Anyways, Msyoo sold his quit-claim to the first hombre who showed up, a man named Raymond. “Is only for I cannot farm this forty ay-caire, is only for is foking shame to waste!” We took him upriver to Possum Key, built a nice little house to keep his old skeeter-bit bones out of the rain, even tacked up shelves for all them books and bird skins, and never got so much as a mare-see. Shooed us out like a flock of hens, glad to see the end of us.
We kept the Frenchman in our family though he didn’t know it. To his last breath, he frowned and squabbled like a coon. For a while he had Erskine Thompson helping, and after Erskine left with Mister Watson, he had young Bill House. Yanked those boys by the ear and kept them scared of him, never let ’em in too close for fear they might learn about the treasure that any day now he was sure to find on Gopher Key.
That Frenchman said he never held with no Father Who art in Heaven. “Man ees made in Hees ee-mage? Who say so? Black man? Red man? Which man? White man? Yellow man? God ees all thees color? Say tabsurde! Man got to sheet, same like any fokink animal: you telling to me your God in Heaven, He got to sheet, too?” And he would glare around at the green forest walls, the white sky and the summer silence. “Maybe you got someting, Ree-chard. Maybe thees fokink Hell on earth is where He done it.”
Or he might point at a silver riffle on the river. “Looka queek! You see? That ees God, ness pa? Birt sheet on your head? That ees God oh-see. La Grande Meestaire!”
“Grande Meestaire, that means ‘Big Mister,’ case you don’t speak French,” I told my Mary. As a Catholic, Mary purely hated all that heathen talk about sun and silver riffles. Even a God who moved His bowels was better than one who jumped out at a body from all over the darn place, couldn’t be trusted to stay up there in Heaven where He belonged. To keep the peace, I’d shake my head over Chevelier’s terrible French ways, but deep in my bones, I felt God’s truth in what he said about sun and silver riffles, yes, and bird shit, too.
After Will Raymond was wiped out at the Bend, his widow sold his quitclaim to a stranger, and that stranger stayed here in the rivers close to twenty years. I got friendly with this man and took some pains to keep it that way, because E. J. Watson was our closest neighbor, never much more than a rifle shot away. Good neighbor, too, but I warned my boys to keep their distance even so. In all them times we was up and down his river, we never tied up to his dock, not even once. We only seen Ed Watson when he come to see us, and we never knew when that was going to be.
Possum Key was well inland where miskeeters plagued the younger children, and their mother couldn’t hardly fight ’em off; doin her chores, she had to lug a smudge pot. Some of them gray summers in the Islands when the rain don’t never quit and the miskeeters neither, never mind the young’uns all bit up and cryin, and that heavy air wet as a blanket and thick enough to stifle a dang frog—them long empty days of mud and hunger and unholy heat made a man half wonder if Judgment Day weren’t just another name for a man’s life. So pretty quick I moved my gang to Trout Key off the river mouth where Gulf winds blew them skeeters back into the bushes: that place was named after the sea trout on the eelgrass banks off its north shore. But along about then, someone found out that Richard Harden had a common-law wife and some grown children up around Arcadia, so they called me not only a dang half-breed but a dang Mormon, too. After that, our home got known as Mormon Key, which is on the charts today.
Way back in the 1880 census, them Chok Bay folks put me down as a mulatta not because my skin was dark but because I had took a white man’s daughter to my bed. Course Mary Weeks was darker than her husband and still is, but she was daughter to the pioneer John Weeks who passed for white, so nobody paid her color no attention. When we scrap, my wife don’t never fail to tell me how she rues the day that a half-breed went and stole a white girl’s heart.
Henry Short was here one evening and winced when he heard her say that; I seen the muscle twitch along his jaw. Henry would come visiting Bill House when Bill worked for Chevelier, and later years he would stop over at Mormon Key. Fine strong young feller, color of light wood, looked more like a Indin than I did. Lighter shade than any of us Hardens except Earl, Annie, and John Owen, and his features weren’t so heavy as what Earl’s were. All the same, Bay people called him Nigger Henry, Nigger Short.
My oldest, Earl, he hated it that Henry ate with us, said if Hardens had a nigger at their table, folks was bound to say that we was niggers, too. And Webster who was pretty dark would look at Earl until Earl looked away. “I reckon I can eat with Henry,” Webster would say, “if Henry can eat with me.” Which don’t mean Earl was wrong about what folks would say. He weren’t.
Course truth don’t count for much after all these years cause folks hangs on to what it suits ’em to believe and won’t let go of it. So them Bay people can call us mulattas if they want but we are Indin. What color they see comes down from times when runaway slaves and Indins was on the run together all across north Florida, but we weren’t nothin but Indins in Mama’s heart even after she joined up with the Catholic mission. My wife, Mary Weeks, her mother was full-blood Seminole, supposed to been a granddaughter of Chief Osceola, so if this Harden bunch ain’t Indin, they ain’t no Indins left in the U.S.A. But white folks are welcome at my table, and nigras or breeds passin through is welcome, too. In Jim Crow days, these lost rivers in south Florida might been the one place a man could get away with that, which don’t mean them rednecks on Chok Bay aimed to forgive it.
According to Chevelier’s way of thinking, there ought to be a law where any man who got his offsprings on a woman of his own color would be gelded. That way ol’ Homo might stop his plain damn stupidhood about this skin business and breed his way back to the mud color of Early Man. Said us Hardens was off to a fine start, we come in almost every human shade, all we was missin was a Chinaman.
Crackers don’t know nothin about Indins and most Indins you come across don’t know much neither. Back in the First Seminole War when runaway slaves fought side by side with Creeks, them black men lived as Indins, took Indin wives, and their offsprings call theirselves Indins today. Some of them Muskogee got a big swipe of the tarbrush but you’d never know that from the way they act toward colored people.
Our Glades Indins, who are Mikasuki, still know something about Indin way. In the old days, if a Mikasuki woman trafficked with a black man or a white one, her people might take and kill ’em both, leave the child to die out in the Cypress. Made ’em feel better, I suppose, but it won’t make a spit of difference in the long run. People move around these days, get all mixed up. Like Old Man Jean Chevelier says, it don’t matter what our color is, we’re all going back to bein brown boys before this thing is finished.
If you live Indin way, then you are Indin. Skin color don’t matter. It’s how you respect our mother earth, not where you come from. I go along with Catholic somewhat, and read my Bible, cause I was raised up in a mission, Oklahoma Territory. But in my heart I am stone Indin, which is why I drifted south to Lost Man’s River, as far from mean-mouthed cracker whites as I could get. This Lost Man’s coast is Harden territory. We mind our own business and take orders from nobody.
HENRY SHORT
Here’s what Houses told over the years about their nigger. I learned it mostly from overhearin by mistake whether I wanted to or not.
My natural-born mama was a white man’s daughter, born not far from the Georgia farm of this House family. She was still a young girl when she got what they called dishonored by a buffalo soldier on his way home from the Indian Wars out West. When she told him he’d got her in a family way, he marched straight to her daddy, declared he loved her, aimed to marry. From the pale look of him, her daddy thought he must be white; the only trouble was that he denied it. Nosir, I’m a buffalo soldier from the Injun Wars and proud about it!
This was still Reconstruction times so by law a buffalo soldier was a free American. Without no experience of bein a slave, this light mulatter boy was one of them smart nigras they
called “the New Negro.” Never knew his place, they said, so he was bound to turn into a beast and go nighthuntin for white women to ravage, same way white men went tom-cattin around after the darkie girls. But according to Mr. D. D. House, this soldier loved his white girl truly and she loved him, too. True love in such a situation was a damn crime if there ever was one, and knowin a dirty troublemaker when they seen one, they naturally took him out and lynched him. Mr. House could not recall his name except it was Jacob and the last name wasn’t Short.
Hearin all this as a boy, I crept away and wept, just crawled off like a dog and got dog sick. But I kept my mouth shut and I done that ever since.
Later I learned from Mrs. Ida House that the mother was thrown down and whipped severely but did not lose the baby as was wanted, so her daddy took his ruined daughter back. Her baby looked white so was tolerated till age four. Then his grandfather got rid of him, sold him off to a farmer bound north for Carolina. About this time along come Mr. Daniel David House who had decided he would pull up stakes and head south for the Florida frontier. That farmer was whipping that little boy along the road when the House family run into ’em, and Mr. House bein who he was, he got riled up, struck the man to the ground after an argument, and pulled that cryin child up behind him on his horse. So the owner hollered, “Hell, that pickaninny’s mine! I paid hard cash for him!” And Mist’ Dan yelled back, “Ain’t you never heard about Emancipation? I’ll get the law on you!”
Miz Ida liked to tell their children how her husband was a hero, rescuin that little feller’s life, but Mr. House did not mind saying in my hearing that he might never done that in the first place had he knowed I was some pickaninny child. “Nosir,” he said, “I would of rode right by.” That come to be kind of a family joke but I smelled truth in it.
That’s how come I got raised up by the House family and I will say that they was mostly kind. Miz Ida always told me I was better off bein sold away than stayin in Georgia with my sinful mama. For many years she drilled into my head that the one thing lower’n a nigra is some “po’ white” female intercoursin with a nigra. Before she was done, I naturally despised the lovin mama I remembered, despised her for a scarlet woman, as Miz Ida called her. This mixed me up because I missed her bad and was very sad when day by day and year by year I come to forget her kindly face. With Miz Ida seeing to my Christian upbringing, I reckon that was what was wanted.
Oldest boy Billy was my same age so we come up together from age four, done about everything together boys could do, hunted and fished, went swimming and exploring back up in the rivers. Them first years I slept in the boys’ room, but around about ten, I was moved into a shed back of the cookhouse, and Miz Ida told me I better get used to calling Billy “Mister Billy.” That weren’t Billy’s idea because first time I tried it, he hollered how next time I “mistered” him, he would punch me bloody or push me off the dock or something worse. But he must of got the hang of it cause after that day everything changed. We wasn’t really friends no more and Mister Billy got the habit of that, too. From that day on, I lived in lonelihood out in the shed where I belonged, the only nigger on Chokoloskee Island.
Nobody knew no name for me exceptin Henry but the House kids used to call me “Shortie” on account I was so small. Later years, when I grew up close to six foot, I went by the name “Short.” I was very light-colored in my skin but I had them tight little blond curls, what they called “bad hair,” so I was “House’s nigger” or “Black Henry.” There was a white man around there that was somewhat darker’n what I was. Some called him “White Henry” so folks would know which was the black man.
BILL HOUSE
Me’n Henry Short worked for the Frenchman collecting wild birds and their eggs. The Frenchman claimed that except as a collector, he never shot uncommon birds, and he liked to tell how he’d trained up boys like Guy Bradley from Flamingo and myself never to shoot into the flock but single out the one bird we was after.
Plume hunters shoot early in breeding season when egret plumes are coming out real good. When them nestlings get pinfeathered, and squawking loud cause they are always hungry, them parent birds lose the little sense God give ’em. They are going to come in to tend their young no matter what, and a man using one of them Flobert rifles that don’t snap no louder than a twig can stand there under the trees in a big rookery and pick them birds off fast as he can reload.
A broke-up rookery, that ain’t a picture you want to think about too much. The pile of carcasses left behind when you strip the plumes and move on to the next place is just pitiful, and it’s a piss-poor way to harvest, cause there ain’t no adults left to feed them young and protect ’em from the sun and rain, let alone the crows and buzzards that come sailing and flopping in, tear ’em to pieces. A real big rookery like that one the Frenchman worked up Tampa Bay had four-five hundred acres of black mangrove, maybe ten nests to a tree. Might take you three-four years to clean it out but after that them birds are gone for good.
It’s the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghosty trees on dead white guano ground, the sun and silence and dry stink, the squawking and flopping of their wings, and varmints hurrying in without no sound, coons, rats, and possums, biting and biting, and the ants flowing up all them white trees in their dark ribbons to eat at them raw scrawny things that’s backed up to the edge of the nest, gullets pulsing and mouths open wide for the food and water that ain’t never going to come. Luckiest ones will perish before something finds ’em, cause they’s so many young that the carrion birds just can’t keep up. Damn vultures set hunched up on them dead limbs so stuffed and stupid they can’t hardly fly.
The Frenchman looked like a wet raccoon—regular coon mask! Bright black eyes with dark pouches, thin little legs and humpy walk, all set to bite. Maybe his heart was in the right place, maybe not. Chevelier generally disapproved of humankind, especially rich Yankee sports that come south on their big yachts in the winter.
Home people never had no use for invaders. Fast as the federals put in channel markers for them yachts, we’d snake ’em out. Us fellers don’t need no markers, never wanted none. From what we heard, there weren’t a river in north Florida but was all shot out, not by hunters but by tourists. Hunters don’t waste powder and shot on what can’t be et or sold, but these sports blazed away at everything that moved. Crippled a lot more than they killed, kept right on going, left them dying things to drift away into the reeds. Somewhere up around the Suwannee, we was told, they was shootin out the last of them giant red-crest peckers with white bills—“ivoire-beel wooda-peckaire,” the Frenchman called it.
Course our kind of men never had no time for sport, we was too busy livin along, we worked from dawn till dark just to get by. Didn’t hardly know what sport might be till we got signed up for sport-fish guides and huntin. This was some years later, o’course, after most of the wild creaturs and big fish was gone for good.
Sometimes the Frenchman’s hunting partner, young Guy Bradley from Flamingo, would come prospect in new rookeries along our coast. Guy was quiet but looked at you so straight that you felt like you had better confess real quick whether you done something or not. He was the first hunter to warn that white egrets would be shot out in southwest Florida. “Plain disagrees with me to shoot them things no more,” he said. “Ain’t got my heart into it.” I never did let on to Guy how I was collecting bird eggs for the Frenchman. Swaller-tail kite, he give us up to fifteen dollars for one clutch, depending on how bright them eggs was marked.
One night the old man come home dog tired from Gopher Key. To cheer him up, I laid out a nice swallow-tail clutch next to his plate, but all he done was grunt something cantankerous about halfwit foking crack-aire kids setting down rare eggs where they was most likely to get broke. When he didn’t hardly look ’em over but just cussed me out, waving that shot-up hand of his to shoo me off, I recalled how Erskine Thompson
warned me that the old frog croaked at everyone just to hide how lonesome his life was, so I try again, sing out bright and cheery from the stove, “Come and get it, Mister Shoveleer!” He didn’t need no more’n that to huff up and start gobbling like a tom turkey.
“For why Monsieur le Baron Anton du Chevalier ees call ‘Meester Jeen Shovel-leer’? For why?” He stabbed at the venison and grits on his tin plate. Next he thought about Watson and jabbed his fork like he aimed to stab my eyes out. “This Wat-son! Fokink crazy man! Satan foo!” Chevelier held up thumb and forefinger to show how close Ed Watson’s bullet clipped his ear that morning. When I wondered aloud if Watson had been joking, he shrieked, “Choke? With bullet? That ees choke?” The Frenchman purely hated E. J. Watson.
Next day I rowed him downriver to consult with Old Man Harden. Nearing the Bend, I seen Mister Watson far out in his field. I edged the skiff in closer to the bank so’s he wouldn’t see us, then shipped my oars and drifted past so’s our thole pins wouldn’t creak. Damn if that man a quarter mile away don’t stiffen like a panther caught out in the open. Turned his head real slow and looked straight at us, then dropped to one knee and reached into his shirt. I felt a chill. How did the man know we was there? How come he went armed in his own field? And why was he so quick to draw his weapon?
I found out quick. That old French fool behind me had stood up with his shootin iron and now he’s ricketing around, trying to draw a bead on Watson. I yell Sit down! and I row that boat right out from under him. He falls back hard, nearly goes overboard. Sheltered by the bank, I row all-out to get down around the Bend, scared Mister Watson might run up to the water’s edge and pick us off. Please, sir, I holler, don’t go pointing guns at Mister Watson, not with young Bill settin in the boat!
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