For a time I lived with my friend Will Cox, who farmed a piece of Tolen land and occupied my old cabin near the Junction. I was building a house on the highest rise in this flat country, the former site of a seventeenth-century Spanish mission destroyed by the British when they came to north Florida from Charleston at the start of the eighteenth century and butchered every Spaniard and Indian they could lay their hands on. When the wind shuffled the leaves of the ancient red oak on that hilltop, I could hear a whisper of that old sad history.
I planted pecans right down to the road, also a fig tree. Built a work shed, horse and cow stalls, chicken coop, sugar mill, syrup shed, corncrib, beehives, and a fine muscadine arbor. William Kinard dug me a well, and my new friend and devoted admirer John Porter got me started with some hardware. (John liked me well enough, I guess, but mainly he was anxious to be known as the confidant and friend of the Man Who Killed Belle Starr.)
Sam’s stepbrother John Russ was a fair carpenter, and together we got my house done in a hurry, using heart pine lath and tongue-and-groove pine siding. My roof of cedar shakes clear of the smallest knothole was the talk of the south county because most men begrudged the time and craft required to make them. Folks were going over to tin roofs, which turn a house into an oven in the summer: the tin starts popping toward midday, and in late afternoon, as the house cools off, she pops some more.
Inside, I dispensed with a parlor in favor of three bedrooms and a large dining room with a kind of window counter through which food could be passed when it came in from the kitchen-my own innovation, built originally for the house at Chatham Bend. The new house had no second story, only a garret with end windows to vent the summer heat. With the lumber saved, I built a broad airy veranda with split-cane rockers where social occasions, such as they were, mostly took place. The porch had a hand-carved railing that became almost as celebrated in our district as my carved railing on the stair at Chatham Bend, and the house was set upon brick pilings to let cool breeze pass beneath the floor and offer summer shade to my hogs and chickens. As for the windows, they were cut high on the walls so that no night rider could draw a bead on the inhabitant-a modern improvement, picked up in Arcadia, that I never troubled to explain here in Fort White.
Black Frank Reese from Arkansas had turned up at Will Cox’s place while I was in the Islands, and I gave him some rough work moving materials. Frank had tracked down that faithless Memphis woman he had sworn to kill but because she had grown fat and ugly, he belted her hard across the head and let it go at that. From this I knew he had matured somewhat since I last saw him.
Will Cox, who had been sharecropping for Tolen, could take no more of Sam’s abuse and came over to farm with me instead. Sam still owed me for those hogs he’d all but stolen when I left for Oklahoma but he had to be threatened with arson or worse before he came up with some razor-backed runts, thin and uncared for. “Ain’t goin to thank me, Ed?” With a rough boot, he drove them off the tailgate of his wagon into my new pen.
“My hogs were fine animals,” I reminded him, “not scrags like these.”
Fat Sammy laughed. “Fine animals make fine eatin.’ ” He winked. “Got fine money for ’em, too.” I mentioned that better men than Tolen had been hung for hog theft back in the old century. “That a fact?” he said. “Yessir,” I said, “that is a fact, and here’s another: a dispute over a pair of hogs caused the famous feud between Hatfields and McCoys. More than twenty came up dead before the smoke cleared.”
“You threatenin me, Ed? I’d go easy on them threats if I was you. Folks here ain’t forgotten who you are and ain’t all of ’em has forgiven, neither.”
I looked him over, saying nothing. In Arkansas, I had been sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor for boarding stolen horses. Anywhere in the backcountry, a man would be punished more severely for stealing a horse than for exterminating this fat human varmint. True, I’d eased up on my drinking and put my gun away for good-I meant it, too-but Sammy Tolen didn’t need to know that.
It was Carrie who sent word from Fort Myers that her mother had passed away; she had taken the two boys into her house. When I wrote back seeking to comfort her, I told her to send Eddie north to help on the new farm; he had been born here in Fort White and still thought of it as home. As for Lucius, he would go to Everglade and board with our friends the Storters while he finished school. All that young feller cared about was Chatham Bend.
Unlike Lucius, Eddie was not handy out of doors, so a nigra named Doc Straughter, who usually showed up, taught him how to do the yard chores, tend the animals. Doc was stepbrother to that girl they called Jane Straughter, who was so light-skinned that anywhere else she would be taken for a white, and so desirable that half the men in the south county, black, white, or polka dots, were sniffing around her like wild tomcats, including that distinguished widower Mr. E. J. Watson and his hired man, Frank Reese. Jane was not yet twenty, very smart and well-spoken for a darkie, which of course she wasn’t, having been got upon the light-skinned Fannie Straughter by my friend John Calhoun Robarts. The Robarts clan never denied young Jane. They called on her and hugged and talked to her as one of their own, and being close kin to Robartses, the Collinses regarded her as family, too. All the same, Jane knew her place and tended to the household chores at my place, where I could keep an eye on her, so to speak.
I told Frank to forget about Jane Straughter, they looked too much like chocolate and vanilla. Made a joke of that, the way we used to, riding out of Arkansas, but this was different, my old partner was rankled. He dared to say, “They say just one black drop makes a man a nigger. That go for pretty women, too?”
And I said, “Oh, she’s got that drop in her, no doubt about it, but she is family all the same, so if a nigra with as many drops as Black Frank Reese was to go messing with her, he might be hunting up more trouble than he’d care to handle.”
Frank very much disliked my tone and did not hide it, knowing that when it came to Jane, only one of us got to tease and that was me. Sucking his teeth as if tasting a hard truth, he gave me that flat kind of look that a tough nigra might get away with in the Indian Country but could get himself shot for anywhere else.
“You’re not a home nigger,” I reminded him, using that word. He looked away. With Jim Crow law spreading like a plague across America, any black man was fair game for whites out to raise hell, and a story in the papers-some crazed black man in New Orleans, resisting capture, had gunned down a whole covey of police before they finished him-had only made things worse. A nigra from other parts, I explained to Frank, might get himself set afire and strung up like a burnt ham by local men for snooping around that Straughter girl the same way they did.
“Burnt ham.” Reese drove his pitchfork hard into the earth.
Leaving the Collinses to oversee young Eddie, I would take John Russ and two of his four sons to the southwest coast. In exchange for repairs and additions at the Bend, I would settle up all our accounts from that winter’s syrup sale. As a Tolen stepbrother, John disliked me on general principles: he went along in hope of collecting his money but mostly because I also took Jane Straughter, to keep her out of the wrong hands while I was away.
Though he knew better than to say so, Frank Reese did not take kindly to my plan. He put on a kind of humble show, as was generally expected when blacks received orders that upset them. They had to act “natural,” which meant not merely compliant but eager and cheerful. Frank tugged his cap and ducked and squirmed with a hideous false smile. Not until I hollered at him-Cut that out, goddammit!-did he straighten slowly, throw his shoulders back, his dark face closed tight as his fist.