PART VI FLORIDA
PART VI
FLORIDA
Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
outlining how American history
is to be taught in Florida schools
Florida
13 October
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Florida is weird.
It’s actually a lot like Louisiana—flat, swampy, humid and populated by strange individuals—except that all of it is coloured pink and aqua. Oh, and instead of sex-toy shops, it has strip clubs. Lots of strip clubs.
Politically, Florida used to be a swing state that decided presidential elections.
Now it’s a ruby red state, largely because of all the folks in the panhandle—the area where Florida borders Georgia and Alabama—who are about as hardcore conservative as it gets: religious, racist, white and poor.
This isn’t a new development.
Florida was one of the most ardent slave-owning states in the Confederacy. It fought with particular bitterness during the Civil War, harder than almost any other state in its efforts to maintain slavery.
Now: pink and aqua.
Like I said, weird.
It was raining hard as we drove into Florida in a crappy 1986 Toyota we’d paid cash for at a used-car lot outside New Orleans.
We were off the grid now.
It was cash only or, if there was no other choice, prepaid credit cards. No trail.
As Audrey drove us across the panhandle on the 10, I pulled my laptop from my backpack and brought up my research on the 1877 investigation in Florida conducted by the Union captain, George McShane.
McShane had gone missing after interviewing two members of the Fisher family and venturing to a salt mine they owned.
I brought up a scan of the progress report Captain McShane had made in late 1877 when he’d gone in search of his four missing prostitutes, one of whom was named Carlotta Stone, and read a few key paragraphs:
The last customer to pay for Miss Stone’s services via her madam was one Mr Cree Fisher, the son of a wealthy local salt mine owner, Mr Wallace Fisher III.
Mr Cree Fisher procured the four prostitutes to attend a ‘gentlemen’s gathering’ he was holding on behalf of a visiting friend, in honour of that friend’s upcoming wedding to Cree’s sister, Mary Rose.
The four prostitutes never returned from this gathering.
I am led to believe the gathering took place at a hunting lodge on the Fisher estate, out near their salt mine south of Tallahassee.
As I reread the report, I saw something I hadn’t really noticed before.
Cree Fisher had obtained the four prostitutes for a ‘gentlemen’s gathering’ for a visiting friend who was about to be married.
‘It was a bachelor party . . .’ I said aloud.
‘What?’ Audrey said as she drove.
‘Hang on a second.’
I brought up an ancestry website and—using a prepaid credit card—searched for ‘cree fisher’, ‘wallace fisher’, and ‘mary rose fisher’ in the state of Florida.
Within moments, I was looking at the family tree of the Fisher family of Tallahassee.
And there they were: Wallace and his son, Cree, and his -daughter, Mary Rose, living in the 1800s:
I immediately saw another name on the family tree that I recognised: Kingman.
Jebediah Kingman had married Wallace Fisher’s daughter, Mary Rose Fisher.
And suddenly something made sense.
Jebediah Kingman had been the bachelor at the bachelor party Cree Fisher had hosted in 1877, the party for which Cree had procured the four prostitutes from Tallahassee.
I immediately pulled up another digital image from my files.
It was the photo I’d surreptitiously taken at the Kingman -mansion in Victorville: of the Kingman family tree.
I saw it right away, at the top.
The same marriage but seen from the Kingman side.
Jebediah Kingman and Mary Rose Fisher.
The union of two wealthy Southern dynasties.
Sure enough, about ten months later, Jebediah Kingman II was born and the union was complete.
‘So what do you make of it?’ Audrey asked.
‘For now,’ I said, ‘that all these old families are intimately connected and that they’ve been connected for a very long time. And that during that time, from Texas to Florida, from one end of the South to the other, they’ve been up to something in the shadows.’
We drove deeper into Florida.
THE FLORIDA SWAMP AND GATOR FARM
Gulf Key, Florida
14 October
The following day, in sideways rain, Audrey and I puttered through a fetid marsh in a small tin motorboat.
We were down by the Gulf, about fifty miles south of Tallahassee but it might as well have been a thousand. This part of the Florida coast was mostly untouched wetlands and sparsely populated, with few roads or towns.
The weather had turned from rainy to absolutely awful, a -classic Gulf storm.
Twenty-mile-an-hour winds. Thick raindrops. Grey sky.
It made for slow going—it had taken us most of the day to get here—but it was perfect weather for our task. Nobody would be out in it with us.
I checked our position on my latest disposable phone.
We were a short way inland from a place called Alligator Point, having made our way there via the coastal swamps in the little boat that we’d bought for fifty bucks from a repair shop in Crawfordville.
Linc’s location pin had come from a spot north of us.
We continued northward through the marsh in the pouring rain until, late in the afternoon, we came upon some ruins: the battered remains of a small port town that had long ago been consumed by nature.
Its jetty and wooden storehouses were twisted and splintered, all the wood stripped pale by decades of rain and hurricane-force winds.
A ghost town.
Audrey said, ‘The map says this is Gulf Key.’
‘Slavers’ Key,’ I said softly.
It made sense: a clandestine slave port wouldn’t be on the coast but rather a short way inland, hidden from view.
In the distance beyond the ghost town, above the trees of the swamp and a low hill, I saw a high white mound.
It looked like a flat-topped mountain, only it wasn’t natural.
‘What is that?’ Audrey asked.
‘The Fisher family’s phosphate mine,’ I said. ‘It was a salt mine when Captain McShane came down here in 1877, but the Fishers converted it to a phosphate mine. That mound covers radioactive waste.’
‘Good way to keep people away,’ Audrey said.
‘Yeah.’
I squinted as the rain beat down against my face.
‘This place has swallowed two investigators already: Captain McShane and Linc Lewis. Keep your eyes open.’
I looked at my phone again.
‘Linc sent his pin from somewhere in there,’ I said, nodding at the dense swamp on the landward side of the ghost port town.
We drove our little motorboat deeper into the swamp.
Reeds and mangroves rose up on both sides of the boat. At times we couldn’t even see the water on which we floated.
Alligators watched us from the rain-speckled waters.
About a mile in, we came upon a second set of ruins.
Some garish lime-green shacks, chain-link fences and sagging palm trees.
A forlorn sign, tilted sideways, read:
The second ‘L’ in Gatorville had long ago disappeared.
A cartoon alligator smiled goofily.
There’s nothing quite as sad as a derelict place of amusement. Everything about this abandoned alligator farm was wretched.
Once upon a time it’d been someone’s dream, but now mud, weeds and swamp water had consumed it.
I drove our boat up to the main entrance, parked it on the shore at the edge of a muddy car turnaround.
In the centre of the turnaround stood a massive fibreglass alligator, jaws open in a fake snarl. A puddle-filled dirt road stretched northward into the brush leading to civilisation.
The entry gate to the alligator farm hung open, its now-useless turnstile covered in grime.
I checked my phone again.
‘This is it. This was where Linc’s location pin last pinged.’
Audrey and I ventured into the abandoned alligator farm.
It was a sorry shell of a place.
The windows of the gift shop had shattered years ago, leaving the little store open to the elements.
Filthy signs proclaimed ‘today’s shows in the reptile theater’ or pointed the way to ‘croc lagoon’ or ‘alligator adventure boardwalk’.
We passed an area labelled: ‘staff only: pens’.
I peered in there and saw dank concrete-walled pens underneath a network of wooden planks: the one-time home of the alligators.
‘Sam, over here,’ Audrey said.
I joined her and saw it: a small amphitheatre of about a hundred raked seats all aimed down toward a stage and an empty swimming pool.
The alligator farm’s main theatre.
The curved walls of the empty pool were painted pale blue.
We hurried down the steps of the amphitheatre to the edge of the empty pool.
A shallow muddy pond had formed at its deep end. Leaves and other damp detritus lined it. Four alligators lay at the far end, watching us.
I swallowed when I spotted it, lying on a dry section of the pool directly below me.
It wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone else who came here, but it meant a lot to me.
It was a single yellow-and-green flip-flop with the label ‘Hurley’ on it.
‘This is where they killed him,’ I said.
The manacles that had bound Linc to the wall had been removed; the only evidence of their existence were some ugly cracks in the blue paint. And any blood from his execution had been hosed off.
We were both silent for a moment as we remembered Linc’s screams while the alligator tore him apart.
I pulled out my fourth and last disposable iPhone Mini and brought up a second location pin on Google Maps.
This pin’s icon pinged in radiating green circles: live.
‘What’s that? Another location pin?’ Audrey asked. ‘It can’t possibly be your friend’s phone. They must’ve taken it or destroyed it after they killed him.’
‘It isn’t Linc’s phone,’ I said. ‘It’s his key ring. His last fuck-you to the Hammer was a message to me. Remember when Linc was rambling and said he’d lost his leg and his mind and his keys?’
‘Yeah?’