…continued from Kirby’s New Year.

On the first Monday of the new year, tensions were high at Jackson, Beauregard & Company.

An emergency meeting of the Board of Directors was scheduled for an uncharacteristically early 9:00 a.m. and all the members were present and waiting only for the firm’s chief counsel who was flying in from Atlanta.

No one spoke, despite their close relationship to each other. Everyone at the table was deep in thought contemplating their part in the drama that was unfolding and how they might get through it, individually or collectively.

Over the weekend, Reuters broke the story that federal drug trafficking indictments were served on the corporate offices and individual officers of the Savannah Steamship Company, and all of their U.S. financial assets were frozen by order of the Justice Department.

Savannah Steamship was one of the banks largest and oldest customers. Following the civil war and through the end of the 19th century, Savannah Banana, as it was affectionately know at Jackson-Beauregard was the largest shipper and importer of bananas into the United States, primarily through the namesake port of Savannah, but also through other eastern ports including Charleston, wherever fledgling new rail lines could rapidly move the perishable fruit to population centers.

And Jackson-Beauregard was there at the beginning, providing financing for ships, railcars, warehouses, and even the development of plantations in Columbia and Brazil.

As a tribute to its relationship with Savanna Banana, the reception areas, pantries, and offices at Jackson-Beauregard were always amply stocked with bunches of fresh bananas.

Ironically, the bananas on the board table this morning were not freshened since the new year, and were overripe with brown spots that blemished most of the yellow peels. More than one of the waiting officers noticed the mocking bananas.

It was Charles James Jackson, Vice President, Customer Accounts who finally snapped, “Will someone get rid of those damn bananas?” Charles was the oldest son of the Chairman William B. Jackson, who, at the head of the table, already averted his entire posture away from the blighted fruit.

William’s only daughter Julia was happy for something to do and promptly snapped up the offending centerpiece and extracted it from the room. Julia Anne Jackson-Brown was the lender’s Chief Compliance Officer and handled the regulators with a finesse and grace that made her father proud, and kept the bank out of trouble. The current crisis would be a new test of her prowess.

Her younger brother William was the only one in the room not preoccupied by the Banana problem. His approval of their loans was never anything other than perfunctory. Instead, he was thinking about Priscilla, and his New Year promise.

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This story continues with Billford’s Folly.

2016 Kirt Van Buren