Two for Twenty

Struggling to keep their mule farm viable, the Wannamaker family of South Carolina reluctantly bought two unwanted mulatto children for a twenty-dollar gold piece at the Charleston slave mart in the last days of the human indignity, slavery. Major Thad Wannamaker did not survive the war. His wife, the cultured Charleston debutante Dorothea DeSaussure Wannamaker, died in grief and guilt. Their progeny, Xavier and Harriette, the offspring from crossed liaisons, survived the rape and pillage of Sherman's army by taking sanctuary along with the family's herd of mules in the swamps. The wealth of both families passed to the liaison progenies, and under the wise guidance of X, the swamp sanctuary was developed into beautiful gardens and a championship golf resort. Their tattered and tarnished past of slavery, infidelity, war, disease and bigotry became lost in the beauty of Cerulean Springs Golf Club. Only the apparitional visits by the ghost of Madame Dorothea Wannamaker to her lover X and their liaison love child Xavier, remain as a reminder of their heritage.