Killing Mister Watson

them scared of him. He was just too strong for a man his age, which is why folks always said the Devil owned him.

The Frenchman come right out and said he didn't hold with no Father Who art in Heaven. 'Man is made in God's ee-mage? Who say so? Black man? Red man? Which man you talk about? White man? Yellow man? God is all these color? Say tabsurde! Homo sapiens, he got to shit, same like any foking animal. You telling to me your God got to shit too?' And he would glare all around at the green walls, the white sky and the wet heat, the summer silence, nodding his head. 'Well, maybe you got something, Ree-chard. Maybe this foking place is where He done it.'

Or that old man might point quick at the sun, point at a silver ripple in the water, saying, 'Look quick! See there? That is God! That is le Grand Mees-taire!' He meant 'Big Mister,' case you don't speak French.

Being a Catholic, Mary Weeks hated that French heathen talk worse than the blasphemy. Even a God who moved His bowels was better than one who popped up every time you turned around. 'Is right? Birt shit on your head, that is God too!' To keep the peace, I just shook my head over his terrible French ways, but I knew the truth of what he said all the way back in my bones, about sun and silver ripples, yes, and bird shit, too. However, for my Mary's sake, I told him what he sounded like was a dumb Indin.

So Pavioni went over to Chevelier, then Will Raymond. For a while it was called the Raymond Place, like Will was some kind of upstanding citizen. Don't think he was. I ain't pointing fingers, so I will say that the Frenchman and Old Man Atwell, back up Rodgers River, they was damn close to the only ones down in the Islands in them last years of the century that wasn't wanted someplace else.

Probably Will Raymond should have picked him a new name, got a fresh start. His widow sold his claim off to a stranger, and that stranger stayed here in the rivers close to twenty years, give or take a few years in the middle. If that bad power at Pavioni bothered him one bit, I never heard about it. I got friendly with him and took some pains to keep it that way, cause them years Mister Watson was our closest neighbor, never much more than a rifle shot away.

Mister Watson was a real good neighbor, yes, he was. Good farmer, too, the first to make the most of that good soil. Went right to work on a palm-log house, built two big rooms. Had hogs and two cows and red chickens, brought in a bay mare for plowing, set up a syrup mill, run his schooner from Port Tampa to Key West, and done just fine. Later on he brung in carpenters and good pine lumber, built him a fine frame house painted white, built docks, built sheds. Only ones between Fort Myers and Key West had anything to stand up to the Watson Place was Bill Collier at Marco and George Storter there in Everglade, both of 'em outstanding men along this coast. Well, Ed Watson kept right up with 'em most of the way.

All the same, I kept my distance, and warned my gang they was to do the same. If Mister Watson needed help we would be neighborly, you know, the same as he was, but all the times we was up and down his river, we never stopped to pass the time of day.

The day come when we had enough of Possum Key. The skeeters plagued the younger children, and their mother couldn't hardly fight 'em off, not when she cooked meals outside and done her chores with nothing but a smudge pot. So I moved my family to an island off the river mouth, where that sea wind kept them skeeters back into the bushes. I always called that place Trout Key, cause of all the sea trout on the grass banks off the shore, but the crackers called it Mormon Key, on account of that no-account old Richard Hamilton had other children by a common-law wife who was still living up around Arcadia. And after a while that fool name stuck, we used it too.

Them Chokoloskee boys called me mulatta, and they got that put down in the 1880 census. Talked against me not so much because my skin was dark, but because a dark man had him a white wife. Well, Mary Weeks, who was writ down as white, she was darker than I am and still is, but she was daughter to John Weeks, so nobody paid her color no attention. John Weeks was white, and Mary's mother was Seminole Indin, so that dark come from her mother's side, unless there's something Old Man John ain't telling. My Mary, she tells our kids I am Indin, but when we are drunk and get to scrapping, she likes to recall how her daddy swore I was mulatta, and got that writ for all to see right on the 1880 census. She rues the day, as she often says, that a 'colored man' went and stole a white girl's heart.

Henry Short was one of 'em who heard her say that, and I seen that muscle twitch along his jaw. Later I challenged him, inquiring what that wince was all about, and finally Henry blurted out how he didn't intend no disrespect, but some might say that running off with Richard Hamilton made my wife the shiftless one, not me. I reckon there is different ways that I could take that.

Henry Short would come visiting Bill House, who worked with Chevelier a year or two, and later years he'd stop over with us at Mormon Key. Big fine-looking young feller, color of light wood, looked more like a Indin than I did. He was lighter than all of us except Gene and Leon, and his features weren't so heavy as what Gene's were, but the Bay people called him Nigger Henry, Nigger Short. Gene didn't like it that he ate with us, said if Hamiltons had a nigger at their table, folks was bound to say that we was niggers too. And his own dark brother Walter would just look at Gene until Gene looked away. 'I guess I can eat with Henry Short,' he'd say, 'if Henry Short can eat with me.'

Which don't mean that Gene was wrong about what folks would say. He wasn't.

According to Jean Chevelier's way of thinking, there ought to be a law where any man who don't marry a different color would get castrated. That way Homo sapiens would stop his misery and plain damn stupidhood about his races and go on back to the color of First Man, which in Chevelier's opinion would work out pretty close to Richard Hamilton. Said the Hamiltons was making a fine start cause we had almost every shade of color, all we needed was a whisker of Chinese.

If you live Indin way, then you are Indin, color don't matter. It's how you respect the earth, not where you came from. Mary Weeks, she's a kind of Catholic, and our kids is Catholic, and I go along with it somewhat, and read my Bible, because I was raised up in a Catholic mission back in Oklahoma. But in my heart I am still Indin, which is why I kept on drifting south to Lost Man's River, as far from those mean-mouthed cracker folks as I could get.

Crackers don't know nothing about Indins cepting to shoot at, and most of these Indins you see today don't know nothing neither. Back in the First Seminole War, the runaway slaves fought side by side with Seminoles, and lived as Indins, a lot of 'em. You take some of them ragtag Muskogee Seminoles up around Lake Okeechobee, a lot of 'em's got a big swipe of the tarbrush, but you'd never know it from the way they act toward colored people.

These Cypress Indins, who are Mikasuki Creeks, some of 'em still know a little about Indin way. They can't keep it going too much longer, and they know it, and maybe that's why they sometimes act so desperate. In the old days, if a Mikasuki woman trafficked with a black man, or a white man, either, her people might take and kill 'em both, and leave the child to die out in the cypress. Maybe that made 'em feel a little better, but it never made a spit of difference in the long run. People move around these days, get all mixed up. Don't matter what our color is, we all going to be brown boys when the smoke clears.

After Bill House left, Old Man Chevelier kind of adopted Leon and young Liza and they visited with him and took care of him and kept an eye on him, and he stayed right there on Possum Key until he died.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the southern half of the Florida peninsula, and in particular its far southwestern region, was scarcely known. This rainy and mosquito-ridden labyrinth of mangrove islands and dark tidal rivers was all but uninhabited, despite the marvelous abundance of its fish and game. 'The Ten Thousand Islands,' as one naturalist has written, 'is a region of mystery and loneliness: gloomy, monotonous, weird, and strange, yet possessing a decided fascination. To the casual stranger each and every part of the region looks exactly like the rest; each islet and water passage seems but the counterpart of hundreds of others. Even those… familiar with its tortuous channels often get lost… wandering hopeless for days among its labyrinthine ways.'

Of the thousands of islands, less than a hundred-mostly in the north-rise more than one foot above sea level, and on most of these, the high ground is too limited to build upon: the more or less habitable barrier islands include perhaps thirty on the Gulf with sand banks up to six feet high and about forty 'hammock' islands farther inland. On these, as a precaution against hurricane, the Calusa constructed substantial shell mounds-or, more properly, hilly ridges-up to twenty feet in height, on which pockets of soil suitable for farming had accumulated. There were also extensive mainland mounds at Turner River that were later farmed by Chokoloskee pioneers.