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

POOR BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE
 
BOOK I OF THE DUVAL/ LEVEQUE TRILOGY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Carol Morgan
 
Copyright © 2023 by Carol Morgan.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023901652
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-6438-7

Softcover
978-1-6698-6437-0

eBook
978-1-6698-6436-3
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 01/26/2023
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
850541
CONTENTS
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part Two
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Part Three
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Part Four
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
 
For my beloved son,
Anton Joseph M azur,
With all my love
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
T HE SUMMER OF 1957 was so hot it damn near scorched the cotton, folks would say in later years. Maringouin County, Mississippi languished beneath a blanket of sweltering heat, drowsing in remote splendor, with hardly a tremor from the racial turmoil that had begun slithering into the rest of the state. The county abutted the Louisiana state line. Consequently, many of the families in the county had, to some degree, a strain of French blood in their veins, but the most highly prized flowed down through the families who had fled Saint-Domingue during the uprising in 1791 – the Duval, Prejean, Babineaux, Delacroix and Leveque families. Most prominent of these families was the Leveque family who owned 275,000 acres of prime cotton land.
The town of Jezreel, nestled in a curve of the sluggish Cocodrie River, lay still in the blazing midday sun. On Main Street, which circled the town square, nothing moved. The leaves overhead hung dusty and lifeless in the breathless hush of the summer afternoon. The red brick courthouse occupied the center of the town square, surrounded by a wide green lawn, shaded by majestic oak and sycamore trees. The bronze statue of a Confederate soldier gleamed in the sunshine. To the east, beyond the business district, were neat cottages with flower-bordered walks and white picket fences that converged with imposing homes set back on spacious, tree-shaded lawns. To the west, beyond the railroad tracks on Beauregard Street, was Milltown, a neighborhood of narrow streets and dingy houses, so called because it lay within the dismal realm of Leveque Mills, a world apart from the rest of Jezreel.
On Monday morning, Omar Gates went on trial at the county courthouse in Jezreel for the rape and murder of a white woman, Eula Faye Langley. The courtroom was packed, and it was muggy and heat smothered as the day wore on. The air conditioner shuddered and spluttered and struggled in vain to cool the room.
Angelique Leveque, Randy Delaney, and his sister Diana-Grace, watched from the colored gallery upstairs as one after another, white witnesses took the stand and testified, more often about their own opinions than actual facts. Omar’s employer, Benoît Dupuis, testified that Omar had been working at the cotton gin on the morning of the murder. The jury of twelve white men went out to deliberate at two p.m. Thirty minutes later they returned with a guilty verdict. Judge Armistead Creighton sentenced Omar to death.
“Let’s get out of here!” Angelique Leveque said angrily. The others followed her as she shoved through the crowded gallery and down the back stairs. At the foot of the stairs she collided with Judge Creighton, headed back to his chambers.
“Well, what in the world are you doing here, Miss Angelique? And sitting up there with the nigras too!” Judge Creighton’s lecherous gaze swept her slowly. “Do you reckon your daddy’s gonna like it, a sweet little gal like you coming here to watch these sordid going ons?”
“Well, Judge Creighton,” she lifted her chin defiantly, “do you reckon God’s going to like you sentencing an innocent man to death?”
Judge Creighton’s amused expression faded. He watched as she and her friends swept past him and out the door. That little gal’s trouble waiting to happen, he thought, but by golly, she’s a little beauty, just like her mother.
François Leveque had stepped out on to the portico and lit a cigarette just before they came outside. Diana-Grace Delaney instinctively fluffed her blonde hair and moistened her lips. François was tall and muscular, with sardonic dark eyes, black hair that fell below his collar, handsome with a brooding, dark splendor and possessed of a rakish charm and innate arrogance that most women, even those who didn’t approve of him or at least wouldn’t admit it to themselves, found tantalizing. Diana-Grace and François dated casually, but she was yet to hear even a hint about a marriage proposal.
“That was horribly unfair, François!” Angelique told her brother. “They’re going to kill that poor man for something he didn’t do! And it’s just because he’s a Negro!”
“It won’t be the first time, won’t be the last.” François tugged a lock of her hair affectionately. “I told you not to go in there, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you’re always telling me not to do something or other, but ....”
“But nothing. When are you gonna start listening to me?”
“When you start to say the things I want to hear,” she replied impudently.
“Well, that ole boy is Parchman bound,” Randy Delaney said. “Wonder when they’ll kill him?”
“You heard what Mr. Dupuîs said. He was working at the cotton gin that day!”
Randy shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s how it is around here. Up until a few years ago, an ex-convict named Jimmy Thompson was the executioner, and he drove the electric chair all over the state in his pickup truck. Everybody used to come sit here on Town Square and watch the street lights dim when they turned on the juice. Remember that, François?”
“I remember it happening. I never came into town to see it.”
“I went once. It was kind of like a picnic ... people brought drinks and snacks.”
“That’s horrible!” Diana-Grace said. “Anyway, they don’t use the electric chair anymore.”
“Well, the gas chamber’s a gruesome death, some say it’s worse than the electric chair. They don’t lose consciousness right away. Their eyes pop out and their skin turns purple and they start drooling and choking ....”
Angelique shuddered and Diana-Grace covered her ears with her hands.
“Randy, shut up that kind of talk,” François told him. “That’s fucking sick.”
Randy lapsed into silence, watching the sunlight glisten on Angelique’s hair and the swell of her breasts in the white eyelet sundress. The bright sun glittered on her engagement ring. She was engaged to Charles Carrington, one of the most eligible bachelors in Maringouin County. He sighed. Maybe before that damned wedding, he would finally succeed in convincing her not to go through with it.
“We should go, Angelique,” Diana-Grace said, “or we’ll be late for Virginia Lee’s Bourré party.”
“I don’t want to play Bourré and listen to that bunch of cackling hens all afternoon. God, it’s so hot! I wish it would rain. You go on without me. I want to go down to the river. Come with me, François?”
“And