Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County

by Amy Hill Hearth

  Jackie had not said a word on the telephone about any of this. Did she not know? Or did she not care? No, Jackie would care. She would be angry, unless she was involved in it in some way. But why would she be involved? Jackie wouldn’t like the idea of someone using “Dreamsville” without her permission, and Priscilla couldn’t imagine Jackie accepting payment for it, or endorsing a development of some sort, either. That didn’t seem like Jackie’s style.

  Of course, maybe Jackie hadn’t mentioned it because long-distance calls cost a pretty penny. More than that, though, was a lack of privacy on Priscilla’s end. With more than fifteen girls sharing one phone at the rooming house that was Priscilla’s home-away-from-home at Bethune-Cookman College, someone always seemed to be lurking in the hallway awaiting her turn. Opportunities were ripe for eavesdropping. The other complication was that Priscilla, working in the laundry and attending classes, often missed Jackie’s calls. It was remarkable how much information a nosy floor-mate could glean from a simple phone message, so Jackie quickly learned to avoid chit-chat and to leave a message saying only that Priscilla needed to call home.

  Whenever Priscilla found one of these messages stuck in the doorjamb of her little room, she felt a little faint. Without fail, she was at first convinced that something had happened to her baby. Maybe Dream was sick and desperately needed her mama. A negligent, selfish, fool-hearted mama who was clear across the state, and almost as far north as the Georgia border, studying English and sociology at a black college where no one knew her secret.

  The hallway was silent, thanks to the late hour, so Priscilla dropped her book bag and purse and dashed to the phone to call Jackie back. As always she asked the long-distance operator to reverse charges, which made her feel wretched until she forced herself to remember her baby daughter. She was doing this for her child. She would do anything for her child. That was why she was away, to build a better life for herself and, in turn, for Dream.

  She felt the same way the next morning when she sat in the back of the Trailways bus. She was doing that for Dream, too. Nine years after Mrs. Parks refused to move from the white section of a bus in Birmingham, the colored section was business as usual in Florida. Here it was 1964, the Civil Rights Act had just been signed by President Johnson, and the yellow line that designated the “back of the bus” was as bright and menacing as ever. There were times when Priscilla could sit wherever she wanted, especially if the bus was nearly empty. But if a bus driver was a bigot, he’d tell you to go to the back of the bus. Or, if there were mean-looking white passengers—and you could never tell, really, just from a glance—it was better to go sit in the back of the bus and live to talk about it. This stuck in Priscilla’s craw and she felt that familiar flash of soul-crushing shame, but again, just like those collect calls, they could be tolerated if she was doing it for her child.

  Jackie had declared that Priscilla should sit wherever she wanted when she rode the bus, but Jackie was a Northerner. More to the point, Jackie was white. What did she know of such things? It was Plain Jane, the poet who paid her bills by writing for strange magazines, who made Priscilla promise to be cautious. Plain Jane, a progressive-minded Southerner although she didn’t look it with her conservative clothes and steel-gray hair that matched her eyes. “Don’t listen to Jackie on this,” she had told Priscilla in a hushed voice on one of her visits home. “You do what you have to.”

  Old Mrs. Bailey White had overheard and quickly agreed. “Get yourself through college,” she counseled. “That’s your job right now. Keep your focus, and don’t get in no fusses.”

  These words of advice made all the difference. It was still hard. Hard to accept their charity for those bus tickets home and for taking care of Dream. But Priscilla was what her granny called “an old soul,” meaning that from the day of her birth she seemed wise beyond her years, as if she’d lived one long life already. She didn’t have all the answers, and she made mistakes, but God had given her the gift of resilience. That, and a very unyouthful tendency to be a good listener when it came to advice, made her seem much older than her nineteen-and-a-half years.

  This was an odd arrangement. Unheard of, as a matter of fact, and yet it seemed to be working. There’d been a rough patch a few months earlier when Priscilla learned that her friends had endured some abusive remarks when they were out and about with Dream. At that point, Priscilla was prepared to come home for good. She would live with her grandma and do her best to raise Dream.

  Plain Jane and Mrs. Bailey White had straightened out the situation, however. They understood that most Southerners would look the other way unless provoked. Privacy and minding your own business trumped speaking up and interfering. The problem was Jackie, who was in the habit of driving around town with Dream in that crazy convertible. She would take Dream with her into the Winn-Dixie and when people stared she’d say, “What’s the matter, haven’t your ever seen a black child with a white nanny before?” And then she’d laugh out loud.

  Naturally, that got folks stirred up. And it wasn’t necessary. So on one of Priscilla’s trips home, the remnants of the little book club had a discussion. There was a whole lot of finger-pointing, with Plain Jane and Mrs. Bailey White taking sides against Jackie. Poor Jackie had this harebrained idea that she was somehow helping the civil rights movement. Finally, after hearing them out, Priscilla spoke her mind. It was hard to think of the right words. She prayed to God to help her find them.

  “Jackie,” she began slowly. Having been in the book club together, they all knew what it meant when Priscilla spoke cautiously. It meant she was trying to think of a way to say something powerful without hurting too many feelings. “Jackie,” she began again, “you know I love you and that I am indebted to you for making it possible for me to go to college. And I know that your heart is in the right place when it comes to helping my people. But you are endangering my child.”

  There it was, like a bomb had gone off. You are endangering my child. Those were words harsh but true.

  Of course, Jackie had reacted like someone had dumped a bucket of wet collard greens over her head. Priscilla couldn’t even bear to look at her. But she had said what needed to be said.

  Plain Jane, who quarreled with Jackie on a fairly regular basis, could not resist adding her two cents. “I told you so,” she said to Jackie. “You were flaunting that baby around like that, just to make a point—”

  “Ladies, please,” Mrs. Bailey White interrupted. “Let’s all calm down and remember we are friends. We are all in this together. Jackie didn’t mean any harm. She just don’t understand sometimes, that’s all.”

  Jackie said nothing for the next hour, maybe longer, and avoided eye contact with all of them. Priscilla, meanwhile, had been consumed with despair, thinking she had been rude and ungrateful, and had pushed too far.

  Plain Jane and Mrs. Bailey White talked about the baby, how much she had grown, about her sleep habits, and how cute she was, in far more depth than was necessary. Finally, Plain Jane addressed Jackie. “Didn’t you say that Dream was the smartest little thing you ever saw?” she prompted.

  Jackie cleared her throat. “Yes, I think she is very advanced. And since I’m the only one here—other than Priscilla, of course—who is a mother, I do think I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Of course you do,” Priscilla had said quickly.

  “No one is questioning your instincts or experience,” Plain Jane said. “It’s just that you’re a foreigner here, you don’t understand how to behave—”

  “A foreigner! Why, excuse me, but I thought we were all citizens of the United States of America. I didn’t realize I needed a passport to live in the Confederate State of Florida.”

  This was getting nasty but at least it signaled to Priscilla that Jackie was not upset or angry with her. Just the entire South.

  No one, even Jackie, wanted to take this conversation any further. “Priscilla,” she said bluntly, “I will reign in my boorish Yankee behavior but I will do i
t for your sake, and for Dream’s. Not for any other reason. And not because I’m wrong.”

  Six or seven months had passed and Jackie had held to her promise. No more driving around town with Dream. The baby was transported, and taken out in public, only when necessary. And, no more comments about being a white nanny. As Plain Jane and Mrs. Bailey White predicted, the rumor mill ground to a halt. People didn’t really care as long as they didn’t have their noses rubbed in it. Their attention was focused elsewhere, on some other unlucky target.

  But now the problem had suddenly flared up again. That was the gist of the conversation when Jackie made the latest phone call. When Priscilla got the message and called back, Jackie seemed to be waiting by the telephone. “There is a new problem with us taking care of Dream,” she whispered into the phone. Specifically, she said, that the baby was “residing” at Mrs. Bailey White’s house.

  And so Priscilla had asked the college’s dean of women students for an emergency leave. Eyebrows were raised, but Priscilla managed to convey in the vaguest of terms that there was a family emergency without providing details that would get her expelled.

  As the bus pulled away from Daytona Beach, Priscilla said her silent good-bye to the little city on the Atlantic coast where people drove cars on the beach, and to the college where all the students looked like her, and no one thought it delusional to dream of becoming an English teacher or anthropologist. Each time she left, she wrestled with the feeling that perhaps she might never be back.

  Twenty

  Blast those old war pilots, Ted Hart thought with disgust. He knew it was wrong to think that way about his fellow veterans, but they were still making it awfully hard to bring civilization to Florida.

  He was beginning to suspect that some of them enjoyed rough landings. More than once, he’d heard them laughing and boasting about cutting things a little close.

  “This is a business and these are passengers,” Ted implored after another complaint.

  The pilots responded in nearly identical ways. “Well, that’s the way we flew in the war and we survived, so don’t tell us how to fly,” they’d say. “Especially since you were a foot soldier, fella. Your kind doesn’t know the first thing about flying.”

  The latter part was true. Ted didn’t even know how to fly a kite. But he was in charge and he figured these guys should listen to him. He’d have fired them all but they were the only qualified pilots who had applied. A few crop dusters had answered the ads and while they didn’t make the grade, Ted secretly wondered if they might not have done a better job from a customer-service perspective.

  On one particularly awful day, a pilot failed to secure the nose hatch on a plane flying south from Tampa. Unfortunately, the hatch sprang open in midflight, sending airbags belonging to the U.S. Postal Service straight into the right engine propeller. The result was a shower of shredded mail dispersed over Fort Myers, followed by an engine fire which resulted in a noteworthy emergency landing on a golf course.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Toomb was starting to lean harder on Ted. None of the routes, which now crisscrossed the state, were making a profit and were not likely to for months. Most of the airports were not up to par, and several lacked hangar space for planes bigger than a two-seater Beechcraft. Ted needed to persuade local officials that Wild Blue Yonder Airways would be a boon to their communities. He traveled the state with mixed results. At times, officials wouldn’t even meet with him unless Mr. Toomb called first on his behalf. Finally, Ted found his niche. When the mayor of Daytona Beach mentioned he was going on a fishing trip to Crescent City, the “Bass Capital,” Ted remarked that he’d spent several summers on a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Next thing Ted knew, he was invited not only to fish for bass by the Daytona Beach mayor but to go deep-sea fishing with the mayor of Fort Lauderdale. As word got out that Ted not only liked to fish but was quite good at it, he found doors opening to his sales pitch. His wardrobe of navy blue suits was pushed to the back of the closet.

  Jackie wasn’t thrilled with this development. In fact, she was furious. “Oh, Ted, where are you going this week?” she would ask on Sunday nights. “Shall we pack your new Brooks Brothers suit, or would you prefer your fishing regalia?”

  Try as he might, he wasn’t able to convince her that he was, in fact, working. “This is the way I have to do business here,” he would say. But she would give him what he thought of as “the look,” a sideways glance of her suddenly chilly blue eyes. What he hesitated to tell her was that he ought to be working on his golf game, too.

  He tried to interest Jackie with stories from his time on the road. Sometimes she was so resentful of his being away that she didn’t want to hear them. But there were other times—the best times—when he and Jackie talked late into the night about this surprising place called Florida. The biggest shock had been learning that the state was, in fact, a part of the South.

  From a Bostonian’s point of view, America consisted of Northern and Southern states, the Great Plains and the West Coast. Of course, there were subcategories: New England was one, but also border states (people who could not make up their mind which side of the Civil War they were on), the Deep South (a place where cotton was grown and people walked barefoot all the time), Texas (cowboys, the Alamo, oil rigs), the Rockies (extremely tall mountains), Chicago (a notable area of civilization in the vast and confusingly laid-out Midwest), California (Hollywood people), and Seattle (so far away that it was exotic). Hawaii? That was a honeymoon destination for the well-heeled. And Alaska? A place that got more snow than Boston and had an unusual variety of wild animals.

  That pretty much left Florida, a place that didn’t fit into any category except its own. More than thirteen hundred miles of coastline gave the impression that the whole state was a tropical paradise. Many inland communities, however, were afflicted by the type of Deep South poverty Ted had thought existed only in states such as Alabama or Mississippi, or in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. This inland poverty affected both whites and blacks. It was the one thing the two races had in common.

  Ted felt badly for blacks living in Florida—especially those living inland. They often had a sort of downcast look, like they were trapped and knew it was hopeless. The sorrow in their eyes reminded him of the displaced persons he had seen in Europe, civilians who had lost everything in the war and had nowhere to go.

  At least the black people seemed to be living in reality, Ted thought. He was not so sure about the whites. Like an episode of the TV show The Twilight Zone, many white people acted as if someone had set their clocks back a hundred years and they hadn’t noticed. Again and again, Ted would be told that Union troops had “invaded” the South, ending a perfectly decent way of life, and that colored folks were “happier in the old days.” Ted concluded that white Southerners, generally speaking, were looking backward, clinging to the past with increasing desperation at the very same time that Northerners were fixated on the future. In April, New York City had opened the 1964 World’s Fair with a hopeful theme called “Peace Through Understanding.” From what Ted had read in Time magazine, the fair focused on marvelous inventions that would make life better. But what good was any of it, he thought, if we didn’t fix the big problems first, like race and poverty?

  In the last year, he noted that it seemed to have become more difficult being a Yankee, unless you were a typical beach tourist. Comments were made. Looks were exchanged. Previously, his Boston accent had been tolerated or even met with friendly curiosity; now it seemed an invitation to be harassed. There was, for example, the restaurant owner in Hardee County who sat down uninvited opposite Ted and grinned menacingly. All Ted had wanted was a lousy cup of coffee and a doughnut but instead he was treated to a disgusting lecture about “the inferiority of the Negro race” and how Yankees needed to mind their own business. Ted had not taken the bait. He was expected, he knew, to get up and walk out or throw a punch but he did neither. While the old redneck droned on and on, Ted had simply pulle
d out a recent copy of the Wall Street Journal and began to read it. He munched slowly on the doughnut and, after he finished his coffee, he left.

  In his free time he visited libraries and historical societies, especially when work took him to larger cities. The territory of Florida, Ted learned, had been in Spanish hands, then English, and back to Spanish again, until Spain ceded the territory to the United States in 1821. Slavery of blacks (and also Indians) was fully entrenched long before Florida became a state in 1845. When Southern slave states began to secede from the Union, starting with South Carolina in December 1860, Florida was third in line. More than 15,000 Florida troops fought for the Confederacy.

  Now, this was the part Ted really wanted to know about: What happened after the Civil War? To his surprise, he found that black Floridians endured decades of intimidation and violence by whites that rivaled—and even surpassed—other Southern states. Ted was appalled that in one particularly heinous act, an NAACP leader named Harry T. Moore and his wife were murdered on Christmas Day 1951 in their home in the small town of Mims in Brevard County.

  One thing Ted was trying to figure out was whether he should use the term colored, Negro, Afro-American, or black. After thinking it through, he started habitually using the latter since it seemed to have been the term preferred by the Massachusetts-born Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a black scholar and one of the founders of the NAACP who had died the previous year.

  Anger and anxiety was not about race only, Ted was discovering. Longtime Floridians both black and white were increasingly at odds with the tourist industry. How could Old Florida hang onto its proud past as part of the Confederacy and remain a place that tolerated the KKK while attracting Northern tourists? By downplaying the true identity of the state and painting a lovely portrait of endless beaches, golf, and fishing. That was the truth that Ted was beginning to understand.