“So you didn’t say anything?” Ted was surprised.
Jackie had sighed. “I’m learning to choose my battles,” she’d said, “and I didn’t want to embarrass the twins. But I talked to all three kids about it later at home. I asked them to think about it and I’m proud to say that all three of them had the same reaction. The phrase ‘our Negroes’ made them nuts.”
Our Negroes. Yes, Ted had heard it many times, too. Another common saying which jarred his Yankee sensibility was “Here in the South, Negroes know their place.” And the people saying it didn’t seem to realize how they sounded. What was brazen and insulting to his ears was normal chitchat to them.
It was a huge relief to him that Jackie was being more careful about what she said and did. Three civil rights workers—two of them white—had been murdered three months ago in Mississippi. Even with Jackie being more prudent, he wished he was at home more, not that he could control Jackie but at least to keep a close eye on her.
Jackie complained often that she hated how much he was on the road. If she was in a particularly bad mood, he would get the “it’s not easy being a woman” rant. Clearly, she was restless being a housewife and mother. Well, it wasn’t so great being a man, either. That’s what he wanted to say but didn’t because starting a third world war was not in anyone’s best interests. But was it really so bad for women? It was men who were sent off to war. It was men who died in battle or came home and had to live with what they’d seen or done. And then what? A man had to get training or an education, find a job, earn money to support a family. Sometimes he actually envied Jackie. When the kids were at school she had time on her hands. When was the last time he had that luxury? She loved that book, The Feminine Mystique, but he blamed it for leading to her breakdown in early ’63. He would never forget how she took off in the family station wagon only to return hours later in that 1960 Buick LeSabre convertible. He understood that it was her personal declaration of independence, a way of defying the “drudgery” (her word) of her boring life as a wife and mother. What about him? What if he traded in his dull sedan for a sports car? That would be the day! Frankly he didn’t feel so fulfilled, either. She wasn’t the one who had to put on a suit every day and duke it out in the white-collar trenches.
Ted was surprised that the world of business felt so similar to the Army. Mr. Toomb could be as insufferable as any general, and Ted was a lowly foot soldier being sent to do the hard part, or so it seemed. And who knew the airline industry would be so awful? People thought it was glamorous, but it was like running a bus company, except these buses had wings and flew in the sky and, therefore, presented a lot more risk. The pilots were proud and stubborn, and completely unwilling to have their authority challenged. They had survived the war. Surely they didn’t need “babysitting,” as they called it.
But the pilots proved to be a little too casual for Ted’s (and the guv-mint’s) taste. They didn’t worry about running low on fuel. Crash-landing? Oh, not to worry. Did that all the time during the war.
Worst of all was the shell-shocked former bomber pilot who forgot to put down the landing gear and slid to a stop—with a plane full of passengers—near the airport terminal (as these buildings were unfortunately called, in Ted’s opinion) at Jacksonville. The pilot’s only comment was, “Oops. Crappy landing.”
Ted was beginning to think the airline wouldn’t make it to the end of the year. It was now early September 1964. The incorporation papers hadn’t even been signed—a “detail” (Mr. Toomb’s word) that made Ted sick with anxiety. They shouldn’t even have been flying. And yet Mr. Toomb was concocting ridiculous plans for expansion. To himself, Ted wondered if it was time to get his résumé ready, just in case.
Seventeen
I didn’t have my phone turned back on in my cottage because I thought I’d be turning right around and heading back to Mississippi. At least, that’s what I told Jackie and the rest, but the truth was a little more complicated. First, I couldn’t really afford it. Second, I didn’t necessarily want to be reached. It seemed to me that if people really wanted to see me, they would come and sit on my porch. People who called generally just complicated my life. They wanted something. As Mama used to say, “Sometimes a phone is more trouble than it’s worth.”
Still, I’d encounter folks at the Winn-Dixie. My old Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Stanley, always seemed to be in the baking aisle when I made my erratic excursions for the few necessities I needed. Maybe she just camped out there, every day for hours, so she could start a conversation with someone. Of course, being a dutiful member of Olde Cypress Methodist Church, Mrs. Stanley was a prolific baker. All Methodists love to bake. Mama used to say there wasn’t a Methodist alive that didn’t have a big ol’ sweet tooth. At Olde Cypress, it was said there was never a meeting—and they loved meetings—without some homemade goody and a pot of coffee. Maybe Mrs. Stanley truly did need to be there in the baking aisle eleven times a week, responding to an emergency request from the preacher’s wife for a pineapple upside-down cake or some Collier County cheese grits. And she would have done it, too, because Mrs. Stanley was one of those church ladies who responds when duty calls.
So there she was, moseying around the flour and sugar aisle. I made a quick dash behind a display of canned green beans but, alas, Mrs. Stanley was faster than a Chihuahua that smells a chicken bone. Mama would have been ashamed of me for trying to duck from Mrs. Stanley, but my life was messy and small talk was not my forte.
“Oh, Miss Dora!” she shrieked. “I put a note in your mailbox not more than an hour ago. We just got a new shipment of Advent calendars for the children and I need someone to open the boxes and get them ready. And it’s time to plan Christmas dinner for the needy.”
Advent calendars? Christmas dinner? It was mid-September. I’d been home for three weeks. To me, Christmas was far off in the distance, somewhere on the horizon. I didn’t even want to think about Christmas. But to Mrs. Stanley, bless her heart, this meant she was running far behind. She was the type who started getting Easter linens out of mothballs before some folks had even taken down their Christmas lights. I spluttered, trying to buy time, but failed to come up with an excuse. I had helped her with many little tasks over the years and it seemed that in Naples, if you’d ever agreed to do something charitable, it was pretty much guaranteed that you’d be doing it for the rest of your life. You’d be in the boneyard before they let you off the hook.
These thoughts were so unkind that I felt instant remorse. I hoped Mama was busy doing something else in heaven—maybe having tea with our former neighbor, Miss Pettigrew—and not listening in on my thoughts and deeds or, sure enough, wouldn’t she be ashamed of me? That was the problem with having a guardian angel sitting on your shoulder. Yes, you were protected much of the time. But it did put a certain kind of pressure on the way you behaved. To make amends to the Spirit World, I smiled at Mrs. Stanley and asked her what time I should show up.
And that is why I ended up the next day at my old Sunday School classroom, perched, with my knees halfway up to my chin, on a chair meant for a five-year-old, making lists and calculating the amount of food the church would need for Christmas donations. When I was done with that, I opened boxes filled with Advent calendars, removing them one by one from the elaborate wrapping and organizing them—as Mrs. Stanley liked—in batches of five. Mindless, yes, and yet freeing. Focusing on the simple tasks at hand, I was able to take a break from thinking about Darryl, the possibility of Dreamsville Estates, the money I would owe my landlady in Mississippi, and the important news I had discovered while I was in Jackson. News that I hadn’t completely digested yet.
Going to Mississippi, all by my lonesome, had given me a new way of looking at Naples and all the folks I’d spent my life around. Sure, I’d lived in St. Petersburg when I went to junior college, and when I married Darryl we lived in Ocala. But that was all Florida. There was something about crossing the state line for the first time that made me feel like I was truly i
n charge of my own life. I could now say that I’d been in three states—Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Now that I was home for a spell I realized that it’s one thing to be stuck in your hometown and quite another to come back for a visit. It doesn’t seem half as bad once you’ve been away. In fact, the familiarity of it—which had been suffocating—was now kind of pleasant. I mentioned this to Mrs. Stanley as we worked, side by side. She had smiled gently and said, “Sometimes you have to go away to understand the importance of what you’ve left behind.”
After finishing my work for Mrs. Stanley, I started to head home but decided to wait an hour to hear a talk hosted by a formidable group calling itself Methodist Ladies in Action. The title was “Change Is Coming to Naples, Too!” There it was, on the bulletin board, in great big block letters.
Well, this was interesting. Living in Jackson for the past year, I was near the frontlines of the civil rights movement but I’d had the feeling since coming home that time was still passing by Naples. If there’d been protests here, they’d been small ones. The drugstore counter was still “whites only” and schools were segregated by race.
I didn’t have any plans. Jackie was doing something with her kids. I had no easy way to go to Mrs. Bailey White’s house and spend time with her or Plain Jane and the baby. I figured, why not?
The speaker was a petite lady wearing a gray suit and sensible shoes. Her hair was cropped short. No pretty bouffant and no makeup, and a smile that showed perfect teeth, a rarity in Collier County. She was introduced as a member of a church in a suburb of Cleveland with a quaint name, Shaker Heights.
She didn’t waste any time getting to the point. “Let me be blunt,” she said. “Your black population is not much better off than they were during the days of slavery more than a hundred years ago, and there’s not much momentum here. When it comes to race relations, you’re at least ten years behind Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.”
I glanced around the room, expecting an exodus, but there was none. “You also have a migrant-worker problem inland in Immokalee,” our speaker added. “Some of your seasonal farm workers are white, but many are black. And the life they are living—that includes children—is worse than anyone should be living in this country.”
This was not news, especially since “Harvest of Shame,” the Edwin R. Murrow special report, was broadcast by CBS the day after Thanksgiving 1960. That was nearly four years ago, and from what I’d read, the broadcast had a big impact nationally. It was a wake-up call to many Americans. Unfortunately, it was dismissed in Collier County as Northern liberal propaganda. In fact, I’d never heard anyone say anything positive about the broadcast here. What had changed in the past year was that inequality was no longer a taboo subject—at least in some circles.
The women in the audience were nodding thoughtfully. Something was happening here. I could feel it, sitting right there in the fellowship hall of the church I attended while growing up. I knew several of the women. One had been on a committee with Mama that collected funds for back-to-school clothing for poor children. With the rest, I had what was called a “nodding” acquaintance.
It was hard to know which event had broken the camel’s back and galvanized these women to become something more than spectators, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was the church bombing the previous year in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four little black girls were killed. The idea that a bunch of grown men would murder children inside a church building on a Sunday morning would be intolerable to these women, no doubt about it.
Naples still had plenty of mean folks, including an active Klan. They were still lurking, much like Seminole Joe. The Klansmen were out there in the swamps, fields, and tidal rivers. Mama had no patience whatsoever for the Klan. As a nurse, she believed all people were the same and should be treated as such. When I was in high school, I had a long conversation with Mama about the way the world worked. “The Klan members think they’re settling some kind of score from long ago,” she had said. “That’s just malarkey. They’re just a bunch of bullies picking on colored folks for one reason: They can! They can murder colored folks, burn their churches, do what they please and no one has stopped them. That’s just wrong,” she said. “You remember that, Dora. It’s just plain wrong. If anything, those other folks—the coloreds and the Injuns—they’re the ones who ought to be settling scores, ’cause so much been done to them over the years. The Klan—they got it all backward.”
My eyes started to tear up, as always happened when I thought about Mama. She was so wise, and I missed her so much.
“Collier County is right in the crosshairs of some of the greatest stressors in our country,” the lady from Ohio was saying. That jerked me to attention. “Besides the racial problem, and the farm-worker issue, you have a new group of immigrants, the Cubans. You don’t have a lot of them, mostly spillover from Miami, but they tend to find the transition to American life very difficult, especially those who were well-off in their home country and are overeducated for the jobs they can get here.”
Cubans? I hadn’t been aware. No one I knew had mentioned it.
“You are also perfectly positioned for explosive growth,” the speaker went on. “With the growing availability of air-conditioning, you will see a large influx of people from the North.”
Good Lord, I thought. Now I’m really awake.
“You have beautiful beaches, great fishing,” she continued. “Your challenge will be managing your growth in a way that doesn’t ruin what you have. And doesn’t leave anyone behind.”
Ha! I thought. Ain’t that the truth.
I looked around the room again. Wouldn’t it have been great if the mayor had been here? Or someone from the newspaper? I wish I’d thought to call Jackie.
“I’d like to finish by saying that I wish it weren’t just women in this room,” our speaker said, as if reading my mind. “For some reason, men won’t come to hear a woman giving a talk,” she added with a slight smile.
“Well, they don’t come to nothin’ that’s been organized by Methodist women,” one of the organizers said, trying to sound playful. I recognized her as the wife of one of the deputy sheriffs. “I wish they would, ’cause we talk about a lot of important topics here. When we have a special guest, we always let them know they are welcome!”
I thought to myself, That will be the day. This led to another thought. And we may fix all the other problems mentioned here tonight before anyone faces the fact that women aren’t taken seriously.
“Well, we can all go home and tell our men what we learned tonight,” our organizer added. “If they won’t come, we can always bring it to them.”
What if you don’t have a man? I thought. I raised my hand. The speaker nodded, and I asked my question. “Hello,” I heard myself saying. “I am divorced. If you’re saying we need to go home and serve our man some newfangled ideas with his breakfast grits and eggs, how do I fit in? I mean, I am just wondering. What else can women do?”
I don’t know what got into me. I’d never called attention to the fact I was divorced, and now I was pointing it out in a very public way. In a room full of Methodist women, no less. I was horrified. Did I sound bitter? Sassy? Maybe even sarcastic? What was happening to me?
Lawd have mercy, I might have learned it from Jackie! Wasn’t this a Yankee thing—not to speak up, necessarily, but to speak up in a way that made others uncomfortable? I surely hadn’t learned this in Mississippi.
I realized all of the women in the room were staring at me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to be funny, I guess.”
“Well, actually you raise a valid point,” the speaker said soothingly. I was so grateful that she came to my aid that I nearly cried. “What women can do—married or not—is to speak up. Speak up at home, in church, in your civic groups, anywhere you have a chance. We are more powerful than we know, if only we make our feelings and wishes known.”
Later, having retreated to my home and my turtles and their
blessed unconditional love, I realized that I was, in fact, following the speaker’s advice already. The unvarnished truth was that little Dora Witherspoon had changed. I was less worried about what others thought of me and more willing to speak my mind. Jackie may have had some influence, but so had the other members of the book club. Mama’s death—and, no doubt, my divorce—played a role, too. I was not the same person I had been. Plus, having gone to Mississippi on my own, and having faced some truths there, gave me a certain cockiness. Heck, I was born in a small town, and I loved it, but it didn’t define me. Not entirely. Not anymore.
• • •
JACKIE KEPT WRITING HER COLUMN, and everyone in town kept reading it. “Chatter Box” was supposed to run twice a week but Jackie, true to her nature, found it hard to be so predictable. And she didn’t want to write only about Darryl. “I don’t want it to seem like a vendetta,” she said, so her second column was called “Mourning President Kennedy.” This was a tearjerker; even those who disliked Kennedy—and there were many in Naples—had to agree that she’d really captured our nation’s lingering sadness. Then she wrote one called “Why American Schoolchildren Should Learn Foreign Languages,” which got no reaction whatsoever. After that, she wrote about her beloved Buick convertible and what it meant to her, which reestablished her as a bit of a loony. (Men could wax eloquent about a cherished automobile, but it was weird for a woman to do so. The fact that it was a Buick and not a Ford or Chevy made it even more peculiar.) She told us that she wanted to write about racial hatred in the South but that her editors had asked her to wait until she was “a more seasoned columnist,” which, in my estimation, was their way of saying “When hell freezes over.” Finally, she got back to Darryl Norwood and Seminole Joe with a column she called “Is Dreamsville a Nightmare?”
Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County Page 11
