Red Grass River

drier than it was ever meant to be and just any old spark would set it afire. The grass for miles around would catch fire too and the trees would get burnt to black skeletons and the muck would just go on burning and burning and at night you could see the sky glowing orange way out in the Devil’s Garden. The smoke would drift in on the wind and turn and high noon sun red as blood and sometimes got so thick you couldnt hardly tell high noon from dawn or dusk. For weeks at a time everybody in town went around with their eyes watering and their throats sore and scratchy from breathing that muck smoke. To make things worse the fires would drive all kinds of critters out of the swamp and there was times when Miami was just overrun with animals getting away from the flames—possums and coons, rats big as cats. You’d see a dozen rattlesnakes a day right in the damn streets. If a little baby in a stroller so much as gave his rattle a shake people would jump a foot in the air and look all wild-about for snakes at their feet. Alligators would come downriver in bunches like timber logs. But hell, the gators was even worse in the wet season, the cottonmouths too. That’s when the streets, would flood with the rain running off the burnt-up Glades like water off a bare table.

As for them who bought land that actually did get drained, well, they set to farming on it and at first they was all excited to see how high the sugarcane grew in the dried-out muck, how the cabbages was big as a man’s head and the tomatoes twice the size of a fist. Them farmers figured they’d sure enough done the right thing and it was worth getting a little burnt up in winter and regular flooded in the summertime. Then just as quick as all that growth come out the ground, it shriveled up and died. Turned out the drained muck didnt have the minerals necessary to sustain the crops. Couldnt none of them farmers get anybody to take their land off their hands for as low as ten cents on every dollar they’d paid for it. A lot of them said the hell with it and packed up and left it to whoever was fool enough to claim it.

They’d started clearing the mangroves out of Miami Beach around that time and the rank smell of all that dug-up seabottom was on every ocean breeze carrying into the city. Beginning in 1913 you could drive into the heart of that stink in Miami Beach by way of the Collins Bridge, back then the longest wooden bridge in the world. Most folk today who tell about Old Miami never bother to mention the smell that used to hang over the town. Well, take it for a fact, the stink of Miami was dawn near constant and something to reckon with till you got used to it.

But Lord, that crazy place was growing fast! Wasnt ten thousand people there in 1910 and by 1920 it had more than thirty thousand souls. In 1913 a fella named Deering started building himself a humongous old-fashioned Italian-style mansion he called Vizcaya. Build right on the edge of the bay in the Brickell Hammock between Miami and Coconut Grove. Spent millions of it—back when a million dollars was a sum you couldnt imagine. Up till the time Deering build his dream house, the town pretty much depended on a small but regular tourist business in the winter and on Mister Flagler’s railroad. But Deering imported hundreds of European craftsmen to do all the fancy masonry and scrollwork and tile-setting and so forth, and he hired about half the men in town to do everything else. In the two years it took to build the place, Miami grew to almost twice the size it’d been and you couldnt hardly go anyplace in town without hearing all kinds of funny foreigner languages being spoke.

In those days Biscayne Bay came right up to the Boulevard and was so clear you could see the stingrays gliding through the grass on the bottom twenty feet down. At the north end of town the bay formed a pretty little cove that tailed in at the Florida East Coast Railroad depot—and down at the south end Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel was set at the mouth of the Miami River. In between was the rest of the town. The center of business was along Flagler Street between the railroad tracks and the Boulevard. The rowdiest area of all—which included the red-light district—was over along 11th Street and a tad west of Miami Avenue, just outside the city limits. That area was called Hardieville in honor of Sheriff Dan Hardie who’d run the whores out of town. There was a story that Ed Ashley had got in a bad fight in a Hardieville cathouse over some girl the very first time he was in there and thats how he got the scar acrost his mouth that for the rest of his life left him looking like he was about to smile or cry and you never knew which one.

The city streets were paved with pulverized limestone back then and the glare of them under the sun would about knock you blind. When it rained, the limestone went muddy and got tracked into every house and office. In dry weather the lime dust rose in a thin pale haze and blew in through the windows and doors and got on everything. It wasnt until after the War that the city commission decided to improve on those streets and got the bright idea to pave them over with eight-by-four-inch wooden blocks. They were cut from cypress and boiled in creosote and would last till Judgment Day. The workmen laid a layer of white sand over the limestone base and then snugged the blocks in place—and bedamn if the ride over them blocked streets wasnt the smoothest you’d ever know. Then came a frog-strangle of a rainstorm and huge puddles formed in the street and water seeped into the wooden blocks and they started to swell up. Little mounds began forming all over the streets and the rain kept falling and next thing you know—pop! pop! pop!—those blocks started flying up off the streets with a sound like gunshots, just whizzing in every direction and ricocheting off the storefronts and busting windows and scaring the bejesus out of the dogs and the draft animals and anybody standing out there at the time. It kept on like that even after the rain stopped, and halfway into the night you’d still hear an occasional pop out in the street and hear a block crack off a wall or pang against an ashcan. The city commissioners didnt want to give up the smoothness of those wooden-block streets, but they didnt want the blocks flying through the air every time there came a downpour neither. They thunk it over for a while and then decided to put the wooden blocks back in the street, only this time with plenty of play between them to allow for swelling the next time it rained. Everybody thought that was a real smart idea. But now the blocks were so loose they clattered when motorcars and wagons rolled over them. When traffic was heavy the clattering was so loud people on the sidewalks had to shout at each other to make theirselves heard. Even those of us who wasnt but squirts back then can recall the godawful racket of them loose wooden blocks. The first rain to come along after the blocks had been reset swelled them up just enough to fit together real nice and for the next day or two they didnt clatter hardly at all and they gave a real smooth ride and everybody smiled and said the commissioners had done a heck of a smart job of it. A few days later it rained again, only harder, and the blocks swelled up a little snugger against each other. But this time the rain kept falling all through the day and the blocks kept swelling and swelling and suddenly pop! pop! pop! they started shooting out all over the place just like before.

One fella was running across the street in the rain to get to the barber shop when a block exploded off the street and hit him between the legs and he let out a yelp they probably heard up in Fort Lauderdale. The way the story went, he wasnt much good to his wife in bed after that and she was a high-spirited gal who liked her fun, so she left him a few months later for a Hardieville piano player she’d met in the lobby of a movie house. The abandoned husband was so full of grief he tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a train as it rolled out of the depot but all he managed to do was get both legs cut off a little below the hips. After that he had to push himself along on one of them little platforms on rollers. He begged money on the streets with a tin cup all day and got drunkern hell every night. But he was a mean drunk and one night he got into it with a fella in a Hardieville bar and bit into his shin just as tight as a bulldog and wouldnt let loose for love nor money. The fella was screaming and smacking him with a beer mug and the barkeep came around and started hitting the cripple over the head with a billy like he was driving nails and between them they beat that poor legless fella to death, sure enough. But even then he didnt let go his bite. They finally had to break his teeth with a hammer to get him loose of that shinbone. The cops figured a man being bit had every right to hit whoever was biting him but they knew the bartender for a bully and thought he’d beat on the fella as much for fun as anything else and they charged him with manslaughter. He went to trial and was acquitted real quick because all the jurors were businessmen and understood how it’d be real bad for business if a man let some fella bite on one of his customers without doing something about it. The legless man was buried in a box not four feet long—looked more like a fat child’s coffin than a man’s The whole thing was a terrible true story but a hard one for most folk back then to tell or listen to without grinning by the time they got to the end of it. Oh, that Hardieville was a rough place. Whole damn town was, truth be told.

Across the street from the Royal Palm Hotel was a park with a bandshell, and across from the park was the Biscayne Yacht Club, where the rich people kept their boats. The club had a cannon they fired every day at eight in the morning when they raised the Stars and Stripes and again at sunset when the flag came down. They say that many a visitor to the city who didnt know about that cannon and happened to be near the yacht club at eight A.M. or sundown when the fuse was touched off soiled himself. Anybody who ever heard it can tell you how the blasts rattled windows all down the Boulevard and sometimes shook coconuts off the trees.

Most visitors to Miami were still coming by train or boat but more and more were now driving down on the Dixie Highway which was already a pretty fair whiterock road by then. And starting in 1913 when Dade County went dry—like most Florida counties already were—the Ashleys had good reason to ride that road to Miami fairly often. This was just a few years after that loony bitch Carry Nation showed up in town with her damn hatchet and made a