people are still yellin how they ought to shoot redskins fast as they show their faces, cause redskins is just as ornery and treacherous as your common Spaniard.
Msyoo was hissin over the idea that a Indin man could desecrate Indin graves, but we seen he was determined to do some plain and fancy desecratin on his own. I knowed just the kind of mound he wanted, and after that day, one of my kids was always guidin him up the wrong creek to make him happy. Every slough had some kind of small shell mound at the head of it, he could hack his way into a hundred, never hit the right one.
South and west of Possum Key in them miles and miles of mangrove was a big ol’ hidden mound called Gopher Key, had a Calusa-built canal we called Sim’s Creek that led out to the Gulf of Mexico: we figured Ol’ Sim for a Civil War deserter, hid back in there on that mound huntin gopher tortoise for his dinner, never got word to come out and go on home. The Frenchman got all flustered up when he seen that straight canal lined with white shell-a sure sign, he said, that this mound was a sacred place. Had enough shell on Gopher Key to move around for the whole rest of his life, so that furious old feller was in there diggin every chance he got. No wind back in them swamps and not much air, only wet heat and man-eatin miskeeters that bit up his old carcass somethin pitiful. My boy Webster- that’s the dark one-Webster said, “Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.”
First year he showed up in the Islands, 1888, the Frenchman bought my quit-claim on the Bend. Once we was piled into the boat, ready to go, he told us we could hang around so long as he could run us off any time he damn well wanted. I shook my head. The truth was, I had sign to go. I never liked the feel of Chatham Bend. Dark power there, the Indins told me, somethin unfinished from some bad old history.
Indin people go by sign, they don’t need no excuse to leave some place that don’t feel right; they just pick up their sorry ass and move it elsewhere. Ownin no more than we could pack into one boat, we traveled light, and where we went was Possum Key, inland and upriver, handy to them big egret rookeries in the Glades creeks. That spring we done some huntin, too, sold our plumes to the Frenchman, traded with the Indins.
Them Mikasukis back up Lost Man’s Slough was maybe the last Indins in the U.S.A. that never signed no treaty with no Great White Father. Called ’em Cypress Indins cause they hollowed dugouts out of cypress logs. Never paddled hardly but stood up in the stern, used push poles, followed water paths that in the Seminole Wars was very hard for the white soldiers to see. Standin up like that, peerin through tall sawgrass, they most always seen you first, you were lucky to get a glimpse of ’em at all. Down in the rivers, Indins was watchin us most of the time. Watched us when we come into their country and watched us when we went away. Give you a funny feeling, being watched like that. Made you think the Earth was watching, too.
One dugout that come in to trade at Everglade in the late eighties was the first wild Indins them white folks ever seen, but that band traded with Hardens two-three years before that. Brung bear meat and venison wrapped in palm fans, wild ducks and turkeys, gophers, palm hearts, coontie root and such, took coffee and trade goods for their furs and bird plumes, with a few machetes, maybe an old shotgun, and some cane liquor thrown in.
• • •
Chevelier slept poor at the Bend the same as us, but it took him a whole year to admit it, that’s how scientifical he was. And he purely hated giving up all that good ground-that was the greed in him. When I told him that ground was no good to him if he didn’t farm it and couldn’t get no sleep, he’d shout at me, waving his arms. My kids could imitate him good: “What you tek me for to be? A soo-paire-stee-shee-us domb redda-skin?” As Webster said, most every kid along the coast could speak his lingo pretty near as good as he did, maybe better.
Anyways, Msyoo sold his quit-claim to the first hombre who showed up, a man named Raymond. “Is only for I cannot farm this forty ay-caire, is only for is foking shame to waste!” We took him upriver to Possum Key, built a nice little house to keep his old skeeter-bit bones out of the rain, even tacked up shelves for all them books and bird skins, and never got so much as a
We kept the Frenchman in our family though he didn’t know it. To his last breath, he frowned and squabbled like a coon. For a while he had Erskine Thompson helping, and after Erskine left with Mister Watson, he had young Bill House. Yanked those boys by the ear and kept them scared of him, never let ’em in too close for fear they might learn about the treasure that any day now he was sure to find on Gopher Key.
That Frenchman said he never held with no Father Who art in Heaven. “Man ees made in Hees ee-mage? Who say so? Black man? Red man? Which man? White man? Yellow man? God ees
Or he might point at a silver riffle on the river. “Looka queek! You see?
“
After Will Raymond was wiped out at the Bend, his widow sold his quitclaim to a stranger, and that stranger stayed here in the rivers close to twenty years. I got friendly with this man and took some pains to keep it that way, because E. J. Watson was our closest neighbor, never much more than a rifle shot away. Good neighbor, too, but I warned my boys to keep their distance even so. In all them times we was up and down his river, we never tied up to his dock, not even once. We only seen Ed Watson when he come to see us, and we never knew when that was going to be.
Possum Key was well inland where miskeeters plagued the younger children, and their mother couldn’t hardly fight ’em off; doin her chores, she had to lug a smudge pot. Some of them gray summers in the Islands when the rain don’t never quit and the miskeeters neither, never mind the young’uns all bit up and cryin, and that heavy air wet as a blanket and thick enough to stifle a dang frog-them long empty days of mud and hunger and unholy heat made a man half wonder if Judgment Day weren’t just another name for a man’s life. So pretty quick I moved my gang to Trout Key off the river mouth where Gulf winds blew them skeeters back into the bushes: that place was named after the sea trout on the eelgrass banks off its north shore. But along about then, someone found out that Richard Harden had a common-law wife and some grown children up around Arcadia, so they called me not only a dang half-breed but a dang Mormon, too. After that, our home got known as Mormon Key, which is on the charts today.
Way back in the 1880 census, them Chok Bay folks put me down as a mulatta not because my skin was dark but because I had took a white man’s daughter to my bed. Course Mary Weeks was darker than her husband and still is, but she was daughter to the pioneer John Weeks who passed for white, so nobody paid her color no attention. When we scrap, my wife don’t never fail to tell me how she rues the day that a half-breed went and stole a white girl’s heart.
Henry Short was here one evening and winced when he heard her say that; I seen the muscle twitch along his jaw. Henry would come visiting Bill House when Bill worked for Chevelier, and later years he would stop over at Mormon Key. Fine strong young feller, color of light wood, looked more like a Indin than I did. Lighter shade than any of us Hardens except Earl, Annie, and John Owen, and his features weren’t so heavy as what Earl’s were. All the same, Bay people called him Nigger Henry, Nigger Short.
My oldest, Earl, he hated it that Henry ate with us, said if Hardens had a nigger at their table, folks was bound to say that we was niggers, too. And Webster who was pretty dark would look at Earl until Earl looked away. “I reckon I can eat with Henry,” Webster would say, “if Henry can eat with me.” Which don’t mean Earl was wrong about what folks would say. He weren’t.
Course truth don’t count for much after all these years cause folks hangs on to what it suits ’em to believe and won’t let go of it. So them Bay people can call us mulattas if they want but we are Indin. What color they see comes down from times when runaway slaves and Indins was on the run together all across north Florida, but we weren’t nothin but Indins in Mama’s heart even after she joined up with the Catholic mission. My wife, Mary Weeks, her mother was full-blood Seminole, supposed to been a granddaughter of Chief Osceola, so if this Harden bunch ain’t Indin, they ain’t no Indins left in the U.S.A. But white folks are welcome at my table, and nigras or breeds passin through is welcome, too. In Jim Crow days, these lost rivers in south Florida might been the one place a man
