Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition

by Edward O. Wilson

  A short distance away, on the Mall, the curators of the National Museum of Natural History continue building one of the world’s largest collections of plants and animals. They too must feel the future in their bones. Recent studies indicate that between 10 and 100 million species of plants, animals, and microorganisms exist on Earth, but only about 1.4 million have been studied well enough to receive scientific names. Many of these species are vanishing or being placed in imminent danger of extinction by the reduction of habitat and other human activities. The loss in tropical rain forests in particular, thought to contain a majority of the species on Earth, may exceed half a percent a year.

  So there is a lot for those who study the diversity of life to do, a new respectability, and a great responsibility. But that is not the reason I am wedded to the subject. The boy who experienced the magic of the zoo and museum is still strong inside me. He is the puppet master of the man. I would have followed the same path regardless of what happened in the rest of the world.

  chapter five

  TO DO MY DUTY

  IN THE SPRING OF 1941 MY GRANDMOTHER MARY EMMA JOY-ner Wilson, known to her family as May, died in Mobile of a heart attack in the house where she had been born in 1868, married, attended a private school run by her mother, raised four sons, and stayed the remainder of her life. Since 1916, when her husband died, she had lived in the company of her bachelor son, Herbert. During all those seventy-three years she had seldom journeyed beyond the edge of the city.

  My father brought Pearl and me to live in the large rambling structure that he and Herbert inherited from my grandmother. The house had a long history, at least for the young state of Alabama. Built by May’s grandfather in 1838, it was for a few years the only house on Charleston Street, though located only a dozen blocks from Bienville Square and the commercial heart of the old city. Here then, if anywhere, were the roots of my peregrine family.

  Alabama’s seaport was a small town in the early 1800s when my father’s forebears arrived, a junior version of New Orleans complete with muddy streets, balcony grillwork, creole cooking, and epidemics of yellow fever. In 1815, two years after American troops took it from the Spanish on orders from President Madison, Mobile was nothing more than fourteen city blocks grouped in a large square north of Fort Charlotte. By the 1830s and 1840s the town was growing rapidly, but many of the streets, including Charleston, still led down to what an early map labeled “low and miry land”—mud banks—lining the Mobile River estuary. The Hawkinses, Joyners, and Wilsons could ride there by carriage in a few minutes and walk over long wharves to reach the ferry slips. Often, no doubt, they just went to fish and net blue crabs lured with soup bones. The wildlands south of the city still existed in a remnant condition. Large stretches of hardwood and pine forest extended south all the way to Cedar Point, the southernmost tip of mainland Alabama on the west side of Mobile Bay. Beyond that, across Mississippi Sound, a mostly uninhabited Dauphin Island formed a line along the horizon.

  When my father was a teenage boy, just before the First World War, he was able, he told me, to step out the front door of the Charleston Street house, stroll down the road a mile or two with a .22 rifle under his arm to the wooded terrain now occupied by Brookley Airport, and hunt quail, rabbits, or whatever else took his fancy. When I was the same age in the 1940s, I often rode my bicycle around Brookley to reach uninhabited woodland and pitcher plant and pine savanna along the Dog and Fowl rivers. I sometimes paused to eat sandwiches and drink Royal Crown Colas on the two-lane wooden bridges spanning these two streams. Around midday an hour or more might pass without the approach of a single automobile. I leaned on the wooden rails in reverie, looking deeply into the slow-moving and limpid water for glimpses of gars and soft-shelled turtles. Today this land is thickly settled, and heavy traffic rumbles all the way down to a bridge running from Cedar Point to Dauphin Island.

  My father was proud of his family history. The Hawkinses and Joyners had emigrated from New England to the Mobile Bay area not long after it became American territory; one, my great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Hawkins, was born there in 1826. They prospered as marine engineers, pilots, and shipowners. My great-grandfather James Eli Joyner, who married Mary Ann’s daughter Anna Amelia, operated a ferry that serviced the Baldwin County shore out of Mobile. One November day in 1870 his ship caught fire and sank close to Mobile, and he drowned while attempting to swim ashore. His young wife was holding my grandmother May in her arms on the porch of the Charleston Street house as she gazed at the distant plume of smoke, not realizing that it meant she would be a widow. To make ends meet thereafter, she opened a private school in the house, the first in Mobile. I own her pendant containing a portrait of her mother, as well as the heavy gold watch chain with dolphin catch taken from her husband’s body.

  In the War Between the States virtually every able-bodied male on both my father’s and mother’s sides fought for the Confederacy. Of the two paternal great-grandfathers, James Joyner served for the duration of the war as artilleryman and teamster; the other was a special case, the undoubted star of all my forebears as far back as I have been able to trace them: William Christopher Wilson.

  Black Bill, as his friends called him, was a man whose blood I like to imagine coursing through my veins, even though after three generations I carry only one-eighth of his genes. He was born William Christopher O’Conner in 1816 in a family of Dublin printers, whose customers I was told included the Bank of England. He must have been a rebel of considerable fire. His parents wanted him to train for the Episcopal ministry, but he yearned for a life at sea. So he left home as a teenager, took a job as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Baltimore, and changed his name to Wilson en route when a passenger by that name died.

  In Baltimore he proceeded to take a Jewish bride named Maria Louise Myers, daughter of Jacob Myers and Sarah Solomon Myers, late of Germany. The newlyweds soon moved to Mobile to seek their fortune. Black Bill—his name came later from the color of his long beard and not from a Black Irish complexion—found employment as a bar pilot. He advanced to master’s status and eventually acquired his own boat, with which he guided merchant ships through the treacherous shallows between Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines. In the early 1840s he became a founding member of the Mobile Bar Pilots Association, a guild still in operation today. He moved his family to Navy Cove, on Fort Morgan Peninsula, where the sails of approaching merchantmen could first be sighted on the Alabama coast as they approached across the open Gulf.

  In 1863, when Admiral Farragut blockaded Mobile Bay, Black Bill and his fellow pilots used their fast ships to run supplies in from Havana. Often pursued, Wilson was finally cornered on a small island outside the harbor. Instead of being simply thrown in irons, he was brought before Farragut and his staff, who made an offer: if Wilson would lead the fleet into Mobile Bay so that it could move swiftly past the guns of Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines without running aground on the shoals, he would receive a large monetary reward and be resettled with his family somewhere in the North. He refused, crying, according to his own account,’ “I’d see the whole Yankee fleet damned in hell before I’d betray my country!” Not exactly the famously historical flourish of Farragut’s authenticated “Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead!” that followed soon afterward (or it might have been “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” or, most likely and least euphoniously, “Damn the torpedoes, Jouett, full speed!”), but good enough for a southern family in a city in which, even into this century, a sign of respect to an older man was to call him “Cap’n.” Oddly, William Christopher Wilson was still an Irish citizen at the time of his capture and remained so. And he never legally changed his name to Wilson. Had I known that as a young man, I might have changed my own back to O’Conner, the sound of which has a nice swing around the apostrophe and a pleasing consonantal bark at the hard C, in contrast to the whispery syllables of Wilson.

  Black Bill was sent off to a succession of federal prisons in New York and Maryland for the remaining two ye
ars of the war, and Farragut and his men soon got what they wanted anyway. They captured another Mobile bar pilot who was at that time fishing for a living off the coast at nearby Pascagoula, the legitimate pilot business having been pretty well closed down. His name was Martin Freeman (no relation to my mother’s people of the same surname, who were then living in northern Alabama). He and other fishermen were armed and prepared to resist a Yankee invasion, but one salvo from the Union guns offshore changed their minds. Freeman agreed to pilot the fleet, and on August 5, 1864, when a double column of monitors and wooden frigates charged into the bay, he was coolly riding the main top of the flagship Hartford. Members of Black Bill’s family watched from their Navy Cove house as Federal shells burst on nearby Fort Morgan. Among Freeman’s rewards after Mobile had been captured was the Congressional Medal of Honor, making him—I hope I do not put too heavy a spin on it after 130 years—the only traitor ever to receive America’s highest military honor.

  When we arrived in Mobile in 1941, the old house was dilapidated and the surrounding neighborhood in decay. Most of the men in the Wilson clan had either died or dispersed, leaving behind widows and spinster daughters sprinkled about the city. We addressed them all as either Aunt or Cousin, depending on their blood ties and age. These survivors were of surprising interest to my father, who at this point turned out to be a family historian seized by nostalgia and a yearning for reflected glory. On Sunday afternoons we visited these living monuments of the treasured past—Aunt Nellie, the younger Cousin Nellie, Aunt Vivian, and Cousin Mollie—in their respective parlors. Obedient to instructions, cleaned up and dressed in my visiting clothes, I kissed each on the cheek and sat on a chair to one side until I could slip away without notice. The reminiscing droned on, a recycling of the stories and sketches of the late Grandma May, Aunt Hope, Aunt Georgia, Aunt Sarah, and all their stalwart departed husbands and brothers and sons, and what happened in the lamented War Between the States, and the many things families did in Old Mobile. Occasionally we visited Magnolia Cemetery, where our forebears and their multitudinous relations and friends lay at rest. Pearl and I stood patiently by as my father located graves, checked dates, and reconstructed lives and genealogies.

  I had no interest in this world of ghosts. I considered my father a bore and my great-aunts and cousins an ordeal. For me Mobile was a place of vibrant life—not of spirits, however, nor of people, and certainly not of relatives, but of butterflies. At twelve years of age, I had arrived with a burning desire to collect and study butterflies. I was keenly aware that the city is on the edge of the subtropics and home to many species not found in Washington, D. C.

  At every opportunity I charged out on my balloon-tired, single-gear Schwinn bicycle, pumping my way down Charleston Street to the rubble-strewn weedlots of the riverfront, west to the scattered pine-and-hardwood copses of Spring Hill, south on the Cedar Point road as far as Fowl River, and east across the Mobile-Tensaw delta on old U. S. 90 to Spanish Fort in Baldwin County. I greeted the sight of each new species of butterfly with joy, and when I caught my first specimen I thought myself a big-game hunter with net. The zebra and golden-winged julia, northernmost representatives of a group that abounds in tropical forests; the goatweed butterfly, bright orange-red with a swift erratic flight, hard to net; the little fairy sulfur, average-sized dog face sulfur, outsized cloudless sulfur, all tropical looking with the flamboyant flashing of their yellow wings; giant swallowtail (and what a thrill to see how different it looked in life from the common tiger swallowtail of the North); zebra swallowtail in the shadowed woods; great purple hair-streak, a stunning iridescent gem I first spotted resting on a weed in a vacant lot; and the large Brazilian skipper, which I reared from translucent gray-green caterpillars feeding on canna lilies in our backyard—all these I added to my butterfly life list.

  During the next two years, before we hit the road again, as it seemed inevitably we must, my interest in natural history soared. I went looking for pileated woodpeckers rumored to nest at Spanish Fort, and on the way saw my first wild alligators, in the marshes of the Tensaw estuary. I scoured the riverine hardwood forests for holly trees and orchids. I built a secret outdoor shelter partly from the stems of poison oak and paid for it with an agonizing rash over a large part of my body (afterward I could identify Rhus quercifolia at a hundred paces). I hunted reptiles: stunned and captured five-lined skinks with a slingshot, and learned the correct maneuver for catching Carolina anole lizards (approach, let them scuttle to the other side of the tree trunk and out of sight, peek to see where they are sitting, then take them by grabbing blind with one hand around the trunk). One late afternoon I brought home a coachwhip snake nearly as long as I was tall and walked into the house with it wrapped around my neck. Pearl sent me back out with instructions to release it as far from the house as could be traveled round-trip during the remaining daylight hours. I owned a machete and used it to chop my way through tangled undergrowth, imagining myself to be in the jungles of South America. One day I misjudged the downward stroke and slashed my left index finger to the bone. Blood streamed down my arm on the long bicycle ride home. Pearl let me keep the knife, nonetheless, figuring I’d learned the hard way to be more careful.

  When America entered the war in December 1941, the tempo of life in Mobile picked up sharply. Tanker traffic in and out of the harbor increased, and overflights of B-17 bombers and other warplanes became commonplace. Poor rural whites—peapickers we derisively called them—and blacks poured into the city looking for work. Jobs were plentiful and labor was short. One anecdote making the rounds at the time involved a white woman who stopped a local Negro woman (to use the idiom of 1942) near her house, saying that she was looking for domestic help. The other responded: “Why, so am I.” If you were white you were supposed to gasp with amused surprise. Change was in the air.

  I was sanguine about the war, knowing that since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had already fixed just about everything else in the country, and since the Democratic Party and Joe Louis, both of whom enjoyed my allegiance, had always won for as far back as I could remember, this new crisis would also work out all right. In my insouciance I retrieved an identity card discarded by my father, doctored it with swastikas and pseudo-German phrases, and dropped it on the sidewalk in front of our house. Someone found it and took it to the district office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My father was called in and questioned by agents. All quickly agreed on the explanation, and my father, to his credit, found the incident hilarious. Indeed, he dined out on it for a while.

  My friends and I were indignant about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, of course, and we knew the Nazis to be evil incarnate. As cartoonist for the Barton Academy junior high school newspaper, I depicted a bestial Japanese soldier stabbing Uncle Sam in the back. In school assembly we sang “The White Cliffs of Dover” and other songs in solidarity with the British war effort. But mostly my mind was elsewhere. I was absorbed in my own interests and never tried to follow the course of the war.

  In June 1942 Ellis MacLeod came down from Washington to stay with me for the summer. We visited my favorite haunts, shared again our old fantasies, and renewed our intention to become entomologists. That fall after he returned home, I set out to collect and study all the ants in a vacant lot next to the Charleston Street house. I still remember the species I found, in vivid detail, enhanced by the knowledge acquired in later studies: a colony of the trap-jawed Odontomachus insularis, whose vicious stings drove me away from their nest at the foot of a fig tree; a colony of a small yellowish-brown Pheidole, possibly Pheidole floridanus, found nesting beneath an amber-colored whiskey bottle in midwinter and which I kept for a while in a vertical observation nest of sand between two glass plates. And colonies of imported fire ants, unmistakably Solenopsis invicta, were there. The vacant lot discovery was the earliest record of the species in the United States, and I was later to publish it as a datum in a technical article, my first scientific observation.

  My ener
gies and confidence were gathering. By the fall of 1942, at the age of thirteen, I had become in effect a child workaholic. I took a job with backbreaking hours of my own free will, without adult coercion or even encouragement. Soon after the start of the war there was a shortage of carriers for the city newspaper, the Mobile Press Register. Young men seventeen and over were departing for the service, and boys aged fifteen to sixteen were moving up part-time into the various jobs they vacated. On the lowest rung of unskilled labor, many paper routes came open as the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds moved up. Somehow, for reasons I do not recall, an adult delivery supervisor let me take over a monster route: 420 papers in the central city area.

  For most of that school year I rose each morning at three, slipped away in the darkness, delivered the papers, each to a separate residence, and returned home for breakfast around seven-thirty. I departed a half-hour later for school, returned home again at three-thirty, and studied. On Monday nights from seven to nine I attended the meeting of my Boy Scout troop at the United Methodist Church, on Government and Broad streets. On Sunday mornings I went to service at the First Baptist Church. On Sunday evenings I stayed up through Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. On other nights I set the alarm soon after supper, went to bed, and fell asleep.

  Four hundred and twenty papers delivered each morning! It seems almost impossible to me now. But there is no mistake; the number is etched in my memory. The arithmetic also fits: I made two trips to the delivery dock at the back of the Press Register building, each time filling two large canvas satchels. When stacked vertically on the bicycle front fender and strapped to the handlebars, the bags reached almost to my head and were close to the maximum bulk and weight I could handle. The residences receiving the papers were not widely spaced suburban houses but city dwellings, apartment buildings with two or three stories. It took perhaps a maximum of one hour to travel back and forth to the Press Register dock, load the papers twice, and make two round trips in and out; the delivery area was only a few minutes’ ride away. That leaves three and a half hours for actual on-the-scene work, or an average of two papers a minute—during which I reached down, pulled out the paper, dropped it, or threw it rolled up for a short distance, and passed on, moving faster and more easily after one satchel was emptied.