The Big House on the Prairie.

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Chapter One - The Lawyer - Part I

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[Soapy]

Editor's Note: This will probably be my most unconventional franchise thus far. As the cover indicates, this won't be your standard franchise reporting. However, I will be providing both a non-traditional presenting of this story and a more traditional one. You do not need to follow the narrative arc of the story in order to follow along with the standard box scores and game reports that will be posted and vice versa. I'll do my best to provide the best of both worlds so follow along as you see fit.

Let's begin this journey, kinfolk.

[Soapy]

You may now post.

[Captain Canada]

Drop alert

[Soapy]

The Big House on the Prairie
Prologue

The athletics' director office served as an impromptu green room as my family and I had crammed ourselves into the glorified closet space. It didn’t make sense to any of us why we were hiding in the first place. The jersey retirement had been announced, promoted and all of the people in the crowd had expected my attendance. Hiding us away as if we were some sort of a surprise made little sense but neither did retiring my jersey at a basketball game — a sport I never played at Waller High School.

After a complaint or ten, the organizers had allowed the rest of my family to peruse the hallways instead of being secluded away for the rest of the first half, leaving just myself and a young man I had met just a year before but now knew more about me than even my own family. He was tapping away in his electronic notepad, as he was oft to do, when he finally felt my piercing eyes on him.

"Let me just read the first page,” I told him, a smile playing at the corner of my lips, "It’s practically done, right? I mean, I don’t got that much more life to tell you about.”

"I think you’ve got plenty more life, Mr. Gurley,” he said with his usual monotone voice, bereft of any warmth or levity.

“You got a title yet?” I asked, expecting the same non-answer I’d be getting for the last month.

“The White House on the Prairie,” he quipped, catching me off guard. I tried to read his face, seeing if he was fucking with me. I knew exactly where it was derived from and the house wasn’t white, a detail I knew he wouldn’t have overlooked. I also knew that he knew that I would know that, hence the fuckery.

I contemplated fucking with him back but as I scrambled my mind for a comeback, the door to the office swung open. My heart skipped a beat until I saw the face of one of the organizers, reminding me that we’d be on in ten or so minutes. As the door shut behind the eager staffer, I couldn’t help but wonder what caused that excitement or perhaps more accurately, which face I was longing to see open that door?

My father’s? My mother’s? Keiyana’s? No, they wouldn’t be opening that door.

[djp73]

Texas!?!?

[Chillcavern]

Intriguing start here Soap, definitely want to see where you’re going with this.

Especially since it seems like we’re starting with older Booker here in the prologue. But where exactly are we jumping into Mr Gurley’s story? Are we going to flashback to the glory days? Or, perhaps, is the biographer right and there is plenty more life to tell - perhaps we’ll see Coach Gurley? Lots of possibilities here, and that’s already got me hooked.

[Soapy]

The Big House on the Prairie
Chapter One :: The Lawyer

Whether or not my grandfather was actually related to O.W. Gurley is something I never bothered to look into. For all intents and purposes, he was and if you asked anyone in Prairie View back then, it would have been O.W.’s honor to be related to Booker Gurley, not the other way around. O.W. might have been a titan in his own community in Tulsa but Booker was the closest thing to Jesus Christ himself in Prairie View.

Named after Booker T. Washington, a friend of O.W.’s which only fueled the legend and added credibility to the ancestral claim, Booker was originally from Sugar Land, Texas, about an hour south of Prairie View. Like most legendary figures, it’s unclear how much of Booker’s origin story is factual and how much of it was the spoil of the victor, being allowed to write and re-write history to shape the narrative a certain way. By all accounts, Booker came to Prairie View in the early 1980s to attend Prairie View A&M (PVAMU), a historically black college and the only school he had applied to out of high school. He lived in one of the houses that surrounded the campus, cramped with a revolving door of students that had been able to pay that month’s rent to keep a bedroom or a couch, depending on the occupancy. After slumming his way through his first year, he had developed a system. He’d work throughout the summer, mostly manual labor in surrounding Houston, The Woodlands and even all the way up to Dallas, and save up his money for the fall and spring semester so he could focus on his studies once class started, only keeping a part time job during those periods to keep spending money in his pockets.

It was at one of those summer jobs that he met Cheryl, who was also a student at PVAMU. That’s about where their similarities ended. Unlike Booker, her family was paying for her schooling and a decent home near campus that she shared with four roommates, a stark contrast the ten or so faces that would come in and out of Booker’s shared home through the course of a few months.

Booker wasn’t the first set of working hands that had a crush on Cheryl and certainly wasn’t the last. Her father, a part Cherokee man named Edward Hussey who everyone called Bossman Hussey, would be considered a real estate mogul by today’s standards. Back then, he was just the 'richest nigga' that all of his workers had ever laid eyes on. He worked his workers hard but paid them a decent wage which kept them coming back, that and the fact that Chery would occasionally peruse the worksite with her college friends. The reason she gave her father and his worksite managers was that as an engineer major herself, seeing the real-world application was invaluable but really, she just liked the attention. Who wouldn’t?

It’s not clear how Booker got Cheryl’s attention but he did, somehow convincing her to not go on a date like many of the architects and engineers that worked for her dad had asked her but to instead go on a walk during his lunch hour. That walk would change their lives together with Cheryl getting pregnant shortly after that and Bossman Hussey wasn’t going to have no working hand knock his daughter up. This is the part of the story that’s often omitted or willfully left out, not beneficial for the lore. My grandfather didn’t pay his way through college by building houses and enduring the summer heat like many would have you to believe of Prairie View's finest. No, he paid for three semesters of college doing that. Bossman Hussey paid the rest, in exchange for him marrying his daughter.

I often think about those series of decisions and the impact they would have on my own life; my grandfather getting at job from Bossman Hussey, Chery choosing to check out that worksite that day, her agreeing to go with him on the walk and the other things that had to happen just the precise way they happened for me to be here. What leads two people to come together is something I often think about. Is it similarities? Differences? Circumstances? Or something deeper, a true magnetic force that wills two individuals into not only meeting each other but create that electric spark that only love can create?

Whatever my first memory of Keiyana was, it certainly wasn’t love. The cousin of my best friend Jeremiah, she towered over both of us as kids and she wasn’t shy about using her physical advantages at the time. She’d bully me every chance she got which were plenty as she often stayed with Jeremiah during the summer, crashing our sleepovers and turning off our gaming consoles. On the rare occasion where we’d fight back, she’d punch me square in the chest and put Jeremiah in a headlock until he cried for his mother.

Even when she no longer held the size advantage, her presence was felt when she walked into a room and though the bullying had stopped, my fear for her hadn’t. You could imagine the absolute horror that took over me when one night, while at Jeremiah’s and playing a stupid dare game that Jeremiah designed for the sole purpose of trying to kiss one of his crushes, the game landed with Keiyana and us both being tasked with kissing each other or completing a random dare. To my surprise, Keiyana chose to kiss me. It was my first kiss, I don’t think it was hers.

We began dating shortly after that, going through the initial puppy love stage and then the pre-teen drama of constants breakups as we navigated both of our changing hormones. By our sophomore year of high school, though, it began developing into something serious, or at least what I thought a serious relationship was at that time. To us, it was serious, perhaps too serious for my mother’s liking. She would often tell me to enjoy my teenage years instead of getting tied down to “girls like Keiyana” she would warn me, that they were only looking to get attached to the last name ‘Gurley’. The irony at the time was lost on her that just a few decades prior, she could have been accused of being one of those girls.

Next release: 5/19/2025

[Soapy]

Drop alert

they told the boy to drop. let's see who come outside fr fr now

Texas!?!?

Intriguing start here Soap, definitely want to see where you’re going with this.

Especially since it seems like we’re starting with older Booker here in the prologue. But where exactly are we jumping into Mr Gurley’s story? Are we going to flashback to the glory days? Or, perhaps, is the biographer right and there is plenty more life to tell - perhaps we’ll see Coach Gurley? Lots of possibilities here, and that’s already got me hooked.

In due time, gentlemen, in due time all will be revealed. Thanks for joining the ride. Let's get to it.