What the River Owes
Sixty-one children, forty adults on Thursdays, and a building she does not own.
- ~95 min
- 19236 words
- 42 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
- Reconstruction-era Louisiana, spring to autumn 1873
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Grand Cane Parish, Louisiana, 1873. Cora Marchand teaches sixty-one children in a former gin house and forty grown men and women on Thursday nights, because a man who can read a ballot is harder to explain away. The parish has two sets of election returns, two claimants to the sheriff's office, a levee nobody has repaired since the war, and a summer coming. Solomon Pitre is a constable and a militia sergeant who was born on the place that now leases Cora her schoolhouse. He wants the courthouse held and the registration lists locked in an iron box and Cora on a boat before September, and he has never once managed to say the third thing without it becoming an argument. Adèle Rousseau is the widow who holds the freehold of Cora's school, eleven hundred acres she cannot work, and a feeling about Cora that has no name available in this parish and no future available anywhere. All three of them are trying to save the same thing by different arithmetic. A Reconstruction drama with the paperwork intact: registration rolls, crop liens, factor's advances, a rifle inventory that has been quietly sold. The betrayals are specific — a northern registrar with a debt, a brother with a reason, a woman who warns exactly one person nine hours early — and each has an argument. Desire is frank and cuts away at the door. The violence, when it comes to the courthouse, is close, fast and graphic, and it is not redeemed by anything afterwards. Five endings; the school stands in two of them.
Content notice
- racist mass violence and massacre, graphic
- lynching referenced
- slavery aftermath and its ongoing coercion
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- queer relationship under lethal social threat
- child endangerment
- arson
- grief
Cast
- C Cora Marchand protagonist; teacher of the Grand Cane freedmen's school no portrait yet
- S Solomon Pitre parish constable and militia sergeant no portrait yet
- A Adèle Rousseau widow; holds the mortgage, the acres, and the schoolhouse freehold no portrait yet
- E Elias Pitre Solomon's younger brother; teamster no portrait yet
- R Registrar Bertram Hollis Vermont man; the honest one no portrait yet
- D Delphine Aucoin Cora's landlady in town; laundress and the parish's real news service no portrait yet