Maiden Name: Marla Jean Conway, MJ
Origin: New Orleans, LA
Present Digs: ???
Years: 22
Accolades:
Roy Conway (Father)
Catharsis: Ainât nobody gotten anywhere in this world by sittinâ on their hands and hopinâ fer the best. If youâve gotta problem, face it head on, and if you know where you wanna go, walk in a straight line.
Demeanor: Tenacious and direct, Marlaâs temper is a flash in the pan, but flares up often. Marla might be a southern belle with all the manners and fixings that entails, but she doesnât suffer fools or mince words. Sheâd the kind of girl that lets you know exactly where you stand, and will kick you back into line if she decided youâre worth keeping, high heels and all. She can come off a bit high strung, but itâs a trait those closest to her have learned to find endearing. Marla is a woman who typically knows what she wants, and has never been afraid to roll up her sleeves, silk or otherwise, and get her hands dirty. Usually too stubborn to admit when sheâs wrong (out loud anyway), Marla prefers to show kindness in action rather than words. In her mind, words mean nothing, a smokescreen of fancy talk and niceties that rarely communicate what someone actually thinks. One needs no better example than southern high society, an institution Marla is thoroughly disenchanted with.
Word About Town:
With a temper like that, no wonder she ainât married. Makes one hell of a peach cobbler though.
Handy with a needle, and too smart for her own damn good.
That girlâs gotta prideful streak in her a mile wide.
The Conway name has been associated with whiskey longer than the south and pecan pie. Every Conway for nine generations has been making the stuff from Tennessee, to Virginia, to way back in the highland hills of the old country. At least thatâs how Roy Conway likes to tell it. What can be confirmed, is that Roy blew into the Big Easy at seventeen with nothing but a few dollars and the Conway family recipe for Honey Whiskey in his front pocket, and with it built himself into one of the largest distilleries in Louisiana. Certainly it was one of the most popular. A smooth finish with just enough bite, Conway Whiskey had a reputation for excellence in the ritzy circles of New Orleansâ night life; and a price tag to match. In a handful of years, Roy clawed his way out of the gutter into a southern manner with all the right fixtures and window dressings. But thereâs only so much anyone can do to erase the stench of the street off a poor manâs skin, and those high society big wigs always seem to have better noses than a blue tick hound. Never stopped them from taking his money though. The south was polite like that.
Personal success and tragedy have a bad habit of going hand in hand, and that was especially true for Roy. Happily ever after with his childhood sweetheart cut short by a bad case of consumption, leaving him a widower and father to a bounding toddler theyâd named Marla Jean. But damn if she just wasnât the apple of her daddyâs eye. He indulged her something fierce, and Marla grew into a young woman accustomed to the freedom of choice that money could afford a woman. Certainly she had her showing as a debutante, coming out with all the frills and pageantry expected of New Orleansâ moneyed elite, but her sights were set on bigger things. As a teenager, Marla caught the suffrage bug, keen on the idea of fully participating in all the world had to offer. Sheâd practically grown up at her fatherâs company, surrounded by gruff, independent men, many veterans from Teddyâs excursion in Cuba, and later the Great War itself. They all had stories about life and the wider world that left her spellbound, and Marla was determined to see it. So when Marla turned down a wedding proposal from her high school beau to skip off to nursing school, no one was particularly surprised. Except maybe Reggie since he bought the ring.
The year 1920 brought with it the much coveted right to vote Marla had rallied for so enthusiastically in her youth. It also established Prohibition, which effectively destroyed the company her father had worked so hard to build, a provision ironically spearheaded by the same group of politically minded women. As Uncle Sam dried out Louisiana, the Conway fortune did too, and with it many of the folks Marlaâs father had called friend. The viciousness of their rejection stung, but Marla bore their sudden reversal of fortune better than her father. Marla's job at the hospital helped keep them afloat, and Marla detracted. Although Marla hurt seeing her father so aimless, whisky had been Roy's passion, not Marla's. Whiskey was all her father had ever excelled at, and it was an art he loved. Closing the Conway barrel house, and laying off the men who worked there (some whoâd been with him from the beginning over twenty years ago), damn well broke him.
How her father got himself mixed up with gangsters isnât entirely clear to Marla, but she knew there was trouble when her father came home with cash in his pockets, smelling like a still. Roy Conway would forget more about making whiskey than any of those bootlegging upstarts could hope to learn in a lifetime. That made him a valuable asset to the OâBannion syndicate, who were amassing an empire built on shine, and partook in the sampling themselves. Roy Conway however, was no gangster, and it didnât take long for that tentative relationship to go south. Whatever prompted the dispute, they apparently needed leverage, which is how Marla found herself snatched off the street at gun point and held in some make shift barrel house for the past three days.