Murder at the Azalea Festival by Ellen Elizabeth Hunter Page A

Binkie invited. "My treat."
    "I'd love to. But with so many tourists in town, the restaurants might be crowded. But maybe we'll get lucky. This is a good time, between the lunch and dinner hours. Shall we try the Pilot House?"
    We strolled down Market to the riverfront where news of a TV star's death did nothing to inhibit merrymakers. A street fair was in full swing with arts and crafts booths, fun and games for the children, jewelry designers, potters, fancy ironwork, dance troupes, jugglers, and of course food.
    The Pilot House restaurant began life in 1870 as the Craig House, constructed as the residence for William Craig, a cooper, or maker of wooden barrels. In 1977, the house was moved from Wooster Street to Chandler's Wharf and converted into a restaurant. Additions were added, including the porch where Binkie and I were being escorted to the one available out-of-doors table which was out on the new deck that extended over the river. When the city was constructing the new Riverwalk, they discovered the restaurant owned a piece of the site. As compensation, the city built a deck for the restaurant that adjoined the boardwalk.
    "Unsweetened iced tea," I told our waiter. In the South unless one specifies otherwise, tea arrives icy and sugary. I had no intention of regaining the seven pounds I'd lost this year, not with a lover in my life.
    And that caused me to remember Mindy's very vocal and ungracious rejection of sweetened iced tea.
    "Is that all?" the waiter inquired, interrupting my train of thought.
    "I'll have the shrimp and grits appetizer," I said quickly. The description sounded yummy: fresh shrimp and smoked kielbasa sautéed with mushrooms, scallions, and spices, served on a fried grits cake.
    "This is going to serve as lunch and dinner for me," I promised Binkie--and myself.
    "I'll have the same," Binkie told the waiter. "But make my tea sweet."
    To me he said, "At my age, sugar will do me no harm."
    "Binkie, you're as trim as a teenager." I patted his hand. "You know, your comments about the skilled slave craftsmen who built the Bellamy Mansion made me think of Caesar Talliere. How was it that he was able to read and write in both French and English? He must have been an extraordinary man."
    "He was a rarity. Not to mention that during those times, it was dangerous for a slave to know how to read and write because slave literacy was illegal in North Carolina after 1830. And Talliere arrived in Wilmington at about 1857, shortly before the war began."
    "Auguste Talliere told me Caesar was abducted from his home and sold into slavery," I said.
    The waiter brought our tea.
    Binkie took a sip, then said, "Talliere was brought here from French Guiana. In Suriname and French Guiana, waterways serve as their highways, connecting one village to another, so even the children master the navigational skills required to travel from one place to another. The Ndjuka had a reputation as skilled river pilots, and that made them valuable to slave traders who kidnapped them and sold them in our Southeastern port cities."
    "How sad," I said, "to be stolen from your home, to never see your family again. How hard it must have been for them, and for their mothers."
    Binkie nodded.
    "Tell me everything you know about him. Jon and I are restoring his house. Tiffany and Auguste Talliere hired us."
    "Then they chose wisely, Ashley dear, for you and Jon are the best in the business." He chuckled lightly. "I wish my students had shown your curiosity. Now let me see. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the French colonized the area that is now known as French Guiana, establishing sugar and timber plantations there. They imported slaves from Africa to work the sugar crop. Talliere's mother was one of those slaves; his father was a French sugar planter. Then, at age seventeen, Caesar was abducted and brought here.
    "His navigational skills were quickly put to use for his owner. Yet in plying the river as he did, he earned a degree