Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Unlike Lucius, Eddie was not handy out of doors, so a nigra named Doc Straughter, who usually showed up, taught him how to do the yard chores, tend the animals. Doc was stepbrother to that girl they called Jane Straughter, who was so light-skinned that anywhere else she would be taken for a white, and so desirable that half the men in the south county, black, white, or polka dots, were sniffing around her like wild tomcats, including that distinguished widower Mr. E. J. Watson and his hired man, Frank Reese. Jane was not yet twenty, very smart and well-spoken for a darkie, which of course she wasn’t, having been got upon the light-skinned Fannie Straughter by my friend John Calhoun Robarts. The Robarts clan never denied young Jane. They called on her and hugged and talked to her as one of their own, and being close kin to Robartses, the Collinses regarded her as family, too. All the same, Jane knew her place and tended to the household chores at my place, where I could keep an eye on her, so to speak.

I told Frank to forget about Jane Straughter, they looked too much like chocolate and vanilla. Made a joke of that, the way we used to, riding out of Arkansas, but this was different, my old partner was rankled. He dared to say, “They say just one black drop makes a man a nigger. That go for pretty women, too?”

And I said, “Oh, she’s got that drop in her, no doubt about it, but she is family all the same, so if a nigra with as many drops as Black Frank Reese was to go messing with her, he might be hunting up more trouble than he’d care to handle.”

Frank very much disliked my tone and did not hide it, knowing that when it came to Jane, only one of us got to tease and that was me. Sucking his teeth as if tasting a hard truth, he gave me that flat kind of look that a tough nigra might get away with in the Indian Country but could get himself shot for anywhere else.

“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.

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.