Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

Richard Hamilton was dead honest, and there ain't too many who can handle that. Never said what he did not know to be a fact, he'd tell you no less than the truth but not one word more. He was very cut and dried, never added and he never took away. When Leon's fool brother got all lathered up, yelling what he would do to this one, say to that one, and working himself into a uproar, his father would just set there looking innocent, like he was listening to a bird or something. "That so, Gene?" he'd say. He believed in live and let live, and if Eugene wanted to holler, let him do it. But if you asked him straight if there was anything to what Gene said, he'd shake his head. "No, there sure ain't," he'd say, and spit, case you missed the point.

Right to his end, and he lived close to a hundred, Leon's pap was a no-nonsensical old man. He wore a white mustache and beard on skin smooth as mahogany, wore a round straw hat and galluses, and he went barefoot. Pap walked away from his last pair of shoes back in '98 and his feet still thanked him every day, is what he said. His boys took after him. Up until the day we left the rivers, 1947, there weren't one self-respecting pair of shoes in the whole family.

The way Mother Mary always told it, Richard Hamilton's mother was a Choctaw princess who got wooed out of her doeskins by an English gentleman, a gun dealer, back in Oklahoma. "Booze peddler and his squaw woman is more like it," Pap said. All the same, Pap had narrow English features to go with his mother's skin, which you might call dusty. He was reared up around a Catholic mission, and he read the Catholic Bible and lived by it, too, till the day he died, and called himself a Oklahoma Indin.

My mother-in-law, she was Seminole on her mother's side, but because her daddy was old John Weeks, the pioneer settler at Chokoloskee, she seen herself as white as a nun's buttocks. She always acted like she done her man a favor to run off with him, though to my mind just the opposite was true. My husband, John Leon, was her baby boy and her favorite among her children, and mine, too. That was about the only thing I ever did agree upon with that gruesome female, and even on that one, our reasons were not the same.

I loved that big strong boy because he stuttered when he got excited, and had him a generous heart under all that roughness. But his mama liked him mostly for his looks, and his fair skin especially. However, I will say for that woman, she was loyal to all her children, even Gene. To hear her tell it, they were the only children in southwest Florida that was worth their keep. She'd say, Folks is always carrying on about how lonely it must be for womenfolk in them awful islands, rain and mud and nothing but skeeters and sand flies to keep you company. And I just say, Heck no, it ain't lonely! Don't need no company when you got children like mine!

John Leon was born the year the Hamiltons give up farming Chatham Bend and went fishing for a year on Fakahatchee. The next year they came back to Chatham Bend, but they were fishermen from that time on. Walter, Gene, and Liza was all born on Chatham Bend in the 1880s, then Ann E. on Possum Key about the time Mister Watson first showed up. Walter was oldest, Eugene in the middle, and then John Leon-they were all two years apart. Gene was fair-haired, and as fair-skinned as Leon, but his nose and lips was kind of thick, you know, and his hair had a kind of little wave to it.

Them long-tongues up in Chokoloskee called Leon Hamilton a white man, but that was just their way to swipe at Daddy Richard, who started the fracas by going off with John Weeks's daughter. The one reason Leon was white, they said, was because a white man got into the pen when the family spent that year at Fakahatchee.

Mother Mary always said, "John Leon is a Weeks." She didn't want her baby boy called Hamilton, and that was because she was a cruel and stupid woman, and didn't care if she humbled her own husband, broke his heart. Daddy Richard would have gone along according to his peaceable philosophy, but John Leon said Heck no, he was Leon Hamilton, even though being a Weeks might have made his road in life a whole lot smoother. But she made Eugene ashamed of his own father, and for a while there, as a boy, he tried to call himself Gene Weeks, but nobody took that very serious except his mother. It was his own Weeks cousins had to beat it out of him.

Loving mother though she was, Mary Weeks cared less for her darker ones-for Liza, who was coffee-color, and for Walter, her firstborn, whose skin drank every drop that wasn't white in both his parents. Walter had his daddy's narrow features-he was handsome!-but that poor feller could of passed for colored anywhere he wanted. Walter Hamilton was a loner, came and went in silence, and later in life he moved back out of sight, up Lost Man's River.

Walter Hamilton kept so quiet, and he moved so quiet, that it was easy for Gene to pretend he wasn't there. Gene spoke in his rough way whether his own brother heard or not, and sometimes I think that's the way both of 'em wanted it. In a boat, Walter was always in the bow, and never looked around if he could help it. Had his own world in his head to keep him company, poor Walter did.

Leon always loved his brother Walter, and when they were boys, Gene and Leon were good brothers, too, but as life went on, they grew to hate each other, and the seed of the trouble, Leon told me, was Gene's bad attitude toward Walter, which came from a bad attitude about himself. Once in a while one of his Weeks or Daniels cousins would get drunk and tease Eugene-Your brother Leon, now, he looks almost like a white man, don't he, Gene?-and all Gene's rage would get roiled up, he'd fight to prove that he was white till he was black-and-blue, and in the end, it was Walter got the blame. In later years, when Walter stayed off by himself, Leon held that against Gene, he came right out with it. Said, "Gene, if your own brother ain't good enough for you, then you ain't good enough for me." Just wouldn't tolerate it. We moved across to Plover Key till Leon cooled a little.

Cruel Mary Weeks claimed to be color-blind, pointing at her husband as her proof, but in her heart it was her own color she despised. Dark blood was not the poison that was passed down in the family, it was that despising.

These Cypress Indins, or Mikasukis, were Creeks same as the Seminoles, Daddy Richard said, only their language was Hitchiti, not Muskogee, they were more hunters than farmers, kept no cattle. They stayed apart from white people, and was real strict. Back in the old days they used to put half-white babies to death, and the parents, too. Today most Indins want to be whites, and seeing that whites look down on blacks, they have got so they think they are somewhat better than what blacks are. Don't matter what color their own skin is, they have that poison. Mary Weeks come down from that poisoned kind, in my opinion.

So she said her husband was descended from a Choctaw princess, and her own Seminole mother was a princess, too. Come right down from Chief Osceola, straight as an arrow. She was no kind of kin at all to any real flesh-and-blood Indins that you could point at, she would not admit to a single redskin relative that ever peed a drop on Florida soil.

This whole darn foolishness of blood will be the ruin of this country. As Old Chevelier told Daddy Richard, human beings was all one shade when they first appeared on earth, and only turned into different-colored races when they scattered out across the continents. The way they breed around these days, the Frenchman said, they were sure to wind up all one color again, and the sooner the better, too, he'd say, because life was terrible enough without this useless misery of color.

We had all colors in the Hamilton clan, and that's for sure. Jean Chevelier called Hamiltons "the true New World family," because Richard Hamilton never thought about your color. If you came along and you were hungry, why he fed you, and he made Old Mary go along with that, and Eugene, too. Otherwise he would not bother his head, he let his wife make the decisions. Leon and me, we felt the same way as his daddy, we shared our table with all kinds and creeds. For that we was called nigger-lovers by the ones that didn't come right out and call us niggers. Course folks with manners, they might say mulattas.