Scene: South Georgia
Characters:
Protagonist: Wheat Ballentine
Widowed sharecropper’s daughter: Jody Jack Embry AKA Miss Marshan “Shan” Duvall
This is a short composition for a scene in my soon-to-be-published Prohibition-era Southern gothic thriller, featuring a 3-string diddley bow, played like a lute or guitar.
I tuned the strings to something musical to my ears and plucked the strings backwards since I am a left-hander on a right-handed instrument. This diddley bow has an electric pickup, built for acoustic instruments, so to record it, I plugged it into a pre-amplifier to an analog-to-digital converter and into my recording software program, Logic. There are two tracks—diddley bow and an Irish flute.
The interlude has a Celtic feel, reflecting the Southern heritage from the United Kingdom. Shan is of Irish descent and Wheat’s family is Scottish.
The two are part of “The Little Big Show,” a vaudeville troupe made up of Wheat, Shan, Jahloh, who is a 10-year-old Gullah-Geeche orphan and Julius “Dominoes” Dixon, a New Orleans lay preacher/hypnotist with a gambling problem.
Dominoes travels by rail car while the other three walk from town to town with Marie, the mule pulling their worldly goods in a cart. They frequently camp out and this is a scene where Shan and Wheat, more or less, hook up to some degree. I won’t reveal any more.
Up to this point, their relationship has been contentious. Oil, meet water; but the longer they interact, and share a common love and bond for orphan Jahloh, their respect for one another grows.
Once Jahloh is asleep, Shan and Wheat sitting next to the campfire, speak quietly about their next few challenging days (the story is a thriller).
A tender, awkward, unexpected romantic moment ensues with the music ending on an unresolved note. You’ll have to find out what happens in the book, to be released in early summer 2026.
