could get away with that, which don’t mean them rednecks on Chok Bay aimed to forgive it.
According to Chevelier’s way of thinking, there ought to be a law where any man who got his offsprings on a woman of his own color would be gelded. That way ol’ Homo might stop his plain damn stupidhood about this skin business and breed his way back to the mud color of Early Man. Said us Hardens was off to a fine start, we come in almost every human shade, all we was missin was a Chinaman.
Crackers don’t know nothin about Indins and most Indins you come across don’t know much neither. Back in the First Seminole War when runaway slaves fought side by side with Creeks, them black men lived as Indins, took Indin wives, and their offsprings call theirselves Indins today. Some of them Muskogee got a big swipe of the tarbrush but you’d never know that from the way they act toward colored people.
Our Glades Indins, who are Mikasuki, still know something about Indin way. In the old days, if a Mikasuki woman trafficked with a black man or a white one, her people might take and kill ’em both, leave the child to die out in the Cypress. Made ’em feel better, I suppose, but it won’t make a spit of difference in the long run. People move around these days, get all mixed up. Like Old Man Jean Chevelier says, it don’t matter what our color is, we’re all going back to bein brown boys before this thing is finished.
If you live Indin way, then you are Indin. Skin color don’t matter. It’s how you respect our mother earth, not where you come from. I go along with Catholic somewhat, and read my Bible, cause I was raised up in a mission, Oklahoma Territory. But in my heart I am stone Indin, which is why I drifted south to Lost Man’s River, as far from mean-mouthed cracker whites as I could get. This Lost Man’s coast is Harden territory. We mind our own business and take orders from nobody.
HENRY SHORT
Here’s what Houses told over the years about their nigger. I learned it mostly from overhearin by mistake whether I wanted to or not.
My natural-born mama was a white man’s daughter, born not far from the Georgia farm of this House family. She was still a young girl when she got what they called dishonored by a buffalo soldier on his way home from the Indian Wars out West. When she told him he’d got her in a family way, he marched straight to her daddy, declared he loved her, aimed to marry. From the pale look of him, her daddy thought he must be white; the only trouble was that he denied it.
This was still Reconstruction times so by law a buffalo soldier was a free American. Without no experience of bein a slave, this light mulatter boy was one of them smart nigras they called “the New Negro.” Never knew his place, they said, so he was bound to turn into a beast and go nighthuntin for white women to ravage, same way white men went tom-cattin around after the darkie girls. But according to Mr. D. D. House, this soldier loved his white girl truly and she loved him, too. True love in such a situation was a damn crime if there ever was one, and knowin a dirty troublemaker when they seen one, they naturally took him out and lynched him. Mr. House could not recall his name except it was Jacob and the last name wasn’t Short.
Hearin all this as a boy, I crept away and wept, just crawled off like a dog and got dog sick. But I kept my mouth shut and I done that ever since.
Later I learned from Mrs. Ida House that the mother was thrown down and whipped severely but did not lose the baby as was wanted, so her daddy took his ruined daughter back. Her baby looked white so was tolerated till age four. Then his grandfather got rid of him, sold him off to a farmer bound north for Carolina. About this time along come Mr. Daniel David House who had decided he would pull up stakes and head south for the Florida frontier. That farmer was whipping that little boy along the road when the House family run into ’em, and Mr. House bein who he was, he got riled up, struck the man to the ground after an argument, and pulled that cryin child up behind him on his horse. So the owner hollered, “Hell, that pickaninny’s mine! I paid hard cash for him!” And Mist’ Dan yelled back, “Ain’t you never heard about Emancipation? I’ll get the law on you!”
Miz Ida liked to tell their children how her husband was a hero, rescuin that little feller’s life, but Mr. House did not mind saying in my hearing that he might never done that in the first place had he knowed I was some pickaninny child. “Nosir,” he said, “I would of rode right by.” That come to be kind of a family joke but I smelled truth in it.
That’s how come I got raised up by the House family and I will say that they was mostly kind. Miz Ida always told me I was better off bein sold away than stayin in Georgia with my sinful mama. For many years she drilled into my head that the one thing lower’n a nigra is some “po’ white” female intercoursin with a nigra. Before she was done, I naturally despised the lovin mama I remembered, despised her for a scarlet woman, as Miz Ida called her. This mixed me up because I missed her bad and was very sad when day by day and year by year I come to forget her kindly face. With Miz Ida seeing to my Christian upbringing, I reckon that was what was wanted.
Oldest boy Billy was my same age so we come up together from age four, done about everything together boys could do, hunted and fished, went swimming and exploring back up in the rivers. Them first years I slept in the boys’ room, but around about ten, I was moved into a shed back of the cookhouse, and Miz Ida told me I better get used to calling Billy “Mister Billy.” That weren’t Billy’s idea because first time I tried it, he hollered how next time I “mistered” him, he would punch me bloody or push me off the dock or something worse. But he must of got the hang of it cause after that day everything changed. We wasn’t really friends no more and Mister Billy got the habit of that, too. From that day on, I lived in lonelihood out in the shed where I belonged, the only nigger on Chokoloskee Island.
Nobody knew no name for me exceptin Henry but the House kids used to call me “Shortie” on account I was so small. Later years, when I grew up close to six foot, I went by the name “Short.” I was very light-colored in my skin but I had them tight little blond curls, what they called “bad hair,” so I was “House’s nigger” or “Black Henry.” There was a white man around there that was somewhat darker’n what I was. Some called him “White Henry” so folks would know which was the black man.
BILL HOUSE
Me’n Henry Short worked for the Frenchman collecting wild birds and their eggs. The Frenchman claimed that except as a collector, he never shot uncommon birds, and he liked to tell how he’d trained up boys like Guy Bradley from Flamingo and myself never to shoot into the flock but single out the one bird we was after.
Plume hunters shoot early in breeding season when egret plumes are coming out real good. When them nestlings get pinfeathered, and squawking loud cause they are always hungry, them parent birds lose the little sense God give ’em. They are going to come in to tend their young no matter what, and a man using one of them Flobert rifles that don’t snap no louder than a twig can stand there under the trees in a big rookery and pick them birds off fast as he can reload.
A broke-up rookery, that ain’t a picture you want to think about too much. The pile of carcasses left behind when you strip the plumes and move on to the next place is just pitiful, and it’s a piss-poor way to harvest, cause there ain’t no adults left to feed them young and protect ’em from the sun and rain, let alone the crows and buzzards that come sailing and flopping in, tear ’em to pieces. A real big rookery like that one the Frenchman worked up Tampa Bay had four-five hundred acres of black mangrove, maybe ten nests to a tree. Might take you three-four years to clean it out but after that them birds are gone for good.
It’s the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghosty trees on dead white guano ground, the sun and silence and dry stink, the squawking and flopping of their wings, and varmints hurrying in without no sound, coons, rats, and possums, biting and biting, and the ants flowing up all them white trees in their dark ribbons to eat at them raw scrawny things that’s backed up to the edge of the nest, gullets pulsing and mouths open wide for the food and water that ain’t never going to come. Luckiest ones will perish before something finds ’em, cause they’s so many
