“You’re not a home nigger,” I reminded him, using that word. He looked away. With Jim Crow law spreading like a plague across America, any black man was fair game for whites out to raise hell, and a story in the papers—some crazed black man in New Orleans, resisting capture, had gunned down a whole covey of police before they finished him—had only made things worse. A nigra from other parts, I explained to Frank, might get himself set afire and strung up like a burnt ham by local men for snooping around that Straughter girl the same way they did.
“Burnt ham.” Reese drove his pitchfork hard into the earth.
Leaving the Collinses to oversee young Eddie, I would take John Russ and two of his four sons to the southwest coast. In exchange for repairs and additions at the Bend, I would settle up all our accounts from that winter’s syrup sale. As a Tolen stepbrother, John disliked me on general principles: he went along in hope of collecting his money but mostly because I also took Jane Straughter, to keep her out of the wrong hands while I was away.
Though he knew better than to say so, Frank Reese did not take kindly to my plan. He put on a kind of humble show, as was generally expected when blacks received orders that upset them. They had to act “natural,” which meant not merely compliant but eager and cheerful. Frank tugged his cap and ducked and squirmed with a hideous false smile. Not until I hollered at him—Cut that out, goddammit!—did he straighten slowly, throw his shoulders back, his dark face closed tight as his fist.
AT PAVILION KEY
With plume birds and gators mostly killed out and fishing and hunting poor, ricking charcoal seemed like the only way a poor man could make a living. And it was in this needy time that word began to spread about that shallow flat extending from Cape Romano and Fakahatchee Pass all the way south to Lost Man’s River and up to a mile offshore in certain places. Men could wade out in waist-deep water and harvest clams with a two-prong rake until they filled the skiff riding alongside. On windless days, the mosquitoes got so bad that clammers had to slather on black mangrove mud for some protection, but all the same, the strongest men dug thirty bushel on a tide. In the evening they’d go back to camp at Pavilion Key and unload their skiffs into the clam boat for the Caxambas factory.
I wanted to get moving on Bill House’s idea for a clam-dredge operation before some feller like Bill House beat me to it. On the way south on the Falcon, I talked with Captain Bill Collier, who had tended to business ever since a boy and already owned or controlled most of Marco Island; he was the one who found that Calusa treasure. Besides the cargo and passenger trade on this big schooner—lately converted to an auxiliary vessel with a two-cylinder engine, the first working motor vessel on this coast—Bill Collier owned the Marco Hotel and general store, a good farm and copra plantation, and the local boatyard and shipbuilding company.
Knowing how keen this feller was for smart investment opportunities, I asked if he had ever reconsidered going partners with me in that clam-dredging operation I’d proposed a few years before. With a clam-canning factory in Caxambas, a mechanical dredge could make a ton of money, I informed him.
Cap’n Bill nodded, squinting dead ahead. When he finally spoke, he was matter-of-fact, describing in more detail than I needed the huge dredge he was having built there in Caxambas—a hundred-and-ten-foot barge, thirty-foot beam, with a clam well forty feet in length amidships. Designed to lower an 800-pound anchor, drift back on the wind and tide on a 1,200-foot cable, then winch the dredge forward while it dumped its clams onto a conveyor belt—
“Bill?” I said.
With nine in crew counting cook and engineer, she could work day and night, Collier continued in that same calm voice. Feed the crew cooked clams and canned corned beef—very small overhead. The dredge could work in deeper water than the rakers, and the flat was so big that according to his calculations, she could harvest five hundred bushels every day eight months a year for maybe twenty years before the bed gave out. My friend Jim Daniels, Netta’s brother, had signed on as her skipper and my friend Dick Sawyer would be mate. The dredge should be ready to operate early next year.
The Falcon was running south before a stiff northerly wind. “Well, hell,” I said at last.
Collier had been watching me half sideways. He coughed into his fist. “Go slow, Ed,” he said. He lit the cigar I had refused and blew out smoke. “That dredge idea weren’t yours back in the first place.”
“Watson is where you got it all the same.”
“Young Bill House,” he continued mildly, “gets a lot of good ideas but other people always make the money, ever notice? He don’t know how to move ahead instead of talk about it. Don’t write it down and date it, show he had it first, and that’s because he worked hard for his daddy since a boy and never got no education and can’t read nor write.” Bill Collier shrugged. “If a man don’t make the most of his own idea, another man is going to make it for him.”
For once, I only grunted and shut up. He had me licked coming and going. Anyway, it was hard to get angry with this man, who was always mild-spoken and straightforward. He took care of his own interests better than anyone I ever came across, and that was because he never drank too much and always knew when to let other men do all the talking. He also took the excellent advice he dispensed to strangers. “When you’re dealing with these Islanders,” Bill told ’em, “state your name, your business, and your destination, and don’t ask no questions, cause you’re apt to get an answer you won’t care for.”
• • •
Unfortunately for all concerned, Jane Straughter was no less desirable in south Florida than she had been in Fort White, and there were long nights, I will confess, when my mind swarmed with fevered images of a pale golden shape that opened up in the bed of E. J. Watson like a sun-warmed split peach glistening with nectar.
Jane and I got along just fine, I let her tease me and I made her laugh. Since my first wife Charlie had been close kin to her daddy, I told her we were “kissin cousins” and maybe she should call me Cousin Edgar. Instead of intriguing her as I had hoped, this made her nervous. After that, she hid when I was drinking, partly because my gawky carpenter, John Russ, away from his worn-out wife, was plotting day and night to get her into bed and had filled her pretty ear with Tolen slander.
John’s two boys, who might have tattled to their mother, had gone off with Erskine Thompson to Key West, so this rawboned Russ was living in some damn-fool paradise. When he was drinking, he dropped hammer-like hints about my deadly past right at my table, then came out with that heron squawk of his while the rest studied their turnips for fear of what ol’ Desperader might decide to do. Restraining my temper, I warned him that if E. J. Watson were the dreadful criminal that Mr. John Russ claimed, it might be unwise to blacken the man’s name to his face, he’d better stick to doing it behind his back. But John was so crazy with the rut that he just hee-hawed louder, out of his loose-cocked donkey lust and twitching nerves. The sonofabitch couldn’t take his rheumy eyes off her.
Being plagued by Jane myself, I couldn’t blame him all that much and anyway his dirty tactics never did him the least good when it came to women.
Forgetting he was hitched up to Gert Hamilton, Erskine Thompson never missed a chance for a long gloomy look at Miss Jane Straughter. As for Bill House, he got hot and bothered every time he happened by and so did Henry Short, though he dared not show it.
Henry Short was a lot lighter in his skin than Henry Daniels, Henry Smith, and a couple other Henrys I could name, but we called him “Black Henry” to avoid social confusion. You sure wouldn’t confuse ’em if you watched ’em work. Short was handy with boats and gun and gill net, handy with any implement he put his hand to. He was steady and painstaking, honest as wood, one of the most able men on the whole coast. Knew his place and always courteous and quiet. Hard to tell what he was thinking, but watching him, I could see he didn’t miss much.
There’s folks will tell you nigras don’t fall in love, not the way we do. Well, I believe that
Henry Short fell in love with our Jane Straughter—it was all that white in ’em, most folks would say. The rest of us might want to rut her half to death in grand old-fashioned drunken Southern style but Henry loved her.
Jane saw the difference right away, and very soon, she loved him dearly, too, she couldn’t hide it. John Russ started abusing him, nigger this and nigger that, until I told him to save that kind of white-trash talk for his Tolen kin. I knew just how he felt, of course, because Widower Watson was very jealous, too, and finally I had to tell Black Henry to stay away from Chatham Bend because I didn’t trust him not to run off with my cook. Because I liked him, I made a joke of it to make him feel better.
Not smiling when a white man cracked a joke was as close to insolence as a black man dared to come, but I don’t believe Short was insolent so much as astonished. He never squinted skeptically the way Frank Reese did, never hesitated to obey—in fact, that day I ran him off, he never even tried to tell my cook good-bye. He nodded, touched his hat, and turned away. Even when Jane ran out and waved, he did not look back. But being in love, he had eyes in the back of his head and knew that his sweetheart was in sight and not only that but exactly where she stood, the sacred spot, because he lifted his straw hat, held that arm high in a lost and desperate wave, and kept on walking down toward the dock.
Only the stiff set of his shoulders told me how upset he was. Like Reese, this feller had guessed that the Boss wanted Jane Straughter for himself, but unlike Reese, this man knew better than to show his anger or make stupid mistakes.
Thanks to the carpenter’s calumnies, our cook stayed leery of me. Also, she was sulky over Henry Short. She hadn’t minded when I’d warned off Reese but now she came and tried to plead with me, eyes full of tears: Mr. Short had told her in all earnestness that he wished to marry and she had accepted. When I shook my head, she cried out piteously and ran away around the house.
• • •
What happened not long after that, Mr. John Russ choked to death. Having supper with me and my noted hog authority, Mr. Waller, he was eating too fast and got a sweet potato in his lung or some damned place. Turned a bad gray-blue, jumped up, and fell down heart-struck before anyone thought to whack him on the back. One minute he was packing in the grub like Judas Priest at the Last Supper and the next he was felled like a stockyard beef, that’s how quick Death had him, his mouth oozing sweet potato like the hind end of a turkey packed with stuffing.
Jane ran in from the kitchen, raised her hand up to her mouth, and whispered, “Poisoned!” Hearing that, my hog man panicked, “Anyone who says Green Waller poisoned him is a damn liar!” Looking quite unwell himself, he sidled bandy-legged toward the door, keeping a wall-eye on Ed Watson while his hand groped for the way out. “Dammit, Green,” I said, “give us a hand here.”
Jane said, “How come you don’t take him to a doctor?” There was a challenge in her tone I didn’t care for. “Well, first of all,” I snapped, “because he’s dead—he has no pulse. Second, because by the time I got him to the nearest doctor—” I stopped, suddenly incensed—“Second, because whether I take him to a doctor or I don’t is none of your nigger business.” I was defending myself too fast from their insinuations, which upset me even more. “Good thing he never crawled into your bed,” I said. “He might have had that heart attack on top of you.”
Upset, Jane offered the late Mr. Russ a look more fond than any she had bestowed on him in life. “Poor Mist’ John would died happy, then,” wept this saucy wench, to gall me. She had overheard our raw disputes over the back pay Russ had coming—disputes fired by common horniness over her own person—and might actually believe that E. J. Watson had poisoned his late carpenter, so I warned her that she’d better mind what she told people at Fort White. “Or you’ll kill me?” Her words came out in a squeak of angry fear. After that she kept her mouth shut. But a girl who can make you jealous of a corpse is probably not too worried you will kill your old friend J. C. Robarts’s beloved daughter, and anyway, no matter what she told them, the Russ clan would assume my guilt and most of my neighbors would too.
Mercifully, John Russ’s boys did not show up for another day or two, by which time their daddy was safe underground. With no family present, we saw no need to build a coffin, and by the time we laid him in his hole, enough river water had seeped in to almost float him. Resting on his spade, Waller opined, “Good thing them boys seen their dad in better days. They sure don’t need to see this blue-faced fright layin without no box in mud and water.” Still sweating out his drink of the night previous, the hog man himself was a poor color. They didn’t call that feller Green for nothing.
The burial done, we trooped back to the house to toast the dead man with a cup of moonshine. Waller sidled up to speak to me in confidence as I sat quiet in my place in the corner. “Please, Ed, Mr. Watson, sir,” he begged. “I surely never did believe them things that carpenter told about you. I never even listened to them dretful stories!”
When his boss leapt up and punched the wall, he sprang back, scaring everybody. I took a deep breath and sat down again and devoted myself to my jug, in ugly humor. After so many years of trials and tribulations, I decided, even the Almighty would concede that his sometime servant Edgar Watson deserved a little solace—young Jane, for instance. But the girl had guessed my line of thought and fled, and though I searched the house, I found neither hide nor hair of her.
In the end, I went crashing and cursing to my bed and there she was. She whispered, “Please now, Mist’ Edgar, don’t go hurting me.” What she meant was, Don’t go killing me. She was terrified.
Sighing, I took her in my arms, feeling that old sweet shiver of relief waft over the surface of my skin like frankincense and myrrh, for all I know. Her breath was fresh, she was light and clean, she had no clumsiness in her. I ran my fingertips over her small neck and breasts, over that full silken rump that until this night had played hide-and-seek under thin cottons. I muttered, “Jane, honey, why would I ever hurt you?” Still fearful, she whispered that this was her first time, which made me smile, indulgent. I was mistaken. She was a virgin, the dear creature, although not for long.
That girl slept in my bed the rest of the time that we were in the Islands, and I like to believe that after the first time or two, she was neither unwilling nor unduly horrified that a large puffing male creature was easing his passion on her person, stirring his pine house with rhythmic creakings. I never wished to take advantage of a young girl’s fear, but life is hard and it don’t relent, so a man would do well to accept such blessings as life puts before him.
NIGGER TO THE BONE
Sometimes, bound homeward from Key West, I stopped at Lost Man’s Beach to take some supper with the Hamiltons and Thompsons. Other times I would put in at Wood Key for a good fish dinner. On that narrow islet, the Hardens had nice whitewashed cabins, with coconut trees and bougainvillea and periwinkle flowers all around a white sand yard, which they kept raked clean to discourage serpents and mosquitoes, and a fish house at the end of a skinny dock on that shallow shore. Dried and salted mullet for the Cuba trade during the running season, late autumn and early winter, and in summer went farther offshore for king mackerel, shipped eight or ten barrels of good fish to Key West maybe twice a week. These days gasoline motors, just coming in, permitted run boats to pick up fresh fish and drop off ice in 200-pound chunks.
The youngest Harden daughter, Abbie, who came to my place sometimes to help out, had good manners learned at the Convent of Mary Immaculate in Key West. Abbie would arrange my parties, sometimes for as many as fifteen guests. Her folks and most of the other Island settlers were invited, and of course I’d attend the Harden parties, too. The three Harden boys played musical instruments, and sometimes I’d call for “Streets of Laredo,” an old Oklahoma favorite that made everybody gloomy except me.
Folks expected I would bust out wild, shoot out the lamps, tear up the party, due to wild stories that came back from Key West. I never did. Exce
pt in well-lighted public places, I never drank that much. There were always strangers in the Islands, fugitives and drifters, and I never knew when some avenger from the past might gun me down. I took that chance in public places to be sociable, but when outside I stayed back from the firelight and inside, I kept my back into the corner.
The Everglades was a frontier like Oklahoma, with plenty of half-breeds in the mix: if the Hardens wanted to be white, they had as much claim to that label as the next bunch. But in the census, Richard Harden had been listed as “mulatto,” and his family blamed this on the malice of the Bay people, who still resented him for running off with John Weeks’s daughter. Eventually he traveled to Fort Myers and signed an affidavit declaring he was Indian because his mother had been full-blood Choctaw (it was his half-Portagee father, Richard said, who accounted for the tight curl in his black hair). Naturally the Bay people paid no attention to his affidavit, which had been his wife’s idea: his family cared about his blood far more than he did. Old Man Richard didn’t give a damn so long as folks left him alone.
An old Bahama conch named Gilbert Johnson was the only Harden neighbor on Wood Key. Every time Gilbert got drunk, he would rue the day his daughters got hooked up with Earl and Owen Harden instead of staying home and tending to their widowed daddy. Here at the bitter end of life, as Old Man Gilbert liked to say, he was condemned to dwell amongst his mongrel in-laws, and he could endure this cruel situation only by venting his poor opinion of them at every opportunity—in effect, each and every evening out on the verandah at the cabin of his bosom enemy Richard Harden.
Like Richard, this contrary old man had married a half-breed Seminole. Therefore he felt qualified to pass his leisure hours expounding on the various deficiencies of Indians as human beings, as exemplified by various members of their two families. When his wife wasn’t listening, Richard thought that most of Gilbert’s guff was pretty funny, and Gilbert did, too: he meant no harm by it, he merely liked to rant as they watched the sun go down on the Gulf horizon.