American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  This was typical of Lena’s generosity, as it was the single area in which Jolie could be said to outshine her, and also a great point of personal embarrassment: that wild Brazilian body on a Bible-quoting holiness girl.

  “Let me think about it,” Jolie said.

  Lena went back to discussing the beach and the weather in her usual fast chatter, was slowing to turn in the campground when she added, as if in afterthought, “Oh—and listen, Jol—he might ask you about the Indians in the forest.”

  Jolie looked at her blankly. “I know absolutely nothing about Indians in the forest.”

  “Well, fine. No big deal. I just might have mentioned that you’re part Indian, and that’s what he’s here to study, so he might, you know, ask.”

  Something in the way Lena said it made Jolie suspicious. “Is that all?”

  Lena sent her a nervous little glance. “And—well, he might also ask about your—you know. Religion.”

  “Lena!” Jolie cried, as her faith was still very much a closet religion, one considered comically contemptible in town, a sure sign of swamp-running, green-teeth Hendrix ignorance.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Lena declared as she swung into the main road of the KOA. “I don’t know why you’re so weird about it. I told him I went to Bethel, and he didn’t drop dead or anything.”

  Jolie was far from reassured and rubbed her face wearily, seeing the last moments of her golden summer evaporate right before her eyes. “If he asks me to speak in other tongues, I’ll get up and leave. God, Lena—why did you even bring it up?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, expertly weaving around the washouts on the lime rock. “We were just talking about his study—he’s writing a paper about Florida Indians—the Creek, and Yuchi—and said he’d noticed they were mostly Pentecostal—which naturally made me think of my good buddy Jolie, and how the Hoyts are part Indian, and, you know, Pentecostal—”

  At Jolie’s groan, Lena’s voice turned pleading. “Oh, come on, Jol, quit being such a pain in the butt. You need to get out more. You keep hanging around the house so much, you’re going to wind up like your daddy.”

  This was enough to silence Jolie, as her father, Raymond Hoyt, had endured a long life and a hard one, marrying late and fathering Jolie on the brink of old age. The loss of his wife to cancer had nearly undone him, and Jolie was known to be his favorite. To her, he was a massively loyal and protective presence, but even she would admit that he was a strange and unusual creature. A rare Christian son of the infamously heathen clan, he’d got saved while pulling a stint in Korea and had returned home determined to convert his brethren. His mission had not been overwhelmingly successful, but he’d kept the faith and, at seventy-three, was still a formidable spiritual leader, who stood six foot three, wore a size-fifty belt, and had a cast in one eye. From the Scots, he’d inherited his height and hazel eyes and hardheaded Calvinist sureness; from the Indians, his girth and stamina and (perhaps) the mystic leanings that had drawn him to the Pentecostal movement in the first place. Since his wife’s death, he had largely withdrawn from public life, and though faithful to the needs of his shrinking congregation, his real passion lay in strange and solitary projects he worked on day and night in his workshop in the backyard (charting the end-time according to the book of Revelation, building a table-size replica of the Tabernacle as described in Deuteronomy, and just lately oil painting).

  “It’ll be one hour of your life,” Lena concluded as she pulled into the dirt parking lot of the concession stand, where their nondate was waiting by the curb as arranged.

  In an effort to appear less Hoyt and inbred and hillbilly, Jolie shook Sam’s hand over the seat, not able to see much of him before he climbed in, only getting an impression of big-city restlessness and personality scarcely contained in the small seat of the old Toyota. As Lena had warned, he was indeed a talker and kept up with her machine-gun chatter word for word, not flirting with her as much as teasing her like a big brother in a fast, urban accent Jolie couldn’t pinpoint. It wasn’t Southern and it wasn’t Midwestern; maybe it was just Miami, where he said he was born, though it was hard for Jolie to believe that such a quick-talking exotic shared her birth state.

  She kept to herself, listening with a half an ear to their chatter as the long August light played across the sunburnt fields that lined the highway into Cleary, the watermelon fields long plowed-over, the peanuts planted, and the tobacco half cut, half in top flower. The fences were better, the farmhouses sturdier the farther you went, as Cleary was Hendrix’s well-to-do relative, civilly speaking. It wasn’t half as ancient, but had snagged the honor of county seat in a moment of hot, antebellum debate and in the past century had waxed in prosperity, even as Hendrix had sunk into obscurity. Location had much to do with it: Cleary was well inside the old Plantation Belt and had proximity to that old trifecta of transportation: railroad, river, and the Spanish Trail. The politics of the day had followed the money, and Cleary was always richer, and more typically Southern, than Hendrix, with a thriving patrician class that had produced senators, a hard-luck governor, and a row of fine old houses on Main Street, which had in a more whimsical time been christened Silk Stocking Row.

  The City Café was across the street from the courthouse, tucked away in the corner of a row of brick fronts, a line of customers usually trailing down the sidewalk, though this early in the evening there wasn’t a wait. Jolie got out first, and the moment she laid eyes on Sam Lense, in the long summer light, she immediately pinned him as ethnic—either Cuban or Jewish, or maybe Greek. His hair was too dark for him to be strictly white, his complexion as olive as Lena’s, though his eyes were lighter, a curious, luminous gray. Light-eyed, they’d call him in Hendrix, and well fed. Not fat, but stocky and solidly built. Except for the light eyes, he could have been one of her thousand cousins.

  If he noticed her close scrutiny, he didn’t comment on it, all his attention on the dusty slice of downtown around them. He perused it all—the brick walls and hot asphalt and plate windows—with a sort of masculine energy strange to her; not booted and Stetsoned and overtly macho, but open and alight with curiosity, as if he’d been waiting all his life to see downtown Cleary and couldn’t believe he was finally here!

  He seemed particularly fascinated by the courthouse across the street—an imposing, old Victorian fortress of a building, with a domed cupola and stone pillars. It stood in a modest municipal copse of sagging, old live oak, bent of limb and dragging to the ground with beards of Spanish moss. In as classic a Southern scene as any historian could ask, a bronzed and grimed CSA soldier kept watch in the corner, peering down his musket barrel with sightless eyes. Sam seemed fixated by the common enough view and surveyed it with great interest, till Lena finally finished her primping and joined him on the sidewalk with a chipper “Ready?”

  He came to himself then, as if he hadn’t heard her, tipping his head to the corner oak and answering with offhanded sureness, “They once lynched a man from that oak—the big one, in the corner. They killed him in Hendrix but dragged his body back to hang at the courthouse. See? They sawed off the limb a few years ago, on orders from the City Commission. You can see the scar. Tourists were coming to gawk at it.”

  Lena and Jolie obediently paused to squint into the failing sun at the gnarled, graceful, old live oak that was indeed missing a lower limb, the scar plainly visible, even two blocks away. The lynching he alluded to was well-known in Hendrix where it had all begun—so commonplace neither of them chimed in, but just stood there staring obediently as he concluded in that mild, instructive voice, “Happened in ’38—nightmare business. Historically speaking, it’s the county’s single claim to fame.”

  He seemed content to point it out and made no more of it. He just followed along, holding the door as they entered the sizzling glory of the old Formica-and-linoleum café, frequented by fans of grease and good value. Lena led them to a booth in the back, tucked away beneath an air-conditioning vent that was delightfully c
old, but hummed like a nuclear reactor, Jolie sliding in on one side, with Sam across and Lena beside him.

  “It looks like a dump,” Lena said, raising her voice to explain, “but the shrimp is famous. They bring it up from Apalachicola, fresh every day.”

  Sam looked more intrigued by the grime than disgusted, taking in the beehived waitress, the rattling old jukebox, and fellow customers with that air of careful scrutiny, as if he were a developer weighing an investment. He allowed Lena to order for them, and when the waitress reappeared with tall plastic tumblers of diabetes-inducing sweet tea, he finished his inspection of the café and turned his bright eyes on Jolie, eyeing her with equal, discomfiting interest.

  “So, Jolie?” he called across the table. “You’re really a Hoyt? On your mother’s side, or your father’s?”

  “Both,” she answered, because she was. Her parents had grown up in Hendrix and married within the faith, which meant they were distant cousins, as were their parents before them.

  Such an accommodation was once standard in insular church communities in the South, though it was unthinkingly hilarious to Sam and Lena, who burst into laughter.

  “Incest is best,” Lena said, a common enough gibe around Hendrix, one Jolie had never found to be hilarious (and neither would Lena have if she had been Hendrix-born).

  Jolie bore her irritation with little grace, so visibly that Sam sobered up quickly and tried to make amends with a little small talk. “So are you a mere babe in high school, too?”

  He asked it as an obvious icebreaker, but Jolie was not so easily drawn out, offering nothing in answer but a slow shake of her head, so that Lena jumped in and answered aside, as if Jolie were a deaf-mute.

  “Jolie graduated in May—she’s going to Chipola.”

  “Never heard of it,” he murmured, unwittingly putting himself back on thin ice, as Jolie’s form rejection from Savannah was still a sensitive subject.

  “It’s the community college, in Marianna,” Lena raised her voice to explain, with a wary eye at Jolie. “It’s where everybody around here goes.”

  “Everybody poor,” Jolie clarified, tired of Lena’s obsessive smoothing and wanting him to understand immediately, unequivocally, that she might be an eighteen-year-old hillbilly half-wit, but she knew who she was; she didn’t need some expert from the university to come in and tell her.

  The silence that followed wasn’t as insulted as it was thoughtful. Sam’s expression returned to one of benign scrutiny as he met Jolie’s eyes across the table, though Lena was plainly tired of Jolie’s childishness and mouthed in great exasperation, “Lighten up.”

  Jolie’s guilt trigger was nearly as itchy as her defensiveness, and she immediately backed off, pink-cheeked and embarrassed, thinking she was getting as bad as Carl in the game of head-butting defiance. It was the Hoyt in her. It was genetic.

  The waitress returned with three heaping plates of fried shrimp before the silence could build. There were none of the usual sides—no salad or hush puppies or cheese grits, just a never-ending plate of golden shrimp and home fries and their own cocktail sauce that was spicier than store brands, infused with the heat of horseradish and red pepper.

  “I hope you aren’t allergic to shellfish,” Lena chirped merrily, trying to reclaim their earlier ease, though Sam Lense seemed to have realized he wasn’t in altogether congenial company and was, on his own side, not so easily drawn out. Lena was forced to carry the weight of conversation as best she could, till finally, in desperation, she called across the table, “Well, Jol—Sam’s here to study the Indians—couldn’t remember which kind,” she allowed with charming honesty, “but Jolie knows because the Hoyts—they’re Indian. Everybody says so. What kind?”

  Jolie’s father would just as soon have discussed birth control with her as his purported Indian blood, but in an effort to be agreeable she answered gamely, “Don’t know—maybe Cherokee, or Blackfeet,” she offered vaguely, as they were names she had heard bandied about by her cousins, who were a lot more into the ethnic variations than the old folk. She paused to let the Professional Indian Hunter jump in and instruct her, but he only plowed through his shrimp, raising an unconsciously doubting eyebrow at the mention of the mythic Cherokee, but keeping his own counsel.

  Lena refused to be drawn in, forcing Jolie to range further afield, offering with even less confidence, “Though Big Mama and Uncle Ott, and Daddy—they say the Hoyts, we aren’t Indian at all; we’re really from Alabama. That we’re—”

  Before she could get it out, Sam made a noise and lifted a hand in warning, as if unable to sit silent while she offered any more homespun theories of origin. “I bet you fifty bucks I can tell you what your Big Mama said you were. I’ll bet you a thousand.”

  Jolie was taken aback by his outburst, equally sure he couldn’t, but forbidden to gamble by reasons of faith.

  “I don’t have fifty dollars,” she said.

  He gamely flipped a fried shrimp on the table between them. “I’ll bet you this shrimp I can tell you what your grandmother said you were.”

  Something in his sureness made her hesitate, though Lena was all for it. “Oh, come on, Jol. It’s all-you-can-eat, who cares?”

  Jolie met his eye a moment, then flipped a shrimp on the table. “Deal,” she said, then sat back and waited with a fair amount of certainty for him to name some obscure local tribe that would be a good educated guess. And completely wrong.

  He seemed to take a lot of enjoyment in her confidence, making a great show of wiping his mouth, then leaning in and confiding in that mild, instructive voice, “Little Black Dutch.”

  The confidence was wiped from Jolie’s face in an instant, making her blink at him in wonder, while Lena asked, “Is he right, Jol? The Hoyts are Dutch?”

  Jolie kept staring at him as she answered aside, “So they say,” and to Sam, “How the heck did you know that?”

  He looked sincerely pleased at her astonishment, picking up his winnings from the table and popping them in his mouth with great enjoyment. “Well, I do have a much sought-after degree in Florida history from UF—approximately worth the paper it’s printed on,” he allowed, “and it’s a fairly common colloquial term in the South, supposedly coined by Sephardic Jews when they were kicked off the Iberian Peninsula in the 1500s. They settled in Holland and created this mythical ethnic identity to explain their lack of height and dark hair and skin. They imported it with them to colonial America, and it really caught on in the South, became a convenient little ethnic dodge—the way mulattoes, half bloods, Turkish sailors, and anyone of color could outwit soldiers and census takers and pass for white in the days of slavery and Indian removal—and the Blackfoot are Canadian, in the upper Plains. There isn’t a Black feet tribe. It’s just another variation—Black Irish, Blackfeet, Black Dutch—they’re ethnic PR, indigenous to the South. They don’t exist.”

  Jolie had never heard of such a thing in her life and just blinked at him in wonder, though Lena asked, “What d’you mean, they don’t exist? What are they? Ghosts?”

  Sam didn’t laugh at the gibe, but thoughtfully deposited a shrimp tail on his plate. “The Black Dutch are. The Muskogee Creek do exist, and are the flavor of the month, as far as Florida Indians are concerned, thanks to their very flexible cousins, the Seminole. None of them are actual aborigines, but a remnant of the Hitachi and Yuchi and all the little tribes of the Southeast, who were driven south by colonial expansion to the swamps on the Choctawhatchee and the Apalachicola. The Creek are trying for federal recognition, and one of my jobs is to track down the surnames from the last Creek census in 1834. Thought it’d be easy, but when I show up at their door and so much as whisper they’re not a hundred percent Scot-Irish, I get this blank, hostile look, like I’m one of Jackson’s soldiers on horseback.” He pointed a shrimp at Jolie. “Just like that icy stare you were giving me a while ago when I made the crack about your college. I’ve never met an isolate group with such an ethnic chip on their shoulder,” he mused. “G
od, they make the Tutsi look congenial.”

  The flush on Jolie’s face was so comically guilty that Lena burst into laughter, though Sam didn’t press the matter. He just grinned at Jolie’s discomfort, then picked up his glass of tea and raised it above the table in a toast. “To the Lower Creek Nation,” he intoned, “and Big Mama, one of history’s great survivors. May her grandchildren haunt the swamp till the end of their days, and Old Hickory be her yard boy in the Great Hereafter.”

  There was no mockery in his face, just a genuine offer of something. Jolie was too inexperienced at the art of courtship to understand exactly what. But the sensation was far from unpleasant, and after a moment she lifted her glass and gamely clicked it.

  Lena joined them and, once peace was declared, dominated the conversation with her usual élan, till the shrimp was gone and the tea glasses refilled so many times that the waitress began giving them the eye. Lena was flying high on caffeine and white sugar by then, and after they settled their bill and returned to the steaming sidewalk, she linked arms with Jolie on one side, Sam on the other, and announced that she simply must have one final Dilly bar before she left Florida for good.

  So what began as an evening of new faces and adventure quickly took on the languor of a hundred other small-town Friday nights, even ending in the same place as they had all the Friday nights that preceded it—in the oily parking lot of the local IGA, where it was customary to park facing the highway and wave at the passing traffic. With Jolie on one side and Sam on the other, Lena sat perched on the hood of her mother’s car and, between waving at honks and going out to say good-bye to well-wishers, chattered like a magpie, telling them every last detail of her future in Savannah.