Chapter 1: Nigger Point

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     "Holly Molly, there's something big on the end of this line," exclaims Henry Hanken to his night fishing buddy and secret best friend Molly LaFollette as his cane pole pulls into an inverted J.

"It's probably just a snag, Hank," she calls from the darkness of the muddy river bank a few feet away, hiking her gabardine hobble skirt as she slides over in bare feet and grabs the rod. "Let me feel!"

With arms entwined, they lean slowly back and hear the horsehair line tighten with a ping on the moonless night at the confluence of north and south branches of the Raritan River.

"Hold it right there!" he commands, savoring the tingling from fine hairs standing erect on smooth forearms, brunette waves tickling his neck, the small bulge of a deltoid pushing into his chest, his own bulge straining into wool knickers. "Something's going to give if we pull any harder."

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     Molly and Hank were a secret because it was a forbidden friendship. Mary Preston LaFollette was the heiress to three wealthy Virginia families whose antebellum stash escaped to central New Jersey as the War of Northern Aggression succumbed to that perceived northern aggression. The Preston, Kern, and Thweatt families had dabbled in tobacco and wheat before that uncivil war, but the real source of their prosperity was an escalating trade in African slaves.
     As the south succumbed and their estates were being plundered by Union forces, their croplands dispersed to tenant farmers, the eldest daughter was making her way north in a wagon train driven by her Yankee headmaster husband and containing their young son, their heirloom furniture, select household human property, and a trunk stuffed with cash and gold built into each of the twin seats of five spring wagons. Flash forward fifty years and Molly is the fifteen-year-old child of that young son, and she was forbidden from playing with the riffraff of the mill town that the Evergreens mansion presided over from a hilltop perch.

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   "What could it be?" Molly gasps as their backward lean slowly gives way to straining legs.

"Probably a log," Hank blurts, holding back the scream bursting to escape from his taught body as the warmth from her contact spreads up his belly and into his chest.

"Logs don't tug," she cries, glancing at him wide-eyed as a strong yank tugs on the line.

"Dad gum, a sturgeon?" he exclaims, redoubling his pull as they stumble back. "Granddad said they used to run the Middlebrook."

"Yikes!" she screams and they both leap back as a dark thing splashes onto the mud.

"Ah-ha," he laughs, regaining his wits and reaching for the line. "It's just the monster of Nigger Point."

"Don't call it that!" she blurts, coming to her senses while brushing the sandy clay off her new skirt. "Our servants hate that word and so do I."

"Huh?" he squeaks, still holding onto the twine with his left hand while turning toward her.

"Look out!"she screams, but the snapper is already wobbling away trailing a bloody line that terminates in a single stub poking out of a huge beak.