Rayetta Flowers was twice as common as Mercelle and her people were poorer than Grandfather. Mercelle did a big job of talking. When Rayetta’s daddy, a Pentecost preacher, caught a tale that his daughter was screwing a nigger boy, he didn’t wait for confirmation. Rayetta’s daddy beat her unconscious and when she came to, he beat her until she was blind in her right eye.
That night a storm of white men came into Grandfather’s yard demanding for Hez. Hez had hid under the porch and listened while Grandfather, who all the white men thought they knew and liked, stood on the porch with his rifle and told them he had beaten Hez and the evil boy had run off in mortal shame. Grandfather waxed his fiction for ten minutes, all about how he intended to be there when they strung up the low, bastard nigger. From his hiding place, Hez heard his grandfather beg the honor of laying the noose around his neck when they caught up with him. The men took off, noisily theorizing about where Hez had run and frantic with the need to find him before he got too far.
Grandfather gave Hez ten dollars and found him a ride on a pickup down into the Florida Everglades where he was to track down an uncle who worked in the produce fields. No one in south Florida had seen or heard of this uncle. Hez lost the tag end of his cash in a poker game. For a while he survived on piecework, mostly picking lettuce.
Lettuce season was already dwindling when Hez got to south Florida. Pretty soon he found himself out of work with less than a dollar in his pocket. He tried a sawmill, but all the workers were white. However, the supervisor, who lived in a rooming house close by, said Mrs. Jackson, his widow landlady, was half crazy with work and looking for some good, cheap help.
Mrs. Jackson had a sprawling white clapboard house with wide porches and green striped canvas awnings and tall dormers poking out the third floor. She kept it freshly painted against the damp. It was known as the cleanest rooming house between St. Petersburg
and Miami. Directly behind it, a long dock reached out into the river.
He didn’t know how it would sit, a dark stranger moving straight up the front steps and onto the porch. But he saw no other entrance except from the dock and that could only be accessed from the river, which was actually a swamp that narrowed and deepened into a proper channel a few miles downstream. She was a white lady and kept her priority, but Mrs. Seraphine Jackson was also young and friendly. She sat him down on the front porch and she had the kitchen girl bring him cool cider. She smelled nice. She was pretty and she had a directness that told you immediately she was a good woman. She inquired about his schooling and his habits. She explained that she needed general help. Hez would be expected to do the heavy household work. She was without a cook as well and would need him in the kitchen for preparation of the boarders’ evening meal. She wanted someone who would learn fast and not wait to be told if wood needed gathering or the porch wanted sweeping. For his labor he would receive room and board and eighteen dollars a week.
Hez settled into an attic room and fell into a daily routine. “Miss Seraphine” Jackson was an excellent teacher, and once she saw that Hez was a boy of good sense and character, she began to invest him with the subtler duties of a large house. Hez, who had never earned so much for doing so little, quickly took on a hundred routine chores without reminder or remonstrance. The arrangement suited each of them beyond their expectations.
He quickly came to know the names and faces of the boarders, congenial white men who supervised various local trades in and near the swamps. He came to understand their willingness to pay Miss Seraphine Jackson’s fifty cents more per week than other boardinghouses in the area. She sold them a modicum of civility, a pretense towards elegance that workingmen who raise themselves to low supervisory positions will immediately seek as proof of their exalted station.
Miss Seraphine didn’t allow them to imbibe liquor or bring women on her premises, so the boarders were either in bed asleep
or amusing themselves elsewhere in the evenings. Nights calmed down early and Hez slept deeper in his attic room than he had ever slept back in South Carolina.
Months slipped past in a haze of contentment and a few pleasant, decorous and necessary words between Hez and Seraphine. Gradually he came to feel that the Everglades was a world unto itself and the outside laws of light and dark people didn’t apply as much here. He still gave the white men a wide berth and kept a small distance while he worked in the kitchen with the young widow. Yet these men weren’t like the arrogant white people he had known in South Carolina. They didn’t keep talking when Hez entered a room. They didn’t act like he wasn’t there. No one seemed to mind if, standing a little ways apart from the men on the porch, Hez smiled at one of their jokes or offered a passing salutation as he mopped the glistening white enameled planks. An older, more experienced man wouldn’t have placed as much store in their seeming tolerance. An older, worldlier man would have carefully marked his route through each day and cautioned himself not to invoke their circumspection by deviating from it.
Eventually Seraphine took an interest in her young steward’s education. Between working the turpentine groves and picking cotton, Hez had been to school off and on through the eighth grade. He could read and write pretty well. Miss Seraphine lent him the use of her deceased husband’s books. He had been a literature student who eschewed poetry and prose and turned to farming. In the late evening, Hez would lie in his attic room with the window open and listen to the swamp and read about medieval warlords and Crusaders and battles and cities and lovers and lost kingdoms.
Miss Seraphine would drill him about the works he read as they set the evening dough to rise. In the beginning her zeal for his gradually increasing knowledge embarrassed Hez. He sometimes thought he could descry a frenetic loneliness in it. There were no other white women of her station for miles around. She had no friends. She almost seemed to lean on their kitchen time together for virtually all her social discourse. By supervising and guiding his education, she was attempting to create an intellectual peer. Even in
the Everglades Hez had no illusions about that. His caste was less formalized here than it would have been back in South Carolina. But it was equally real. The men would have plenty to say if they knew she was plying him with Robert Browning and geography and math.
He was putting by about thirty dollars a month. He figured when it came to a thousand he’d head back towards the Carolinas and buy himself a little farm. It was a lonely existence, there in the swamp with no other people to talk to except the two Creole serving girls. They were older, homely virgin women who lived upriver with their mama, who took all their earnings. They had no interest in a seventeen-year-old kid. They seemed to hold some deep, unspeakable prejudice against any person or idea from the world beyond the Everglades. They were as a rule hard to please and always ready to condemn him to Seraphine, usually via some false infraction of the house rules on Hez’s part. They frequently went to Seraphine to complain about him. His hands were dirty. He had spit on the kitchen floor. Seraphine invariably upbraided them for their lack of charity.
Aside from an occasional exchange with one of the white men on the porch, Hez’s entire social life consisted of listening to Miss Seraphine while they prepared the evening meal. As the months passed she shared more and more of her story with him.
She was the daughter of a Baltimore Methodist minister. She had married Evan, a young would-be farmer who had brought her to south Florida five years earlier. Evan had designs on farming produce, pulling in two or three crops a year, and making a fortune. He put his young savings down on the house and the land and his first few lettuce crops. For a year or two, things went very well for the newlyweds. Seraphine loved her hardworking husband ferociously and labored to turn his house into a proper place in which to raise his children. She furnished and decorated their house with antiques inherited from an aunt up in Maryland. She had artistic eyes, a knack for organizing and a penchant for perfection that conspired to make theirs the most painted and polished house for miles around.
In April of their third year together, with no one but Evan to help her, Seraphine gave birth to a son. The young couple’s rejoicing was short lived. One morning a month later, Seraphine leaned into the child’s crib and found the infant stiff and lifeless.
Devastated, they buried their child and tried to comfort each other with the promise of more children. Evan took it in his head that this loss was God’s judgment on them. He drowned his grief in hard whiskey and working doubly hard long hours in the produce fields. He left her alone with the loss while he took his solace with whores in town. He was afraid to sleep with her, afraid that she would conceive and the curse revisit them. Seraphine held no such view. It had been a dark accident of fate. She was young and strong and ready to bear more children. She tried to believe that her young husband, if left to his own devices, would eventually regain his faith and his better nature.
The following September brought a hurricane. Salt water ran forty miles inland from the ocean and the lettuce crop was destroyed. After that Evan sat on the porch and drank whiskey. Soon the bank took the land and he was unable to secure the loans he would need to start over. He was slapping Seraphine away by now. He abandoned all civility to his death wish, gambling in the swamps among lowlifes with money he didn’t have to lose. Hez had played enough back eddy poker to know the rest of the tale. The lost man had got in over his head with some drifter who had taken his due with a Bowie knife and left him for the gators.
Young women with half Seraphine’s griefs turned back up at their parents’ doors and became brittle, gray ghosts slipping about behind drawn shades in upstairs rooms. Seraphine had summoned enough wit and strength to throw open her house to boarders and draw a living from it. She had buried both her husband and her child in the Everglades. She said that rendered it her native soil. The only hope of conquering it lay in embracing it.
About a year after Hez began working for Seraphine, he began to notice the changes in her. Her pale cheeks had begun to show color. She was taking pains with her platinum hair. Grief, she was beginning to understand, is eternal, an undiminishing burden which
might, if squarely folded and stowed, lend a heavy ballast to her lonely existence. From time to time one of the men would invite her to the picture show in town. But she always refused them politely. Later in the kitchen she would gently deride the men to Hez, detailing their unfortunate, vulgar and wholly inferior natures, the roughness of their manners, the ignorance betrayed by their coarse speech. Often she would use the opportunity to draw comparisons between her boarders and Hez, pointing up his virtues and saying that he was destined for loftier ground. By this time Seraphine had taken an almost obsessive interest in Hez and not only his studies, but every other aspect of his existence as well. Seraphine insisted that he write to Grandfather, let him know how the wind was blowing. She located a colored church fifteen miles up the swamp and lent him her boat so he could attend on Sundays. She took Evan’s blue serge suit out of mothballs and cut it down for Hez. Hez looked so fine when he showed up at church that the little congregation took him for a visiting preacher and begged him for a sermon on the spot.
These days she took a little whiskey in sugar water as she cooked. She always poured Hez a similar amount in a mason jar which he would slip back into the bottle when her back was turned. Now she wanted him on the stool by the stove, his eyes adoring her as she stirred soup and admonished him to get an education and move way up north where a colored man might have a chance. Now she wanted his opinion if she changed her hair or wore a different necklace. There was, if not a carelessness about her, then a widening of outlook. Hez assumed it meant that soon she would tire of these environs and, native soil or not, head north towards her civilized youth and the prospects of sharing her life with a man of her stature.
One afternoon she offered him a small piece of fresh salt rising bread and her finger lightly brushed his lip as he tasted the warm, moist dough. Another time, when she had taken a second glass of whiskey and sugar water as they cleaned the kitchen after dinner, she said that he was all that stood between her and a black swamp.
He thought he heard his heart break when she said that, and he prayed that heaven wouldn’t let her hear it too.
Their first time was a Saturday night while the men were in town. He was in his room reading one of her books. She appeared in the door wearing a loose fitting dress of coarse white cloth that he had never seen. She was free and easy with him by now, so it didn’t seem strange at first. Except that he didn’t remember that perfume and her lips had been lightly traced with red. He struggled to supplant his increasing desire for her, but he knew she could sense it.
His ache for Seraphine had been a solemn secret between himself and God for the better part of a year. It was something fine and private, a recurring dream, an ecstatic agony he had vowed to stow deep in his breast and carry to his grave. The slightest indication on his part that he desired her would be all the justification the men would need to haul him into the swamp and hang him.
That Saturday night the power that latched his door behind her would not be silenced or stopped. What he had held within was only half of something and she held the other. That night when she crossed to his bed and kissed him, he decided that no consequence or eternity in hell was too great a price for the majesty and the wonder she brought him. After that night, it would have been pointless to live without knowing that the passing hours would bring her back to his room and they would lie tenderly together until dawn and breakfast duties threatened.
Months passed in quiet days, their love safely sequestered beneath their kitchen conversations and locked behind the door to the attic stair which could be bolted from the inside when it was closed. It was torment to sit by the dining room door and watch the men eyeing her as she laid out food on the sideboard. It was agony to overhear their crude assessments of the flesh she hid under her high collars. Yet these and so many other scenes out of their daily routine were tolerated because they led the lovers to their next secret rendezvous.