Little Girl Lost 6: The Return of Johnnie Wise

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The Return of Johnnie Wise

KEITH LEE JOHNSON

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The Return of Johnnie Wise

Keith Lee Johnson

Dare to Imagine Publishing

PO Box 935

Maumee, OH 43537

©copyright 2010 Keith Lee Johnson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

ISBN 10: 1-935825-00-3

ISBN 13: 978-1-935825-00-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931557

First Printing: July 2010

Printed in the United States of America

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This is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, real people, living, or dead, or to real locals are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. Any similarity in other names, characters, places, and incidents is entirely coincidental.

Recap: Books, One, Two, and Three

I
t was Christmas Eve when Johnnie Wise’s purity was first compromised, but she had nothing to do with the extralegal transaction. She was a fifteen-year-old, born-again Christian who had aspirations of becoming an evangelist before her mother sold her virginity to a white insurance man named Earl Shamus during the winter of 1952. The color of the man who paid for the privilege and subsequently plundered the orchard that was reserved for one special man was not the issue. Had Earl been a black insurance man, the compromise would have been the same, only worse in that the crime would have been black on black—a slightly different rendition of dog eats dog. Humiliation, confusion, indignity, uncertainty, embarrassment, mistrust—all of these were the issue, and all of these shaped her future decisions, which culminated in a tragedy she, for all intents and purposes, wrote, produced, directed and starred in.

Because of all of these, she not only learned to accept compromise as a way of life, compromise became her strongest supporter, her trusted ally, her constant companion, and she learned to use it against the man who introduced her to it all. Earl took her innocence. Johnnie took his money. Along the way though, without realizing it, she became enamored with riches, which ultimately led to more compromising. Unbeknownst to her, the purity that once defined her slowly gave way to conniving manipulation. Before she knew it, she had learned to justify anything she did. But when she was being taunted by her classmates on the way home from school one day, she was rescued by a robust football player named Lucas Matthews.

The two fell in love.

Meanwhile, her love for money had grown, and she wanted more of it. Earl bought her a home in an affluent Negro parish called Ashland Estates. He even set her up with Stockbroker, Martin Winters, who she seduced to learn the ins and outs of the stock market, further compromising who she once was and who she wanted to become. But when Marguerite, her Creole mother, was killed by her most faithful customer, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, she turned to Lucas’s boss, Napoleon Bentley, a ruthless gangster who would stop at nothing to have her.

As a ploy to win her heart, Napoleon promised to avenge her mother’s death. Later, he went to her home and told her that Lucas was having an affair with his wife and he would kill him for that if she didn’t give him the sweet revenge he deserved by giving him one night of pleasure. Johnnie quickly refused, but when Meredith Shamus paid her an unannounced visit and confronted her about her ongoing relationship with her husband, Earl, Johnnie was so shocked that she forgot Napoleon was still in the kitchen and could hear their conversation.

Meredith revealed it all. She even knew about Martin Winters. Napoleon then threatened to tell Lucas about the affair. She agreed to give him what he wanted, but she made it clear it would only happen one time, believing it would be a quick in and out encounter that she could easily forget and even pretend that it never even happened. But she was so enraptured by his sexual prowess that she couldn’t get Napoleon out of her mind. Later, when Lucas saw Johnnie staring at Napoleon with longing eyes, he realized that she’d had sex with him. Johnnie responded with half truths and total lies—magnificent lies. Lucas believed her falsehoods because he wanted to believe her.

Later though when Lucas was presented with the prospect of selling drugs and making fast easy money, he seized the opportunity. Lucas didn’t know that the whole operation was a set up by Napoleon to get him out of the way. Napoleon wanted Johnnie, and to show her what a wonderful guy he was, Napoleon talked to a judge he knew and got Lucas three months at Angola Prison and then three years in the Army. Lucas accepted the deal, having no idea he had been seriously set up.

While in prison, Lucas improved his reading skills, and one day he received a letter from Colonel Strong, who had played football for his high school coach. Strong was contacted by their mutual coach, and now he wanted to give Lucas the same opportunity he’d had. Strong also wanted him to play football for him in Germany. The Colonel pulled some strings and got him out of Angola Prison after serving one month. Lucas wrote a letter to Marla, his girlfriend on the side, Napoleon’s soon-to-be ex-wife, who had left her husband and went back to Chicago. Marla and Lucas agreed to meet in an out of the way town far from New Orleans for one last romp.

After they made up for lost time at the hotel, Marla told Lucas a truth that deep down he knew, but didn’t want to face. Lucas accidently killed the messenger who had delivered a strong dose of reality. He put her body in the trunk of her Cadillac and pushed it into the river. Before she died, Marla had told Lucas that Johnnie was being tried for the murder of her new stockbroker, Sharon Trudeau. Marla had gotten her the best attorney in Chicago to represent her.

Meanwhile, the Syndicate Commission decided to get rid of Napoleon Bentley. He had been warned to keep niggers out of the business and not to associate with them anymore. Bentley ignored their warnings, and he and Bubbles, his black lieutenant, paid for that mistake with their lives.

But when Lucas heard Meredith testify that Johnnie was having sex with her husband and Martin Winters, it broke his heart. Nevertheless, he still loved Johnnie. They had planned to leave New Orleans together, but something kept happening to prevent it. As a final act of love to ensure that Johnnie would leave New Orleans for good, Lucas set her house on fire. He didn’t know that two hundred thousand of her money was hidden in the fireplace. He also didn’t know that white Christians had decided to burn down Ashland Estates after he left even though he saw them heading that way as he left the prosperous community.

Johnnie was acquitted of murdering Sharon Trudeau, but she and the rest of the citizens who lived in Ashland Estates returned to the charred ruins of their once beautiful homes. Just as Lucas had hoped, Johnnie was about to leave New Orleans. And now,
Little Girl Lost: The Return of Johnnie Wise
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Chapter 1

Leaving New Orleans

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ooking through the rearview mirror as she drove away from her smoldering Ashland Estates home, the sight of seeing Sadie and her children standing in the street watching was far more than Johnnie Wise’s young heart could bear. Sadie was the only friend she had left in New Orleans, in the world for that matter. She couldn’t imagine what her life would be like without Sadie Lane in it. Oh, how she would miss hearing her friend’s knock on the back door, her expectation of being let in to have a bite to eat and drink coffee. Oh, how she would miss their conversations about the men in their lives, the white folk they worked for, and the women who hated them for being beautiful—Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Beauregard and her cook, Katherine.

As hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop thinking about all the good times she and Sadie had shared. The trip to Las Vegas particularly came to mind. In her mind’s eye, she could see them boarding an airplane for the first time, going into a casino, watching her brother, Benny, completely dismantle Paul “Sweetwater” Smith for six rounds before knocking him out, and then spending a few unforgettable hours with Napoleon Bentley, who she sweetly ravaged several times before returning to her own hotel room.

As the sight of Sadie and her children, who were probably still clinging to their mother, diminished while Johnnie drove farther away, she fought earnestly to control the emotion of losing a world that was hers and everything in it. But when the image of Lucas Matthews, her adoring boyfriend materialized in her mind, her eyes welled. When she saw him up in the balcony of the courtroom, looking down at her, knowing that she was more like her deceased mother than she cared to acknowledge, she lost control. She pulled her car over and parked as tear after tear rolled down her cheeks, lingered on her chin, and then eventually dripped onto her white blouse. With both hands on the steering wheel, she leaned forward and rested her head there while raw emotion forced her shoulders and back to hunch as she gave into the anguish of losing everything she had held dear.

She had other memories that were equally painful and difficult to forget. Just four weeks or so ago, she had been raped by Billy Logan, a boy who had teased her about her relationship with Earl Shamus because he thought she was too pretty to be involved with a white man on an intimate level. While she was coming to terms with that violation, she was violated again. This time by the law itself. She was arrested, tried, and fortunately acquitted for a murder she didn’t commit. What made the arrest so egregious was that it was spawned by a vicious article in the newspaper. The prosecutor knew she was innocent, yet he tried to convict her anyway on the word of one “witness” who was not a witness because he didn’t see Johnnie kill anyone, nor was she in Florida at the time of the murders. It therefore didn’t matter if she killed Sharon Trudeau or not. Being a Negro and accused was enough for the grand jury to indict.

When she thought of how close she had come to death, not once, not twice, but three times, the law being her attempted executioner the second time, she cried all the more and wondered why God had spared her so many times when people in her family, black and white, were dying all around her. She had lost it all, and being dirt poor again left her feeling like her heart had been ripped out with no anesthetic to mask the radical surgery that had been performed. She had been poor before, and there was no honor in it. But now, she was in a worse condition because she didn’t even have a place to lay her head. Image after image filled her mind as she thought about the beautifully furnished home she once owned, which had all the trimmings.

Without intending to, she thought about the clothes in her closet. She’d had so many outfits that she could go more than an entire year without having to wear the same garments twice. Now all she had were memories of the pampered lifestyle she lived, the clothes on her back, and the shoes on her feet. But when she thought the images couldn’t get any worse, they did. While her shoulders and back were still hunched, she saw the dilapidated dwelling in ruined Sable Parish—the place that Marguerite called home and great uneasiness swept over her as she contemplated the possibility of returning to that shameful existence. The day she left that place with Earl came into focus as she argued, and then physically fought with her mother prior to leaving Sable Parish for good.