Introduction
Dellaphina Jones
An Human [
You're thrown in the river, sink or swim; well, I was baptized in bathtub gin
Appearance
Notable Features
c Long dreadlocks (with an increasing number of silver strands mixed into the black)c A blurred brand on her upper left thigh that might have been an M, crossed with a scarred horizontal line
Personal Style
Della associates dressing well with a sense of power, so she spends plenty of time and effort on her appearance. Projecting the right face to the world is part of her livelihood, so she considers quality fashion and fine jewelry a necessary business expense (an excuse that conveniently mollifies her practicality). At work, she favors imported fabrics and intricate work with beads and lace—some of which she does by hand, telling herself with grim determination that she enjoys it—as well as elaborate hairstyles. When the mask comes off, however, she prefers loose materials, like long robes and belted dresses. A small part of her likes the idea of moving easily through the world without needing to create a presence.Dellaphina Jones
Circumstances
Currently
For over a decade, Della has owned and operated the Silk Rose Saloon in Never. Business is brisk, and while the Rose will never be the sort of establishment that draws the town’s upper crust, it’s still more than prosperous enough to cover its expenses and turn a profit. Della keeps herself and her staff comfortable and uses the rest to pay her own good fortune forward. She also sends money to her adult son in Denver, where he operates a fledging medical practice. Their relationship is difficult, and he has good reason to resent her. Sometimes he accepts the money; sometimes he returns her letters unopened.Health & Capabilities
Della is in excellent physical health. Slim but strong, she has impressive endurance, and despite her small stature, she's learned how to fight to win. Mentally, she'll never admit to boredom--there's always repairs to make or work to do for the Silk Rose--but she was never a homebody. She liked the thrill of surviving against bad odds in the back country. Her confinement to Never's limits wears on her, and while she isn't prone to depression, she does fall into black moods that shorten both her patience and her temper.Socioeconomics
As owner of one of Never's most prosperous businesses, Della sits at the low end of the upper class, precisely at the position of financial influence where no one can entirely ignore her existence. Socially, however, the lethal combination of her gender, race, and profession prevent her from rising above the middle. On a personal level, she lives comfortably. The profits from the Rose allow her to import fabrics, food, and other fineries at a level she could never have imagined during the worst of her early years. She can distribute the rest as she likes: investing it in commercial endeavors; giving it to causes of which she approves, sending it to finance her son's practice. By any measure, this is success. Being essentially trapped inside the cage she gilded for herself still chafes.Skills & Talents
c Wilderness Survival: Della can make herself relatively comfortable in bad conditions for weeks at a time, having learned to start a fire, forage and hunt for food, and build rudimentary shelters. She hasn't needed these skills since arriving in Never (fortunately or not).c Marksmanship: A skill and a hobby. She won't be winning the sharpshooting competition, but she's comfortable with firearms.
c Self-Defense: She's small and quick and fights dirty because learning any other way was never an option. She might not win, but she'll definitely make any attacker regret trying it.
c Sewing: It's tedious and she hates it, but she spent years in a seamstress shop, so she's skilled enough to make and mend clothing.
Present Relationships
c Dr. Orion Jones: Della's adult son, who is struggling to get his clinic in Denver off the ground. Their relationship is often fraught. She abandoned him during his childhood to volunteer with the Union army, and he's never quite forgiven her, so they do better with a little distance between them. He spent his teenage years in Never, but escaped to study medicine in Philadelphia, where he lived with his late father's family. He and Della exchange infrequent letters.c Rita Griffin: A spirit and a friend, Rita tends bar at the Silk Rose.
c Jo Dove: Another Silk Rose employee, Jo reminds Della of the daughters she never truly knew. She won't acknowledge her partiality (or the reason behind it), but anyone can see her fierce protectiveness.
Identity
Hobbies
c Marksmanship: Learned out of necessity, but she enjoyed the feeling of a gun in her hands more than she ever expected, so she’s kept up the skill.c Beadwork: Initially mastered because she liked the look of fancy needlework but couldn’t afford to buy it. Now she just refuses to admit that she’s spent years doing something she actively dislikes.
c Reading: Learning at all was an act of rebellion, and she still feels the tiniest thrill every time she opens a book.
c Gardening: Her favorite distraction. It gives her the satisfaction of doing something useful and the excuse of spending hours out in the sun.
Personality
Having suffered plenty during the early years of her life, Della is of the opinion that she should no longer have to suffer at all…unlikely as that might be. As such, she no longer willingly suffers fools. One of the better benefits of life experience is having learned the skills, martial and oratorical, to back up her warnings when someone tests her limited patience. Don’t fuck around; don’t find out. Customers too drunk to know better might be welcomed back to the Rose eventually, but anyone guilty of cruelty or witlessness will be out the doors without even a chance to offer an excuse. Someone behaving badly enough might be invited out the back door, where the opportunities for making amends become much more limited. Eliminating threats entirely has never been out of the question, especially where her livelihood and the people who depend on her are concerned.Past pain has taught her to parcel out her kindness as sparingly as anything else of value. She loves fiercely, but sincere words about it will never come easy, and whatever does come out of her mouth rarely matches the shape of her heart. She knows that people think of her as callous. She still prefers that to people thinking of her as weak, because few things make her more coldly furious than feeling manipulated or helpless. Just the thought of relying on someone else or begging for help makes her sick with discomfort. Even so, she’s learned through hard experience that pride is one of the least costly things to surrender. If someone she loves is at risk, she’ll lay down everything--up to and including her life.
Her trust is even harder-won than her kindness. Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it for good.
Background
History
TW: Slavery and associated physical, sexual and emotional abuse.Dellaphina was born on a Georgia plantation in the summer of 1830. Sold three times before the age of fifteen, she lost every blood relation in the process, and then spent the next ten years in a helpless rage watching the same thing happen to her own children. She hadn't wanted to conceive them. Losing each one felt like pulling open her ribs and tearing out pieces of her exposed heart, anyway. She fed the other babies of her masters, nursing the children born to their wives instead of their property. One of those wives had bad eyesight, worse vanity, and a rebellious streak. She taught Della to read to avoid squinting through an ugly pair of spectacles.
Della knew what happened to slaves that fled without a plan. She'd promised herself to never be one of them, until she was loaned out to a plantation in Virginia, and her bad luck turned worse.
Youngest of her master's nephews, Ezekiel Matthews showed a mild smile and welcoming hand to his neighbors. Behind closed doors, he stripped off the mask and indulged himself in all kinds of cruelties. Della had never thought herself capable of killing a man. But the night he fell asleep beside her, paying her no more mind than a piece of furniture he'd broken and forgotten, she realized that she'd been wearing a mask, too. She took the razor he'd left beside the basin and slit his throat. When she picked up her dress from the floor, she saw the little box tucked under the bedstead. Desperate to put miles between herself and Matthews’ body, she still knew better than to travel with the money. She dug a hole beneath a crooked tree and buried the box. Then she set out north.
Even with a head start and no warrant issued, she should have been caught. Out of good fortune or blind luck, the camp she stumbled into belonged not to a bounty hunter, but to another woman alone in the wilderness. Sukey Tabors had escaped her slavers a long time ago--right after they dragged her off the ship, in fact, back in 1783--and ever since, she'd used her magic and her wits to help other freedom seekers do the same. In Della, she saw a kindred spirit.
On their way north, Sukey taught Della everything she could about survival without spellcasting. She demonstrated how to forage for food, confuse tracking hounds, tell direction by the stars, and even shoot a gun.
They collected a handful of other escaped slaves from "stations" along their way. Eventually, they crossed over into Pennsylvania and arrived in Philadelphia. Sukey used her connections to find Della a seamstress position in a local shop.
The work was just as tedious as ever, but nevertheless, Della felt herself moving in a positive direction. Among the Free Blacks of the city, she could lift her shoulders and straighten her back without fearing that someone would take a whip to it. For the first time, she worked hard and was paid for it. And when she finally met a man who seemed worth her time, she could meet him head-on and look him straight in the eye.
Officially a trader, Marcus Jackson worked long hours shipping goods along the rivers. A small percentage of his cargo was freedom seekers, packed between the bolts of cotton cloth. Della was more interested in his Underground Railroad work than his marriage proposals, but she still birthed him a son in 1854. Orion was the first child she’d chosen to bear. Despite her satisfaction over the fact, motherhood didn’t fulfill her in the ways she’d imagined. The early years of suckling, changing, and nannying reminded her too much of wounds never healed. Even after she stood before the preacher and vowed to love and honor (but not to obey), she sometimes lay awake in the dark, listening to Marcus breathe beside her but thinking about a buried box.
She reminded herself that nothing in life had ever come easy, so contentment shouldn’t be any different.
Her own uneasiness matched the tightening tensions throughout the country. The beginning of the war came like the first crack across a sheet of ice--terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Marcus volunteered immediately. Della stayed behind, anxious and resentful, until she couldn’t stand living in her own skin. She left Orion in the care of Marcus’ sisters and joined up as a nurse. Her impatience made caretaking a trial, and when Sukey showed up outside her tent one night, offering work better suited to them both, she left the wounded to better care and struck out for the deeper South. Sukey knew the backwoods of Virginia like the back of her hand, and with the help of her charms, the Union’s scouts and spies passed on valuable intelligence about Confederate forces. After a year of rough living, Della looked forward to meeting up with Marcus’ 6th Regiment near Richmond in the winter of 1864. Instead, she received the belated news of his death at Chaffin’s Farm.
She knew that she should go back to Philadelphia, reclaim her son, and gather up what was left of their lives. Instead, she threw herself back into the conflict as if she had nothing left to lose, eventually seeing out the end of the war with Marcus’ old regiment in North Carolina. Sukey told her to go home, and Della agreed that she finally could. She had just one thing to do, first.
The Virginian roads were still dangerous, but she knew how to protect herself. The box was just where she’d buried it.
With Orion in tow, she left the upper south for its western edge. Missouri promised a new beginning, where no one would know to question either her affluence or its source. Her army connections helped her find her footing until the right property went up for sale. Those connections also gave her a partner--respectably white and male--who signed the papers and then stepped aside while she made the repairs, hand-picked the staff, and finally opened the doors to the Silk Rose Saloon.
Business started slow. The Rose’s neighbors made their opinions clear, with insults in the street and vandalism in the dark, but Della bided her time. She had funds to spare and a son for distraction. Adversity brought the staff together, made them friends, gradually made them family. When profits began to trickle in, Della could smile in the faces of those who’d tried to intimidate her. As the popularity of the Rose grew, however, its detractors escalated from warnings to threats. Della took solace in the fact that she’d survived far worse. She’d come too far to back down or give ground, and while her girls were nervous and her bouncers suspicious, she stifled her own uncertainties beneath a steely facade. Keeping her head down hadn’t been an option for a long time.
Late in 1869, she woke up smelling smoke. She, Orion, and a handful of others escaped the conflagration. Several others weren’t so lucky. The local constabulary shrugged their shoulders, averted their eyes, and judged the fire an accident, but the smugness of her neighbors laid bare the truth. Della was left with two handfuls of ash and an unyielding rage that only worsened with time. Obsessing over the atrocity would bring her no consolation--her son, the surviving staff, and her white partner warned her as much--but Della didn’t want peace. She wanted justice. And since the mundane world wouldn’t give it, she’d look outside its narrow boundaries for retribution.
Sukey didn’t want to help, at first, but the two of them shared a specific sort of pain. During the war, they’d taken a similarly distinct satisfaction in vengeance. When Della’s fury wouldn’t be swayed, Sukey showed her how to draw the circle, line it with salt, and seal it with blood. They spoke the incantations together and weathered the black fire that filled the room.
The woman in the circle looked human but for the feathers lining her arms and the backwards joints of her knees. When Della spoke to her, she bared long fangs and hissed her resentment, but she had willingly answered the summons. She stayed in the circle and listened to Della’s terms. Then she agreed. With Sukey as witness, they crafted the contract, and the demon scrawled her true name in ichor before handing Della the quill. At the final stroke, her name in blood, Della ignited like unholy flame. So did every conspirator involved in burning the Rose to the ground. It was an agony that burned clean, like cauterizing a wound. When it was done, Della felt whole even with another name branded across her soul.
She had bargained for more than vengeance. She had demanded restoration, and with the Rose resurrected on the dusty frontier of New Mexico Territory, she would restart her life for the third time.
Contract
Della traded her soul to restore the Silk Rose Saloon, originally built in St. Louis, Missouri and destroyed by arson (in what would today have been acknowledged as a hate crime). The contracted demon wasn't quite powerful enough to return everything exactly as it was, so the building now resides in Never thanks to the town's liminal qualities and deep wells of supernatural power. Effectively tied to the saloon, Della can't venture too far away from its physical location before she begins to ignite and burn in its place. She can't leave the town limits of Never.
Sealed by Charlotte Yellowhorse
Plotting
