I done a lot, lived a long time, and seen more than I cared to. I remember what I seen, and learned some from it, but I was born on the run like a young deer and never had no time for improvement. What little I come by I owed to that Frenchified old feller who was Mister Watson's closest neighbor next to me.
First time I met that mean old man I tried to run him right off Chatham River. That was the winter of '88, two-three years before the day Mr. Ed Watson come around the bend. We was living at Pavioni then, which is the Watson Place today. There was forty acres on that Pavioni mound, but we farmed just the one, for our own use. We was making a fair living, salted fish, cut buttonwood, took plumes in egret breeding season, took some gator hides, some otter, done some trading with the Indins, and eased on by.
That morning I felt something coming, though I never heard a thing. Looking south across the field, I see my old woman, Mary Weeks, and it is like looking at a stranger. In a queer shift of wind and light off of the river, what I see is not my Mary but a big dark cruel-mouthed woman in long gingham, hard bare feet, bad scowl half-hid in the shadow of her sunbonnet. She is out on the river-bank and she is pointing, like she seen a vision in that glaring sky out toward the Gulf. Though I can't hear, she is hollering into the wind, her mouth round as a hole.
Big Mary is the kind who don't come hunting you, just hollers what she wants from where she's at. Sometimes I play deaf, pay her no mind. But this day I had sign of something, so I set down my hoe and come in from the sweet potatoes, telling my two older fellers to keep at it.
This skinny old man has rowed in from the Gulf, three miles or more against the current. He is wearing knickers, with a necktie and jacket laid across the seat, like he was out taking the air. Damndest thing I ever seen on Chatham River. I figured he had got loose off one them steam yachts that been showing up on the Gulf Coast in the winter, and I hollered at him to get the hell back down the river where he come from. He just waves me off, like I'm a fly. Picks up his spyglass and looks straight into the mangrove like he sees something in there besides mangrove, then keeps right on a-coming like he never heard me. Has to row hard cause the tide is falling, quick funny strokes, but he rowed very strong, I was surprised.
By the time he hits the bank, he's pale and peaked, but he's all excited. "How do you are!" he says, lifting his hat, then points downriver. "Cuckoo!" he says.
"Cuckoo yourself," I say, hitching the gun.
This little stranger has thick spectacles and wild round eyes. His black hair sticks up like a brush, and cheeks so bony that light glances off, and wet red lips and a thin mustache that runs all the way around his mouth, and pointy ears the Devil would been proud of. This time he says, kind of cranky, "Mawn-grove cuckoo!"
"Don't try nothin," I say.
"What to hell you doing here?" His voice is kind of sharp and cross, like it's me who don't belong on my own property. He's too bony to be sweated up, but he takes out a neckerchief and dabs his face, and then he reaches for a shotgun he's got leaning in the bows. Had a load of bird shot in it, and he's just moving it because it's pointing at my knees, but I never knowed that at the time, couldn't take no chances. I hoist my barrel so he's looking down the muzzle, to give him an idea just what was what.
"What to hell!" he says again, no particular reason. When he shrugs and pulls his hand back from his gun, I see he ain't got all his fingers.
"Made that mistake before, I see."
"Do not self-excite, m'sieu," he says, dabbing some more.
I never had no experience with such a feller, and I'm getting riled. I pick his gun out of the boat and break it, toss the shell into the river. He flings his hands up, rolls his eyes to heaven. "What for you waste!" he yells. "What is matt-aire with this foking country!"
"You don't hear so good," is what I tell him, laying his gun back in the boat. "Git on back yonder where you come from."
"You are vair uppity, my good man," says he. And damn if he don't hop over the bow, push my gun barrel out of his way, and climb the bank. Hands on his hips, he looks around, like he's inspecting his new property.
Behind me I hear my woman snickering. Ol' Mary Weeks has a mean mouth and a mean snicker. I jab the barrels into his back, and damn if he don't whip around and wrench that gun out of my hands and back me up with it, and when he's got me backed up good, he breaks the gun, picks out the shells, and drops 'em like dead mice into the water.
I tell you, it scared me how quick and strong he was, and crazy. A man would try that when a stranger has the drop on him has got to be crazy or so fed up with life he'd rather get shot than take more shit off anybody. Willie Brown now, he is small and very strong, but he is built strong, and he's young, while this man here is getting on, he looks plain puny. I know right then he has the Devil in him. Even Mary Weeks is spooked, cause she ain't snickering no more, and Mary Weeks don't overlook too many chances.
Around about then John Leon comes out of the shack dragging the rifle. Even at four, John Leon knew his business. Never says one word, just drags that gun across the yard a little closer so's he can line that stranger up real good and don't waste powder when he hauls back on the trigger. His plan was to shoot this hombre quick, get the story later.
The stranger hands over my gun while Mary Weeks runs and gets ahold of our youngest boy. She don't care nothing for me no more, but John Leon is her hope and consolation.
The old man is rubbing his sore back, disgusted. "You shoot stran-jaire just for coming on the shore?" he asks, riled up at the whole bunch of us. "In this foking country even enfant are shooting pipples like I shooting birts!"
He brushes his jacket off and puts it on, never mind the heat. He has a pair of glasses on a string. Puts them on, too, then stands on tippy-toes in his laced boots to see who he is dealing with on this damned river. "Is Chatham Bend?" He looks around again, shaking his head. "You are squatt-aire? You have squatt-aire right?" This old feller has spotted my dusty hide, he has mistook me for some kind of help.
In them days there weren't but maybe ten souls altogether on this whole eighty mile of coast, south to Cape Sable, which is why this feller is so surprised to find us pioneers back up the river. He complains that the Bend was uninhabited when he passed by here plume hunting a few years ago. Why, only last week, folks at Everglade and Chokoloskee had told him he could move right in. "Many year my heart have settled on this place!" he yells, putting the fingertips of both hands on his heart. "For why nobody knows it you are here?"
"They know I'm here," I say.
At that he turns to look at me more careful. Then he looks at the woman in the doorway of the shack, and our little boy.
"You met John Weeks up there at Everglade? That there woman is his daughter, and that there little feller is my youngest boy." At them words, Mary looks away and goes inside. "Or supposed to be," I say. She bangs a pot.
I can tell from the stranger's face that he has heard some rumor on this matter. "Ah, je com-prawng!" he says. He weren't no Yankee, I knew that much.
Since our visitor was taking things so hard, I told him stay awhile, have a look around, and he shrugs some more like he is doing me a favor. We go down with the tide to detach his gear off a Key West schooner, Captain Carey, that was anchored at Pavilion Key. The captain hollers after him, "Sure you're all right? When shall I fetch you?" But the old man perched in the stern don't hardly wave at him, don't even turn around, and finally the captain drops his arm, shaking his head.
The Frenchman is so busy asking me questions that he don't hardly wait to get an answer. As days go by, I inform him how this once was Pavilion River, but these Indins around here don't know nothing, so they say Pavioni. Well, this dang French know-it-all tells me how Pavilion got its name! Says a pirate from the Spanish Main was camped here on a offshore key with a young girl off a Dutch merchantman. Girl said even though he had killed off all her family, she would gladly suffer the fate worse than death so long as he spared her own dear life. Well, his crew got sick of looking on while he lay down with her, they said it was her or him, and so he had no choice but to poison her. Before he left, on account he loved her, he built her a thatch shelter to keep the sun off while she died in agony. When an American man-o'-war caught up with him, the Spaniard described this kindness to the Dutch girl to prove how such a courtly feller did not deserve to hang. After they hung him, they went up there and found most of the girl under that shelter. Called it a pavilion, named that key for it, and we call it "Pavilion" to this day.
Chevelier said he'd found no "Chatham" in the old accounts. Said "Chatham River" might of come from the Indin name of Chitto Hatchee, or Snake River, as it was called on the old war maps around 1840. Fakahatchee, now, where John Leon was born, that is Fork River. The Frenchman knew that Indin tongue like he was born with it.
This old French feller-I always think of him as an old feller cause of that stiffness in him, though he weren't so many seasons older'n me-he told us later that he come from France with a French "ornithologue" name of Charles Bonaparte. He was an ornithologue himself and never cared who knowed it, but he sold bird plumes, too, to make ends meet. Looked like some rare old bird hisself, damn if he didn't, quills sticking out all over his head, beady eyes and a stiff gait-the dry way a man will look who lives too long without a woman. Spent too much time with his feathered friends, looked like to me, cause when he got excited, his hair went up in back just like a bird crest, he looked all set to shit and no mistake, and he screeched as good as them Carolina parrots he was hunting for.
It was right there on Chatham Bend that Jean Chevelier shot the first short-tailed hawk was ever seen in North America, something like that. Weren't much of a claim cause it weren't much of a bird-tail too damn short, I guess. Why he thought this o' scraggy thing we couldn't eat would make him famous I don't know. He seen Carolina parrots, too, far away up inland, freshwater creeks. Bright green little things, size of a dove, all red and yeller on the head, but they was shy and he never did come up with one.
Them parrots used to be thick as fleas back in the hammocks. I told him I would eat a few when I went in there after deer and turkey. "Eat it? Mange? Le perroquet?" He squawked and slapped his brow. Well, that was a long time ago, I told him, and I ain't seen one since. I believe they told me not so long ago that them pretty birds has flewed away for good.
Christmas 1888, Captain Carey brought presents from Key West for all the kids, give each one an apple, candy cane, and Roman candle. That evening Old Man Chevelier says, How would you like to help me collect birds? And he spells out all the kinds he wants, not a plume bird in the bunch. Wants wild eggs, too. I'm nodding away to show I get the drift, and when he says "swallowtail hawk" I nod again and smile and say "Tonsabe."
At that he flies right at my face-"Where you get it that word?" I tell him that is Indin speech for swaller-tail hawk, and he asks, real sly, "Which Indin?" "Choctaw," I says. I call myself by my mother's tribe just to get on in life. Choctaws was good Indins, I tell him, helped Ol' Andy Jackson fight them Creeks, helped him steal most all of Georgia for the crackers. But when they made him president, Ol' Hickory packed the Choctaws up right along with the dang Creeks, sent the whole sad and sorry bunch off to Oklahoma. I told the Frenchman that Ol' Hickory kept a soft spot in his heart for Choctaws all the same.
That Frenchman weren't much interested in my historical lore. He asks what is this river in my language, and I tell him that the old words for this country have been lost. He nods quick, like he's sprung a trap. "Tonsabe is old word, is it not?" He grins. "Tonsabe is Calusa, is it not?"
He had took me by surprise and my face showed it. That word ain't used by Mikasuki, nor Muskogee neither, that word come straight down from my granddaddy, Chief Chekaika.
Back in them days, Chekaika's name was a dirty word to white people, so I says, real coony, "Choctaw and Calusa must be pretty close." But he keeps staring right into my eyes, nodding his head like he can read my brain. Then he sets down on a crate, so we're knee to knee.
"Vair few Calusa words survive," he says, nodding and staring.
I decide to trust him just a little, cause it ain't often I find somebody who knows what I am talking about. Well, I say, my people was not Calusa, not exactly, they was what white men called the Spanish Indins.
Damn if that don't overjoy him so, he has to jump up and sit down again. He tells me Spanish Indins was descended from Calusas that the Spaniards took over to Cuba. Being Spaniards, they snuck some Indins back in to this coast to stir up trouble when the Americans was grabbing off the State of Florida. "So! You are Calusa!" Gives me that skull smile of his when I do not answer. "You know all about where is Calusa burial!" I shrug again.
Chevelier told me he had studied up the maps and such, read the Spanish archives in Madrid, visited all of the big mounds in the Ten Thousand Islands before he decided that Chatham Bend was a main Calusa mound way back in Spanish times. Somewhere pretty close to here, the Calusa took eighteen canoes and attacked Juan Ponce de León, and maybe they withdrew into these hidden rivers to escape the Spanish poxes, cause poxes done a lot more damage than all them swords and blunderbusses put together. If his theory was right, then somewhere in these godforsook green islands was a burial mound, built up higher than the village mounds, using white sand, and one sign of it would be traces of canals out to open water, like some he had seen already, up the coast. Any temple would be gone by now, and the white sand overgrowed, but all the same there was a burial mound on one of these here islands, had to be! He was very excited, but gave up in disgust when I just shrug. "I ain't nothing but a dumb old Indin," I tell him.
"Indians say 'dumb Indin,' white pipples say 'dumb Injun'-why is that?"
"Maybe dumb Indins are too damn dumb to know how to say 'dumb Injuns,' what do you think?"
"Ay-coot," he says, "I am vair interest in Indiang pipples. These foking crack-aire are know-nothing, are grave rob-baire! Are des-ecrating!" He talks this way to get on the good side of this dusty feller who might not care too much for his cracker neighbors.
He wanted to study a Calusa burial place, he says, blurting it out.
"Calusa treasure?" I smile him my best smile. He does not answer.
All the while the Frenchman talked about his mound, he was watching my eyes like a cardplayer to see if I might put him in the way of it. I knew him a little bit by now, and I believe he did want to study that mound, just like he wanted to study birds, cause he was a real scientist, he was born curious, he was the nosiest damn man I ever come across. But he would loot them graves first thing, because some way he was starved by life, and greedy, and here was maybe his last chance at fame and fortune. I was watching him as close as he watched me, and I seen his crippled hand twitch while he spoke.
"Well," say I, "one day I was out des-ecrating with my oldest boy, had ten-twelve pretty skulls lined up on a log, airing out, y'know. Chip the crown off for your ashtray, rig the head for your cigars. For a human humidor you just can't beat it." I hum a little, taking my time. "Them redskin skulls done up artistic for the tourist trade will bring you some nice spot cash down to Key West."
He is really staring. "Commaung?" he says. These Frenchmen say "Come on!" like it's a question-Com-maung?
"Yessir. One them skulls had a hole conched into it, and I give that one to my boy, and he stuck a buzzard feather in there, looked real pretty." I let him sit with that one for a minute.
He says in a funny voice, "Where this place was?" He couldn't take the chance I might be fooling.
"Nosir," I says, "I wouldn't let on to my worst enemy about that place!" and I drop my voice right down to a whisper and touch knees. "Cause when we lined them skulls up, put the feather in, why, all of a sudden, them trees went silent on us! That silence was so silent it was ringing!" I set there and nod at him awhile. "Yessir, we was plenty scared, and we got out of there, and we ain't never been back. Left them twelve skulls lined up on that log grinning good-bye. Cause that ringing silence, know what that was? That was the venging spirits of Calusa Indins!"
Then I show him my Indin face, refusing to answer any questions for his own damn good, and he had to accept that out of his great respect for the noble redskin. He went away, shaking his head over the idea that a Indin could desecrate Indin graves, and bound and determined to do some desecrating on his own. I knowed just the mound the Frenchman wanted, and after that day, until he died, one of my kids was generally his guide, to keep him headed off the scent, keep him away from there as best we could.
Every one of these small creeks and canals had some kind of small shell mound at the head of it, he could hack his way into a hundred and not hit the right one. But south and west of Possum Key, well hid from the world in all them miles of mangrove, was a big old clamshell mound called Gopher Key, had a Calusa-built canal we called Sim's Creek that led straight out to the Gulf of Mexico. Don't know too much about ol' Sim, might been one them misfits from the Civil War hid out back up there on that key, took plenty of gopher tortoise for his dinner. Gopher Key weren't the place Chevelier was after, but it give him enough shell to dig the whole rest of his life.
Anyway, we took him over there to keep him busy. He got excited when he seen how well hid it was, and that long and straight canal built out of shell was his sure sign that Gopher Key must be a sacred place. For some years, the poor furious little feller was back in there digging white shell every chance he got. Heat was terrible, and the skeeters bit him up so bad he didn't have no French blood left in his old carcass. My boy Walter-that's the dark one-Walter said, Time those skeeters finished with him, that Frenchman would of lost all that French blood, he'd talk American just as good as we did.
Speaking of blood, my grandfather was real pure-blood Spanish Indin, didn't want a thing to do with the Muskogee and Mikasuki Creeks-the Seminoles-that was taking over his Calusa country. But finally he understood what Chief Tecumseh warned us, that if Indin people didn't put away our feuds and fight the whites all in a bunch, there wouldn't be no land left to fight over. Sure enough, the white men lied and broke all their agreements. Here in Florida, they aimed to pen up any Indin they hadn't killed, ship that redskin sonofabitch to Oklahoma.
So Chekaika took some Spanish Indins and Mikasukis and went up the Calusa Hatchee and licked Lieutenant Colonel William Harney and his soldiers that was setting up the trading posts in Indin territory. Yup, Chekaika run Old Harney off into the bushes in his underwear, which were not forgiven and were not forgot. Chief Billy Bowlegs was a young man then, he was in on that one. After that, Chekaika took seventeen dugouts down around Cape Sable and over to the Keys, went to the Port of Entry on Indin Key, killed Dr. Henry Perrine, the famous botanist, and caused a uproar. People called it a massacre, but this Dr. Perrine had been recommending a canal to drain Cape Sable, in Calusa territory, they leave out that part.
From Indin Key Chekaika went back to Pavioni, but he figured the Army knew about them gardens, and Pavioni'd be the first place they'd come looking, so he took his people and went up Shark River to a big hammock maybe forty miles from the east coast. Shark River in them days was called Chok-ti Hatchee, the Long River, cause it was the main river of the Everglades, flowed all the way south from the Big Water, Okee-chobee. Not knowing about "Chok-ti," the white people figured them dumb Indins was trying to say "Shark," and that was that.
One afternoon he showed my mam the beautiful swallow-tail hawk, kiting back and forth across the trees. Ton-sa-be, he said, very slow and careful, so his little daughter would remember it forever, the sun and the bird and the shining water-grass west of the hammock. Tonsabe. That word come rumbling out of him like a voice out of the earth. He told her how, seen from above, that bird's wings reflected the sky blue, but only God could see it from above, so tonsabe was God's bird, sent to watch over us.
Some of them whiskey Seminoles took dirty money to scout out Chief Chekaika's camp, and the Army sent Harney in pursuit out of Fort Dallas, on the Miami River. Took him by surprise on his home hammock. My mam and some others run off into the reeds, but her father was shot, and they strung him up before he finished dying. His people crept back in under the moonlight a day later, seen him hanging in the shadows of that big madeira, turning and turning. They took him down and buried him Indin way.
Mikasukis call that hammock Hanging Place, and they claim Chekaika for a Mikasuki, although he were Calusa to the bone. Chekaika was the biggest man in the People's memory, them Mikasukis will say the same even today. Some Mikasukis claim Chief Osceola, too, though Osceola was half-breed Muskogee Creek. Them poor Indins are desperate, I imagine.
After Harney got revenge on Chief Chekaika, he went on west across the Glades, come out at what they now call Harney River. The white people said he was the first to cross the Glades; Indins don't count, of course, and never did. After that he went out West, killed a bunch of Sioux. Made ol' Harney a general for that one, but he never got to be president like Andy Jackson and Zach Taylor and the rest of them Indin-fighters we had down here, cause us red fellers whipped Bill Harney's ass from start to finish.
The spring after Chekaika's death, the few warriors left put out word at the Green Corn Dance that any Indin seen talking to a white man would be killed, and they kept on hiding for another twenty years, till the whites got sick of getting licked and went off to fight their civil war instead.
The Florida Wars was the only Indin wars the U.S. Army never won, had to trick and bribe and steal to get the job done, get one Indin fighting with another. Finally they got to Billy Bowlegs, who had started out with Chekaika on the Calusa Hatchee. Took Old Billy over there to Washington, D.C., give him the name Mr. William B. Legs, snuck him into some upstanding hotel where no durn greasy redskins was allowed. A few years after that, they made him rich, and Billy took his people west, out to the Territory.
Before Harney lit out for the Wild West-Chevelier told me this-that sonofagun was recommending the drainage of the Everglades, same as Dr. Perrine. Recommended the ruin of south Florida is what it was, though it took 'em up till the new century to get around to it.
My mam went west to Wewoka, Oklahoma, with Billy Bowlegs's people from Deep Lake, signed right up with the Catholic mission so's to get her kids a bite to eat. I was out there in the Indin Territory all through my youngerhood. Later I went for a soldier in the Union Army, whole cavalry regiment of breeds and nigras slapping leather and raping and carousing all over the Territory and beyond. Some of them men was half-red and half-black, come down from strong slaves that run off across the wilderness and were taken in by Indins who prized their bravery, and they was the biggest, strongest men I ever saw. Indins called us buffalo soldiers cause the darker ones was buffalo color, with the same dark woolly nap. Indin women who seen us coming would lay down quick and throw sand up inside theirselves to take the fight out of us boys, y'know, unless we got a lasso onto 'em first. That was part of the game, and seems like they had as much fun as what we did. Most of 'em, anyways.
Today I might be a little ashamed that I took up arms against my own Indin people, but in soldiering days, I didn't see them western tribes as people. Them lonely plains wasn't our country, and anyway, your Kioways and Comanches and Pawnees and whatnot weren't nothing but bare-ass renegades, couldn't make out a single word we said.
It was only later I got talking to an old medicine man, a Creek, and he asks me where I was born and bred, and I tell him Florida, and he says, How come you ain't standing on the land? Took me a while to see what he meant, Indin way, and then I seen it, and I run off from the buffalo soldiers and started working my way back south and east to the Land of Florida. Last thing I heard, the Union was still after me, but that was a long time ago. I was what you might call a deserter, and I been deserting ever since, least when it comes to white men and their ways.
There were three good reasons I come home. The Indins here-wild Mikasukis hiding back there in the Cypress-were still real Indins that never surrendered to the missions, never mind the Union. Also, the Islands was a sacred place of the Calusa homeland. Also, Chekaika lived at Pavioni before he retreated back into Long River, so Pavioni was as close to home as I could get.
Long about 1875, I threw in with William Allen, who was the first pioneer down in the Islands. Settled on Haiti Potato Creek-Haiti potato, that's cassava, so the Frenchman taught me-and changed the name to Allen's River. Kept that name right up until the nineties, when the Storter family changed the name to Everglade. I was never a man to be scared off by hard work, and things went along real amiable with my feller pioneers until I got close to Mary Weeks, at Chokoloskee Island, down the Bay.
Chukko-liskee, way the Indins say it, means "old house"-old Calusa house, I reckon, because Cypress Indins wasn't there in early times. Nobody remembered no old house, but the Frenchman figured it must of been some kind of temple. That big mound is back in there where Turner River comes down from the Glades with good fresh water-Turner River was once Chukko-liskee Creek-and it's well sheltered by five miles of outer islands. The settlements at Everglade and Half Way Creek was only mud bank, had their feet in water, but Chokoloskee Island is a shell mound of one hundred fifty acres, some of it twenty foot above the sea. Them Indins knew what they were up to, they'd never be washed off Old House Key, not by no hurricane.
My father-in-law, Old Man John Weeks, pioneered truck farming down at Cape Sable in the Civil War, moved up to Haiti Potato Creek, moved around the Islands. He come full circle, washed ashore at Cape Sable once again before he died. This stumpy feller was the first to settle Chokoloskee Island. Pretty soon he sold off half the island to the Santinis, and after that Old Man Ludis Jenkins-Tant Jenkins's daddy-come in there with his Daniels woman and her Daniels children. One of them Daniels girls was later spoken for by Nicholas Santini and the other one was Henry Thompson's mother.
Old Man John Weeks, he passed for white, he had his honor there to think about, but it took me a while to figure out white people's attitudes. If I was a Choctaw, like I said, then I was a "good Indin." And if I was mulatta, like they claimed, then I was a free man, a free citizen. But this was 1876, right at the end of the Reconstruction, when the Rebs got things turned back their way all over the South, and life got uglier than it was already for people wasn't pink enough to suit 'em. So these crackers decide to protect their womenfolk and run this dang Choctaw right out of the settlement, maybe tar and feather him while they was at it. You ever seen a man in tar and feathers?
Well, I left quick, but I took Mary Weeks right along with me. We headed south, down the Ten Thousand Islands, all the way to the Calusa mound at Pavioni.
Folks never bothered us in them first years. It was only after Watson come, and mounds got scarce, and the Bay men was drifting farther south to find good fishing, that they began to take a different attitude. They was even friendly when I went up there to do my trading, once they seen I wasn't showing off my woman. They had her figured for a tramp that run off with a brown boy, and just so long as I didn't brag on it by showing her off before God-fearing citizens, why then it was not the nigger's fault, is the way they said it. Cause when it comes to white women, they'd say, a nigger just can't help hisself. Being a animal at heart, the poor devil just goes all to pieces.
Now that don't hardly mean that dingy rascal won't get gelded, burned, and lynched, cause they's only so much of his deviltry that decent Christian folks is going to tolerate. But so long as he respects their religious feelings, the way I done, and takes his low-life slut-that's what they called her!-and lives with the runaways and desperados, way out to hell and gone in them dark Islands where only the Devil is witness to their sacrilege-well, then, by Jesus, live and let live, ain't that right, boys? Let the Blessed Lord Above take care of His own sinners, cast 'em straight down to perdition on the Day of Judgment.
Some of them gray summers in the Islands when that rain never stopped, and children crying, and nothing for days and days and days but mud and hunger and bad skeeters, in a hellish steam wet and thick enough to stifle a dang frog-them long gray summers in that heat made a man half wonder if Judgment Day wasn't arrived already.
Once we was down on Chatham River, that place was our own Hamilton territory. White was welcome at my table, but not no more than any other color. Might been the one place in the country I could get away with it, but that don't mean it was forgiven. Mary's sister Sally married Jim Daniels, and later on their daughter Blanche married Frank Hamilton, whose daddy, James, moved to Lost Man's River along about that time. James Hamilton weren't no kind of kin, I don't believe that were his lawful name no more'n it was mine, but his boy married right into our family. So James Hamiltons was kin to us, and they was our neighbors down that way for many years, but they told people they was no relation.
Long ago I give up trying to explain. I look at my hand and know there's seasoning in my blood, can't get away from it. But John Leon would be a white man anywhere, and Eugene, he has white skin, too, also Annie, the youngest. But Walter, he is pretty dark, good narrow features but his skin is shadowed, and my older girl is a pretty shade of coffee. That color could be my mother's side, from times when Indins and slaves was on the run together all across north Florida. But that old woman was Indin to the heart, she never thought nothing but Indin way.
As for Mary Weeks, her mother Elizabeth was full-blood Seminole, supposed to be, the granddaughter of Chief Osceola. They can call us mulattas all they want, but we are Indin. Why heck, if this Hamilton bunch ain't Indin, then they ain't no Indins left in the U.S.A.
That first year, 1888, the Frenchman bought my claim on Chatham Bend. Said kind of gruff that we was welcome to stay on, but I had sign that it was time to go. I never felt right at Pavioni, never liked the feel of it. Pavioni had some old bad history, back to early times. It was what Indins call a power place, but it was bad power, something dark.
Indin people go by sign, they don't need no excuse to leave someplace that don't feel right, they just pick up their hind end and move it elsewhere. In them early years, we owned no more than we could pack into one boat, we traveled light. Get up and go and throw up a lean-to when you get there, and lash together a thatch hut where you might rest a spell.
Where we went was Possum Key, which wasn't but a few miles up the river. Had seven-eight good acres there, a lot more garden than we ever needed. That spring I was plume hunting for the Frenchman, and Possum was close to the big rookeries up the Glades creeks back of Alligator Bay, and handy to the Mikasukis, too, trading plumes and otter. The last Mikasuki renegades was hid in the Big Cypress on them hammocks back in Lost Man's Slough, and they was about the last wild Indins left. They never signed no treaty with no Great White Father. One dugout that come in to trade at Everglade in the late eighties was the first Indins seen by white people in thirty years. But they was spying around Possum Key maybe two years before that, they brung us turkeys, venison, and such, and we took their furs and bird plumes in to Storter's, got 'em trade goods, ordered a few guns from Colonel Wall's hardware store up in Port Tampa, and gave 'em a little cane liquor, too, to keep things lively.
Chevelier slept bad at Pavioni, same as we did, but it took him a whole year to admit it, that's how scientifical he was, and how cranky about giving up so much good ground. That was the greed in him. When I told him Pavioni was no good to him if he didn't farm it and couldn't get no sleep there, he'd shout at me, waving his arms. My kids could imitate him pretty good: "What you tek me for to be? A soo-paire-stee-shee-us domb redda-skin?" Pretty quick most everybody on the coast was imitating Jean Chevelier, we could speak his lingo near as good as he did.
Jean Chevelier sold his rights to the very first hombre who showed up, man named Will Raymond. "Is only for I cannot farm this forty ay-caire, is only for is foking shame is going to waste!" So we took the Frenchman home to Possum Key, built him a house to shelter all them books and bird skins and keep his old skeeter-bit bones out of the rain, and never got so much as a thank-you. When we was done, he shooed us out, acted tickled pink to see the end of us.
Oh yes, we kept the Frenchman in our family, though he didn't know it. To the very end, he frowned and squabbled like a coon. For a while he had a young boy helping, Henry Thompson, and after Henry left, he had Bill House, but he never trusted neither of 'em, never let 'em in too close, for fear them boys might let on about the treasure that any day now he was sure to find on Gopher Key. He yanked them boys hard, by the ear, and kept 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.
Chatham Bend, the largest shell mound between Chokoloskee and Cape Sable, is first described in the journals of Surgeon-General Thomas Lawson, who in February of 1838, during the First Seminole War, led a U.S. Army expedition against "the Spanish Indians"-people of Calusa ancestry returned from Cuba to Florida by the Spanish-to discourage smuggling of guns and ammunition from Cuba to the Seminoles.
We anchored opposite the mouth of Pavilion River, near which we saw a smoke, and on the banks of which, six or eight miles up, the Pilot stated positively that we would find twenty families of Indians, and perhaps others from the interior of the country… Here again we were doomed to meet with disappointment, for the town was tenanted by no living thing, man or beast… The site of this village is very beautiful… and the ground on both sides of the river more valuable than any I have seen in this section of the country. The only objection to it is, that there is no fresh water on it, or in its vicinity…
A later Army expedition found a village of twelve palm-thatch houses and a large forty-acre garden, but which Indians these were was not determined; they may have been the last wild band of Mikasuki under Arpeika, catted Sam Jones, or perhaps a remnant of the "Spanish Indians." In the late eighties Pavioni, as the Indians called it, was occupied briefly by Richard Hamilton, who sold his claim to a Frenchman, M. A. LeChevallier, who sold it in turn to a fugitive, Will Raymond.
Richard Hamilton and Mr. Chevallier, who settled nearby islands, were Mr. Watson's closest neighbors for many years. Hamilton was rumored to be a grandson of the great Spanish Indian war chief Chekaika, who perpetrated the massacre of Dr. Perrine and others at Indian Key in 1840 and who was subsequently shot, then hung, by Lieutenant Colonel Harney's expedition of pursuit from the Miami River into the Everglades.
Our tent was pitched within a short distance of the tree on which Chakika was suspended. The night was beautiful, and the bright rising moon displayed to my view as I lay on my bed the gigantic proportions of this once great and much dreaded warrior. He is said to have been the largest Indian in Florida, and the sound of his very name to have been a terror to his Tribe.
The expedition continued south and west, emerging at last at what is now called Harney River-the first white men ever to traverse the peninsula of southern Florida.
On the Coast and Geodetic Survey charts for 1889, Chatham Bend is identified as "the Raymond Place," but Will Raymond gave up Chatham Bend a few years later, having been killed by sheriff's deputies from Key West. Why Richard Hamilton, then Chevelier, abandoned that large mound so speedily is more mysterious. But Pavioni had a malevolent reputation, and E.J. Watson, who acquired the rights from the Widow Raymond, was the only white man ever to remain more than a year or two; he farmed the Bend for nearly twenty years.
Monsieur LeChevallier, known familiarly along that coast as "Jeen Chevelier" (pronounced "Shovel-leer") or simply "the old Frenchman," was a significant figure in Mr. Watson's early years in southwest Florida. Monsieur Chevelier (as we may as well call him, since "Chevelier Bay" commemorates this spelling in the Ten Thousand Islands) was probably the first large-scale commercial hunter in that region of egret and other species killed for their decorative plumes. In 1879, he established a bird plume operation at Tampa Bay which apparently occupied him for about five years. In 1885, he hired the sloop Bonton to conduct his party from the new settlement on the Miami River around the Keys to the Ten Thousand Islands. The party included Louis and Guy Bradley, young plume hunters of the region. (Guy Bradley later became the first Monroe County game warden, with salary paid by the Audubon Society. He was murdered by a former associate in 1905-one of the several local killings popularly attributed to Mr. Watson, who by that time had become notorious.) Charles Pierce kept a lively journal of the voyage, which took place in the spring and summer of that year.
I had heard a great deal about an old Frenchman, M. LeChevelier, a taxidermist, collector of bird skins and plumes, who was living up the Miami river… Mr. Chevelier is French and cannot talk good English… Pelican skins are the main object of the trip, plumes next, also cormorant skins, in fact all kinds of birds. Mr. Chevelier has a market for all of them in Paris. He gets fifty cents for the pelican skins, twenty-five cents for least tern, $10 for great white heron and $25 for flamingo. Great white herons are scarce and flamingos more so. If it was not for that we would soon make the old man rich.
Despite a right hand crippled by his own gun, Chevelier blazed away with his young associates. The Bonton log is a catalogue of destroyed birds, relieved here and there by lively accounts of storm and wayfarers, mosquitoes, and old Key West, where the party was welcomed and assisted by Chevelier's associate, "Capt. Cary." Presumably this is Elijah Carey (see House and Hamilton interviews), who would later join Chevelier in his plume-birding operations.
In the Ten Thousand Islands, the Bonton anchored off Shark River and also "inside of Pavilion Key," in pursuit of roseate spoonbills, egrets, boobies, and white pelicans. Farther up the coast, "we came to an island that had a palmetto shack on it where lived an old Portuguese named Gomez with his cracker wife. Mr. Chevelier had known Gomez some years before." This was Gomez or Panther Key, from which Gomez guided them on a hunt for roseate spoonbills (or "pink curlew") the next morning.
Juan Gomez, like Mr. Watson, was a local legend in the Islands, still celebrated for the claim that in his youth he had been addressed kindly by the emperor Napoleon in Madrid, Spain, and had later sailed with a buccaneer named Gasparilla. By his own calculation, Gomez was 108 years old at the time of the Bonton's visit, and he was still there in 1900, when a visitor described this region as "that maze of intricate channels… a place that was once the refuge of pirates, and even now retains the flavor of bloodthirsty tales."
Although harshly criticized a few years later by W.E.D. Scott (in the Audubon Society publication called The Auk) for "wanton destruction" at Tampa Bay in 1879, M. Chevelier was a dedicated naturalist. Doubtless the plume-bird shooting financed his scientific investigations, since he was collecting in Labrador and donating bird skins to the Smithsonian as early as 1869. Since Scott's day, three "LeChevellier" bird skins have turned up at the Smithsonian and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Scott himself listed seven rare bird specimens credited to "A. Lechevallier," including two short-tailed hawks collected at "Chatham Bay" in 1888 and early 1889.
Jean Chevelier was drawn fatally to this wild coast, where he would spend the remainder of his life. In his first year he lived on the great Calusa mound on Chatham Bend, having purchased quitclaim rights from Richard Hamilton (see interviews); the Hamilton clan, which remained close to him, was also closely associated with Mr. Watson.