"SOUTHERN JUSTICE" BY SAMUEL EAKIN
Southern Justice is historical fiction based on real characters and places in rural Louisiana. A white, female history professor of black history and her son are unexpectedly pitted against unexpectedly pits the last generation of a corrupt aristocratic plantation family seeking to maintain control over the town and its oil. Southern Justice is a gritty, real snapshot of the seeds to twenty first century politics as Southern landed gentry extends institutional control over a racially split town colliding with the sixties drug culture, forced integration, growing southern evangelism and the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Synopsis: Southern Justice
Southern Justice is a fictional plot based on real people and events in a small Louisiana town during forced integration (1967-1969). The plot is fiction wrapped around real events, characters, & here-say from a tumultuous era that remains all too familiar in the 21st century. The story follows the precipitous decline of the plantation aristocracy, the ingrained nature of Southern racism, the re-emergence of the KKK, and the emergence of evangelical conservativism, as the Old South collided with the Sixties. Told with true southern humor, Southern Justice is a ground floor view of a rural Louisiana town colliding with the sexual revolution, the drug culture, and the growth of big government, while forced to confronts its own racism, told from the perspective of real southern characters and events that could have never been invented.
The story begins with Meadow, a “mulatto” prostitute recruited by a Deputy Landeaux to seduce Quinine, the only black cop in the small town of Bumkin, Louisiana. Landeaux is a henchman for the Tremblay family, Quinine’s aristocratic white cousins who have asserted control over him so they could bilk him out of a fortune in oil from his family property. Sally Callahan is the main character, a white, a professor of black history and champion of the black community, she is close to the Williams sisters, a large black family. Sally is trying to get her unruly teenage son Bam into college early, before school integration turns violent, when she is accused of racial favoritism by a visiting black government official. Judge Jim Keys is the legal instrument of southern justice for the Tremblay family, and a high school sweetheart of Sally’s. “Bubba” Tremblay is a corrupt plantation owner and Southern Baptist deacon fearful of losing white dominance over “his” town. He is the polar opposite of Sally.
Meadow seduces Quinine and then is jailed by Landeaux after Quinine is murdered. Levi, the local Jewish newspaper publisher is conflicted by his empathy for minorities as he investigates Quinine’s death and finds evidence of the Ku Klux Klan at Quinine’s murder scene. Levi publishes a front page picture that surfaces unmistakable resemblance between Meadow, the prostitute, and Magnolia the youngest sister in the Williams family. As issues surrounding Quinine’s death increase, young Bam stumbles onto fields of marijuana hidden on the Tremblay property further intensifying Levi’s pursuit of the story. Levi subsequently confirms that Bubba’s prosperity isn’t just coming from sugar cane. He is in charge of prostitution and drug operations that are funding the KKK’s metamorphosis into a “corporate” lobby built under the guise of the “Citizens Council” which is fueled by the marijuana trade.
Sally connects all the dots with the help of local characters and confronts Judge Jim, proving that Landeaux was involved in the murder of Quinine so Bubba could steal his oil property. Sally gives the Judge a week to clean up the mess or suffer the public consequences, confirming that the Bubba Tremblay, his largest client and father of his law partner, is operating a criminal enterprise. Even worse, she confirms that Meadow and Magnolia are illegitimate twins, born to Bubba’s black mistress. But Meadow as turned the tables on Bubba by marrying Quinine before he was killed, becoming the sole heir to his fortune. She escapes jail with unexpected help from Reverend Hezekial a local black preacher, then returns to kill Bubba on her terms, exposing a relationship between his lawyer son and Deputy Landeaux, who Bubba has controlled through threat of exposing that he is gay.
Bubba survives Meadow’s assault, but Judge Jim quickly delivers brutal southern justice to Landeaux and the Judge in the most unexpected manner, forcing Bubba Tremblay to sign over ownership of his bank under the legal threat of laundering drug money. His action produces an unexpected settlement of Quinine’s estate in favor of Magnolia, the good twin, and now the only remaining legal heir to Quinine’s fortune because Meadow is a hunted felon. But in the final pages of the book, we learn that the Judge was hiding his role as the grand wizard of the KKK and Meadow has switched places with her twin, who now rests beneath a giant magnolia tree next to a golden meadow, for which they were named.
Kirkus Review
TITLE INFORMATION
SOUTHERN JUSTICE
Sam Eakin manuscript (409 pp.)
BOOK REVIEW
A debut social novel tells the story of how a murder drives a small Southern community to confront its deeply ingrained racism.
Louisiana, 1969. Nineteen-year-old Meadow Williams, a biracial sex worker with no knowledge of her origins, is required to come to the small town of Bumkin to work for the secret prostitution ring run by the white local sheriff. She won’t be a regular prostitute, however: Her job is to seduce local cop Quincy Tremblay Jackson, or “Quinine” as he’s known, due to his addiction to alcohol-based cough syrup. For this, she will be paid $100,000 and maybe find out who her parents were. Quinine is also biracial, and he owns a large portion of land that his oil-drilling white cousin, the local bigwig Bubba Tremblay, desperately desires. The racial dynamics of Bumkin have become especially sensitive because of a recent judicial order to integrate the schools, which has placed significant pressure on the local white scholar of black history, Dr. Sally Callahan. When Sally isn’t trying to make sure her brilliant but mischievous son, Bam, gets into college early, she’s fielding questions from the various local factions—civil rights organizations, teachers’ unions, segregationists—hoping her work will help prop up their various worldviews. “Integration was going to be a crash course in chaos,” thinks Sally. “Quickly. Everywhere. It was hard to see any winners any time soon. Integration was indeed overdue, but instant integration was going to be overwhelming. It wasn’t what anyone had expected. But then, who could have known?” When Quinine, the bagman for the local sheriff-run syndicate, is murdered and Meadow becomes the chief suspect, Sally and a few other progress-minded locals attempt to intervene, but the full story has roots deep in Bumkin’s past.
Eakin’s prose is sharp and expansive, weaving historical and political trends into the lives and conflicts of his characters. Here he explains the troubles of the white pastor of Bumkin’s Baptist Church: “Now southern religion and southern politics were becoming indistinguishable. Broadcast preachers…had literally stolen the microphones right out from under local preachers like him with a new evangelical message of neo-fundamentalism laced with a message of prosperity and inherently, racial overtones.” The author also has a talent for the concise, aphoristic phrase: “That’s part of the problem Sally,” one character says. “Southern manners can’t survive both integration and the Sixties.” While some of the tale’s language is unpleasantly old-fashioned—the narrator repeatedly refers to Meadow as a “mulatto”—the ambitious novel generally seeks to confront racism and show how foundational it is to communities like Bumkin. The book’s length (409 pages) and large cast of characters allow Eakin to explore the issue in great depth and from many perspectives. While some of the storylines are of less interest than others—the audience probably won’t be as infatuated with Bam as the author is—they intersect and inform one another in ways that will remind readers how connected we all are.
An engrossing tale about the integration of a Louisiana town.
Samuel Eakin - Personal Bio
I have been an active venture investor and analyst in restructured companies and organizations for the last forty five years, serving as advisor to various corporations and government agencies on complex project financing. Over this duration, I travelled the world to finance complex ventures and engaged in writing technical documents and histories for businesses, collecting many rich stories to write about at a later date.