Somewhere near the Mississippi riverbank and Eads Bridge, St. Louis, Missouri, September 4, 1925
Located at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the city of St. Louis is one of the nation's largest. It's both a busy river port and a major train hub.
In the years following the Great War, both the enactment of national Prohibition and the sudden outbreak of the Second American Civil War brought about great changes- for better or for worse. As a result of the former, the once prosperous breweries of St. Louis struggled to remain in business, and an underground industry started filling the gaps... or the taps, as it were. By the start of September 1925 however, the city was at the forefront of the greatest refugee crisis in American history...
Ever since the Bible Belt Secession had started, black Southerners had been fleeing upriver to St. Louis- escaping the newly formed Neo-Confederacy.
It was another chapter in the ongoing Great Migration of African-Americans to Northern cities, but the circumstances of this northward exodus made it uniquely dramatic, especially since people were fleeing en masse following the old Underground Railroad...
Some refugees would stay in and around St. Louis, many would hop on trains headed further north to Chicago.
The city was getting but a taste of the crisis to come...
...
In the morning of August 2, Inspector Legrasse of the New Orleans Police Department and his men had failed to return from what should have been a simple foray into the bayou the previous night to find and eliminate a troublesome vodou cult suspected of kidnapping and murdering members of the KKK...
Instead of Legrasse's men coming back, the cultists themselves- about a hundred people- were now marching to New Orleans, armed with weapons seized from the police, to rally the populace and overthrow the government. When they arrived in the outskirts of the city, it became apparent that they weren't alone.
The Lizard-men started coming into the city from all directions, flooding the docks and attacking the few Confederate warships in the harbor, which were quickly seized. Soon the Rebel soldiers and policemen discovered that their own ships were firing on them.
By the end of the Battle of New Orleans, the police headquarters were burned to the ground. Government buldings were seized, the mayor was captured and brought before the leader of the uprising: Alastor...
In a historic radio broadcast (the first of many from him) Alastor announced to the Divided States of a terrified America that New Orleans had been liberated, that the rest of Louisiana would soon follow and that now the city was not merely a sovereign State- but the capital of a new nation, with a provisional Constitution and himself as provisional President...
The First President of the Republic of New Africa.
...
The following night, the Lizard-men attacked and destroyed the crucial crossing point on the Mississippi at Vicksburg. The monsters were in control of the river, and the Neo-Confederacy was cut in half. The writing was on the wall...
...and the true nightmare began.
Through the month of August, throngs of scaly monsters walked out of swamps and rivers all over the Deep South. They would strike at night and target military facilities and police stations. Whole units of Rebel soldiers vanished without a trace, only for their impaled corpses to be found days later on the edges of a swamp...
...and where they appeared, blacks rose in rebellion to massacre the Neo-Confederates and join the Republic of New Africa.
As thousands, then hundreds of thousands of white refugees started fleeing into the Upper South, the Rebel front was collapsing. Union troops and armoured vehicles under General Pershing would advance only to find long columns of refugees and deserters seeking asylum in the USA.
In places like Florida, US Navy forces blockading the South would suddenly be leading a massive evacuation effort...
Intelligence gathered by DHORKS agents painted a confusing picture of the creatures' abilities; there were thousands of reports of people, including whole families, who had 'miraculously' escaped the scaly horde in the dead of night. It became alarmingly clear that none of them had actually escaped: the monsters had let them go.
They must have been under strict orders to only attack and kill humans who were fighting back.
And then there were news and scattered reports concerning the growing bands of black rebels taking over the Deep South, growing into the Revolutionary Army of New Africa. They would rarely work together with the Lizard-men, being unable to understand their language, but they would prevent the enemy from regaining any ground once the sea-green monsters were back underwater.
In every liberated city, the Confederate monuments were finally torn down or blown apart. White churches were either burned to the ground or reconsecrated, to serve as places of worship of the dreaded god Cthulhu...
And with all of this happening in the background, the radio broadcasts started going out...
...
Alastor's broadcast never lacked new voices...
Voices of captured Klansmen that he and his cult subjected to absolutely excruciating truth spells...
Amid their screams, they confessed the most revolting atrocities imaginable...
Alastor's acolytes would then find and interview survivors of those same attacks, including the Tulsa Massacre...
Combined with John Scopes' testimony of what took place at his own trial in Dayton, it was a double blow from which the public image of the Klan never recovered. It was enough to thoroughly shake the conscience of a great nation. But Alastor would give a silver lining to all of this for his listeners...
...in his role as (provisional) President, he ended each broadcast with an appeal to his Union counterpart: an offer to negotiate a military alliance against the most powerful of the remaining Neo-Confederate states- Texas. In exchange, the federal government would recognize the independence of the Republic of New Africa, comprising the six states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.
With the looming threat of war with the Russian Empire, the United States were in desperate need of supernatural allies. Not only such an alliance would bring a swifter end to the Texan rebellion, it would liberate federal troops in the Upper South to be sent to the West to decisively crush that last Rebel stronghold of Utah- or, as it was called now, the Kingdom of Deseret.
Not only Alastor offered peace and friendship with the North, he set a few guidelines for the future of race relations in the region. The white refugees who had escaped the Deep South will never be allowed to return, lest they are treated as second-class citizens. Black immigrants and refugees in the North will be welcome in New Africa, and the Five Civilized Tribes (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole) will be allowed to return from their western exile in Oklahoma to their ancestral lands.
The Republic of New Africa would be the true land of the free, a nation cleansed of the stain of white supremacy...
...but the Ku Klux Klan still existed in the North and West; and this is why we finally circle back to the Art Decò landscape of St. Louis, with its many speakeasies and the Southern refugee camp...
Proposed anthem of the Republic of New Africa
watch?v=SKRVqrOp-Uk
A tall, sharply dressed man in a long coat walked near the riverbank on a quiet late Summer night...
Everything about him looked somewhat sharp, from his punctual, overly tidy and fastidious demeanour, to his dark eyebrows and strangely ambrate eyes- seemingly frozen in a stoic expression of displeased annoyance at everything around him.
A pair of spectacles completed his orderly book-keeper look. He would carefully check his pocketwatch and then hide it back in his coat, probably because he was calculating the exact number of seconds between him and his destination...
Overall, the guy was tall, creepy and handsome enough he could give Alastor a run for his money.
He entered the Little Daisy Cafè, only to find there was only one person there: a 16-year-old girl in a downright gorgeous golden flapper attire, which contrasted starkly with her dark hair and eyes.
The man figured out at once- with the same cold, clean precision with which he would solve an equation- that she was there waiting for the boy she had met by chance at the refugee camp. She was there as an assistant nurse, he was there helping his mother- a devout woman who assisted the refugees in any way she could, despite her tough, even grumpy demeanor.
"Oh, Mordecai!" The innocent-looking girl exclaimed, "I'm sure everyone downstairs is waiting for you to bring some life to the party!" She said, her words dripping with enough sarcasm to fill the Mississippi.
"I'm leaving that tedious-sounding job to you, Miss Pepper, you and soon-to-be-hospitalized poor soul who has had the misfortune of becoming your latest dance partner."
Ivy scoffed, "Tsk! Last time I checked, a ficus would make a better dancer than you!"
"Your botanical evaluation is correct. Have a nice evening, Miss Pepper..."
...
Once he had crossed a secret door in the pantry of the unassuming establishment, Mordecai had entered a different world. The Little Daisy Cafè was but a portal into an extensive maze of limestone caves below the city...
The muffled sound of distant music betrayed a jazz band that was playing somewhere underground, between vast walls of solid stone that allowed for spectacular acoustics...
Walking down the stairs, Mordecai saw the ever-dutiful doorman Horatio. He gave him the long coat, thus revealing the impeccable tuxedo underneath.
The door itself looked somewhat ordinary on the outside, but on the other side it was a marvel, decorated with a club-shaped motif. And the rest of the place...
...was the subterranean treasure trove of glittering Art Decò galore known as the Lackadaisy speakeasy.
...
Mordecai, making as much noise as a black cat, went straight for his boss- Atlas May.
Seeing him, Atlas apologized and briefly absented himself from his wealthy friends and patrons...
"Our informant has been... difficult," Mordecai explained, "but he does know the location of a Klan gathering. Tomorrow night."
Atlas smiled, "Agent Drago will be happy to hear that..." he said, soft-spoken as he always was, "Go with Viktor. Make sure no one escapes once the police arrives."
"Of course, Sir."
...
By all accounts, Atlas May was a practical man, an opportunist who had capable men in his debt because he had offered them an opportunity when they needed it most... And out of those men, his two most trusted operatives were a Jewish man from New York and a Slovak who had fought in the American Expeditionary Force- against his own countrymen in the Austro-Hungarian Army, no less.
For these reason, Atlas had little sympathy for the asinine rhetoric of the "100% pure-blooded Americans"... people who also happened to be staunch Prohibitionists... That, and helping the feds came with certain benefits...
Atlas and his Lackadaisy gang (his employees, his wife and his goddaughter) had recently learned that they lived in a vast universe- a place populated with angels, demons, lizard-men and eldritch gods. But whatever the gods and the monsters did, their job here would not change...
The booze must flow.
...
As Mordecai was headed outside, Ivy came in; she was all but dragging an exceedingly dorky and quiet blonde boy who was clearly overwhelmed, even embarassed by the sheer, unexpected opulence of his surroundings...
"You know the Breakaway, right?" She asked, "And the Charleston? Right step, left toe, left step back, right toe and..."
"You mean dance?" Calvin (or Freckles, depending on who you asked) blurted out with the most innocent and clueless expression ever.
"How about the Lindy Hop? That's the new one they're doing in New York..."
...
The next morning, Atlas and his wife Mitzi where taking a walk near the riverbank, when a distant tune caught her attention...
...a haunting melody that, at first, seemed to come from nowhere in particular...
But it came from a young man, dressed in grey, worn-out clothes-little more than rags- playing an even more worn-out violin. In fact, it was a miracle that he could play anything with that thing...
And on top of all that the man, who was naturally skinny, looked like he hadn't eaten anything in days...
...and yet he smiled, his eyes closed. With only some pigeons to keep him company, he delighted in the sheer ambience his music created...
The music slowly stopped.
"That's beautiful music, honey..." Mitzi said in her lovely Southern accent, "...What else can you play?"
The man smiled at them.
Maybe he had found the place he could belong after all...
Old Man River
That seems far too austere a name
For something made of mirth and rage
O, roiling red-blood river vein
If chief among your traits is age
You're a wily, convoluted sage
Is "old" the thing to call what rings
The vernal heart of wester-lore,
What brings us brassy myth-made kings
(And preponderance of bug-type things)
To challenge Titans come before?
Demiurge to try at Avalon-once-more!
And what august vitality
In your wide aorta stream
You must have had to oversee
Alchemic change of timber beam
To iron, brick and engine steam!
Your umber whisky waters lance
The prideful, sober sovereignty
Of faulty-haloed temperance
And wilt her self-sure countenance:
Yes, righteousness is vanity
But your sport's for imps, not elderly
So if there's a name for migrant mass
Of veteran frivolity
That snakes through seas of prairie grass
And groves of summer sassafrass...
A name that flows as roguishly
As wild waters, fast and free...
It's your real name
Mississippi