Shadow Country (97 page)

By 1900, Tampa Bay had its first automobiles and cobbled streets where shod horse hooves might skitter on the fresh manure. The Tampa Electric Company had more business than it could handle, and the cigar industry was booming, with over two hundred small factories at Ybor City. To avoid complications at Fort Myers, I conscripted field hands in the Scrub, a makeshift settlement east of Ybor where black folks huddled in their shacks in the scrub palmetto, but my business dealings took place mostly in saloons.

One afternoon, forsaking the saloon to pick up my supplies at Knight & Wall Hardware, I grew somewhat impatient with the clerk, who kept the line waiting while he demonstrated some silliness he'd picked up at the dancing school. To command his attention, I stepped forth, drew my revolver, and fired holes into the floor around his shoe. “If you prance as fancy as you talk,” said I, “let's see you prove it.” Someone ran out, the deputies arrived, and after I was overpowered, I was marched to jail. One deputy said, “I'm sorry, Ed, but nobody saw no fun in that exceptin you.”

Tampa Bay was becoming a large port where few folks knew me; when I grew unruly, Fort Myers rarely heard about it. However, my luck had now started to change, because news of this episode reached Fort Myers before I did.

As everyone knows, Americans love a desperado, not the scurvy villain with a scar but the suave rascal of style and courtly manner. Having lawman made a dangerous reputation at Key West and Tampa, I couldn't walk the street without folks pointing. Almost overnight, Mr. E. J. Watson had become the most celebrated citizen in town after Tom Edison—or perhaps the most notorious, as Jim Cole liked to say, trying to bend things in the Langfords' favor in the transactions over the terms of Carrie's marriage.

Cole had already seen to it that I was no longer welcome in the business circle and now it appeared that he'd persuaded the Langford family that a fugitive from justice and accused murderer could not be permitted to be seen at a decent wedding. Though Carrie assured them I was not Belle's killer, the social pressures finally proved too much, and in the end, it was suggested on behalf of both families that I stay away from my beloved daughter's wedding. As sad as I had ever seen her, Mandy agreed with the request, adding, however, that she would abide by whatever her husband decided.

I was too shocked to speak about this sensibly: if I was unwelcome, I would not attend the wedding with my family, but I might damn well invade it and outrage them all. Of course I did not really wish to do that, and to make certain I didn't, I stalked out of the house and went down to the boat, intending to go home to Chatham River. “We're sailing,” I told Sonborn, coming aboard. Without a word, he set about preparing to cast off.

In my angry haste to raise the sail as the schooner drifted free, I tangled the halyards, fouled the boom: the sail hung at a crazy angle like a huge broken white wing. I bellowed at Sonborn to get his ass up the damned mast and clear that mess in a hurry only to discover that he'd spotted my blunder before I could try to blame him for it and was already scrambling aloft. The boom came clear and the sail snapped to; my son hung on as the ship righted herself and I hauled her taut to a scattering of whistles and rude waterfront applause as Sonborn, still aloft, paused to get a breath. This boy had learned his job, he was an able-bodied seaman. Why couldn't I praise him or at least thank him? I could not.

As if this humiliation weren't enough, my daughter chose this moment to come flying down the dock in tears, not to invite me to the wedding but only so she could call out that her heart was broken, that she loved her Papa and would miss him dreadfully at the altar and so on and so forth and good-bye, good-bye. Waving, she thrashed her arms wildly with a hanky in each hand.

Sonborn's hand, not mine, rose in a small wave of farewell. Did he actually believe Carrie was waving to him? Or had he taken pity on her, seeing her wave falter in the empty air, unanswered? I suppose he meant well but it seemed pathetic any way you look at it.

I turned my back on Carrie, yelling at my son to jump to it, get those lines coiled, clear the deck. I really don't know what I yelled but I do know I was glad later that Mandy had not been a witness.

I never knew why Sonborn stayed with me for that voyage home instead of attending the wedding as his sister wished; it never occurred to me until years later that he might have done that for the same reason he had waved to Carrie, to support his father out of kindness but also because he longed to believe he belonged in this family. In any case, we never spoke on that long voyage south.

BLOOD SHADOW

Down in the Islands, “we were coughing up the dust of our nation's progress,” said C. G. McKinney. The only memorial to our brave victory in the Spanish War was the mahogany in Everglade that was planted by the Storter family at the trading post. That tree promised to last a good deal longer than all the crepe, flags, bombast, and parades.

With my wife in Fort Myers and Netta gone, I installed Tant Jenkins's sister as the housekeeper at Chatham Bend. Josie Jenkins was small and kind of pretty with her Cherokee mother's dark brown eyes. “Our daddy Mr. Ludis Jenkins loved his Injun Seleta,” Tant told me. “When she left him for another, he got over her, I reckon, but the poor feller had to kill himself to do it.” Noticing his odd smile, I realized with surprise that he had told the truth but wanted me to laugh anyway and so I did. Tant needed to make people laugh no matter what.

My syrup enterprise, though still short of capital, was growing fast again under its new name, Island Pride, and that was because, in my humble opinion, our product was the best on the west coast. Sugarcane is a giant grass and any fool can grow a grass: the difference lies in the timing of the burn. In south Florida, the cane begins to ripen with the first drop in night temperature in September. In October, an experienced hand who knows the wind goes out with a firepot and burns it over. Without the big leaves that clog the mill, the stalks are much lighter and more easily handled, and good strong stalks lose very little sugar to fast-moving flames. Also, the burning clears the field of snakes and scorpions and chases out wild game; a good shot ranging along the field edge during the burn can generally bring down more than enough to feed the crew.

Dry cane ignites all in a rush with a heavy roaring as in storm: if the burning is timed right, the fire produces a black smoke so thick and oily that it has a kind of muscled look as it rolls skyward, leaving the earth in deep sepia shadow and strange light. If the field is dry, I organize the burn on the day before harvest, in late morning. Burning too early harms the plant and causes the cane to grow back with thinner stalks, until finally it leans and sprawls before it can be reaped, especially where cane rats (which throw big litters six times in a year) have been gnawing. Even then, being so hardy, the crop keeps right on growing, slowing the harvest where wind-tangled cane forms a thick green matting on the ground.

A steam engine ran the mill that pressed the stalks. I rigged a frame for a big kettle over a buttonwood fire for boiling the syrup, which smelled so fine that Richard Harden claimed it made his mouth water three miles downriver and another half mile off the coast at Mormon Key. My giant kettle, two hundred and fifty gallons, was twice the size of any kettle in the Islands, and our plantation produced ten thousand gallons every year, over three times the amount produced by Storters, who hauled their stalks from Half Way Creek to their mill at Everglade. We packed the syrup in onegallon tins and saved the skimmings to make moonshine, sold off our white lightning by the quart jar.

Harvest started in October, when a cane crew was fetched in for the labor: free transportation, a dry bunk, and three square meals a day. Most of the crew were drifters of all colors from the shantytowns and saloon alleys of Ybor City and Key West. Some bitched that they were kidnapped while dead drunk, and I'd say, “Well, you might as well work now that you're here because otherwise you'll be taken out and shot instead of paid.” That backed 'em down, made 'em chop a little faster; they never felt too confident the Boss was joking. But scaring those men was a bad mistake, firing those rumors of “Watson Payday” that would plague me in the years to come.

Cutters use a cane knife like a big heavy machete. Because the long blades are honed to a singing edge as sharp as sawgrass, the work is dangerous and accidents are common, especially among the drinkers but also among the green hands, older men, and those exhausted. They go bleary. The veterans may rig themselves crude shin guards or hide leggings, having hacked an ankle or sliced off toes at one time or another, often their own but sometimes those of the man beside them. When a cutter working tired or too fast stoops to grab a clump for chopping, his sweat-filled eye, sometimes an eardrum, can be pierced by a leaf tip, hard as any spine. In this humid climate, there is heat collapse; sore backs go with the job. Every little while, even the strongest may straighten in a slow half turn, arched like a bow, the heel of one hand pressed into the lower back to ease those muscles.

Rather than lose time to injuries, I was strict about our safety measures, and in the early years, we had very few bad accidents. Then a big cutter working tired sliced his foot half off when his knife glanced off a root clump. I rowed him out to Mormon Key, got that foot sewed back together by Richard Harden, but not before the man half bled to death. Being superstitious, he would not return upriver so he lost his pay.

Late in 1899, a new nigra feeding stalks into the mill caught his burlap apron in the feeder belt, which grabbed his hand as he wrenched at the apron and chewed up his whole arm right to the shoulder. I was away. The crew foreman, a young Key Wester named Wally Tucker, called his wife out of the house to rig a tourniquet; seeing so much blood, Bet lost her head and rushed that dying man into the house, let him bleed all over the corner of the front room while people ran like chickens to fetch useless things and he died anyway. By the time they thought to mop that blood, it was too late, the pine boards drank it. Tried to hide that bloodstain under a straw mat but even strangers heard about it. The next time I went to Everglade, Bembery Storter warned me about a rumor going around that when it came time to pay his help, Ed Watson knocked 'em on the head and dumped 'em in the river. I told Bembery the truth and I guess he took my word but it was no use. That story spread like a bad flu as far as Tampa, where my buyers beat down my price with hard questions about black blood in Watson's syrup. For six months or more, we sold hardly a quart of the best cane syrup in the U.S.A.

That bloodstain that would not wash away spooked everybody on the place, just as the business was starting to go well. Every visitor came inside to stare, we could have charged admission! For a long time after, Island Pride syrup was very hard to market because of that rumor there was blood in it. Time and again and ever since, I have tried to leach that stain out, paint it over, but sooner or later, for some damnable reason, the blood shadow rises through the paint like the slow rise of a gator from deep water, drifting slow, slow, slow up to the surface.

ZACHARIAH

After that feller lost half his foot the year before, a cane cutter named Zachariah had gone around stirring up trouble, claiming the work was much too dangerous for such long hours and poor pay and threatening to start a strike. Spouting the union agitator talk that was causing all the trouble on the east coast railroad, he infected the whole crew with discontent.

For want of capital, my company was now at a critical place: it would suffer another setback it could not survive if this black bastard started a strike here in the harvest season. I called him aside, promised him more money if he would keep this quiet and just shut up about his fucking union; he was shrewd enough to protect himself by calling to the others through the window that the Boss was trying to bribe him. Then he informed me he was fighting for the workers of the world, not just himself, so that workers everywhere might fairly share the profits. I cursed him for a dirty communist and finally threatened him: he passed this guff through the window to the crew, which clapped and whistled.

I threw him out but I already knew that this one was going to be back. Sure enough, when that man bled to death, Zachariah accosted me again, demanding better pay and safer work conditions. A young cutter named Ted had caught his fever, helped him organize a strike for the first day of the harvest unless Island Pride met their demands.

From his new mansion at Palm Beach on the east coast, Mr. Henry Flagler was dealing with foreign syndicates and immigrant labor and all kinds of communistical ideas, but he also had hard overseers to deal with troublemakers and he brought in strikebreakers. These thugs enforced their own idea of law and order on his rail line, up to and including capitalist punishment, as Tant called it, and other big new industries around the country were doing the same: announced they'd never negotiate with commie scum, then nailed 'em hard and quick before the journalists arrived and trouble spread, same way they took care of the strikers in the mines.

These business leaders we celebrate as great Americans let nothing stand in the way of their own ambitions—that's the secret of their greatness. Such men are more than willing to invest their workers' lives so long as they are spared all the unpleasantness. Never have to bloody their soft hands or hear about excessive violence, not if their lieutenants know their work:
Go out and play yer golf game, Boss, enjoy yer nice sea air.
Soon as the owner is safely off the property, armed men rush the unarmed strikers:
Dirty dagos! Want yer wop heads busted?
Never wait for an answer, just sail right in with clubs and pistols, smash a few faces, break some arms, and run the rest off the property unpaid. Those men lying on the ground who never stand up again turn out to be the very troublemakers they were after in the first place, and someway there are never consequences, no investigation, because the press is kept away and the law, too. “Hardest fight I ever fought,” Henry Flagler told reporters the next day, this rich sonofabitch who never saw one minute of the fighting. His henchmen spared him all the ugliness and bloodshed.