Early October, with my brother Claude and Henry Short, I was fishing the bayous up inside the Chatham delta (what’s called Storter Bay on the marine charts of today), and selling the catch to the clam diggers on Pavilion Key. My good old friend from boyhood, Lucius Watson, usually came downriver to fish with us, but Lucius had left the Bend after some trouble, he was in Flamingo.
One evening we were at Pavilion selling mullet when Jim Cannon from Marco and his boy came in and caused a uproar. The Cannons were farming vegetables on Mr. Chevelier’s old place on Possum Key. Some said they were prospecting for the Frenchman’s treasure (or maybe the miser money folks claim Ed Watson killed him for) but Jim was just provisioning the clam crews, same as we were. Bananas and guavas were still thick on Possum in the years bears didn’t clean ’em out, also the gator pears and Key limes put in by the Frenchman. His garden was kept cleared and his cistern fresh by Indians who camped there on their way north from Shark River.
After Watson came back to Chatham Bend in early 1909, the Cannons never cared to stay the night at Possum Key. Camped with the clam crews on Pavilion, went upriver each day on the tide. On that dark squally morning, Jim’s boy saw a pale small thing breaking the surface. “Pap,” he calls, “I seen something queer stick up, right over there!” And Jim Cannon says, “No, you ain’t never! Must been some ol’ snag or somethin.” The boy hollered, “Nosir! It was white!” Well, Cannon paid him no more mind, and they went on upriver. But that boy worried all day about what he’d seen, and coming back that afternoon, he was on the lookout, and pretty quick he’s hollering and pointing.
Know that eddy just below the Watson place, off the north bank? Jim Cannon swung the boat in there, saw something white and puffy sticking up that turned out to be a woman’s foot. The current curling past it was so strong that they had to take a hitch around the ankle just to stay put, but there was nothing to be done, they could not come up with her. That corpse seemed moored to something deep down in the river and they pretty near capsized trying to boat her.
The boy was scared and getting scareder: he figured that the giant croc reported from this stretch of river must have a hold of her. Staring at that ghosty face mooning deep in the dark current and the hair streaming like gray weed, he burst into tears of fright, he was shivering in some kind of a fit. So Cannon cut her loose, said, “Never mind, son, we’ll just go ashore, report this here calamity to Mister Watson.” Having more sense than the father, the boy screeched, “Nosir, I ain’t going!” He had heard those stories about Watson, he was scared stiff.
Jim told him to hush up so he could think. He concluded that whoever committed this foul deed had nothing to lose by getting rid of witnesses and he’d better go back to Pavilion, find some help.
Next morning, a party went upriver. Henry Short was very much afraid but he went with us. Kept his old rifle handy and nobody objected, the body being just below the Watson place. That giant woman had been gutted out like you’d gut a bear, then anchored off with sacks of bricks left over from the syrup works and some pig iron. When she bloated up and floated all that iron off the bottom, that one foot broke the surface and wigwagged the first boat that came along. Every man was boiling mad to see a woman as good-hearted as Hannah Smith treated so brutally. Some of ’em were talking big about going up to Watson’s house, but except for Henry we weren’t armed so we never went, and nobody came out of that house to see what we were up to.
Hannah’s hog-thief boyfriend was still with her. Somebody looked down and there he was! He had been weighted separately but their lines tangled, he rose with her, and that spooked us, too.
Those bodies had been there a few days and nobody wanted to look at ’em, let alone smell ’em-made our eyes water. We dug a pit on the south bank down the river, maybe thirty feet in from the point where Watson had been clearing off another cane field. Henry Short helped dig the hole but he knew better than to lay a hand on her. Maybe someone mumbled a few words and maybe not.
Returning downriver, someone spotted a third body wedged into the mangrove roots, all torn by gators. We rigged a hitch to Dutchy Melville and towed him back and buried what was left of him beside the others. One feller threw up and I came pretty close.
A man can go there yet today and see that lonely grave. Big and square, maybe sunk about a foot, and nothing growing, even some years later, as if someone had lifted a barn door stuck in the marl. Those three lost souls are laying in there right this minute. You open that pit, you’ll have a look at Hell.
We hardly got back from the burial when in came this big nigra from the Watson place, dark husky feller in torn coveralls. He had taken a skiff and got away from Chatham Bend-a desperate act because he was no boatman, his palms were raw from pulling on old splintery oars. One minute he was moaning and blubbering so much you could hardly make him out, the next he was quiet and his eyes were steady. Captain Thad Williams, who came in that day to pick up any people who wanted to go north before the storm, gave that man a hard cuff to make him talk straight, and finally he hollered that three white folks had been bloody-murdered on the Bend.
“Jesus, boy, we know that!” a man yelled. “Tell us who done it!”
“Yassuh! Mist’ Watson-”
“Y’all hear that? Watson!”
But before we could pin him down, he cried, “Nosuh, I mistook myself! Mist’ Watson’s fo’man!”
The ugly silence in that crowd was partly outrage against any nigra who would dare to get his white boss into trouble. Captain Thad talked rough with him, told him to be careful who he went accusing; Thad told me later he had been afraid this excited crowd might lynch him. The nigra was moaning and carrying on but back of all that noise and fear I sensed something cunning.
Watson’s back-door family-that whole Daniels-Jenkins bunch that lived off and on at Chatham Bend-that bunch wanted to shut this black man up right then and there. And seeing the way the wind was blowing, the man insisted, “Nosuh, ah sho’ mistook mahself! Mist’ Watson nevuh knowed nothin about nothin! Mist’ Watson gone!” But not until he got Watson suspected had he switched his story.
Watching him work his story back and forth, I realized this feller knew what he was doing from the start. Cox might have killed him at Chatham Bend and he had no place to run, so he risked coming to Pavilion Key to warn the nearest white men about a dangerous killer. If he’d left it at that, he might have been all right. But as we could see, he was in a rage, maybe mule-headed by nature: he put out that stink of suspicion rather than let his white man boss get off unpunished, then backed off from a flat-out accusation. Didn’t want to die, but if he had to die, he would not go before he risked the truth. As Henry Short found out and told us later, this man was determined to see justice done, even if his idea of justice was an act of revenge that could very well get him killed. He had dug himself a deep dark hole of trouble, probably too deep to climb out.
When this nigra was told how the woman’s body had surfaced in the river, he let out a yell, “Oh Lawd Miz Hannah! Lawdamercy!” They slapped him again, to shut up all his racket. Everyone was trying to think what we should do. When Thad demanded, “Who gutted out those bodies?” he blubbered how Mist’ Les Cox tole him he was done fo’ if he didn’t shoot into the bodies and help “in the guttin and haulin,” said Mist’ Cox tole him if anybody asked, just blame it on Mist’ Watson. This was the first time most of us learned that the foreman’s name was not John Smith but Leslie Cox.
That black man was plain crazy to confess he had shot and manhandled a white woman. When someone yelled that this damn nigger had been in on it from start to finish, there rose a kind of ugly groan and a man whapped his face. “You shot a white woman, that what you said? Laid your black hands all over her? What else you do?” If there’d been one tree limb on that key that had not been chopped for fuel, they would have strung him up.
But if he was mixed up in it, why had he come here? Why had he talked himself into so much trouble? Those watchful yellow eyes gave me the feeling that this man had done just what he aimed to do. When he saw I’d seen that, he cast his eyes down. Bone reckless, maybe, but no fool.
At the fire, the clammers were drinking shine, angry and frustrated; most agreed that shooting this man could do no harm. But Cap’n Thad declared that his vessel was the only one that could carry them all home from Pavilion Key to escape the coming storm, and anyone who harmed this crucial witness to the crime would get left behind. He marched the nigra over to his schooner for safekeeping, and once the man was out of sight, the crowd calmed down some, deciding to see justice done in court.
Tant’s sister Josie was still spitting mad that a white man had been slandered by “a dirty nigger.” She’d had some drink and they let her rant and rave. Swore she’d never board that rotten ship with such a bunch of yellerbellies, not if it was her last day on this earth, and neither would her man Jack Watson’s baby boy. “Spittin image!” one drunk yelled when she lifted him above her head for all to see.