Florida Studies : Proceedings of the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association [1 ed.] 9781443811705, 9781847186294

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Florida Studies

Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association

Edited by

Claudia Slate (General Editor) and Keith Huneycutt (Executive Editor)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association, Edited by Claudia Slate (General Editor) and Keith Huneycutt (Executive Editor) This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Claudia Slate (General Editor) and Keith Huneycutt (Executive Editor) and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-629-7, ISBN (13): 9781847186294

To Steve Glassman, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Past FCEA President and first editor of FCEA Proceedings

President April Van Camp Indian River Community College Vice President Donald Pharr St. Leo University Secretary William Wall Santa Fe Community College Treasurer Rich McKee Manatee Community College-Venice Local Arrangements 2008 Donald Pharr St. Leo University CEA Liaison Steve Brahlek Palm Beach Community College Past President Keith Huneycutt Florida Southern College Webweaver Jane Anderson Jones Manatee Community College: Venice At-Large Board Members Deborah Coxwell-Teague Florida State University Carole Policy DeVry University: Orlando Stone Shiflet Northcentral University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Pedagogy Florida Crime Writers and the (Classroom) Environment........................... 3 Karen Connolly-Lane Using Florida Literature – Even in a Class Focused on Public Writing .... 11 Linda Moore Ritual and Region in Student Writing ....................................................... 17 Cherelyn Bush Old Florida Portrait of a Florida Artist: Helen Tooker ................................................. 25 Steve Glassman Florida Picaresque ..................................................................................... 33 Maurice O’Sullivan Zora Neale Hurston: Finding the Meaning of Home in a Florida Author’s Life ............................................................................................. 45 Steven Knapp “The Dream is the Truth”: Remembering My Life with Zora Neale Hurston ...................................................................................................... 59 Sarah M. Mallonee Civil Rights, Disobedience, and Protest in Tallahassee’s Two Public Universities................................................................................................ 65 Salena Coller

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Frontier Florida through Fiction’s Eyes: Patrick D. Smith’s A Land Remembered and Theodore Pratt’s The Barefoot Mailman....................... 75 Joy M. Banks Iris Wall: Indiantown Pioneer “Cow Huntress” ........................................ 81 Nancy Dale Modern Landscapes, Modern Labyrinths: Ways of Escape in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ......................................................... 91 Julia Rawa Species Muck, Floating Sanitoria: Deconstructing and Historicizing Lanier’s “A Florida Ghost” (1877).......................................................... 111 Martha L. Reiner Contemporary Florida Connie May Fowler’s Remembering Blue and the Ecocentric Novel...... 155 Laura S. Head Palm Beach: Utopia or Dystopia?............................................................ 167 Kathleen Anderson Carol Frost as Floridian: Cedar Key Poet Speaks Nationally.................. 173 Taylor Joy Mitchell Natural Florida “Rather Than Abide an Ordinary Life”: The Orchid Thief – A Faustian Saga ......................................................................................................... 183 Carole A. Policy Lumber Mills, Phosphate Pits, and Phantom Land: Polk County, Florida as a Literary Setting .................................................................... 191 Keith L. Huneycutt Zora Neale Hurston and the Hurricane of 1928....................................... 201 Valerie E. Kasper

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Creative Showcase Something Lost........................................................................................ 211 Jeff Morgan He Speaks the Language of Orchids........................................................ 213 Jeff Morgan Recipe for Extinction............................................................................... 215 Jeff Morgan In the Joy of Bellicosity........................................................................... 217 Jeff Morgan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The 2007 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association (FCEA) in Fort Pierce, Florida, was one of our most successful conferences to date. April Van Camp deserves kudos for her hard work at organizing the conference sessions and collaborating with Indian River Community College so that we were able to use one of their fine, high tech facilities. Thanks go to the administration, staff, and faculty of Indian River Community College for being stellar hosts. Everyone applauded the easy flow of the events and the excellent food provided. In addition, FCEA board members, in immeasurable ways, contributed to the planning and execution of the conference. Finally, credit is due to all the presenters and panelists who were vital to this stimulating, well-attended, and thoroughly enjoyable conference. We are all looking forward to FCEA 2008, which will be held in Tampa, Florida, under the leadership of vice president Donald Pharr of St. Leo University. Several other individuals deserve credit here. FCEA President Steve Glassman chaired the Annual Meeting and the FCEA board meetings and is also the founder of Proceedings. His passion for Florida Studies, in general, and this organization, in particular, continues to motivate us all. Keith Huneycutt as executive editor helped me immeasurably with the editing of this Proceedings volume. Associate Editor Karen R. Tolchin, Associate Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University, also edited and encouraged us to continue our Creative Showcase section. Florida Southern College enabled me to dedicate time and energy to this project and provided me with production assistant Shay Lessman, who for the second year worked tirelessly as a magician — formatting and tinkering — not satisfied until all kinks had miraculously vanished. My husband Risdon Slate continuously serves as a model to me of a scholar and trail blazer with his motto: “If you don’t shoot, you don’t score.” With this volume, a rich collaboration of individuals has scored big for academic excellence.

PREFACE

The first year of Florida Studies Proceedings of the Florida College English Association Proceedings, I contributed an article, while this year and last I served as general editor; increasingly, I have gained an immense respect for my colleagues and their scholarly work. With all the teaching, committee, and administrative responsibilities that these individuals shoulder, they still go the extra mile to present papers on Florida topics and then submit them for this volume. Dozens of FCEA 2007 Meeting participants formatted their papers to the template provided on the FCEA website and submitted them for consideration. Some of the authors expanded on their papers while others stayed with the original length. After review by at least two scholars, the final selections were made, further edited, polished for publication, and organized into several categories. Pedagogy, the first section, includes essays about the importance of stressing region in the classroom. One essay even focuses on teaching Florida crime writers, like Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey. The Old Florida section begins with an essay on the artist Helen Tooker and then continues with an analysis of picaresque novels dating back to 1831. Other essays in that section discuss writers Patrick Smith and Theodore Pratt, selfdescribed cracker Iris Wall, poet Sidney Lanier, and the civil rights years at two of Tallahassee’s universities. Of course, favorites Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Hemingway are represented. The Contemporary Florida essays span topics as diverse as author Connie May Fowler, poet Carol Poet, and Palm Beach as a dystopia. The essays in Natural Florida highlight the literary use of the Florida setting: exotic flowers, the Florida hurricane of 1928, and lumber mills and phosphate mining in Polk County. Creative Showcase, the final section, includes poetry presented at Poets Reading Their Work, a session of the FCEA 2007 Meeting. The poems speak of “shadowless seas” and “the language of orchids.” These selections reveal the richness of Florida and embrace a continuing conversation about all the state has to offer students, faculty, and the reading public. .

Claudia Slate, editor Karen Tolchin, associate editor

PEDAGOGY

FLORIDA CRIME WRITERS AND THE (CLASSROOM) ENVIRONMENT1 KAREN CONNOLLY-LANE

Vanity Fair's May 2007 "Green Issue" credits the fiction of Carl Hiaasen with revealing his "deep-seated anger that [Florida's] alligators, burrowing owls, and blue-tongued mango voles . . . have been replaced by vicious predators—lobbyists, land developers, and lawyers" (259). With this observation, offered under the appropriate heading "The Pointed Pen," the magazine's editors capture all that I think makes Florida crime novels like Hiaasen's Native Tongue or Stuart Kaminsky's Midnight Pass ideal "textbooks" for use in our college classrooms. The genre from which they hail is rich with tradition and poised for invention. The issues they raise are prescient and familiar. The characters, the settings, and the language they employ are exotic and ours. After a brief discussion of the mystery genre in general and what makes it a ready vehicle for social and cultural commentary, I will review some of its pedagogical implications. My emphasis will be on using Florida mystery writers to teach college-level English or writing classes in Florida schools. As keynote speaker for a major conference on detective fiction held in the late 1980s, "The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolutions and Current Trends in Detective Fiction," Carolyn Heilbrun, who wrote her own popular series of mystery novels under the name of Amanoss, addressed the question of why a detective novelist might choose to write detective stories "and not 'real' novels" (7). Her answer, "that with the momentum of a mystery and the trajectory of a good story with a solution, the author is left to dabble in a little profound revolutionary thought" (Heilbrun 7), while correct, only covers part of the story. Another part is, of course, about numbers, about a popular form accessing as many readers as possible. A quick scan of the mystery shelves at my local Barnes & Noble yields over 5,500 mystery titles (stretching over 460 feet of shelf space) which feature an extraordinary range of detective types—from cats to cooks, from Vietnam vets to fashionistas, from professors to priests. But part of the story is also about acknowledging a formula—perhaps more

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precisely, a process of reformulation—that allows for both familiarity and change. It is about reformulating again and again a thesis within particular generic constraints because that very formula helps to get ideas and issues noticed. Although some scholars continue to insist that the detective formula is, by nature, static,2 my contention is that, on the contrary, it is in a constant and necessary state of flux. The key for the socially-minded—or environmentally-minded—mystery writer is to harness that capacity for change, to manipulate the genre (and, in a sense, the reader) toward new ideas and new realities without appearing to completely abandon the old and/or accepted ones. Mystery writer Raymond Chandler eloquently captures this notion in the introduction to his collection of short stories, Trouble Is My Business. Although his focus, in this particular context, is on early contributors to pulp magazines, the implication for mystery writers in general is undeniable: "To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack" (ix). One important method for exceeding those limits is illuminated in the work of social theorist Richard Harvey Brown. In "Realism and Power in Aesthetic Representation," Brown contends that, through a process called “genre stretching,” an artist can manipulate a familiar form so that it points to an alternative, even radical reality (136). Genre stretching is the term coined by Brown to describe a literary technique that involves the manipulation of a popular form in order to achieve a new, but closely related, form capable of conveying a new sort of message. The key, according to Brown, is that popular or familiar forms, especially those associated with the school of realism, are considered real precisely because they are familiar. (As fanciful as many Florida examples may seem, much of what our mystery writers portray is either ripped from the local headlines or can regularly be seen from our own lanais.) The object of genre stretching is to change the art form so that, although it appears new in some ways, it still feels familiar. In terms of social implication, in theory, one can adjust the “realist” features of a work of art so that it is no longer simply reflective of the status quo, but is instead suggestive of an alternative, even radical reality. As Brown explains it, “If the point is not to describe reality but to change it, then realistic art is a form of combat” (141). One important way for writers to "stretch" their genre is to craft finely textured characters who speak honestly of and to their time period. (Again, as fanciful as some Florida examples may seem, Hiaasen's recurring character Skink, an ex-Florida Governor turned part swamp rat and part eco-vigilante is one of the most admirable and down-to-earth characters the genre, local or otherwise, has to offer.) An important

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related issue is the creation of trenchantly real "backgrounds" and settings which readers can recognize as persuasive and compelling versions of their own physical and cultural surroundings. Tampa-based crime writer Tim Dorsey, who talks of using his serial killer "hero" Serge Storms to "bump off the people he wants to bump off [himself]," captures the crazy mixture of pride and aloof familiarity that constitutes many a Floridian's sense of the real: I love Florida. I'm passionate about the state. There's a constant renewable source of material if you have a newspaper subscription. As outlandish as some readers might think an idea is, people in Florida will say 'Oh, I know where that came from.' (qtd. in Collins 25)

Within the context of the Florida college classroom, and given the tenor of Dorsey's quote above, it is not difficult to imagine the benefits of a literature or cultural studies course based on a selection of local mystery writers. This semester (spring 2008), for instance, I am teaching an American Studies course called "American Culture and the Private Eye" for Eckerd College and the Program for Experienced Learners. The focus of the course, which begins with early hardboiled masters like Dashiell Hammett and traces the evolution of the genre through to contemporary examples like Hiaasen, is to examine how 20th century American writers have employed the detective story in the effort to effect, as well as to resist, political and cultural change. A similarly-minded course, with a tighter focus on how Florida crime writers have used the detective genre to communicate their concerns about Florida's changing natural and political environment, would offer a great way for an English department to contribute to other interdisciplinary programs like Environmental Studies. Specific assignments might begin by pairing Hiaasen's Native Tongue with his non-fiction text Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, or by incorporating Hiaasen's Stormy Weather and Dorsey's Hurricane Punch into an investigation of the environmental and economic impact of hurricanes—actual and/or anticipated—on Florida's coast. But benefits like these do not have to be limited to "just" the literature or cultural studies arena. I am equally as excited about opportunities to apply these materials in the writing classroom. One obvious opportunity is the research paper. Year after year, section after section, I struggle with new ways to prompt students to think beyond the notion of producing a "report" on some broad, boring topic. I encourage them, instead, to join the conversation, to use other people's writing and other people's ideas to develop, to bolster their own. Texts and issues like those I have mentioned above might just offer students the

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inspiration to research and write about something on which they already have opinions and for which we can prepare them to take a clearly articulated and well-supported stand. Hiaasen's blue-tongued voles are not really that much of a stretch. Recently, students in my Tuesday night writing class traded yarns about encountering the wild pigs that sometimes root along University Avenue, a main thoroughfare near Manatee Community College's Lakewood Ranch campus. Why not start with one of Hiassen's texts, explore the issues it raises regarding preservation, and then invite students to investigate how the technically feral pigs were brought to the area, and whether or not, as some suggest, they should be eliminated as pests? Situations like these, as predictable as it may sound, present students with the valuable chance to become detectives, as well as to study them. Another productive, pedagogical use for the Florida mystery novel might be in teaching various rhetorical or writing strategies, such as cause and effect or narration and description. A reading of Stuart Kaminsky's Midnight Pass might offer entry into the ongoing "chicken-or-the-egg" debate about why and how Sarasota's Midnight Pass was closed in the first place or what might result, both geographically and economically, if the Pass is reopened.3 "Smaller," yet no less promising, opportunities lie in seeing, discussing, even mimicking how writers like Hiaasen or Kaminsky use language and imagery to evoke certain attitudes or emotions. Consider this image, from Stormy Weather, of Skink lashed to a bridge, preparing to ride out the upcoming hurricane: Back on the bridge, under a murderous dark sky, the kneeling stranger raised both arms to the pulsing gray clouds. Bursts of hot wind made the man's hair stand up like a halo of silver sparks. (Hiaasen 9)

Or how they use dialogue to reinforce such ideas or images: "'Crazy f****r,' Jack Fleming rasped" (Hiaasen, Stormy Weather 9). Or how they vary sentence lengths or sprinkle their prose with alliteration in order to create or change pace. One classic example that has been repeatedly praised, and artfully imitated, in more than one of my classes is Dashiell Hammett's mastery of the one word sentence. This famous string, "Smoke. Stink. Heat. Noise.", comes from Red Harvest and describes a prizefighting arena in a dirty mining town known as "Poisonville" (Hammett 74). Okay, so it’s not the tropics. But, the realistic setting and the slang-inspired sound are important antecedents to those currently in vogue with Florida's modern day crime writer. Tracing that stretch, or the one from one south Florida master, say John D. MacDonald, to another, say Les Standiford, amounts to one last suggestion (at least in this context)

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for how we might incorporate such material into our writing classrooms. On to my justification. The theoretical underpinnings for my pop culture-inspired pedagogy come, largely, from two key sources: bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress and Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary. From hooks, I take the idea of teaching as performance. As a former development director and a pop culture enthusiast, I cannot resist the lure of a good pitch made with the right visual—or linguistic—aid. From hooks, I also take (to heart) the idea that one of our major responsibilities as teachers is encouraging students to know the rules first, and break them second. From Rose, I take (again, to heart) the idea that our students come to us as experts (at hunting, fishing, navigating Disney World) and that the responsible, successful promotion of literacy depends on our ability to acknowledge and to capitalize on their expertise. There is something at once reassuring and exhilarating about encountering something in a classroom, in a book that we already know something about. Even I confess to picking up Kaminsky's first Lew Fonesco novel, Vengeance, and becoming instantly smitten with the idea that the main character travels the 301 to work and eats breakfast at First Watch, just like me. I cannot imagine a better recipe—that elusive mixture of comfort and enthusiasm—for stirring the kind of deep critical thinking and graceful, informed writing that we all hope to inspire in our classrooms. In an April 2006 NPR interview, Michael Connelly (former Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale crime reporter, current Tampa resident, and author of 12 novels featuring Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch) claims that one of the most important functions in the "evolutions of the crime novel" is "to be a mirror, a social reflection of what's happening in our society" (Collins 24; Connelly). He also provides a kind of golden rule for what it takes to produce a good detective novel, saying it should offer "an idea of how it [presumably, the world] works" and "how it should work" (Connelly). In many ways, this reminds me of bell hooks' advice regarding how we should conduct education in general, as well as what, specifically, we often try to accomplish when we teach academic writing—to help students identify and master basic strategies and conventions in hopes that they will apply them in ways both successful (i.e. "correct") and refreshing. By drawing on the wide selection of Florida-based and Floridainspired mystery writers—writers who, by and large, have managed, and thus modeled, these same sorts of authorial athletics we expect from our students—we have a unique opportunity to capitalize on Connelly's golden rule in order to enrich our application of Florida's Gordon Rule.

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Notes 1

Portions of this essay have been adapted from my dissertation, "Politics and the Private Eye: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Hardboiled Tradition (University of Minnesota, 2006). 2 One primary example is University of Minnesota professor Marty Roth who, as recently as 1995, has argued that, collectively, detective novels represent "a body of fiction that has no antecedents and can only fulfill its function by refusing to evolve" (249). 3 For more information on the migration and subsequent closing of Midnight Pass, and on the controversy that surrounds the question of whether or not to reopen the pass via dredging, see websites for The Midnight Pass Society (www.midnight.pass.net) and ManaSota-88, a local, volunteer-based environmental watchdog (www.manasota88.org).

Works Cited Brown, Richard Harvey. “Realism and Power in Aesthetic Representation.” Postmodern Representations: Truth, Power and Mimesis in the Human Sciences and Public Culture. Ed. Brown. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 135-67. Chandler, Raymond. Introduction. Trouble Is My Business. By Chandler. 1950. New York: Vintage-Random, 1992. Collins, Mary Ellen. "Whodunit in Florida? A Backdrop for Murder." Maddux Business Report Apr. 2007: 24-27. Connelly, Michael. Interview. "Novelist Connelly Revisits His 'Crime Beat' Days." Host Scott Simon. Weekend Edition Sunday. Natl. Public Radio. 29 Apr. 2006. Dorsey, Tim. Hurricane Punch. New York: Harper, 2007. Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest. 1929. New York: Vintage, 1992. Hiaasen, Carl. Native Tongue. New York: Warner, 1991. —. Stormy Weather. New York: Warner, 1995. —. Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. New York: Ballantine, 1998. Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Gender and Detective Fiction.” The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolutions, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture 19. New York: Greenwood, 1988. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994 Kaminsky, Stuart M. Midnight Pass. New York: Forge, 2003. —. Vengeance. New York: Forge, 1999.

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"The Pointed Pen: Carl Hiaasen." Vanity Fair May 2007: 258-59. Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin, 1990. Roth, Marty. Foul & Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995.

USING FLORIDA LITERATURE– EVEN IN A CLASS FOCUSED ON PUBLIC WRITING LINDA MOORE

The composition courses at UWF–ENC 1101 and ENC 1102–both required freshman composition courses–have undergone radical changes in the past few years. Now ENC 1101 is a course focused on academic writing. ENC 1102, on the other hand, is a course focused on public writing. Both courses require that students carefully evaluate the outside sources that they choose to use to support their own ideas about the course’s topic, both emphasize argument instead of literary content, and both use vastly different genres as writing modes. I have taught ENC 1102, the second semester public writing focused class for several years. For the past few semesters I have chosen literacy as the main focus of my classes, having students use online published reports from such organizations as Chronicle of Higher Education, ProLiteracy Worldwide, Florida Literacy Coalition, American Association of University Professors, Poynter Online and others. This current information, along with the text Public Literacy, and Pearson’s Academic Writer’s Handbook provide students with an abundance of credible statistical information and information on writing pedagogy for the course. In addition to using two specific books off the Chronicle’s campus bestseller list (Mitch Albom’s Five People You Meet in Heaven and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code), this semester I used a personal project to emphasize real-world writing to my students. This project involved a biography I had written of a Florida writer–Florence Glass Palmer–that was submitted for publication in a reference book about Alabama writers. In using this project, I was able to emphasize several points covered in class through the semester about public writing. Following steps in any research project is the first idea I emphasized to produce a better product. I discussed first identifying the task’s topic, purpose, audience, and format. Then I described the types of research that went into the project.

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Topic In 1995, I was asked to help compile a reference book entitled A Biographical Guide to Alabama Literature, being compiled by Dr. Bert Hitchcock and Elaine Hughes at Auburn University with entries being submitted by several Alabama writers. My specific topic was Florence Glass Palmer, an Alabama writer who published in the 1930's. I showed students the instructions from Dr.Hitchcock, which identified the audience, purpose, and format for the article.

Audience and Purpose “For the curious ‘general reader’ and for scholars and students of many ages and degrees, A Biographical Guide to Alabama Literature should be a dependable repository of facts, an easily used reference book both concise and satisfying in its providing of information.

Format The article should include bibliographical information of the author’s works, basic biographical facts, and descriptive and critical information. The instructions also gave formatting information.

Formation of Research Question My next step in the research project was to ask myself several questions that my research should answer: when had Palmer published, what had she published, and how were her works received by the general reading public? Then I began my systematic research of the author, which I explained to my students.

Research Techniques My first step in researching Palmer was a general overview step in UWF’s library’s files, where I found a reference that listed two books that she had published along with their publication dates. These books, Life and Miss Celeste (1937) and Spring Will Come Again (1940), were housed in the library, so I checked them out for later reading. In an article in the second edition of American Women 1935-40, I found a nice surprise. Palmer had a Pensacola address. This bit of information led me to another kind of research: local field research with the possibility of interviews.

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Excited that she might still have ties in Pensacola, I set off to check local historical information. My second step in the research (field research and interviews) led me to phone Mary Dawkins at the Pensacola Historical Society, who invited me to search the historical files in downtown Pensacola. There I found a wealth of information, including an unpublished speech that Dawkins had delivered to the Pensacola Chapter of DAR in October 1989. From that speech and from Dawkins, I learned that Palmer’s daughter and son still lived in the area. However, the son was in the hospital, close to death. Dawkins’ speech referred to a journal that Palmer had kept, and I wondered if Palmer’s daughter had the journal in her possession. Returning to UWF’s library, I learned from the archives director that a music scholarship has been established in Palmer’s name. Checking the library’s special collections section, I found more information about Palmer, including some letters. One was to Miss Occie Clubbs, a Pensacola resident from whom Palmer had first heard of the two Charbonier sisters, one of whom became Miss Celeste in Palmer’s first novel. Miss Occie had asked Palmer to edit what Palmer referred to as “an impressive and scholarly piece of work” about Stephen Mallory that Miss Occie had written. In another letter to Lou E. Miller in 1939, Palmer mentions being at work on her second book, Spring Will Come Again, a book about her own background in Alabama. These letters gave me the opportunity to mention to my students that what was once intended as a personal letter had become a bit of public material, similar to the diary of Anne Frank. I continued to search for materials in the library and found book reviews for Life and Miss Celeste in the New York Times Book Review and in the Pensacola News Journal microfilm archives. Presenting the research I had done on Palmer gave me a chance to emphasize several different research techniques and public writing genres to my students: library research (both as overview and as specific information gathering) using books and newspaper reviews of her books from respected newspapers such as the New York Times, local historical files from community societies and from the campus library, and phone and personal interviews from those who had known Palmer. In reviewing my notes from Dawkins, I found Palmer’s daughter’s name–Emma Covington–and then found her phone number and address in the Pensacola phone book. Calling her, I described my interest in her mother’s work and explained the part an article about her mother would play in Dr. Hitchcock’s proposed book. Ms. Covington agreed to an interview and invited me to her home to see her mother’s materials, which included a scrapbook, several letters, and her personal journal.

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Using Florida Literature–Even in a Class Focused on Public Writing

I met with Ms. Covington in July of 1995, where I took notes on Ms. Covington’s recollections of her mother’s courtship with her husband, her scholarly training and early teaching, and her writing. I looked through Palmer’s scrapbook and took notes. Ms. Covington would not let me take the scrapbook or copy any of its contents. However, my notes yielded a wealth of information about her mother, who addressed her journal as “Dear Book.” Her journal recorded events of Palmer’s life, of the death of her mother and father, and of her love for her husband. Emma Covington said that her mother constantly examined her life through her writing to make sense of things. Palmer’s journal added another valuable bit of research to the growing list of materials.

Drafting the article: from outline to draft After months of interviews with Dawkins and Covington and reviews of the printed materials on Palmer’s life and books, I finished reading Palmer’s two novels and began an outline for my article. I emphasized to my students that I always work from a scratch outline that directs and helps me organize and limit my writing. I showed students the messy handwritten outline and draft; then I showed them a typed copy of the work. After several revisions, I mailed the manuscript to Dr. Hitchcock and to Palmer’s daughter, asking both to edit the manuscript for factual correctness. Both returned the copies, with letters. This part of the research project gave me a chance to discuss argument tactics important to public writing, especially Rogerian tactics that mimic Carl Roger’s advice that writers must build a bridge of good will with audience. Ms. Covington, Palmer’s daughter, was not pleased with the article and was concerned that the article referred to her mother by last name instead of Florence or Ms. Palmer. Finding Palmer’s daughter adamant about the use of her mother’s name, I sent her Dr. Hitchcock’s letter that stated that the academic society does not refer to “Mr. Shakespeare” or “Mr. Homer.” Showing my students Ms. Covington’s handwritten and emotional letter emphasized the sometimes dissatisfying aspects of working with interviewees. A few months later I received a phone call from Ms. Covington, saying that she had talked to several of her friends and understood that the treatment of her mother’s name in the article is standard treatment, but that she still found it “cold.” After revising several drafts of the article and doing some careful proofreading, I finally sent the article to Dr. Hitchcock, satisfied that I had

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done an adequate job of answering my initial research questions and of providing sufficient information for the Alabama bibliographical entry. My description of the real-world writing of an article gave students a great deal of information on such public writing projects. They learned the value of planning, of doing general and specialized library research, of conducting research in local areas such as the Pensacola Historical Society, and of conducting field research such as phone and personal interviews. They learned that interviews are good ways to gain information, especially if the informant is a close relative or a good friend of the subject being researched. However, they also learned that one must handle the informant carefully to avoid misunderstandings and hurt feelings. They also learned that writing takes time and cannot be done in one night. Students were amazed that I spent roughly two years writing the article. The book has still not been published, and I fear it never will, but I gained knowledge of an interesting part of Pensacola’s history as I read Palmer’s unforgettable story of Miss Celeste, a historical figure of Pensacola’s past.

RITUAL AND REGION IN STUDENT WRITING CHERELYN BUSH

I have freshman composition and developmental freshman students write about a family ritual. This assignment has many levels, and it is an interesting assignment to work on over several weeks. The assignment requires one to detail an important or significant family ritual which has been ongoing for several years. The paper requires use of sensory details and dialogue. Several workshops allow students to refine the use of these stylistic attributes and get peer feedback. The essay is short, under three double spaced pages in length. I provide a handout of previous students’ sentences which illustrates multiple adjective uses so they must be concise in their writing. We also consider and discuss in class the best use of dialogue. In using this assignment while teaching at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, I used it with both the regular freshman composition students and also with the Academic Development Program (ADP) students. My Writing 120 Effective Writing I course and English 020 Basic Writing course were two different sets of students. It seemed that the ADP students would enjoy the Family Ritual assignment, since it is an experiential essay. All the information is drawn from their own observation. The courses had very different enrollments as the students in Writing 120 had successfully passed a university entrance writing exam. The ADP students had not passed it and also had other potential indicators of lower writing skills, such as SAT or ACT scores. Also their high school GPA’s were reviewed. West Chester University of Pennsylvania has a small African American enrollment. In 1996, it was 7.7% of the total enrollment. There are 57 African American students enrolled as of their The Diversity Transformation – Summary Report 2000-2006. There was a total enrollment of approximately 12,000 students. My ENG 020 classes were predominately African American. These courses are capped at 15 and two had only a sprinkling of white students. It initially surprised me that the courses were so heavily weighted with African American students. The ADP students do attend a summer session where they take classes and an orientation to campus life.

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Ritual and Region in Student Writing

The students in my Writing 120 course detailed the typical family rituals around holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. They would refine the one significant point, perhaps the scent of an aunt’s musky perfume only smelled during a languorous Thanksgiving respite or their view of a red and green printed shiny paper with fluffy red ribbon put into their hands at Christmas and the rustling of the tissue paper as they lifted out their gift. Because of the proximity of the university to the Jersey shore, some would detail the elaborate 4th of July rituals, including being stuck in traffic. Students were encouraged to contemplate small rituals, and some detailed being part of a new family due to death or divorce. One student wrote an evocative piece about reading a bedtime story to her three-year-old half sister. She hoped that her reading brought them closer together and bridged a 16 year age gap. It was a ritual that she hoped to continue for many years. Students addressed in the conclusion of the paper what they expected might happen to the ritual or how they might later carry it on. Most of the students had commonalities in their description, and sharing the ritual memoirs allowed us to share in their significant tradition. These memoirs allow us to see the commonalities we share. The African American students in one ENG 020 course detailed picking up their baby or children from a parent or grandparent, and some were single mothers. Some were fathers trying for involvement with the child they had fathered. These African American primarily first-generation college students had many everyday concerns that the other students did not. When we first started brainstorming the ritual, one white female student described an annual trip to Paris that her family enjoyed. Her peers’ eyebrows went up and there were glances between the African American students. Her family ritual was quite meaningful and important to her, as her mother was of French descent and her maternal grandparents were there. One student joked with me after class, “Dr Bush, I have trouble getting to class on time since I don’t have a ride; how’s her whole family go to Paris?” The African American papers focused more on rituals of family, church and local activities. One student did detail a summer reunion in a southern state, with cousins, aunts and uncles pushing the attendance close to one hundred. Several students wrote about a Sunday meal and how their participation was expected. One did not disrespect the matriarch of their family by not appearing at Sunday dinner. The detailing of the food preparation played a large part in the ritual. When I taught at Ferris State University in rural Michigan, there was another shift in the focus of the rituals. The college is located in Big Rapids, Michigan and is a state university with an enrollment of approximately 10,000 on campus students. The town is quite small, with a

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population of 10,000. Most of the students do not stay on campus, and most return home for the summer. There is a 24-7 Wal-Mart and a 24-7 Meijer. There are lovely hilly vistas and Lake Huron is within an hour drive. The students joke about meeting each other in Wal-Mart because there are no 24-7 restaurants or bars, and the nearest mall is also 60 miles away. It is a quiet little burg and perfect for the students interested in serious study of Pharmacy or Optometry. These esteemed programs draw students nationwide and they are the 4.0 students. Ferris State University also offers Associates degrees and certificates and has an auto body shop. It offers programs completed in as little as a semester to a Ph.D. level commitment. I was told by a colleague not to expect my male students to attend class on the opening day of hunting season. This made me a bit incredulous, but I soon realized how significantly the ritual of hunting with a father or uncle or next door neighbor shaped the young men’s lives. In my teaching of English 150, several male students wrote about a different aspect of the hunting experience. Their descriptions of the ritual varied. One focused on the trip to get to base camp and all the anticipation of arrival at it, while another focused on the preparation of food by a camp cook. Another focused on the rising in the early morning damp coolness or cold and silently following his father to their tree stand or blind. These hunters easily embraced the assignment, for hunting lends itself easily to five senses description. Even the gutting of a deer is colorful and visual. One student wrote about his hunting ritual and how it had changed since his uncle had died. Students project in the conclusion how they might feel should the ritual end, and his essay memorialized his uncle and allowed us to feel his loss. One young female student’s mother had just been killed suddenly, and she focused on how she and her sister accompanied their mother on a “Back- to-School Clothes Shopping” venture each September. She recollected her mother’s keen advice and acquiescence to her daughter’s wills. She believed that she and her sister would still shop together but of course in a new ritual manner. Students wrote about rituals as varied as log rolling and playing board games. One student wrote about breaking a peppermint pig for good luck. He and his sister would put it in a cloth bag and break it with a hammer. The one who got bigger pieces would have terrific luck the next year. His sister wielded the hammer with the just right touch and he was left with pink crumbs and bad luck. Another student highlighted his family’s playing of Monopoly, turning it into a 24 hour around the clock demand on their time and energy. No one was willing to call it quits. There was a great deal of affection illustrated in most rituals.

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Ritual and Region in Student Writing

The next time I used the Family Ritual assignment was with developmental students at Edward Waters College (EWC). Edward Waters College is a historically black urban college located in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. The college has an enrollment of around 800. Jacksonville has a population of nearly one million. The college has a 95% African American enrollment. My first semester I had a teaching load of one developmental class, two freshman composition II classes and a 400 level British literature class. Since another professor was teaching the initial freshman comp I sections, which focused on expository writing, I had a research orientation for the Freshman Comp II. At EWC, students are slotted into writing classes on the basis of ACT or SAT scores. Also there is a review of their high school GPA. These students took a writing assessment test also and that score placed them in developmental writing. I found that these students, drawn predominately from Florida, with a handful from Georgia or S Carolina, demonstrated varied skills during inclass free writes. Some had good grammar and a grasp of writing essentials, but most did not. A spontaneous in-class writing is the student’s real writing, without the convenience of grammar and spell check. Some had deficits that were eye-opening, so we worked our way slowly through the book, with their doing online grammar drills and quizzes through TestGear. This was a requirement of being enrolled in ENG 098. Once we established a classroom community, and it was a fun and verbal group of students, it seemed like a good time to approach a more complex essay. I decided to have them attempt the Family Ritual essay. We worked through each step of it and had five workshops over the course of creating, revising and submitting the final draft. The students complained about the amount of paper used over the multiple workshops but the quality of the essays was unmistakable. They had intriguing introductions, taut thesis statements, chronologically organized descriptive paragraphs with use of sensory detail, clever and accurate dialogue and a conclusion focused on the continuance of the ritual. Their choice of rituals was refreshing. One of our initial class discussions on the focus being a family ritual highlighted many not in nuclear families. The majority was in single parent households and many were emancipated. Still, it was interesting when we started discussing the concept of “ritual” and I shared some previous student papers and ideas. Most of this class had never traveled outside their home state. Some had not traveled outside their city or town. For being at an urban college, they appeared sheltered in their experiences. Still, they had some very specific rituals they attended. After much discussion, they started brainstorming to begin their writing. A variety of prewriting techniques were discussed to motivate the

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initial capture of their ritual. Some used cluster graphs, some did free writing, some did outlines and whatever helped their creative wheels spin was acceptable. Students focused on the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, a beach outing, a newborn christening, an annual Youth Conference, a fishing trip, the Classic, and a family reunion. Brandon focused on his family’s ritual of going to the beach. His family would go after church. He vividly described the restaurant with flashing red and orange lights, charred hot dogs, peppery steaks and crispy chicken. His family went to the beach to have fun at the restaurant. Adrianna described a Thanksgiving meal ritual prayer where one family member shared a prayer before eating. She noted that the longer the prayer went on, the feistier the group became, and some did not close their eyes for the prayer but remained gazing at the food. Nick detailed her family’s christening service to welcome newborns into their family. The parents bring in the baby, and after the pastor does the baptism, there are joyful shouts, and loud greetings to each other. Her family feels happy sharing their beliefs. Rodriguez details his annual fishing trip to the ocean. He hears the excited shrieks of his little cousin landing his first fish; the fish leaping and flipping like a fan with the blades turned on high. As the beach became crowded, it sounded like a college football game. Tasting the fresh fried crunchy fillet was the final delight Arieyal details attending the Classic in Orlando. This popular college football competition draws fans nationwide. She noted the aroma of stale cigarette smoke or being stuck next to someone with foul bad breath for the whole game. She and her cousin enjoy the halftime show and the rowdiness of the crowd each year. Denroy explains the ritual of how he and his brother wait for relatives to arrive on Thanksgiving. They enjoy the strong coffee aroma and shred a juicy watermelon while they wait. The small ritual is priceless to him. Alan notes all the sensory details of his Thanksgiving ritual and ends with his crazy uncle who cracks jokes. He insults everyone in the family and says, “I still love you cus you my family.” Alan believes that every family has a family member like his uncle. Trent would spend the night at his relative’s home and the whistling and screeching of train brakes made for restless sleep. Still, he really enjoyed the sweet potato pie and the enormous raindrops landing on the green grass. He will continue his tradition. Ledarris has an aunt who is such a fine cook that his friends try to crash their family get-togethers. His uncle’s barbeque is hot and spicy with a pinch of pepper, and it is chewy and tangy. His family loves to eat together and share jokes. There is sameness in the depictions the rituals. Even though there are some regional differences, for example my EWC Florida students can fish

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year round, unlike my Michigan students who can only fish seasonally; it is interesting how geography and climate impact a ritual. Indeed it might be a ritual in Florida, but it can take place any day. In Michigan, it is a planned for annual event. I wonder if my students consider climate in their lives. My reflection on the different stories show that most students have a ritual that is important, and they recognize the value of it and of maintaining it Even though students initially protest that they “have no rituals,” once we begin a discussion of it, and peer workshops in which they read other’s rituals, then they do recognize the role of ritual in their lives. These rituals create a bond with one another and a respect for individuality. Students accept that while the exact actions of a ritual vary from one family to the next family the significance of performing them is equally important.

OLD FLORIDA

PORTRAIT OF A FLORIDA ARTIST: HELEN TOOKER STEVE GLASSMAN

Some years ago I was shown two paintings of Old Florida by Helen Tooker’s daughter. One of these works was of a houseboat on the Saint Johns River. The other portrayed Monday morning court in a rather makeshift-appearing city hall in Cedar Key. In this painting, a penitent mill hand pleads his case to the mayor after a Saturday night spree and presumably a Sunday locked up in the local hoosegow.

The style of the latter fell between social realism and Norman Rockwell, weighted a bit toward the famous Saturday Evening Post artist’s work. In a state with a better developed history of artistic endeavor, these paintings

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Portrait of a Florida Artist: Helen Tooker

may not have struck an observer as remarkable, but the fact that the artist Helen Tooker actually witnessed and painted scenes of what even fifteen years ago would have been called a lost Old Florida seemed noteworthy. The artist’s daughter is Helen Parramore, a retired professor from Valencia Community College in Orlando. I recently contacted her and learned her mother had passed on in 1997. I also learned that both Helen Parramore and at least one of her children had some of her mother’s paintings and that she believed a gallery in St. Petersburg was offering others for sale. I asked if I could come to St Petersburg, where Dr. Parramore had retired, photograph her mother’s Florida paintings, and gather biographical information about her mother. I said I wanted to make a presentation at the FCEA about her mother’s contribution to the humanities in the state. Helen Parramore agreed albeit—I sensed—a bit reluctantly. When I arrived in Saint Pete, I discovered one of the reasons for her hesitance. Helen and her daughter held only six or eight of her mother’s paintings. A call to the gallery yielded the information that all Tooker’s paintings they held had been sold. Even more distressing to me was the fact that there was no perceptible style connecting the works. Aside from the two paintings mentioned above, there was a view of the H.M.S. Bounty in Tampa Bay with the old Sunshine Skyway in the background used in the Marlon Brando version of the film.

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A couple of other innocuous Florida landscapes rounded out the collection. In addition, there were a few paintings of ships at sea and one still life of the sea crashing into rocks. I had much earlier photographed a restored Neptune painting in the lounge of the Island Hotel in Cedar Key that I knew Helen Tooker was responsible for. Clearly, the motif tying most of Helen Tooker’s work together was water, in particular the sea. More tellingly, the obituary of Helen Tooker in the St. Petersburg Times called her a “nautical artist.” The obituary, bylined by the Times’s obituary editor, Craig Basse, ran to four columns with photo.

All this made it fairly clear Helen Tooker was not the unsung painter of uniquely Florida scenes, such as the Cedar Key court painting, I had hoped to find, but it was equally apparent she was a noteworthy Florida artist and that her story was worth telling in a forum such as the FCEA. In particular, I found her family’s view of her of telling interest. They made no bones about regarding her as something of a Gully Jimson-like figure.

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Portrait of a Florida Artist: Helen Tooker

You no doubt remember Gully Jimson as the iconoclastic and rather scandalous protagonist of Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth. Helen Tooker was born in Attleboror, Massachusetts in 1906. She came of age in the Roaring Twenties, and she obviously was a charter member of the Jazz Age. Her daughter reports that young Helen Tooker had “several abortions” in her twenties. Finally her parents refused to intercede for her another time and she was forced to carry her oldest son to term. A long-standing admirer, Dewey Martin, was enlisted as her husband of record, and Mrs. Helen Tooker Martin settled down to the business of painting whatever she could—including signs if necessary— while her family raised itself. The photo above shows Helen Martin, as she styled herself then, in what was probably her Bay State Studio. At this time, she produced work reminiscent of more avant garde artists of the time. More commercially lucrative material came in the way of curtain art in local meeting halls around New England such as this. Helen was sure to get the local chief of police or similar official to put in a good word for her. One wonders what she did to obtain these recommendations. While she painted the advertisements in hand, her sister would be detailed to canvas local businesses selling space on the curtains. According to Helen Parramore, more ads were sold than there was space on the curtains, all of which occasioned a hasty departure from many a New England town. Every curtain, however, had space for an ad by Helen’s own Bay State Studios. This mode of living took a toll on—if not on Tooker herself—those around her. Her husband Dewey Martin killed himself in 1938. Left almost destitute, Helen moved her family to a cabin on a lake. The family had no electricity or running water. A litter of skunks lived under the cabin. Later, Helen bragged she would feed her hungry children (by then there were five, one girl and four boys, ages nine to three) by catching one of the skunks by the tail so it couldn’t spray her. She would then cut the animal’s throat, skin and clean it and turn it into a tasty stew. Her daughter insists all this was simply a figment of the artist’s imagination. When the weather turned cold—they were still in Massachusetts— Tooker farmed her children out to various relatives and others. The documents I went through in Saint Petersburg includes a telegram from son Billy asking for money for fare, so he could return home from the farm where he was let out to, almost like indentured help. To her family, Tooker’s devotion to her art (and her own indulgence) seemed, from a mature perspective, pathological. Her daughter presented me with the URL to a website detailing the criteria for a sociopath. I was assured that her mother fit every criterion. Cited was the means by which her family

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was moved to Florida shortly after WWII. She borrowed the summer earnings of her daughter. These monies were earmarked for a return to college, but instead Tooker used the money for a one-way migration to Florida, specifically to the Gainesville area. It was at this time that she became familiar with Cedar Key and recorded the Monday morning court scene and painted the Neptune painting still visible at the Island Hotel. From that time until her death almost a half century later, Tooker made her living as an artist in Florida, painting whatever took her fancy and what she thought she could make a buck at, much of it with a nautical theme. She was (or claimed to be) the official artist for the HMS Bounty exhibit, one of St. Pete’s flagship attractions in the 1970s. She painted pictures of America’s cup racers. Her painting of Christopher Columbus’s three ships hangs in the American embassy in Madrid. She worked in other media too, sculpting the altar for the Episcopalian church in Key West. In Miami and Christmas, Florida, she produced near life-size statuary, and three Episcopalian bishops asked her to do their portraits. Nevertheless, her lifestyle remained flamboyant, her consumption of alcohol legendary. Her grip on the truth was always what could be termed artistic. A grandson-in-law told me that he would sometimes receive phone calls at his office from his “mother.” This was the way “Nana” insured she was able to bull her way through the switchboard bureaucracy to her far from willing caller. She also claimed she was the official NASA artist, and her obituary photo shows her in a shirt she made for herself with a NASA patch. Here is a shot of her when she was about eighty. She is the poster girl for an eye surgeon who performed laser surgery. Sometime after this, when she was 87, she made the headlines again, when she was “Baker Acted.” She was confined for 15 days because of what mental health authorities—and her family—felt was her outrageous behavior. However, she was able to convince a judge that she was mentally competent. She was released. She returned to her hovel-like home—where mice roamed among empties and nibbled on unsold paintings. Her ordeal became the centerpiece of a major story by the Times.

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Portrait of a Florida Artist: Helen Tooker

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Helen Tooker died in Saint Petersburg in 1997 at the age of 91. Altogether the Times estimates she produced 1200 paintings, now found around the country and the world. Among them was this one she called “Silk Road” depicting the transportation industry from the days of Marco Polo to the Space Shuttle. Daughter Helen Parramore will soon bring out a memoir of her life with her artist mother entitled Skunk Stew.

FLORIDA PICARESQUE MAURICE O’SULLIVAN

Picaresque novels have always represented the fiction of dislocation. Their disenfranchised protagonists, from Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Blas to Tabitha Tenney’s Dorcasina Sheldon and Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella, wander through a disordered world into which they will never comfortably fit. Even if their world were more orderly, these picaros, with their skeptical realism, their individualism, and their idiosyncratic value systems, could never make all the personal compromises that acceptance requires. Like Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, they could never join a club that would want them as members. What both disturbs us about and attracts us to the picaresque is the essential dissonance of its world. Its earliest authors, from Mateo Alemán and Alain LeSage to Thomas Nash and Voltaire, have discovered a random universe, one which lacks the providential order and essential benevolence of most seventeenth and eighteenth century prose fiction. Their protagonists, these displaced picaros, have actually discovered our modern world of midnight cowboys, easy riders and down-and-out artists on the road to oblivion, our contemporary universe of relativism and discontinuity, existentialism and disharmony. Their disdain for convention reflects their disconnection from traditional moral codes, just as their apparent dishonesty often reflects their choice of alternative moral values. Two of our state’s earliest novels represent the origins of a Florida picaresque tradition long before Jack Kerouac took a Greyhound bus from Orlando to New York for the publication of On the Road. The first, The Lost Virgin of the South, can easily be described as the first fully Floridian novel—an 1831 book about Florida by a Floridian and published in Tallahassee. Although it appeared under the name of Don Pedro Casender, it was actually the work of the Rev. Michael Smith. Smith appears to have used the Casender nom de plume, the name of one of the story’s characters, to reinforce his subtitles, “A Tale of Truth” in the first edition and “An Historical Novel, Founded on Facts” in the second. Smith’s facts are, of course, open to serious debate. The second novel, Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1839 The Adventures of Robin Day, is the product of a

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popular Philadelphia novelist, playwright and physician wise enough not to pretend to much historical veracity. While the picaresque world of guileful rogues and adaptable tricksters and its episodic narrative seem perfectly matched to the eclectic history and flexible identity of Florida’s population, especially during its territorial period in the 1830s as the region attempted to define both its past and future, these two novels use that picaresque tradition in very different ways. The Lost Virgin is accidentally picaresque; its author’s inability to find a coherent plot or credible characters creates a meandering tale that echoes the disorder often at the heart of the picaresque. But while that sense of disorder traditionally reflects a critique of societies and their institutions, Michael Smith seems more interested in justifying Jacksonian policies. The Adventures of Robin Day, on the other hand, shows a sophisticated, experienced writer with a clear knowledge of the genre’s traditions and potential, writing a comic adventure that rivals Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, whose titles he echoes, and skewers everything from America’s sense of its manifest destiny to military heroism. A deep admirer of Andy Jackson for both his policies and his populism, the Rev. Michael Smith dedicated The Lost Virgin of the South to Jackson, “who would at an advanced age, full of infirmities and at the height of his popularity, have submitted to the call of a majority of the American people, to sit in the Presidential chair for eight years when he well knew it to be full of thorns. . . .” (“Dedication,” n.p.). That final allusion to Jackson as a type of Christ suggests both Smith’s fascination with suffering and his belief in the nation’s divine mission. Smith’s sense of the appeal of suffering is even apparent in his comments on the purpose of literature, especially when he adds consolation as a third goal to the classic Horatian idea of literature’s purpose: “The design is to instruct in some matter, both new and interesting, relative to the Indian war in the South—to amuse and delight the fancy, and to console the heart under circumstances forlorn and distressing” (“Preface,” 3). This curious novel, whose second edition was published as two volumes printed as one, mixes history and narrative, romance and military strategy, admiration for the noble savage and a firm vision of American exceptionalism, along with a fascination with and repulsion for foreign cultures, into a remarkably confusing narrative which sprawls from Florida to Alabama and, ultimately, Spain. Much of the confusion stems from the author’s capricious and random sense of plotting, which relies heavily on chance encounters, coincidences and unexpected appearances. The

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medieval proverb printed as a motto on the title page—“Astra regunt hominess sed regit astra Deus” (The stars rule men but God rules the stars)—reflects Smith’s curious belief that Andy Jackson’s success was not only inevitable but foreordained, while life for everyone else is accidental and unpredictable. The novel begins as a ship carrying the family of Colonel Ward approaches the Florida coast. In what would become the novel’s pattern, the opening paragraph offers a promise of safety and security, only to undercut it: The noble ship, still more nobly freighted, had braved many a night storm, that poured with fury on old Ocean’s breast, now brought its precious charge in sight of the land of perpetual green. All eyes beheld the pleasing prospect, all hearts were suffused with new and increasing pleasure: but oh! how short lived are earthly joys—a tremendous burst of thunder now seemed to shake the world, a black and sulphurous cloud of mighty size, was flying from the west; on the wings of this whirlwind, and to close the late cheering scene, the sun seemed to be fast sinking in the gloomy shroud. (5)

As the boat sinks, a brave young Spaniard saves Col. Ward and his children: Calista, Cirephia, and Casender. Once ashore, the family is captured by Seminoles, who decide to adopt the adorable 10 year old Calista, who will become the lost virgin. At the very moment she is taken, the family’s savior, Perendio Cevillo, secretly slips a golden locket around her neck. Living among the Seminoles, Calista, a remarkably precocious young girl, finds a Bible, teaches herself to read it, and converts herself to Christianity. Meanwhile, her brother Casender joins Andy Jackson in the Indian Wars. Years later at the battle of Tallushetche, Caesender, fighting for the American army, unknowingly wounds his sister, who is trying to rescue her Seminole family. Luckily, Perendio, watching the battle, saves her and recognizes the little girl he had rescued years ago by the locket which he had placed around her neck but which she apparently has still not noticed. Despite her extraordinary intelligence, she only realizes their connection when he opens the locket to show her his portrait. As this episode demonstrates, Smith seems far less interested in the credibility of either his story or his characters than in telling his version of the Indian Wars. To do so, he constantly shifts scenes and interrupts the narrative with digressions into military strategy, theological discourse, political analysis, and an extended history of the pirate Es Joebe. In one twenty-eight page debate about Christian hypocrisy between a Presbyterian minister and a Creek ally of the Americans, for example—a

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Florida Picaresque

debate dropped into the middle of preparation for a battle—the Creek points out that “you Christian people act from the authority of the examples of the Bible, in cases that suit your own interest and inclination; but when the examples or commands of this same Bible are in opposition to them, you refer the application to the Jews, to whom alone you say the Old Testament was given. . . .” (59). As that passage indicates, Smith shows a deep admiration for the Native Americans despite his clear belief in Andy Jackson’s mission and the inevitability of American hegemony. Even Jackson himself reveals a sympathy for his enemy; as a witness to the debate on Christianity, he awards the victory to the Creek. Of course, in Smith’s universe the victor is remarkably well read, able to quote easily from an impressive group of authorities ranging from Alexander Pope to the Emperor Constantine. Perhaps the greatest strength of Smith’s work is his willingness to allow the Indians to provide their own perspective. A chief named Wetherford points out, “Our cause is just, the Great Spirit knows that it is just. We did not go into the country of the whites; they came into our country” (35). While it may be just, Smith shows, it is also doomed. Despite a clear sense that Jackson’s victories were not only inevitable—an underlying theme which limits the tension of the battle scenes—but morally right, Smith does show a good deal of ambivalence when he occasionally contrasts, even if implicitly, Euro-American and Native American values: As Indians do not measure their land, any of them can take up their habitation at any place they find vacant, and they or their offspring can keep it during their life. They believe the Great Spirit made the ground and water for the use of all his children, and that is wrong for people to mark any part and keep more than they can use.” (117)

All of these digressions, many of which turn into harangues, invariably make it difficult to keep track of the primary story. Smith clearly realizes that fact, even if he chooses to do little to avoid it, whenever he returns to the narrative. At the beginning of Chapter VIII, for example, he writes, “We now commence the narration of the most interesting parts of the book—of the adventures of the Lost Virgin. . . . It will be remembered by the reader. . . .” (116). The summary that follows acknowledges his excursions. Stylistically, in addition to the oddly wandering narrative, which revels in its frequent digressions and, after the Indian War, takes his characters over to Spain to become involved in Spanish intrigues against Napoleon Bonaparte for little apparent reason, Smith relies heavily on providing

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curious technical details (e.g., latitudes and longitudes, clinical descriptions of battles) and on repeating phrases he is fond of. Characters, for example, are threatened with a “watery grave” on pp. 6, 7, and 13. Perhaps because he so frequently takes his reader away from the main story, he also finds it necessary at times not only to explain but also to evaluate his own story: “This appalling and interesting tragic scene had scarcely closed. . . .” (174). At its best, The Lost Virgin offers a wide range of sympathies for everyone from American Indians and Spanish patriots to Roman Catholic priests and Andy Jackson. Its extraordinarily confusing story, episodic and wandering narrative, bizarre coincidences, and realistic detail suggest a picaresque model. But unlike the European picaresque, with its comic tone and satirical perspective, Smith seems utterly serious in his story, as his often emotionally overwrought passages suggest. Rather than a result of conscious decisions, his picaresque elements seem a byproduct of the author’s lack of control, conflicting sense of purpose, and limited interest in his characters. While The Lost Virgin’s wandering plot stems largely from its author’s constantly shifting focus and lack of sense of narrative, The Adventures of Robin Day wanders because of its author’s joyful embrace of the chaos that the picaresque’s tradition of improbability offers. Like the Lost Virgin and her family, Robin Day begins his adventures as a child washing on shore in a shipwreck. But where Smith’s shipwreck seems merely a random accident, Robert Montgomery Bird’s reflects the bad luck which characterizes his protagonist’s fortunes. In the tradition of the classic picaro, Robin Day stumbles from misadventure to misadventure, surviving largely on his wit, guile, and cunning. We know far more about Robert Montgomery Bird, the author of The Adventures of Robin Day, than about the mysterious Rev. Michael Smith. Born in Delaware in 1806, Bird attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Medical School. After practicing medicine for a few years, he began writing popular but now forgotten plays like The Gladiator, The Broker of Bogota, and Oralloossa, Son of the Incas. A quarrel in the mid-1830’s with his mentor and patron, the actor Edwin Forrest, encouraged him to re-focus his energy on novels. By the 1840s he had returned to medicine as Professor of the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica at the Pennsylvania Medical College. Part of his research during this time included what was then known as sun painting, the early practice of photography. It was not, however, until 1992 that his family revealed these early paper negatives and positives, now on display at the University of Pennsylvania.

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During the mid to late 1830’s, Dr. Bird became the most extensive practitioner of the picaresque tradition in the United States. In Sheppard Lee. Written by Himself, for example, he explores the adventures of a young wastrel who finds he can assume the souls of others in a novel that echoes his contemporary and friend Edgar Allan Poe. The following year, his most popular novel, Nick of the Woods. Or, The Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Kentucky, offers a striking contrast with The Lost Virgin’s admiration for Native American in what reads like a conscious critique of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels. Making the case that “The North American savage has never appeared to me the gallant and heroic personage he seems to others,” (Preface, v), Nick tells the story of a Philadelphia Quaker, Nathan Slaughter, who becomes a relentlessly efficient Indian killer. Sixteen years later in his preface to Nick of the Woods’ revised edition in 1853, Bird continued defending Slaughter’s mayhem by describing Native American life and culture as essentially Hobbesian: “ignorant, violent, debased, brutal” (32). In The Adventures of Robin Day (New York: J. Polhemus, 1839), Robin tells the story of his life from the time that he was found on the New Jersey shore in September 1796, the only survivor of a shipwreck other than two ducks and a broken-back cat. Salvaged by the scavenging wrecker Mother Moll, Robin, who goes through a series of names at various stages of his early life, from Sammy September and Robin Rusty to Sy Tough and Robin Day, is sold at seven to the villainous Skipper Duck for a ten gallon keg of rum. Eventually saved by Dr. Howard, whose son Robin rescued from drowning, he soon finds himself at school where he meets his life long hero and role model, Dicky Dare. The son of a Revolutionary War hero, Dicky Dare constantly although unsuccessfully attempts to emulate his father both in his commitment to republican principles and his fascination with violence. Robin’s description of Dicky’s first dreams of glory reflects both his admiration and the ironic tone of the novel: “The military spirit, which, it was said, he had inherited from his father, and which had hitherto been indicated only by a love of fisticuffs, was beginning to blaze out in its nobler attributes; ambition, the love of rule, and a desire and resolution to fight his future battles, not with his own hands merely, but with the fists of his inferiors” (I. 47-48). After leading a rebellion against their tyrannous schoolmaster and his flogging system of education, Dicky convinces the town to establish a republican model of education, one that rejects force and relies on the school’s citizens, its students, to form a more perfect academic community. In Bird’s world, that naïve assumption inevitably fails and

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forces the town leaders to hire an even greater tyrant, Mr M’Goggin, to reassert authority in what has become an anarchic world. When Dicky organizes a major attack on the new headmaster’s home, the rebellion backfires with serious casualties. Always the loyal follower, Robin Day needs to flee to Philadelphia, where his mentor, Dr. Howard, has arranged for a career with the merchant Mr. Bloodmoney. In the best picaresque traditions, Dicky Dare, Dr. Howard, Mr. Bloodmoney, and Skipper Duck regularly reappear both to complicate and untangle Robin’s adventures. And Robin constantly finds himself returning again and again to service with the Bloody Volunteers or as a captive, sailor, or pirate on the ship Jumping Jenny. Nothing sums up Robin’s erratic and capricious journey as much as his decision to go South and join a militia against the British in the War of 1812, only to find that he has actually joined a group of British loyalists. Bird clearly enjoys the absurdist nature of Robin’s essentially random journey through life. And that journey moves forward as breathlessly as a movie serial racing from crisis to crisis. In only three chapters of the second volume (15-17), for example, Robin faces a typical set of frenetic adventures. Seized by a group of Creeks and made to run the gauntlet, he attacks his captors by throwing sand in their eyes but finds himself finally condemned to burn at the stake, only to be saved by a hurricane. Escaping in the storm, he rejoins his old military unit, the Bloody Volunteers, in one of their insane campaigns, but he is captured by the Spanish and taken to Pensacola, where he dines with the governor. And the two volumes have 67 chapters in all. Bird’s interest is in creating as capricious a story as possible and supporting it with a consistently ironic tone rather than in capturing any realistic detail. As a result, his characters have names like Chowder Chow and Mr. Fabious Maximus Feverage and his descriptions are almost always generic. Dinner with the Spanish grandees in Pensacola, for example, offers no specificity. Robin describes “the dessert in which we were feasted with the delicious fruits of the tropics, fresh brought from the neighboring isle of Cuba (ii, 155), but he never identifies any of those fruits. In much the same way, Florida’s landscape and Native American customs remain only vague backgrounds for Robin’s story. Robin’s—or Bird’s—only real concern with detail appears in the narrator’s taste for allusions, a reflection of one or the other’s education. The book’s opening sentence, for example, refers to “Sylla (the Roman)”; the first three chapters find ways to allude to Semiramis, Nero, Domitian, the Seven Wise Masters of Greece, and Anaxagoras, philosopher of

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Lampsacus; and Robin’s favorite oath is “by Julius Caesar,” while he calls his travels “The Hegira.” Dicky Dare shares his disciple’s affectation, naming his horse Bucephalus after Alexander the Great’s famous steed. At the end of the novel, the narrator discovers his true identity, finds a sister and uncle, marries the daughter of his patron Dr. Howard, and appears to live comfortably if not necessarily happily ever after as the heir of a distinguished Spanish colonial family. Of course, to achieve that end, Robert Montgomery Bird needs to devote the entire penultimate chapter to a long, complex and improbable unraveling of all the confusing and increasingly absurd threads of his story. But that unraveling simply reinforces the accidental and arbitrary nature of Robin’s adventures, reinforcing the essentially picaresque nature of the book. When he discovers, for example, that the one woman he—the lost “little Juan Aubrey”—was attracted to, Isabel, is actually his sister, he quickly switches his affection to Nanna, the daughter of his first patron Dr. Howard. After he marries her, he encourages Dicky Dare to woo Isabel, his sister and former love. As usual, Dicky’s dreams of conquest and glory blind him to the possibility of personal pleasure; he “was as ready as Othello to recount to Isabel the history of his wars, but he never cared to take her in the pliant hour. . . . “ (ii.265). Since Dicky Dare’s vision had shaped so many of Robin Day’s adventures and misadventures, it is only fitting that Robin’s story ends with Dicky’s fittingly ironic death: The same great spirit which carried him with a single company into the heart of the Creek nation, to snatch the conquest out of the hands of his brigadier, was revived in Mexico; he took an opportunity one day to separate himself from his commander, and set out, with a force of fifty men, and the commission, or title, of Colonel. . . to liberate the Mexican nation on his own account. He, doubtless, calculated upon receiving great assistance from the Mexican nation itself, and having his command swelled by successive patriots in a countless army; but before any reinforcements appeared, he had the misfortune to be attacked by vastly superior numbers and was, with his whole company, cut to pieces.” (II, 266)

While the author never quite seems to understand it, the reader recognizes that, with Dicky dead, Robin can now escape his labyrinthine rambling and begin moving towards some consciously chosen goals. But Robin’s world of rogues and vagabonds, the displaced and the delusional, offers no real meaningful goals. Thus Bird must shift to the very values he satirizes throughout his novel and end it with a sentimental tribute to family and love: “With these around me, a loving wife and devoted sister

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at my side, with peace, and affluence, and happiness under my roof, and the wisdom of advancing years stealing into my head, I can look back without regret, and review with smiles, the tissue of misfortunes by which I was led to such enviable possessions. . . .” (II, 267) Perhaps the most interesting question about all of Bird’s picaresque novels is whether they might have influenced his fellow critic of the James Fenimore Cooper tradition, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Since the only clear contact between the two is a comment the teenaged Clemens makes to his sister Pamela in an October 8, 1853 letter about a performance of Bird’s The Gladiator that he had seen the night before, that question must simply continue to tantalize. But the young man’s reaction to the play offers a fitting summary of Bird’s achievements: the future Mark Twain notes, “I did not like parts of it much, but other portions were really splendid.” As so often in the history of American literature, Florida offered its northern neighbors both positive and negative models for an American picaresque tradition. Michael Smith’s The Lost Virgin, in its awkward attempts to merge the picaresque with polemical history, seems primarily an archetype of those historical novels written by political figures like Jimmy Carter and Newt Gingrich. Robin Dare, on the other hand, offers a promising foreshadowing of our most impressive picaros from Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield to Sal Paradise and the Blues Brothers.

Notes All quotations from The Lost Virgin are taken from the second edition (Courtland, AL: Michael Smith, 1833).

Works Cited Alemán, Mateo. La vida del Picaro Guzmán de Alfarache. Barcelona: Barcelona Cormellas, 1600. Anon. La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades. Antwerp and Spain, 1554. Bird, Robert Montgomery. The Adventures of Robin Day. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1839. —. The Broker of Bogota. In The Life and Dramatic Works of Robert MontgomeryBird. Ed. Clement E. Foust. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1919.

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—. The Gladiator. In The Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird. Ed. Clement E. Foust. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1919. —. Oralloossa. In The Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird. Ed. Clement E. Foust. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1919. —. Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay, a Tale of Kentucky. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837. —. Rpt. Nick of the Woods. New York: J.W. Lovell, 1852. —. Rpt. Nick of the Woods. New Haven: College & University Press, 1967. —. Sheppard Lee. Written By Himself. New York: Harper, 1836. The Blues Brothers. Dir. John Landis. Perfs. Dan Aykroyd, James Belushi, James Brown. Film. Universal Pictures, 1980. Carter, Jimmy. The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revoloutionary War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Casender, Don Pedro. [Michael Smith]. The Lost Virgin of the South. A Tale of Truth; Connected with the History of the Indian War in the South, in the Years 1812-13-14 and 15, and Gen. Jackson, Now President of the U. States. Tallahassee: M. Smith, 1831. —. The Lost Virgin of the South: An Historical Novel Founded on Facts, Connected with the Indian War in the South, 1812 – 1815. 2nd ed. Courtland, AL: M. Smith, 1833. Gingrich, Newt and William Forstchen. Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella. London: A. Millar, 1752 LeSage, Alain-René. Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. Amsterdam: Oosterwyk, 1715. Nash, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller, or, The Life of Jacke Wilton. London: Thomas Scarlet for Cuthbert Burby, 1594. Salinger, J.D. Catcher in the Rye. New York: F. Watts, 1951. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. London: J. Osborn, 1748. —. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. London: for the Author, 1751. Tenney, Tabitha Gilman. Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon. Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1801. Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn. [New York: The Century Company, 1884-85]. —. Mark Twain Papers. California Digital Library. 8 October 1853.

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Voltaire [François Marie Arouet]. Candide, ou L’Optimisme. Paris, 1759.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON: FINDING THE MEANING OF HOME IN A FLORIDA AUTHOR’S LIFE STEVEN KNAPP

The state with the prettiest name, The state that floats in brackish water, Held together by mangrove roots —“Florida” by Elizabeth Bishop Florida: gorgeous sunlight, fleas, flowers, frogs, ferns, alligators, poincianas, flies, cypress, roses, magnolias, roaches, bougainvilla, gnats, pines, roaches, china berry trees, fleas, bedbugs and magnolias amid dazzling palms and stretches of waters. Wish you could see it all. —Zora Neale Hurston to Lawrence Jordan, May 3, 1927.

The Florida College English Association focuses attention on Florida writers and topics. So what makes someone a Florida writer? Presumably, if one is a writer and a Floridian, then one is a Florida writer. Like most simple propositions, this is not so simple when examined closely. I want to dig a little deeper into what it means to belong to a particular place, and I want to consider what Zora Neale Hurston’s life and writings reveal about belonging. Does she belong to us—Floridians? Is she one of us? Is she, unequivocally, a Florida writer? Before you ask why anyone would ask these questions, consider the claims that arise from her two reported birthplaces—Eatonville, Florida, and Notasulga, Alabama. Both Eatonville and Notasulga share the distinction of being Hurston’s purported birthplace. Because Hurston wrote in Mules and Men (2) and in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1), that she was born in Eatonville, she is considered a Florida author. Until a couple of years ago, many publications and Web sites reported Hurston’s birthplace and birth date as Eatonville, 1901. A few still do. Nevertheless, scholars— investigating the details of Hurston’s life—found evidence that she was born in Notasulga, Alabama, some ten years earlier than reported by Hurston, herself. Does her birthplace matter? Is this—the birthplace

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alteration—an example of infantile amnesia, and does this make her an Alabama author? What if the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama (ACETA) claims her as one of its own? In some sense, people who are thinking “What does it matter?” are partly right. This would hardly be the kind of question requiring the wisdom of King Solomon; after all, we would not have to divide the living body of Hurston akin to Solomon’s order in the case of the baby claimed by two professed mothers. If Alabama, Florida, New York, Louisiana, Haiti, and Jamaica all claim Hurston, so much the better, right? There is enough Hurston to go around. For her fans, competing claims seem all the better for the author’s legacy. The more places advertising “Hurston slept here,” the better it will be for Hurston’s continuing popularity and canonicity, right? Perhaps I should unilaterally surrender to the ACETA and be content with the fact that Hurston falsely claimed Eatonville as her birthplace. If so, can Eatonville legitimately claim Zora Neale Hurston as one of its own? Would Eatonville’s claim be any less false than Hurston’s own, that she was born there? Moreover, Hurston spent the closing years of her life in Fort Pierce, the Sunrise City, and this became her burial place. What can Fort Pierce claim? Partly, we think about such things because there are claims and counter claims about who belongs. Us and other are frequently—one might almost say, naturally—occurring divisions made by the human mind. I propose to enter this quagmire for several reasons. The easiest justification is the scholarly pursuit. Entering disputes is what scholars do. Perhaps we are carrying on the disputatious tradition of our forbears, the theological doctors of the Church, who would willingly debate the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. Nevertheless, there is more at stake than just the fun of a good argument— for argument’s sake. A better reason than mere argumentativeness is the opportunity to revise the distorted picture of Hurston’s final years, especially those in Fort Pierce, Florida. The received wisdom is that Hurston left the northeast in poverty and disgrace, that she died in a sort of literary exile: a welfare case, alone and friendless, forgotten and forsaken. Fort Pierce becomes the metaphor for Hurston’s literary wilderness. In today’s version of Hurstonography, like Moses in the wilderness, Hurston disappears in Fort Pierce—her literary exile—far from the promised land of New York City and the literary spotlight of the Harlem Renaissance. We have all read the stories. None of Hurston’s books was in print. She had been humiliated by the child-molestation charges. She had bounced about from job to job and from place to place. She was penniless and sick. Ih 1960, she died in total obscurity. She had become a burden to the community, and her funeral and

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burial became a pauper’s welfare affair at the expense of apathetic, mostly-white Fort Pierce taxpayers. In short, Hurston had become just another destitute nobody, for whom nobody mourned and nobody cared. While this is the current view, and while there is just enough truth involved to afford a patina of credibility, there is more fiction in this story than there is in Hurston’s much-maligned autobiography. If you believe the generally-accepted view of Hurston’s life, I want to change your mind about Hurston’s history, about her last years, and about her relationship with Fort Pierce. Why? This excursion into revisionist history can reveal something new about Hurston. Moreover, Hurston’s life and writings provide us with insights into belonging and insights into the idea of home. Because she was a wanderer who left her parents’ home at such a young age, Hurston’s home raises interesting questions, and the answers can help us better understand her literature and life. In gaining a new understanding of her, perhaps we can even gain insights into ourselves.

The Hurston Myth It is true that Hurston was devastated by the false molestation charges that had been leveled by young boys who concocted a story to cover up their own sexual experimentation. And she was even more devastated by the subsequent flood of negative newspaper coverage that the charges precipitated. Nevertheless, what seemed to affect her most was the vitriol of her enemies and abandonment by her erstwhile friends. Few stood by her. Fortunately, her publisher did come to her aid and even provided her an attorney to help get her released from jail and prepared for her legal defense. Without him, who knows what might have become of Hurston or her literary legacy. However, many whom Hurston thought she could count on abandoned her. Consequently, at that time (1948), the lowest moment of Hurston’s life, she wrote an uncharacteristically long letter to photographer/writer Carl Van Vechten. In it, Hurston mournfully pens what might have become her epitaph: “All that I have ever tried to [do, all—x-ed out] has proved useless. All that I believed in has failed me. I have resolved to die. It will take a few days for me to set my affairs in order, and then I will go” (Kaplan 573). Scholars sometimes treat this letter as a suicide note, but it is atypical. Does a typical suicide note claim that tokens of friendship and support “have held back this resolution for five days” (574) and that “a few days” more are required? She is certainly confiding that thoughts of suicide have crossed her mind, but this is a letter to friends, not a note to

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authorities found pinned to her dress. A significant piece of the Hurston myth is manufactured from this one letter, a letter that can be interpreted in different ways. Someone determined to commit suicide has no real need to get this world’s affairs in order. A better way to interpret this letter is seeing it in the light of warranted self-pity and a bit of hyperbole. She’s trying to convey to friends the depth of her pain and the sincerest thanks for their personal support and encouragement. Moreover, Hurston penned that letter in 1948, but she died some twelve years later. In the interim, Hurston experienced many more ups and downs—but none of life’s setbacks took her to those depths again. In short, her thoughts of suicide were not indicative of some long slide into depression, despondency, and demise. When Hurston recovered from her depths of the late 1940s, she once again became the feisty Zora who could take on the world with her vivacious charm and irrepressible wit. By the time she settled in Fort Pierce, in the late 1950s, friends and acquaintances testified to her vigor. She once again ubiquitously sported her often-ostentatious hats. She lived in Fort Pierce demonstrating the active and even combative style for which she had come to be known. One friend who visited with her here in Fort Pierce reported that Hurston loved to argue, so much so that when he would yield and concede some point she had made, she would switch sides and rekindle the debate. There is little to suggest that Hurston’s energy or love of life deteriorated in her last years. There are no confessions about depression, and she is clearly making plans, dreaming dreams and still jumping at the sun. Instead of diminished hopes, in spite of the financial difficulties that she experienced throughout her lifetime, Hurston is planning to buy land and run a business supplying local florists (Kaplan 770). She is sixtyseven and still writing and revising a novel. Moreover, Hurston writes for a local newspaper, teaches school, receives guests, and carries on her correspondence. In 1958, she is trying to get the city to help create a playground that she is planning, and she wants to invite Roy Campanella, the famous baseball star, to visit (770). People might still ask, however, “Did Hurston feel truly at home in Fort Pierce?”

Home in Hurston’s Life Popular folklore tells us emphatically, “home is where the heart is.” Where then was Hurston at home? Several possible answers arise. Among other cities, she lived in Eatonville, Baltimore, Washington D.C., New York, and finally Fort Pierce. When Hurston first left home after her mother’s death, however, home had already ceased to exist—in

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Eatonville—for the teenaged Zora. For Hurston, conflicts with her authoritarian father and his new, young bride robbed home of any meaning. She went to Jacksonville to school, and following a short-lived return after Zora’s father cut off funds for her schooling, she went to live at her brother’s home. Yet her brother’s home did not become home for her, either. Therefore, she struck out on her own, searching for somewhere she could call home. One of Hurston’s earliest extant writings is a poem entitled “Home.” Hurston wrote the poem when she was studying at Howard University, in 1919. Valerie Boyd, the recent biographer of Hurston, says of the poem, it “bore witness to Zora’s nostalgia for Eatonville, romanticized by the power and selectivity of memory” (82). The poem speaks of the Eatonville of Hurston’s youth, the Eatonville she longed for while living in Washington D.C.: I know a place that is full of light, That is full of dreams and visions bright; Where pleasing fancy loves to roam And picture me once more at home. (Boyd 8)

Boyd adds, “Beneath the typewritten poem, she scribbled an explanatory note: “Just a bubbling over of a melancholy heart—momentarily” (82). Sometimes Hurston also calls New York home. This means something more than just the fact that she resides there. She meets a male companion there and she develops close professional friendships, especially her friendship with Langston Hughes. And while New York City, especially Harlem, becomes home to Hurston, she freely writes of the unfulfilled dreams she experiences: Prometheus on his rock with his liver being continually consumed as fast as he grows another, is nothing to my dreams. I dream such wonderfully complete ones, so radiant in astral beauty. I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die. But even as they fade, I have others. […] There is no excuse for a person who lives on Earth, trying to board in Heaven. (Kaplan 77)

New York, she shows, is a combination of high hopes and dreams and— sometimes— bitter realities. There, too, she endured poverty. She worked her way through school. Though she had a patron, and received scholarships, Hurston often struggled to pay rent and to eat. Yet Hurston called her New York apartment home (216), and traveling in Florida in 1927, she writes, “I’ll be very glad to be back in New York City” (94), and “I yearn to point the nose of my car due North and throw her into high”

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(99). Yet in 1931, Hurston writes to Charlotte Mason, “they are tearing up 66th street and the noise is awful. Besides, other things make New York unpleasant to me at times, so that I am utterly disorganized for short periods (220). In 1932, Hurston writes, “I’d love to go South if I could. There are several good reasons. 1. Atmosphere to work. 2. Escape New York. 3. Health 4. Chance of self-support” (250). For Hurston, the allure of New York was short-lived. Once again in the South, Hurston confides to Mason, “Somehow a great weight seems lifted from me. I have been trying to analyze myself and see why I feel so happy. But I do” (253), and shortly thereafter she writes from Eatonville, Florida, “I am happy here, happier than I have been for years” (254). Hurston writes of Eatonville, “I’m willing to stay here forever” (266). But only nine days later, Hurston writes back to Mason, “I have changed my mind about the place. […] this locality has so many draw-backs. They steal everything here, even greens out of a garden” (267). In spite of the temporary setback in Eatonville, Hurston never fully warms to New York City again. Instead, we read, “New York is painful to me now. I feel so out of place” (272), and “New York is not a good place to think in” (363). Her falling out with Langston Hughes over the failed collaboration on Mule Bone certainly weighed on Hurston, too. In 1934, Hurston writes, “I returned to my native village for quiet, atmosphere and economical existence in addition to my love of the place” (316). When she writes from New York in 1935, Hurston longs for the South: “I love my Florida. I am sick of these dull gray skies and what not. I want to be back home!” (351). She also confesses, “I hate snow!” (633), which rules out complete happiness in New York. The Zora myth—created by biographers more than a decade after Hurston’s death—depicts a meteoric rise to incredible heights in New York, followed by a steep decline to poverty and obscurity. This is not the picture Hurston’s letters paint. While she did attract attention in New York, we should remember that she arrived—as she says—with $1.50 in her pocket, and she left with precious little more. Perhaps the economic collapse of the Great Depression is partly to blame, but a cursory reading of her letters reveals that Hurston’s success could never be measured in financial terms. New York was a tough place for Hurston, and she never stayed there for very long. Therefore, I ask, how accurate are Hurston biographies that paint a picture of her as solidly entrenched in New York, only to later descend into poverty in Florida? At what point in her nomadic life was Zora Neale Hurston at home? As scholars and fans, can we say with conviction that Eatonville is her home, or New York is her home, or should we concede that Notasulga is her home?

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The Hurston family Bible and census records show that Zora was born in Notasulga, but her heart was clearly not there. In her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston uses Notasulga as its setting. The novel starts just over the creek from Notasulga, and this Alabama locale is the home of Ned Crittenden. Ned is arguably Hurston’s most revolting black character. Ned is racist, a hater of his own race, a black man who has imbibed the slave-master mentality. Ned calls his young stepson John—the mulatto protagonist—a fool for looking white folks straight in the face (Jonah’s 2). Ned warns John: “Yo’ brazen ways wid dese white folks is gwinter git you lynched one uh dese days” (2). Concern for John is hardly Ned’s motive. Instead, he resents John’s yellow skin. Ironically, Ned can accept blackskinned Negroes, as fellow inferiors, but the white in John’s blood fills Ned with resentment and hatred—a form of self-loathing. Ned’s wife, Amy, confronts him about his racist views, “You always runnin’ yo race down” (10), and he does not deny it, but Ned sees himself, living after emancipation, as a master in his own right. His slaves, his wife and family, are those he can dominate with violence and the fear of violence. John, being part white, threatens his worldview. Ned reacts with bitterness and more violence. John escapes his repressive servitude only by running away before Ned can turn him over to Captain Mimms, a former slaveplantation overseer who had nearly killed slaves with his brutal beatings. Even so, John proclaims, “Sometime Ah jes’ ez soon be under Mimms ez pappy” (8). John’s mother persuades him to run, rather than submit to Mimms, and after swimming the creek, John strides into Notasulga, the plantation home where he was born (15). Repeatedly, Huston associates Notasulga with slavery and the slave mentality. Hurston uses other places—Chicago, for instance—negatively too, but none embodies the evils of slavery more than Notasulga. Chicago lures blacks North with its false promises of opportunity and equality in “The Gilded Six-Bits,” but it becomes for Hurston a place between Egypt and the Promised Land—a false hope, a diversion. Hurston makes a subtle warning here: Negroes wandering in the wilderness after leaving the plantation should avoid the temptation of trading plantation slavery for slavery in the factories and stockyards of Chicago. Yet, Chicago is hardly Egypt—bondage and spiritual death. In Hurston’s novel, Notasulga symbolizes the plantation itself. Notasulga is certainly no more a symbol of home in Hurston’s novel than is a slave shack on a master’s plantation. In a similar way, a sharecropper’s house symbolizes poverty and desperation in Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use.” In that story, the antagonist, Dee, hates the house where she was born and raised. Walker implies that Dee may have started a fire that destroys the family’s

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house. Though Dee’s little sister is trapped inside the house during the fire, Dee stands next to the sweet gum tree with a look of concentration on her face, enjoying the sight of the burning shack. Dee leaves this place at the first chance, and she does not return for several years, though her mother and badly-scarred sister remain there. Dee desperately wanted escape from her birthplace and the place she was raised. Walker makes Dee into a lesson about heritage. Being born somewhere is not always enough to tie person to place.

Florida as Hurston’s Home Few Floridians today can make the claim to having been born in Florida. Does this mean that most full-time residents of Florida are not really Floridians? While I have lived in Florida for more than twenty-five years, is my written work—even now—the work of a Michigan writer? The accident of birth surely cannot be the only means of creating one’s identity. Can one’s identity shift? Since I had lived twenty-five years in Michigan, when I spent twenty-five years and one day in Florida did I then become more of a Floridian? Does time spent in a particular locale change the claims of place, or will I always be a Michigander—a “Wolverine”? Even considered legally, birthplace is not definitive in creating citizenship, even less so one’s personal identity. The United States is one of the few countries where non-citizens automatically give birth to citizens, simply because they are born inside its borders. But, dual citizenship is possible, and often countries acknowledge the right of a person to choose between two possible identities. Should people have the right to make their own claim to place? Does Zora Neale Hurston have that right? Can she choose Eatonville over Notasulga? If birthplace is not the last word in belonging to a certain place, what are some other legitimate ties? Perhaps the strongest claim is residence. Whoever resides in a particular place makes a claim on that place and the place makes a claim on him or her. The idea of home captures the literary imagination like nothing else does. For example, in American classics such as O Pioneers!, Willa Cather makes the Great Plains come alive as Alexandra Bergson transforms a barren homestead into the Bergson home. From Cather we glimpse the grandeur of subduing the earth—making it serve a stubborn matriarch, and in the process, making it hers, a possession, a right, transforming wild earth into pasture and farm, forcing it to take on the image she wills. Once a family such as the Bergsons settles the land they acquire, they become one with the land. It is give and take. And the land takes, too. In O Pioneers!, Cather has the matriarch—Alexandra—confess to Carl, who’s

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left the Nebraska divide and traveled widely, that she would rather have had his freedom than her land. But Cather puts the rootlessness of his life into some perspective: Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here [Alexandra] you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock coast and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder. (72)

Cather shows why land has an allure. If one can change the land, corral it, tame it, and make it serve one’s needs, it provides transcendence, even a touch of immortality because the changes can shape the land beyond a single human lifetime. The earth, in turn, extracts its price—ownership is conferred on those who pay it. Hurston, too, understands and accepts Cather’s basic point about land’s transcendent value, and its ability to impart immortality. She proposes land purchases and tries to purchase land on several occasions. In 1945, Hurston writes to W.E.B. DuBois to convince him to purchase Florida land: “As Dean of American Negro Artists, I think that it is about time that you take steps towards an important project which you have neglected up to this time. Why do you not propose a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead?” (Kaplan 518). Hurston argues that an artist’s personal financial resources, or lack thereof, should be of no consequence: “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness. We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored” (519). This seems to foreshadow Hurston’s own situation at the time of her death. One of the facts that is often overlooked, however, is Hurston’s argument that Florida is the ideal place to create this monument to America’s Negro artists. She proposes Florida, “not […] because it is my birth-state, but because it lends itself to decoration easier than any other part of the United States” (518). Hurston nurtures an ongoing and growing love affair with Florida after she returns there, from New York, after her studies at Barnard College.

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Readers of her letters can see that Florida was displaced as Hurston’s home for only a few years. Afterwards, Hurston retrospectively disparages her stay in New York as a less happy time. When Hurston goes south, it has nothing to do with molestation charges or failures in her literary career. She goes south for peace and quiet and a better atmosphere for writing. She goes south to live more economically. She goes south to find the comfort of home. Moreover, it isn’t just Eatonville that captures Hurston’s fancy. She writes, “I love Orange County!!” and she plans on buy a home in Winter Park (479). On her thirty-two foot houseboat on the Halifax River, Hurston writes, in 1944, “the various natural expressions of the day on the river keep me happier than I have ever been before in my life” (500). In Eau Gallie, Florida, in 1951, Hurston writes, “I am the happiest I have been in the last ten years” (662). In some sense, Hurston has outgrown Eatonville, but she maintains her love affair with Florida. In Eau Gallie, Hurston claims that she regained her health (679). Financial difficulties, a recurrent problem in Hurston’s life, caused her to lose her Eau Gallie property. Nevertheless, from Merritt Island, in 1957, Hurston writes, “I am living in a house-trailer now for privacy to work and like it very much” (753). While Hurston had problems on her job at the technical library at Patrick Air Force Base, and was fired, she was offered two jobs in Fort Pierce: one at the Chronicle newspaper and the other at Lincoln Park Academy, a high school. In Fort Pierce, Hurston again reaffirms her love of Florida: “I am about to get hold of a plat of ground of my own […] and I think that I can manage financially” (770). And, from Fort Pierce, Hurston continues writing about Herod the Great and contacts publishers to see if there might be any interest in the book. She had written an earlier, successful book about the biblical character Moses, so choosing to write about Herod seemed reasonable to Hurston. For my purposes, considering the idea of home, I could easily have started with the Bible. The Bible begins—in Genesis—with an explanation of how the earth became humanity’s temporary home, how a perfect garden was soiled by sin, and how a man and woman were left homeless, doomed to wander unfriendly ground until a new home could be found for them. Home is a universal theme, and our Western forbearers, the Greeks, have given us an archetype in the genre of quest and return to home: The Odyssey. Odysseus spent nine years fighting in the Trojan War; then he spent nine more years—chronicled in The Odyssey—trying to make his way back home to Ithaca and to his wife, Penelope: Muse, speak to me now of that resourceful man who wandered far and wide after ravaging the sacred citadel of Troy. He came to see many

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people’s cities, where he learned their customs, while on the sea his spirit suffered many torments, as he fought to save his life and lead his comrades home. But though he wanted to, he could not rescue them—they all died from their own stupidity, the fools. They feasted on the cattle of Hyperion, god of the sun—that’s why he snatched away their chance of getting home someday. (Book 1)

In the story of Cain and Abel, wandering and dying far from home is Cain’s punishment, too, for killing his brother Abel. Again, the Bible first shows us God punishing humanity by depriving people of their homes, and death away from home often signifies God’s displeasure. Homeless wandering and death are familiar literary tropes. Moreover, death in faraway places, or death on distant battlefields, raises questions about the dead and their homes. Do the dead have homes? Some of the dead are certainly at home, while others are not. Cemeteries and graveyards make claims on behalf of the dead. William Shakespeare’s grave has the following verse engraved upon it: Good Friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here: Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.

Can the dead lay any claims upon the living for their own space or place? Can ground be “hallowed” and “consecrated”—in the words of Abraham Lincoln—by the bodies and blood of the dead? A part of us says yes, but is home another name for one’s final resting place? Is Shakespeare now at home in a grave at the Holy Trinity Church? There is a sense in which someone’s death—especially in one’s chosen home—marks that place in a special way. The last sentence of Cather’s O Pioneers! tells us that land returns a human harvest wrung from people’s blood and tears—a sort of mystical fertilizer—making the land absorb the hearts and souls with the bodies of its inhabitants: “Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” Fort Pierce is fortunate to have received Zora Neale Hurston. Fort Pierce, Florida, opened its hearts and homes to Zora Neale Hurston in 1957. She was offered a chance to write for the Chronicle newspaper. In 1958, she was asked to share her special talents, to teach English at Lincoln Park, the all-black school. She was offered a place to live, for which she need not worry about scraping together enough money to avoid

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homelessness. And, here she was offered friendship by many local families: including the Benton family and individuals such as Ann Wilder—a reporter and friend who spent hours at the famous author’s side before Hurston’s death. Here she wrote, taught, received friends, and here she died in January, 1960. Fort Pierce mourned Hurston in a community funerary event. A volunteer band played, songs were sung, prayers were offered, and friends wept. It was quite a gathering according to those in attendance, different from the bleak, friendless, unceremonious pauper’s funeral depicted in some later accounts. Fort Pierce did not seem big enough for outsiders looking back at the larger-than-life Hurston they idolized. These posthumous fans saw Hurston as belonging to New York, Harlem, and some major university such as Columbia or Howard. Was Fort Pierce despised for being Fort Pierce, or was it rightfully denigrated for depriving Hurston of a much-deserved monument—at the very least a headstone to mark her final resting place? While Hurston’s friends might have done better on one notorious item, giving the author a gravesite marker, they offered her much more. They gave Hurston a place to be Hurston at the end of her vivacious and unsettled life. She did not die a lady’s maid, a manicurist, a domestic, or even a librarian at a military airbase. Hurston lived and died here a teacher and an author. The respect, recognition, and acceptance denied her elsewhere were afforded her in the little town of Fort Pierce, Florida. Here she lived, here she taught, here she wrote, and here she died. Friends knew she was somebody special. Shortly after Hurston’s death, when a deputy sheriff spotted the little fire in the yard at Hurston’s home, he knew what was likely happening: a person’s personal papers were routinely burned after one’s death. Driving up to the scene of the little fire in Hurston’s yard, this deputy—an acquaintance of Hurston’s—immediately soaked the papers and put out the fire, recovering all he could of Hurston’s papers. Somehow, he knew they were valuable. Nobody from New York or Washington D.C. told him so, and nobody from outside of Fort Pierce was there offering him money for Hurston’s personal papers. In fact, there was no market for the treasure trove that deputy salvaged that morning. He dried the papers on his porch—a fitting place, reminiscent of one of Hurston’s all-time favorite places in this world, Joe Clarke’s storefront porch. He kept the papers for years in his home. Eventually, when others began to discover what people in Fort Pierce already knew, the papers would find another home at a university library. And today, Fort Pierce still honors its greatest literary resident.

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Fort Pierce is home to the Zora Neale Hurston branch library. It is home to the Dust Tracks Trail, which marks and commemorates significant historic sites of interest in the life of Zora Neale Hurston in Fort Pierce. It has begun hosting an annual Zorafest. And, Fort Pierce hosts The Garden of Heavenly Rest—Hurston’s last earthly resting place. While I cannot tell you precisely where Hurston’s body lies, I can show you the place that best qualifies as Zora Neale Hurston’s real home on earth. How can Fort Pierce be as much home for Hurston as Eatonville? Fort Pierce is the kindling place of Hurston’s legacy because it offered her a home when others did not. With some liberty, to paraphrase Willa Cather, Fort Pierce is the fortunate city that received a heart like Hurston’s into its bosom, to give it out again in the shining eyes of youth!

Works Cited Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! New York: Houghton, 1995. Homer. Homer: The Odyssey. Trans. Ian Johnston. Dec. 2007 http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/homer/odyssey1.htm. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper, 1996. —. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. New York: Harper, 1990. —. Mules and Men. New York: Harper, 1990. Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Random, 2002.

“THE DREAM IS THE TRUTH”: REMEMBERING MY LIFE WITH ZORA NEALE HURSTON SARAH M. MALLONEE

Beginning at the beginning: I would like to include an extended passage from the opening of Their Eyes Were Watching God: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. (1)

Their Eyes Were Watching God opens here with the perhaps strange philosophical musings over men, women, dreams, truth, memory, and the business of living. The narrator’s idea that “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” resonates with me now as someone who left the muck and found her way back to it (Hurston 1). My own dreams have come true, and I am living this great life according to all that I never want to forget. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie works her way through her love affairs and marriages to three men; I am working my way through my own love affair with academia and the intellectual journey of the professoriate. As a middle and high school student at Lincoln Park Academy in Ft. Pierce, I walked the halls with the ghost of Zora Neale Hurston and was close enough to throw a stone to her final resting place. As a member of the second class of International Baccalaureate candidates at Lincoln Park, I adored the in-depth nature of our comprehensive studies, but I did remain a bit of a procrastinator and a bit scared of the big project, that extended essay due in the spring semester of my senior year.

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Under these circumstances, Zora Neale Hurston, her connections to Florida, and her great literature saved me. I wrote an exposition of Hurston’s life and works and tried my hand at being a literary critic as I delved into an intricate discussion of the influence of setting on dialects and conflicts in Hurtson’s most prominent works. In an attempt to wrap things up after much analytical and descriptive wandering in the essay, I wrote the following: The physical setting creates the conflicts in many of Hurston’s novels and provides the opportunities and outlets for growth and prosperity to her characters. Florida is enveloped by this very colorful cloud of wonder, according to the descriptions and flattery of it in her novels. Alice Walker writes of Florida’s influence on Hurston, and I know how much Florida has affected me in my short life. The weather in Florida is unique, the shape of Florida is unique, the land has a unique richness for growing citrus, and there is a great diversity here from the tip of the Keys to the Florida-Georgia/Florida-Alabama borders; Florida is all together individualistic. This is evident in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings. She displays the ability to absorb herself in whatever environment she is surrounded by, and to be inspired by these environments.

I am left wondering now, do I always write about myself while pretending to write about others? Finishing this essay and the other core requirements of the International Baccalaureate program, I did find myself an inspired person as well. My setting fostered plenty of conflicts and offered me great opportunities for growth. And grow I did. I sprouted wings of confidence and ambition and I flew off “de muck” of this here town and landed knee-deep in the swamps of New Orleans, Louisiana. Of course as a student at Tulane University situated in the high and dry, beautiful and ornate garden district of the crescent city, I sometimes had to go searching for the laissez le bon temps roullex! But believe me, the good times were never far away in this magical city of life. My horizons were broadened by my venture to the gulf shores of this boot state, and I certainly wrapped that new horizon around my waist like a fishnet—Janie Crawford style, that is. My experiences in this thriving, culturally diverse, and intellectually stimulating university setting fostered many extraordinary moments and helped shape me in subtle and profound ways. Among the things I am most thankful for are my relationships with the professors and graduate students. The academic excellence and just the overall “neat” factor of the involved, impassioned, and innovative faculty prepared me and propelled me into the path of graduate school and the

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rigors of a life in college English. Tulane was both comforting and challenging and allowed me the space to refine my academic skills and grow a little less naïve. I was so well-prepared and enriched by my secondary school education that my adventures at Tulane just seemed to make it all that much better. Oddly enough, through my years at Tulane, I all but abandoned Hurston, though I could never abandon my own “Florida-girl” status. I remained dumbfounded throughout my four years away from Florida that not everyone in the world wore tank tops and shorts all year round and spoke of weather as they would of family. How was I marked as a Florida girl? I knew I was a born and bred Floridian because I felt neither Southern nor Northern; certainly not Midwestern or a West-coast girl. The groves, the swamps, the cane, and the oceans all blend and simultaneously contradict themselves in this Florida that I know. Perhaps that was all that I took with me. It was good for me to leave this peninsular home for that stint of time and meet the most interesting of people who would define themselves with their own regional identities. Much like Zora, I was an anthropologist of culture and collected the stories of the students at this nationally and internationally respected university. One of the sure reasons that I lost Hurston for a time at Tulane was primarily that I was not going to be an English major, and I was certainly not going to be, like my mother and my paternal grandmother, an English teacher. Why then, could I not stay out of the English faculty offices and literature classes of all these outstanding professors such as Geoffrey Harpham, Rebecca Mark, and Supriya Nair? What I wrote in my personal statements for my graduate school applications tells of this inevitable transformation: My undergraduate schooling at Tulane has thoroughly prepared me for a professional career in literature and I have been very successful here, finding not a single English class that did not fully engage my intellectual curiosities and my interest.

Tulane prepared me, for sure, but my confidence here in retrospect now seems to border on hubris and for that transgression, the gods and godesses of graduate school sought retribution. So it was that graduate school brought me back to Florida, though my return to my home state kept me still distant from the muck of my childhood, some 220 miles away, to be exact. As a Master’s student at the University of Florida, I experienced another sort of homecoming. At this university where “palm and pine are blowing” and the “girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest” I continued a family legacy. So many of

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my family members attended the University of Florida, I felt Gainesville was a home away from home already. But this homecoming was much like Janie’s, hard-earned and with still much to work through. The hardest things I’ve done in my life, I did in graduate school. The most I’ve stretched, grown, and struggled, was in graduate school. I was the most at home and the most out of my comforts of home as a seeker of a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. If ever Freud was right about anything, it was surely about the powerfulness of the unheimlich, or the uncanny. To feel simultaneously at home and out of home certainly encapsulates much of that adventure in my life, and I learned so much in every step of that process. Getting in to graduate school was a tremendous lesson in humility and started all of that growing and stretching previously mentioned. The many rejection letters I received from “dream” schools were coupled with a few acceptance letters from those “safety” schools I was smart enough, thankfully, to include in my application pile. My graduate school life started, therefore, with the full knowledge that yes, this is going to be a tough road to travel, but my naivete and general Pollyanna outlook on life kept me at it. The blunt reality of the job market and English Department politics in schools across the country hit me hard at the beginning of several first and second year courses when our esteemed professors sat us all down in class and said things like “in all likelihood, the majority of you will never work in an English Department at the post-secondary level.” This was certainly devastating and heartbreaking but also served a personal need for some serious soul searching and determination of my destiny in this work-a-day world. Feeling quite uncertain, therefore, that I would ever even work in an English department at the college level, I tried very hard not to get my hopes up when I interviewed here at IRCC. But a full-fledged return did happen with the offer of a full-time position in this fantastic department. While I still have one foot in the graduate student life, I have taken a huge leap into this new life of mine as a professor at Indian River Community College. And this new setting offers plenty of challenges and opportunities for growth as well. Perhaps one of the most profoundly wonderful opportunities I have had is the opportunity to work alongside Mr. Steven Knapp, my colleague here in this session and in our department. In the summer of 2005 as I jumped directly into the deep end of a full summer load at my new school, Mr. Knapp befriended me and reminded me to dust off my copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God and my companion Zora texts. The second summer of my tenure here I decided I would bring that recently revisited work to my classroom as well. What

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fun, what fun. During an intense six weeks spanning July and August, my dear ENC 1102 students and I poured over every page of Janie, Jodie, and Tea Cake. We laughed at the porch lies and dropped the book in shock when Janie shoots Tea Cake in final desperation—which serves, some of us argue, as a key to her final release and regeneration of self. I must admit, though, I still read this narrative with the hope that this time Tea Cake gets the serum in time and fixes that nasty rabies that’s torturing him and Janie. Though the story line remains the same, the unfoldings and awakenings of the students remains fresh and exhilarating. Through Their Eyes Were Watching God, my students uncover the power of language and the importance of having a voice, telling one’s story, or being the narrator of one’s own life. They also begin to wonder about the power of a simple pear tree to awaken the spirit and inner life of a sweet young girl, and see the great symbolism of this intellectual, physical, and spiritual transformation of Janie and thus the possibilities for all women. Here I am, back in the community of my growing up years, witnessing the struggles and triumphs of those who sit in these classrooms in this muck-town. I watch them grapple with the complexities of their lives, I read their insights and interpretations of the lives of others, and I listen to them plan their own launch towards their distant horizons. This, Ms. Hurston, is my privilege I want never to forget. This is the dream that is the truth of my life. During that fantastic journey back into Their Eyes Were Watching God in the summer of 2006, I inscribed the title page with my now-grown up thoughts that are starting to crowd out the more sophomoric ones scribbled throughout the text. I wrote, “Summer 2006: Re-reading for ENC 1102 course at IRCC. A beautiful foray back into these words of my memory. It is a hot, humid, wet summer backdrop for my own rediscovery of Janie … Eatonville … Womanhood … Desire … Language … Place … Experience.” I am grateful to my high school English teacher, mentor, and mother Elizabeth Mallonee for helping to bring Zora Neale Hurston into my life and allowing me to take it far away. And I am equally thankful to Steven Knapp for reminding me to find my way back to Zora’s muck-story. Then again, perhaps the biggest thank you goes to the author herself for bringing to life a woman and her journey for us all to appreciate. I remain in awe of the written word and its power to inspire, connect, and reconnect our lives.

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Work Cited Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

CIVIL RIGHTS, DISOBEDIENCE, AND PROTEST IN TALLAHASSEE’S TWO PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES SALENA COLLER

During the 1960’s many students from the all-black Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU) and students from allwhite Florida State University (FSU) participated in acts of civil disobedience and protest. In the book Freedom in the Family: A MotherDaughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights Patricia Stephens Due and her daughter Tananarive Due discuss the civil rights activism within their family as well as the activism of lesser known activists who deserve credit for risking their lives and careers. J. Stanley Marshall, the Past President of FSU, discusses the history of FSU in the book The Tumultuous Sixties Campus Unrest and Student Life at a Southern University. Black students and white students in Tallahassee, Florida, actively questioned the ethics of racial discrimination and warfare. Exploring the decade of the sixties from the perspective of a civil right activist who was a student at an allblack university and the point of view of a university administrator at an all-white university provides one with a sense of hope against the negative influences of racism and war.

Civil Rights Activists at FAMU & FSU In the twenty-first century many Americans take for granted that Caucasians, African Americans, and other minority groups attend public schools and universities together. They also take for granted that African Americans and Caucasians may visit the same movie theatres, amusement parks, stadiums, public parks and public beaches. Almost everyone in the U.S.A. is familiar with the stories of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, extremely influential civil rights icons who inspire hope. Many Americans remain ignorant about the history of thousands of unknown people during the 1960’s who risked the lives, families, and careers in order to help millions of African American Citizens obtain the civil rights

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that have been denied to them for centuries because of their ancestry and the color of their skin. On Saturday, February 20, 1960, fourteen FAMU students, two high school students and one adult woman named Mary Ola Gaines participated in a sit-in at a Woolworth restaurant in Tallahassee, Florida (Due 48). Eleven out of the fourteen participates in the sit-in were arrested for “engaging in riotous conduct” (Due 50). Patricia and Priscilla Due were included in that group and spent forty-nine days in jail for sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter (Due 4). Both Due sisters were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Patricia Stephens Due says that CORE taught that a person or a group of people could destroy an injustice system by using Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent protest (40). During Patricia’s childhood she quickly learned that the freedoms in the U.S. Bill of Rights did not apply to Negro citizens (Due 18). In the summer of 1959 the Due sisters joined CORE which inspired them to become active in the civil rights movement (“Patricia Stephens Due Biography”). Members of the CORE scheduled sit-ins on March 12, 1960 at both the McCrory’s and the Woolworth restaurants when the negotiations failed with the management (Due 52). Patricia Due witnessed twelve FAMU and FSU students get arrested for sitting together as an interracial group and ordering food at a Woolworth restaurant (53). FSU student Oscar “Bob” Brock and five other white FSU students were among the group arrested, and they were verbally taunted by white police officers and onlookers. Another white FSU student Robert Armstrong and several other people were arrested during a sit-in at McCrory’s restaurant (Due 52). Due went to the FAMU campus and recruited almost one-thousand student protestors after witnessing the arrest of students and a mob of men who belonged to the White Citizens Council blocking the entrance to the Woolworth (53). Tear gas was unleashed on the new protestors, and Due says that a police officer told her, “I want you” and threw a tear gas canister into her face because he recognized her as a leader (54). During the Civil Rights Movement in Florida Conference in 2004 at the University of South Florida’s (USF) St. Petersburg Campus, Due told the audience that she suffered permanent injuries from the tear gas canister which has made her eyes extremely sensitive to light forcing her to wear sun glasses all the time. When Patricia Due was President of the Tallahassee CORE in 1963, she organized FAMU students and local high school students to picket in front of the Florida Theater on Monroe Street and the State Theater on College Street because both theater owners refused to sell Negroes tickets (Phillips, “Negroes Begin Picketing”). Later that evening about one-

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hundred desegregation protesters were sprayed with tear gas when marching through Tallahassee. Out of the group of protestors FSU student Harold D. Taylor, Patricia Due and 35 FAMU students were arrested when they were marching through the city towards the county jail to protest the arrest of their fellow students who picketed in front of two Tallahassee movie theatres. (Philips, “Tear Gas” and “Negroes Cleared”). On May 31, 1963, Judge Ben C. Willis “dismissed the contempt of court charges against 221 Negro students and one white youth arrested in a segregation demonstration on May 30” (Philips, “Negroes Cleared”). After the court’s judgment smaller groups of student activists were allowed to protest in front of the two white-only movie theaters Some of the FAMU faculty even risked their jobs by participating in CORE. When the Due sisters decided to create a local CORE group in Tallahassee, they recruited students and three faculty members. Miss Daisy Young, an advisor for the NAACP and FAMU’s assistant admissions director, helped the new Tallahassee CORE group at FAMU recruit white students from FSU, and she also offered her home as a meeting place (Due 44). FAMU’s chaplain Dr. James Hudson and FAMU music professor Richard Haley both joined the Tallahassee CORE (Due 45). Due mentions that Haley eventually lost his job at FAMU because of his activism within CORE (45). Having the right to vote is part of the U.S. Bill of Rights, but helping black people register to vote in the U.S.A. was a dangerous activity in the twentieth century because of the racism of the white majority. In May of 1964 the New York Times reported that Quincy’s Police Chief J. W. Hair had Mrs. Due under surveillance while she was organizing a voter registration drive for Negroes within the city. Due told the New York Times that the police frequently stopped to question her in order make the other Negroes more reluctant to register to vote and that some of the Negroes who participated in the voter-registration drive lost their jobs. The city of Quincy is located in Gadsden County, FL. The New York Times reported that Mr. Hutchinson, who has been the Gadsden County Voter Registrar for the last twenty years, claimed that whites did not prevent Negroes from registering to vote even though the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Commission said that the county has historically denied Negroes the right to vote. Vivian Kelly, a resident of Gadsden County, remembers the great misfortune that happened in the past when two activists tried to help Negro people register to vote: Dr. W.S. Stevens who built a Negro hospital was beaten and tied to a tree, and Miss Bowies’ house was burned down (Due 245). Despite the risk, Mrs. Kelly, an elementary school teacher allowed

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Due to conduct civil rights work out of her house until Principal Witt Campbell decided to loan Due a house (Due 246) Due remembers FAMU students such a as Doris Rutledge, Sidney Daniels and Ira Simmons and white activists such as Judy Benninger, Scott McVoy, Stu Wechsler, Eleanor Lerner and UF student Mike Geison participating in the summer voter registration program (247). Many of the parents of the activists who participated in the voter registration drive in Gadsden County would call and beg their children to come home after hearing about the three voter registration activists missing in Mississippi (Due 239). This was a frightened time for the members of CORE since the organization had voter registration drives going on in several states during the summer of 1964. For those people who were born in the generations after this tumultuous period, it is amazing to think that three men were murdered simply for trying to help disenfranchised people register to vote. In Florida when a person attempted to help black people register to vote, they often times risked their livelihood and lives. Patricia and John Due were very upset when they heard the news about the missing CORE voter registration activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman who were missing for 45 days until their bodies were found with bullet holes in Mississippi’s new dam (Sitton & Goldman). Due had met Schwerner at a CORE meeting in New Orleans and Due’s husband John had met Schwerner’s wife Rita (239). John Due had also been James Chaney’s lawyer when he and 70 other civil rights activists were arrested in Meridian, Mississippi (239). One can only imagine how frightening it would be to participate in a CORE voter registration drive when hearing the news that three fellow CORE members were murdered for helping Negroes register to vote. All Americans should know the history behind the Civil Rights Moment that occurred because Negroes who were legal U.S. Citizens were illegally denied their civil rights a very long time before the U.S. Supreme Court, the White House, and the FBI decided to prosecute people and institutions for denying people their civil rights. While in the middle of her civil rights activism, Patricia Due married a civil rights lawyer John Stephens and together they had three daughters. Their daughter Tananarive Due suffered from prejudice as a child despite the civil rights work of her parents. Tananarive was forbidden to enroll in kindergarten in at least five of Dade County’s public schools because they were white-only schools (Due 19). This experience of racism caused her to pour baby powder all over her face and then ask her mother if she could go to school (Due 19). Tananarive and her sisters were the first generation of children in their family to attend integrated schools. When a white boy

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asked her to the prom, she said “no” out of fear of being called an “Oreo” by the other Negroes (Due 32). Whites and Negroes were oftentimes encouraged to avoid socializing with people from other races even in integrated schools. During the summer of 2004 the Florida Studies Center of the USF Library System, the University Honors Program of USF St. Petersburg, the Florida Humanities Council, the Tampa Bay History Center, the YWCA, and the AARP’s Florida’s Voices of Civil Rights Project organized together to present The Civil Rights Movement In Florida Conference which took place on the USF St. Petersburg campus from June 3 through 6 (“Florida Studies”). Patricia Stephens Due, a guest speaker at that event, spoke with me for a few minutes and signed my copy of her memoir Freedom in the Family. Attending the conference was an amazing experience since one had a chance to relive history through the stories of the black, multiracial and white civil rights activists who risked their lives and careers to fight against injustice and racism. I learned that one should be thankful for one’s civil rights and avoid taking them for granted.

J. Staley Marshall at FSU In his memoir The Tumultuous Sixties Campus Unrest and Student Life at a Southern University, Staley Marshall describes the challenges of respecting students’ right to freedom of speech while minimizing the disturbances caused by a radical protest organization named the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (77). Marshall says that the SDS organization at FSU and the other SDS branches through out the nation would engage in radical protests and try to disrupt university classes (77). Many of the students at FSU were upset about the Vietnam War, and some were concerned with the civil rights movement (19). Marshall says that FSU was racially integrated in 1962, but tension existed between some of the students. Ross Oglesby, FSU’s Dean of Students, forbid FSU students from “participating in unauthorized demonstrations and parades” and “visiting the FAMU campus without permission” (Marshall 20). Despite Dean Oglesby’s order, some FSU students like Harold D. Taylor who was arrested at a CORE protest, continued to participate in protests with FAMU students (Philips, “Negroes Cleared”). Some students believed so strongly in their beliefs that they were willing to risk their academic status at the university. The Students for a Democratic Society’s national organization was created in 1962 and was inspired by the anarchists in the late ninetieth century (Marshall 79). The Tampa Tribune reported in an editorial that

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Gregory Calvert, the national secretary for the SDS, told a newspaper in May of 1964 that the SDS was actively organizing sedition within the country and that the FBI reported that a workshop on how to make bombs was held at an SDS convention (“Question” 10A). The Tampa Tribune also reported that the FSU Student Senate decided to recognize SDS as a student organization on November 2, 1968, and the FSU Faculty Senate agreed with the decision “because [both Senates] cannot “distinguish between organized anarchy and free speech” (“Question” 10A). John Champion, the University President, denied SDS’s request, and then the Faculty Senate decide to support the SDS by passing a resolution saying that the University President does not have authority to approve or disprove student organizations. The year of 1969 was a busy time for the FSU students who participated in several protests and for the new FSU President attempted to keep the university functioning smoothly. John Champion publicly resigned from his presidency at FSU on May 15, 1968, and on January 1, 1969 Marshall became the FSU President. Marshall was invited to appear at an open rally in April in order to learn more about SDS, and he was greeted with boos and profanity until he finally left the stage (60). During that same month the university sponsored a Symposium on Student Unrest and the SDS boycotted the meeting and used the incident to gain media attention (60). The SDS disrupted a meeting of the American Association of University Professors that took place later in the month (Marshall 60-1). On April 10, 1969, two-hundred FSU listened to the SDS secretary Mike Klonsky speak about SDS’s grievances (Marshall 81). FSU students and SDS members held a demonstration at an Army Recruiter’s table on May 14, 1969 (Marshall 81). On May 19, 1969, FSU students and faculty formed a new organization called the Committee Against Repression (CARE) and on the next day four hundred members marched to the Capital building to present demands to Florida’s Governor and Legislature (Marshall 81). Marshall claims that when he was department head in the School of Education in 1960 that he hired FSU’s first black secretary and awarded the first doctoral fellowship to a black graduate student in 1961 (179). During the summer of 1962 the first black students at FSU attended the Summer Science Institute which was conducted by Marshall’s department and was paid by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Marshall 180). Marshall also claims that FSU vigorously recruited black faulty members during the 1970’s (180). During 1968 the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated FSU and the University of Florida established Black Student Unions on

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their campuses (Marshall 180; Rogers 21). Marshall admits that the university made progress towards the advancement of black students’ academics and interests but that the university should have done more (180). Marshall said that the black students at FSU had well defined goals and did not involve themselves with student protest groups like the SDS who did not serve their purposes (180). Marshall’s memoir deals primarly with the administrative challenges of interacting with radical groups of students on the campus. Most of the student protests dealt with students disagreeing with the university’s policy or the Vietnam War. Since there were very few Negro students at FSU during the 1960’s the Civil Rights Movement was not an important issue for most of the students at FSU. John Herbers noted that during the first six months of 1969 out of the 292 major protests at 232 universities in the U.S. 45% of protests had to do with students wanting more power and 22% were related to the Vietnam War. Herbers also concluded that the SDS and other radical organizations were only involved in 28% of all protests. He also discovered out of the 292 major protests 3,652 students were arrested, 156 were expelled, and 708 were placed on probation. There were injuries in 22% of the protests and property damage in 19% of the protests (Herbers 13).

Conclusion When Patricia Stephens Due signed a copy of her book she wrote the following statement: “Thank you for coming to our Florida Civil Rights Conference. Freedom in the Family documents much of our history in Florida. Remember the struggle continues.” During the Civil Rights Movement everyday activities such going to a movie theater, sitting on a bus, and sitting at a restaurant table became incredible acts of courage. Many FAMU and FSU students risked bodily harm and their academic careers in order to protest or picket for their ideas about civil rights, warfare or authority. Marshall and many university presidents had to adapt to radical changes while balancing students’ rights to freedom of speech and students’ rights to earn a university degree with minimal disturbances to their studies. Racial desegregation was a long and difficult process for universities and other institutions. All Americans should remember the injustices of the past in the hope that current injustices can be eliminated and possible future injustices can be avoided. U.S. citizens should feel gratitude towards the courageous men and women who risked so much to fight negative forces of injustice and bigotry.

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Works Cited Due, Tananarive and Patricia Stephens Due. Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Goldman, Ari L. “Service Recalls Rights Activists Slain in South.” New York Times. 21 June 1984: A1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . Herbers, John. “Analysis of Student Protest Finds Most Nonviolent, With New Left a Minor Factor. New York Times: 14 Jan 1970: 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . Marshall, J. Stanley. The Tumultuous Sixties: Campus Unrest and Student Life at a Southern University. Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 2006. “Negroes Meet Subtle Antipathy in Quincy, Fla, Voter Campaign.” New York Times. 18 May 1964: 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . “Patricia Stephens Due Biography.” The HistoryMakers.17 Oct. 2006. 1 Nov. 2007 . Phillips, R. Hart. “Negroes Begin Picketing Tallahassee Theaters. New York Times. 2 June 1963: 1. Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . Phillips, R. Hart. “Negroes Cleared by Florida Judge.” New York Times. 1 June 1963: 1. Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . Phillips, R. Hart. “Tear Gas Routs Florida Negroes.” New York Times. 31 May 1963: 2. Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . Rogers, Ibram. “Celebrating 40 Years of Activism.” Diverse Issues in Higher Education 23.10 (29 June 2006). 18-22. Sitton, Claude. “3 in Rights Drive Reported Missing; Mississippi Campaign Heads Fear Foul Play – Inquiry by F.B.I. is Ordered Three Men Reported Missing in Mississippi Rights Campaign.” New York

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Times. 23 June 1964: 1-2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative. 10 Oct. 2007 . “Question: When is Anarchy Free Speech?” Tampa Tribune 18 Jan. 1969: 10A. “Florida Studies Hosts Florida's First Civil Rights Movement Conference.” News at USF St. Petersburg. 24 May 2004. 2 Oct 2007. http://www.stpt.usf.edu/news.asp?action=detail&article=291&category

FRONTIER FLORIDA THROUGH FICTION’S EYES: PATRICK D. SMITH’S A LAND REMEMBERED AND THEODORE PRATT’S THE BAREFOOT MAILMAN JOY M. BANKS

The congested highways and urban sprawl of Florida often cause residents and visitors alike to forget the Sunshine State’s frontier roots. A little over one hundred years ago, wild cattle and panthers far outnumbered settlers in the state. In his documentary Patrick Smith’s Florida: A Sense of Place, author Patrick D. Smith comments on Florida’s wilderness past: Florida was this country’s first frontier… Florida was also one of this country’s last frontiers ‘cause long after most other parts of this country were fairly well settled, most of Florida was still a wilderness.

Authors have long been fascinated with wilderness Florida, using both the uniqueness of the people and the unknowns of the land to color their works. Two authors in particular – Theodore Pratt and Patrick D. Smith – vividly show the intimate relationship between the people of frontier Florida and the land itself. While both authors wrote several novels about the sunshine state, this paper will look at two in particular: Pratt’s The Barefoot Mailman written in 1943 and Smith’s A Land Remembered written over forty years later in 1984. Both novels describe the lives of Floridians during a time period often forgotten by residents today. Regardless of the fact that Pratt writes primarily of the land between Palm Beach and Miami and Smith focuses on the hammock lands around Kissimmee and west to Punta Rassa, both authors capture the struggles of the early settlers, specifically, the struggle between frontier men and women and the search for a suitable mate, and the constant battle between preserving the natural Florida and supporting development. While these two ideas can be considered separately, often the conflicts between man and land and man and woman intertwine into an inseparable battle.

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As in most frontier situations, women were sparse in the wilds of Florida, so most men had little to no experience dealing with the intricacies of females. Both Pratt and Smith capture some of the confusion and anxiety that young men can experience during their first encounters with the opposite sex. Perhaps the best comparison of men dealing with women for the first time is between Steven Pierton, the newest mailman in Pratt’s novel, and Zech MacIvey, the son of a cattle herder in Smith’s multi-generational tale. From almost the first encounter with Steven, Pratt shows the mailman’s lack of experience dealing with women. Doc, the owner of the general store and post office in Palm Beach, says this of Steven: ‘You ain’t even ever had any experience at them, and I don’t like it the way that’s made you woman-feared… I blame myself. It ain’t been right, the way Cap Jim and me brought you up, having no woman at all about to learn you their ways.’ (Pratt 6)

Steven has lacked even the presence of a mother in his life. Until he meets Adie, who, at first, disguises herself as a boy, Steven never has felt the pull of attraction for the opposite sex. Due to the nature of their meeting, Steven and Adie’s relationship starts as anything but normal. Left alone with a girl, who was supposed to be a boy, Steven suddenly feels a different sort of responsibility for her well-being. After waking up the morning after Steven makes the discovery of Adie’s deception, he makes a discovery about himself: “Another alarm came to him. Even as he had it, he wondered why he should feel so concerned about her. He should be wishing that something would happen to her. Instead, he called to the scrub, ‘Keep your eye out for snakes’” (Pratt 50). While Steven is not fully aware of the inner workings of females, he is sentient enough to realize that escorting a woman of nineteen across eighty miles of beach would raise more than a few eyebrows and potentially cause any number of problems. Zech’s first encounter with an eligible female is slightly more normal but no less life-changing. While on a trip to gather and brand cattle, Zech is drawn away from the herd by Frog and Bonzo, his father’s two cow hands, and into town for some real food. While in town, the men discover that a town dance is taking place. After discovering that Zech has no experience with such frivolities, Frog states his opinion: ‘If you ain’t never held a girl and stomped to the fiddles, boy, you’re old enough now to learn what it’s like. It’s more fun to kiss a girl than a cow,

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and a girl’s a heap softer to lie on than that hard prairie ground.’ (Smith 165)

After being sheltered in the hammock along the Kissimmee River for most of his life, Zech is nearly overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of a frolic. This does not, however, prevent him from catching the eye of the prettiest girl in the room. Rather than try to join the world of Glenda Turner and the dance, however, Zech invites her to explore his world by showing her his dogs and taking her for a ride on his horse (Smith 166168). Unlike Steven, Zech has no idea of the proper behavior between an unmarried man and woman. While Steven was acutely aware of being alone with Adie on the beach, Zech willingly draws Glenda into his saddle for a moonlit horseback ride. Perhaps some of the discrepancy between Zech and Steven arises from the fact that the MacIvey clan did not live in a settlement, but Steven was very much entrenched in the politics and social mores of a growing coastal community. In addition to the variant nature of Steven and Zech’s first encounters with attractive women, the development of their individual relationships also takes on a different feel. Almost immediately after Steven finally realizes his attraction to Adie, he faces a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: a competing suitor. Sylvanus Hurley arrives from the North with a smooth-talking nature and a desire to make money. While Steven leads the shady northerner down the beach to Miami, Sylvanus probes Steven about available women: ‘Are there any pretty girls in Miami?’ ‘Well,’ Steven replied, ‘There’s one that I know of.’ Sylvanus glanced at him. There was the hint, not the open fact, of his amusement. ‘I can see how you feel about that one.’ (Pratt 77)

While Sylvanus admits to Steven’s open admiration to the one pretty girl in Miami, this fact does not prevent the businessman from pursuing his own course with Adie. In fact, the very first meeting between Sylvanus and Adie includes the exchange of a gift that Adie asked Steven to bring her—a perfect paper nautilus from the beach route (Pratt 87). The bickering between Steven and Sylvanus continues, including competing for spots at Adie’s dinner table, fighting at a local dance, and engaging in a bit of political rivalry. In the end, however, Steven’s shy and honest nature wins Adie’s heart, securing her love for the mailman. Zech also faces conflict in his encounters with Florida females; however, his are of a different nature. Rather than dealing with the struggles of vying with another man for a woman’s affection, Zech must

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choose between the appeal of two women: Glenda, the shopkeeper’s daughter, and Twanda Cyprus, a Seminole living in the Everglades. The decision that Zech faces poetically illustrates the decision that all Floridians faced at the time: civilization or nature? When Zech discusses with his mother his first encounter with Glenda, he describes some of the sensations he had: ‘Was she pretty?’ ‘The prettiest thing I ever seen,’ Zech responded… ‘She had hair as red as a sunset, and she smelled like flowers.’ (Smith 175)

While Zech’s first date with Twanda also includes a horseback ride, just as with Glenda, Zech now has a different experience. The female smell of her made him dizzy, like the night he rode with Glenda, only this time the scent was not flowers; it was an outdoor smell, like smoke and crushed pine needles. (Smith 211)

As time progresses and Zech ages, he must choose a wife. While essentially his legal choice is Glenda, he also loves Twanda, spending a passionate night with her that results in a son. In the end, he does not make the choice between nature and civilization, but rather he tries to find a compromise between the two. Steven also feels a connection between his fight for Adie’s love and a fight to save the Florida that he loves. In her master’s thesis “Floridians in Literature,” Glenda Crossman says, “[Mailman] is a love story, a story about a man and a woman and their love for their new home, Florida. Steven’s love for his profession, for Adie, and for his island provides the inspiration to this historical drama” (38). In fact, Adie is the first person with whom Steven shares his intimate love for nature by sharing his island, Hypoluxo. When Sylvanus’s threats begin to include the island, Steven invariably makes the connection between his battle for Adie’s love and his ownership of the island. As Doc and Steven piece together the actual threats to Steven’s claim of ownership, Steven realizes the importance of the battle. Pratt writes, “It was almost like getting or not getting Adie. In his mind she and Hypoluxo were so closely tied that one would not do without the other” (177). After a controversial election concerning the location of the county courthouse, Steven, Doc, and the others from Palm Beach must attempt a daring capture of the county documents that now belong outside of Miami. After successfully taking the documents that rightfully belong in Juno, Steven must also make a stop

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at Adie’s house to express his love. Steven finally has the courage to declare those feelings that have plagued him since their first meeting: ‘You can see and know why I’m here. You been knowing how I feel about you from the first, the very first on the beach. Every time I tried to tell you before you knew it the same as if I’d said it. I’m saying it now. I been wanting you, every day, every minute. Every step I took called it out. You and the island go together, with me, all three.’ (Pratt 208)

Whereas Zech’s female encounters ultimately cause him to balance the land and love, Steven finds a way to combine his two passions into one life. While Pratt includes hints of the development to come, such as the railroad that removes the need for a walking mail route between Jupiter and Palm Beach, his novel ends on a note of promise. Steven and Adie escape the evil business man bent on developing Miami for profit. While they probably live on their secluded island for many happy if not trying years, they will not escape the development that crosses Florida like a plague. Since Smith’s novel covers several more generations of Florida history and development, the author’s message is not filled with as much promise as that of Pratt. Zech’s loves produce two boys: Solomon steeped in the growing importance of land development and ownership, and Toby Cypress, raised in the traditional ways of the Seminoles. While Zech tried to combine his father’s commitment to the old ways with the realization that the world was changing, Solomon fully embraces the development of land in the hope to improve Florida. Not until too late does Solomon realize the destructive nature of his actions. Late in his life, he recognizes that he created a land development monster that continues to consume the wilderness of Florida (Smith 425). During a reception at which Solomon is supposed to receive an award for “his lifetime contributions to the Miami area and to Florida” (Smith 423), Solomon finally acknowledges his own disgust with the progress consuming Florida: ‘When I first started out alone after my pappa died, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I thought I was doing the right thing. But you sons a’ bitches knew, and you did it deliberate. That’s the only thing that marks me from you. The catchword with me is stupidity. With you it’s greed. More is better, bigger is better. Well, you bastards are too stupid to know there soon won’t be no more. …Progress ain’t reversible. What’s done is done forever, and I’m sure as hell not proud of it. If any of you idiots had the brains of jaybirds you’d stop right now too.’ (Smith 427)

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Solomon’s words on such a prestigious occasion perfectly capture the great loss that Florida experienced during the period of rapid growth. Those who cared did not realize until too late the true and dire consequences of their actions. Later in his own life, Patrick D. Smith observed that “there are two Floridas. One is the artificial, man-made Florida; that’s the tourist Florida. But there’s another Florida. This one is the natural Florida or the true Florida, and that’s a Florida most tourists never see” (Place). While a drive through some central Florida counties still reveals vestiges of frontier Florida, the pristine coastal lands of the east and west coasts of Florida described in both A Land Remembered and Mailman have long since disappeared. Crossman makes this astute observation: “[Florida] is a state of both great promise and great peril, with a future that could be as wondrous and inviting as our sunshine and golden beaches, or as dismal and disturbing as our crime rate and disappearing wildlife” (109). Love comes much easier to Florida’s inhabitants today; the population contains a much healthier balance between the two sexes. What is lost from the influx of people, however, is the call of the land, the presence of quiet moments of wildlife interacting with their surroundings, and the solitude of a place with no roads. Frontier Florida may have lasted longer than any other frontier in the United States, but the days of beachfront mail routes and cross-state cattle drives are now but a distant memory.

Works Cited Crossman, Glenda Dianne. “Floridians in Literature.” Diss. Rollins College, 1996. Patrick Smith’s Florida: A Sense of Place. Prod. Patrick Smith, Jr. and Kim Miller. Perf. Patrick Smith. DVD. Panorama Studios, 2005. Pratt, Theodore. The Barefoot Mailman. St. Simons Island, GA: Mockingbird Books, 1980. Smith, Patrick D. A Land Remembered. New York: Signet, 1984.

IRIS WALL: INDIANTOWN PIONEER “COW HUNTRESS” NANCY DALE

“I am a true ‘Florida cracker’ but with a little extra salt!”

Whether it is hunting “piney wood rooters,” parting cows, rounding up wild horses, hunting alligators or heading-up the six family-owned W&W Lumber Yards, Iris Wall is at home in what she says “is the best town on Earth”: Indiantown, Florida. Looking across the pasture not far from her modest residence is Iris’s herd of thirty DNA tested and registered “Cracker Cows” who make a rowdy, bellowing entrance when Iris calls them for an extra treat of grain. There are several small herds of cracker cattle scattered across the state in an attempt to preserve them. These cracker cattle date back to the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors near St. Augustine in the 1500’s. After the Spanish left, they turned loose cows, hogs, and cattle that the new settlers hunted down. You couldn't just go and lasso some cows roaming in open prairie; you had to hunt them out of hard-to-get places, the swamps, woods, and thick palmettos. This is how they got their name: “cow hunters.” The early pioneers of the 1800s gathered the horses and cows and sold them to the Confederacy and the Union. The “cracker cattle” are tough; they are adapted to Florida’s climate and are able to live on nothing. (“Seminole”)

Iris Wall is a long-time member and Vice President of the Florida Cracker Cattle Association. Following her intention to “support the best of Florida,” Iris Wall also is a member of the Florida Cracker Trail Association, a non-profit organization that supports the preservation of the old cracker trail from Bradenton to Fort Pierce, the old trail that “cow hunters” used to herd thousands of cattle to market from coast to coast. Iris is also on the Board of Directors of the Cracker Horse Association. She says, “People like ‘cracker horses’ because they aren’t affected by the heat; they run like a steak of lightning, have a calm nature, and are easy

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keepers.” Riding her own cracker horse, “Abraham,” Iris has participated in the Great Cracker Trail Ride of 1995, celebrating Florida’s 150 years of statehood and the “Great Florida Cattle Drive of Ought 6” that got underway in Osceola County and ended in Kenansville. Standing firmly on her belief to “keep old Florida alive,” she says “agriculture is disappearing.” Born in 1929 as a fifth generation Floridian and Native daughter of Indiantown, Iris was born to Lois Roland and Cecil Pollock. Her grandparents, Anna and Alonza Roland moved to the little community from Chancy Bay near Canal Point. At 77, Iris Wall is still a working “cow girl,” or what she prefers to be called a “cow hunter”: It’s what I have been doing all my life. When I was just a little girl in the 1940’s, I remember the screwworm epidemic. I used to ride with some benzene in my saddle pockets. I would squirt it in the cow’s naval to get the worms to work their way to the surface. Then you had to take some palmettos or anything to scrap them out. There were hundreds of maggots that hatched from flies. After you got out the screwworms, you painted the wound with a tar-like substance called ‘Smear-X.’ Anytime there was fresh blood on an animal, the fly would lay its eggs and they would hatch into worms. In the early 50’s, the University of Florida sent out a bulletin saying that they were going to turn loose millions of sterile flies from an airplane. Many old ‘crackers’ laughed, but it worked.

From her earliest memories, Iris learned to nurture and work the land and helped her daddy gather up and part cows/calves during the calving season: We drove more than 100 head of daddy’s cattle from Indiantown to Palm City. We would get up before the cows “got out off the bed.” After the calves nurse, the “baby sitter cows” take the calves away so the mother can feed. At a certain time, the cows walk to water, then they go to rest and lie down. As a young teen, I worked cattle alongside “cow hunters” who trusted me like a Queen. My dad worked for Mr. Williamson during my early teens, and I would ride thirteen miles out to their ranch and be there by daylight to go cow hunting. However, there is one story that Mr. J. C. Bass tells on me when I was parting cattle. There were a bunch of cows in a crevasse when one of them broke out and I got thrown on my back. Daddy just rode over, looked down at me said, “Gal, you could do better than that!”

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Sometimes we would gather cattle weeks at a time and with no fences, the gathering was much different from today. After we gathered about 100 head, the children would hold the cattle while the men rode out to the sides and gathered more cattle and drove them to the herd. When we heard the whips and dogs ahead of us, we knew to speed up, but when they were behind us, we stopped and waited. We had a man that would lead out ‘on point’ and we had an old black cow that we called “old lead cow” that would follow the point man and lead the herd. My dad always said, “If you learn to think like a cow you don’t need a rope, and you never let a cow take a step except in the direction you want him to go.” Daddy would go to Carry’s Cattle Auction in Tampa and buy every old horse to give us kids, and he would say, “Go to it!” That is exactly what we did. I learned how to “gentle-down” a horse, so I guess I was the first “horse whisperer.”

It was about the sixth grade that the self-described “strong willed redhead” met her lifelong partner, Homer, who was born in Montana and moved to Indiantown when he was a toddler. However, when Homer and Iris began courting at Martin County High School, “charming” her, she said, “wasn’t all easy going,” even though, unbeknownst to him, “I had my eye on Homer since the first time I saw him.” Perhaps it was the sixth grade play Aunt Drusilla’s Garden that turned the glimmer in his eye into romance when Iris starred as Aunt Drusilla and Homer, the gardener. “We used to fuss and fight,” Iris said, but near the end of high school, Homer somehow got up the courage to gingerly ask Iris, in his own special way, for a date: “Do you think you might be able to get a dress for the prom?” In her usual manner, Iris had already made up her mind and the rest led to their marriage in 1948 after high school, graduating in a class of 38 students. They were 18 years old, and “we spent the next 47 years in a marvelous life. We cow hunted together with two hound dogs, rode the woods, hunted, and fished. It was wonderful.” The young couple also had their adventurous close calls: On the night Terry was born, we were on the way to the hospital at West Palm Beach and Homer was driving after he had gotten bit on his finger by a hog. I told the doctors to take care of Homer and the baby. Hogs have a very infectious bite.

Then there was the time when Iris was threatened by the largest specie of Florida snake, the Diamondback rattler. Iris and Homer were feeding horses under some cabbage palms where there were a lot of dead leaves:

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Iris Wall: Indiantown Pioneer “Cow Huntress” I heard the dogs yelping then I heard the rattle. Homer shouted, “Don’t move!” The rattler was moving under the palmettos. Homer pushed me hard, hit the snake on the head with a big stick, and killed it. It was a huge!

Iris was also confronted by some daring moccasins that caught her off guard: I was pulling along a corn sack behind some others who were gigging frogs and putting them in the bag. I suddenly had an eerie feeling as I walked along, so I looked behind me. There were two big moccasins following me and the sack. I hit the bank and left the sack.

She continues with the following: In 1994, as a last effort to fight Homer’s cancer, I took him to a clinic in Mexico but it was futile. In his last words he said, “Don’t feel sorry, Iris, we had all this time to tell each other how much we loved one another. This is not the end. What we’ll have in Heaven will be better than what we had here on Earth.”

Today, Iris Wall manages a sprawling 1,200 acre ranch where she not only works cows, monitors the water levels, and pastures but retreats into the woods from the creeping urbanization along the fringes. Referring to herself as a “woods rat,” it is amidst the tall pines, oaks, and scrub that Iris replenishes her mind, body and spirit strengthening her strong faith in God. As one of the founders of the Family Worship Center in Indiantown, she is a Sunday school teacher for adult women “whom I have known for more than fifty years.” One of Iris three daughters, Eva Edwards, says her mother is the “family glue and epitome of a ‘cracker,’ she never gives up. With her love of Nature, mother is an example of appreciating what God put on Earth.” All three daughters Terry Gilliam, Jonnie Flewelling, Eva Edwards and their husbands, who manage the W&W Lumber Yards, work in the family business. Iris and Homer started the lumber business in 1962 with a partner, whom they bought out three years later. Homer sold lumber around Lake Okeechobee and Iris ran the lumber yard with baby Eva slung on her hip. Iris says, “We started with nothing and eventually bought the business.” Today, there are six regional W&W Lumber Yards in Florida. Besides her business accomplishments, Iris says she is most proud of her children and grandchildren. One granddaughter, Whitney, a hair stylist, maintains Iris’s well-coiffed appearance whether she is getting reading for the trail or preparing to give one of her many talks. But, despite the demure appearance of her brood, Iris says that their “kids were

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raised to shoot an alligator in the eye, hunt wild hogs, and appreciate Nature.” Iris Wall’s life is inseparable from the land: “Everyday I ride the pastures not just to work, I come here to rest.” Along an almost hidden path off a rutted road, Iris says, “this is one of my favorite spots.” Climbing over a couple of fallen trees nestled into native brush, she steps onto a small rise and pauses “to listen” to utter silence; the only lingering sounds are the trill of birds and little critters rustling beneath the leaves. She says, This is old Florida and this is what I want to preserve. At one time in Florida, the water was so pure you could drink from a gator hole. But, today, the habitat is threatened by development everywhere in Florida. In the last fifteen years, I’ve seen only two Florida Panthers. It was one time when Judge Bailey, his wife, Carol and I were riding on the grade at the ranch in a cool, rainy mist and I said, “There’s a cat!’” Carole said, “I think it’s a Florida panther!”

Bumping along in Iris’s pick-up truck is like riding with a “cow girl” parting cattle over pastures, underneath trees, weaving in and out of languid cows and calves lulling in the cool afternoon breeze as the road intertwines up to a picturesque wooden cabin perhaps inclined to greet a couple of bone-tired “cow hunters” dusting off their boots to take a respite on the porch after a long trail ride. But, for now, the cabin is quiet until a young brood of grandchildren or school kids stop by to visit with Iris and hear her own stories about her unique experiences carving a life from the wilds of Indiantown. Based on her belief in educating youth about Nature and Florida’s native habitat, Iris addresses many young people: I never turn down an invitation to speak to children. Recently, I brought a buckboard full of second graders from Warfield Elementary school here and took them on a tour. I showed them the cow pens, explained the brand on the cattle’s shoulders, and showed them the difference between in a slough and marsh. We were raised on cowboy and Indian movies, but the cartoons children watch today are very unhealthy. One of kids came inside the cabin and asked me if it was OK to jump up and down on the bunk beds, I said “sure.” I want them to experience life in the country and have an understanding of agriculture. I love children. However, I didn’t come out here to this cabin for sometime after Homer passed away in 1994 but I finally decided I must go on with my life and

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Iris Wall: Indiantown Pioneer “Cow Huntress” began to fix the place up. I bring the children here to enjoy the way people used to live in early Florida.

Perched above an open pasture and a backdrop of tall oaks, the peacefulness of the cabin in the rustic setting inspires freedom: “One night my teenage grandson and I stayed up all night right here just talking. Isn’t that something that a grandmother can have this kind of relationship with a grandson with all these years in between us?” But for years, the ranch with its entire family heritage, remained without a name until one day she says, My daughter Jonnie and I were headed from the house to the ranch when she turned to me and said, “Mom, I’m tired of telling people to just cross the railroad tracks, go two miles west of town on State Road 710, and make a right into the ranch. You need to give the ranch a name.”

As is her way, a woman of action with little hesitation, Iris recaptured the words of her beloved late husband, Homer: “The worst position a person can be in is when they have to climb off their high horse.” These words stuck and the ranch now welcomes visitors through wooden portals with the proud words “High Horse Ranch.” The early Lower Creek Indians from Georgia were already settled at Indiantown when Iris’s grandparents discovered the rustic beauty of “real Florida,” a moniker for the community today. The Indians migrated into Florida to escape the dominance of the Upper Creeks. The high elevation, 35 feet above sea level, was an ideal site to support their livelihood of fishing, hunting, and agriculture. Along with other Southern tribes, the Indians became known as “Seminoles” derived from the word “Myskoke” of the Creek language and “simano-li,” an adaptation of the Spanish word “Cimarron” which meant to Europeans: “Wild” or “wild men” (“Seminole”). By the 1900s and Florida’s “boom days,” the little settlement began to attract the attention of northern entrepreneurs with its ideal location 30 miles inland from the east coast and 30 miles southeast of the second largest fresh water lake in the United States: Lake Okeechobee. One of these visionaries, who recognized the opportunity for growth in Indiantown with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers construction of the cross-state canal, was S. Davies Warfield, a Baltimore financier and railroad tycoon who wanted to expand the rails from Central Florida to West Palm Beach.

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Solomon Davies Warfield was born in Maryland in 1859. During the 1880s, he established and built a Baltimore company to manufacture his invention of corn cutters (a small utensil to peel corn) and silkers. In 1898, he was associated with John Skelton Williams and started the Seaboard Air Line Railway Company in 1900 (“Who was”). Warfield was also President of Old Bay Line, a passenger vessel on the Chesapeake Bay. In honor of Warfield, a steamer was christened: The S.S. President Warfield. In the 40’s, the vessel carried trans-Atlantic passengers to the United Kingdom and later became part of the U.S. Navy. The vessel was involved in stowing immigrants into Palestine and was finally moored in Israel. Leon Uris used the vessel in his novel, Exodus, but it later burned to the waterline and was scrapped (“Continental”). However, after visiting Florida, Warfield focused his dream on Indiantown where he envisioned a resort community and central southern headquarters for his Seaboard Airline Railroad (or Seaboard Coastline), as well as the seat of Martin County (formed in 1925); thus, he began to buy up large parcels of land. Warfield masterminded a model city, laid out streets, built a school and houses, and the majestic Seminole Inn. With grand flair and drama, Warfield opened the Inn in 1927 with a celebrated guest list including his niece, Wallace Simpson, who became the Duchess of Windsor when she married the King of England. But Edward abdicated the throne to marry the divorcee. The legacy of Wallace Simpson’s famous words lasted longer than her royalty: “You can never be too thin, or too rich.” Warfield’s dream of the wilderness resort town never came to fruition during his lifetime when he died the same year the Inn opened. With the Great Depression lurking across the country, the ornate art deco structure remained silent along State Road 710 for another decade with little success to revive it by a new consortium of investors who took hold of Warfield’s interests as the “Indian Town Development Company” until 1953 when it was renamed “Indiantown Company, Inc.” (“Indiantown”). However, according to Iris, not known to many, “Indiantown” was formerly known as “Annie” after the revered Mrs. Annie Platt. The Platts were old time Florida pioneers. In 1970, Homer and Iris bought the Seminole Inn and renovated it. Today, Iris’ daughter, Jonnie Flewelling manages the Inn, listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. The Seminole Inn provides visitors from all over the world a trip back in time through its historic charm and ambiance. There’s nothing like enjoying fried chicken and all the fixin’s, fried green tomatoes, and Southern green beans in the stately Windsor Dining room where royalty were once served. Iris said they bought and

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restored the Inn “as a gift to the town.” Part of Iris Wall’s Mission today is to “encourage small owners to practice good stewardship with the increasing urbanization of Florida.” With all that Iris has accomplished in her lifetime, she still has more to do. Iris Wall believes in “stewardship” and most importantly her children. But her growing concern is with the overdevelopment and urbanization of Florida: Developers want the land. I will never sell one inch of it. They aren’t making any more land, and the government is not making it easy to hold onto. There is so much corruption in politics, and money is so important. The politicians are unconcerned about a way of life. When Homer and I had no money, it was a small factor in our life. Today, real estate is out-of-site. People are building castles to live in. I tell some of the senior seniors I talk to that they live in a climate controlled environment. They have no knowledge of the weather. But I say when you start to see dust on your boots, you better think about saving water. These planned communities are providing an unrealistic way of life. Does every small community need a ball park, an equestrian center, and expensive playgrounds? The whole nation needs to come off the “high horse.” Developers are always interested in buying our land but I don’t want to sell one acre as it would mean more money to developers and less agriculture; the agriculture industry is going down the drain. In the beef industry, Florida is the twelfth producer in the nation in 200607 but ranchers are being forced to sell in order to pay unrealistic tax bills or inheritance taxes. In order for ranchers to keep their property, they need to get a tax break and not be told by the government what to do. Ranchers have always taken care of the land. Today, most ranchers are land rich and dollar poor. It’s a hard life. My grandpa had a big garden and grew food; he had chickens and cows. But, I don’t know what to do if conviction to save agriculture isn’t deeper. Life is not a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, or success. Life is being satisfied every day. Life is having trust in people. Today, there is a conception of success that equals money, but the best and miserable have had money and fame; it does not bring happiness. I was born dirt poor but I know I’ve done my best and I have a happy life. I have the best friends all over the state and a family I love.

Iris Walls’ optimism echoes through the whispering pines, the land, and is implicit in her genuine smile and determined nature. She is living

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proof of her philosophy: “Be whatever you want to be and keep you word.” Acting on her convictions, Iris Wall is on the Board of the Martin County Farm Bureau and member of the Florida and National Cattlemen’s Association. Next to the Indiantown Library in Kiwanis Park is the Homer Wall Gazebo constructed from the trust funds of the U.S. Generating Company. Homer Wall was a founding member of the Indiantown Kiwanis Club and devoted his life to the community. Iris Wall was selected as the “Woman of the Year in Agriculture, 2006” by Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles H. Bronson.

Works Cited “Continental Trust company signed by Solomon Davies Warfield – Maryland 1908.” http://www.scripophily.net. “Indiantown…Rich in History.” 2007. http://indiantownfl.org. “Seminole: Definitions and Much More.” 2007. http://www.answers.com Wall, Eva. Personal Interview. 27 February 2007. Wall, Iris. Personal Interview. 27 February 2007. “Who was president of SAL in 1925?” 2007. www.greenspun.com.

MODERN LANDSCAPES, MODERN LABYRINTHS: WAYS OF ESCAPE IN HEMINGWAY’S THE SUN ALSO RISES JULIA RAWA

Since its publication in 1926, The Sun Also Rises has inspired a prodigious amount of scholarship. What then is the purpose of this additional study? Its genesis is based on the reason why I have long found the novel so compelling: Hemingway’s sense of place. Lawrence Durrell once noted: One last word about sense of place; I think that not enough attention is paid to it as a purely literary criterion. When books are well and truly anchored in nature they usually become classics. They are tuned in to the sense of place. You could not transplant them without totally damaging their ambience and mood (163).

Hemingway is tuned in to place: "Unless you have geography, background," Hemingway once stated, "you have nothing" (Baker 49). He is (of course) famous for his representations of Italy, France, Spain, Africa, Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean. Hemingway is also much preoccupied with movement from place to place. Most of his Lost Generation characters (like Lawrence Durrell’s) search for ways of escape (borrowing from Graham Greene here). His expatriates are desperate to escape from the grey, mechanistic, modern world into romantic landscapes untouched by the Great War. Fussell observes that “the fantasies of flight and freedom which animate the imagination of the 20’s and 30’s and generate its pervasive images of travel can be said to begin in the trenches” where freezing, traumatized soldiers clung to the idea of a “warm world somewhere else” (Abroad 4). Hemingway’s Spain, Africa, Florida, Cuba, and Caribbean share some characteristics. They are “warm worlds” where nature is closer at hand. Hemingway often juxtaposes the urban and the pastoral—privileging the natural and/or primitive rather than the modern. Compare his vexed representations of the modern city in A

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Clean, Well Lighted Place to his positive representations of natural paradise in Islands in the Stream and the Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway’s modern city (like Eliot’s) is a labyrinth of trauma and malaise while Florida’s Gulf Stream and Africa’s Green Hills offer his protagonists primeval challenge and experience of the sublime. The good place reigns in PTSD, insomnia, alienation, and psychic fragmentation. However, natural paradise is often problematized by the presence and pressures of others—as we see in Hemingway’s Key West in To Have and Have Not and Hemingway’s Riviera in the Garden of Eden. Even so, sojourns in the wilderness and on the sea provide necessary renewal. Like many of Hemingway’s novels, The Sun Also Rises possesses a vigorous sense of geography—as well as an intriguing journey based on an antipodal urban/pastoral design. Moreover, from Montparnasse to Madrid, a rare synthesis of geographical and psychological exploration takes place. Hemingway’s acute imagist technique renders place extremely suggestive and gives the text much of its force.

Montparnasse The Boulevard Saint Michel, the Boulevard Raspail,, and the Place Contrescarpe all lead to Montparnasse, the opening locus of the novel. Critics have observed the juxtaposition of France and Spain. Paris's quarter is the base of an urbane locus that includes a jazz age expatriate milieu which Fitzgerald called "the greatest gaudiest spree in history" (Cowley 5) and socio-cultural undertones of war trauma. In the manuscript version of the text, Hemingway writes: "To understand what happened in Pamplona you must understand the quarter in Paris. There is nothing romantic about the quarter and very little that is beautiful" (Balassi 46: ms 11-12). This bit of authorial emphasis was edited out of the text. Yet while A Moveable Feast is "full of a warm sense of knowing Paris and belonging to it," The Sun Also Risesun Also Rises presents a city which lacks such warmth, perhaps because it is seen from the perspective of a narrator-protagonist who is “out of joint with his time and place" (Lewis 124). Montparnasse glitters via a throng of Left Bank bars (the Cafe Select, Dome, Rotonde) and an atmosphere of "cool sophistication" and "vie de Boheme" (Capellan 25). Critics have commented on the wastelandesque ambience of Hemingway's Montparnasse where "cut off from the past chiefly by the war, life has become mostly meaningless. Instead of playing chess one drinks, mechanically and always" (Young 59-60). Hemingway's rejoinder that the novel's expatriates are "beat up" rather than lost makes sense—as some have pointed out. Yet Montparnasse is problematical. The locus is

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shaped by inauspicious deus loci: Mars and Eros. Jake's physical wound is an emblem of the "dirty war" (Sunun 17) which traumatized the expatriates. Mars complicates the course of Eros and creates a tangled situation. "Romance meets the hard reality of human passion and is destroyed by it" (Wilkinson 48) as Jake deals with his legacy from the war (his impotence). Paul Fussell notes: "The War that was called Great invades the mind [and] is all-encompassing, all-pervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century" (321). The memory of the war persists in the expatriate milieu and plays a key role in the representation of Montparnasse. "Everybody's sick" (Sun 16) says the poule Jake picks up under the electric signs of the Cafe Napolitain. She connects the sickness in Par with the war. Stine suggests that "the indelible stench and bloated corpses of the Great War fill up the deeper reticences of [Hemingway's] iceberg style" (327). This is true with respect to the first part of the text. Fussell contends that the landscape of no man's land and the loss it represents persists in modern memory. Just miles from Paris lay the wastes of the Western Front. The presence of Flanders invades the opening half of chapter IV. Conradian psycho-geography (Gurko) pervades Jake's taxi ride with Brett on the Avenue des Gobellins in Montparnasse: The street was torn up and men were working on the car tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett's face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. (Sun 25)

Imagist technique turns the streets of Montparnasse into a representation of psychic fragmentation. Svoboda points out that "Hemingway's consideration is replaced by Jake's presentation" (39). The harsh, artificial light of the acetylene flares call to mind the war, and the flares and shell fire which were the only light in a troglodyte world of mud and smoke. The streets are being "torn up": this conjures up trench imagery and suggests disorientation and psychic fragmentation. If compared to Brett's ensuing remark that her situation with Jake is "Hell on earth" (SunSun 27), the landscape takes on symbolic resonances. Montparnasse becomes the modernist equivalent to hell, the wastelands around the Somme. Maze or labyrinth imagery dominates these night-time street scenes. Jake and Brett drive haphazardly around, directionless, uttering stunted phrases about their situation. In this stage of Jake's experience, he is not operating from a clear center. Many archetypal journeyers have had to travel through the

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labyrinth (which signals a lack of direction). Metzner suggests that the labyrinth "has to he reversed if we are to come to the center of our being" (123). This pivotal scene is juxtaposed to the final scene of the novel. Jake and Brett's taxi ride on The Grand Via in Madrid will be different from their descent down the Rue des Gobellins in regard to imagery and tenor. Yet we also encounter passages like this: In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early morning feeling of a hot day. (SunSun35)

This passage evokes a pleasant Paris which echoes in Hemingway's later work A Moveable Feast. Morning is a good time for Jake. It is easier to be "hard boiled" (Sun 34) about his romantic problems in the morning. It would he inaccurate to overlook passages like this in tracing the symbolic undertones of Montparnasse. The darker aspects of the city are emphasized to suggest the protagonist's emotional disequilibrium. The manuscript version of the text uses authorial emphasis: "The quarter is really more a state of mind than a geographical area" (from Balassi 46: ms 11-12). The opening chapters of the novel have "an underlying and unexplained tone of sadness which is unmistakable" (Wilkinson 65) into which the passage above subtly blends. The opening locus is urbane, and its physical landscape is marked by a great number of bars and cafes which are the headquarters of a jazz age cultural milieu. Some critics see a dichotomy between the urban and the pastoral in the text's France/Spain split. Robert Lewis observes: "The traumatic and dispiriting experiences for the heroes tend to occur in man made environments . . . developed areas like cities" (121). Indeed, the Montparnasse locus (like Shakespeare's court viscerally subjected to human strife) is a volatile social arena. Gallagher contends that urban areas cause psychological overstimulation: "high social density is psychologically as well as physically restrictive, because being marooned in a sea of people undermines our sense of control—arguably the worst behavioral influence and environment can exert" (184). For Jake, emotional control is of considerable importance because lack of emotional control has painful consequences. Rhetorical technique enhances emotional tenor via place based detail in the novel. The quarter is an objective correlative (Eliot) for Jake's inner disequilibrium. Zelli's is analogous to the ball musette encountered in chapter III:

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Inside Zelli's it was crowded, smokey, and noisy. The music hit you as you went in. We danced. It was crowded and close.. 1 had a feeling as in a nightmare of it all being something repeated. (SuSun 62-64)

Hemingway uses leitmotifs of light and dark throughout the text (such as Brett's getting "blind" or drunk, and the Sommesque darkness and flares of the Rue des Gobellins). Darkness is accentuated here, as it is in much of the imagery of the opening chapters. Hemingway also uses parallelism and repetition. The adjectives crowded, close, smokey, and noisy suggest confusion, overstimulation, and turmoil. The place-based imagery mirrors Jake's state of mind. Wilkinson explains: "Hemingway understood that the story of the heart, of its silences and unexpressed emotions, could only be told through the direct presentation of events and relationships in the novel" (68). The scene is nightmaresque because Jake is entangled and alienated by a situation which repeats itself: he can't check his feelings for Brett though he realizes the limitations his war wound has placed upon him. Due to the conflict between his emotions and judgment, Jake's behavior and pattern of communication with Brett (and vise versa) is inconsistent: "When conflicting and depressing emotions prevail within the psyche our experience is consistently one of darkness and gloom ... The alchemists called this state massa confuse—the chaos of the elements. The elements symbolically represent psychological functions—thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and the like. In this phase, our inner psychic energies and tendencies are in chaotic conflict" (Metzner 84). Chaos casts a darkening gloom upon Montparnasse. Jake tells Robert Cohn, who has developed idealistic wanderlust, that "going to another country doesn't make any difference. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that" (SSun 11). In other words, place doesn't affect your state of mind and situation, and you can't change by taking a journey. Yet as Robert Lewis observes, "there is a lot of what Jake dislikes in Cohn in Jake himself" (125). The Sun Also Rises is considered to be a highly modern and scriptible text. A post-structuralist reading questions Jake's narrative credibility and traces inconsistencies and contradictory value judgments in the text. I argue that Jake's experiences will indeed undermine his own initial value judgment. Certain "stripped usable values" (Rovit 159) fend off nada for Jake, and auspicious genius loci help. Jake has to leave Montparnasse to distance himself from a locus which reinforces and reflects his condition. Gallagher observes that "like other behavioral states, depression requires a coincidence of environmental and biological clues. Getting over a bad habit, a lost love or a drug requires environmental deconditioning. You can't recover if you sit around in your old haunts. To

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condition yourself to health you have to break past associations and respond to the positive stimuli of new places" (134). The opening locus is characterized by an atmosphere of confusion and signals the commencement of the archetypal journey. In myth, the journey occurs for many different reasons. Metzner notes that "the call may be a subtle inner prompting, a vague sense of needing to leave, to make changes" (111). The protagonist's pain and frustration regarding his tangled romance with Brett and his uneasiness in the jazz age scene trigger a vague sense of needing to leave, to make changes, what Joseph Campbell calls "the departure."

Burguete The novel’s action moves forward as the expatriates travel from France to Spain. In Abroad, Fussell writes poignantly of the “appeal of the Sunwarmed, free, lively world elsewhere, mockingly out of reach of those entrenched and immobile, apparently forever, in the smelly freezing mud of Picardy and Flanders” (4). Many who survived the war traveled to sunwarmed, free, lively worlds elsewhere: Ernest Hemingway to Florida, Robert Graves to Majorca, and Gerald Brenan to Spain (4-11). For Jake and his friends, Spain beckons. Once Jake arrives in Spain, profound changes in scene, style, and mood take place. Some critics argue that modern malaise permeates the entire novel: "The latent disgust inherited from the war is always breaking through [the text] and even the fishing idyll in Burguete, an attempt to rerun a movie of prewar innocence" (Stine 334) cannot overcome the overall "atmosphere of sterility" (Young 59-60) which surrounds the expatriates. The Western Front echoes in the opening setting; however, Spain is a place of vision and power in the novel. Spain is untouched by the First World War and thus distanced from its devastation and demoralization. Angel Capellan contends that Hemingway's protagonist's pilgrimage ends in Spain: the only land where he encounters a fully natural environment in its primitive form, a ritual horn with the most pagan rites, and a people full of natural wisdom. Spain remained an essentially agrarian land. Man lived with the seasons and celebrated the rituals that followed the development of the solar year -often under the guise of Christian rites but in fact much older than Christianity (51).

There is synchronicity between the outer journey and inner journey as Jake and Bill leave Montparnasse and take a bus up into the primeval Basque highlands around Burguete:

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As we climbed high the horizon kept changing. The road went into a forest and the sun came through the trees in patches ... Out ahead of us was a rolling green plain with dark mountains beyond it these were not like the brown heat baked mountains we had left behind. These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them ... Away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the grey metal sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles. (Sun 108)

Landscape is an objective correlative for Jake's consciousness. On a literal level he is traversing terrain which is changing. On a figurative level his experience can he associated with "crossing the threshold": Campbell's term for the phase of the journey in which the symbolism of the threshold is accentuated. The ascent from the parched lands into a different landscape marked by verdant imagery, natural sunlight, and the promise of rain suggests a state on the verge of psychic expansion and restoration— and is juxtaposed to the Montparnasse scenes. Critics like Baker have recognized the significance of mountainscape in Hemingway's writing. Metzner notes "Climbing or approaching the holy mountain is a pilgrimage to the center of the world —psychologically speaking, to the center of our existence" (120). Disengaged from the complexities of the sophisticated, the modern, and the urbane, Jake experiences realignment and ease. Roncevaux, a medieval Catholic citadel which towers above Burguete, is a classic journey archetype. The mysterious castle may hold the grail which quenches thirst and promises restoration. Jake meditates upon it for a brief moment: "It’s high. It must be twelve hundred meters" (Sun 108). Situated on a summit, the monastery suggests psychological ascent and a desire for transcendence. Genius loci saturate the Basque landscape. Roncevaux is identified with certain sacred traditions and is thus a good example of terra sancta in the text. There is a "Rolandesque medieval sense" in "the magical landscape around [the Catholic citadel of] Roncevaux" (Stoneback 8). Stoneback places his reading of the text in a Roman Catholic context. Jake is a "questing pilgrim" along the medieval route of Santiago de Compostella which runs from France to Spain. Jake, as a pilgrim, has a "strong devotion to the deus loci" of the places through which he travels on his pilgrimage (10). Yet nature herself possesses the sacred. Hemingway’s important characters have profound relationships with the natural world. Hemingway reveals that nature can be dangerous as well as beautiful. In After the Storm, for example, the wrecker-narrator describes the destructive power of a Florida hurricane. Yet Hemingway’s key protagonists welcome

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natural challenges as authentic and approach nature with reverence. In The Sun Also Rises, the Basque landscape has a radiant, numinous quality which finds a parallel in Jake's sensitized state: "Meaning seems to leap out of matter, like a tiger out of a dark cave. When we see a landscape in this light whether internally or externally, we are moved to walk with wonder and respect, in a sacred manner, as the American Indian elders teach" (Metzner 120). Jake walks with wonder and respect in the Basque terrain. "Intensification of consciousness" and "psychic restoration" (Gurko 71) are implicit characteristics of the experience in Burguete. For Jake, as well as for Nick Adams in Hemingway's short story “Big Two Hearted River,” the good place fends off nada and undertones of war trauma, confusion, and insomnia. The world of the Dingo, the Select, and Zelli 's ebbs into the shadows as Jake drinks in the wilderness around the Irati river: The fields were rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. We went up a steep bank and across the rolling fields. Looking back we saw Burguete... Beyond the fields we crossed another fasterflowing stream. A sandy road led down to the ford and beyond into the woods. The path crossed the stream below the ford. We went into the woods. It was a beech wood and the trees were very old. We walked on the road between thick trunks of old beeches and the sunlight came through the leaves in light patches on the grass. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees spaced as though it were a park (Sun 117).

Chapter X to Chapter XIII continue in this fashion. Clear, concrete images, parallelism, and the repetition of key phrases, rolling fields, grassy plains, clear streams, and woods, create a rhythmic, fluid, and tranquil organ base which mirrors the emotional and intellectual position of the protagonist. Burguete glows with the sublime power of nature. Wilkinson notes that "untouched nature is synonymous with that which is natural and beautiful and unquestionably good. It becomes a purifier of the wound of degenerated culture and stands as an image of self which has not disintegrated in social chaos. This is why in Hemingway ... the description of landscape is always charged with emotional power" (37). The Basque wilderness suggests a state of realignment: “Connection [to nature] momentarily heals the chasm separating self from other which characterizes modern consciousness" (Wilkinson 37). This is further underscored by its juxtaposition to Montparnasse, which, as has been noted, is associated with psychic fragmentation. Jake experiences the power of nature and reaches a higher level of consciousness in his sojourn in the Basque highlands. Eliade explains that "through experience of the

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sacred the mind grasps the difference between what is revealed as real, potent, rich, and meaningful and that which is deficient in those qualities in other words, the chaotic and perilous flux of things, their fortuitous and meaningless appearances and disappearances" (154). Other Hemingway protagonists have peak experiences in natural landscapes—Nick Adams in Big Two Hearted River, Thomas Hudson in Islands in the Stream, and Santiago in the Old Man and the Sea (among others). Yet in accordance with the pattern of the archetypal journey, the protagonist is obliged to leave the sacred place. Thus, Jake must descend from the mountains and come to terms with the pain of modern existence.

Pamplona The protagonist's journey reaches a climax in the destination point: Pamplona. A group of readings (Baker, Young, Rovit, Lewis) link Montparnasse and Pamplona. The expatriates "burn in the stampede of the encierro" as well as the "hells of the ball musette" (Rovit 160). Robert Lewis maintains that beyond the bull ring "the place settings of Pamplona are spiritually indistinguishable from those of Paris and they are often international (which is to say nation-less and place-less) hotels and bars" (125). Yet Pamplona has distinguishing characteristics. On the left was a hill with an old castle with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind ... there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun away off you could see Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral. In back of the plateau were the mountains (Sun 94).

Every detail in the passage conveys profound impressions and interrelationships. Juxtaposed to the modern capital of France, Spain is a medieval tapestry of castles, cathedrals, fields of grain and mountains: these are profound images suggestive of beauty and continuity. The fields of grain which touch the very walls of the city suggest mellow fruitfulness and evoke a passage in For Whom The Bell Tolls in which life is equated to a hawk flying over a field of ripened grain (312). Spain (like Florida and Africa) is a place of vision and power in Hemingway’s works. As Jake moves nearer to Spain, he moves closer to existence which is vital and heart-felt. Capellan observes that Spain is a deep, primeval world, "a natural order with Mother Earth at its base. The earth Hemingway talks about is not just the mountains and the streams of Burguete but the entire cosmic order of Pamplona with its inhabitants, festivals, rituals, beliefs, and traditions, a primitive microcosm surrounded

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by wheat fields" (55). The revelry in Pamplona is part of a "genuine seasonal celebration" (Capellan 54) as well as a religious festival. The protagonist is sensitive to place and has a singular experience in Pamplona. The atmosphere of Pamplona during the fiesta is distinct from the atmosphere of the text's opening locus. Religious processions in the streets, mass in the ancient cathedral, the running of the bulls through the streets, the mysticism of Spanish ritual, and the charged intensity of the festival de San Fermin heighten the narrative: The fiesta was going on. The drums pounded and the pipe music was shrill, and everywhere the flow of the crowd was broken by dancers. The dancers were in a crowd...All you saw was the heads and shoulders going up and down, up and down (Sun 164)

Pamplona is a metaphor for passion. Literally passion for the bullfight, aficion takes on expansive nuances. Aficion, whether quasi-religious, romantic, or sexual is the tenor of the locus. The vehicle is the narrative construction of location and situation. Wagner notes that Hemingway "arranges sentences of varying lengths and compositions to create the tone he wants" (109). The intense tone of the Pamplona chapters is created by parallelism and isocolon (the use of grammatical elements equal in length and structure). The fast, intense passage cited above is repeated in the Pamplona chapters. The repetition of the same key images and phrases, in the same or reversed order, creates a rhythm which builds to a crescendo as the expatriates are swept up by the hysteria of the fiesta. The Basque and Navarrais dancers and singers with their heads and shoulders going up and down, the shrill reed pipes and fifes, the tapping of the drums, the crowded hum that came every day before the bullfight, the great roar from the bull ring, and the sharp riau-riau! jump from the narrative and create an imagistic organ base—which Pound called "a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear." The equilibrium reached at Burguete is lost during the fiesta. The environmental and social force of the fiesta explodes the problems generated in Montparnasse. In the quarter, Jake's psyche is divided by his torturous feelings for Brett. Like the Avenue des Gobellins, Jake is torn apart—by mixed motives. This preexisting situation is heightened by the fiesta. The pagan aspect of fiesta time Pamplona has been recognized by critics. The riau-riau dancers "formed a circle around Brett and started to dance ... they were all chanting" (Sun 155). Dionysus, the god of intoxication, mania, and "infinite vitality" as well as "the cruelest destruction" (Metzner 99) is one of fiestaesque Pamplona's main deus loci.

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The festive wine drinking in the Basque streets and back street wine shops heightens existing passions and advances Jake's psychic fragmentation. The expatriates get smashed and disoriented; moreover, Jake, Mike, Cohn and Romero become violent. Retreating to separate rooms in the Hotel Montoya, the expatriates suffer splitting headaches. Some consider the Pamplona section "vanity" comparable to "the way it was in the Montparnasse cafes" (Baker 85). Yet something important happens in Pamplona— especially if the archetypal journey is considered. Pamplona is the arena where Jake undergoes pivotal ordeal. Metzner notes that "transformation toward more fragmentation, greater internal dividedness, is seen as regressive; with one important exception" (90). In the Hermetic tradition, Separatio occurs as "healing takes place as some psychic complex is disintegrated through a breaking down process, applied to the area of hardened defenses and resistance" (Metzner 100-101). Explosive emotion, struggle, and fragmentation occur just before transformation and integration (in which the elements of our nature are distinguished and separated). Jake experiences this process in Pamplona. The turbulence of the festival mirrors Jake's inner turmoil as he "tries to resolve the tensions…between the aficion world he prefers and the expatriate world he inhabits" (Balassi 39): Below us were the dark pits of the fortifications. Behind were the trees and the shadow of the cathedral. There were the lights of a car on the road climbing the mountain. Below was the river.. it was high from the rain and black and smooth. Trees were dark among the banks. We sat and looked out. Brett stared straight ahead and suddenly she shivered (Sun 182-183).

This scene occurs just before Jake helps Brett pursue Romero—which will damage Jake as well as his comradeship with his Spanish friends. Imagery of light and darkness is again profuse; the river is black rather than shining as it had been on the approach to the city. The only lights belong to a vehicle ascending the mountain. The scene is an objective correlative for Jake's state. He is going through a critical ordeal. Stoneback states: "here is a pattern of ascent, of a fortified position on the edge and the tension which precedes the fall. Jake is at the edge of the abyss, the dark pits below him ...Brett falls, Jake falls, and there is no rising motion until the fiesta is over" (18). Jake can’t control his love for Brett at this point—and her liaison with Romero causes him jealously and anguish. The dramatic clash of passions causes Separatio. The following scene marks the end of something for the protagonist: I went out the door and into my own room and lay on the bed. The bed went sailing off and I sat up on the bed and looked at the wall to make it

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Hemingway once stated: "I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought" (Wagner 105). This passage epitomizes Hemingway's subtle style. Capellan notes that "the influence of [Pamplona] will be even more intense than before" (54). Pamplona changes Jake. Flayed by his trials, Jake gets "drunker than I ever remembered having been" (Sun 223). He experiences a nervous breakdown. Yet his ordeal in Pamplona will become the basis for increased self knowledge and self healing: these are the boons the archetypal journeyer often receives after undergoing trial in the place of vision and power. In the Montparnasse scenes, there exists a hardened resistance in Jake: he loves and desires Brett. Yet Pamplona shatters this resistance. Disorientation ebbs and is replaced by the emergence of focus: the world was not wheeling anymore. Wagner points out that "instead of dialectics, Hemingway gives us suggestion" (112). Images of clearness and brightness signal approaching individuation and the consequent potential for "a way to live in it" (Sun 153). If Jake looks strange to himself in the mirror, it may be because he is on the edge of a transformation. In the subtle details of the passage, changes occur which signal the end of the Pamplona phase and transition to the San Sebastian phase.

San Sebastian Jake leaves Pamplona (and his companeros) to swim and dive on the Spanish coast. In Hemingway, the sea is a primeval place of power, ecstasy, and renewal. This is clear in works like Islands in the Stream and the Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s Edens are associated with the ocean—as we see in Islands in the Stream and the Garden of Eden. The first work opens with a section originally titled The Sea When Young and is replete with sublime descriptions of the beauty and power of Florida’s Gulf Stream. In mythology and literature, water is the great symbol of emotional and spiritual sustenance. Descent into the depths is a central journey archetype: I dove deep once swimming down to the bottom. I swam with my eyes open and it was green and dark ... In the quiet water I turned and floated. I saw only the sky and felt the drop and lift of the swells. The water was

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buoyant and cold. It felt as though you could never sink. I swam slowly, it seemed like a long swim with the high tide ... and dove cleanly and deeply, to come up through the lightening water, blew the salt water out of my head, and swam slowly and steadily into shore (Sun 237-238)

The sea contains the proverbial salt of wisdom. After his experiences in Pamplona, Jake submerges in the sea where undiscovered realms of emotion and spirit surface. Jake's boon is anagnorisis or recollection. At San Sebastian, he recollects the inner strength and peace which will sustain him as he traverses the labyrinths of the war traumatized modern world. The San Sebastian chapter is pervaded by parataxis and anapopoeisis. Jake is silent and offers no clear statements about the impact his journey has thus far had upon him. In parataxis, clauses and sentences are not linked by explicit transitional words. One idea is not subordinated to another. Their logical connections are instead implied. In the extreme parataxis, in connection with other rhetorical devices, like asyndeton (lack of conjugations) or polysyndeton (many conjunctions) "produces a voice that is chantlike, a sound associated with poetry and classical oratory, high style" (Hicke 104). Asyndeton, used in the first part of the passage, and polysyndeton, used in the last lines, create a poetic effect. Jake's swimming in the sea is ritualistic. The tone of this ritual is emphasized through "classical" stylistics. Hemingway once commented upon his use of repetition: "In the first paragraph of Farewell I used the word and consciously over and over the way Bach used a note in music when emitting counterpoint" (Wagner 110). In chapter xix, the smooth yellow sand, cool swells, lightening saltwater, and the early morning when everything is fresh and cool and damp become harmonious notes which create, when repeated and echoed, a serene and fluid organ base. Metzner notes that, in psychological terms, "the ocean symbolizes the vast emotional unconscious, since the element of water is associated with affect and feeling. Descent into the fluid depths of the emotional psyche are... healing, cleansing, and liberating" (114). Coolness, quiet, and saltwater all purge the confusion of Montparnasse and the explosive passion of Pamplona. The archetypal descent into the depths involves solitude. Gurko observes: "At the climax of their journeys, travelers find themselves alone—this solitariness often expressed subliminally, this release into another frame of existence, carries with it a sense of slipping back into a universal harmony" (73). The ocean at San Sebastian evokes Jake's natural solitary self and distances it from the unrest ashore. Jake becomes realigned to the rhythms of the sea and solitude: he reaches into his own inner depths. Sheer imagism shapes the San Sebastian locus.

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Clear, concentrated place based detail intimates emotional and intellectual nuances. Svoboda remarks upon the difference between the more explicit manuscript version of chapter XIX (which sustained extensive revision) and the published text in which "the effect of place upon Jake has been shown rather than analyzed" (39-40). An explicit emphasis on restfulness, solitude, and getting all straightened around inside again become submerged. Authorial emphasis is edited out, but representations of catharsis and anagnorisis are strengthened through imagism and the syntactic construction of the chapter. The San Sebastian locus is also an objective correlative for Jake's consciousness. Psychologist William James observes: “The evolution of character consists in straightening out and unifying the inner self” (Metzner 91). This is challenging idea—especially in a modern or postmodern context. However, Jake has to get straightened out inside to learn "how to live in it" (Sun 153). His love for Brett is clearly higher feeling; however, it creates desperate anxiety because his wound frustrates the normal course of passion. Negative criticism abounds about Brett—and many critics blame Brett for Jake's problems. Yet Brett has also been damaged by the war. Moreover, as a few thoughtful critics have pointed out, she is honest and (at the end) rather brave. Jake must meet the exigencies of his situation. Romantic passion is both natural and positive; however, it is painful for Jake. The archetypal hero often challenges boundaries; yet in a paradoxical sense the protagonist's achievement involves heroic endurance in observing certain boundaries. Rovit argues that Jake must "live his life by those passions which are in the scope of his powers and conducive to the possibilities of self realization" (158). San Sebastian suggests that Jake's deliverance from the labyrinths of confusion and the edge of despair depends on his capacity to stand alone and create a separate peace. At San Sebastian, chaos subsides. Metzner suggests that "Fragmentation and dividedness are the mechanisms which divide our personality. The process of inner purification strips away the barriers that produce the state of dividedness—the direction of growth and evolution is toward integration" (90). Immersion in water suggests both dissolution and purification. The ocean is the crux of the setting and evokes the strong eternal sea of the novel's epigram from Ecclesiastes. For the protagonist, solitude and the majestic indwelling force of the sea induce catharsis and anagnorisis. Campbell observes that “the descent into the depths is a "life-centering, life-renewing act” (92). Jake dives deep, down to the bottom of the sea: figuratively he plunges deep into his consciousness and finds his emotional center. The water is buoyant: "It felt as though you could never sink" (Sun 237). After emerging from the

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archetypal descent into the depths, the protagonist achieves some degree of self composure.

Madrid Place once again creates movement in the text—as anti-climax is reached in "the high hot modern town" (Sun 240) of Madrid. Like the descent from the Basque highlands, Jake must surface from introspection and sanctuary in San Sebastian. He takes the Sud Express through Alveoli and the Escarole to the Norde station—literally and figuratively "the end of the line" (Sun 239) in regard to his crisis with Brett and his journey. Once again, subtle shadings in place point to tenor. After "the rite of sharing the gin and vermouth…in a clean well-lighted place" (Lewis 127), Jake and Brett finish lunch at Botin's and then take a taxi ride along the Grand Via. This taxi ride is deftly juxtaposed to the taxi scene of the Montparnasse chapters: It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with the trees and grass where there were taxis parked. A taxi came up the street. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the grand Via. (Sun 247)

The earlier taxi scene, shrouded in the macabre chiaroscuro of the Rue des Gobellins, suggests disorientation. Madrid, in the acute light of the Spanish sun, is also juxtaposed to tenebrous Montparnasse. The light imagery is different here. The phrase It was [very] hot and bright... is repeated for rhetorical reasons as isocolon once again sculpts the organ base. “Absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation" (Pound 3) is used. Concentrated light imagery gives the passage a positive quality. The atmosphere is evocative of the end of book II in which Jake senses the enigmatic emergence of a very clear and bright quality at the extremity of his fiesta-ing. On the verge of transformation in Chapter XVIII, "The world," for Jake, is "still inclined to blur at the edges" (Sun 224), but there are no blurred edges in the last passage. Dazzling Madrid is the quintessential imagist locus. It is an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. The locus can also be approached as an objective correlative for the protagonist's psychological position. Metzner suggests that "if unawakened consciousness is clouded or obstructed, then transformed consciousness is comparable to seeing in the clear, unobscured light of the sun. Enlightenment means bringing in light.

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Metaphorically speaking when the clouds of ignorance [or confusion] are dispelled the light of the sun, and the light of the spirit shines in brightness" (74). The luminous Grand Via is an analogue to the inner direction, balance, and clarity which Jake achieves after the ordeal in Pamplona breaks and consequently transforms his pattern of perception. Pound once observed that "the natural object is always the adequate symbol" (5). The Grand Via suggests direction. Jake knows where he is going. Consideration of the journey motif necessitates consideration of the question of transformation. Grebstein suggests that the conclusion of the The The Sun Also Rises confirms the vain course of the modern age. Stoneback sees the protagonist as a catholic pilgrim, and feels that Jake "never drifts, and always seems to know where he is going and why he is going there" (10). Gurko indicates that Jake's journey is "magical" yet concludes that (after the Burguete interlude) "Jake gets back to Pamplona and eventually to Paris exactly the same man he is at the beginning. [His] annual excursion from France to Spain and back leaves him precisely as he was" (73). This reading suggests that the protagonist does experience some kind of transformation and that the configurations of that transformation exist in the subtle delineations of loci which are sculpted by imagist technique and the use of the objective correlative. The process of individuation is part of Jake's journey. Beyond the immediate physical journey, "The protagonist is engaged in a sentimental journey, a descent into the ever widening awareness of his own heart" (Wilkinson 68). The power of place triggers intensification of consciousness and consequent changes in Jake's thinking, values, and motives. Jake's comments to Cohn in Chapter 11 are qualified by his later experience: "Perhaps as you went along you did learn something" (Sun 148). The sun burnished closing points to the progressive transformation of the protagonist: "Progressive transformation is from limitation to freedom, from darkness to light, from fragmentation to wholeness and from illusion to realization" (Metzner 14). Jake moves from desperate attachment and consequent selfestrangement—through ordeal—to self knowledge. The return phase is implicit in the archetypal journey. Jake returns to the modern arena (“the modern city of Madrid") with a new sense of equilibrium—indeed a new approach to life. As Jake enters Madrid he passes through the Puerta del Sol—the gate of the sun. This marks a passage from Dionysian Pamplona to Apollonian Madrid. Paglia states:“Nietzsche calls Apollo the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, god of individuation and just boundaries ...Apollo is exclusion and exclusiveness" (73). Brett's statement "Oh Jake.. We could have had such a damned good time

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together" (Sun 247) elicits his closing rhetorical question "Isn't it pretty to think so"? (Sun 247). This creates a necessary boundary. Although Spilka feels that "love is no longer possible" (113) at this point, Svoboda argues—persuasively—that Jake and Brett appear to "move into a new, mutually tolerant and understanding relationship" (Svoboda 91). Eros must be replaced by Agape. The gate of the sun is an apropos point of departure for this exploration of The Sun Also Rises. Capellan observes that "Hemingway's sense of place, his feeling for landscape and surroundings, are the gates to his fiction" (46). Since archaic times the sun has represented lucid vision and/or enlightenment of the central self. In the closing setting of the novel, Jake moves out of the shade and into the sun. Hemingway refers to Ecclesiastes in the title of this novel which, as Fussell observes, is “one of a plethora of sun titles during the period” (139). Like Hemingway’s other sun-seeking protagonists (roving on Florida’s Gulf Stream or in Africa’s Green Hills), Jake finds a warmer world, a degree of clarity, complex ways of escape and perhaps even some “pleasure at the fairground on the way” (Mick Hucknall).

Works Cited Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952. Balassi, William. The Trail to The Sun Also Rises, The First Week of Writing. In Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment. Ed. Frank Scafella. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Bloom, Harold. Ed. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway's Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949. Capellan, Angel. Hemingway and the Hispanic World. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Cohen, Ted. “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy.” In On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Cowley, Malcolm. Exiles’ Return: A Narrative of Ideas. New York: Harper & Row, 1941. Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1991. Durrell, Lawrence. Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

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Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969.Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. —. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Gallagher, Winifred. The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. New York: Harper Collins, 1993 Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway's Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, London: Feffer & Sons, 1973. Gurko, Leo. Hemingway and the Magical Journey. In Hemingway: A Revaluation. Ed. Ronald R. Noble. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1983. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner's, 1964. —. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's, 1932. —. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner's, 1940. —. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner's, 1926. Hickey, Dona. Developing A Written Voice. San Francisco: Mayfield Publishing, 1933 Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory. Ed. Michael Groeden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Lewis, Robert W. “Hemingway's Sense of Place.” In Hemingway In Our Time. Eds. Richard Astro and Jackson Benson. Corvalis, OR: Oregon State UP, 1974. Metzner, Ralph. Opening To Inner Light: Metaphors of Human Transformation. Los Angeles: Jeremey Archer, 1986. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Ed. P.G.W Glare. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. Paglia, Camille. Art & Decadence From Nefertiti to Dickinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays. Ed. T.S. Eliot. 1954. New York: New Directions, 1968. Reynolds, Michael. The Sun Also Rises: A Novel of the Twenties. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Rovit, Earl. Ernest Hemingway. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Spilka, Mark. “The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises.” In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House. 1985.

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Stine, Peter. Ernest Hemingway and The Great War. In Fitzgerald /Hemingway Annual. Eds. Matthew Bruccoli & Richard Layman. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. Stoneback, H.R. “From the Rue Saint Jacques to the Pass of Roland, to the Unfinished Church on the Edge of the Cliff.” In The Hemingway Review.Vl (Fall 1986): 2-27. Svoboda, Frederic Joseph. Hemingway & The Sun Also Rises: The Crafting of a Style. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 1983. Wagner, Linda. “The Sun Also Rises: One Debt to Imagism.” In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. — Ed. New Essays on The Sun Also Rises. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Wilkinson, Myler. Hemingway and Turgenev: The Nature of Literary Influence. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Young, Phillip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966.

SPECIES MUCK, FLOATING SANITORIA: DECONSTRUCTING AND HISTORICIZING LANIER’S “A FLORIDA GHOST” (1877) MARTHA L. REINER

Sidney Lanier’s “A Florida Ghost” can be deconstructed by developing historicist contexts. Sidney Lanier wrote the poem at Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania and published it in Appleton’s Magazine in 1877, as Reconstruction ended, after the end of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency. Contexts include marine biology voyages that collected species for the Museum of Comparative Zoology on vessels like the Blake, in interchanges with vessels including the Swedish Josephine, with reports published in the museum’s widely circulated Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In New Literary Histories, Claire Colebrook observes that new historicist criticism has focused heavily on the Renaissance partly because literature was developing an autonomous domain at the time (24). Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicist focus in looking at nonliterary texts along with literary texts of a time includes practices of “renaissance self-fashioning” and “the circulation of social energy” in negotiation. F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams have focused on the rise of genres, Colebrook notes (36). Leavis in his textual criticism emphasizes categories and embodiment of experience in the value of a literary text, and Williams links experience indirectly with politicaleconomic reality in culture as a “complex of practices, significations, institutions, forces and personal responses” (Colebrook 142; Williams 1415, 121; Richter 1153-1172). Drawing from Frederich Engels’s September 1890 letter to Josef Bloch and its observation that “’even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants’” along with theories and religious views and “’remote’” connections among “accidents” (“things” and “events”) influence change, Williams emphasizes that “determination” occurs in “specific and indissoluble” “real” “constitutive processes.” Through social processes, lives are defined. “Structures of feeling” or consciousness occur with “interrelated” and sometimes “interlocking” relationships in actions and deliberations. The flux of

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relations of “dominant” and “residual” with “emergent” cultural elements is structured “at the edge of semantic availability” (Williams 82, 99, 13031, 133-34; Fletcher 349). Leavis in The Great Tradition explores categories linked to tradition, like the novel genre and “’the English novel.’” He emphasizes transnationality in chaining comment about Eliot, James, Flaubert, and Conrad and mercantile and diplomatic contexts. Leavis’s analysis of technique and form includes analysis of encoding dialect and phonological aspects (15-20). Letter writing and periodical publication are important cultural formations of the transatlantic Victorian world, and Victorian “structures of feeling” are related to emergence of new technologies and industrial processes. The world of Victorian periodical publication was a relatively autonomous domain, although risky in its volatile evolution. Nineteenth century transatlantic literature was more broadly directly connected with economic and governance institutions than English Renaissance literature was. There were similar subterranean circulations in the two eras. Lanier uses Renaissance allusions partly because of his interest in the Renaissance, partly because of continuing influence of early modern events and structures (including cultural reintroductions of archaic elements), and partly as displacement of comment about trans-Atlantic and transnational interactions in the 19th century. With close reading and exploration of historical contexts, also applying structural linguistics, this study analyzes Lanier’s “A Florida Ghost” (1877) and other poems, travel narratives, philosophical and psychological essays, and letters written by Lanier, as well as photos and illustrations published with his work from the end of Reconstruction into the beginning of the 20th century. Collections of Lanier’s letters were published in 1889, 1907, and 1945. Lanier’s Hymns of the Marshes poems (1877-78) were published in 1907 with photo illustrations and a cover illustration representing nature and environmental processes and suggesting emergent change in uses of natural resources. Frederic Jameson’s idea of a “political unconscious” influencing literary representation of emerging technologies that influence political environments relates to encoded discourse in Lanier’s letters and published writings. Lanier was in the Tennessee mountains and on coastal waters with the Signal Corps, an institution of continuing technological and. industrial development from the Civil War years into years after Reconstruction. Representations of specie circulations were juxtaposed with reports of findings about nature. The opening line of John Murray's "Reports on the Results of Dredging," from the Gulf of Mexico (1877-78), the Caribbean (1878-79), and the Atlantic Coast (1880) describes Murray’s analysis of

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deposits collected between the Gulf of Maine and Cape Hatteras in 1880 and in the Gulf of Maine in 1875: "These deposits consist of blue or gray colored muds and sands. . . ." (37). Within the detailed list report of samples, Murray notes that from Cape Hatteras south to Lat. 31, 48 N., "deposits are green muds or sands" (40). This would be near Ossabaw Island (Lat. 31, 50 N.) off the Georgia coast, where the Altamaha River flows to sea from Atlanta through Macon, east toward Brunswick and Sea Island at the coast south of Charleston and Savannah and north of Jacksonville, toward Bermuda and Madeira, Casablanca, and the Canary Islands. Confederate money was blue or grey, and the use of greenback money began in 1862. Lanier was born in Macon. The marine geography exploratory voyage was an important circulations vehicle. In New England: Indian Summer (1940), Van Wyck Brooks notes the leadership of Louis Agassiz, “this old Humboldtian explorer,” his influence on Henry Adams, and his friendship with Longfellow (29-31), suggesting New England links to the Gulf Coast and Latin America. Theodore Roosevelt, an Agassiz and William James student,, was at Harvard in the late 1870s. Louis Agassiz’s son Alexander Agassiz led many explorations, reporting with Leon Griswold, including species collection and surveying voyages around Florida. Louis Agassiz, an extremely prominent evolutionary biologist, headed the Museum of Comparative Zoology, whose Bulletin published many exploration reports. Intertemporal network prosopography links activities in culture and enterprise as contexts of Lanier’s poetry and essays. FitzGerald Ross’s “A Visit to the Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, 1863-64,” Part II, published in Edinburgh Review 1865, describes meeting a sergeant “on the road,” classifying “[t]his signal corps” paradoxically as “an institution peculiar to the American armies.” Ross continues with his description: On marches and during battles, high and commanding positions are occupied by squadrons of this corps who communicate with each other by flags on the old semaphore system, and report all important communications to their generals.

At Harper’s Ferry, Jackson worked with communications at Virginia heights and Maryland heights. Another recollection of time with the procurement, propaganda, and signaling group states the following: [W]e rode half-way up that mountain to a farmhouse, and then scrambled up to the top of a peak called the Pilot, where a party of the signal corps were stationed. From thence we had a most splendid panoramic view of the

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Deconstructing and Historicizing Lanier’s “A Florida Ghost” (1877) plan and lesser hills beneath us. We could see Chattanooga and the Yankee camps, and, with a good glass, were also clearly to distinguish every individual soldier. We could trace the positions of the Confederate camps, though the army was now hidden from our view by trees, which, however, were afterwards pretty well cleared away for fire-wood” (Part II, 28, 41).

Signal Tower, Cobb’s Hill, Appomattox River, Va 1864. Bermuda Hundred, Virginia. Photographer at Butler’s Signal Tower. Library of Congress. LC-B8112501 [P&P]; LC-DIG –cwpb-01831 right image of stereograph.

Resemblance of Signal Corps towers and the tower at the Temple of Shiva in Madura or Madras relates to transnational circulations of persons and knowledge including British-Indian science and engineering in colonial empire in which the Indian Jagadis Chandra Bose, who studied at St. Xavier’s in Calcutta and then London and Cambridge universities, along with the German Karl Ferdinand Braun, would be leaders in electromagnetism studies including discovery in the 1870s of semiconductor rectification (one-way directionality) and radiotelegraphy, the Italian Signal Corps working with wireless (Seitz and Einspruch,

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Nandy), as well as circulations related to commodities including cotton. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy at Calcutta Medical College did early work with insulated submarine telegraphy in 1838. During rebellion against the British in India in 1858, Lionel and Francis Gisborne received a concession from Ottoman and Egyptian governments to run a cable from Egypt to India via the Red Sea, the first cable to India (Headrick and Griset). Indian observatories with masonry rather than glass instruments, including the observatory at Benares on the Ganges, were built by Jai Singh II in the early 18th century. Sir Charles Oakley, governor of Madras under the East India Co., established the Madras Observatory in 1792. T. G. Taylor was the government astronomer at Madras during 1822-1843 (Reddy, Sharma, Ansari), following the Napoleonic Wars and into the years of Anglo-American abolition. The observatory of the Xavier College Observatory at Calcutta was established in 1875 (Ansari).

Landing where they exchange prisoners, James River, April 1865. Library of Congress. LOT 11486-F, no. 8 [P&P]. Reproduction number LC-DIGppmsca-11704 (digital file from original photograph). Other prisoners’ exchange photos include Butler’s Dutch Gap Canal, Chesterfield, Virginia; Aikens Landing near Dutch Gap, site of exchange of Rebel prisoners, The War for the Union Photographic History; Steamer New York waiting for Exchange of Prisoners – Aikens Landing, Virginia; Ft. McAllister, Ga., from the flagstaff. www.civilwarphotos.net, www.antiquephotographics.com.

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Hybridity of naval forces continued from the Civil War into late 19th century interactions with foreign empire. The S.S. Miami was built at the Philadelphia naval yard. It shipped to the Gulf and took part in a campaign against New Orleans. The Miami was transferred to the Atlantic at the North Carolina sounds in 1862, and it fought the Albemarle in 1864. The Miami was based in the James River while Lanier was with the Signal Corps in the Tidewater in 1864 (Naval Historical Center, Project Gutenberg E-Book of Integration of the Armed Forces). The Miami became a commercial vessel in 1869. Albert J. Myer and William J. Nicodemus went from the Navaho campaigns to leadership in the Union Signal Corps early in the Civil War. Benjamin Butler’s takeover of civilian telegraphy in the Chesapeake area was questioned. The Confederate Signal Corps was organized under the Inspector General rather than under the Engineer’s Department, according to George Raynor Thompson, who notes an unusual aspect in references to “aerial” telegraphy, possibly related to what Nikola Tesla would invent as “wireless wave” telegraphy and to territorial establishment of lines. Lanier was born February 3, 1842, in Macon. His Lanier ancestors settled in Virginia at a site that would become Richmond, and his mother was an Anderson of Virginia. Lanier attended the Presbyterian Oglethorpe University, graduated in 1860, and then worked as a tutor. Professor Woodrow at Oglethorpe became an important scholar in Charleston, S.C. Lanier joined the Macon Volunteers in 1861. Lanier and his brother were transferred to the Confederate Army’s Signal Corps at Petersburg in Tidewater Virginia and assigned to work as blockade runners, each commanding a boat. Lanier also served with the corps at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. He was captured offshore from Wilmington by the federal Santiago de Cuba. Lanier, who had previously developed consumption, was imprisoned at Lookout and at St. Mary’s, Maryland. After some time, release of Lanier, imprisoned at Point Lookout, occurred, and he traveled south. A friend smuggled gold in his mouth into the prison. A friend, Lilla from Montgomery, traveling with her little girl, heard that Lanier was on the boat to Fortress Monroe at Hampton, found him in the cattle hold extremely emaciated, gave him brandy, and revived him (Kent 35, Mims). In 1867, Lanier worked as head of a school in Prattville, Alabama, and married Mary Day. He returned to Macon, studied law with his father, and did some legal work for his father-in-law with property at Brunswick, Georgia. After some time in New York trying to improve his health, Lanier moved to San Antonio in 1872 and worked there. He played first flute with the Baltimore Symphony concerts in Baltimore in 1873. He

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visited Florida in 1874, describing in a May 27, 1875, letter a stay in Polatka [Pilatka] (198-99). In 1877, Lanier was visiting in Philadelphia and working with the Treasury and with General William M. Dunn of the War Department during questioning around Georgia’s Reconstruction governor R. B. Bullock, who had left the state in 1872, and his repudiation of state bonds. Bullock, whom Lanier resembled, had studied communications and worked in the American Telegraph Co.’s Philadelphia office and then moved to Augusta in 1860 to run the Southern Express Co. for Henry Plant. Bullock later returned and became head of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. One of Lanier’s relatives, J. F. D. Lanier, was a successful New York banker who developed western railroads and was an adviser to President Lincoln (Mims). Charlton W. Tebeau describes explorations in 1870 to consider building telegraph lines down the Florida coast to the Keys and Cuba as well as an 1883 expedition from Fort Myers to the Everglades and an earlier observation by the New Orleans Times Democrat of draining enterprise at the Kissimmee River. An 1874 Edward King article in Scribner’s Magazine forecast railroad building from Jacksonville to St. Augustine and along the east coast to Cape Sable at the southern edge of Florida’s coast around to the Gulf Coast, across the Everglades from where Miami would develop, and to the Keys. Tebeau observes that in the 1830s and 1840s officials operated knowing that “Florida Indians were in communication with Cubans somewhere on the southwest coast.” Land at the western edge of the Everglades including Chatham Bend was “little known to the white man” until the late 19th century: “In 1885 after a cruise on that coast one writer said of the maps of the area: ‘. . . for general outline they were superb, but for particulars all of them were signal failures’” (40, 46, 53). Lanier was corresponding with D. C. Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins, about getting a fellowship or professorship in literatures and sciences. He was also considering work with the Peabody Library, although he thought problems with the Tennessee bonds might cause delay. A committee clerkship was also possible (Letters, 1874-77, Anderson and Starke 455-57). Lanier’s November 25, 1877, letter to Sarah Farley at Baltimore refers to his publication of the poem, then titled “A Puzzled Ghost in Florida,” prospectively, with a strong hint of retrospect, “Have you seen a humorous poem of mine in Appleton’s Journal for December, called ‘A Puzzled Ghost in Florida’?” (Letters 1874-77, 1899, 1945, 499). Typography of silver in “Down silver distances that faintly gleamed/ On to infinity,” suggests Liverpool. In “I know a little story— well, I swow—“swow” suggests connections between Stowe, the southwest, and Washington and the northern Pacific potlatch area. Howard

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Johnson’s study of Bahamian immigration notes a Gulf Stream path. Linked palmettos and Key images suggest Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house near St. Augustine and Jacksonville, the key bridge at Cincinnati, and circulations “from Maine to Floridy.” Connections between houses of refuge and “sanitorium” and between asylums and law of the sea as well as complex migrations and transactions are suggested in the closing paradox of “How one same wind could blow my ship to shore,/ And my hotel to sea!” Other articles in 1877 issues of Appleton’s include W. H. Riding’s “The Harbor and Commerce of New York,” with discussion of quarantine infrastructure, D. H. Jacques’s “A Florida Island” in a style resembling Lanier’s, and Charlotte Adams’s “Giorgione’s Venice” with styles much like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s in a narrative of looking for Giorgione and finding instead a notary, finding a sign announcing “Female Education, with Instruction in Foreign Languages” and exploring the campo. The narrative, which expresses an unusual connection between human consciousness and atmosphere, suggests D. C. Gilman’s antiquarian travels and her own later emphasis on fertility themes, “He is colossal in his achievements when he has once convinced himself that creation is the worthiest end of life” (248). The “colossal” image links to “’Cal’latin’ for to build right off/ A c’lossal sanitarium” in Lanier’s “A Puzzled Florida Ghost” (568). Charlotte Adams also published “Christmas in Venice” in Harper’s in 1877, with “To a Pioneer of Antislavery,” a poem with images and rhythm characteristic of Lanier’s and Gilman’s poetics and suggesting Poe, also appearing in Harper’s in 1877. After Lanier lectured on Elizabethan poetry and Shakespeare during 1877-78, he spent some time in 1879 in Rockbridge Alum Springs. D. C. Gilman appointed him a lecturer in English Literature at Johns Hopkins for a year (Kent 34-39). May 22, 1880, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s diary notes her first appearance in print, a poem about dandelion greens titled “To D xxx. G xxx” (20, 859). Denise Knight notes that the “forgotten” poem appeared in the May 20, 1880, edition of the New England Journal of Education. Gilman and Lanier allude directly to exchange of persons along with migrations, hostelry, and shipping; they allude indirectly to developments in earth science including tidal studies and radiation mining. D. C. Gilman, as a sinologist and rare books and antiquities collector, assistant librarian and professor of physical and political geography at Yale, had traveled to the Middle East acquiring books and artifacts and then had served as the second president of the University of California beginning in 1872 before becoming president of Johns Hopkins in 1875. He published many studies in antiquities and geography. Arthur Gilman at Harvard, born in Illinois, with a childhood in St. Louis before his family

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moved to New York, where his father worked as a banker, would work with Mrs. Agassiz in the 1880s and 1890s on coeducation, bringing women graduate students to the Harvard Annex for graduate study (New York Times). The second marriage of Arthur Gilman, a literary adviser for Riverside press who published Theatrum Majorum: The Cambridge of 1776 in 1876, was to Stella Houghton Scott (Dictionary of American Biography). Frederick Beecher Perkins, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s estranged father, was a magazine editor as well as a librarian at the Boston Public Library and than director of the San Francisco Public Library. Charlotte, born in Hartford, married her cousin Charles Houghton Stetson in 1900 after her 1894 divorce from artist Charles Walter Stetson. John Taylor Gilman, a financier from a family in farming and ship building, represented New Hampshire in the Continental Congress, lobbied to allow the state bank to speculate with deposits, and was elected New Hampshire’s governor in 1794. He was also president of the New Hampshire Bank of Portsmouth. His brother Nicholas Gilman, a shopkeeper, is said to have formed a militia during paper money disturbances in 1786. Nicholas Gilman served with the Continental Congress and in Continental securities investment and then was a U.S. Senator during the French Revolution (Robinson). George Huntington Hartford and George Gilman founded the Great American Tea Co. in New York in 1859 (“Retail”). In the 1860s Taylor & Huntington of Hartford published government photographers’ war photographs. In an August 26, 1877, letter to Bayard Taylor, Lanier alludes to mineralogy, munitions chemistry, and military procurement in commenting about “so many Rhodes from here to Kennett,” also writing that “Mrs. Lanier joins [him] in hoping that Mrs. Taylor has brought back some new strength out of the Virginia mountains.” Uranium was mined in Colorado by 1855, in Colorado’s Central City district by 1871, and in Utah by the 1870s. Ores from mining in Montana including gold at Kennett and Tobacco Roots near Virginia City were shipped to sites in Britain for smelting during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. Virginia City was Montana’s capitol from 1865, after a large find at Grasshopper Creek in 1862, until 1870, when the territory became a state and the capitol moved to Helena, where there is uranium (Uranium Producers of America; Montana Department of Environmental Quality; U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management; Wilkes; Finch). D. H. Anderson was a Civil War photographer. There was uranium in the Rosebud Sioux area of Montana where “Doc Taylor” would build a cabin in 1913. In 1863, Bayard Taylor, secretary to American minister Simon Cameron in St. Petersburg, influenced Russia toward a “benevolent neutrality” in

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relation to the North while England and France were asking Russia to favor the South, according to A. J. Prahl. Bayard Taylor published “genteel,” highly visual travel writings about the western United States in the 1850s (Bredeson 88). Cecil Rhodes, who would develop explosives enterprise and gain control of diamond mining in South Africa by 1889, organizing De Beers, had been sent from England in 1870 at a young age to help his brother in Natal, who was working on a cotton plantation. Rhodes stayed with the Surveyor-General of Natal, started a fruit farm, and worked in diamond mining before he went to study in the late 1870s at Oxford, where he became a freemason. Shipping connections with Natal, where Afrikaners were a minority of the white population, were important in relation to metropolitan and London connections with the Cape Colony and British Empire (Wasserman, Porter), and there was an important East Indian population at Natal. The Confederation of British and Boer states in South Africa formed in 1877. Dutch patent law was repealed in 1869, Britain changed patent laws in 1872, and Germany’s new patent law in 1877 limited price competition (Link, Freeman). Lanier worked in government with what economists of innovation including Gregory Tassey (1982, 2005) refer to as industrial “infratechnology,” public goods like basic research and measurement standards. Tassey (67, 71) emphasizes the tendency for underinvestment in infratechnology public goods including some generic industries and research about generic industries. In late 1879 Lanier received an assignment from Gilman to teach at Johns Hopkins. The October 8, 1895, issue of Nature magazine, published as Roentgen was introducing his discovery of X-rays, includes a brief story about plans to build an International Submarine Telegraph Memorial that would honor innovators including Cyrus Field, Sir John Pender, and Sir James Anderson. The following item announces a gift from C. J. Rhodes to the South African Museum of a white or square-mouthed Rhinocerous (Rhinoceros sinus) shot by A. Eyre in the Mazoc district of Mahonaland and sent to England. James Anderson and Benjamin Smyth of England received a U.S. patent in 1882 for an electric telegraph "transmitting or 'translating'" from one cable or line to another, a system for cable and for aerial or subterranean land lines. Transnational telegraphy networks were well developed by the late 1850s. The Henry Troth Hymns of the Marshes cover illustration resembles the cover illustrations for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” published in New England Magazine in January 1892 and her In This Our World poetry collection published by McCombs and Vaughan of Oakland in 1893 and then by Maynard and Small of Boston in 1898.

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Images are stalactite branches and sea flora, epiphytic and terrestrial bromeliads. Stalactite arches are characteristic of Moslem architecture. Henry Troth was a photographer among artists in the Rose Valley community near Philadelphia who were active 1901-1911. He exhibited internationally with George Stieglitz and F. Holland Day. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was in treatment with Silas Weir Mitchell in Philadelphia beginning in 1887. Imagery in her “The Yellow Wallpaper” includes a sometimes etherized reeling of consciousness, natural objects, and designed objects and a sense of Brownian motion that parallel Troth’s nature photographs, some of them glass lantern slides. Troth and Holland Day were jurors for the 1899 Philadelphia Photographic Society Exhibition. In early 19th century Philadelphia, druggist Henry Troth was a civic leader active in the Philadelphia Literary Association and ran for office with the Workingmen’s party. Samuel Holland was the first survey or general for British North America, publishing important maps in 1760 and 1776 (“The Artists”; Sullivan 575; Swift).

Sidney Lanier, Hymns of the Marsh, Illustrated from Nature by Henry Troth, Scribner’s, 1907, with 1877-78 Lanier poems. Shore plants, possibly Aechmea bromeliads, resemble those on the Monitor McAllister illustration. Cover from 1899 Small, Maynard book edition, of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Elisha Brown Bird design. Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. www.abaa.com. Wild Ginger (Asarum Canadense). Henry Troth photograph. Penn State Digital Library. Also Troth’s Wild Fern photo, George Eastman House.Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her “The Yellow Wallpaper” in New England Magazine in January 1892. Tulip Poplar Blossoms. Henry Troth photograph, ca. 1900, George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. Gift of 3M Co., excollection Louis Walton Sipley. AMICA Library.

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Elements of cover illustration of Gilman’s In This Our World poetry collection link to Troth photographs and to Gilman’s diary records of her drawings. Also C. florida, Dogwood, L, Harrisburg. Henry Troth photograph. Penn State Digital Library Collections.

Lanier’s Hymns of the Marshes poems contain many atmosphericgeological process, revolution, and human sexuality and reproduction allusions: “Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl/ Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl/ In the magnet earth, — yea, thou with a storm for a heart,/ Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part/ From part oft sundered, yet ever a globèd light” and ”Reverend Marsh, low couched along the sea,/ Old chemist, rapt in alchemy, /Distilling silence, — lo, / That which our father-age had died to know —/ The menstruum that dissolves all matter- thither/ Hast found it; for the silence, filling now/ The globèd clarity of receiving space.” A menstruum is a solvent, especially a solvent for extracting a drug from a plant. Tuberculosis and death from tuberculosis were very common in the 19th century, although the spread of tuberculosis began to slow in the mid19th century. Laudanum, an opiate, was used for abortion and to treat tuberculosis. Merck introduced commercially produced morphine made from opium in 1827 and began selling commercially produced cocaine in 1862. Bayer was first to sell heroin, a bond of morphine and acetic acid into a more concentrated opiate, in 1898. Large German chemical companies and Swiss companies including Hoffman-LaRoche imported much opium to the West (Braithwaite and Drahos 361-62). Deconstructively, the observation alludes to equatorial exploration and colonization and to research in physics and astronomy. “Reverend Marsh” represents border maritime transactions and the law of the sea. With this

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apostrophe Lanier alludes to a network including the “magnetic” Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s aunt, who lived at Mandarin on the St. John’s River near Jacksonville in the 1870s), and Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet’s brother. Lyman preached at Litchfield, Boston, and Cincinnati. One of his associates was Phineas Taylor. Marine geologist William Healey Dall, who had worked as a clerk for the Illinois Central Railroad beginning in 1863 before being appointed to lead the Western Union expedition to Alaska and then researching with the U.S. Coast Guard Geological Survey during 1871-1884, was a son of Charles Henry Appleton Dall, a Boston Unitarian minister who moved to Calcutta, India, in 1855 (Healy and Dall Papers, Smithsonian Institute). Lyman’s son Henry Ward Beecher was a prominent abolitionist preacher at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, which became a naval center. Hiram Tuttle worked in insurance in Brooklyn in the late 19th century, and Governor Tuttle of New Hampshire in the early 1890s was a road building advocate. American Protestant religious abolitionist, social reform, and mission networks linked with Anglo-Catholic abolition reformists including Charles Gore, who would co-found the Christian Social Union and the Community of the Resurrection, become bishop of Birmingham, and work with South Africa in the 1880s, during the partition of Africa (Groves). Transatlantic abolitionist philanthropy networks with supporters at sites like Philadelphia and Liverpool included James Gillespie Birney and Henry B. Stanton in 1839 as well as Lewis Tappan (Tappan Antislavery Society Correspondence). Late 19th-century Barcelona and Venezuela diplomat Herbert W. Bowen, a son of Lewis Tappan’s daughter Lucy Maria Tappan, was a descendant of the “Indian apostle” John Eliot, who settled at Natick in 1660 and translated the Bible into Algonquin and wrote an Indian grammar. Abolitionist Lewis Tappan was a wool and cotton merchant in Philadelphia and New York and then joined his brother Arthur’s silk merchant business in Boston. Arthur Tappan founded Oberlin College. Lewis’s brother Benjamin was a senator in Ohio, and his brother Charles was in business in Portland. Lewis Tappan also ran a mercantile credit information bureau in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Henry Varnum Poor’s wife Mary was related to the Tappans. Boston commission merchant Lewis William Tappan graduated from Amherst in 1834 with Henry Ward Beecher and later lived in Canada, South America, and Europe. The image of John Elliott (John E. Ward), mayor of Savannah 1853-54 and U.S. minister to China 1858-60, appears on the Confederate $10 bill. John Elliott Tappan founded the Investors Syndicate (later American Express) investment advisory service in 1894 (“Herbert”; Crosby; Chandler; Lipartito and Peters; Lushkey).

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Until 1869 Britain had a policy of protecting direct access to India by keeping European political establishment out of Egypt and protecting Egypt, according to Halford L Hoskins (140). The relationship continued toward the partition of Africa in the 1880s. Ottoman connections with India included Egyptian squadrons in Red Sea ports in 1865. British leaders resisted change in the East and wanted to limit Egypt, as French and Italians developed port activities in the Mediterranean and slave trading activities continued. Consul General Stanton purchased Suez Canal Co. shares for Britain in 1875, as Ishmail of Egypt stated plans to advance to the Somali Coast. British cooperation with Egyptian advances in east and central Africa countered Russian, Turkish, and German expansion as the area around Lake Victoria, an Arab slave trading center since the 12th century, an area in which there were important mineral deposits, became regarded as a reservation. August-September 1877 negotiations after the Brussels Conference of September 1876 including the Khedive Ishmail led to a vague agreement against the slave trade and support for the Khedive’s jurisdiction of the Somali Coast (Hoskins 144, 147). Edwin Stanton was U.S. attorney general and then secretary of war from 1862 to 1868. An Arthur Stanton translated Roentgen’s report of his discovery of X-ray radiation that was published in the January 23, 1896, Nature magazine. The report of X-rays and potential use in medical imaging represents continuity of discovery in waves of innovation and anticipates breeder reactors: The deviation of kathode rays by the magnet is one of their peculiar characteristics. . . . the place of most brilliant phosphorescence of the walls of the discharge-tube is the chief seat whence the X-rays proceed from the front where the kathode rays strike the glass. If one deviates the kathode rays within the tube by means of a magnet, it is seen that the X-rays proceed from a new point, i.e., again from the end of the kathode rays.

A report about discussion of new policies for British industrial trade representatives followed Stanton’s translation and a follow-up report by Swinton. William Edwin Stanton, who would work as pastor at Lemon City north of Miami and then help organize the new Baptist church in Miami in 1896, gave lectures in early Miami about India. Stanton, a Connecticut native who had graduated from Colgate and Hamilton Theological Seminary, previously worked as a pastor in the innovative industrial community of Lowell, Massachusetts. Quarantine delays were common at Lemon City in the late 19th century, with Plant system transportation and transfer to boat rides to Miami. There was much Chinese immigration during the late 19th century, at ports including Key

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West, as Indian and Chinese coolie labor circulations developed. Arthur Stanton translated Roentgen’s discovery of X-ray radiation in early 1896 for Nature. William Arthur Stanton, who did missionary work in India beginning in 1898, in Out of the East: India’s Search for God (1938) described missionary work of Lyman Jewett in India (1854-1869) and reform preaching of Keshub Chunder Sen (1838-1884). Description of Chunder Sen’s first public lecture, 1866, included “Like a meteor, he flashed across the Eastern sky, astonishing the world with his brilliant oratory and his spiritual power’” (104). Nineteenth century scientific images of a subterranean “sea of fire” connected to active and past volcanoes and rocks formed from minerals of “common origins” received continuing interest, as studies of vitrification processes and materials including petroleum and silicon advanced (Mysen and Richet). Jewett & Co. published Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Tappan). Stanza 5 of “A Florida Ghost,” “The silent steersman landward turned,/ And ship and shore set breast to breast./ Under a palm wherethrough a planet burned/ We ate, and sank to rest,” connects marine geologists’ coastal explorations, astronomy, and materials and energy physics as well as solar eclipse. A Mediterranean solar eclipse in 1870 followed a North American solar eclipse in 1869. Expeditions to Spain and Sicily organized for the 1870 eclipse conducted advanced spectroscopy and polarization observations (Becker). Signifieds of Lanier’s signifiers include emerging “ship to shore” telecommunications and smugglers’ exchange, with subterfuge about whether a voyage would go to its destination, head out and meet another engagement, or possibly cancel. Signal technology and customs monitoring developed in marginal settings. Comments of the Reverend Rudolph Agassiz, rector at Oxford, concerning his son’s observations in China about European-Chinese relations and infrastructure development consider human trafficking of Chinese in areas with railways and graves and telegraph lines under development. Clement F. R. Allen, counsel at Pakhoi, states, “Ships have to lie at some distance from the shore, but not sufficiently far to cause the transport from ship to shore to add very much to the expense of freight” (Agassiz). W. Rupert Maclaurin describes a series of communications innovations about every 10 years beginning in 1900, “ship to shore service, wireless telephony, short-wave communications, entertainment broadcasting, portable radios, FM and television.” Lanier’s chain of signifiers leads from Kennett to Rhodes to Appollonius. Apollonius of Rhodes, a Greek poet born about 295 BCE, wrote about cities’ foundations (Ktiseis). Apollonius of Perga, a Greek born about 261 BCE, developed geometry related to mapping.

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Apollonius’s On the Burning-Mirror concerns focus and the parabola, with the fixed point and line suggesting railway and trolley or streetcar paths versus later automobile situations along with eminent domain controversies. His comparison of a dodecahedron and an icosahedron traced in one sphere deconstructively suggests controversies about species evolution and extinction, California money circulations, and beehive storage interacting with immigration companies, “he or she sews” (development of an international Singer salaried sales agent network), and object storage. Also, in Spanish, communication for Lanier after he moved to San Antonio, adjoining Mexico, in 1872, cosecha means harvest or collection of immaterial things, and cosera means a land area that can be irrigated all at once. Many Confederate Veterans moved to Texas after the Civil War. Census reports for 1880 include description of resolution of Civil War debt—repayment, conversion, and consolidation of somewhat interlocking debt that included development financing of railroads and other improvements including college and university building from the Jacksonian era, pre-Civil War infrastructure development, post-Civil War rebuilding, and construction and support of mental asylums, higher education, and schools. Virginia assigned West Virginia a share of Virginia’s debt and a share of contributions from a large literary fund, with description and analysis in the Census reports suggesting population interchange into and out of West Virginia related to areas beyond Virginia as well as to Virginia. New York also had a literary fund. The report on South Carolina’s debt conversion and consolidation describes financing of railroad building between South Carolina and Georgia, West Virginia, and the Deep South before the Civil War and more focused financing of railroad development into Florida, South Georgia, Brunswick, the Blue Ridge, Morgantown, Memphis, and Alabama and Chattanooga after the Civil War. Bonds for rebuilding Charleston were authorized under an 1838 act and were redeemable in 1868, followed by stock and bond financing under mid-1850s acts for rebuilding the capitol. One item included “the Georgia air lines.” The debt report includes discussion of scholarships and South Carolina’s asylum. Description of the Massachusetts debt includes the state’s railroad and canal investments during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s and construction of asylums. In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman includes her observation of a large increase in the number of Negroes institutionalized in insane asylums after the freeing of slaves, Denise Knight’s edition of Gilman’s diaries notes. The Maryland debt accounts include the state’s Medical University (Medical and Chirurgical Faculty, founded in 1799 in Baltimore). The New England states’ debt was

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somewhat consolidated, and repayment was to be in gold in London or, at the option of the governor and council, prospectively, payable in “lawful money of the United States.” The District of Columbia report mentions investment in expanding the Centre Market-house in 1826. The Pennsylvania accounts include a large investment for “use of free schools.” The report on Florida begins with a preamble, “Florida was ceded by Spain to the United States in 1819, and an act establishing a territorial government therein was passed by Congress March 30, 1822.” Florida’s bonded indebtedness included a state seminary fund as well as a schools fund. A February 19, 1853, New York Daily Times report on moral and religious developments noted that the Florida Methodist Episcopal Church was supervising the East Florida Seminary at Micanopy and the Fletcher Institute at Thomasville, Georgia (“Church”). Pedro Menendez D’Aviles established the first colony in America, at St. Augustine, in 1565. In the mid-1870s, Daniel Flagler, who would become chief of ordnance, was building at sites at Rock Island Arsenal and Sandy Hook, N.J., that later developed as resorts. Stephen Vincent Benét, a St. Augustine native who taught at West Point, inspected artillery tubes, and “developed a center-fire primer for metallic ammunition” during the war and worked with ordnance chief Alexander B. Dyer during postwar inquiry, was ordnance chief from 1870 to 1891. Benét, who promoted experiments in metallurgy, worked with Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs developing army production of wagons during the mid-1870s after the Panic of 1873. There was controversy about U.S. government design interacting with international production of arms and European innovation in small arms design during the 1880s (Beaver). During the 1870s Lanier played the flute in the Baltimore Orchestra, and later he taught Renaissance, medieval, and Anglo-Saxon literature at Johns Hopkins University. Lanier’s The Science of English Verse, started by 1878 and published in 1880 by Scribner’s, links poetry composition with Renaissance human interactionisms, espionage, and word play: Rhythm—-the ‘musicall numerositie’ of Puttenham—-is effected in English Poetry by one or other—-sometimes by all—-of the agencies named, to wit: by differences in Duration, in the Pitch, in the Intensity, and in the Color, of the sounds (words), together with the Rests or Silences, employed. Illustration from Queen Elizabeth’s poem on Mary Queen of Scots: ‘The fear of future foes, exiles my present joy.’

John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) published his “The Theory of Sound,” which describes sound waves mathematically, in 1877. Carlyle in Sartor Resartus refers to George Puttenham’s translation of Horace’s Arte

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of English Poesie (1589). Lanier links continuing advances in sound, recording, and electric power technologies with emerging management science control systems. In the concluding line of the 10th stanza in “A Florida Ghost,” “This yea’th can be your line,” the ironically constrained “can” suggests Cape Canaveral, a site Ponce de Leon explored while looking for Bimini before discovering the Bahamas. In 1851, William Brenshley Rye published a translation of Louis Hernandez de Biedma’s account in the tradition of Hakluyt’s translation of Ferdinando de Soto’s exploration narrative. The introduction considers rivalry of the English and Cabot versus the Spanish and Ponce de Leon, noting from de Leon’s 1512 account of discovering and naming Florida an observation of the “warlinke people of the coast of Cautio (a name given by the Indians to all the country lying between Cape Canaveral and the southern point of Florida).” Bahamians as well as Cubans immigrated to Key West in the 1870s (Johnson).“Can” also alludes to the Kennawah Canal at the James River in Richmond, site of the Tredegar Ironworks and Haxall Flour Factory. Another allusion is to emerging management science linear programming iterations. An August 16, 1873, New York Times report from Delaware shows use of management science and scientific distribution in recording increased peach shipping and an increased number of trains, with destinations including Jersey City and Philadelphia, and expanded salmon canning in Oregon is reported August 25, 1873 (“Salmon”). As cannery reports continued, in February 13 and 15, 1878, the New York Times carried a classified ad announcing “Edison’s Speaking Phonograph (‘Speech Bottler’)” near a Putnam’s ad for Bayard Taylor’s Lectures on German Literature (“Edison’s”). “Can” also might allude to the Battle of Cannae, 216 BC, Carthage versus Rome, in the Punic wars. With “This yea’th can be your line,” Lanier alludes also to the marginality of the heath, and, deconstructively, to the 23rd Psalm and “Sí.” Lanier in The Science of English Verse also links biophysics and cognition psychology, referring to Charles Wheatstone and Hermann von Helmholz, “who applied the principle [tone color for determining constituents of sound, sensitivity, images display] in constructing an apparatus of tubes and membranes.” Wheatstone’s inventions included the stereoscope, and von Helmholtz’s research on physics of the senses included invention of the ophthalmoscope. Lanier suggests that “tone color” “should bring into the reader’s mind the principle of segmentary or partial vibrations which combine with the fundamental vibrations (of a string or of a column of air in an instrumental tube) to form a composite tone,—-as different light-vibrations combine to form a composite color, like purple. . . .” “A formal poem is always composed of such sounds and

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silences (or of the signs, or of the conceptions, of such sounds and silences) as can be co-ordinated by the ear.” The Signal Corps used an unusual telegraph, the Beardslee telegraph, as well as flag signals that were limited by weather conditions. Lanier’s analysis suggests harmonics, polyphonics, and parallel processing. James Sully, in “The Question of Visual Perception in Germany,” Mind April 1878, similarly described Johannes Müller’s work on spatial perception, contrasting “excitation” and “spatially dark,” categorizing subjective or retinal perception, and analyzing the division and connection of optic nerve fibers. Sully describes Lotze’s and Wundt’s work on “local coloring” of the retina, with perceptions of purple as violet and then blue in moving from center to periphery as well as Helmholtz and Wundt’s views of the influence of past experience in binocular perception (167-68, 182-84). Inventor George W. Beardslee of New York developed electric storage batteries as well as the Beardslee, which worked with the letters of the alphabet on a dial and was designed to be carried easily. The Signal Corps ran “telegraph trains,” carrying the magneto field telegraph, which had a limited range and used wires although it did not require batteries, in wagons. Beardslee’s son Frederick ran Signal Corps telegraph trains in 1862. Sometimes other military telegraphers used Morse Code telegraphy while the Signal Corps used the Beardslee. The Signal Corps also used cryptographic disks and changed codes (Thompson). Edge and interacting cultivation images in “A Florida Ghost” suggest clandestine and interactive dissemination and application of new automation, electricity, and radio technologies like Edison’s vote counting machine, telegraphy and electricity regulator, and electric light. Images in the poem, which has a few signifying metrical variations within stanzas generally of three lines of iambic quatrameter and a final line of iambic tetrameter, link smugglers’ and salvagers’ circulations to Civil War times and to the contemporary setting of the poem. Britain’s Limited Liability Act of 1862, the year Congress passed the Union Pacific Act to sponsor transcontinental railroad building, extended provisions for limiting liability of shareholders in corporations, including provisions to allow insurance companies to organize with limited liability (Braithwaite and Drahos). The previous year, the British government was working on ways for Britain to increase cotton production in India as the Civil War and its blockades intensified. The British focused on developing communications for knowing about cotton supply and transportation and encouraged developments like the Manchester Cotton Co. Cotton producers were ambivalent about having India try to replace the United States as the major source of Lancaster’s cotton, although American cotton was grown in the

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Dharwar district. In September 1862, the year of the Trent affair, suggesting a subterranean shift in enterprise management alliances in India and Britain, Lord Elgin reported a proposal that the Government of India should buy all the cotton in the country and send it to the coast in case it could find a market there. Following this diplomatic conflict, the U.S.S. San Jacinto’s taking Confederate agents Mason and Slidell from a British vessel to prison, England set an embargo on exporting war materials to the United States. England’s imports of cotton from India increased in 1862 although its total cotton imports were less than half of its 1861 cotton imports, falling from 1,256,984,736 to 523,973,296 lbs., also with a large price increase for Indian cotton in Liverpool. Expanded efforts the next year included cultivating Bombay cotton and growing “exotic” cotton with seed from New Orleans or Egypt. After cotton dealers set up agencies in Karachi for adulterating cotton, a commission was formed and the Cotton Frauds Act of 1863 was passed. The price of British imports of Indian cotton during the Civil War increased after 1862, as India’s share of British cotton imports declined. Much of the work in improving India’s communication system was easing the transport of cotton from the interior to ports (Harnetty 73, 80, 95). The Blyth brothers worked with development of cotton supplies in Paraguay that began in 1862, when Francisco Solano López succeeded his father as president (Whigham 6-7, 9), also the year after the death of Prince Albert. Marine insurance rates increased by 1863. Foreign enterprise took on much U.S. shipping tonnage (Huebner 439). Images in Stanza 3 concluding with “dusk diver Eve” paradoxically alluding to ancient Greek hunt and romance reinterpreted in the medieval Guigemar also suggest Harriet Tubman, Jefferson Davis’s escape wearing his wife’s dress, and Judah P. Benjamin’s incremental escape from the Florida Keys to England in disguises including a ship’s cook’s. Images of interchanges also suggest the Knights Hospitalers’ journeys between Paris and Palestine during the Crusades and circulations around Harriet Beecher Stowe at Mandarin on the St. Johns River. The image of “old broideries,” with English-Spanish translingualities also elsewhere in the poem, suggests Stephen Crane and his wife and Jacksonville and bordellos. Ephraim Sturdevandt of Cleveland bought land in Miami, and his daughter Julia Tuttle visited south Florida in 1872. The American Neurological Association organized in 1874. Henry Plant worked for Adams Express and in package and funds delivery during the Civil War, reorganized railroads and shipping after the war, and then developed St. Petersburg on the west coast as a health resort during the 1880s and 1890s, as Russia and eastern and western Europe developed sanitoria tourism and northern New York and the Appalachians

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redeveloped resort areas started in the 18th century around mineral springs. After Spain gave Florida to Britain to gain control of Havana in 1763 following Britain’s takeover of Havana the previous year, development during 20 years of British control included building the King’s Road between Savannah and St. Augustine and settling a site, now the Jacksonville area, where the road crossed the St. John’s River. Huguenots had settled on the St. Johns River in 1562 (AAA; “Jacksonville”). Transformation of register and use of dialect in “A Florida Ghost” suggest economic transformations and itinerancies. In the Stanza 4, “brimming East,” and “oval moon, a perfect pearl” represent Early Modern art and literature (the Pearl poem, chiaroscuro, Ingres) and transnationalities including Uniate and Familist interactions. Medieval exoticisms related to sea voyages and colonialisms suggest hope in an emerging empire as Chinese immigration conflicts interacted with U.S. transmigration. Vegetation species, dialect, and geographic links in “Investments? Orange plantin’?, Pine?/ Hotel? or Sanitorium . . .” represent migrations from various northern streams including travels through the swamps at the Florida-Georgia border down to the coastal communities of Tampa and Key West as well as clandestine exchanges around lumbering between the Gulf Cost, central Florida, and the East Coast. “’Cal’latin’ for to build right off/ A c’lossal sanitarium” links glottal, closing, and gloss, suggesting garroting, also alluding to the ancient world classical elements of late 19th century hotel building and earlier plantation construction, including Gulf Coast plantations built in the time of cotton cash crop slavery. The line refers to the Shakespearean Caliban, to Albert Gallatin (U.S. treasury secretary during the Napoleonic Wars), to D. C. Gilman and language and speech studies, likely to Nicholas Gilman, and to Confederate money losses. “Fur from this tarnal land,” the concluding line in Stanza 18, links carnal, tariff, tarn (mountain lake or pool, related to Agassiz's glacier studies), and the extensiveness and cyclical continuity of salvaging, with Russia and France developing fur trade in the New World, especially Canada, and marine geologist William Dall leading Western Telegraph’s expedition to Alaska in 1863-68. Saskatchewan is an important uranium mining site (“Sasketchewan”). The Suez Canal opened in 1869. The romance-seduction images in Stanza 4, “In that large luster all our haste surceased,/ The sail seemed fain to furl,” and “Down silver distances that faintly gleamed/ On to Infinity,” in Stanza 6 link Columbus finally landing, John Dee, numerological Elizabethan-era colonization and empire promoter associated with the Familists, and emerging late 19th century

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volatility and inertia in economic development. Images linking the Florida ghost and commerce, including “For here I walk, forevermore,/ A-trying’ to make it gee/ How one same wind could blow my ship to shore/ And my hotel to sea!” in Stanza 21, the last stanza, allude to hostaging themes in maritime law and colonial empire. Deconstructing gee suggests Lee, with Lanier also resembling Lee. Gee is an Indian food ingredient, rancid butter, carried on treks.

Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater near Tampa. Photo Martha L. Reiner.

A Dutch-English connection in architectural pattern language in the United States follows from links between England and Continental Europe during the Merchant Adventurers’ mid-15th to early 17th century monopoly of English merchants trading unfinished woolens from a headquarters in Antwerp. Architecture in the Hawthorne, Stowe, and Florida circulations, with porches and peaked roofs, is in a New York Dutch-New England Puritan-Habsburg. This stream blends into the Creole architecture range in Florida, with British country cottage influences joining French and Spanish influences along the Atlantic coast and along coasts of the southeastern and southwestern states. These pattern language influences continued from the early 19th century into the post-Civil War era. Lanier published his Florida, Its Scenery, Climate, and History, with an account of other Winter Resorts and Key West in 1876, when he found Florida’s main industry in agriculture, oysters and fishing, and lumbering. Savannah exported cotton, lumber, and rice. A railroad ran from Savannah to Live Oak in Florida, and steamships ran from Savannah to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Pilatka on the St. John’s, Lanier observed (167). Dr. Benjamin B. Strobel, a Charleston physician who studied at the Medical College of South Carolina and learned natural history with Dr. John Bachman (pronounced back or bock), a Lutheran minister in a circle of naturalists around the medical college and the

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College of Charleston, moved to Key West in 1829, wrote about the wrecking business, and became editor of the Key West Gazette. John Audubon visited Strobel at Key West with a letter of introduction from Bachman, who had met Louis Agassiz after visiting botanist John Bartram at Philadelphia (Strobel, Bachman). Britain changed shipping regulations and tariffs as a free trade movement began in 1830 (Brown), as British abolition of slavery developed. Deconstructively, “gee” also leads to Jesuit. Daniel L. Schlafly Jr. observes connections between Jesuits in Maryland and the interaction of Central and Western Europe, Poland, and the Vatican with imperial Russia in educational formations in the late 18th century and into the 1820s and 1830s, including émigré tutors. Russian prejudices against Jesuits were reduced as there was increased intrest in Masonry, Roman Catholicism, and mysticisms. Studies at Jesuit colleges in Belorussia included civil architecture and explosives (425-27, 430, 432-33). Robert Emmett Corran finds that during the mid-19th century Jesuit university foundings increased in the United States and that by the Civil War the Society of Jesus was very influential within the geography of sectarian colleges. Michael Accolti and John Nobili started a Jesuit college in a Franciscan seminary at Santa Clara, California, as they arrived in San Francisco in 1849 at the peak of the Gold Rush, and they convinced Turin, a Jesuit province, to develop California as a mission. The United States conducted various negotiations in the 1850s and 1860s with the Italian government about harbor, warehouse, and customs arrangements with government units including Turin related to Spezia and Sardinia, agreeing in 1870 for transfer of a U.S. depot from Genoa to Spezia (Ropp, Marraro). Joseph Bayma, advancing stereochemistry, went to Santa Clara in the 1860s, and the college developed studies in astronomy and radio (Corran). Fort Point at San Francisco, among the “Third System” of forts planned around the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific during the Madison and Monroe administrations and into the Jackson administration, was built from 1853 to 1861, the year the Pony Express, which ran between San Francisco and St. Louis, was discontinued. The first branch of the U.S. mint opened at San Francisco in 1854. The first electric telegraph service began in San Francisco, from the Merchants Exchange to Point Lobos, in 1849. Telegraph service started between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1860 and between San Francisco and New York in 1862 (“San Francisco History”). There was much immigration from Cuba to Key West during wars from 1868 to 1878 leading toward the Spanish-American War and Cuba’s independence from Spain (Harper 279).

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Lanier published his Sketches of India in 1876, after he published his Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History in 1875. He wrote about indigo cultivation, an enterprise also of colonists a Dr. Turnbull brought to New Smyrna on the Halifax River south of St. Augustine in 1767. The German government had prohibited indigo culture and manufactures in 1577, and the English Parliament had passed acts against indigo (“Sketches of India, 1876, and “St. Augustine and April, 1877-78, Retrospects and Prospects). British planters in Florida followed the East India Company’s cultivation of indigo, Lanier found. On the banks of the “great lagoon of Florida which is called the Indian River” (Retrospects and Prospects 208), he saw ditches and young forests growing on what he assumed were proprietary indigo plantations of English settlers granted land after Florida went under English protection. These were abandoned after Florida was given to the United States in 1819-21. In the early 19th century, Perkins companies at Boston and Canton were leading opium traders, with much trading of Turkish opium from the Levant centered at Smyrna shifted to Chinese boats at American ports (Stelle 65). Lanier also describes interactions between the Spanish and French in Central America and the West Indies and indigo planters in India (Retrospects and Prospects 209). Victoria was named Empress of India in 1876. Nature essayist Thomas Wentworth Higginson of New England, an abolitionist interested in women’s suffrage, worked in indigo cultivation at one time. His cousin Henry Lee Higginson, who joined his wife’s cousin John Cabot Lee in a private banking partnership in 1868 when he was 34, would oppose Brandeis’s advance and appointment as an associate judge on the Supreme Court (Katz). Samuel Gilman, a son of Gloucester merchant Frederick Gilman’s, was recruited from Harvard to lead the previously Congregational Unitarian church in Charleston, a center of merchants from diverse groups who were in contact with European and New England ideas. His sister married the leading antislavery trial attorney of Boston and helped him shelter fugitives (Howe). Lanier’s “St. Augustine in April” describes links between the St. Augustine and St. John’s communities—the churches, rail lines and tram Ways—and the visits of consumptives and asthmatics to St. Augustine in April. Lanier tells about the reading-room in the back of the post-office on the Plaza, “the lovely sailing-grounds around the harbor . . . all in a white zigzag with races of the yacht-club and with more leisurely mazes of the pleasure-boat fleet.” He notes that there were complaints about construction of a sea-wall (related to lover’s lane activities) and observes much “Carlylese” spoken (26, 42). His Florida essays also published in his Retrospects and Prospects collection include description of the water

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works, the Ogechee (or Ogeechee) Canal between the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers, and the police department, “precisely” what one would expect “in an Arcadian city: being a plain building in a cool and shady brick court, overhung by trees, covered with climbing vines, and, to the view of the passer-by at least, as clean as a Dutch parlor” (168). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s diary entry in Providence the day after her description of a Boston January 2, 1880, visit with her friend “the gentle Greeley” (Lewis, although possibly Horace), looking at zoological and archaeological museums, includes an unusual reference to receiving a card from “’Henry Alford Short,’” “all in a box,” “Beuteous.” In the next entry, January 23, 1880, Gilman records memories in verse, including a Macbethean “6 cents I did spend, on three pinks to the end/ of enhancing L. G.’s valentine,/ and the rest of the day, spent in painting the spray,/ with effect most uncommonly fine.” “Bolan” sifts ashes. “Had a letter from T. full of pleasure and glee,/ announcing his boxes arrival.” These lines in chains of signifiers suggest collaboration with Troth on Hymns of the Marshes illustrations that would be published in 1907 with poems that Lanier wrote in 1877-78. Gilman’s February 9, 1880, entry includes “Hazards suspected.” Her correspondence with “the pleasing Almy” came by telegraph. “I see a letter on the step. I claw at it” links to the Hymns of the Marshes cover illustration and to the machinic or espionage placement of a cat from a tree branch into a swamp. October 28, 1883, Gilman writes, “Sam . . . Brought me three little tea roses, to paint. . . . I paint little greentrees card.” October 29, Gilman sees Jessie Taylor & Miss George. November 5, 1883, Carrie Hazard, who would become president of Wellesley in 1899, brings Gilman orders for cards. Gilman paints other flowers November 12, 1883, “harebells and rosebud,” and corresponds with Walter [Stetson]. November 19, 1883, Gilman goes to “Ath” [Gilman visited Atherton and atheneums including Howard Atheneum] and gets “’Hannah Thurston’ and address of magazines.” Denise Knight’s edition of Gilman’s diary glosses the reference as a novel written by Bayard Taylor. Gilman buys tuberose for Madame Charbonnier on November 21 and paints a gladiolus panel on November 23. November 22, 1883, “Divers children call. Lend ‘Three Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ to Fred Hines. Call on Lu Manchester. . . .” These lines suggest advances in power generation by Elihu Thomson and German and Asian groups around the time of the 1884 Philadelphia Electrical Exhibition as well as marine geologists’ circulations. “Beuteou” and “Bolan” suggest boat, bote, and Butte and western minerals exploration and mining links with Harvard, notably in geologist Leon Griswold’s work. References to a friend named John Mason prefigure the

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husband character John that Gilman would write into her “The Yellow Wallpaper” and link revolution and psychiatry. September 17, 1886, Gilman paints “four cards; Jap. Apple, yellow lily, gentian, & cardinal”; these images also suggest the Hymns to the Marshes illustrations, including the lily shape in the lower left or at a California-Mexican geography. September 20, 1886, Gilman walks with Walter and Katharine (her husband, Walter Stetson, and daughter Katharine). “He came home early, tired of getting his pictures off to Pittsfield” suggests Pennsylvania, William Pitt and Quaker merchant Johns Hopkins, artists forming into the Rose Hill group near Philadelphia, and mining circulations that Lanier and his friend Bayard Taylor worked with. Gilman’s reference to Lu Peck and work with the dictionary, apparently the Century Dictionary edited by Peck, suggest cryptographic work and connection to Naval munitions energy research. February 15, 1887, Gilman, also describing financial crisis, notes “Finish of valentine.” January 22, 1890, Gilman’s diary records “Did two cards for Mr. Taylor, things to mark his hours of return, charged [$]3.00.” Gilman was sent to a Philadelphia sanitorium for treatment with Silas Weir Mitchell in April 1887, a few months after she began to emphasize women’s issues in her reading, including Higginson’s Forum article on women’s suffrage. A. P. Antipppas and Carol Flake in “Sidney Lanier’s Letters to Clare deGraffenreid” note that Lanier’s close friend Clare deGraffenreid, like Lanier’s wife Mary Day a Macon native, and living in Philadelphia while the Laniers lived in Baltimore, worked at the U.S. Patent Office after Lanier’s 1881 death until June 11, 1886. Henry Troth Coates published The Fireside Encyclopedia of Poetry, comprising the best poems of the most famous writers, English and American, with Porter & Coates of Philadelphia in 1878 and 1881. The photography of Fred Holland Day of Norwood, Massachusetts, a Bohemian in Boston during the 1880s who would later exhibit Henry Troth’s works, included black male nudes. In 1895, Day became the third American, following Alfred Stieglitz and Rudolf Eickenmeyer, in the Linked Ring, an English photographic society (George Eastman House; Fanning; Wikipedia). June 9, 1880, Gilman’s diary records, “I sit in theater between Emma Holland, and Mr. G. Sen[ior].” In December 1879 she attended anatomy school and visited with the Hollands. January 30, 1881, Gilman notes of her Aunt C [Caroline Robbins], “Annawards reads ‘Sevenoaks’” [by Josiah Holland] “quite persistently.” Josiah Holland had graduated from Berkshire Medical College at Pittsfield before supervising schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the late 1940s, writing for and editing the Springfield Republican in the 1850s and 1860s, and then founding Scribner’s Magazine in 1870 with

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Roswell Smith (National Cyclopedia of American Biography). W. M. Meredith and Henry Troth published Memorial to the Legislature respecting a canal on the west side of the Schhuylkill: read in Select and Common Councils, January 29, 1835, and passed in 1835. Another interrelation is that John Taylor Gilman was Governor of New Hampshire in the 1790s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s brother Tom Perkins in Nevada, who had studied at MIT and then moved to Nevada in 1879 as a railroad surveyor, was running for county surveyor in October 1880. A General Gilman surveyed the Okefenokee Swamp in 1879 (“Okenfenokee”; Lane). Applying conceptual and spatial mapping analysis (Jameson) to the Leon Punderson lithographs for William Dall’s Voyages of the Blake, Blake Mollusca Plate XVIII, 1877 to 1880, with publication in 1885-86 and 1889 after a preliminary report in 1881, reveals representations of invention and discovery and migrations. In illustration 6, Aclis nucleata Dall is in the mountain west, site of uranium mining at Montana south of uranium mining at Saskatchewan. Nikola Tesla worked for Thomas Edison in the 1880s and did electricity demonstrations at Colorado Springs in the 1890s. Aclis Egregia at a lower right “Florida space” flows to transversal spiral funneling at Scala contorquata Dall, with Victrola detail, at a Utah and Colorado uranium mining area. Details in spatiality of a Canaveral-Ft Myers transversal links late 19th century naval propulsion research and Edison’s later move to Ft. Myers. Abolitionist, feminist, and women’s economic and legal rights scholar Caroline Healy Dall, a Bostonian, the mother of the naturalist, geological surveyor, and Smithsonian curator, was a daughter of an India merchant. In the 1840s she did a census of free blacks in Washington, and in the early 1850s, before her husband moved to Calcutta as a Unitarian missionary, she was a Canadian agent to a society helping fugitive slaves (Dimand, Unitarian Universalist Historical Society). Lanier’s finding a “gee” allusion has complex contexts related to technological innovation as well as to transregional and transnational circulations. Lake Punderson is in Geauga County in northeastern Ohio, where many Amish settled. Early and mid19th century horse trading in Geauga with markets in the northeast and in New Orleans for horses bred in Ohio was related to a Mormon presence. Pennsylvania Dutch including Mennonites and Dunkers as well as Amish brought Conestoga wagons to Geauga, a site also of contact with French Canada. Mules also were raised in Ohio, west of Columbus. These were sold to plantations and to travelers going to California and Oregon. Demand for draft animals increased during the Mexican American War and as the Civil War began. The plantation trade in mules ended as the Civil War began. Mules were sent to Baltimore and shipped to the West

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Indies (Jones). Mortimer Dormer Leggett, who moved from Ithaca to Geauga, Ohio, when he was 15, studied medicine and law and practiced law. He served as a volunteer on the staff of his friend George C. McClellan in western Virginia as the Civil War began. He raised a volunteer unit in Ohio, was commissioned a colonel in 1862, commanded a division in the Atlanta Campaign and Sherman’s March to the Sea, and was in the Carolinas campaign in 1865. Leggett returned to Ohio, practicing law in Zanesville. President Grant appointed him U.S. Commissioner of Patents in 1871, and he served until 1881, when he returned to private practice. In 1884 he founded a company that became part of General Electric (Wikipedia). Kronstein and Till in a 1947 study note that Leggett as commissioner wrote to the Secretary of the Interior in 1873 about the importance of the upcoming conference that led to the International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property at Vienna in 1883, endorsing English, American, and Belgian laws and a statement for Germany by German engineers and forming an industrial union. Leggett argued that patent laws should protect original inventors, differentiate importing and innovating, and harmonize nations’ industrial innovation and advancement. Kronstein and Till note that 1877 Patent Office hearings include comments from a patent attorney noting comments by Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) to a steam engineers’ group in a British scientific society after the exhibition advocating patent reform along with comments by Hulse, English judge of textile machinery at the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876), about American advances, as Germans were advancing in electrical technologies. Thomson presented findings about thermodynamics, undulatory theory, solar heat, solar energy emission, and refraction around the sun (James). F. A. Ober’s “Florida and the West Indies,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York (1886), in presenting new information on economic geography, is written as if it is reviewing all the explorers that “A Florida Ghost” might refer to. The photo illustrations from Lanier, Hymns of the Marshes, from Nature by Henry Troth (Scribner’s, 1907), resemble stereoscope images. Pennsylvania State University’s collection includes many Troth glass lantern slides. Imagery in the Hymns to the Marshes collection includes a dodo-shaped pool (alluding to bimetallism and evolutionary biology and likely to Dodo in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), a pond suggesting industrial processing, and placement of a cat figure (suggesting the cathode ray, invented in 1879) from a tree branch, with a subterranean resort acrobat diver figure suggesting the Spanish inversionar idea of investment, into a swamp.

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Lanier’s “A Florida Ghost” poem represents inns and alehouses, English New World settlements, and encomiendas in Atlantic circulations. Gãmini Salgãdo suggests there was connection as well as differentiation of inn and alehouse related to an “organized anti-society” of Elizabethan roads, with inns centrally located and licensed to sell wine and alehouses obscure and possibly unlicensed Salgãdo). John C. Appleby describes Francis Drake’s making England’s first contact with the East Indies at Ternate as unplanned and suggests that English imperial rhetoric emerging by the 1570s, including Dee’s Arthurian myths like the Welsh Prince Madoc’s discovering America in the 12th century, was important although not widely acknowledged as serious (62).

Henry Troth photo illustration from Lanier’s Hymns of the Marsh, 1899.

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Henry Troth photo illustration from Lanier’s Hymns of the Marsh, 1899. “And would I know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in/ On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.”

English goals of self-sustaining, self-reproducing settlement interacted with continuing privateering and competition from Dutch colonization (Appleby 60-61, 66; Armitage 106-07, 112, 113). Hernán Cortez from Medillín in Extremadura, Castille, Spain, had been in the Indies for about 12 years when Diego Velázquez chose him to administer a holding process at Yucatan. Cortez would develop encomienda settlement and trade. Suggesting what Lanier would write about broideries, Bartolomé de las Casas wrote in his Historia de las Indies, “Finally, Cortez showed himself as a great Lord and as if he had been borne in brocade and with such authority that no one dared to show him anything but love.” Cortez led an exploration that stayed some time in Cuba. In Mexico he received gold, set up trading that interacted with slaving and remote areas and included items possibly from earlier expeditions, organized procurement, observed Indian rituals, criticized human sacrifice, worked with alliances against Montezuma, led battles. He sent an unusual map of Tenochitlan resembling the brain and the Chinese World Map of 1500 with one of his reports to Charles V. A Nuremburg woodcut map following from Cortez’s notes and emphasizing the inside-outside perspective of the Chinese map was published in 1520 before his letters about the New World were published in 1524. Cortez explored and received gold, observed Indian rituals, worked with alliances against Montezuma, led battles, and began to manufacture gunpowder (Thomas 40, 116, 120-24, 149-150, 154-55, 197, 268-69, 317-19, 579, 592; Swift). Lanier wrote and published his “Florida Ghost” in 1877. In 1577, when Anglo-Spanish relations worsened after some years of gradual improvement, Drake’s voyage into South

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American territory not claimed by other Christian princes was, at least officially, not just for plunder in world of piracy. Drake and others in the navy interested Queen Elizabeth, officials, and courtiers in building an alliance between English and native forces, including escaped slave cimarrones, who countered Spain, to develop colonies (Appleby 61-62). After the end of his presidency, from 1877 to 1879, Grant sailed with his family on a round-the-world tour. He lived in New York City, and in 1881 he became president of Gould’s Texas Southern Railroad and developed contacts with Mexico. He became sick in 1884 and died in 1885. The design of a temporary tomb for Grant at Riverside Drive in New York is a vault with rustication design resembling brickwork arches of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Charleston and the top level of the Crystal Palace at the 1851 Exhibition in London. “Marsh Song at Sunset” among Lanier’s Hymns of the Marshes poems (1877-78, 1907) would work more directly with Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero image chains, emphasizing pardon of injurers. “Bright Arielcloud” alludes to atmospheric and electricity research described also in Thoreau’s “Haze” nature poem and suggests patent conflicts. The Hymns of the Marshes illustrations link environmental, biological, and industrial processes. The cover illustration suggests emergent development of radiation along with the interacting circulations of the marine geologists and blockade runners. John C. French in a 1933 MLN article states that notes at the beginning and ending of Lanier’s Bohn Library edition of George Long’s Discourses of Epicetus were plans for three series of nature poems, including the Hymns of the Marshes series. A tentative title at this point was “Swashbuckler” (27). The final illustration suggests marsh border migration and espionage-intelligence circulations placement, precision of new technologies like the cathode ray, invented by Karl Ferdinand Braun, a German physicist, in 1879, and concern about contact with new radiation technologies. “All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss/ The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan,” in Hymns of the Marsh, “Sunrise,” alludes to emerging work toward radiation imaging as well as to smuggling scenarios. In Harper’s August 1856 issue, “The Dismal Swamp” follows “On the Application of Photography to Printing,” suggesting emerging bioimaging technologies and including the hypothetical comment, “’Well, it’s a specimen of Brussels lace, magnified by the electric telegraph” (435). “Astronomocial Observatories in the United States” appeared in the June 1856 issue. In a July 9, 1887, Scientific American supplement, Elihu Thomson reports retrospectively in “The Phenomenon of Alternating Current,” following his New York talk to the American Institute of Electrical

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Engineers reported in Electrical World, on discovery-invention and demonstration of a double dynamo that could be used to start a conventional dynamo. Among other reports in the supplement is an April 1887 talk by A. E. Outerbridge Jr. to the Franklin Institute about refracted carbon casting and new industrial patterning, producing refractorily carbonized fabric. Outerbridge introduces his report of embroidered fabric and lace or grass and leaves placed in a green sand mold and covered with molten metal producing patterned carbonized, noncombustible fabric sheets that could be used as molds for other design work, developing the idea that some processes were discovered earlier, even in ancient times, and then went out of circulation. With new techniques, it was possible to retain volatile compounds. Extremely fine mesh, with holes less than 1/50th of an inch, kept the two layers of molten iron from running together in the casting. The 1887 report of process imaging resembles 1896 reports of Roentgen’s radiation imaging. An April 8, 1897, Nature magazine brief item from the Academy of Sciences meeting in Paris in March reports, "By the molecular bombardment in a high vacuum, Crookes showed in 1879 that the face of the diamond became covered with a blackish deposit. By its behaviour towards oxidizing agents this deposit is now shown to consist of graphite, proving that the diamond must attain on its surface a temperature approaching that of the electric arc" (551). Uranium and diamond mining developed along with research on heat, explosives, and electricity. Pearl, silver, and luminescence images in Lanier’s poetry signify cultural orientalism and intoxification sometimes related to bondage, and they suggest developments with uranium, which was used in pottery glazes and as reinforcing in photographic plates in the 19th century. German-Czech mountain areas near Schneeberg were mined for silver as early as the 12th century, later yielding cobalt and uranium along with silver and cobalt. Cobalt was used in blue dyes, and Netherlands tile makers and the Schneeberg mine owners as the “Cobalt Chamber” controlled the world market in blue dye until the 19th century. In 1789, Professor Klaproth reported his extraction of a new material with unusual properties, initially uranium oxide. In a mid-1990s essay, Stephen Greenblatt defines culture as “a particular network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas, and—through institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage— people.” Literary work with “prevailing codes governing human mobility and constraint,” may transform culture as it is presented (Greenblatt, “Culture”). Working as a “specialist in cultural exchange,” Lanier includes diffuse representation of bondage and migration along with suggestions of

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emerging technological and industrial change. Lanier’s “scientific” poetry is scientific in composition method, and it includes representation of science. Lanier’s “A Florida Ghost” links explorers, naturalists, mapping, travelers, innovation, and development retrospectively and prospectively.

Works Cited “Academy of Sciences, Paris.” Nature. 53.1 (April 8, 1897): 551. Adams, Charlotte. “Giorgione’s Venice.” Appleton’s 2.3 (March 1877): 247-254. Dec. 1, 2007. . “Saskatchewan.” December 10, 2007. . Schlafly, Daniel L. Jr. “True to the Ratio Studiorum? Jesuit Colleges in St. Petersburg.” History of Education Quarterly 37. 4 (Winter 1997): 421434. Seitz, Frederick, and Norman G. Einspruch. “First Use of Crystal Rectifiers in Wireless.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 42.4 (Dec. 1998): 639-642. Sharma, Virendra Nath. Sa Wai Jai Singh and His Astronomy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsi dass, 1995. “The Signal Corps.” Nov. 1, 2007; Jan. 12, 2007. . Stealey, John E. III. “Slavery in the Kanawha Salt Industry.” Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South. Ed. John C. Inscoe. U P of KY, 2000. Stelle, Charles C. “American Trade in Opium to China, 1821-1839.” The Pacific Historical Review 10.1 (Mar. 1941), 57-74. Strobel, Dr. Benjamin B. Account of John J. Audubon. elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v080n04/p0462-p0466.pdf. Sullivan, William A. “Did Labor Support Andrew Jackson?” Political Science Quarterly 62.4 (Dec. 1947): 569-580. Sully, James. “The Question of Visual Perception in Germany.” Mind 3.10 (April 1878): 167-195. Swift, Michael. Mapping the World. London: Chartwell, Compendium, 2006. Tappan, Lewis. “Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society [Part 1, 2].” The Journal of Negro History 12.2 (Apr., Jul. 1927): 179-204. “Herbert W. Bowen: An International Figure of the Month,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 1903, digitized May 30, 2007. Tassey, Gregory. “Infratechnologies and the Role of Government.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 21 (1982): 163-180. “Underinvestment in Public Good Technologies.” Link, Albert N. and F. M. Scherer, eds. Essays in Honor of Edwin Mansfield: The Economics of R&D, Innovation, and Technological Change. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2005. 61-85. Tebeau, Charleton W. They Lived in the Park. Everglades Natural History Association. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1963. Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortéz, and the Fall of Old Mexico. Touchstone. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Thomson, Elihu. “The Phenomenon of Alternating Current.” Scientific American (Supplement) 24.610 (July 9, 1887). Dec. 1, 2007. . Thompson, George Raynor. “Civil War Signals.” Military Affairs 18.4 (Winter 1954): 188-201. Troth, Henry. Photographs at George Eastman House, Penn State Digital Library Collection. Tulip Poplar Blossoms, Lady Fern. George Eastman House. Henry Troth photographs. . U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Report on Valuation, Taxation, and Public Indebtedness. 1880 Census. U.S., Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management. “Ghost Towns/Historic Mines.” Nov. 1, 2007. www.blm.gov/style/medialib/blm/mt/blm_information.Par.42819.File. dat/Ghost%20Towns.pdf. “The Virginia City Mining District.”Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Oct. 15, 2007. www.deq.state.mt.us/abandonedmines/linkdocs/techdocs/129tech.asp Wasserman, J. M. Afrikaners in Natal up the Outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War. Chapter 1 of dissertation. University of Praetoria, 2005. Whigham, Thomas. “Paraguay and the World Cotton Market: The ‘Crisis’ of the 1860s.” Agricultural History 68.3 (Summer 1994): 1-15. White House Historical Association. Grant and Stetson House. Dec. 1, 2007. . Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Richter 1158-59, 1162, 1164, 1153-1172. ”The Yellow Wallpaper.” November 1, 2007. http://manybooks.net/titles/gilmanchetext99ylwlp10.html

CONTEMPORARY FLORIDA

CONNIE MAY FOWLER’S REMEMBERING BLUE AND THE ECOCENTRIC NOVEL LAURA S. HEAD

“I wrote Remembering Blue from the same place deep inside myself from which I approach all my fiction, which is this kind of deep, primordial muck in my head. . . . it’s really our shared primordial muck. The muck insists that I write. It drives me. . . . The material, the story, is rooted in the muck.” —Connie May Fowler, Interview with Mary Glenney

Connie May Fowler’s comment about “primordial muck. . .our shared primordial muck” has rich implications. First, it prefigures the form and the content of her novel Remembering Blue. Formally, the novel is a quest, as one might expect from her statement that it had its genesis in “our shared primordial muck” in her head, a reference to Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious as the source of universal patterns and archetypes in art. Thematically, it is a quest for individual identity. But this primordial muck was generative of all life on earth, so it is also a reminder that identity is contextual and depends upon the interrelationships among the individual, the human community, and the rest of nature. Finally, the image of life coming from soil and water—or “primordial muck”—recalls the universal association between soil, water, and the feminine, that other source of life. As an exposition and critique of these ideas, Remembering Blue unites the concerns of both ecology and feminism. In this paper I argue that it is an example of what should be labeled the ecocentric novel.

Theoretical Background The identification of the female and the natural world is ubiquitous.1 Both the earth and nature have from ancient times been referred to as mothers, and the fertility of women likened to that of land and sea. Therefore, ecological and feminist issues have long been connected. Contemporary ecofeminists contend there are even stronger reasons to connect the nature and fate of women and the environment: Western culture has viewed nature, like women, as essentially passive, a ground

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for, or a subject or victim of, action by another (Gaard, “Living” 1). Our language itself endorses this: according to the OED, the word “environment” is defined only by what it surrounds. It exists—it has meaning-only in the presence of something else. Like the feminine, it is defined by what it is not, not by what it is. Attached to that definition, of course, is a value system that judges both nature and the feminine to be inferior because they are, by definition, lacking in what males in western culture consider valuable: reason, independence, mobility, etc. Even if we refuse to accept that nature or the feminine is inferior to human beings or the masculine, we are caught in a duality, states Val Plumwood. As long as we define one only in terms of the other, the duality remains. It is difficult to escape because JudeoChristian religions and Western philosophy, from Plato onward, have endorsed it; because it has become naturalized in our society, it underlies many of our basic conceptions about ourselves and the world and permeates our art. In “American Literary Environmentalism,” David Mazel suggests that this dualism results in a particular type of plot that is evident in mythic patterns and has been described by Jurij Lotman in terms of topography (141). Lotman argues for the existence of only two fundamental character types in myth: . . .those who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with respect to plot-space, who can change their place in the structure of the artistic world and cross the frontier, the basic topological feature of this space, and those who are immobile, who represent, in fact, a function of this space. (Lotman 167)

Mazel links Lotman’s description of plot elements to Donna Haraway’s conception of scientific research, in which she also identifies two aspects or characters, “the hero and. . .the space through which he moves,” claiming that the hero is the “creator of differences” because he separates the self from the other—that which is outside the self and is to be conquered. The object of conquest and resistance becomes the female or the subject race: the “other.” (Mazel 141, Haraway 234) In the heroic quest, the archetypal journey which Joseph Campbell has called the “monomyth,” and which is ubiquitous in Western literature, this dualistic pattern is clear. In the three basic stages of the traditional quest form, the hero leaves his familiar environment, enters another in which he is tested by obstacles he must overcome or adversaries he must conquer, and returns victorious to claim his position as leader of his people (36). This mythic form is solitary, competitive and, in its results, autocratic. It assumes the (typically male) hero is capable of acting alone and outside of

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his context, values individual rather than community achievement, and has as its goal an increase in the hero’s power. When females appear in the traditional quest, they are a means to an end. The pattern can be altered to accommodate a female questor, as Annis Pratt and other feminist Jungians have argued, but the quest remains solitary rather than communal.3 “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” provides an alternative to the hero-centered, conflict-ridden, linear plots based on the so-called masculine form. In this now-classic essay, Ursula Le Guin describes what she calls a truly female fictional form that could arise from a seedgathering model. It focuses on a community of diverse individuals rather than a single hero and is based on a cyclical concept of time. Certainly this holds true in the novels of Connie May Fowler, but to gender the form as female would merely reinforce the oppositional patterns at the heart of the problem. According to Plumwood, [T]he dualistic dynamic does more than writing subordination into the definition of the underside [the devalued part of the oppositional structure]; it also creates via radical exclusion polarized understandings of identity based on subordination/domination. Correcting this requires. . . liberatory analogues obtained by transcending the false choices created by polarized understandings of dualism.” (66)

These analogues are available courtesy of modern science. Dualism presupposes the existence of an individual subject, an independent factor in terms of which all others can be defined; this autonomy is part of what Birkeland calls the “androcentric premise” (24). However, ecology has shown that such independence is an illusion. As Neil Evernden put it in “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy,” “There are no discrete entities” (93). The boundary between human and animal was destroyed by Darwin, and more recent discoveries have destroyed those between animals and plants and even between one organism and another (94). Evernden asks, How, in short, can you make any sense out of the concept of man as a discrete entity? How can the proper study of man be man if it is impossible for man to exist out of context?” (95)

Absent the existence of separate individuals, dualism is impossible. Interrelatedness is not the opposite of diversity, however. The recognition of differences is not the problem; the assumption of a hierarchy based on dualism is. To avoid dualism, then, the ecocentric novel must respect the differences among creatures and individuals but

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also their interconnections. Concepts of masculine and feminine, human and environment must be permeable, and roles must be shared. In Fowler’s novels, these conditions are met. While her works contain features of the quest patterns and of the carrier-bag form, they do so without the assumption of dualism. Traits traditionally labeled “masculine” and “feminine” shift from character to character as the need arises, and the shifts are not unidirectional but occur continually within the community. The role of questor shifts as well and includes both humans and other animals. These criteria are insufficient to define the ecocentric novel, however. Patrick Murphy has stated that fiction “is probably the terrain in which the least codification of a nature writing canon or mode of representation has occurred” (32). However, Lawrence Buell has provided what he considers a rough checklist of some of the ingredients for an environmentally oriented work: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. . . . The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. . . . Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. . . . Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. (7-8)

When we add Buell’s criteria to the previous ones, we have the outlines of an ecocentric pattern. I propose the following, more complete, description of what I am calling the ecocentric novel: x the plot line appears recursive and cyclical; future events are foretold, past events are inserted in flashback, and patterns of events or behaviors recur in other individuals, creatures, and generations; x the narrative is motivated as much by intuition, instinct, and dreams as by traditional logic, and it may employ magical realism and other forms outside traditional realism; x multiple points of view are often presented, and even when a single narrator is used, the thoughts of others may intrude through memory or empathy, shifting the perspective; x the action occurs within a community, not outside of it;

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the interactions among community members blur but do not erase the lines between individuals, between the living and the dead, and between humans and their environment; these interactions result in multiple interdependent quests, including those of non-human creatures; conflict exists not so much between individuals or between human beings and the rest of nature as between the natural and what is regarded as unnatural—frequently, commercial development, pollution, standardization or conformity, or anything else that interrupts, interferes with, or denies natural cycles and connections among/between elements of the natural world, including human beings; despite this pattern of endless recurrence, these are not tales of Sisyphean woe. Both what Le Guin called “female” stories and what I call ecocentric ones celebrate rebirth and the continuity of life after death just as does the traditional quest pattern. the narrative resembles a re-envisioned myth in which the goal is not individual conquest or power but the welfare of the natural world.

Analysis Fowler’s Remembering Blue serves as an example of these characteristics. Its narrator, Mattie Blue, had been abandoned by her father and raised by a mother who gave her neither attention nor affection but devoted herself to a totally artificial life of selling makeup and playing whatever role was necessary to attract the brief interest of a long series of lovers. Mattie remembers with embarrassment the sight of her mother, a fake smile frozen on her face, pretending to be a cheerleader for the man of the moment. Upon her mother’s death, Mattie had set out in search of life and love, having really never known either. Yet in the most unlikely of places—a convenience store in Tallahassee, Florida, where she had moved and taken a job as a clerk—she feels the pull of both embodied in a customer, Nicholas Blue. After returning with him to Lethe, the island owned by his extended family, and being inducted into the life of a fisherman’s wife, she begins to learn the ways of the sea from him and those of the garden from his mother. Nick’s forebearers had migrated from Greece and homesteaded this island, which was named for forgetfulness; but it is not the island that can be forgotten here: it is the miserable life on the mainland. Those on the island have few cars, no stores, and no telephones. Cut off from both

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traffic and technology, they remain close to nature and live by its rhythms, accepting both the life and the death it offers. This connection is expressed in the legend that the males in the family were originally dolphins and that they periodically die at sea because the dolphins call them back. Nick himself was born at sea because he was so boisterous in the womb that his mother went out on the boat with her husband in hopes the fetus would relax and allow her to sleep as well. He immediately calmed down, only to be driven forward into birth during a storm. The sea gave him life just as it will one day bring his death. The intimacy of this connection dissolves the lines between humans and their environment and is illustrated by his belief in the legend of the dolphins: a string of dolphins is tattooed on his arm, and he tells Mattie of the siren song he hears at night when he is at sea, the beautiful music that lures him but that he rejects to return to her. She demonstrates the deep truth of the myth by explaining to him that dolphins were once land-based mammals but returned to the sea, retracing their steps to their ancient home, just as he will do. Nick’s physiology is so completely attuned to the ocean that he claims his blood thins at low tide. Such a strong response to the moon is normally associated with females and their menstrual cycles, but it is one of many indications that the dualism of gender roles, like the separation between humanity and nature, breaks down in the ecocentric novel, allowing both sexes to develop and express a broader range of personality traits and emotions. It is Nick, the male, who symbolically gives birth to the new Mattie, who encourages her to escape the numbness, obscurity, and routine of her old existence and to explore the world outside of and within her. It is the broad-shouldered, muscular Nick who shows his tenderness for her by soaking and massaging her feet and painting her toenails, who is inspired to follow a butterfly on its journey, who teaches her the lore of birds and fish, and who shows her the way the moon shines on the water. Rather than relying on reason, typically described as the province of males, he depends upon instinct, explaining, I know what the Bible meant when it said God cast Adam and Eve out of Paradise. God didn’t send them anywhere; he took something away. Their animal eyes, all that under the surface stuff that lets us know we’re part and parcel with the beasts and fish and snakes. He turns us into fools in our own land. (82)

And Mattie admits she has been a fool, but soon begins to “glimpse this world through Nick’s eyes. Its fragile unpredictability that flourished in the midst of cycles asserting themselves with the resolution of stone.”

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(82) She learns from him and from his grandfather to identify with the creatures of land and sea, and sounds an alarm, rousing the family to help, when thousands of newly hatched turtles are dying on their perilous quest across the sand to the sea. Despite these efforts by the human members of their community, most of the turtles will not live long enough to return to the same shores and lay eggs as adults, but the people of the island do what they can to save the turtles because both species share that same struggle to survive in a world that grants both life and death. The islanders engage in a continual cycle of taking from and giving back to the lives of others. The fishing done by the males and some of the females is described not with the imagery of the contest or the hunt, but with that of the farm. The fishers tend the sea creatures, harvesting what they need and protecting what they do not through the use of proper techniques. They are ardent conservationists. Indeed, when rising taxes made it necessary to sell part of Lethe, the family sold much of it to the Nature Conservancy. On land, Nick’s mother, Lillian, mirrors their efforts in her garden. She grows heirloom plants to preserve varieties that are endangered; she employs native plants and uses xeriscaping. She turns Mattie into a gardener as well, one who was literally baptized in the muck of life, having fallen headlong into the piles of manure out of which her garden will grow. She and Mattie clear the space for the garden by throwing away the old machinery that has been collecting behind the house, symbolically replacing technology with nature. Just as Lillian has taught her, Mattie will someday teach her descendants for, as Lillian says, a true gardener does not garden for the present but for the future—for posterity. Whereas typical questors are set in opposition to their environment, nature is not the enemy of these islanders. Weather and other forces of the natural world provide dangers, but they are shared by all who live. In this novel, as in many written since the 1980’s, the true enemies are those who try to separate themselves from their natural environments, to treat it as “other”—something to be used for their own ends. Developers, who managed to buy part of Lethe, are among them. They build without regard for the environment and threaten both its survival and the islanders’ way of life. Those who live in the developments ignore the beauty of their surroundings, treating nature as a spectacle, and its products, such as the starfish, as trophies to be collected. Sensing that the sea would eventually bring his doom, Nick had temporarily left the island for the mainland, where he met Mattie. However, his dependency on the ocean proved to be as great as that of the dolphins with which he identifies. He realized that however it might end,

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his quest led back to the sea. Therefore, he returned to Lethe and accepted his own place in the cycle of life and death rather than try to sustain himself in an environment he viewed as unnatural. He even refuses to wear a life vest while at sea. One day he simply fails to return from a night of fishing. His boat is found but not his body; it has mysteriously disappeared. Mattie does not believe Nick is truly dead, because nothing ever really dies. It merely changes form. That is suggested by Nick’s first name: Proteus. He was the primordial Greek sea god capable of changing his form. For Mattie, Nick has become a dolphin, and she introduces their daughter to him before her birth by floating in the ocean. The novel ends with the baby waiting to be born, to move from the fluid of the mother’s womb into that of the ocean, where she will join her father. The scene of the pregnant Mattie floating in the ocean is a clear reference to the connection between women and nature, the concept with which I began this article. However, in the ecocentric novel this association is devoid of its original dualism because Nick has become identified with the water. By floating in the water, Mattie is demonstrating both her dependency upon nature and her complete immersion in it. Her action is a consummation like that of sexual union, for all separation between human being and environment has disappeared.

Conclusion Fowler’s novel may depict an ideal way of life but it is not necessarily a practical one- although, as Birkeland contends, “cooperative relationships, such as those found among women or tribal cultures, are by definition unrealistic and utopian” if we accept the “androcentric premise” based on male dominance (25, 24). Nevertheless, this level of interconnectedness among all levels of nature—human and otherwise—is not shown operating in contemporary sub/urban environments where interconnectedness is primarily technological. It requires an isolated setting—in this case, an island—in which a ban on technology is enforced by nature or by choice. Although it demonstrates the union of people and nature, the novel virtually ignores the connections of the island and its people to the rest of the country and the world. The separation between island and mainland is not only physical but philosophical and psychological in Remembering Blue; surely that represents a dualistic approach as well. And even in this supposed Eden some individuals refuse to acknowledge their interdependence. Nick’s sister-in-law abandons his brother and their child

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for a new life on the mainland. His eldest brother is a black sheep who disappeared years earlier, leaving his son to be raised by the rest of the family. Family members have little choice of career and survive only because they already own the land. That, too, is threatened; they have no guarantee that they will be able to keep their part of the island should taxes rise again or other crises occur. The novel ends in an image of rebirth, but it it also exhibits a kind of fatalism. Charon, Nick’s grandfather, named after the ancient boatman who ferries spirits into the underworld, is the only male member of the older generation still alive, and he is apparently demented. His senility could be a sign that people should not try to extend their lives beyond the age that they are able to work and contribute to the lives of others. Whatever the case, he receives no medical attention for his condition. Nick, too, is unwilling to do what many would consider reasonable to take care of himself. He falls off of his boat in a calm sea and drowns, a fate he could have avoided simply by wearing a life vest. Passive acceptance of whatever befalls us is not a necessary consequence of interconnectedness with nature, however. Refusing to see ourselves as masters of nature does not mean reversing the relationship and allowing nature to master us. Neither do we lower our own value by increasing that of others. Rather than look to Remembering Blue or any other work for a panacea, perhaps we should simply recognize that it describes an option for some, but not all, of earth’s population. In his discussion of Edna Escamill’s Daughter of the Mountain: Un Cuento, Patrick Murphy admits that while “the knowledge, rituals, and practices of traditional ways” may enable the protagonist of that novel to reach spiritual unity with the land and culture of her ancestors, they do not provide a path available to people of other heritages (35-6). Acknowledging both difference within unity and a continuing cycle of change as our studies of ecology have taught us to do, we should not be surprised that no single, universal approach to our reintegration with nature exists.

Notes 1

The connection between women and nature and its implications is discussed in Plumwood, 19-40. See also Gaard and Murphy, “Introduction,” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, 1-13; and Birkeland, “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice, 24, among others. 2 For a more complete list of opposing pairs, see Plumwood, 43. The topic is also discussed by Birkeland, among others. 3 For a discussion of the form of female heroic quests, see Heller, Pratt, and Christ.

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Works Cited Buell, Lawrence. Introduction. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1995. 1-30. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. Christ, Carol P. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1995. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, and Nature. Ed. Greta Gaard. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 1993. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy.E. Greta and Patrick D. Murphy. Urbana: U of Chicago P, 1998. Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Orientalism.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 127-46. Murphy, Patrick D. ‘”The Women Are Speaking’: Contemporary Literature as Theoretical Critique.” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy.E. Greta and Patrick D. Murphy. Urbana: U of Chicago P, 1998. 23-48. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Brighton, Eng.: Harvester P, 1982.Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 92-104. Fowler, Connie May. Interview with Mary Glenney. “A Conversation with Connie May Fowler.” Remembering Blue. New York: Ballantine, 2000. n.p. —. Remembering Blue. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Gaard, Greta and Patrick D. Murphy. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. U of Illinois P, 1998. Gaard, Greta. “Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature” Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Ed. Greta Gaard. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. 1-12. Garrar, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.

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Heller, Dana A. The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990. King, Ynestra. “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology.” Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Ed. Judith Plant. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989. 18-28. LeGuin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 149-54. Lotman, Jurij. “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” Trans Julian Graffy. Poetics Today I (1979): 161-84. Mazel, David. “American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic

PALM BEACH: UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA? KATHLEEN ANDERSON

Palm Beach, Florida seems to be a beautiful, clean, safe place where anyone who could afford it would want to live. Driving over the bridge to this island Paradise, one is greeted by rows of towering palm trees, their silver trunks extending into the heavens. Palatial banks and brokerage houses with glossy windows, rows of charming shops and restaurants with gingerbread trim and festive awnings, the ocean sparkling in the sun as bathers lounge in the sand or splash in the waves. In the designer district of Worth Avenue, exclusive stores face each other in pristine, orderly rows with the most appealing items carefully displayed behind polished glass. Mansions of all dramatic architectural styles framed by gardens with topiaries and statues are protected by highly stylized hedges that must have been sculpted by Edward Scissorhands. Everything is immaculately clean and bordered with blossoms. This island paradise of the super-rich is home to more than ten billionaires and a majority of millionaires with an average net-worth of ten million dollars. Half of the residents are CEOs. Others are royalty, celebrities or inheritors of vast fortunes. Wealthy people expect the pristine and pleasing, so my husband and I moved near them to relish the attractive, quiet, safe, peaceful atmosphere they demand. It’s safe for me to walk alone after dark, and police cars routinely patrol the streets. I love to ramble along the ocean and through charming neighborhoods. There is no dirt, no violence, no chaos here. All is as it should be. And yet, nothing is as it should be. Palm Beach presents itself as a “middle landscape,” to borrow the term Virgil uses in his Eclogues to refer to the rural ideal, the landscape between the city and the wilderness: the small, prosperous village surrounded by cultivated nature. Think happy milkmaids and shepherds with flutes.¹ The rural landscape presents us with the ideal symbiotic balance between civilization and nature. Nature is subdued, but in a way that

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enhances its fruitfulness rather than depleting it. Man lends form to nature but does not steamroll it as in the city. In the rural, “middle landscape,” Adam is supposed to tend the garden, not dominate or destroy it. The duty of farmers is to take care of nature while making it fruitful. America was supposed to be a “garden nation,” Jefferson’s ideal of a nation full of self-sufficient farmers who avoid the evils of urbanism. The garden myth was clearly more realized in the Midwest than in the feudalistic South. Palm Beach was originally built as a getaway for northeasterners. The island of Manhattan is clearly defined as the city. The island of Palm Beach was intended to be more of a garden city, in a place that has perfect weather, where there is no harshness (which is the subtext of the garden paradise myth). Everyone has a pleasant cottage among the trees and the gentle breezes of the pure air, in a place that provides the perfect balance of civilization and nature. However, Palm Beach violates the essential elements of the rural idyll. The middle landscape requires that people are actually engaged with the land and living off of it; that relationship defines a true garden. Here, millionaires pretend to be in a garden, but it resembles the fake farm at Versailles. There is no real self-sufficiency, but rather, a highly-stylized imitation of a country idyll. Urban wealth and capitalism underlie it; there is no sustaining agriculture that would support it. Therefore, it is a false enclave. On a first tour of Palm Beach, one notices that the trees are too tall and straight and wonders if they are real or manufactured out of grey concrete. The lawns and shrubs look just-clipped, as do the people. Everything and everyone is hyper-manicured. The ideal agricultural landscape is cultivated, but not manicured. Everything has a specific functionality. In a typical country idyll, shade trees shelter pedestrians as well as landowners walking about the village. Beauty is combined with function. By contrast, the palm trees and sculpted shrubs on the island are intended to look attractive and prestigious, but they fulfill no practical purpose: they provide neither shade nor fruit. On a farm, there exists a symbiosis between man and nature in which everything has a function while being naturally beautiful. The gardens would be vegetable gardens. The country cottage would be solid and roomy with some ornamentation, but the emphasis would be on creating a place in which the farmer can live a decent, solid life. By contrast, some Palm Beach houses are so enormous that they totally violate the ethos of the comfortable country cottage. In the city, residents strive for show. Social status becomes more important in civilization than

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living. When my husband and I went to a realtor on the island in search of a cheap rental, she claimed no such thing was available (though it was) and that the rentals start at $2500 per month. She simply wanted us off the island. The middle landscape is characterized by the ideal of self-sufficiency, not exclusivity. One’s prosperity enables one to take care of one’s family. There is no hoarding of wealth as in a capitalist society. It is beneficial to have plenty of food, but acquiring or raising one’s status is irrelevant. Each member of the ideal agricultural community serves his or her role as just another citizen nurturing a family, not as an aristocrat shutting oneself off from the larger community. Limiting the access of others is typical of the urban civilization where society is stratified by a capitalist economy, where the focus is not on the substance (such as food to eat) so much as the symbolism (the specialness of what one is eating). Exclusivity functions on a highly symbolic level. The middle landscape is about living well by enjoying having enough of all that is necessary and not being dependent on others for it. The wealthy enjoy excess, whereas it is unrealistic for a manual laborer farmer to gain excess; the goal is not to start an empire. The distinction between plenty and excess reflects the different emphasis on real needs as opposed to status. The middle landscape fosters neither hedonism nor an excess of sensory pleasure. For example, the country woman would have well-made, good-quality dresses so she is comfortable and looks decent, not ostentatious. High fashion is contrary to the pastoral myth. In the context of extreme, urban wealth, aesthetics supersede necessity and function purely for the sake of status, rather than for the sake of having one’s needs met both aesthetically and functionally. One does not need five hundred dresses or dresses made of silk with crazy twists of fabric, designed by a famous person. My colleague, Dr. Mark Buechsel, whose ideas form the foundation of this essay, claims that there are quaint villages all over Europe that are living, functioning communities, authentic rural idylls. They are not fake or exclusivist, but grew into what they are through the centuries, because of the way they function. Their personality and groundedness emanate from their historical reality, not merely from a financial reality. The buildings grew from a centuries-long history, from regional distinctiveness and purposeful planning. The architecture is not a wild hodgepodge of styles; the buildings were built in the same way for ages, for a purpose. The entire landscape, with its vegetable gardens and orchards, reflects each area’s past. It was not arranged by a developer, but shaped by history. These European villages are as beautiful and safe as Palm Beach,

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according to Dr. Buechsel, but there is reality to back up the surface, an authentic aesthetic that is integrated into the whole landscape. These villages make Palm Beach seem eerie and put on, an illusory fantasy escape with no context. Of course, any perceived Utopia has its issues. My colleague also mentioned that in his own idyllic German village, the teenagers are torn between pursuing Satanism and drug abuse. A slight overstatement, which nonetheless makes a valuable point. No perfect place exists; every Utopia is illusory by nature. And yet, his village more effectively conveys a sense of substance and history behind the pleasing surface than my artificial “island village.” Since I cannot simply move to a European village, I am contenting myself with renting a tiny apartment on Palm Beach for now. If I avoid examining my surroundings too closely, everything seems fine. If I make the mistake of looking and listening, I witness some realities that do not reflect a fantasy ideal. On Worth Avenue, I have seen a window display featuring a slinky bikini on a baby manikin. Enlarged photographs of models with expensive jewelry draped orgasmically across their mouths. Clearly excited adult female manikins. Portraits of monkeys in royal garb. Dogs in royal garb. Beauty and perversity. Sex and materialism. The beauty of the middle landscape is a comparatively chaste beauty, moderate, modest. The cult of beauty on Palm Beach leads to distortion. It is linked with money, so it becomes consumed and degraded while it is worshipped. A long-time resident of Palm Beach claimed that another resident’s former maid had told her that after being forced to flush the toilet for her employer, every time, she finally cracked and quit. She had said, “I hope they go straight down to hell,” emphasizing the direction with her finger pointing downward. Other people have told me stories of a family with staggering wealth avoiding paying the music teacher as long as possible and then underpaying her at last, until she fought for the correct amount. Of a fair and kind employer who could not stand up for herself among her own and actually forced herself to host a dinner party when ill, occasionally excusing herself to go vomit. She had not cancelled because her “friends” would not excuse her—it was the most convenient evening for them. I have seen anorexic women incessantly running all over the island. Running, running, running away from bourgeois robustness and toward an impossibly fashionable emaciation. Fat old men with very pretty, young women. My friend saw a very fat, unattractive man in a Palm Beach restaurant wearing an expensive suit that was clearly tailored

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to his corpulent form. His unlikely girlfriend, a tall, thin, beautiful blond model, fawned on him with simpering affection. As they left the restaurant, my friend overheard the man smugly assuring his “fembot,” “I’ll buy you . . . .” He did not catch what treasure she was going to receive next, but her boyfriend had clearly already purchased her love. I imagine the two casually dressed, meeting for the first time in the line at a Subway. He makes awkward overtures, expecting rejection; she whirls away with unconcealed repulsion. A resident of a high-priced condo on Worth Avenue cautioned me one evening about walking alone in the dark; I was shocked by her anxiety. The price of exclusivity is fear of invasion. The covetous masses are dangerous. I am dangerous as a member of the mainland bourgeoisie, and she is unaware of her danger. I am the one who should not be on the island. Hypocritically, most days, I do not mind the artificiality of this island paradise as long as it continues to preserve intact its beauty, cleanliness, orderliness, safety, and quiet. I can enjoy the long walks, the windowshopping and sudden admiration of a piece of translucent china with the most delicate of green ginkgo leaves painted across it, or one, simple, sparkling brooch of flawless design. But then, I pass the manicured lawn of a mansion and suddenly catch an overpowering sewer smell. A hint of the waste underneath the surface. When a skeleton runs by. When a couple fights in the street, well-dressed, a fancy car nearby. A total violation of decorum, a flash of ugliness. Then, I long for the pastoral, for the middle landscape, and wish I could move to a European village. In the meantime, I will let the wind carry the stench away, and focus on the sweet scent of hibiscus and the smile of the elegant, perfectly accessorized lady and gentleman, walking hand in hand along a perfect façade.

Note 1

I am indebted to Dr. Mark Buechsel for this insight, as well as for numerous additional ideas that have been incorporated into this essay with his permission.

CAROL FROST AS FLORIDIAN: CEDAR KEY POET SPEAKS NATIONALLY TAYLOR JOY MITCHELL

Carol Frost can call many places home. This too-little-celebrated poet has divided her years between the mountainous regions in Upstate New York and the calming gulf waters in Florida. Her poetry abounds with natve Floridian images and she often uses landscape as a bridge between the abstract and the tangible. In her latest collection of verse, Frost explores this division between places. A Queen’s Desertion moves from the northern landscape where bees are dying to the southern seascape where manatees, eels, and gulls thrive. This is a journey through loss. According to Garth Greenwell’s review, this collection, unlike her previous I Will Say Beauty, has no governing theme and the many-faceted poems do not logically form a whole. However, with careful attention to the intricacies of the poems, one can discern three different governing themes: the southern journey, the subtle female narration, and the adoption of male personas. When analyzing the major transitions between the four sections of the collection, one coul argue that the southern journey governs. The first piece, “Lucifer in Florida,” surveys the Floridian landscape from the distance of the heavens. Fallen Lucifer becomes a patron of the southern journey. Lucifer journeys south from the heaven’s city (“which is the stars”) to the runway lights of Florida’s islands that illuminate palm trees and ancient oaks (1). He rides south with the darkness to the depths of the seas, leaving behind all he has scorned. Frost transfers patronage to Cabeza de Vaca, in “Relacion of Cabeza de Vaca,” whose persona concludes the transitional section “The Body has Two Seasons.” The long narrative poem about the Spanish explorer’s southern journey from Florida to Mexico powerfully reinforces this theme. De Vaca traveled south from Spain over the open waters and walked to Mexico among the hostile tribes “as slave and shaman” (27). The final section, “Voyage to Black Point,” employs colorful language that speaks on the Florida Keys’s ecologic interests and quite possibly speaks to what drives Frost’s own annual

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journey south. The narrator of “Black Point” describes the hours spent in a small boat. Conversations with “sea meadows” spawn recollections of panicked moments. The “luminous neck of snake” becomes a turtle and the swimming of black and white tattered fish lead the speaker into a trance. These remembrances of familiar sounds and images lead the speaker to conclude with: “I’ve traveled to hear this sound” (38). Readers could argue that the author, as narrator, travels south to perpetuate participation in these moments with nature. This journey can be recognized as both literal (Frost as traditional snow bird) and figurative (the naturalness of dementia and death). Frost’s constant reference to figurative journeys urges readers to keep moving. Constant movement equates to sanity: “We have to keep moving even while realizing that the loss of mind and body is the natural conclusion” (Greenwell Queen’s). Natural conclusions of death, and thus loss, appear throughout Queen’s –from freezing bees and gasping redfish to a fallen Lucifer. David St. John claims that "With her characteristic lyric grace and philosophical ease, Carol Frost asks life's most difficult questions as if they were the most casual and natural of all . . .and perhaps, they are” (back cover). The naturalness with which Frost invokes the potent images of loss is wonderfully direct. She often writes how the body has seasons and appetites that should not be ignored. And she does this “in clearsightedly literal and disenchanted descriptions” (Greenwell Beauty). Of course, the body falls apart; the mind loses memories. Frost declares joy when faced with these natural movements: “I was happy: What are living and dying if not the most natural of ceremonies if practiced: not turned away from: not denied?” (Frost 82) Thus the natural journey south, back towards the earth, keeps the collection intact. But southern journeys through death alone do not govern the collection. The first section of the book, “The Queen’s Desertion,” contains a subtle female narrator. Greenwell states that these poems are affecting because they occupy “the voices of both the woman suffering and the daughter who grieves for her” (Greenwell Queen’s). Even in the act of deserting, the queen recognizes beauty in the shriveled bees resting on the bottom of a beekeeper’s box. This underlying grief, similar to a mother’s or lover’s sorrow, can be noted in the Apiary series: “Forget this, forget that—keys, glasses, what is was you just said, what you meant to say... a dance of signs/ sorrows passing by like shadows,/ time running by like a small girl running by like a madwoman” (Frost 8). Here the narrator assigns a sort of femininity with this gendered image. Allusions to Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” reinforce the feminine narrator. Elsewhere in the series, the female narrator is more pronounced: “Mother hears/

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ambient grief and, more and more,/ her earlier German tongue—rhyming Schiller lines./ Where were you? I’ll ask. Wer bist du? she’ll say… O mother…” (12). If this section echoes the title of the collection, the narrator could be considered to carry on throughout the book. The queen bee of the collection might die or adopt male personas but does she ever really desert her colony? The argument for the feminine perspective subtly dictating the collection might be bolstered by the focus on the seasonal cycles of life. The collection opens on the verge of winter and the section “The Body has Two Seasons” details a woman’s painful journey of life and loss. In “Songs for Two Seasons,” Frost succinctly describes a breast removal surgery in which “The flesh comes free and the nodes/ are loosened from their element. / The nerve will never stir; no / caress again will cause a tingle” (18). However, this distinctly female procedure is no more cause for concern than other bodily losses for “The body has two seasons/ and doesn’t exist to be changed; / it itself changes” (19). The feminine perspective explores these seasons in “The Queen’s Desertion” which relates the loss of mind to autumn’s falling foliage. In the Apiary series “Autumn fattened and thinned” into “wintriest gray shapes” (8). The titled numbers of the Apiary series do suggest some larger project, but since time careens away like a madwoman, the other poems might have to wait until next season. The beekeeper, or female narrator, of this section must have patience that the next season will arrive. She must feel comfortable renouncing her colony for the time being. Here in the north’s winter, bees stop buzzing and fall dead. In the title piece to the collection, winter arrives and past the “unmarked snow” the narrator sees “the yawning trees, shriveled bees on the bottom pan” (7). Movement ceases and the dead, left behind bees simply illustrate beauty. Frost uses the bee metaphor brilliantly throughout the collection. Reminiscent of constant movement, whether mental or physical, the bees symbolize how mental or physical activity can be taken for granted. Frost concludes the collection with bees buzzing back to life to suggest the necessity of movement for the amiability of life: “the bees have taken over late branches, swelling like fruit/ sweeter for the lateness” (74). This subtle feminine narrator does not just occupy voices of a mother and daughter or exist as a stand in for the seasons. One could also posit that as a traveling woman, Frost appropriates the places she journeys to and from through the adoption of various male perspectives. She adopts traditional male personas to depict southern movement. Lucifer embodies the first adoption, or patron. Frost strategically places “Lucifer in Florida”

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as prologue. With proper mythological Greek aesthetics, Lucifer, as deity, “cast down from heaven’s city” before any action begins (3). Frost adopts this male persona possibly to prepare her audience for the ensuing drama. Frost’s Lucifer marvelously explicates on the failed garden and the imbuing darkness, “If the future is a story of pandemonium, perfection’s close” (3). The gatekeeper of the collection notes all the previous moments he has scorned and yet seems satisfied to note that “all this lasts whether I leave or come” (3). The importance, therefore, of Lucifer’s prologue should not be overlooked. Greenwell states that “Fallen, though still allowed the name of light-bearer, Frost’s angel surveys the Floridian landscape with the pained wonder of Milton’s Satan approaching Creation” (Greenwell Queen’s). Frost’s Lucifer gazes down at his world darkened by the fall but retaining a reminiscence of beauty similar to when the narrator of “The Queen’s Desertion” later finds beauty in the dead bees. Establishing Lucifer as the prologue patron, “Frost gives pride of place to an intuition she has long pursued: that mankind bears a closer allegiance to the fallen than to the victorious angels” (Greenwell Queen’s). Frost adopts Cabeza de Vaca’s persona next in her most experimental narrative poem to date. De Vaca’s own journey is retold in a sprawling fashion with a nod to John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.” Frost pays the tribute of quotation: “Once I walked with a crowd of other simple people who wished/ to make me believe that I not one instant die but endure and endure/ the hollows and offenses of the body” (30). The reference to Berryman highlights de Vaca’s long journey around the American gulf coast. Frost offers readers unprecedented notes on her adopted persona; she wants readers to be aware that de Vaca courted sympathy for native peoples unique for his time. For outlawing the enslavement of native women, de Vaca was returned to Spain in shackles. Frost also includes dates and places of her patron. The poem begins on the “Island of Ill Will, Louisiana, 1528” and ends in “Cedar Key, 1993.” He took an early expedition to Florida through or past Cedar Key and Frost obviously wants to commemorate her southern city with the inclusion. De Vaca’s adopted male persona serves as the transitional piece of the collection. He leads into Frost’s other experimental poems that form the third and longest section “Voyage to Black Point.” “Voyage to Black Point” contains sentences stripped of punctuation, save the colon. Sensational energy is compressed in lines driven to stark images. All titles after places, animals or gulf water phantoms of the Florida landscape, “these poems constitute something like a blazon of the Florida Keys” (Greenwell Queen’s). The Florida Keys, stretched out into

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the gulf, are illustrated as “places of sudden and sometimes dangerous mystery, littered with boats run aground and everywhere suggestive of peril” (Greenwell Queen’s). Frost’s narrator declares: “I love and fear winding in these waters: deep corridors: /currents: shoals: iridescence boiling / suddenly: the back of something larger than my boat.” Yet, Frost also presents these as unknowable waterways even with the possibility of self-assured navigation: “charts often wrong: storm / shift: cuts narrowed: still fathoming the tides.” In this section, de Vaca’s persona is traded for that of Apollo, who is “not merely the dolphin cresting [god,] but also the offended god who strips Marsyas of his skin and also, above all, the source of prophecy, of knowledge gleaned from “low and sweet” murmurings, “hallucinogenic” in their distance from “familiar voicing” (Greenwell Queen’s). “Black Point” opens with: I want to say oracle: sea grass: crab cluck: swollen sheepshead in a fitful sea nodding assent:: I who listened for decades to familiar voicings now heard Delphic imaginings low and sweet: hallucinogenic as when the dolphin crests in early morning vapor and light mixing on water the leap and splash thunderous: a flight of birds: one piping: syrinx in the wind: a rising sea—(1-8)

Notice the barely related images. But these gossamer connections create bold and lasting images for the reader. Frost employs this colorful language of Florida throughout poems such as “To Fishermen,” “Blue Crab,” “Sandpiper,” “Dolphin,” “Eddy,” “Snake Key,” “Low Tide,” “Manatee,” “North Key,” “Boat,” “Redfish,” and “Voyage.” Frost investigates the mortal seasonal plight by entering into a Dantesque descent into the ebb and flow of the seascape. Body consumes body. Blue crab claws rear up in the “warring gardens” of the sea (40). Fish “only eat to molt to procreate: salt sea mud breeding in the shoals” (40). The poet observes the flora and fauna partake in the darker cycles of nature, “giving a last promise for everything still to come: brine heaven: crabs who fish fish who eat crabs:/ kingfish: mako: hardheaded catfish: ravenous ibises curving above:/ land-buried without body…yet still swimming in a hellish bright inlet” (44). These natural battles are likened to the warring Greek tales from Homer, “Odysseus too young for Troy: so dreamed” (44). She even recalls Bishop again, but this time not with misplaced keys or lost memories. Instead, Frost challenges Bishop’s “The Fish” to remember “where to put the knife in” (52). Apollo’s adopted persona navigates

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through these stricken waterways. In “Snake Key,” Frost writes “Our sense of origin ourselves bedeviled:/ Apollo Saturn: in the rose black garden Eve: loving: killing:: labyrinthine of journey: can’t be myth to be left behind” (65). Once deep inside the southern labyrinth Frost suggests readers can only “count the snakes: you can: but there’s no way only back where you were” (66). When Frost exhausts these bare but lyrical experiments, she adopts her last male persona—Old Pan. Pan once duelled Apollo and his tortoise shell lyre with his wax reeds in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Frost, though, does not remain true to Ovid’s version of the duel. She agrees with Midas, the illustrated fool, who insists that Pan’s music is finer; thus in her version, the forest-dwelling Pan beats the Olympian Apollo. By rewriting Metamorphoses, Frost gracefully passes between male personas and ends her collection with the “rich rustic music of “Old Pan” whose presence can be glimpsed at moments earlier in the collection” (Greenwell Queen’s). In “Black Point,” the poet makes mention of a “syrinx,” and the “panic” the poet feels later in the poem can be attributed to Pan allusions. The collection closes with simple quatrains that solidify each theme: The reed and breathless voice fans the bees with their ire flies and lulls them to sleep in one fertile body. (5-8)

The quatrains contain images reminiscent of Keats’s Autumn Ode. Movement is still insisted and the seasons are highlighted: It will be winter soon, too soon, Pan will be rapt, still in snow, but only a few brave the cold, and briefly. (13-16)

Each section then can be seen as the microcosm of a season told from a female perspective that adopts various male personas. The first section can represent autumn because it introduces readers to the inevitable fall and what must be left behind. “Telling the Bees,” begins with “Will we tell the bees or bees tell us its no sadder—another all whoever’s fall it is?” (1). The second section, “The Body has Two Seasons,” corresponds to the winter season. In this section, Frost includes poems from her previous collection Love and Scorn. According to Greenwell, their presence in this section is puzzling and he claims they “gain nothing from the change of scenery” (Greenwell Queen’s). Yet, if season and scenery have changed,

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maybe the poems’ presence is not so puzzling. “Voyage to Black Point” springs forth with life. No reprints exist in this section, only vivid colorful images of Florida ecology. And then Frost returns once more to the need for movement and summons the Greek god Pan, who dances a rite of acceptance through a metaphysical landscape on the verge of seasonal change—the bees are not dead; the dark woods are filled with music. Therefore, the cycles of the season continue and the queen never really deserts her colony. Frost provides readers with three possible governing and entwined themes for this collection of seasonal change—the southern journey through loss, the subtle female narrator, or the adopted personas. Thus when Greenwell labels the collection as uneven and decidedly her least coherent, his review (otherwise thorough and encouraging) might be misguided. The logic behind the four sections does form a satisfied whole, more than the poems just echoing off of each other. Frost’s new collection experiments with form and a new commitment to the lyric with a variance of themes to hold the work together.

Works Cited Frost, Carl. I Will Say Beauty. Evaston: TriQuaterlery Books, 2003. —. The Queen’s Desertion. Evaston: TriQuaterlery Books, 2006. Greenwell, Garth. Rev. of The Queen’s Desertion by Carol Frost. The Boston Review. 9 Oct. 2007 http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/greenwell.php —. Rev. of I Will Say Beauty by Carol Frost. University of Central Missouri Press. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www.cmsu.edu/englphil/pleiades/Frost.html

NATURAL FLORIDA

“RATHER THAN ABIDE AN ORDINARY LIFE”: THE ORCHID THIEF—A FAUSTIAN SAGA CAROLE A. POLICY

Susan Orlean’s description of orchid poacher John Laroche in The Orchid Thief is vaguely reminiscent of something out of the old X Files episode “Home,” the one about the in-bred mutant clan of murderers who stashed their mother in the sub-floor. Lean as Cassius, pasty as paste, with “the posture of al dente spaghetti,” thirty-six year old John Laroche could be a member of the Southern Gothic Freak club. Although his demeanor is edgy, his voice, especially on the phone, is often “slushy, drowsy, cross, suspicious as a tax examiner’s” (86). An almost constant “cigarette hack” punctuates his conversation. His repertoire of customized laughs ranges from a scratchy chuckle at fools to a schadenfreudistic snicker at rivals. He is passionate about collecting and hybridizing wild orchids and will let nothing stand in his way (33). Laroche believes that “mutation is the answer to everything” and that even his own incredible intelligence is probably the result of being exposed to a substance that mutated him to genius status. “Every time I’d make a new hybrid, it felt so cool,” he says through the space where his front teeth used to be. I felt a little like God.’” In typical New Journalistic style, Orlean’s The Orchid Thief reveals a Faustian frottage that magically emerges from her portrait of John Laroche. Laroche is a scofflaw, a “shrewd bastard,” a con man. But he is also a charismatic questor whose orchid obsession demonstrates that there may be something to be said for snatching the rare opportunity to echo Faustus’s glutted ejaculation: “O this feeds my soul!” Orlean met John Laroche in 1995 in the process of writing an article for The New Yorker about his arrest for orchid poaching. Intrigued by a news story in the St. Petersburg Times about Laroche and three Seminole tribesmen having been caught dragging pillow cases of rare orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, Orlean traveled to the Collier County Courthouse in Naples to feed her curiosity about the unusual incident (6, 11). The Orchid Thief, published in 1998, is a quirky spin–off of the article about Laroche, whose febrile obsession with orchids verges on concupiscence: lust. Orlean writes, “He was the oddball ultimate of

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those people who were enthralled by nonhuman living things and who pursue them like lovers” (136). He would go to great lengths—even to the extent of endangering his health—to obtain a wild plant he thought was seductive and that he could replicate and pimp for lots of money. He once accidentally spilled a toxic pesticide into a cut in his hand that entered his bloodstream and permanently damaged his heart and liver. Undeterred by this freak occurrence, Laroche cleverly turned the experience into profit by selling to a gardening journal an article entitled “Would You Die For Your Plants?”—a title Christopher Marlowe might have appreciated (Orlean 5) Laroche’s fervor for cloning wild orchids to produce fantastic hybrids, although genuine and heart-felt, is all about becoming rich and famous. Not only did he want to become an overnight success and outshine all of his fellow orchid aficionados, he wanted to do so in a sneaky, underhanded way. He could be a great con man, he brags. However, “It’s more challenging to do what you want,” he says, but to “try to do it so [that] you can justify it.” He goes on, explaining that sometimes he is hit by “that collector feeling”: “I’ll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It’s like I can’t just have something—I have to . . . learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it” (33). The reason that hybrids are so fascinating is that they “have no real purpose.” They would not have existed were it not for someone doing the “plant sex” for them. “That’s the cool thing with hybridizing,” he laughs. “You are God.” The turbulent relationship of science, nature, and morality has been associated with the Faustian legend since the beginnings of modern science. In Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, Dr. John Faustus, bored with the mundane knowledge of philosophy, logic, medicine and law, trades his soul in return for Mephistophiles’ gift of twenty-four years of metaphysical horseplay. And what exactly does he get in exchange? A release from gravity, a release from physical embodiment, and a release from the laws of physics—just a little hocus pocus that allows him to defy the laws of God’s nature. This power, albeit temporary, is worth it to him. “These metaphysics of magicians/And necromantic books are heavenly!” he says (I. 48-49). “A sound magician is a mighty god/Here Faustus, try thy brains to gain a deity” (I. 62-63). Faustus turns to the black arts, the underbelly of traditional science, and bids farewell to the Trinity for the chance to punk the pope and to hook up with a demon disguised as Helen of Troy. Sounds like a typical MLA conference. In The Orchid Thief, Orlean tells us that, like Faustus, Laroche also “prided himself on possessing flawless logic and reason” and scoffed at the intellect of his fellow mortals whose “constricted and unsubtle minds”

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could not free themselves from “legal boundaries.” He enjoyed tricking people, but always for their own good. At one point, Orlean even catches him in his office perusing a magician’s supply catalog. His sleight-of-hand justification of poaching orchids is that by propagating endangered orchids, he can strengthen them, make more flowers, and then sell them on the cheap so that everyone can enjoy them (214, 218). He is improving on nature, not molesting it. In fact, he rationalizes, he was doing the world a favor by stealing, getting caught, and calling attention to an ambiguous law that even environmentalists should thank him for helping to eliminate. He is not at all immoral, Laroche contends, but more like amoral—his attitude similar to that of the Greek Sophists—and much too smart to be accountable to, let alone punished by, ambiguous legalities. Like Faustus, “The word damnation terrifies not him,/For he confounds hell in Elysium: His ghost be with the old philosophers” (I.iii.58-60). Seventeenth-century peer of Marlowe and father of early science Francis Bacon, appears to offer a viewpoint similar to that of Laroche in his 1625 seminal essay New Atlantis: “You have but to hound nature in her wanderings.” He goes on, using undeniably rapacious language: “Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating those holes and corners when the inquisition of truth is his whole object” (qtd. in Huws 33). Referring to his scientifically Edenic plant world of Atlantis, Bacon equates human creativity and the production of hybrid growth with an enhancement of God’s nature, writing, “By art likewise we make them greater or taller than their kind. . . . Also we make them differ in color, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures and copulations of diverse kinds (qtd. in Gessert “Bastard” 293). Modern day horticulturalist writer George Gessert agrees with Bacon and Laroche, praising plant hybridization in his article “Bastard Flowers” and noting that “knowledge brings earthly power and, perhaps, even brings men closer to God” (293). The notion that the intrinsic and the fiscal value of mankind’s procreativity is contested by notions of ethics and morality obviously is not lost on John Laroche. He asks, “Isn’t every great thing the result of that kind of struggle? Look at something like atomic energy. It can be diabolic or it can be a blessing. Evil or good. Well, that’s where the give is—at the edge of ethics. And that’s exactly where I like to live” (30). Sexual imagery abounds in Orlean’s descriptions of orchids, their habitats and their collectors, and hers is not the only text about orchids that is rife with musky, steamy innuendo, the very stuff of Mephistophiles’ deadly sin of lechery that distracts Faustus when he thinks of penitence. In fact, many of the orchids take on rather lascivious personalities. In Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy, for instance, Eric

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Hansen describes an orchid named “Magic Lantern” as having “shiny, candy apple red stamiode that covered the reproductive organs” that was “shaped like an extended tongue identical to the Rolling Stones logo. “This shocking red protrusion,” he writes, “nestled in the cleavage of two blushing petals, then dropped down as if to lick the tip of an inverted pouch that looked like the head of an engorged penis” (30). At a slide show, Hansen notes, the audience responded to the beautiful images of hybrid orchids with “stifled moans and grunts that are more frequently associated with the midday crowd at an adult movie house” (35). As early as 1653, The British Herbal Guide warned that the orchid hobby ignited lust, sometimes called “orchidelirium” (Orlean 50), and Laroche wholeheartedly concurs: “You get so obsessed with these goddamn orchids that they all start to look beautiful. It’s part of the sickness” (97). Although orchids are found all over the world, South Florida is home to the largest brothel of native species of orchids of anywhere in the United States, a fact that calls to mind Mephistophiles’ answer to Faustus’ question “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” Look around. “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it” (I.iii.76). Despite the passion that the wild orchid engenders in the human breast, it is illegal to collect endangered plants in the wild in Florida—unless the collector is a Florida Native American. The Seminoles, for instance, are exempt from this law out of respect for their traditional hunting and fishing practices, so, in theory, they are allowed to enjoy for their use endangered plants and animals. On the other hand, there is another law that disallows the removal of anything at all from state-owned preserves, including the Fakahatchee so the intersection of the two laws is problematic. Working as an employee of the Seminole tribe in harvesting endangered species of orchids, Laroche believed that as an agent of the tribe, he, too, was exempt from penalty. When the judge rejected Laroche’s request to dismiss the charges and instead found him guilty, fined him $500, and exiled him from the Fakahatchee for a total of a year, he was righteously indignant, using rhetoric to express his displeasure that combined sex, violence, and religion in just two sentences: “You know I feel like I’ve been screwed. I’ve been fucking crucified” (12). Even his language is hybrid. Laroche’s run-in with the law eventually led him to impulsively sever his relationship with orchid breeding, but it did not stop him from turning to a new obsession: posting pornography on the internet. As Orlean explains, this was just “another opportunity to profit from human weakness” (246). Laroche says, “People spend a fortune on this junk, and I just keep charging them more and more. . . . Maybe at some point it will dawn on [them] that they’re

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wasting their money. . . . I’m doing them a favor by helping them realize how ridiculous it is. That’s why the more I charge, the more helpful I’m being” (246).

Gunther S. Stent, in Paradoxes of Progress: The Faustian Man, describes the Faustian man as being “locked in an endless strife with his world to overcome obstacles, conflict, to his mind, being the very essence of existence (21). By these lights, John Laroche appears to be a true exemplum of the Faustian man. But, what do we make of Susan Orlean’s fascination with this Faustian Saga? How was she seduced by the power of desire? Curiosity, the compulsion to witness something, to know something—this is what drew her into the Laroche’s story. “What I wanted,” she writes, “was to see this thing that people were drawn to in such a singular and powerful way. . . . I wanted to want something as much as people wanted these plants. . . . I wanted to know what it feels like to care about something passionately” (41). Having met Laroche and the other orchid breeders, Orlean realized that, “rather than abide an ordinary life,” many people do take extraordinary risks to achieve something exceptional that will feed their soul (273). Her frank admission makes this treatment of the world of orchids and collectors in The Orchid Thief as much about her own motivation as it is about theirs. True, at first she wanted to “glut the longing of [her] heart’s desire” (Marlowe 1.iv. 72), to see a fully blooming ghost orchid, because it was so rare, so elusive, so compelling. But after getting lost while slogging through the Post-Lapsarian muck of the Fakahatchee and realizing that she could be swallowed up by this swamp, an apt metaphor for her lust for lust, she experienced a kind of epiphany. She writes: I felt sorry for myself for being lost in the Fakahatchee Strand. . . . Then like all sorriness it hardened into something less stifling and I suddenly decided that I would rather walk, no matter which way we went, than to sit here idle and frantic. . . . At this point I realized it was just as well that I never saw a ghost orchid so that . . . it would remain forever something I wanted to see (281).

As the Faustus epilogue enjoins, Orlean perhaps learned that the wise should only “wonder at unlawful things: /Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits/To practice more than heavenly power permits” (Marlowe 1023). Ironically, Orlean and Laroche were able to find their way out of the government-protected quagmire by following the gleam of a car fender in the distance, the symbol of modern mankind’s penetration of and

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adaptation to nature Wilderness areas such as the Fakahatchee, we should remember, were once the province of displaced native inhabitants, like the Seminoles, and, as Ursula Heise points out in her article “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocritism,” “far from being nature in its original state,” they are “the product of cultural processes” that are ongoing (507). In fact, if we took the time to study environmental history, we would find that, as William Cronon points out in his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, “people have been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing” (qtd. in Youngs 379). Moreover, if we continue to categorically separate humanity from nature, Cronon says, we are left with “little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature” may be (qtd. in Youngs 379). So, perhaps there is some yet undiscovered ecological system of sustainability within which orchid poachers would fit. Could it be then that, with his pale skin, colorless eyes, and faded white overalls, John Laroche may personify the “adaptation” that Cronon alludes to: an embodiment of the spectral ghost orchid itself, the consummation of desiring subject and object desired, the quasisublime loss of self that Faustus begs for when he asks God that his soul be mutated into “little water drops/And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found”? (V.ii.108-109). Not quite the master of the spoken word that Marlowe is, John Laroche nevertheless confidently maintains that, regardless of whether it is done legally or illegally, mutation is a righteous activity—the way of the future. He philosophizes, “You end up with some cool stuff and some ugly stuff and stuff no one has ever seen before. . . . It’s the way evolution moves ahead. . . . There are a lot of wasted lives out there and people with nothing to do. This is the sort of interesting stuff they should be doing” (17).

Or, correspondingly, in the words of Dr. John Faustus, “O what a world of profit and delight/of power, of honor, of omnipotence/Is promised to the studious artisan!” (I.i.53-55). Would the Orchid thief burn his books? Not on his life!

Works Cited Abrams, M. H., et al Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. I 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Cronon, William. “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1.1 (Jan. 1996): 7-55.

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Gessert, George. “Bastard Flowers.” Leonardo 29 (1996): 291-98. Hansen, Eric. Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Heise, Ursula. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocritism.” PMLA 121 (Mar. 2006): 503-16 Huws, Ursula. “Nature, Technology, and Art: The Emergence of a New Relationship?” Leonardo 33 (2000): 33-44 Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. Ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol I 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Stent, Gunther S. Paradoxes of Progress: The Faustian Man. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1978. Youngs, Amy. “The Fine Art of Creating Life.” Leonardo 33 Eighth New York Digital Salon, 2000: 377-80.

LUMBER MILLS, PHOSPHATE PITS, AND PHANTOM LAND: POLK COUNTY, FLORIDA AS A LITERARY SETTING KEITH L. HUNEYCUTT

Most of Florida’s authors have ignored Polk County or have mentioned it only in passing, but Polk has been the setting for a handful of significant literary works. A recent event, the 2005 publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s Polk County in a collection of Hurston’s plays uncovered in 1997 in Library of Congress archives spurred my search for other creative works with settings in Polk County.1 Some refer to Polk County in passing; a noteworthy example is Stetson Kennedy’s Palmetto Country, which mentions folklore from the county. Several books have chapters or a large portion of the setting in Polk County. For instance, in Year in Paradise (1952) by Sara Jenkins, the main character moves from New York to Central Florida to the fictional phosphate mining town of Paradise near Mulberry to be the new school teacher of poor, uncooperative children of miners. However, Jenkins’s novel, as in works that merely mention Polk County, places little importance on the specific setting offered by Polk County. The Polk County setting figures more significantly in works by three authors: Harry Crews, Dennis Covington, and Zora Neale Hurston. Polk County provided the inspiration for Naked in Garden Hills by Harry Crews (1969). Most of the novel is set in the fictional Garden Hills, which Crews never identifies as being in Polk County; nevertheless, its central location between Tampa and Orlando clearly pinpoints its location. Moreover, Crews makes clear in an interview that the setting of the novel is based on the ruined phosphate country that he saw around Mulberry on a trip across the state.2 Crews used the setting to represent various themes of his novel, such as the spiritual waste of the characters’ lives and the destructive power of greed. The novel opens after the phosphate operation has closed down, leaving a polluted environment behind. Jester, a frustrated black jockey who now is the driver for the town’s current

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owner, Mayhugh, surveys the landscape from his home atop Phosphate Mountain: On all sides of Phosphate Mountain for nearly as far as [Jester] could see were mounds of earth the color of potash and partially covered with a ragged fringe of weeds and rusted pieces of machinery. Down the valleys broken strands of barbed wire had fallen between rotted, leaning posts. Metal conveyor belts, corroded and frozen in disuse, lay twisted and broken in the weeds. From the window, Jester could look straight into the deep hole of Garden Hills. (2-3)

Another major character, Dolly Ferguson, attempts to revitalize Garden Hills by building nearby Reclamation Park into a tourist attraction that overlooks the abandoned phosphate ruins, which she eventually transforms into a go-go dancing attraction and freak show, but the people of Garden Hills remain as hopeless as the surrounding landscape.3 Dennis Covington’s 2004 creative non-fiction book, Redneck Riviera, narrates the author’s pursuit of the American Dream from his home state of Alabama down to the heart of Florida in the River Ranch land development of Polk County, where the author encounters lawlessness, corruption, and downright meanness. River Ranch Acres was established by the Gulf American Land Company in a shady arrangement that included assurances to Polk County commissioners that River Ranch Acres would produce abundant tax dollars with no regulation or services responsibility for the county. Gulf American purchased almost 45,000 acres of undeveloped wilderness and subdivided it into 140,000 lots to be sold at a tremendous profit. Covington explains that “River Ranch . . . had no roads . . . no electricity, no drinking water, and no sewage system. Twenty percent of the parcels were under water” (29).The company was sold “to GAC, a Pennsylvania-based finance company” that went bankrupt in 1975 (Covington 30). Sixteen thousand landowners were left with “nothing but the raw, unsurveyed, and unimproved land they had purchased at exorbitant prices nearly twenty years before” (30). In 1982 Covington’s father received a letter from Dick Powell, founder of the River Ranch Landowners’ Association, established in direct opposition to the so-called Hunt Club, or River ranch Property Owners Hunting Association, which claimed authority over the entire area despite its members’ owning a fraction of the acreage. The group leased land to cattle ranchers and built “hunting camps and vacation homes” wherever they wished, enforcing their authority with armed guards at the gate limiting the access of nonmembers, even deeded property owners. Powell’s letter indicated that ‘these hunters and other squatters had moved

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onto the land in great numbers, erecting shacks, trailers, and even second homes illegally on landowners’ property” (32). For Mr. Covington, then sevetny-two, his River Ranch lot was his only lifetime investment, which he left at his death four years later to Dennis. Dennis Covington imagines that his father wanted to engage him in a western-style adventure “reclaiming . . . family land that had been stolen by gunslingers and cattle barons. . . . thinking that I might ride into Polk County, Florida, one day demanding justice, even if it meant riding into an ambush” (37). For Covington, Polk County becomes the setting not merely for a non-fiction narrative, but also for an adventure cast as a Wild West story. In May 1996, he drove with his nephew Craig in an old jeep Cherokee into the heart of the Polk County darkness, to claim his 2 ½ acres. Much like the desolate landscape described by Crews, Covington’s River Ranch seems to reflect the character of its inhabitants: “this part of River Ranch was a landscape of beat-up tin shacks with dog runs and outhouses; junked appliances and swamp buggies loomed beneath the trees like the intact skeletons of steel dinosaurs”(49). Deep into the territory, Covington comes across “rows of squatters’ houses, some neat but some junked up with wrecked school buses and house trailers and foul-smelling garbage pits” (71). Along the way, Covington encounters a parade of interesting characters, including Dick Powell, a gutsy man who uses the law to fight for his property rights. The story has plenty of outlaws and rough characters: for instance, a local rancher had been shot at, so “The Hunt Club sent two of its men to investigate. Both wore revolvers in holsters strapped to their waists, like characters in a spaghetti western,” and one of them remarks, “I’d just love to shoot somebody today!” (64) Covington manages to find his own plot and build a cabin on it; however, after growing harassment and vandalism, someone smashes up his jeep and cabin, and he loses hope: “Nobody was going to be arrested for destroying my camp. . . . Cowboy songs around the old campfire were out of the question now” (127). When Covington moves to Idaho to pursue another land dream, he finds out that Powell finally won his legal battle to gain access to his property: “In a July 1999 letter, Powell’s attorney summed it up nicely: sometimes the good guys win!”4 Polk County was a different kind of place for Zora Neale Hurston— no doubt rough and dangerous, but also a cultural paradise. Directed by anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University, Hurston journeyed home to Florida to gather African American folklore in 1927 and 1928, an expedition that took her from her childhood home of Eatonville southwest into Polk County (Hemenway 111). She visited work sites and

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surrounding communities with concentrations of black workers to gather folk tales and songs. In Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her imaginative autobiography, Hurston describes the setting in which she found the storytellers and singers. Much of her interest lies clearly in the work performed, the workers themselves, and the job sites. For instance, this is her passage on the sawmills and their powerful workers: These poets of the swinging blade! The brief but infinitely graceful, dance of body and axe-head as it lifts over the head in a fluid arc, dances in air and rushes down to bite into the tree, all in beauty. Where the logs march into the mill with its smokestacks disputing with the elements, its boiler room reddening the sky, and its great circular saw screaming arrogantly as it attacks the tree like a lion making its kill. . . . All day, all night. Rumble, thunder, and grumble. Yee—ee—ow! Sweating black bodies, muscled like gods, working to feed the hunger of the great tooth. Polk County! (Dust Tracks 690)

With similar admiration, Hurston describes Polk County workers in phosphate mines, citrus groves, and turpentine camps and on railroad construction sites. Hurston found her richest source of information about the workers in the jook joints, where these hard-laboring men and their women unleashed their raw passions: “Polk County. After dark, the jooks. Songs are born out of feelins with an old beat-up piano, or a guitar for a mid-wife. Love made and unmade. . . ” (Dust Tracks 692). Violence, often between women, was common: “And . . . the pay night rocks on with music and gambling and laughter and dancing and fights. . . . That is the primeval flavor of the place . . . the primitive approach to things. . . ” (Dust Tracks 695). As she records the lore of the sawmill, Hurston becomes involved with its community to the point that one jealous woman, Lucy, attempts to knife her. Hurston’s best friend, Big Sweet, not only rescues her, but throughout Hurston’s Polk County stay, helps her “collect material in a big way. . . . She pointed out people who knew songs and stories. She wouldn’t stand for balkiness on their part” (Dust Tracks 698). In her 1935 Mules and Men, Hurston presented much of the folk lore gathered in Florida; after struggling with a structure for the material, she framed the lore with the narrative of her “research” expedition. Following days of gathering tales in and around Eatonville, she returns for more on the store front porch, where Charlie Jones recommends new territory: “. . . Zora, you ain’t in the right place to git de bes’ lies. Why don’t you go down ‘round Bartow and Lakeland and ‘round in dere—Polk County? Dat’s where they really lies up a mess and dats where dey makes up all de

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songs and things lak dat. Ain’t you never hear’d dat in Polk County de water drink lak cherry wine?” . . . [The group] talked and told strong stories of Ella Wall, East Coast Mary, Planchita and lesser jook lights around whom the glory of Polk County surged. (Mules and Men 60)

Crossing the line into “the famed Polk County,” Hurston and her friends stop at the “Everglades Cypress Lumber Company, Loughman, Florida” (Mules 62). Once Hurston becomes accepted by the workers and the women living with them, Loughman not only provides her with a rich mine of lore, but it also presents her with a living community that creates the tales. As Dana McKinnon Preu points out, The black community at the Loughman sawmill camp has an atmosphere and physical characteristics different from those in Eatonville, and, thus, provides elements of black culture not seen there. . . . Certainly it embodies the physically violent side of the oral cultures. . . (52).

Hurston gathers material at a dance and a lying (story-telling) contest and then ventures out with the swamp gang, where she finds the most abundant tale-spinning – here at the farthest cultural distance and most different physical setting from her New York City starting point (Mules 68), the wildness of the place suggested by the need for her friends to accompany her “to see to it that I didn’t get snake bit nor ‘gator swallowed” ; Hurston adds that the watchman. . . had been killed by a panther two weeks before” (Mules 68). The next morning they begin telling stories while waiting for the swamp boss, and fortunately for Hurston, the logging is cancelled for the day. They walk slowly back to camp and then through the woods to fish in the lake, stories flowing all the while. Among the Polk County storytellers in Mules and Men, the only woman is Big Sweet, who emerges as the most important character throughout Hurston’s Polk County writings. As Preu explains, “Befitting the oral heroic mode, Big Sweet is monumental in her physical presence and in her actions” (59). With Big Sweet to guard her in the jook, where the human society is as dangerous as the natural wilderness surrounding the camp, Hurston safely watches and socializes and hears folk songs, tall tales, threats, hyperbole, and boasting – the lively talk of the celebrants full of folklore. After a short trip to the phosphate country around Mulberry, Lakeland, and Pierce, where she “collected a mass of children’s tales and games” (Mules 153), Hurston returns to Loughman to join a big marriage

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celebration. She leaves for good in the midst of a brawl involving Lucy, Big Sweet, and others. Preu comments that “The physical strength and violence celebrated in folktales of the culture thus becomes reality” (53). Returning to the Polk County setting, Hurston nominally collaborated with Dorothy Waring to create the play Polk County in 1941.5 Set at the Lofton Lumber Company, it revisits many characters from Dust Tracks and Mules and Men, notably Big Sweet, Ella Wall, Nunkie, and Box Car. Big Sweet’s musician lover Joe Willard becomes Lonnie; jealous, threatening Lucy becomes Dicey; and Zora becomes Leafy Lee, a naïve New Yorker who has travelled to the lumber camp to learn the blues. The play opens with detailed stage directions, describing the “primeval woods . . . [that] surround everything. Bull alligators can be heard booming like huge bass drums form the lake at night. Variegated chorus of frogs, big owls, and now and then the cry of a panther” (Polk County 280). For Hurston, the rugged Polk County lumber camp is ideal for this drama of fierce passions: Working, loving temporarily, wearing their switch-blade knives and guns as a habit like men of the Old West, fighting, cutting, and being cut, such a camp where there is little law, and the peace officers of state and county barred by the management, those refugees from life see nothing unlovely in the sordid camp. They love it and when they leave there, will seek another place like it. Such a place is the cradle of the blues and work songs. There they are made and go from mouth to mouth of itinerant workers from one camp to the other. (281)

Other Polk County locales contribute to the play — Dicey visits Ella at Mulberry, which becomes the home of evil and trouble, and Bartow represents the white man’s law and order, with which the Quarters Boss threatens Big Sweet if she kills again, but the lumber camp provides the setting for the entire play. In Mules and Men, Hurston presented Polk County as the ideal setting for her gathering of African American folklore. In Polk County, the characters spend little time telling folk tales but much time singing bluesy folk songs, and the characters themselves often seem like those of folklore. The men at the Jook competing for Leafy’s attention boast with hyperbole of the sort found in tall tales: Sop-the Bottom says, “I aim to give you a passenger train just for a sort of remembrance . . . And then I aims to hire some men to run it for you” ; Do – Dirty easily tops that boast: “I aims to buy you one of them big oceanliners, and then I aims to buy you a ocean of your own to run it on” (Polk County 346).

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Big Sweet, Zora’s guide, her protector, and a storyteller in Mules and Men, in Polk County is an accomplished blues singer and mentor for Leafy. Again, Big Sweet has the extraordinary abilities of a folk hero: “I done made over this place more nearly like Lonnie say it ought to be” (Polk County 320). Big Sweet explains how she came to be the camp’s unofficial peace keeper: [O]ne day about six years ago, me and God got to sort of controversing on the subject of how some folks loves to take advantage of everybody else. He said that sure was the truth, and He never had meant it to be that-a-way. Preaching and teaching didn’t do some of ‘em no good. Jailing ‘em didn’t help ‘em none, and hanging was too good for ‘em. They just needed they behinds kicked. (Polk County 319)

Hurston fashions Big Sweet’s account of her conversation with God in the familiar language of folk lore, in which God is an anthropomorphic and accessible character, particularly for the folk hero. Hurston adapts the Hoo Doo material of Mules and Men to the deep woods of Polk County to provide the setting for Dicey’s attempt to destroy the sawmill gang; there, with Ella Wall as a Voo Doo Queen surrounded by ritualistic music and dancing, Dicey casts a spell on the marriage party of Leafy and My Honey; Big Sweet enters the scene, breaks the spell with a heroic shout, and foils Dicey and Ella’s evil plot, much like a folkloric hero overcoming the devil. Lonnie, revered by all at the camp, is the high priest of the blues who charges others to help indoctrinate the neophyte into their mysteries: “She want to sing the blues, so we all got to help her out all we can. Each and every one of you teach her what you know” (Polk County 321). Like Big Sweet, Lonnie at times seems a larger-than-life character with supernatural connections: “Poor Dicey, she sure is set on cutting out her own coffin. But me and High John ain’t going to let her” (Polk County 331). Lonnie refers to John the Conqueror, “the great human culture hero in Negro folklore” (Polk County 229).6 Later, Sop-The-Bottom says, “Oh, don’t you worry about Lonnie. He’s all right. Bet he’s off somewhere having one of his visions. Nothing don’t worry that Lonnie. He’s just like High John the Conquer. Don’t care what trouble it is. He can find a way” (Polk County 337–38). When Lonnie reacts to a deceptive letter sent to him by Dicey, and has fallen into blue silence, the others speculate; Sop-the –Bottom says, “He may be way out on ether’s blue bosom somewhere travellin’ around. Then he going to come back and tell us something to make our work seem easy, and our burdens seem light” (Polk County 348). His faith in Big Sweet restored,

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Lonnie resumes his role as spiritual shaman of the camp: “Now, I can dream some more. Listen. I hear the drums of High John de Conquer. I can fly off on the big wings. I can stand on ether’s blue bosom. I can stand out on the apex of power. . . . I got my wings. I rides the rainbow” (Polk County 356). The stage direction comments: “He stands exalted, and his mood touches all. . . . First Lonnie smiles beatifically, then good humor and laughter spreads over the place“ (Polk County 356). When the play ends, Lonnie proclaims, “Now, I can fly. Everything is going to be just fine; the stage directions indicate that “there comes the sound of the mystic drums [and] a huge rainbow descends” (Polk County 399). The happy couples all scramble on board, and “the rainbow rises slowly” (Polk County 399). This supernatural feature was cut from the arena theater production, but it serves to emphasize the play’s other folkloric elements. In Polk County, Hurston has transformed the Polk County of Mules and Men into more than a place where folklore is created and shared; it has become itself a mythical place.

Notes 1

Polk County debuted in an adapted version at the Arena theater in Washington D. C. in 2002. 2 Anne Foata’s “Interview With Harry Crews” presents Crews’s discovery of the Polk County phosphate country: “. . . and then the landscape became ruined; as far as the eye could see, there were ponds of scummy water, broken tracks, barbed wire . . . It looked like war. . . .Then I began to see the refineries, some of them abandoned, some of them still working. It depressed me and I thought: “’Oh my god, here we are again right in the middle of man and what he is capable of on the earth . . . And those poor hopeless people who live under it were glad when the factories came in: they thought it was Progress.’”(45) 3 Critics have interpreted the meaning of this novel in many ways. A sampling follows. Jeff Abernathy argues that Naked in Garden Hills is a response to the Agrarian movement of the 1930’s: Crews develops a withering critique of the transformations of the South in the twentieth century that invokes the Agrarian arguments of the 1930s: his grotesques here emerge out of an industrial New South that has abandoned farming for the factory, the rural for the urban, the sacred for the secular . . . (68). Abernathy asserts that “the closing of the plant returns the residents of Garden Hills to a pre-technological, pre-industrial society, and Crews portrays with savage irony the emptiness of their lives in the absence of the factory economy that has transformed them. . . (71). Gary L. Long comments on capitalism in the novel: ”Water-filled, scummy tailings of a played-out phosphate mine – the creation of a

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god-like absentee industrialist who ravages the Florida landscape for profit . . . . Jack O’Boylan is a faceless exploiter of resources and people. Michaelangelo’s Creation is his corporate logo; his business is destruction” (56). Edward C. Lynsky discusses religious implications of the novel: Naked is an allegorical treatment of the Garden of Eden and the conflicts between its inhabitants and its creator. Jack O’Boylan, a Christ figure who never appears, is a wealthy industrialist who purchases the barren tract in rural Florida from a financially ruined land speculator after O’Boylan “looked and saw it was real good” (148). Larry W. Debord and Gary L. Long argue that “The experiences of the characters in Naked in Garden Hills challenge popular beliefs about getting ahead. Jester attempts to escape poverty through merit; Fat Man tries to maintain his inherited wealth; Dolly seeks to exchange the accident of her beauty for security. All three make faulty assumptions about success and use methods that preclude it. By different routes, they become failures”(47). 4 The State of Florida’s Conservation and Recreational Lands program overcame earlier fears and began looking into condemning and purchasing 271,000 acres: “. . . state biologists had consistently ranked River Ranch Acres at the top of their list of desirable properties. The acreage was unrivaled in terms of ecological diversity and susceptibility to development” (Covington 173). The State’s only remaining concern was with the various illegal camps, shacks, etc. When the wildfire of May 2000 spread through “the Hunt-Club’s self-proclaimed camping area . . . at least 113 of the Hunt Club’s structures had been destroyed,” though Covington’s land “was untouched – a vast field of palmetto and pine, as fine as beaten silver under the first light of dawn.” (177). 5 For a discussion of Hurston’s dramatic career and its relation to Florida, see Warren J Carson’s Hurston as Dramatist: The Florida Connection; the article comments on Polk County. Polk County remained generally unavailable until 2005, when Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell published From Luababa to Polk County: Zora Neale Hurston’s Plays at the Library of Congress. Also in this collection is Jook, a brief sketch including familiar Polk County characters Nunkie, Ella Wall, and Big Sweet and set in “a saw-mill jook house.” 6 See The Glossary of Mules and Men, 229.

Works Cited Abernathy, Jeff. “Agrarian Nightmare: Harry Crews' Dark Vision in Naked in Garden Hills.” The Southern Literary Journal. 34:1 (Fall 2001): 68-78. Bledsoe, Eric ed. Getting Naked with Harry Crews. Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 1999. —. Perspectives on Harry Crews. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Carson, Warren J. Hurston as Dramatist: The Florida Connection. Glassman and Seidel 121-129.

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Covington, Dennis. Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream. Cambridge, MA: Counterpoint, 2004. Debord, Larry W. and Gary L. Long. “Harry Crews on the American Dream.” The Southern Quarterly. 20:3 (Spring 1982): 35–53. Foata, Anne. “Interview With Harry Crews.” Bledsoe, Getting Naked with Harry Crews 26-48. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. USA: the Library of America, 1995. 557–808. —. Mules and Men. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. USA: the Library of America, 1995. 1267. —. Polk County: An Authentic Negro Musical in Three Acts Co-Authored with Dorothy Waring. In From Luababa to Polk County: Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress. Ed. Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell. Baltimore: Apprentice House, 2005. 277-399. Long, Gary L. “Silences, Criticisms, and Laments: The Political Implications of Harry Crews’s Work.” Bledsoe, Perspectives on Harry Crews 47-62. Lynskey, Edward C. ”Early Harry Crews: A True Grit’s Religiosity.” The Pembroke Magazine. 23 (1991): 143–151. Preu, Dana McKinnon, “A Literary Reading of Mules and Men, Part I.” Zora in Florida. Ed. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. 46-61.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND THE HURRICANE OF 1928 VALERIE E. KASPER

Recently, Florida newspapers have run articles about the Herbert Hoover Dike in south Florida. The dike was built around Lake Okeechobee after the 1928 hurricane killed more than 2000 people in the Everglades when the lake rushed over its four to six foot embankment. Built out of mud, sand, grass, rock and concrete and named after President Herbert Hoover, the current dike has withstood a handful of hurricanes since then, though none as powerful as the 1928 (Klinkenberg). So the question today, as in 1928, is will it withstand another devastating hurricane? Or, will people, as they did in 1928, lose their lives? In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God captures the death and devastation in the ‘Glades as the 1928 hurricane rolled over south Florida and the small dike that held back Lake Okeechobee failed. Hurston’s knowledge of the Everglades and its people and her firsthand experience with a hurricane in Haiti not only allowed her to authentically incorporate the 1928 hurricane of south Florida into Their Eyes Were Watching God, but it also allowed her to cast light onto the black migrant workers who lost their lives.

Background of Lake Okeechobee, the Dike, and the Hurricane of 1928 Lake Okeechobee is 37 miles by 35 miles and covers 450,000 acres of rich, fertile black earth called muck (Reese 53), and each year the summer rains would cause the lake to expand into the farmland around it where families lived and grew crops. Many families used small boats for transportation during those months of flooding, but even so, the fertile land produced plenty of food. However, in 1916, the government-run Everglades Drainage District (EDD) decided to regulate the water levels of Lake Okeechobee by dredging several drainage canals. This would reclaim thousands of acres of muckland in which farmers could plant crops year-

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round because it would keep the lake from invading their crops during the rainy season. In addition to regulating the water levels, the EDD decided in the early 1920s to erect a permanent earthen dike around Lake Okeechobee, which would further contain the lake’s water and protect its inhabitants. In 1928, a four to six foot dike of mud, dirt, and rock was constructed to protect the towns around Lake Okeechobee, and as “long as it didn’t rain too hard, too fast, and as long as the winds didn’t push the water against the flimsy barrier,” people believed it would contain the lake and protect them (Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post). However, in September 1928 it rained too hard, too fast, and for too long, and the winds did push the water against the flimsy barrier. That night the dike broke, killing at least 2,500 when it failed and flooded the hundreds of square miles of farmland around it. Water in some places was more than 20 feet deep. In Belle Glade, one resident saw an old rubber tree in which debris had been carried into the upper branches, and he estimated the flood was 27 feet high. Few structures in town were more than 20 feet (Mykle 204). According to the Palm Beach Post, the death toll was revised from 1836 to 2500 in 2005, and it was believed many more than that perished. The vast majority of the victims who died (estimated to be three quarters of the dead) were black migrant workers, many of whom came from the islands south of Florida to work. Accounting for members of this population was complicated not only because of their migratory habits but by the fact that most were known, even to their friends, only by nicknames. Another reason the number could not be ascertained was many were carried by the flood far into the sawgrass (National Weather Service). Many factors came together to produce the devastation caused by the 1928 hurricane: current technology was unable to track hurricanes accurately, forecasts were often incorrect, and people of the ‘Glades refused to leave their homes and crops. For almost two weeks forecasters knew the storm was in the Atlantic Ocean. Government weather watchers, as well as ships' reports, kept tabs on it. But, in 1928, information was frequently wrong or obsolete by the time it was received (Klinkenberg); therefore, many residents disregarded it. And, one of the incorrect assumptions of the 1928 hurricane was it would hit on September 14 and curve northward along the coast (Klinkenberg; Kleinberg 57). This information reached the ‘Glades, and many residents sought refuge or left. However, many did not leave. And, when it didn’t hit on September 14, the residents who had sought safer locations returned.

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In addition to the obsolete information and incorrect assumptions, the technology in 1928 was not accurate or reliable either. When the hurricane reached the islands south of Florida, forecasters lost track of it because radio towers in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Nassau, which were used to broadcast weather information back to the states, were destroyed during the hurricane. A few ham radio messages reached the outside world to confirm the scale of the disaster, but there was no official information, such as wind speed, rainfall, or storm direction (Mykle 127). By the time Florida forecasters realized the magnitude of the hurricane, it was too late to warn those inland. As a result, on September 16, 1928, a monster Category 4 hurricane, spanning 500 miles and packing 150-mph winds, caught South Florida by surprise, especially Palm Beach County and the Lake Okeechobee region (Kaye).

Hurston’s Authentic Depiction of the 1928 Hurricane in Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston wrote a remarkably accurate portrayal of the hurricane of 1928 and its effect on the inhabitants of the ‘Glades; however, she was not there at the time it devastated south Florida. She wasn’t even in Florida, nor did she come to Florida until the next decade. Her ability to recreate realistically and convincingly the 1928 hurricane came from two sources: the people she knew in the ‘Glades and her own experience with the 1929 hurricane in the Bahamas. Hurston did not come to Belle Glade, Florida to collect information until 1935 (Kaplan 353, 641). Hurston was an anthropologist who wrote about Florida for the Works Progress Administration, a depression-era work relief government program, between 1935 and 1939 collecting folklore throughout Florida. Much of the material in the chapters about the hurricane is based on accounts of the storm that she collected during this time from people in the ‘Glades. Many of the people she spoke with were described in her work. And despite not being there, she was able to immortalize the hurricane and capture the lives of the black folks who lived in the ‘Glades because of her ability to connect with the people (Kleinberg 205). She knew many of the survivors, which allowed her to recreate the events of that night (Boyd, “Goin South” 2). In addition to the stories she collected from survivors of the hurricane, she also was able to recreate the vivid scenes in detail because she had survived the 1929 hurricane in the Bahamas. On September 28, the Bahamas was hit by a category 4 hurricane whose winds destroyed the house Hurston occupied and left her homeless. She found shelter with

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many others at a local police station. She remembered the “dead people washing around on the streets” and the “stench from the dead animals” (Boyd, “Wrapped in Rainbows” 187-8). After surviving the hurricane in the Bahamas, she recalled in a letter to Langston Hughes that she thought she would never get back to the mainland (Kaplan 148). However, years after she returned to the mainland, she accurately portrayed the desolation and destruction caused by a hurricane, and this can be seen in the many similarities between her novel and actual events in south Florida. Hurston’s description of the towns, wildlife, and foliage in the Everglades shows her extensive knowledge of Florida. The story is infused with references to trees, plants, and animal characteristics of the region. Hurston references rabbits and possums, rattlesnakes and buzzards, and deer and panthers. She uses the plants and animals to produce the first warnings for Janie and Tea Cake. She describes the cypress trees, the blooming sawgrass, the blowing banana trees, the coons, panthers, and other animals moving east to avoid the storm (Hurston 155). These animals, along with the Seminole Indians, are heading east toward the road for Palm Beach to avoid the hurricane. Janie encounters two parties of Seminole Indians leaving the area. They inform her they are seeking higher ground because a hurricane is coming. Hurston uses stories, such as the Seminole Indians, to illustrate some of the folklore she is known for. Several of the stories in Their Eyes Were Watching God came from actual events Hurston collected during her travels in Florida, heard about from others, or possibly read about in newspapers. The Seminole Indians, houses washed off their foundations during the storm, and tales of survival and demise are all stories Hurston incorporates into her novel to make it more authentic. The Seminole Indians in the Brighton Indian Reservation area on the northwest edge of Lake Okeechobee knew a big storm was coming in 1928. They could sense trouble because of the still air, the animals heading east looking for refuge, and the “eerily bright, yet pale, glow” of the daylight. Respecting these harbingers, the Seminoles left the area. “They had been heavily battered in the 1926 hurricane with a dozen dead and many heads of cattle drowned. They understood the power of the hurricane. Tales of whole villages swept off islands in the Everglades were related in oral traditions told around campfires” (Mykle 132-3). The Indians felt the whites were foolish to stay in the area that was “once under the water – Lake Okeechobee” (Mykle 133). The Indians are said to have told one person of the impending hurricane. They told Clarence Miller, who was a black man and “one of the few non Indians

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they trusted. Few Indians would have even thought to warn a white man” (Mykle 133). Instead of leaving the ‘Glades, as the Indians did, many residents of the ‘Glades sought shelter in 1928. Many piled into the sturdiest house in the area and vigilantly waited. Once the dike broke, though, the high water forced them into their attics. The Boots family from Belle Glade converged in one house with 63 other people. When the water rose, they climbed into the attic. Just as Tea Cake, Janie, and Motorboat sought refuge in an abandoned house, so did the people of the ‘Glades seek refuge in their homes. Though Tea Cake and Janie left for higher ground, Motorboat remained in the house. And, just as with the people of the ‘Glades, the house in which Motorboat sought refuge was washed from its foundation. The difference was that Motorboat’s house was not destroyed. Most of the houses in the ‘Glades were destroyed once they were washed from their foundations, pushed by the strong current, and smashed into other buildings, trees, and debris, thereby throwing their inhabitants into the “black, pitiless waters” to fight for their lives throughout the night (Mykle 166). After fleeing the abandoned house, Tea Cake and Janie continue to head for West Palm Beach, but Janie tires. Tea Cake carries Janie on his back when she is no longer able to move. Once they reach the six-mile bridge, Tea Cake rests. During this time, Janie tries to cover him with some tar paper roofing, but she is blown into the water. To keep from drowning, Janie grabs the tail of a cow swimming by. It could be coincidence or it could be that Hurston read the story in The New York Times of a man who swam with his wife on his back to save her. They abandoned their house on Lake Okeechobee Island and headed for higher ground. The man made four trips, one trip to carry his wife and three more to carry their children off the island (“Florida Dead”). In addition to this story were other stories of survivors using cows as rafts and splintered lumber as paddles (Klinkenberg), just like Janie using the tail of a cow to keep from drowning. The stories were not confined to the ‘Glades. Many stories came from the Palm Beach area, as well. Once Tea Cake and Janie make it to West Palm Beach from the ‘Glades, Tea Cake is forcibly enlisted to help with the recovery effort. He is accosted by two white men who tell him to come with them to “go bury some uh dese heah dead folks”; otherwise, “somebody’ll be burying you” (Hurston 170). He is held for several hours until he is able to escape. Tea Cake returns to Janie and tells her it is time to return to the ‘Glades where “de white folks know me” (Hurston 172).

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Tea Cake survives and lives to return to the ‘Glades. However, many blacks in West Palm Beach were not so lucky. Coot Simpson, who was drafted into the recovery effort on a West Palm Beach street, was shot and killed by National Guardsmen Knolton Crosby. One side said Simpson tried to leave after talking to the supervisor and was shot in the back; the other said he attacked Crosby and was shot in self-defense. The shooting was ruled justified (Kleinberg 183-7). Through real-life events that Hurston wove into her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God is able to cast light onto the lives of those, such as Coot Simpson, who lost their lives because of the 1928 hurricane. The novel gives a voice to the three quarters of the dead who lost their lives – the black migrant workers. Few white people thought about what the black migrants would do if the dike broke. Black folks had nowhere to go, no cars to carry them to safety; they could not travel on barges and had no relatives on high ground. They would have to take their chances in their flimsy shacks built out of scrap wood and tarpaper, most no stronger than poorly built coffins (Mykle 118). Even the books written decades after the devastation caused by the 1928 hurricane focus on white families and the effect the hurricane had on them. And even today, West Palm Beach is still racially divided as many push for memorials for the black residents of the area (Sharp). The story immortalized in Hurston’s novel continues to cast light and draw discord onto a piece of history that has been continuously re-lived and re-evaluated in books, stories, and articles for the last 80 years.

Works Cited Boyd, Valerie. “Goin’ South: Zora Neale Hurston was in Flight from a Failed Relationship when She Created Her Masterpiece.” Book (JulyAugust 2002): 8(3). General OneFile. Gale. University of South florida Z3950. 13 Oct. 2007. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/start.do?prodId=ITOF. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows. New York: Scribner. 2003. “Florida Dead Put at 400, with 23,000 in Distress.” The New York Times. 20 Sept. 1928.: pg. 12. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 2006 Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Kaye, Ken. “Disaster Struck without Warning.” South Florida Sun Sentinel Online. 14 Sept. 2003. 12 Oct. 2007

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. Kleinberg, Eliot. Black Cloud. New York: Carroll &Graf, 2003. Kleinberg, Eliot. “The Storm of 1928: Dead-on Devastation.” Palm Beach Post Online. 1 June 2003. 20 Aug. 2007

Klinkenberg, Jeff. “The Storm of Memories.” St. Petersburg Times Online. 12 July 1992. 20 Aug. 2007 . Mykle, Robert. Killer ‘Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. National Weather Service Office - Miami, Florida - Memorial Web Page for the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. 26 July 2004. 20 Aug. 2007. . Reese, Joseph Hugh. Florida’s Great Hurricane. Miami: Lysle E. Fesler, 1926. Sharp, Deborah. “Storm’s Path Remains Scarred after 75 Years.” USA Today Online. September 2003. 12 Oct. 2007