In his theory about the great Calusa clam bed, the Frenchman had tried to distract me from whatever he was up to back on Gopher Key. Even so, his guess was correct. Coming up the coast one day at dead low water, I eased myself barefoot over the side. Right away my feet located hard shapes under the sand: upright clam valves in what proved to be a clam bed close to a mile wide-I mapped it out-extending almost six miles north from Pavilion Key. This was exciting. Establishing a clam fishery so close to home where I could keep an eye on things might finance my whole operation. I would stake a claim and form a company as soon as my harvest was finished in late winter.
At this time, young Bill House was working upriver from the Bend on his dad’s new plantation at House Hammock. For a year or two, he had collected rare bird eggs for the Frenchman, and old Jean must have mentioned his clam cannery idea to decoy that boy away from Gopher Key, because one day I came by House Hammock and found Bill constructing a crude dredge. What’s that for? I inquired. Bird eggs? When he grinned sheepishly but said nothing, I changed the subject quick: knowing this young House for a slow mover, I was not discouraged. I sailed to Marco the next day and confided my great discovery to Bill Collier, inviting him to join me as a partner. This man had been unusually successful in his business enterprises and had the experience and capital I lacked. To my surprise, Collier seemed skeptical of the whole proposition, even when I mentioned my clam-dredge idea. I would have to find a partner or at least a backer among my business acquaintances in Fort Myers.
My friend Nap Broward had made his name by smuggling contraband arms to the Cuban rebels and was urging me to use the Gladiator in this night business. Broward was anxious to avenge his friend Josй Martн, who had been shamed into returning to Cuba by fellow rebels; claiming he did too much talking, not enough fighting, his own men got that little feller killed when he tried to prove them wrong. In the end my ill wife persuaded me to avoid such a reckless venture. After so many long hard years of separation, we should cherish this precious time, she said.
Very weak, Mandy gazed into my eyes in a shy way that told me she knew she would not live much longer and warned me to be careful for the children’s sake. She showed me a Copley print called Watson and the Shark, which portrayed a man fallen out of a longboat who was being seized by a huge shark in Havana Harbor. “I think you’d better stay away from Cuba!” Mandy said. The doomed Watson was a soft, pale, naked fellow, wallowing helplessly in the shark’s jaws and rolling his eyes to the high heavens, and the only crewman trying to save him was the one black man. “Well,” I laughed, “it’s a damned good thing that Watson feller had his nigger with him!”
“I imagine you mean ‘nigra.’ ”
“Yes’m, I do.” And that was true. I did. I had spoken carelessly.
Mandy had never accepted my excuses-that that word’s use was just a careless way of saying “nigra” and that nigras often used it, too. Good black people, she said, used “black folks”: “nigger” was somebody shiftless, “no account,” even disgraceful. I wasn’t so sure, though. I guess I would go along with that most of the time. Some say “coloreds,” ladies preferred “darkies.” If you were black, she reminded me, every last one of these white man names would be insulting, wasn’t that true? They were just dark-skinned human beings. They were people. This whole race business distressed Mandy very much. She felt that Emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction-all of that loss and suffering-had come to nothing, and that our great national disease remained uncured.