The white van pulled in through the gate of Simmons Sweet Tea at noon, and nobody on the loading dock moved. It was an unmarked panel van, clean and dull, with no sign on its door and four people in it. I stood on the dock with my cane in the sun, eighty one years old, watching it settle. My daughter in law Lindsey was beside me, clutching a folder to her chest, and my son Marcus stood by the tea vats with his arms crossed, and his face turned a color I had never seen on a living man. Earline, my plant manager of thirty years, put down her clipboard and took one step toward me.
Out of the van stepped two investigators from the Office of the Attorney General of South Carolina, in gray suits, and with them a stout woman and a thin man, who were not investigators at all. The stout woman was Deborah, the mother of Lindsey, who spent her weekends on the casino boat at Little River. The thin man was the buyer. His name, they said, was Warren Pike, and he had never bought a tea company in his life. He had been recruited for the afternoon to play a part, in a pressed suit, for a fee of two hundred dollars and a case of bourbon.
It was a story that unwound itself. A sale of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars had been invented by my son Marcus, and the deposit check had been paid by Deborah, from the savings of a man who trusted her, and then spent at the roulette wheel. Marcus had needed to show me a buyer, I would learn, to get me to sign over my shares of Simmons Sweet Tea. Lindsey, who did not know what she was walking into, had carried the folder. The lead investigator held up the check, and the whole dock heard it flutter in the breeze off the harbor.
A deposit check held up in a tea plant gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the front porch in Charleston.
I gave my terms on the loading dock, among the stacked pallets, with the smell of sweet tea all around us. “Gentlemen, do your work. Deborah, you will make a full statement and return what is left of the money of that man. Mr. Pike, you may go home and think about what you have done. Marcus, you will come inside with me and sit down at my desk. You will tell me why, and then you will go to the program in Mount Pleasant, and I will pay. Lindsey, you may stay in the family. The plant stays in my name. Lucius built it on honest work.”
Lindsey broke first. She dropped the folder on the concrete and put both hands to her face, and her words came out in a rush. “Miss Hattie, I did not know. Marcus told me it was a real buyer. Mama told me it was a loan she was making to him. I believed them both because I wanted to.” She sank down on an upturned crate. “I should have asked one question. I carried that folder into your plant like a girl carrying cookies, and it was a trap. I will never forgive myself. Never.”
Marcus, who had been standing like a stone, heard the word attorney general, and bolted. He shoved a stack of crates aside, vaulted the rail of the loading dock, and ran along the rows of tea barrels toward the water gate and the harbor beyond. He had perhaps fifty feet to go when Earline, who stood five feet two and had been rolling barrels since she was eighteen, put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. Twenty workers of the second shift stepped out between the barrels, forming a long line. Marcus turned left. Another line. He turned right. He stopped.
Earline walked down the aisle between the barrels with her clipboard under her arm. “Mr. Marcus,” she said, “I changed your diapers in this very plant. Sit down on that barrel before I turn you over my knee.” Marcus looked at her, looked at the line of faces, and sat. His shoulders sagged. The two investigators arrived and stood, one on each side, not touching him. I walked slowly down the aisle with my cane, and I stood before my son, and I put my free hand on his cheek.
The money consequences were fair. Deborah was charged with fraud and returned the stolen savings from the sale of her condominium. The man who had trusted her received every dollar. Warren Pike pleaded to a lesser charge and agreed to testify. Marcus was charged but, on the word of the investigators and of a very persuasive widow, received treatment and probation. The sale of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars never existed. The plant, the recipe and the brand stayed in my name, and the deposit was gone, but nothing else was.
In the name of Lucius, who passed in 2019, I started the Lucius Simmons Fund. It pays for kitchen equipment, licenses and training for small food businesses of widows and recovering families, in Charleston, Berkeley and Georgetown counties. In the first year we outfitted twenty two kitchens. One belonged to a woman of seventy in North Charleston who sold pound cake out of her car. When the new oven was delivered, she opened the door, looked inside, and said it was the biggest thing she had ever owned.
Marcus came home from Mount Pleasant in May. On a bright afternoon he walked into the plant in his old work shirt and found me at my desk. He did not ask for his job. He stood at the door with his hands behind his back and said he had come to wash barrels. I pointed to the yard. By the time I looked out the window, he was kneeling beside a row of tubs with a brush, scrubbing, and Earline stood over him, arms crossed, watching the whole thing. I put the kettle on for sweet tea.
