What inspired the story THE CAINE PLANTATION?
How did I pull together all the elements for The Caine Plantation? The reason Kathy leaves police work. For those who claim that police turning on each other isn’t true, you are (respectfully) incorrect. They turn on each other all the time. It just doesn’t get the same media attention that a cover-up does. But it always takes the career of one of them away, even if they aren’t fired. Which is probably one of many reasons that people believe in a blue code. While police are a brotherhood, that doesn’t supersede self-preservation.
Basically, all this is lore and local legends. The reason that it’s not in the beginning with some of the research I provided was that I don’t have any proof for any of it. I used to work for a major metropolitan police department, and I have read some reports of crimes that happened during historical times. However, I have long since lost the connection to them, so I have no way to verify them. That is why these are listed here.
It’s funny how the inspiration came together for this story. A friend was going to buy an old, rundown, nasty plantation and restore it to be an event hall. The city had tried to GIFT the home, located on prime real estate, but there were no takers. The condition was that it had to be moved. Another complication was that it was or had been on the national registry of historic properties. This made even the gift of this home cost-prohibitive to anyone who would take it.
It’s located at the entrance of a very large and sprawling subdivision. The subdivision was built in the mid-1970s. It consists of mostly trilevel and quad-level homes. It is distinctly middle-class 1970s. I had been assigned to patrol this area. I will have to say not much happened here. At the time I was patrolling. It was only about 10 or 15 years old, so it was still insulated from the crime rate of the city.
I noticed over the years that there seemed to be a theme. A little girl called the police about ghosts, much to her parent’s surprise when we arrived. She perfectly described the Dark Lady, and this is where her name comes from. The ghost was hiding in her closet, and she wanted the police to remove her. I was telling the story to a neighbor who worked at a convenience store that was located at another entrance to the subdivision. He commented that when he was in high school, he heard somebody tell him not to take money out of his mother’s purse. Except when he turned around, all he saw was the whisps of a white bell dress with little red rosebuds as the hem flashed around the bedroom door. He looked in the hallway, but no one was there. He was quick to point out that he had her permission to take the money because it was supposed to be lunch money for school. However, I didn’t share the description of Dark Lady with him. Yet he described the same dress, white with little red rosebuds, as the Dark Lady. I thought it was curious that these two people that did not know each other, even if they did live in the same subdivision, gave the same description two years apart.
Another resident called about an African American woman who broke into her home. The woman was crying and hiding in the closet. When she refused to come out and claimed to have accidentally killed people. The resident called the police to report it. No crying woman was found when we arrived, and no bodies were connected to this story. One thing stood out. There was a black fog in the room until the resident turned the light on when she heard crying. The woman was wearing what looked like a silver turtleneck or high collar with a white bell dress that had roses on it. Hence the fact that I gave Jason the surname of Rose. Rumors about the neighborhood ghost were always of an “act right” nature.
I refused to buy a quad-level in the subdivision because, indeed, it smelled like a homicide. I could never find any reports, and trust me, I looked, but the smell of that much blood doesn’t leave your memory. I could never be at peace at home with that smell in it, EVEN IF I cleaned it out. There would always be that first impression.
Later, I would learn more about the original family who owned the Haunted Mansion. It was located on the corner of the main entrance that led out to the main highway. They had owned the entire area and had been tobacco farmers as well as thoroughbred racehorse breeders. It was over two thousand acres. The mistress of the house had engaged in moving slaves north as (and here’s where the foggy details come in) they were subject to abuse. She wanted to help them escape the abuse. Reports are foggy and inconsistent with whether or not she was also subject to the same beatings as the slaves, and that’s why she helped them, but there are equal stories that suggested she just wanted to undercut the neighboring plantations’ expenses by “stealing farm equipment,” as the reports listed. There is no way to tell what her original intentions were at this point.
The original location was in a hilly area that led into a mountainous area. The Shawnee tell me runaway slaves used to hide in some caves where non-perishable food and supplies were left in small, sealed barrels. The operation had been hands-off so as not to get caught and have built-in deniability. In other words, contact was limited to near nil between operatives and runaways. They were quick to point out that this was a rare occurrence. To run the railroad on a regular schedule would invite capture. Only a few escaped slavery via this method. The few that I spoke with didn’t use quilts and didn’t elaborate on their methods, except to very politely decline to “talk to white people about it, especially ones in law enforcement.” I am not sure about the truth of their stories, but the lore of them was irresistible, and lore is all I needed for a fictional tale.
Pirates. Well, I do believe the term “pirate” has been watered down over the decades, but at one point in time, they were nothing but organized crime located on the high seas. Not to be confused with the term “privateer,” pirates were found in some historical records to lure desperate slaves with the path to freedom. They would hide them in barrels “to hide them” from slave hunters. The pirates were really hiding them from law enforcement authorities who would stop them from “stealing” slaves. The pirates would load the slaves onto ships and sail to the islands, where they would be auctioned to the plantations there with no hope of escaping the island. I can’t imagine the mental anguish or level of disbelief that would accompany the reality of (A) surviving being in a barrel on a ship and (B) seeing the light only to absorb the fact that you are now on yet another auction block.
The easiest way for the pirates to gain the trust of the runaway slaves was to dupe poor whites who wanted to help. This way, the poor whites would show genuine kindness as they made the offers to hide in sealed barrels and to be placed on ships. At least one of these poor dupes committed suicide when they discovered what they had actually done. The most notorious pair that engaged in this activity was the son of a wealthy plantation owner along with the highest-ranking African American field hand. The field hand would make friends with slaves that lived on other plantations. He would then carefully choose his victims. In exchange for this, he enjoyed probably more freedom than the white dupes that the pirates engaged. Both were able to get away with it for decades. It wasn’t until much later when a newspaper reporter followed the story of three missing seamstresses, two freed slaves and one white woman, to the islands. By then, it was safe to say they had gotten away with it. All that could happen at the time was knowledge and not justice. The three women were trapped in prostitution in Haiti with no hope of escaping the island or being returned to the U.S. Indeed! I did find a listing for an old mansion for twenty-five dollars on eBay! I wish I had taken screenshots to prove it, but it’s lost to time and cyberspace. I believe this is no longer a thing on eBay, as real estate sales have legal hoops and regulations to comply with that complicate bidding on the platform, but I freely admit I have not checked it out in many years
Karine-Green 