“Listen, Mr. Grummond, it would be really quite offensive to even have you calling you thinking you can still assert your will on the Russell land – it would be if your opinion mattered. The lease is up and the family of Elijah Russell no longer wants your enterprise on it, and you were told to prepare to leave. You have until the end of August to move. Everything you and your workers do is being watched and documented right now, and if you make a single move to degrade our land in going, it's going to cost you your assets. My young lawyers are hungry.
”Try me, Mr. Grummond. Please. Your family owes mine reparations for slavery anyway – make a wrong move getting off my family's land and find out that you will pay your family's debt to mine in full! Yes, of course I have enough money as a billionaire – but I can fatten up my heirs like your family fattened you up at 248 years of my family's expense! Try me!”
“You know,” eleven-year-old Eleanor Ludlow said to eleven-year-old Velma Trent, “my grandfather has a deeper voice because he's a basso profundo, but baritone can be just as scary. Your Pop-Pop – wow.”
“Yeah, you put about 405 years of bad behavior in his face, and Pop-Pop will definitely show you why you don't do that mess with him,” Velma said. “It's not about the money either. Elijah Russell and Thomas Setter Stepforth were enslaved, but they messed people's lives all the way up getting and staying free, and slept well. And you really didn't want to mess with any of the women in there either.”
“Of course not,” Eleanor said. “Strong men don't come from weak women.”
“Of course,” Velma said. “Our grandmothers are kind, but you already know who my namesake is, and my Grandma Gladys is going to be here in about thirty minutes – a whole born Jubilee-of-the-mountain-born.”
“Aren't some of the Black Russells also part Jubilee-of-the-mountain family too?” Eleanor said.
“Yeah, so that's how we get Gracie,” Velma said. “Pop-Pop's mother had a Jubilee-of-the-mountain grandmother too, so he's like 1/8 Jubilee and so the Jubilee that comes down through him and Mom met the half-Jubilee in Dad and decided to come out and play in my baby sister.”
“We have some of that going on over here too – so, Cousin Harry is a double-Lee because his grandfather is Horace, the last surviving son of Horatio Lee-of-the-Mountain, but his mother's grandmother was a granddaughter of Samuel Smith Lee-of-the-Valley. And then, you know that Andrew, George, Amanda, and Grayson are my first cousins. We all descend from Hilda Lee, Horace's big sister and the youngest daughter of Horatio Lee, but my first cousins' father was Charles Lee Carter, and he was a great-great-great-grandchild of Carter Lee, one of Robert E. Lee's older brothers, so they are double-Lees, too.”
“That explains why Andrew is so much like your Cousin Harry, and Grayson kinda is too – real quiet, super thoughtful, not in anybody's way but just out-thinking everybody.”
“Yep,” Eleanor said. “They love having him here, because as much as they love Papa, they kinda need Cousin Harry to help them figure themselves out. Not that Papa isn't always thinking, but getting out of people's way is something people need to do around him, not the other way around.”
“Personality differences,” Velma said. “Your grandfather and mine both kind of roll up and everyone else figures out what they need to be doing in their face. Andrew and Grayson and my dad and your Cousin Harry are going to let you do what you want and then hand you your consequences … see?”
Six-year-old Grayson Ludlow, having also heard the conversation Mr. Stepforth was having, had packed up his heavy-duty Legos into his little red wagon and come across.
“Excuse me, Mr. Stepforth,” he said, “but if you need an extra bulldozer or two to deal with these people not acting right with your family's stuff, I want you to know I've got a bunch of them here.”
“Well, thank you, young Mr. Grayson Ludlow. I'll let you know if we need to roll out after you win the Lofton County Virtual Spelling Bee, Second Grade Division – that's August 30, so we'll give them until September 1.”
“OK,” Grayson said. “I'll be ready.”
He put his little hand up and the billionaire shook it with a smile before the little boy took his wagon back across to his own house.
“And he's dead serious,” Velma said, “because he was really listening to the story your grandfather told today.”
“Grayson is almost always listening, and almost always dead serious,” Eleanor said, “a lot like Andrew and Cousin Harry. It's kind of how we know the Lee sides of them are coming together. I mean, it's not like Grayson and Andrew and Cousin Harry never laugh – but it marks all three of them out, like the Jubilee-of-the-mountain is living loud and proud in Gracie.”
“Wait until my Grandma Gladys gets here, and the two of them start finishing each other's sentences,” Velma said.
“I wish my grandparents were here to meet her,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, she's moving in for a while next week,” Velma said. “See, not all family stories are fun. My Trent grandfather was such an upright man that the Jubilees-of-the-mountain let him marry in, but most of the rest were moonshiners that became drug dealers in my father's generation. Grandma loved Grandpa, but she's tired of most of the rest of the Trents and is moving in with us for a while until she figures out what she wants to do next.”
“My Ludlow people were winery people because, you know, 'upper-class,' ” Eleanor said with the appropriate air quotes around upper-class, “but they did moonshine and tobacco too, and the only reason my grandfather's branch of the family wasn't as into it is because Edwin Ludlow was like Grayson: they could see he was going to be a builder young, and the Lofton Trust paid him way more. People are just people and family is just family – some good, some bad, and we all need Jesus.”
“Ain't it the truth,” Velma said, “although you are going to hear more of that phrase in the next few hours than enough.”