LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI Chapter 2

The girls bought Lee cute Outfits
courtesy free clip art

The Hostess girls at Club Louise found two year old Leo (whom they called Lee) to be just adorable and they spent a lot of time with him before their shift started.

The girls made pretty good money and they would buy Lee presents. Sometimes it would be toys to play with and again it would be a new outfit they wanted him to wear.

The club had a shower room for the hostesses which had both tubs and showers.  Louise insisted that the girls always smelled fresh even if they had to bathe twice a day.

The ladies would bathe Lee and dress him with one of the new outfits they had bought for him.  They always washed him with perfumed soap which strangely enough he liked.

His mother started to object about what they were doing but then she figured it did no harm and besides he enjoyed all the attention.

They wanted him to call them his aunts.  He asked his mother about it and she said she saw no harm in it.

Lee became three years old and the girls threw him a party.

He had got to know a few of the men guests and they were there also. They gave him both money and gifts. His mother put his money away until he was a little older.

One of the favorite people in the club was Moses the piano player. He would play hours on end for he loved playing.  

In the mornings he would let Lee sit along side him and watch and listen. After some time Lee wanted to play but didn't know how for all he could do was bang on the keys and make noise.

Moses showed Lee how to play a tune with one note at a time. As time went by he began to relate the keys on the piano to notes on paper. By the time he was five he could both read a simple score and play it on the piano.

Because his hands were still small he couldn't play the full chords but he could span two or three of the notes depending on the key it was in.

He convinced his mother to buy him a practice key board with some of his gift money so he could practice on it without making any noise.

He liked to talk to some of the regular guests and listen to the stories they could tell.

 

There were men from all walks of life from time to time and they told him about everything from sailing to gold mining.  

As Lee older grew his mother decided that Lee was old enough to bathe himself. He had begun to ask questions about the ladies which told her that he was becoming too observant of the undressed ladies. 

Madam Louise often filled her idle time by playing card games. Of course Lee wanted to know how to play and kept asking her to show him how.

Earlier when she was a young girl, her father taught her how to shuffle and deal the different card games.  She worked as a dealer in a saloon for some time and learned to spot a cheat right off. In fact she was so good at it that the crooked card sharps wouldn't play at her table for they knew she would call them on it.

Lee was a fast learner and had a keen eye. Louise showed him many of the tricks crooked card sharps used, and then would see if he could spot how she was cheating.

He just had his sixth birthday, and would watch some of the guests have a friendly game in the morning before they were open for business.  Lee noticed that some of the players would cheat, and they were easy for him to spot.

He told Louise about it, and she had a talk with some of them and advised them to quit cheating or she would have them thrown out.

To be Continued