The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Mickey LeDoux ran the sweetest moonshine operation in all of South Alabama, tucked away in a deeply wooded hollow in the hills west of Darling, on Dead Cow Creek. Mickey’s vats and stills were tended by five or six young men, including Mickey’s cousin Tom-Boy LeDoux and another cousin, Baby Mann. Baby (whose real name was Purley Mann) was the youngest son of Archibald and Twyla Sue Mann. He’d been called Baby from the time he was a kid because his hair was baby fine and silvery blond, his face was cherubic, and he was extraordinarily polite and gentle. Folks said that he might not have been at the front of the line when the good Lord was handing out brains, but everybody agreed that he more than made up for it in other ways. Baby had an enormous sympathy for people in need and made no distinctions between the friends who lived in Darling proper or those who lived over in Maysville, on the colored side of the tracks. He’d been known to give away his last dollar to help somebody.

Mickey, who was not a man to help those in need, handled the distribution end of the moonshine business. For this, he drove his workhorse Model T Ford, nicknamed Sweet Bess, after his girlfriend, Bessie Dumonde. Sweet Bess was equipped with heavy-duty rear springs that enabled her to carry a hundred gallons at a time without a noticeable belly sag. Her rear seat had been pulled out for extra cargo space, and Mickey and the boys filled it with gallon-size tin cans, each of which, when full of tiger spit, weighed seven pounds. He could pack twenty six-can cases into Sweet Bess’ trunk and backseat, which meant that he was routinely hauling a half ton of highly flammable booze. He preferred the tin cans to the glass jugs that the other shiners used, because he was a daredevil driver and he didn’t want to risk any broken glass bottles when Bess barreled down a rutted road ahead of Chester P. Kinnard, that pesky revenue agent who was making it his life’s mission to put Mickey out of business.

But Mickey wasn’t just a daredevil behind the wheel of his Model T. He was also a master moonshiner. He had taught his crew how to turn the malt into sweet and then sour mash, how to keep the wood fires burning under the pot stills at just the right intensity, and how to pour out the toxic heads and tails of the doublings and bottle up only the middlings, a potent 150 proof liquor fit for the gods, purely wonderful, a fierce and fiery bolt of white lightning that blazed all the way down Charlie’s throat to the pit of his stomach.

And then Mickey hauled this amazing stuff to the nearest secret retail outlet, which was no secret at all. Everybody in Darling—including Sheriff Roy Burns—knew where to go to obtain a bottle of LeDoux’s finest, known by its fans as LeDoux’s Lightning. Mickey’s second cousin, Archie Mann (Baby Mann’s father), kept a stash behind the saddle blankets in the tack room at the rear of Mann’s Mercantile, on the east side of the courthouse square. That’s where you could find it whenever you needed it.

But of course, this was Darling’s very own, well-kept secret. Nobody told Agent Kinnard or his fellow revenue agents, because many people in Darling benefitted from the enterprise, one way or another. Archie and Mickey shared their profits generously with their extended family. They shared with Sheriff Roy Burns, too, who promised to tip them off if Agent Kinnard was planning a raid. Charlie himself had heard the sheriff say that he wasn’t aiming to hit the local shiners. His exact words were, “They can cook up what they want so long as they live decent and don’t bother me none. Some of ’em couldn’t feed their kids if they couldn’t make moon.”

It was a tidy little business and as Archie often said, it didn’t hurt a single soul—except maybe those few who imbibed a mite too much of Mickey’s whiskey. But that was human nature and wasn’t going to change no matter how many revival preachers came through town calling down fire and brimstone on drunkards or how many laws the government tried to impose.