Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (14 page)

The fact that Ted was old Mr. Toomb's right-hand man had given the family a little extra leeway. No one in town wanted to provoke Mr. Toomb, one of the richest and most powerful men south of the Mason-Dixon line, with money invested in cotton, orange groves, tobacco, sugarcane, and—that old Southern favorite—land. Mr. Toomb would stray from Ted's carefully constructed business plan and buy a piece of land, and Ted would ask why. There was never a reason beyond, “Well, it was for sale.” The last time it happened, though, Mr. Toomb put Ted in his place by saying, “I hired you to give me the know-how into the way business works in the North, not to tell me what to do.”

So Ted had learned to walk a thin line. He was still trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Up north, the best way to stay gainfully employed was to play the game. Generally speaking, this meant giving your boss all the credit publicly and then you'd be rewarded later. Ted had tried that with Mr. Toomb, and it hadn't worked. He was baffled until he began to notice that in the South an employee seemed to fall into one of two categories: You were either a servant with no rights or say whatsoever or you were “family.” You didn't have to be related. In fact, you could be any color of the rainbow and possibly be referred to as “family” by a white person (although never, Ted observed, the other way around). To Ted's Northern ears, there
was something patronizing about a white person referring to a black person (usually a longtime servant) as “part of the family.”

Then the day came when Mr. Toomb said to him, “Ted, you're like a son to me. You're a part of the family.” And Ted felt very special and very honored, until he remembered that Mr. Toomb said the same thing to his longtime, long-suffering chauffeur, who was black.

He had discussed it that night with Jackie, who was just as confused and disturbed as he was. She relayed a conversation she'd overheard two women having at the Book Nook. In loud voices they'd said, “You know, Yankees have their race problem, too. They shouldn't be coming down south telling us what to do about our Negroes.” Jackie was pretty sure she was meant to overhear this remark, and was about to say something when Judd and the twins entered the store. She had planned to meet them there and buy each one a book of their choosing.

“So you didn't say anything?” Ted was surprised.

Jackie had sighed. “I'm learning to choose my battles,” she'd said, “and I didn't want to embarrass the twins. But I talked to all three kids about it later at home. I asked them to think about it and I'm proud to say that all three of them had the same reaction. The phrase ‘our Negroes' made them nuts.”

Our Negroes.
Yes, Ted had heard it many times, too. Another common saying which jarred his Yankee sensibility was “Here in the South, Negroes know their place.” And the people saying it didn't seem to realize how they sounded. What was brazen and insulting to his ears was normal chitchat to them.

It was a huge relief to him that Jackie was being more careful about what she said and did. Three civil rights workers—two of them white—had been murdered three months ago in Mississippi. Even with Jackie being more prudent, he wished he was at
home more, not that he could control Jackie but at least to keep a close eye on her.

Jackie complained often that she hated how much he was on the road. If she was in a particularly bad mood, he would get the “it's not easy being a woman” rant. Clearly, she was restless being a housewife and mother. Well, it wasn't so great being a man, either. That's what he wanted to say but didn't because starting a third world war was not in anyone's best interests. But was it really so bad for women? It was men who were sent off to war. It was men who died in battle or came home and had to live with what they'd seen or done. And then what? A man had to get training or an education, find a job, earn money to support a family. Sometimes he actually envied Jackie. When the kids were at school she had time on her hands. When was the last time he had that luxury? She loved that book,
The Feminine Mystique
, but he blamed it for leading to her breakdown in early '63. He would never forget how she took off in the family station wagon only to return hours later in that 1960 Buick LeSabre convertible. He understood that it was her personal declaration of independence, a way of defying the “drudgery” (her word) of her boring life as a wife and mother. What about him? What if he traded in his dull sedan for a sports car? That would be the day! Frankly he didn't feel so fulfilled, either. She wasn't the one who had to put on a suit every day and duke it out in the white-collar trenches.

Ted was surprised that the world of business felt so similar to the Army. Mr. Toomb could be as insufferable as any general, and Ted was a lowly foot soldier being sent to do the hard part, or so it seemed. And who knew the airline industry would be so awful? People thought it was glamorous, but it was like running a bus company, except these buses had wings and flew in the sky
and, therefore, presented a lot more risk. The pilots were proud and stubborn, and completely unwilling to have their authority challenged. They had survived the war. Surely they didn't need “babysitting,” as they called it.

But the pilots proved to be a little too casual for Ted's (and the guv-mint's) taste. They didn't worry about running low on fuel. Crash-landing? Oh, not to worry. Did that all the time during the war.

Worst of all was the shell-shocked former bomber pilot who forgot to put down the landing gear and slid to a stop—with a plane full of passengers—near the airport terminal (as these buildings were unfortunately called, in Ted's opinion) at Jacksonville. The pilot's only comment was, “Oops. Crappy landing.”

Ted was beginning to think the airline wouldn't make it to the end of the year. It was now early September 1964. The incorporation papers hadn't even been signed—a “detail” (Mr. Toomb's word) that made Ted sick with anxiety. They shouldn't even have been flying. And yet Mr. Toomb was concocting ridiculous plans for expansion. To himself, Ted wondered if it was time to get his résumé ready, just in case.

I
didn't have my phone turned back on in my cottage because I thought I'd be turning right around and heading back to Mississippi. At least, that's what I told Jackie and the rest, but the truth was a little more complicated. First, I couldn't really afford it. Second, I didn't necessarily want to be reached. It seemed to me that if people really wanted to see me, they would come and sit on my porch. People who called generally just complicated my life. They wanted something. As Mama used to say, “Sometimes a phone is more trouble than it's worth.”

Still, I'd encounter folks at the Winn-Dixie. My old Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Stanley, always seemed to be in the baking aisle when I made my erratic excursions for the few necessities I needed. Maybe she just camped out there, every day for hours, so she could start a conversation with someone. Of course, being a dutiful member of Olde Cypress Methodist Church, Mrs. Stanley was a prolific baker. All Methodists love to bake. Mama used to say there wasn't a Methodist alive that didn't have a big ol' sweet tooth. At Olde Cypress, it was said there was never a
meeting—and they loved meetings—without some homemade goody and a pot of coffee. Maybe Mrs. Stanley truly did need to be there in the baking aisle eleven times a week, responding to an emergency request from the preacher's wife for a pineapple upside-down cake or some Collier County cheese grits. And she would have done it, too, because Mrs. Stanley was one of those church ladies who responds when duty calls.

So there she was, moseying around the flour and sugar aisle. I made a quick dash behind a display of canned green beans but, alas, Mrs. Stanley was faster than a Chihuahua that smells a chicken bone. Mama would have been ashamed of me for trying to duck from Mrs. Stanley, but my life was messy and small talk was not my forte.

“Oh, Miss Dora!” she shrieked. “I put a note in your mailbox not more than an hour ago. We just got a new shipment of Advent calendars for the children and I need someone to open the boxes and get them ready. And it's time to plan Christmas dinner for the needy.”

Advent calendars? Christmas dinner? It was mid-September. I'd been home for three weeks. To me, Christmas was far off in the distance, somewhere on the horizon. I didn't even want to think about Christmas. But to Mrs. Stanley, bless her heart, this meant she was running far behind. She was the type who started getting Easter linens out of mothballs before some folks had even taken down their Christmas lights. I spluttered, trying to buy time, but failed to come up with an excuse. I had helped her with many little tasks over the years and it seemed that in Naples, if you'd ever agreed to do something charitable, it was pretty much guaranteed that you'd be doing it for the rest of your life. You'd be in the boneyard before they let you off the hook.

These thoughts were so unkind that I felt instant remorse. I hoped Mama was busy doing something else in heaven—maybe having tea with our former neighbor, Miss Pettigrew—and not listening in on my thoughts and deeds or, sure enough, wouldn't she be ashamed of me? That was the problem with having a guardian angel sitting on your shoulder. Yes, you were protected much of the time. But it did put a certain kind of pressure on the way you behaved. To make amends to the Spirit World, I smiled at Mrs. Stanley and asked her what time I should show up.

And that is why I ended up the next day at my old Sunday School classroom, perched, with my knees halfway up to my chin, on a chair meant for a five-year-old, making lists and calculating the amount of food the church would need for Christmas donations. When I was done with that, I opened boxes filled with Advent calendars, removing them one by one from the elaborate wrapping and organizing them—as Mrs. Stanley liked—in batches of five. Mindless, yes, and yet freeing. Focusing on the simple tasks at hand, I was able to take a break from thinking about Darryl, the possibility of Dreamsville Estates, the money I would owe my landlady in Mississippi, and the important news I had discovered while I was in Jackson. News that I hadn't completely digested yet.

Going to Mississippi, all by my lonesome, had given me a new way of looking at Naples and all the folks I'd spent my life around. Sure, I'd lived in St. Petersburg when I went to junior college, and when I married Darryl we lived in Ocala. But that was all Florida. There was something about crossing the state line for the first time that made me feel like I was truly in charge of my own life. I could now say that I'd been in three states—Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Now that I was home for a spell I realized that it's one thing
to be stuck in your hometown and quite another to come back for a visit. It doesn't seem half as bad once you've been away. In fact, the familiarity of it—which had been suffocating—was now kind of pleasant. I mentioned this to Mrs. Stanley as we worked, side by side. She had smiled gently and said, “Sometimes you have to go away to understand the importance of what you've left behind.”

After finishing my work for Mrs. Stanley, I started to head home but decided to wait an hour to hear a talk hosted by a formidable group calling itself Methodist Ladies in Action. The title was “Change Is Coming to Naples, Too!” There it was, on the bulletin board, in great big block letters.

Well, this was interesting. Living in Jackson for the past year, I was near the frontlines of the civil rights movement but I'd had the feeling since coming home that time was still passing by Naples. If there'd been protests here, they'd been small ones. The drugstore counter was still “whites only” and schools were segregated by race.

I didn't have any plans. Jackie was doing something with her kids. I had no easy way to go to Mrs. Bailey White's house and spend time with her or Plain Jane and the baby. I figured,
why not?

The speaker was a petite lady wearing a gray suit and sensible shoes. Her hair was cropped short. No pretty bouffant and no makeup, and a smile that showed perfect teeth, a rarity in Collier County. She was introduced as a member of a church in a suburb of Cleveland with a quaint name, Shaker Heights.

She didn't waste any time getting to the point. “Let me be blunt,” she said. “Your black population is not much better off than they were during the days of slavery more than a hundred years ago, and there's not much momentum here. When it
comes to race relations, you're at least ten years behind Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.”

I glanced around the room, expecting an exodus, but there was none. “You also have a migrant-worker problem inland in Immokalee,” our speaker added. “Some of your seasonal farm workers are white, but many are black. And the life they are living—that includes children—is worse than anyone should be living in this country.”

This was not news, especially since “Harvest of Shame,” the Edwin R. Murrow special report, was broadcast by CBS the day after Thanksgiving 1960. That was nearly four years ago, and from what I'd read, the broadcast had a big impact nationally. It was a wake-up call to many Americans. Unfortunately, it was dismissed in Collier County as Northern liberal propaganda. In fact, I'd never heard anyone say anything positive about the broadcast here. What had changed in the past year was that inequality was no longer a taboo subject—at least in some circles.

The women in the audience were nodding thoughtfully. Something was happening here. I could feel it, sitting right there in the fellowship hall of the church I attended while growing up. I knew several of the women. One had been on a committee with Mama that collected funds for back-to-school clothing for poor children. With the rest, I had what was called a “nodding” acquaintance.

It was hard to know which event had broken the camel's back and galvanized these women to become something more than spectators, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was the church bombing the previous year in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four little black girls were killed. The idea that a bunch of grown men would murder children
inside a church building on a Sunday morning
would be intolerable to these women, no doubt about it.