What a glorious year, and scarcely started!
On January 1, electric light came on for the first time at the new Fort Myers hotel and also in several business establishments, Langford & Hendry for one. Last year when Mr. Edison lit up his Seminole Lodge, that glorious blaze was the first electric lighting in the nation! (He had already offered street lights but the men refused them, claiming night light might disturb their cattle!)
On February 16, the international telegraph station at Punta Rassa got America’s first word of the explosion of the battleship Maine while lying at anchor in Havana Harbor. 260 young Americans, killed in their sleep! The “dastardly Spaniards,” as our paper calls them, claim the ship’s own magazines blew up, but nobody believes this sinful lie.
And here is the third piece of historic news! On 8 July, Miss Carrie Watson will marry Mr. Walter G. Langford of this city!
But but but-yes, I respect Walter and admire him, truly, but no one can say any thought of this marriage was mine. I was simply informed how lucky I would be to make such a good match “under the circumstances” (Papa’s shadowed reputation); I was not to be silly about it because “grown-ups know best.” I’m not a grown-up, I suppose, just a child bride.
Naturally the child is scared she’ll be found wanting. Thanks to dear Mama, I am educated by our local standards and can cook and sew. I have taken care of little brothers since the age of five so I might manage a household if I have good darkie help-is that enough? Am I a child? (I think about my tomboy days and snoopy Erskine, and how Papa promised he’d tie net weights to my skirt hems if I didn’t quit climbing trees.)
In the evenings after school these days, Mama tutors me and my squirming little brothers. We are reading Romeo and Juliet. Juliet was just my age when Romeo “came to her,” as Mama puts it (once the boys are gone). She is trying to teach me about life while there is time, but the poor thing goes rose red at her own words, and as for me, I screech “Oh Mama!” pretending more embarrassment than I really feel. Is it sinful to be curious when a grown man nearly twice my age (and twice my weight) will clamber into my bed, climb right on top of me?
Mama feels sure he is a decent young man. “What can be decent,” I protest, “about lying down on top of a young girl without his clothes on!” Saying this, I have a fit of giggles, because really, it’s so comical! Mama smiles, too, but feels obliged to say, “Well, Papa will talk to him.” And I cry out, “But what can Papa say? Don’t touch a hair on my daughter’s… head, young man, if you know what’s good for you?”
I know, I know. It’s not funny in the least and yet I giggle idiotically. The whole town must be snickering.
One day on a buggy ride with Walter, we saw a stallion covering a mare in a corral. Walter got flustered, wrenched the buggy reins and turned us right around. I won’t deny it, I wanted to look back: it was exciting! This body I drag around is so inquisitive! Cantering along the river, a queer feeling in my “private parts” makes me wonder if that “fate worse than death” might not be bearable.
Reverend Whidden has upsetting breath and no good answers to such questions: I know that much without even asking. “I daresay,” (he dares say) “things will work out in the end.” What I don’t dare say, least of all to him, is anything about this earthly flesh, this female vessel that yearns and fidgets and perspires in his face, pretending that her sweet virginal inquiries arise from some pure source.
If anybody finds this diary, I will throw myself into the river.
Walter is gentle and he tries to tell me that he will not hurt me, but he can’t find a way to say this that doesn’t embarrass both of us to death. He supposes I have no idea what he is getting at, and I can’t show I understand lest he think me wanton and so we nod and smile like ninnies, blushing with confusion and distress. He is so boyish, for all his reputation as a hell-and-high-water cowboy! His embarrassed moments are when I trust him most and love him best.
After church, he courts me on the old wood bench beneath the banyan tree where our good shepherd, Mr. Whidden, can spy on the young lovers through his narrow window. Is this why Walter doesn’t kiss me?
In the evening my shy beau walks me down to the hotel to see the new electric lights in the royal palms that line the street or attend the weekly concerts of the Fort Myers brass band at the new bandstand. The whole town turns out to hear patriotic marches in honor of “our brave boys in Cuba.” We’re shipping our cattle to Cuba again, not for those cruel Spanish anymore but for Col. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Who would have thought the Union banner would ever be cheered here in a southern town? The Stars and Stripes are everywhere! Remember the Maine! our cowboys yell, galloping through the streets, raising the dust.
Walter says he would like to “go bag me a Spaniard,” but he cannot abandon his mother when his father is not well, so will stay home and run their cattle business. Dr. Langford is an excellent doctor, he takes good care of Mama, but in recent years-here’s Papa again-his side interest in business makes him pay more mind to profits than to people. “Doc” Langford and Captain Cole are grazing stock on Raulerson Prairie at Cape Sable, where Papa says the horseflies and mosquitoes will show them what damn fools they are if saline coast grass doesn’t starve their cattle first. (If Papa’s two cows at Chatham Bend had no screened shed between sunset and sun-up, he says, they’d be sucked dry of blood let alone milk.)
Sometimes I think that Mama is getting better. When we first came, she had a queer shine to her skin like a coon pelt scraped so thin the sun shines through. With rest, she has some color back and her old curiosity, too, and even dares to question Papa’s views about the War. Being an invalid with time to read, she keeps herself so well informed that even Papa pays attention to her comments. In her quiet way, Mama despises the cattlemen’s “tin patriotism,” all this flag-waving and fine speechifying. Our brave young men, who have no say about it, are sent off to be killed, while our rich businessmen wave the flag and rake in the fat profits from what the Secretary of State has called this “splendid little war.” Mama asks, “How ‘splendid’ is it for scared homesick boys who must do all the screaming and the dying?”
Although the words “brave Yankee boys” still set his teeth on edge, Papa is fiercely patriotic, but hearing the Langfords and Captain Cole gloat over their war profits has made him cynical. (Captain Jim Cole chortles unabashed that war “is the best d-business there is.”) “Captain Cole!” he growls, disgusted. Says this so-called captain has no give to him and people see that so he takes Walter along to grease his way. Walter admits that Mr. Cole is a “rough diamond,” but like Mama I find no diamond in the man, a hard dull money glint is all I see. Papa suspects these public patriots of selling cattle to the Spanish on the sly.
Dear Papa says he will never salute the Stars and Stripes. The war with Spain is very like “the War of Yankee Aggression,” as he still calls the Civil War: the South, he says, was the first conquest of the Yankee Empire, and Cuba and the Spanish colonies will be next. Yet he also denounces Mr. Twain for writing that Old Glory deserves to be replaced with a pirate flag, with black stripes instead of blue and every star a skull and crossbones. Mama nods, swift needles flying. She quotes an editorial: “The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people, even as the taste of blood-”
“Mrs. Watson.” Papa snaps his paper. “Kindly permit me to read in peace.”
Mama hums a little to soothe Papa, whose newspaper is lifted high to block her from his sight. I watch her bosom rise and fall in her emotion. “This is the Good Lord’s war on Spain, they say, and we are but His servants. Don’t you agree, dear?”
“Mrs. Watson, be still!”
“With all this money being made, it’s so appropriate that we inscribe Him on our coins-In God We Trust! I believe the Germans share our feeling: Gott mit uns, they say.” Speaking more and more softly, Mama knits faster and faster. “So even when our women have no voice-and our poor darkies are tormented, burned, and hung-we can take comfort in our faith that God is on our side.”
Papa’s paper falls still as he turns his gaze to her in dreadful warning; she raises pale innocent eyebrows and resumes her knitting. “A brave lady”-she pretends to address her daughter, as if only females could make sense of the ways of men-“has recently petitioned President McKinley about the lynching of ten thousand Negroes in the past twenty years alone, almost all of them innocent of any crime.” She is upset that the Supreme Court has upheld segregation on the railroads. “ ‘What can more certainly arouse race hate,’ ” she reads aloud, quoting the dissent of Justice Harlan, “ ‘than state enactments which in fact proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?’ ”
Papa slaps his paper down and leaves the house. Lucius and Eddie beg permission to run after him to Ireland’s Dock, knowing he will buy them sweets at Dancy’s Stand before he sails. The two boys twist like eels upon their chairs, and Eddie pretends he is suffering a call of nature, but Mama doesn’t let them go so easily: in her quiet way, she is determined to advance her “liberated” ideas, about women’s suffrage especially.
Mama says that Indians, too, would suffer “Jim Crow” laws if we hadn’t wiped most of them out with bullets and diseases. In south Florida today, there are few left, but Papa says they have started to come in to trade at Everglade with dugouts full of deer hides, plumes, and pelts. The women like calico in yellow, red, and black-coral snake colors, says Lucius, who knows everything there is to know about Indians and the natural world of the Glades country. Probably the coral snake has sacred meaning, our little boy explains, until Eddie scoffs at his opinions, reminding him that he is only nine. Eddie is happy here in town but Lucius badly misses Chatham Bend.
The Indians are still afraid that the few families left in the Big Cypress and the Glades will be captured and removed to Oklahoma. They call themselves Mikasuki, denying they are Seminole, but nobody listens to them, least of all Captain Cole, who declares he would gladly round up the whole bunch and ship ’em as far as New Orleans in his cattle schooner at no charge to the government-“just to be rid of ’em,” he says, “cause they won’t never be civilized, no more’n wolves nor panthers, and sooner or later they will get in the way of progress.” Papa says this was the first d-d thing he ever heard Cole say that he agreed with. Said the man sounded sincere for once, all but that part about not charging for the shipping.