Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Very Respectfully Yours,

A. P. Santini

Dolphus had gotten his revenge and never knew it. That Broward permitted his complaint to be sent to his friend Watson made it clear that I would be unwelcome at the statehouse until I had rebuilt my reputation-in other words, until I was prosperous again, which in this great land of ours amounts to the same thing. And so I was forced to stand by and watch as Florida’s west coast development fell far behind the east. Nap Broward had committed most of the state’s money to his steamboat canals east of Okeechobee, while John D. Rockefeller’s partner Henry Flagler, with flags, fanfare, and fine speechifying, was finishing the last leg of his Florida East Coast Railway, from Homestead south across the keys and channels toward Key West. From his beachside headquarters, Flagler described his railway as “the hardest job I have ever undertaken,” oblivious of the brute labor done by the thousands of unknown men who worked like animals in that humid heat to make his fortune. (One newspaper reported that the num-bers of railway construction deaths in Florida were rivaling those in Panama, where the railroad company helped defray expenses by packing its corpses into brine barrels and selling them to medical schools back in the States.) Nobody wanted to investigate all that dying, least of all the U.S. government, because Flagler was opening up south Florida for development, commerce, and big investors. “The kind of red-blooded American who made this country great”-that’s what the newspapers called Flagler. There was red blood, all right, but it wasn’t his.

Our field hands were better housed and fed than the immigrants and Caribbean blacks and crackers who perished over there when Flagler’s crews revolted, forcing his thugs to bring in drunks and bums to break the strikes. Not that I opposed strong measures to support progress in this brave new century-on the contrary, I ached to be involved. But it enraged me that a small cane planter on a remote frontier river should be reviled for “Watson Payday” while more powerful men supported by the government were writing off human life as overhead as an everyday matter.

Lucius would nod politely at my earnest outrage, but next day he might say something quiet that his mother might have said, like, “I’ve been thinking about progress, Papa. Shouldn’t progress in our great nation mean progress for everybody?”

Those two men on my place had died for the common good because they had obstructed the progress of this region-that’s what I told myself when I thought about it, which I tried not to. Occasionally I came close to discussing those Tuckers with Lucius, who was still sad that he’d never heard from his missing brother, but being shamelessly in need of this boy’s good opinion, I did not dare.

Our new cane crop came up better than expected in those rain-swept days of spring and early summer when new shoots can grow six to eight inches in a day. But on the eleventh of September, 1909, just before harvest, the worst hurricane in memory flattened my cane to a tangled mat of leaves and twisted stalks. Because the new cane was still green, the storm bent those stalks over without killing the plants, and the damp weight of that green mat threatened the entire harvest. I drove Green Waller off his hogs, sent Kate and Lucius into the field, and we worked like nigras because, being broke, I had no real ones except Sip and Frank. Grabbing and chopping night and day, we salvaged what we could and burned the rest, but the new sugar was watery and the syrup so thin that I would not put my label on the cans. I shipped a single small consignment for the little it would bring at Tampa Bay.

Jim Howell of Chokoloskee came to work that year, brought along his brother George’s boy to help. Jim was the slowest-working man I ever saw, but something put the fear of God in him because he burned to finish up, get the hell out. Kept stalks coming to the mill from dawn to dusk, kept his nephew working that same frantic way, which was why that same bad accident happened again. Boy got tired, got his apron caught, his hand, then his whole arm, but this time some arm was left above the elbow. We bound a tourniquet as best we could, made him cough some moonshine down to keep his heart going, put shine-soaked linen in his mouth to stop his screaming.

Frank Reese knew the story of that stain in the front room and his expression when we laid young Howell in the boat was clear -You let a black man bleed to death and try to save the white one. There was no time to explain that with a motorboat this boy still had a chance. “Frank,” I warned him, “this is what we are going to do, all right?” Black Frank said nothing. I ran young Howell to Marco and found a faster boat to take him north to the Fort Myers hospital, by which time he had hardly enough blood left to feed a sand flea. They saved his life but he was meant to lose it. A few months later this boy went fishing and perished with his daddy and the younger children, drowned in a sudden squall on Okeechobee.

That September hurricane of 1909 tore off roofs and blew to pieces most of the Key West waterfront and the cigar factories. Here on the Bend, it took a shed and half the dock, and at high tide the house up on its mound stood in the middle of a thick brown flood that jumped the riverbanks. Kate wailed that we would all be washed away but thanks to Lucius, the kids made an adventure of it. More excited than scared, they came through fine.

Little Ad was proud of our strong house, which hardly creaked. Their mother had read them “The Three Little Pigs,” and Ad boasted to Everybody who came through how our house stood up to the storm’s huffing and puffing. When he couldn’t stop talking about it even days later, we realized he’d been a lot more frightened than we thought.

After the hurricane, the family lost all interest in my auto; not once did I take the tarp off after that storm. The waste of money made me wince every time I walked past. Finally we loaded her onto the Gladiator, took her up to Tampa Bay, and sold her cheap in Ybor City, which since the hurricane had replaced Key West as the home of the Cuban cigar.

On the way home to the Bend, I stopped off at Pavilion Key with intent to trade a gallon of syrup for two bushels of fresh clams procured for me by Mrs. Josie Jenkins Parks Hamilton Johnson, to name but a few of my old friend’s discarded and deceased. Her brother Tant, who had dug the clams, told me they were growing scarce due to Collier’s dredge. That big contraption tore hell out of the bottom, broke the shells, exposed them to the drills and starfish, and generally put those clammy fellers off their feed. I was only thankful it was Captain Bill who was held responsible for the calamity-the “clamanity,” Tant called it-the only mortality in south-west Florida that nobody had tried to blame on E. J. Watson.

Josie Parks, as she was known that year, looked somewhat the worse for considerable wear but her spirit was lively as ever. She offered me a mug of rum to seal our dealings and we nailed that mug down with another to celebrate the mystery of life. Before I knew it, this agile widow had grown so alluring in my eyes that for the first time since the turn of the century I awoke next morning in her weary bedding. And as her brother used to say, “things went from bed to worst.” I’d hardly snapped my galluses, in fact, before I got Mis Josie in a family way. “Our love child,” Josie marveled. But a love child on its way so soon after Kate told me she was pregnant promised to be a domestic complication that I scarcely needed.

In the clam camp, my footsteps were dogged by another complication, this one a young feller named Crockett Daniels, who had somehow come by the wrong idea that I might be his daddy. His confusion was understandable, since nobody was even sure which Daniels bunch he sprang from. Like many Florida frontier folk, the Daniels clan was what they call “half full of Injun,” and most of their offspring had black hair straight as a horse tail and a dark copper complexion to go with it. Some had the high cheekbones and big hawk nose, too, and this Crockett kid was one of ’em. Netta’s brother had hooked up with an Injun-looking woman and her cousin married the sister, and their kids lived all mixed up together, big loose litters. Not only did this gang look Injun but the families had that Injun custom of raising up stray kids, Crockett included.