Old-timers knew it wasn’t wise to talk about Seminole Joe unless you absolutely had to, and then, only in quiet, funeral-parlor voices. You surely didn’t write about him in the newspaper.
The fact that Darryl was planning to call his development Dreamsville Estates was a shock. A wickedly clever business idea on Darryl’s part. But what kind of fool would provoke Jackie Hart and Seminole Joe at the same time?
Over the years, Dolores had occasionally heard a child being disciplined by a thoughtless parent saying, “You’d better behave or Seminole Joe will get you tonight.” Well, first of all, Dolores thought that was mean. Why would anyone scare a child like that? She’d never talked to Robbie-Lee like that. Second, Seminole Joe wouldn’t be bothered with some poor skeerty-cat child who hadn’t done his homework or his chores. He had far more worthwhile wrongs to right. Besides, no one could summon Seminole Joe for selfish reasons. Some spirits could be conjured for specific reasons, but not Joe. He had a mind of his own.
Jackie was the type of Yankee who, no doubt, would laugh at the idea of Seminole Joe, like the woman manager who came down from Chicago to train Robbie-Lee to run the Sears catalog store. Miss High and Mighty had interrupted a conversation between Robbie-Lee and a customer by announcing, “What are you talking about?! Surely you know there is no such thing as ghosts!” And, according to Robbie-Lee, it was said in a way that made both him and the customer feel ignorant.
Dolores knew the type. What the lady manager didn’t say, but might as well have, was, “I don’t believe in them, therefore, they cannot possibly exist.” Dolores knew differently. The truth was, if you didn’t encounter spirits it was because you refused to see them—possibly, to your own detriment.
Why were Yankees so certain they understood the world better than anyone else? You’d think life was some kind of big joke, and they were the only ones smart enough to know what was funny and what was not. Folks like that weren’t open to mystery or magic. They thought they had everything figured out, so their minds were closed like a steel trap. It was kind of sad, when you got right down to it.
Maybe the problem was that Yankee folks, even on vacation, were always in motion, running from one activity to the next. If they weren’t swimming, they were golfing. If they weren’t golfing, they were boating. That was fine—they were welcome to it—but Dolores was puzzled that people could claim to love the outdoor life and yet seem so far away from nature. They preferred houses built like bunkers with cement floors and walls, barriers to the swampland where, God forbid, bugs and other scary things lurked. Dolores imagined them in their nice houses, some with air-conditioning, all of them with plumbing. They put on shoes that looked like combat boots, just to walk to their mailboxes. She’d seen them and tried not to laugh.
Did they ever spend hours looking at the stars, as Dolores did? There was nothing quite like star watching on a clear night, or witnessing the fight for survival among the plants and critters in the swamps, to make a person remember that she was just a speck of dust.
Seminole Joe was more than a story. He was a spirit, and spirits live on, in different ways and for different reasons.
What most folks didn’t seem to understand was that Seminole Joe was the spirit of injustice. He represented all the wrongs that had been done in the ’Glades. Folks were scared of Seminole Joe but in her opinion, it was Darryl they should have been skeert of. Darryl was like an overseer with a whip, a man with no soul. Darryl was a man who had choices, and he’d chosen mean over good.
From time to time, Dolores actually understood—just a little—what it must have been like to be colored or Indian. It didn’t take a genius to see that white people were at the root of just about every mess you could think of, and Darryl was just the latest version. White folks had a knack for finding their way to the top of the pecking order and ruling the roost. Dolores could see this, and yet it created a problem for her because she was white, so what was wrong with her? What was she lacking? Why wasn’t she rich and powerful, and sitting at the top of the henhouse looking down on everyone else? Maybe she wasn’t quite mean enough. Or ambitious enough.
She uncrumpled the newspaper and reread the column. Jackie Hart’s bringing up Seminole Joe was bound to complicate an already-tricky situation. Jackie seemed to thrive when she created chaos. But Dolores had lived long enough to know that a wise person didn’t let a bobcat out of its cage and assume it would eat only varmints. No, sir, it might eat you instead.
She looked over at the night heron. “Let’s hope Dora Witherspoon talks some sense into her man,” she called out, and the bird stretched its wings in response. To herself, she added, “Otherwise, I’m afeared we be in for a wild ride.”
Fourteen
What do you suppose Seminole Joe looks like?” Judd asked, wiping the sweat from his brow with the hem of his T-shirt. He had fled to my little cottage to get away from the craziness that had been going on all day, ever since the Naples Star landed in people’s driveways or hedges. Judd said the phone had not stopped ringing with excited people wanting to talk to his mother about her column on Seminole Joe. No wonder he wanted to hide out for a while at my cottage. And I put him to work, helping me dig some new holes for the turtles to wallow around in.
“Haven’t you ever seen the local Indians?” I asked, surprised.
“You mean selling baskets?” he said. “No one ever said they were Indians. I didn’t know who they were. My teacher said we should stay away from them, that’s all I know.”
“Well, did you ever see the movie Key Largo?” I asked.
He looked like he was racking his brain. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “That was before my time.”
Judd cracked me up. Sometimes he sounded like a thirteen-year-old boy, and sometimes he sounded like a sixty-year-old man.
“Well,” I said, slurping on my iced tea, “Lauren Bacall was in it. And Humphrey Bogart.”
“Seminole Joe looks like . . . Humphrey Bogart?”
I tried not to laugh. “No, no, Humphrey Bogart plays a man who was in the Army in the war and visits his dead friend’s father and widow who live down yon in Key Largo. There’s a bunch of gangsters in the movie, too—Edward G. Robinson plays one of them.”
The word “gangster” got Judd’s attention. He was behaving like a thirteen-year-old again. “So what happens?” he said, completely focused. I noticed, once again, that he had Jackie’s blue eyes—the exact shade. And yet he looked like his dad, Ted Hart, too.
“Well, the real star of the movie is a storm,” I said. “A hurricane. But maybe I shouldn’t tell you more. Sometime maybe you’ll see the movie and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.”
“But—wait—what’s this got to do with Seminole Joe?”
“There are characters in the movie who are supposed to be Seminole Indians,” I said, “and I think some of them really are. So Joe probably looked more or less like the Indians in Key Largo.”
Judd looked disappointed. “But how am I going to see the movie?” he said. “It could be five years before they show it on TV.”
“You could go to the library and see if they have any books on the Seminoles,” I said, and his face brightened. “They must at least have a book about Andrew Jackson and the Seminole Wars,” I added.
Well, that was the last I saw of Judd that day. He was off on his bicycle like Paul Revere warning folks that the British were coming, an image that fit mighty nice, considering that he’d spent the first eleven years of his life in Boston.
Judd’s energy was inspiring. After fixing myself a fried bologna sandwich, half of which I fed to my turtles, I decided to go for a stroll on the beach to look for shells and clear my mind. To my surprise, every little shell or pebble seemed to hurt my bare feet. In my year away from home, it seems I’d become a tenderfoot on account of wearing shoes all the time. But the surf was gentle and soothing as bathwater, and I realized, splashing along in ankle-deep water, that I was happy. Not happy about Darryl’s development
plans or his remarriage to some Northern gal, of course, but happy with the general direction of my life. I had learned a great deal during my year in Mississippi—some of it hard to take—but I was more independent than I’d ever been. I was going back to Jackson, not forever, but for a little while longer. I was not going to run away from the city of my mother’s birth and the story that was unfolding there about her past. My past.
There was still plenty of daylight, so I went home, found my old Keds, and walked slowly downtown. I told myself I was going to get a root beer float at the Rexall counter but truth be told, I wanted to see if anything was going on. Sometimes, folks would gather downtown when something important was happening. I’d be able to judge how big a reaction Jackie’s story was getting by the number of people—usually at home on a hot night in Naples—milling around and looking for an excuse to talk.
Sure enough, there were people gathered by the bench in front of the post office, outside the Rexall, and by the Winn-Dixie. I recognized a few people from high school but wasn’t eager to talk to them, especially Betty Jane Pomeroy, who was holding court over by the Green Stamp Redemption Center. Betty Jane had a way of inserting the topic of her happy marriage, brilliant children, and fabulous house into every conversation. Fortunately, I saw Plain Jane walking along by herself from the direction of the Dairy Queen. We saw each other at the same moment, and I was reminded, once again, how much my old book club meant to me. Before them, especially since I’d gotten divorced, I’d felt like a stranger in my own hometown.
Plain Jane and I perched on the top step of the Everglades Savings and Loan, a good location for spying on people ever since it was rebuilt at eight feet above sea level after being trounced by Hurricane Donna. “You know what they’re talking about, don’t you?” Plain Jane said, between bites of an ice cream cone that was melting faster than she could eat it.
“I can guess,” I said.
“Someone said Darryl is going to have a press conference tomorrow,” she said. “Apparently she really stirred things up. You know, people don’t talk about spirits, much less Seminole Joe. Everyone around here knows the stories but no one has ever written about it in the newspaper.”
This was true. Somehow, just the fact that Seminole Joe had made the pages of the Naples Star made a scary story seem real. Official. Or, as Mama would have said, bona fide.
Hard to say where this was headed, though. Were they upset about Seminole Joe, or mad at Jackie for writing about him? Would their fear become anger at Darryl for possibly disturbing Seminole Joe?
That night I didn’t sleep well and I bet the same was true for half the population of Collier County. I couldn’t decide which was worse: to sleep with the windows shut and die of the heat or leave them open and possibly be ax-murdered by Seminole Joe. When I finally fell asleep, my eyes were closed but my ears were wide open, and any little sound had me leaping out of the bed.
The next day, the Naples Star carried this story on the front page:
* * *
STRONG RESPONSE TO ‘MISS DREAMSVILLE’ DEBUT
by the Editors
Collier County residents reacted with unusual animosity yesterday to an opinion piece by our new columnist, Mrs. Jackie Hart, also known as Miss Dreamsville, after her famous radio show of that name. Our phone rang off the hook yesterday from calls by readers incensed by Miss Dreamsville’s (and this newspaper’s) decision to publish an account of the legend of Seminole Joe. A logbook kept by our staff showed that eighty-seven callers complained that Seminole Joe did not like attention and that Miss Dreamsville’s column could cause him to rise from his ghostly grave and commit new atrocities. We find this highly unlikely, although we are flattered that so many residents assume that Seminole Joe is a faithful reader of the Naples Star. Collier County residents, let us remember that “Joe” is a legend! This is 1964, the Modern Age, and as such it is time we put these superstitions to rest, or at least keep them in check, or our fine community will remain stuck in the putrid fog of backward thinking. We will be running a special Letters to the Editor section on Friday to address readers’ concerns. In a related development, Mr. Darryl Norwood has announced that he will hold a press conference today at 7:00 PM to answer questions about his project.
* * *
Well, I had the answer to my question. So far, at least, people were more upset with Jackie and the newspaper than they were with Darryl. As I tried to decide what to do next, Judd came by on his bicycle. He said he’d tried to call his father, who was in Tallahassee, but hadn’t been able to reach him.
“Mom was on the phone with a lawyer in New York City, then she got so mad she left the house,” he confided. “I tried to call Dad but the long-distance operator wouldn’t make the call because I’m a kid.”
Judd left, but not before agreeing to go with me to the press conference in case Jackie showed up and made a scene. I would rather have a tooth pulled without novocaine but I knew in my heart I had to go—for Judd’s sake, at least.
About two o’clock in the afternoon, while I was writing a letter to Mrs. Conroy, my landlady back in Mississippi, I heard Jackie’s car pull up. To my surprise, she marched right in—right past Norma Jean, Myrtle, and Castro. This was not a good sign. She was so mad she forgot to be afraid of “those dreadful things.”
“That odious, reprehensible, son of a lobster boat!” she hollered, by way of a greeting. I’d never heard anyone utter that particular string of words before but, considering the circumstances, I figured this was some kind of exotic, Northern insult. I was relieved somewhat by the realization that I was not likely the intended recipient of her anger.
She remained in the doorway, her hand still on the knob of my front door, and yelled again. “He’s going to get away with it! He can use my name!”
“Jackie,” I said, my voice shaking, “come sit down.” I approached her gingerly, like she was a wild critter that had escaped from Jungle Larry’s African Safari, a tourist trap on the Tamiami Trail. Carefully, I took her arm and led her to Mama’s old chair, where she collapsed in a theatrical heap. I left her side long enough to retrieve a tall glass of sweet tea and carry it back to her on a little tray with a napkin. After a few sips, she was calm enough to tell me what had happened. She spoke in short, little sentences, like she was going to blow a fuse if she tried to say a whole sentence at once.
“I talked to the lawyer. On the phone. I called him long distance.”
I waited. “Well,” I said. “What did he say?”
She swallowed hard. “Darryl can call his development Dreamsville if he wants. He just can’t use my picture on any of the advertisements. He can’t say that I endorsed it, since that would be a lie. But he doesn’t have to get my permission to call it Dreamsville, or Dreamsville Estates.”
“I see.” Actually, I didn’t understand it at all.
“I don’t ‘own’ the name Miss Dreamsville,” she added, sensing my confusion. “Not in a legal sense.”
“So you can’t sue him?” I asked quietly.
“Well, I could sue him. But I wouldn’t win.”
“And that’s what the lawyer told you? On the phone?”
Jackie lit a cigarette. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the way it is. Unfortunately.”
“And this was the lawyer in New York?”
“I called two—one in New York, the other in Boston. They both said the same thing.”
I let this sink in. Jackie seemed more relaxed, like she’d used up all her anger, but I was becoming madder by the second. What the heck was wrong with Darryl that he would steal my friend’s name? Was this another swipe at me? I had to admit it was, in a sickening way, an ingenious move on his part. Jackie had put Naples on the map with her radio show. Even Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, had done a little segment on CBS Evening News about Miss Dreamsville. It would be easy for Darryl to market his new development to Yankees by calling it Dreamsville Estates.
I hoped Mama wasn’t listening in on my tho
ughts. She never had approved of cussin’ in any way, shape, or form. But all I could think of was, That odious, reprehensible, son of a lobster boat.
Fifteen
The challenge at the press conference would be keeping Jackie from speaking her mind. Judd and I made her promise six ways to Sunday that she wouldn’t say a single word, what with her talent for making bad things worse.
“Jackie, tonight we are going to be flies on the wall,” I kept admonishing her as we walked downtown from my cottage.
“Yes, all we’re going to do is collect intelligence,” Judd added.
“Judd Hart, you’ve been watching too much of that spy stuff on television,” Jackie scolded.
“Mom, what I’m saying is that we should lay low and observe what happens. Then we can reconvene and plan our next move.”
Jackie sighed and ruffled Judd’s hair. “Do you think the girls will show up?” she asked, referring to her twin daughters—Judd’s older sisters.
“Not a chance,” Judd said.
“Well, that’s good because I wouldn’t want to embarrass them,” Jackie said. “They think I’m embarrassing enough already.”
“They’re girls, Mom,” Judd said soothingly. “They’re weird.”
Jackie looked at Judd as if she were going to say something more but didn’t. Instead, she ruffled his hair again.
“You’re not going to embarrass anyone,” I said firmly, trying to get back to the point. “You will be dignified, like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.”
Jackie had insisted we go early and stand directly in front of the stage set up by the Chamber of Commerce on the grass next to City Hall. I would rather we stood in back but I soon realized what she hoped to accomplish. She wanted everyone to see her. She stood with her arms crossed, staring tragically into the distance. Judd put one hand on her shoulder protectively. I copied Jackie’s stance except I planned to look eyeball-to-eyeball with Darryl once he started speaking.
Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County Page 9
