Reconstruction Era

Okay.

Right up the road from this swamp, a farm owner had told me the story of Maggie, the local witch doctor in the post-Civil War era who leveraged her reputation to protect her fishing hole via threats of putting a root or, quote, casting a spell on anyone that poached her fish and game.

Are places like this still protected via spells or root cast from 150 years ago? He's asking a question.

Do ghosts move around or still wander? Am I crossing the line by hunting along a remote canal that was hand dug out and claimed by somebody else? Could it be facilitated that the duck hole I used was once dabbled in some sort of hoodoo, voodoo, or witchcraft of 100 years ago? The thought had certainly crossed my mind as I hunted this spot, but I nearly always hunted solo and I don't frighten too easily.

And he did the research for this book.

And he told me when we did our last book, when we went into it, the last book was right around this time period that we're talking about, around post-Civil War.

It was called The Deadliest Election, and it was about the gubernatorial election in 1872 in Louisiana, which led to Reconstruction ending and Jim Crow for 100 years in the South.

That's the Reader's Digest version of it.

I think primarily because Hart wasn't present at the murder of Davis.

All may have gone well for Hart, with nothing more ever said about the matter, and the murder of G.W. Davis would be a footnote in one of those lengthy lists of shootings that occurred in the post-Civil War Ozarks.

Had he hired someone other than Sam Orr, who seemed to run his mouth while drinking, and it seems he never stopped drinking, Hart also fouled up by not getting these men out of the region, and I mean not Texas, not Kansas City, out of the region.

I'm also inclined to believe, and this is my take after reading all of this and cogitating on it a bit, that Hart was just as careless as Sam Moore when it came to running his mouth.

And then in the South, our notion or that sort of popular notion is the veranda at Tara, where we have the aristocrats sitting, sipping their mint tulips and that kind of thing.

The Southerners in both antebellum and post-Civil War like to think about themselves in those terms, but at the same time, The Confederates thought they had invented the new, modern, civilization for the future.

And they wanted to expand their civilization across the Western Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere because they thought it was the wave of the future.

And so at one and the same time, you're looking backwards for your images, for your mythology, but on the other hand, you think you've invented the type of government that is appropriate to the modern world.

Mm-hmm.

You've got this district attorney, Scott Colombe, who would be the first Black senator from Mississippi since the post-Civil War reconstruction era.

And he's making that connection, trying to tap into the frustration around the maps and on top of his broader political message on... a lot of the issues that are affecting voters in Mississippi, health care, inflation, food insecurity.

And voting rights is just one more part of his message that he's hoping could resonate.