River Crossings

By Dr. Curtis J. Way

River Crossings
By: Dr. Curtis J. Way
Edited by: Staff at Spoon Book Publishing
About this Book
This book is about a black woman who vicariously and ability wise saw herself as a blue-eyed blond seeking economic security, compatible sex, and peace amongst races; she experienced River Crossings. Rivers are beautiful to view and they are an iconic symbol of natures grace and power. River Crossings here represents the obstacles that this woman had to overcome just to have the basics. This family and this woman were sharecroppers who had to overcome obstacles that were mostly embedded in the customs; now she attempts to promote healing and end hate. River Crossings has some very vivid intimate scenes but not as many as in Dr. Ways two other books Sunrise Sunset at East Blythewood Ranch & Maggies Cycle. This trilogy is intended to be sexually real raw enjoyable quick reads and it is hoped that you will like them. Please let us know what you think at Spoon Book Publishing at [e-mail].

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483653839

Dr. Curtis J. Way

About the Author Dr. Curtis J. Way has five academic degrees, thirty-two Masonic degrees, and is a former State Superintendent of Sunday School. He is a certified secondary school teacher in New Jersey and South Carolina and taught a little while at Rutgers U. He has done post Doctorate studies in Governmental Project Management & early child-hood education. He has many awards for “Outstanding Community Service.” Dr. Way is also an animal lover and owns CJW Ranch where has had everything from many fowls, goats, emus, and llamas, to full size and miniature horses. Dr. Way in writing this book Maggie’s Cycle said it is a book built of composites of situational circumstances of people caught up in systemic racial confinement, deprivation, and castigation who were wrestling with many daily occurrences that seem to them to be beyond their control. Maggie’s Cycle covers four generations within about 100 years of matriarchal family structure. These characters repeatedly rely upon their physical appearance and sexual appeal as a way to solve all of their problems. You may let us know what you think at Spoon Book Publishing at [e-mail]. Dr. Way writes fictions in vivid descriptions of sexual intimacies. This book is much like another book he recently released named Sunrise Sunset at Blythewood Ranch. He said that book was a compilation of “TMI” into one little book of intimacies. He hopes you the readers are pleased with both of these works and you will just enjoy them.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Dr. Curtis J. Way.

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.

Edited by: Staff at Spoon Book Publishing

Rev. date: 06/10/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

136810

Contents

Author’s Note

About the Author

About this Book

Dedication

Introduction

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

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Quotes

Love me tender, love me strong, and love me long; I hate it when its wham bam thank you ma’am.

Ms. Leola Mae Palmer

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My sharecropper mother had to work in the fields from sun up to sun down six days a week and yet she had nine children that lived; she had to have found some time to make nine children. Let’s face it regardless to how hard life is that does not mean your body’s sexual needs shut down. Sometimes sexual needs are greater in hard times.

Ms. Leola Mae Palmer

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Sometimes God gives us something other than what we crave and pray for that is far greater. I love and trust in the Lord.

Ms. Leola Mae Palmer

Fifty years of hard work, River Crossings, and sex; a story of what life is like in mod-slavery & sharecropping in the 21st century in America right under our noses.

In a sharecropper’s family Daddy is required to be invisible.

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Daddy welcomed folk into our home as if we were for show.

The first things that a sharecropper dad must give up are his dignity and his rights to protect his family; so our Dad just showed us off so we could all live.

Ms. Leola Mae Palmer

Author’s Note

This is a fictional story of a real person that was born in a sharecropper’s family in slavery in the mid twentieth century in a rural area of South Carolina. It covers the structure of the system that holds people like this in bondage that is much like slavery. The story is focused on the many River Crossings of Ms. Leola Mae Palmer, her family, and their overseers.

This story is also just as much about the impact of hate and that hate is not the answer or response to hate. Any time a system is based on race superiority it is doomed. Oppressors suffer as well as the oppressed and the answer is to end the hate and unite as members of humanity.

This is an attempt to take a real person’s story and fictionalized it to make a story that is pleasurable to read while trying to be true to the real agony that this woman experienced in this subjugating life. It is also important that her desire to end hate be paramount in telling her story; the story is very candid and inclusive of her personal life.

Ms. Palmer has experienced all kinds of discrimination and hate but she is well and strong in her beliefs that God has been good to her. She does not hate anyone or anybody and she does not feel that the world owes her anything. She will not allow bitterness to enter her thoughts or her life.

Her story reminds us of that old adage But for the grace of God. She has had many River Crossings of hate and abuse and she only wants people to know that she exists and that there are other people still in similar circumstances in 2013. Her desire is to have the world not make judgments about poor people who seem to not be flourishing as we think that they should with the many opportunities of today as we know them. Similarly important to her is that there is no time for excuses or blame. She wants us to just use this story to take a peek into her life and know that she and people like her exist; that is all she wants.

When this author first wrote this story for Ms. Leola Mae Palmer it contained the names of many of the well known black people in the entertainment and the political arena who she feels are major Sellouts. She feels that they are trying to ingratiate themselves by catering to the one percent by attacking poor and black people for not doing more to Help themselves.

It is beyond Ms. Leola Mae Palmer’s ability to understand how black folk who make millions of dollars for being willing to use their black faces to be the ethnic representative of or spokesperson for black people to say negative things that cut the economic throats of other black folk and the poor. She says, To hear or see them spew these insulting things is just like they have cut your throat and then they are rubbing salt into the wounds by criticizing poor people for being dependant and saying that they are refusing to take responsibility; #shameful. These are the same people that make me so bleeping mad that my head fumes as it is now just thinking about them. Leola sat shaking her head as she said, Bleep! Hate is an ugly thing and self hatred or hate for your own people is the worst kind of hate.

Gratefully the Editors at Spoonbook Publishing decided that the point could be made without calling the names of the people who Ms. Leola Mae Palmer thinks are self hating of their own people and betrayers. But in spite of the admonitions of the Editors this Author on behalf of Leola wants to include a few things about the one person whom Ms. Leola Mae Palmer thinks epitomizes the black people who have made it big and is now trying to pull the ladder up behind.

Leola points out very emphatically that the thing that makes her so bleeping mad is the ironic bleeping fact that this person she is talking about who is a black comedian who no doubt got hired in dramas and comedy because he is black in the name of Diversity. She says, You would think that anyone who is hired in the name of diversity would know that they have an obligation to bring to the table the things that concerns and are important to the folk they supposedly represents. But no! This bleeping selfish idiot perceived or was told that his function is to negatively stereotype poor and black people and to sell them products that are not healthy or good for them. And Leola continued, The ugly part of this is that this bleeping sellout got paid well for betraying his people. Now he is talking bleep as he sits back on his retirement money. Let’s end hate of others, hate of self, and hate of all kinds

About the Author

Dr. Curtis J. Way is a US Army veteran who has five academic degrees, thirty-two Masonic degrees, and is a former State Superintendent of Sunday Schools. He is a certified secondary school teacher in New Jersey and South Carolina and has taught a little while at Rutgers U. He has done post Doctorate certifications in Governmental Project Management & Early Child-hood Education. He has many awards for Outstanding Community Service.

To win a trivia quiz you will need to know that Dr. Curtis J. Way wrote three books in 2013. They are Sunrise Sunset at East Blythewood Ranch, Maggie’s Cycle, and now River Crossings. This trilogy is demonstrative of Dr. Way’s love of people and women’s stories. You will want to have these books in print because that’s the kind of books these are. These books will strike reality cords for you. Please let us know what you think at Spoon Book Publishing at [e-mail]

About this Book

This book is about a black woman who vicariously and ability wise saw herself as a blue-eyed blond seeking economic security, compatible sex, and peace amongst races; she experienced River Crossings. Rivers are beautiful to view and they are an iconic symbol of nature’s grace and power. River Crossings here represents the obstacles that this woman had to overcome just to have the basics. This family and this woman were sharecroppers who had to overcome obstacles that were mostly embedded in the customs; now she attempts to promote healing and end hate. River Crossings has some very vivid intimate scenes but not as many as in Dr. Way’s two other books Sunrise Sunset at East Blythewood Ranch & Maggie’s Cycle. This trilogy is intended to be sexually real raw enjoyable quick reads and it is hoped that you will like them. Please let us know what you think at Spoon Book Publishing at [e-mail].

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Generations have come to this river to pray before me and for me.

This is Leola Mae Palmer’s story of life from zero to fifty & she admits that she sometimes prayed at River Crossings and sometimes she just said, Bleep it!

River Crossings is a novel by: Dr. Curtis J. Way

Available everywhere & from Spoon Book Publishing

www.spoonbook.com All rights reserved

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the many fore-parents who have had to raise their families in slavery and economic enslavement. A special dedication is given to those fore parents who had to raise their families in little huts in fields behind the landowner’s big houses in a system that was called Share Cropping. Everyone knew that there was no honest sharing of the crops and the people doing all the work had no rights associated with being free in America. This system was knowingly instituted to be a way of extending slavery under another name and for the most part that is what it was and that’s how it still exist.

This book is written in 2013 and of course the average reader is going to assume that the circumstances describe in River Crossings are things of the bygone past. Sadly these things are not of the past in South Carolina and in many other places in the United States as of now. Therefore this book is dedicated to the folk who are still subjugated and are fighting to be free. Also a thanks to the hard workers who realize that these people exist and are fighting to help them by organizing labor and advocating for housing to assist the folk that are still locked into slave like conditions.

This book is also dedicated to the many folk who survived life in a sharecropper family and did well. Leola, the main character in this book, loves to point out that Jackie Robinson was born into a sharecropper family. She hopes that we can all work like Jackie’s life exemplifies to end hate of all kinds to unite America.

This book follows Leola Mae Palmer and we want to thank her for her candid story especially for hold back nothing. Ms. Palmer was born to a sharecropper family in the mid twentieth century and we met her in 2013 when she was working in a Work Release job for a petty trumped up crime of writing bad checks or kiting checks. She has to serve her time working at a fast food restaurant. This type of work release labor is really slave labor provided to businesses that do not want to pay prevailing wages. This woman cannot quit her job so she is a slave in 2013. This work release system is in pretense called Work release when you are not released just like in Sharecropping it was called crop sharing when the person who did the work did not get a share. Both of these misnomers were and are forms of forced cheap labor or slavery. I dedicate this book to Ms. Palmer and the many people who are caught up in this sham in America.

Introduction

Plug into Leola Mae Palmer life at this introductory point.

River Crossings are just events in life and if you have the means you can devise a plan to make your crossings. If you are without means then River Crossings halts or impedes your progress. For example, when a billionaire gets into a sailing yacht and enters the sailing channel off Nantucket Harbor and there are no winds that billionaire thinks that this is an awful and ruinous day. It is like the Gods have forsaken all of the planning that went into that day.

That circumstance is to this billionaire so important that it is like life’s many River Crossings. However, these sailing yachts are equipped with small low powered engines that can be used to get back to the docks or just maneuver to a spot in the channel to sit at anchor and enjoy the day doing other things. Therefore to the rest of us who are not billionaires we think that comparatively this is not River Crossings.

However, when Ms. Leola Mae Palmer’s poor family that lives in a hut in a field out near the tree line adjacent to the cotton fields behind the fancy main house of the landowner has no food in the house that is to them really serious River Crossings. There is no plan B or way for this family to exist except as old folk used to say, Make Do. Make do sometimes meant doing without or going hunting or fishing; and it is always a possibility that this sometimes meant going to neighbors to ask for help. Bartering and sharing is a way of life for poor people in like circumstances but these instances are definitely River Crossings.

Ms. Leola Mae Palmer was born to a brutally subjugated sharecropper family in the 1950s. The mechanization of farming allowed her to escaped working in the fields all day like all of her older siblings and her parents. But she had to baby sit her younger siblings while other family members worked in the fields and she lived the life of subjugation like all the rest.

Leola had access to old magazines and newspapers that were brought home by her older siblings and her grandmother who were housekeepers. The magazines and newspapers were brought home to be used as wallpaper and insulation for the hut that they lived in but Leola always read and looked through them as she imagined herself to be free, blue-eyed, and blond.

Leola’s mom taught her how to be humble and subjugated so she learned how to bow and shuffle and say yes suh and no ma’am to get along. But inside Leola felt that she only needed to get out from under her family’s overseers and her parents and she knew how to live free.

She knew how to use grammar, to set a seven place table setting, how to apply makeup, she was well read, she knew how to work, and she even knew what the US Constitution said she ought to be able to do as a free person in America. In her mind all she had to do was to go along to get along for now until she could break free.

Vicariously Leola was two people. She was a slave in reality but mentally she was of the ruling or free class and free to achieve as any other American could. She loved white entertainers and idolized political figures that seemed to not have animosity toward black people or the poor. She fumed at black entertainers and politician who were ingratiating themselves by putting down poor and black people as lazy or bad people.

The problem for Leola aside from her being two people in one was that she could not escape circumstance that burden black people in South Carolina. She had seen the system destroy her family and target black men for humiliation but she still thought that she could get around all of this if she associated herself with the right people.

A set of circumstances eventually did force Leola to be out on her own and she put together her dream team of associates that she thought could not fail. She learned the hard way that people could look her in the face and only see that she was black and not see her character and determination. Or, as she now thinks, maybe they did see this and that is why they wanted to break her spirits like they did all of her fore parents.

Leola Mae Palmer has spent her life in River Crossings and although she knows that she ought to be free she is not. She is reconciled that her time has come and past and that she must now spend the rest of her time helping the next generation of people who create impossible River Crossings and those who have to live through River Crossings.

River Crossings is a story of Leola Mae Palmer’s life that started in an area that was controlled by old line families. These white people are as trapped as she because they inherited a race hate based system and they are locked into preserving it like it their responsibility.

These land owners say they have owned these lands since they were granted by the Crown of England but some of these people and their fore parents really stole their land from black people who were chased out of the county during reconstruction and the civil rights movement. This is no secret but they keep living the lie.

This ill gotten land is partially why these white farmers are so fearful of Outsiders and vehemently hostile to black people; especially the ones they don’t know. They think that they have to fight to hold on to this land by any means necessary.

The family that controlled Leola’s family had lots of land and government help. They had government subsidized steel buildings with many pieces of older farm equipment that was also subsidized or bought with taxpayer’s money. They hid the older equipment in these buildings so that they could get new government subsidized equipment.

The point is that these pockets of enslaved people are known to exist by state and federal authorities. This hidden federally subsidized equipment was housed in big steel buildings but Leola’s family was housed in an un-insulated hut without electric power or water. These people and their way of life is no big secret but no one seems willing to open what they fear is like Pandora’s Box.

If these pockets of racism and hate are volatile and Pandora’s Box like it is because of corporate owned media. Let us be clear about River Crossings, it is a story about pockets that exist because we let them exist. If all Americans knew that we all expect and insist on justice for all then it would happen. South Carolina is not all racist, hate, and all a Red State as we are led to believe. Purple is coming everywhere. There are many good and decent people in every state. River Crossings is an anomaly that we can and need to clean up to move forward. "You can call me a dreamer but I am not the only one;" you’ve heard that in the Beatles but it is true.

Leola is emphatic that she does not hate anyone and firmly believes that the answer to hate is not more hate. She is refusing to allow any bitterness or hate to enter her life because she knows that hate brings stress and stress can kill you. Stating facts or spreading the truth is not an act of hate. It is important that we come to terms with what we are doing to each other.

Leola believes that she is blessed just to be alive and well. She wants to dedicate her life to ending hate and spreading understanding because this is the best way to unite us all. It pains her that there are so many people who do not know that people like her even exist. She appreciates you for hearing her story.

Each chapter has a subtitle so that the reader can go back to the chapter that moves them to feeling what Leola felt as she lived this life and as she tells her story. All of the names and places are disguised to protect the innocent. Please come into the life of Leola and do with her all the things that she did and you will realize that her decisions were not as off norms as they might seem in retrospect; hindsight is 20/20; please enjoy.

Chapter One

Here I am in my rented one room shocked & reflecting. Leola Mae Palmer

Early in life everyone sort of has a notion of what they would like to do with their lives at least in general. Most people know that he or she wants to do their own thing but never intends to be too far out of what is considered the norms. This is very tricky for a girl. For a girl to stay within the norms of expectations usually means that she must hurry to do the things she wants to do because she knows that society expects her to get a husband and have children.

For females this also means she has to try to achieve all of the other things she wants to do before she gets too old or tied down to realize her dreams. My dilemma is that I have lived half of my life and I have had the husband and fortunately one child and I have worked my butt off but yet I have nothing materialistically; and now I am starting over.

I am now in a rented room and just one step from being homeless. I figure that my present status and circumstance is about 25% my own fault and about 75% the fault of having too many systemic River Crossings. It takes a lot of precious time in River Crossings. Most of the River Crossings that I have experienced were in place because of the color of my skin and hate. If I am able to do anything else with the rest of my life it is to stop hate. Any time that one individual thinks that they are superior to another that is the genesis of hate and it dooms the hated and the hater to lots of unnecessary River Crossings.

Today is an amazing day for me. I am a 49 years old woman and I have just finished putting everything I own into one rented room. The stuff that is mine that is in this room I brought in here in several plastic garbage bags. Thank God this is a furnished rented room.

If you have ever heard the expression, This is the first day of the rest of your life; then please understand that this day feels like it is the first day of the rest of my life. This is really a very emotional day. This day feels like it is a day of starting over or being reborn.

I feel too old to be starting over and I know being reborn is out of the question. This day gives me a weird sort of doomed feeling. The one thing that makes me feel this way is that I know that I should by now in life have at least more material things than would fit into a few garbage bags and into one rented room.

Even though this realization is painful and it feels like it is all happening today but I know that my life did not begin today and hopefully it will not end today. However, I do believe that this day is really a sad culmination and commentary on a lot of the events in my life. Most events were imposed on me and some few I think I brought on myself."

River Crossings are not easy as I think about my life. None of the memorable events in my life seemed at the times they were happening that they were life changing. But I now know as I look back that at each turn I took and decision that I made they were pivotal and these many turns in my life are what has put me here in this one rented room today.

This realization is why I must and want to tell my story to maybe help others. By telling my story I hope it will help other but just as importantly I hope it helps me to take another look at my life. I am ready to tell and reexamine my life story and take another look at especially the pivotal events. I want to rethink my life decisions as I tell the story of my life. I am going to tell more than that part of my life in which I am proud; I am going to tell it all!"

As a woman I know I have been dumb, vain, naïve, and all those things that women end up doing before they know better. To tell my story I might get off into how my hormones behaved from time to time. A woman’s physical needs are more important than I realized when I started to think of my life. Therefore, I want to tell and look at all of the good, bad, ugly, loving, intimate, and the ridiculous parts of my life.

I admit that I have had to have sex every day or at least four or five times a week from the times that I became active and fortunately I did not have to have that many different partners. I never had sex before I got married and that is noble but the husband I chose had to have sex several times a day.

That first husband experience is I think what established what turned out to be for me my normal sexual needs; but that couldn’t last. After my husband died and as I got older or above forty I have had more partners because most partners nowadays only last about a year and some will only last as little as once and done.

I am starting to think about my sexual life because it is important but it is not knowingly a River Crossing. The only negative effect on my economic life that my sexual needs may have had is maybe the amount of time lost that I might have been doing something or thinking of what to do to remedy my economic circumstances.

Some of my sexual time was admittedly lost but it was intended to be in partner seeking. Partner seeking was in fact I thought time well spent productive time I thought at the time because I was seeking economic stability via a financially stronger partner because women earn so much less. If any of the partners had worked out to be my financial backup then I would not be so exposed to one slip and everything fails.

I was also seeking intellectual companionship in partners which is important in making good decisions in life for economic and in just living a quality life. I was searching for economic and intellectual enhancement when I fell for an attorney’s glib story that approached me at work.

No one would expect an attorney to troll amongst the fast food restaurant workers for a mate but in one instance an attorney convinced me that he just had to be with me because I was the person he was looking for his entire life. Here I am working in a fast food restaurant and I have my hair in a bun and wearing a uniform that reveals nothing of me but he swears that I am his dream. So that was not smart but I did it.

This man looked good and he was driving an SUV or custom truck with a Cadillac emblem on it that he says cost about sixty thousand dollars. He took his order from me and promised to pick me up when I got off that day if I agreed. Sure I agreed because I had no way home for one; and two, I had no reason not to hear this man out because I would hate to think for the rest of my life that God had sent me a savior and I turned it down.

So when I got off that day he picked me up and took me from work without changing or anything to a nearby marina on Lake Wateree. This is in South Carolina near Columbia. He told me that as an attorney he found that all of the women available to him were phony and they took him as a status symbol at their parties but none of them really loved him for who he is as a person. I bought it I guess because I was stressed and I wanted to believe in something and him.

He admitted that he had accepts the socialization of his peers because it was good for his practice but he said that was very hard to do. He said that when he really wanted to have fun and enjoy his life especially his sexual life he went to Charlotte NC. In Charlotte his sex life was spent in a private club he had to join to find people who did not make a big deal out of being intimate.

If you see a lady in this club that you want you tell her you want her and she either says lets talk about it and it works out or she says not now. There is never