Jeanine found him slumped over his desk in the study. She went from elated that he might be dead to disgusted when she realized he was crying to himself.

“Darling! They’ve finally done it.” He moaned as she approached. “Those damn orthodoxy bastard, they’ve killed my business! They won’t let me sell cocaine. Not like I used to. All that income – it’s going to disappear!”

Her slap came out of nowhere, catching him mid-sob.

“Murray, you are a terrible husband, an absent father and a pathetic lover. And, so help me God, if you don’t keep me comfortable, I’ll let all your new country club friends know that you bought your way up to their level by selling drugs to the negroes.”

Pulling her new mink stole tight, she stepped back from him.

“So, if they won’t let you sell it like you used to, find a new way to sell it. The demand isn’t going to go away, prices are just going to go up. Time to be big, Murray, bigger than you’ve ever been.”

She planted a cold, hard kiss on his cheek then left him alone in the darkened study.

He’d never felt so small before.

Memphis Note
At first, Memphis’s cocaine laws were as lax as its liquor laws. But then, racism was introduced into the anti-drug equation, and attitudes began to change. The first big step toward prohibition of the drug was when the city voted to ban the sale of less than a pound of cocaine to anyone with out a prescription. A pound being much more than any normal addict could hope to afford. Sadly, all this did was push the drug underground and create even more crime around it.

Near as anyone could tell, she lived on her porch. Hot or cold, stormy or dry, she was there, every day and night. On the rare occasions she did take a powder, she was back in just a moment. Just blink and she’d be back in her chair, watchin’.

It wasn’t out of some unhinged love of a fresh breeze that she spent those hours on her porch. No, she watched the only way into her house. She’d blocked off the rear exit with a bookcase long ago. This way she ensured constant vigilance of any of her lost souls that might slip away when their craving got too great.

Ask her why she’d turned her house into something akin to an asylum, and she’d always answer the same way.

“Them that’s sellin’ it, they’re sayin’ things about those that’s takin’ it. Sayin’ they’re criminals, sayin’ they’re rapists, sayin’ they’re murderers. I lost my boy to drugs for a time, and he ain’t never been none of those things.”

Then, she’d pause for a moment before continuing.

“So I figure, if God brought him back to me, least I can do is bring the rest o’ them back to God.”

Memphis Note
When cocaine exploded in Memphis around the start of the 20th century, nearly every fear of the drug was linked to racist fears. Local governmental reports said 80% of the black population was using the drug, that it had supplanted all other economic forces, that it was the cause of every rape of a white woman in the city, and that it would eventually lead to a race rebellion. None of these things were true, and all of them were built on fear of a drug that only white pharmacists were capable of supplying.

It was the same dream every night.

He was back at Shiloh, on his horse. Saber out, trying to shout over the din to his troops. Then, a whistle in the air, a sudden roar and a searing pain, whiting-out his vision.

He awoke screaming every time.

The nightmares were so bad that he’d taken to sleeping in the guest room to give his wife respite from his horrors.

His days were spent in a exhausted daze from the lack of sleep and the morphine solution prescribed to dull the pain. But even the narcotic couldn’t cover up that incessant itch, just below the knee on a leg that was no longer there.

Once he’d tried to quit the morphine, convinced that it was at the root of his nightmares. He hadn’t made it through a day before the vomiting and fever had driven him back to the drug.

Which is why he viewed the small jar of off-white powder he held with some trepidation.

The doctor said it was just the thing to snap him out of his morphine dependency; that he was giving it to all the injured veterans.

Extract of Peruvian Coca, the label read.

Memphis Note
The Civil War was the first war that lead to a marked increase of American drug abuse. Doctors gave heroin, opium and morphine to soldiers to dull the pain. Over-use of which lead to addiction. Addictions that had to be kept up upon returning home. Initially, cocaine was seen as a way to break opiate addictions, but was unfortunately just a replacement for them. Memphis wasn’t an exception to this rule, with drug abuse spiking dramatically in the last quarter of the 19th century.