Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

It’s on these tree-covered ridges and hammocks and the wet grasslands beyond that the new natives, the domesticated descendants of those early hunters, settle. Calling themselves the Calusas and the Tequestas, they begin to fire and decorate clay pots and manufacture elaborately carved shell and bone ornaments; they develop societies divided into classes of ruling priests, administrators, and workers and build communal longhouses and places of worship with cypress, slash pine, and thatch.

This is the moment when the serpent enters Paradise. At least in the Kid’s dream that’s how it happens. From the underbrush near the mouth of the Appalachee a half-dozen Calusa men step forward to greet the bearded pale-faced strangers and admire up close their shiny helmets and breastplate armor, their brightly colored pantaloons and their, to the Indians, colossal triple-decker canoe. It should be a simple matter to exchange food and other locally processed and manufactured goods with these humans for some of their steel and woven possessions. For decades they have been hearing about white-skinned people from a faraway land, heard tales of their several gods and their marvelous inventions and weaponry from fellow tribesmen and — women who have traveled overland along the canals and rivers to the peninsula’s eastern coast where the white people are rumored to have made a permanent settlement at the mouth of a river flowing to the sea from the mountains of the north. The Europeans who have settled over there are said to be for the most part peaceful and mainly interested in trade with the natives and fighting off other Europeans at sea.

It’s hard for the six Calusa men to know which of the two types of Europeans has come ashore here — the traders or the slavers. These fellows seem friendly enough however and are not carrying manacles or chains. In fact they have rowed from their great canoe to the mouth of the river and have spread out on the grassy shore large bundles of beautiful cloth and steel axes and knives apparently for trade.

The six native men emerge from the palmetto bushes and holding their bows down and their arrows stashed walk gingerly but with a basic trust in their shared humanity toward the Europeans — who draw their steel weapons and quickly surround them and clamp manacles on their ankles and wrists and chain them together.

The Kid wakes from his dream that has turned into a nightmare. He is swiftly relieved for he realizes that all along he has been asleep and dreaming. Everything’s going to be okay. But then, seconds later, years have passed. Centuries. The last of the twenty thousand Calusas and Tequestas, fewer than three hundred of them now, mostly children and old women and men who have not been enslaved or killed by the Europeans, in a final raid are rounded up by Spanish soldiers and shipped to Cuba.

There are now no human inhabitants of the swamp and the marshlands surrounding it, no one living on the tree islands and hammocks and in the saw grass plains north and east of the wetlands. From the thousand estuarine islands along the coast to the large central lakes inland the entire region has returned to its paradisal state. The mounds and midden heaps and the cultivated gardens and cornfields are covered over with trees and palmettos, and the longhouses and thatched huts of the villages have fallen to the ground and rotted and disappeared into the soil. The banks of the canals and irrigation ditches have been washed away by flood and hurricane and invaded by mangroves, coco plum, and strangler pine. The man-made grid of canals and ditches has been integrated into the swamp’s vast constantly shifting natural system of waterways, marshes, and sloughs.

Once again the only sounds and sights in the Kid’s dream are those of a semitropical world in which there are no humans. He believes that he is lying half-awake aboard his houseboat on a mattress beneath a cheesecloth mosquito net with his dog and parrot asleep beside him. He thinks he is awake. He is still trembling but is relieved to have escaped from the Spanish slave catchers and the British soldiers and now from agents sent down from Georgia and the Carolina plantations to sail along the coast hunting escaped African slaves.

For nearly a century the Kid is the only human being residing in the Great Panzacola Swamp — until he learns that there are many people besides him scattered throughout the wilderness. He’s been joined by people driven south from their ancient Appalachian homeland by the American army, Creek and Miccosukee Indians. He smells the smoke from their fires, hears them chopping trees on the hammocks to build huts, sees them pass along the streams in their canoes, fishing in the sloughs, gathering oysters from the bays. They hunt with rifles and weave beautiful multicolored fabric for their clothing. They call themselves Seminoles and this entire corner of the peninsula has become their homeland, their Seminole nation.

Gradually in the last few moments the Kid has begun to realize once again that he has not wakened. He only thought he woke: he is still asleep and dreaming. He feels an unease, a serious discomfort with that information. He fears that if he cannot wake from his sleep and break off this dream, something really bad will happen to him. He is afraid that whatever will happen to the Seminoles at the hands of the white people in the century and a half yet to come will also happen to him. It’s as if his personal history has been locked down in a cell alongside their tribal history, as if their fate and the fate of the Panzacola wilderness are now his as well.

He tries to concentrate and will himself awake. He grunts and groans, trying to make animal noises that he can hear in his sleep and that ought to wake him. But he stays asleep. He says to himself, It’s only a dream, a fucking dream. If I can wake up, everything will be okay, and I’ll be in Paradise again. Really bad things won’t happen to me. I won’t be a loser with no place to live and no friends or family to turn to for comfort and help and company, I won’t be a pathetic convicted sex offender on more or less permanent parole with a tracker clamped to my ankle, I won’t be an ex-whackoff addict and an ex-porn freak kicked out of the army and without a job, paying my way with probably dirty money taken from a superfat weirdo professor of sex-offensiveness studies who for reasons unknown is paying me to help make people think he’s on a secret spy agency’s hit list. If I can just wake myself up, I won’t be a total limp dick in every way possible. If I can only wake myself up and stop myself from dreaming, I won’t be me anymore!

ALARMED BY THE KID’S GROANS IT’S Annie’s single frightened bark and a squawk from Einstein that wake him from his multilayered dream. And while it would be truly a paradise for the Kid if when he awoke he was not himself anymore he is in fact still the same person he was yesterday when he took his rented houseboat up the Appalachee and anchored it at Turner Slough. The sole consequence of his dream is that he knows today that he’s not living in Paradise like he thought he was last night but in a fallen world and if he had a computer he’d probably be watching porn and jacking off right now.

But he remembers that he has to feed his companion animals and though his lascivious desires dwindle they don’t quite go away. He learned from the group therapist in prison that there’s a difference between a desire to get high and a craving for it and that the same is true for any addiction, even for an addiction to porn and jacking off. The main difference — according to the therapist who was explaining all this to the inmates in the group which except for the Kid was made up of drug addicts and alcoholics — is that a desire doesn’t go away until it’s satisfied but if you think about something else like feeding your companion animal, a craving unlike a desire will disappear. She told them addicts have cravings, not desires. And although the Kid mostly believed her at the time lately he’s begun to wonder why the cravings keep coming back if they’re not desires. Maybe the psychologists distinguish between the two even though they know there’s really no difference between them so you’ll use a few mental tricks and be able to go for a long time without satisfying either and they figure you’ll lose the desire eventually along with the craving and it won’t matter that there’s no difference between them.