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Stick by Elmore Leonard
(Harper Collins 2002, Paperback, 401 pp., $7.50. Originally published by William Morrow, 1983)
A Reconsideration by Nick Garnett
Once Upon a Crime
In
order to appreciate Elmore Leonard’s raucous and satisfying 1983 crime thriller, Stick,
one must recall that the Miami of the early 80s was spinning its wheels and looking for traction. The era of the
60s hipster and rat-pack was long over and Don Johnson and his white Armani jacket were a year away from painting the town
pastel, creating the slick mystique that would put Miami back in the fast lane. Though the TV show had not yet aired,
there was plenty of vice in Miami. An assortment of high rollers and lowlifes trolled the town, scamming, making deals,
and looking for the next big score.
Yes, it’s a crooked town, and in Stick, Leonard populates it with his characteristic mix of vividly-portrayed kingpins, oddballs and schemers,
including the villainous Chucky—“big all over, high-waisted, narrow through the shoulders, the broad hips of a
woman . . . and a sagging crotch”—a hyperkinetic, dope-wholesaling ‘Nam vet (a precursor to deranged Iraq
War veterans who are now beginning to populate contemporary thrillers) looking to get out of the game, who barely fends off
his post-traumatic stress disorder with a steady diet of Quaaludes, and Nestor Soto, a Cuban-American mob boss who’s
not above practicing Santeria rituals on humans as well as chickens.
When a $200,000 coke deal with Nestor goes bad because Chucky inadvertently sends an undercover cop to make the buy, Nestor
demands more than his money back; he wants a pound of flesh. Chucky agrees and arranges for one of Nestor’s bad
boys, Eddie Moke, a skinny, laconic, reptilian, Stetson-wearing sociopath, to make sure whomever Chucky sends with the $200,000
won’t come back.
Enter our protagonist, Ernest Stickley (Stick), a cagey, 42-year old small-time
car thief, fresh out of prison for armed robbery. Stick has drifted down to Miami for a fresh start and proximity to
his adolescent daughter whom he hasn’t seen since being sent up. Rainy, one of Stick’s jailbird buddies
who now works for Chucky, convinces the reluctant Stick to be his back-up bag-man to return Nestor’s money. What
neither of them knows is that Chucky has offered up Stick to Nestor as payment in full. Fortunately for Stick,
things don’t go as planned and it’s Rainy who’s gunned down, an outcome that satisfies Nestor and Chucky,
but not Stick, who barely escapes with his life and goes on the lam down in South Beach. (Yes, South Beach. Back then,
Ocean Drive was low rent, populated mostly by seniors squeaking by on Social Security.)
Leonard’s lead characters are often driven by their own moral code (in this case prison born) and it’s Chucky’s
betrayal of Rainy (not to mention the five grand he was supposed to pay) rather than seething personal vengeance that motivates
Stick to get even. Wily as he is, Stick, a practically broke, middle-aged ex-con, disoriented by and out of touch with
the free-wheeling vibe he encounters in Miami, could do with some help and a little coaching.
Stick is a quick study, though. All he needs is a break or two, which Leonard provides (along with a dose of social
commentary) in the form of more whacky, deliciously-described characters. There’s Barry Stamm, a would-be-wise-guy
millionaire investor who, upon deducing that Stick was about to steal his Rolls, hires him to be his chauffeur and puts him
up at his fabulous Bal Harbor compound where he meets the houseman, Cornell Lewis. When Cornell, also an ex-con, isn’t
performing “freaky-deaky” Nubian slave fantasies with the lady of the house, he’s displaying a wry and practical
outlook on his surroundings. It’s Cornell who suggests that Stick pay attention to the house’s comings and
goings and learn something. “Learn what?” asks Stick. “I don’t know. Something,” Cornell says, “There must be something you
hear listening to all these rich people can do some good.”
That something is provided
by Stick’s love interest, Kyle McLaren, a long-legged, successful investment consultant who’ll eventually help
Stick try to beat Chucky at his own game. Unfortunately, in falling for Stick even after he tells her his past includes
murder, Kyle, a fresh-faced idealist with a brother in the FBI, also sets off the reader’s implausibility alarm.
This is only a road bump, however, in a story which for the most part stays in the passing
lane from beginning to end. Along the way, Stick manages to make a point or
two about our desire and ability to reinvent ourselves. Elmore Leonard couldn’t have known it 1983, but the city
in which he chose to set his story would do a pretty good job in that regard.
Nick
Garnett lives in Miami Beach and continues to write about it in his memoir.
The
Barefoot Mailman by Theodore Pratt
(Florida
Classics Library, Paperback, pp.215, 50th Anniversary Edition, 1993, out-of-print but available online from $5.23) A Reconsideration by
Gwen Keenan
In stop-and-go, rush-hour traffic near Palm Beach, the idea of a three-day walk down the beach to Miami
seems a plausible, desirable alternative mode of transit. This footloose fantasy comes from my recent rereading
of the perennial Florida favorite The Barefoot Mailman by Theodore Pratt, first published in 1942 and set in the
1890s. Eighteen years ago I read The Barefoot Mailman, at the suggestion of my Floridian boyfriend, now husband,
to get a feel for what Florida was. I’m from Ohio, and my vision of Florida revolved around sunny
beaches, tall buildings and a famous, oversized rodent. This was my first introduction to “Cracker”
living and the characters who settled this unlikely patch of brush and swamp. It set the hook that led
me to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Ernest Hemingway and a fuller, richer understanding of the state
I now call home. Mystery, intrigue and a compelling love interest make The Barefoot Mailman, a timeless, pleasant
read. Pratt’s characters are eminently likeable, if vaudevillesque: good suitor, bad suitor, maiden,
and a cast of colorful characters in support. Pratt constructs the rivalry of his two main male characters
for the love interest so that it stands for the battle between competing interests for Florida itself. Steven Pierton,
the barefoot protagonist, is an orphan raised by the bachelor Bethune Brothers in the frontier Palm Beach. Steven
carries the southbound post three days down the beach, the only passable trail to Miami, overnights, and then returns with
the northbound mail. Steven is the local boy made good, having secured this rare stable federal employment.
He knows everyone and is known to them. Steven also guides newcomers to Miami, via his route. Enter Adie,
a boarding school runaway, who “hitches a walk,” and goes on to play a pivotal role between the two male leads.
Steven knows and appreciates the landscape, which he describes to Adie: “…. And you don’t locate morning glory land like this all the
time. I’m hoping to find one [a wife] who’ll plant herself here and grow and bloom just like
they do. And who’ll like the birds and the other living things. Even the snakes when they can be
friendly-like, such as a big old black snake who comes around the house to eat palmetto bugs and lizards and scorpions and
keeping away rattlers and moccasins. You hear the birds? It’s them I’m wanting
her to like most.” Steven’s Eden here is Hypoluxo, an island now largely covered in condos and sandwiched between
the concrete banks of high-rises to the east and the ten-lane I-95 that pulses to its west. In his words,
there is a yearning to hold on to the harsh and fleeting natural beauty that was early Florida. Steven’s second “passenger”
is Sylvanus Hurley, the suave, unscrupulous land prospector. As they walk toward Miami, Sylvanus expounds
on the promise of this beachfront. “I looked up the weather records before I came here. …Climate’s
the thing, that’s what I’m interested in. Take this beautiful sunny day with the blue sky and
the breeze and the waving palm trees. . . This is the American Riviera. That’s what it’s going to be here, that’s
what I’m going to make it. “Why, it’s a tropical paradise. It’s the Empire
of the Sun. It’s the Garden of Eden.” Steven retorts, “The land’s pretty good
right here by the coast, but you go back about as far as you can spit and there you get it by the gallon instead of by the
acre.” This split between the unscrupulous, if ultimately visionary, developer and the contemplative, pastoral
mailman haunts Florida to this day. Pratt skillfully uses the local trading posts to flesh out the contrasting
hopes for fledgling Florida with each mail delivery: “ ‘Pineapples is the thing here. Citrus? Truck vegetables? Well, maybe.
But let me tell you: ten thousand pineapple plants can be put on one acre of ground to return as much as two thousand dollars
a year.’ That was straight Middle West twang, probably Illinois. “ ‘My land! Mary says Constance has had
her baby, a boy, and it got to thirty-two below last winter. She can’t believe it was like summer
here.’ That was nasal New England. “ ‘I can’t say the country is what I was told it was in New York,
but it’s cured my lumbago, and I guess anything is worth that, bugs and all.’” Sylvanus seeks to snap
up acreage and create a boom town based on the climate, while Steven expounds the natural beauty and parries Sylvanus’
underhanded efforts to corner the Miami land market. The ensuing contest for the hand of Miami’s
most eligible and attractive maiden is an allegory for the competing loves which shaped old Florida and vie for its affections
even now. Author of thirty books – thirteen of which are set in Florida—Theodore Pratt knew the land.
His prose captures the look and smell and feel of Cracker Florida: “Before noon they came to Hillsborough.
You could tell it from far away by the great trees its water nurtured. There were gray cypresses
thicker than a barrel, lofty pines, and great banyans whose ropelike air roots dropped to the ground from high overhead… “Orchids
and other airplants roosted like chickens on weird branches. Aerial fungi and lichens peered from the creepers.” And Mailman
gives us the bird song that serenaded these settlers: “They listened. There was the shrill call of the parakeet.
A limpkin wailed insanely. Ground doves cooed sensuously, almost indecently. A woodpecker tapped. A chuck-will’s-widow
whistled and another answered. Most of all there was the continuous message of a mockingbird, scolding between imitations
of other calls.” Perhaps these descriptions, which preserve that fleeting natural beauty and the rugged individuals who
first settled here, provide the best recommendation. The book is more poignant to me now that I have seen
so many wild places disappear and have witnessed the joy of my children as they experience the pure wild beauty that remains.
Pratt’s The Barefoot Mailman is pedestrian-paced journey across sandy beaches, gator-infested inlets, and time,
guiding us to an unforgettable and unforgiving land of beauty and possibility.
Gwen
Keenan is a budding freelance writer and retired Coast Guard commander. She lives in Tallahassee with her
husband and their four young children.
This replica of the original statue of the Barefoot Mailman stands at the foot of the Hillsboro Inlet
Light. Here the eleven barefoot mailmen crossed the hazardous inlet as they carried the mail along the
beaches between Palm Beach and Miami. Speculation that one of them, James “Ed” Hamilton,” who disappeared
here in 1887, was attacked by alligators while swimming the inlet is the basis for a significant scene in The Barefoot
Mailman. The original statue was erected in front of a Hillsboro restaurant and was later moved by
the town to its present location, in front of the Hillsboro Beach Municipal Hall (1210 Hillsboro Mile, Hillsboro Beach, FL).
Photo by Gwen Keenan.
Condominium by John D. MacDonald
(Fawcett, Paperback, 480 pp., Currently out
of print--used copies are available on Amazon.com)
A Reconsideration by John Bond
"To diggers a thousand years from now, the words of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of
the tomb of Tutankhamen."
--Kurt
Vonnegut
The most striking thing about John D.
MacDonald’s Condominium, a tale of paradise lost, is its prescience. “Guarding against
assault,” one character notes, “creates the fear of assault. Speaking always of conspiracies creates more fear
of conspiracies.” Published 30 years ago (1977) and currently out of print,
Condominium is a big book. The longest of MacDonald’s 78 novels, it is a disaster epic,
an ensemble piece, a financial thriller, a philosophical treatise, a morality play. It heralds an environmental
warning—MacDonald was an environmentalist long before environmentalism was cool. If
Condominium were published today, it might be considered a somewhat campy retrospective of life in the Sunshine State
thirty years ago. It is in some ways a period piece, depicting the last of the days when Florida was known
as God’s Waiting Room. Before Disney made its mark, before the cocaine cowboys and Jimmy Buffet and
Mariel and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. Before Hurricane Andrew. Yet
turn to the real estate section of any Florida Sunday paper; the ad copy might have been ripped from the pages of Condominium,
promising dream life in paradise. The underlying storyline of real estate boom and bust, financing fraud
and white collar crime reads like this morning’s Miami Herald: political corruption and real estate rip-offs,
senior citizens outliving their dreams and their bank accounts, health crises outlasting the insurance to cover them, sex
and scandal, marginal construction, all built on moral foundations of shifting sand. What drives the plot
of Condominium is the ebb and flow of Florida’s economy, banal yet heinous, with individuals acting in their
own best economic interest regardless of the consequences to others.
The book has two acts. Act I: meet the retirees who have come to Golden Sands Condominium on Fiddler Key
to live out their golden years, and the sharp real estate developers
who have swindled them. The developers build shoddily, break laws, bribe their way around regulations,
destroy natural beauty and disregard warnings of what might happen should a hurricane hit the sandy islets of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The retirees slowly catch on. The smarter ones try—rather ineffectively—to seek redress.
The dumber ones plod along in blissful ignorance. Act II: the characters introduced in Act I reap
the whirlwind as Hurricane Ella (first named on page 308) smacks
them, knocking down several condos including Golden Sands and killing off half the cast. Within
this structure, MacDonald gives us over 200 named characters and the points of view of dozens of them. The last of these enters
on page 432 (of 478) and sticks around just long enough to be irritating and then die, leaving the reader feeling a little
guilty for disliking her so quickly. The hallmark of MacDonald’s 21 famous Travis McGee novels—featuring
the crusty but charming gumshoe who lives aboard the Busted Flush in Ft. Lauderdale—is the first person narrative
voice, clear as the springs of the Rainbow River, thrusting the plot forward. Condominium is different—its
characters swirl around like grains of sand in crashing surf, each bouncing off the others and cast willy-nilly on the shore
by a force that is beyond them. Well over half the novel’s characters are retirees drawn by the promise of paradise on
the Gulf to Golden Sands. “We’re pigeons,” says one, “…a big field of old pigeons too pooped
to fly away.” And he’s right.
Most of the characters are unhappy in one way or another, and tired. Theirs is a rather boring catalogue
of human frailty. Their beachfront community is a Peyton Place curiously devoid of passions.
The women particularly are two-dimensional—credible
women and their motivations were never a MacDonald strength. MacDonald ties it all together with
a narrative voice exuding the authority of great knowledge: “. . . the Gulf Stream moves through the Straits of Florida
, , . at a volume of thirty sverdups . . .A sverdup equals one million cubic meters per second . . . The total flow of all
the rivers in the world is two sverdups.” MacDonald manages more-or-less artfully to weave that kind
of data into his story. He describes which fishing lure to choose, the arcane minutiae of Real Estate Investment
Trusts and construction financing (MacDonald had an MBA from Harvard), why manta rays jump, the cause and effect of red tides,
formation of oyster bars, condominium law, hurricane science, nursing home management and economics, how alcohol affects the
liver, hundreds more such details informing the plot and defining the characters. The
most powerful character in Condominium is Florida, with all its ironies of the dark and venal set in a tropical paradise.
MacDonald had a deep appreciation for the natural wonder of all things Floridian, and his works carry a plaintive, poignant
sigh for that which is about to pass. One early reviewer (Stephen Zito, Washington Post) called Condominium
“…a brief against the rape of Florida.” As you read Condominium, you know that
Florida is less beautiful than it was, but more beautiful than it will be, and that it’s urgent to appreciate what it
is before it becomes what it will. Condominium
is certainly flawed. Its long set-up and two-act structure are unfulfilling. The denouement
is cursory and perfunctory. The absence of a central character impedes the flow of plot; too many
things happen to too many people for the reader to latch onto one. It is, although I like such things,
somewhat too didactic. But . . . Somehow it works. In the end whether by
the hand of nature or man we all get our just desserts. On the final page the reader has the sense that
what should have happened did happen. There is satisfaction. Even a bit of justice. And the sad certainty
that nature suffers, Florida suffers, for our hubristic hand in it all. Condominium is an important piece of Floridiana, a cautionary tale about the evils of greed and the clash
between man and nature. At the end a character ascribes the tale’s events to “human optimism
and strange tax advantages and too much time between hurricanes.” How much has changed?
As surely as Earth turns, sooner or later The Big One is coming. For a small taste of what that
might mean, read Condominium.
A SCUBA instructor, boat captain and pilot, John
Bond has written 6 non-fiction books about poker. His short story “T-Bird” appears in
Best American Mystery Stories of 2007. Like John D. MacDonald, he loves the Florida that was, is and
will be. His website is johnbondwriting.com
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
(Scribner, Paperback,
272 pp., $14.00)
A Reconsideration by Alex Handwerger
Seems every Key in Florida eventually goes from quaint, affordable
beachside town where the locals can make a living catching fish to souped-up uber playground for the rich and famous.
Eventually those Key Rats or Conchs are driven out of town, replaced by McMansions sprouting up on
a daily basis. Seventy years ago, Ernest Hemingway worked and played on a wilder, cheaper Key West, but
he was prescient about times to come in his 1937 novel To Have and Have Not.
The first two sections
of the book were originally published as short stories. Hemingway tacked on the final and longest part
to turn the stories into one novel, a fluid, action-packed story of one man’s decline as he tries to eke out a living
for his family in Key West during the Great Depression. Our tragic hero, Harry Morgan, is a classic Hemingway man—brimming
with machismo, wise in the ways of boats and guns, chock full of integrity. He’s what we’d
call a “manly man,” but he’s got a sensitive side too. Completely devoted to his wife,
Marie, and their two daughters, Harry simply wants to provide for his family, but his job as a charter fishing boat captain
isn’t making that very easy. When we open in Havana Harry is trying to make an honest living renting
out his boat, when he goes into debt after a wealthy sports fisherman charters his boat for a month, breaks his equipment
and takes off without paying Harry a dime. Human smuggling, bringing Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida, is just the ticket
to get Harry out of debt. During the deal he kills the ring leader and kicks the immigrants off his boat
before returning to his home in Key West. Skip to a few months later and Harry is now making a living illegally
running liquor from Cuba to Florida. On his last trip he pissed off some Cubans who shot him in the arm.
As Harry is dumping the liquor off the coast of the Key to avoid heat from the feds, two wealthy politicians, the “haves,”
sail by in their chartered boat, spot Harry and report him to the authorities. A few months later we find Harry
back in Key West. His boat has been confiscated by customs, and now he’s missing an arm.
He’s dousing his problems in Freddy’s bar (Freddy is reportedly based on Joe Russell, the owner of famous
Key West Hemingway haunt Sloppy Joe’s Bar) when a smarmy lawyer he refers to as Bee-lips offers him a job.
Harry would drive a getaway boat from Key West to Havana for a group of Cubans who plan to rob a bank to finance their
revolution. Harry contemplates refusing the job- he knows it’s the most dangerous thing he’s
ever taken on- but concludes that he doesn’t have a choice. I could stay here now and I’d be out of it.
But what the hell would they eat on? Where’s the money coming from to keep Marie and the girls? I’ve got no boat,
no cash, I got no education. What can a one-armed man work at? All I’ve got is
my cojones to peddle. So Harry agrees, taking along his friend Albert,
another Conch (Key West local) struggling to support his family, and they set forth on their doomed voyage.
The book highlights the disparity between the rich and the poor and Hemingway shows us this best through the desperation of
his characters, through the setting of Key West, filled with locals hit hard by the Depression while wealthy tourists use
it as a playground. Between the action-packed boat scenes in the third part of the book, Hemingway introduces
us to Richard Gordon, a writer vacationing in Key West. Richard is Harry’s opposite.
His numerous infidelities are ruining his marriage. He writes books about uprisings of the working
class yet is clueless to the inner life of his subjects. As brutal as Harry is, he’s true to himself,
while Richard is completely lacking in integrity. When the book came out in 1937, critics panned it for its tangents and for Harry’s
loose morality. Harry, a thug with a tommy gun, isn’t very warm and cuddly. He’s
certainly not the suave character Humphrey Bogart portrayed in the 1944 movie barely based on the book. But
Harry’s devotion to his wife and her love for him do make him loveable, a character to root for and cherish.
The scenes between Harry and Marie make up the most moving parts
of the book, scenes that soften the hard edges, that give Harry Morgan depth and a humanity. And in these
scenes Hemingway gets the chance to show us why he’s such a great writer. Take this one, the last
time Marie sees her husband: She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide-shouldered, flat-backed, his hips
narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like,
she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek
bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned
at her and she began to cry. ‘His goddamn face,’ she thought. ‘Everytime
I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.’ Hemingway even gives us a comical sex scene in which Harry uses the stump of his
arm to … well, just read it. To Have and Have Not is a fast
paced action adventure with a conscience. For Hemingway virgins it’s an exciting introduction to
his work. For fans, it’s a delicious treat to be savored. When I read this in
high school, it was my first Hemingway, and I immediately fell in love. I think both new readers and those
revisiting the book will too.
Alex Handwerger is an editor of The Florida Book Review and a student in the MFA Program at Florida
International University.
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The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Ballantine,
Paperback, 320 pp., $14.95) A Reconsideration by P. Scott Cunningham
The quintessential book about Florida’s flora, The Orchid Thief
follows protagonist John Laroche on a meandering journey through the obsessive world of orchid collection and culitivation.
Susan Orlean wrote the book out of a story she did for The New Yorker magazine, about a man (Laroche) who got caught
trying to poach three thousand dollars worth of endangered orchids out of the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in 1994. The
oddities of the case—Laroche employed Seminole Indians to handle the flowers because of their legal immunity to poaching;
he claimed he was going to save the flowers by breeding them—and the oddity of Laroche himself, a toothless, self-educated
flower expert, led Orlean to expand the story, and in book form, it becomes something much more than a bizarre true crime
tale. Orlean did an exhaustive amount of research into Florida’s social and biological history, and she weaves Laroche’s
obsession into the wildness of the state itself, its rich botanical diversity and the many attempts by greedy developers to
tame and profit from it. What emerges is a tale of obsession—Laroche’s obsession with creating the ultimate get-rich-quick
scheme, the obsession of collectors with their orchids, and Orlean’s obsession with seeing her first ghost orchid in
bloom. By letting all the characters, human and plant, tell their own stories, Orlean captures the beauty of passion itself.
P.
Scott Cunningham is a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor and a regular contributor to the New Times.
His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pool, Court Green, Cider Press Review and Mc Sweeney’s Internet
Tendencies.
Also see P.Scott Cunningham's review of The Ghost Orchid Ghost: Tales from the Swamp
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The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Aladdin, Paperback, 528 pp., $5.99) Reconsidered by Susan Jo Parsons 70 years later—a glimpse of old Florida Before Scout Finch became
the precocious narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, there was Jody Baxter, the ten year-old hero of The Yearling.
Author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a protégé of Maxwell Perkins, the editor from Scribner’s who
aided the careers of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rawlings held her own among those literary giants--The
Yearling, published in 1938, captured the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939. Now, the book
is a staple on Florida high school reading lists, but it mustn’t be dismissed as a tale for school children.
It preserves post-Civil War pioneer life in Florida as well as offering the reader a nostalgic look at childhood. The
Yearling is set in the wilderness of northern inland Florida. Jody
Baxter lives in a small, isolated house with his parents. His mom, Ora Baxter, is a large, hard woman with
sharp words for her son. You soon forgive her, though, because you witness her really roughing it—water
has to be hauled to the house from a nearby sink hole, she has no other women to share her household duties and she lost several
children at early ages. Jody is the only of her children to survive. Penny Baxter, Jody’s
small-framed but tough father, is a bit more indulgent with his son, and strives to teach him the ways of survival in their
harsh landscape. Penny’s lessons don’t end at how to hunt or how to cultivate—he strives
to teach Jody how to be a good man. The dialogue is a bit tedious at first since it’s an odd mixture of formal
English and backwoods speech. But you soon grow accustomed to the language. Jody and
his father set off to hunt down a dangerous bear, Old Slewfoot: “You’ll not be scairt when we come up with him, Pa?”
“Not lessen things go mighty wrong. I’m fearful, always for the pore dogs.
They’re the scapers gits the worst of it.” Penny’s
eyes twinkled.
“I don’t reckon you’ll be scairt, son?” “Not
me.” He thought a moment. “But if I was to be scairt, must I climb a tree?”
Trouble is aplenty—mostly from the hard blows Mother Nature delivers. Old Slewfoot repeatedly
attacks the Baxter’s small homestead, killing their livestock, and a flood destroys the crops. The
family survives these hardships only because of Penny’s perseverance. Further trouble arises from the Baxter’s
nearest neighbors, the Forresters, a wild, hard-drinking bunch. While Penny is a model of patience and
good values, the Forresters are quick to stir things up. When hardship strikes one family or the other,
however, the other family immediately pitches in to help, despite their uneasy relationship. It’s
the only way to survive on the unforgiving frontier. The
Forrester family provides Jody with the only playmate his age, Fodder-wing, a sickly boy who has a gift for caring for wild
animals. Fodder-wing’s exotic pets inspire Jody to adopt an abandoned fawn, Flag. Flag
and Jody are soon inseparable, and as boy and fawn travel the forest, they enjoy the freedom of childhood and learn the sometimes
costly consequences of childish mistakes. The Yearling explores the inevitability of growing up
and losing the magic of wonder childhood holds: …Sunset was coming a little earlier, and at the corner of the fence row,
where the old Spanish trail and turned north and passed the sink-hole, the saffron light reached under the low-hanging live
oaks and made of the gray pendulous Spanish moss a luminous curtain. Jody stopped short with his hand on the fawn’s
head. A horseman with a helmet was riding through the moss. Jody took a step forward,
and the horse and rider vanished as though their substance were no thicker than the moss. He stepped back
and they appeared again. He drew a long breath. Here, certainly, was Fodder-wing’s Spaniard. He
was not sure if he was frightened or no. He was tempted to run back home, telling himself that he had truly
seen a spirit. But his father’s stuff was in him, and he forced himself to walk forward slowly to
the spot in which the apparition had appeared. In a moment the truth was plain. A conjunction
of moss and limbs had created the illusion. He could identify the horse, the rider and the helmet. His
heart thumped with relief, yet he was disappointed. It would be better not to have known; to have gone
away, believing. The Yearling has one of the best novel endings I have ever read—it
is bittersweet, like life. You could call The Yearling a coming of age story. Or
even a man versus nature story. Or possibly a Florida history book. I call it a love
story, about love for family and home. Susan Parsons is Publisher of The Florida Book Review
Everglades River of Grass 60th Anniversary Edition by Marjory Stoneman Douglas (Pineapple
Press, Hardcover, 447 pp., $19.95)
A Reconsideration by Jennifer Hearn
Marjory Stoneman Douglas opens The Everglades: River of
Grass with a straightforward yet compelling sentence: “There are no other Everglades in the world.”
This year, which marks the 60th anniversary of River of Grass, we celebrate the words of Ms. Douglas,
which galvanized a nationwide movement to protect a region of the earth that, although teeming with life, was seen by the
world as a wasteland. Because of her and other advocates’ commitment to bring the world’s attention
to this miraculous river of sweetwater and sawgrass, the Everglades is no longer a moribund ecosystem. It
has a pulse, although still very quiet. The Everglades stretches one hundred miles from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of
Mexico and is up to 70 miles wide. Originally when rain poured into Okeechobee it was propelled by way
of rivers, creeks, rivulets and other water systems. “The Whole system,” Douglas writes, “was
like a set of scales on which the forces of the seasons, of the sun and the rains, the winds, the hurricanes, and the dewfall,
were balanced so that the life of the vast grass and all its encompassed and neighbor forms were kept secure.” Douglas
first brings to life the Everglades when it was still an unspoiled river enclosing diversity. In language
as rich and dense as the flora and fauna that crowded the jungles of the Everglade’s Ten Thousand Islands, she writes
of the gnarled trunks of the custard apple, the ephemeral life of the chizzle winks, the creeping of the moonvines and the
luminescence of their white blossoms at night. We can feel the pressure of the strangler fig’s embrace as she describes
it climbing up an oak. Douglas shows us, also, the prehistoric Glades people who developed their own civilization, in which
art, craftsmanship and religion burgeoned and spread throughout the neighboring communities. Her descriptions
are so vivid, it’s as though she was hiding behind a palmetto tree underneath her big floppy hat, peering at dancing
priest who wore wood-carved animal masks, or watching a funeral ceremony in which the dead were buried in mounds with their
knees to their breast, "the position he held," Douglas writes, "unborn, in oblivion of his mother's body.” Then Douglas
carries us far from the palm-thatched houses in Indian villages to the bustling, sordid cities of Europe where men in harbors
and quayside wine shops held their flat maps of the ocean, completely absorbed by the looping rings of the Outer Sea.
Douglas evokes the discoverers’ perilous journeys to the New World, the dread of the lurking, frowzy pirates,
and the devastation of the Indians by the white man. She writes, “The docile Arawaks of the first
islands died like flies. The fiercer Caribs of Cuba were being hunted, brought in long chained files to the mines and the
fields and exterminated. They died too rapidly, unable to bear the unremitting toil, the lash, the starvation,
the overcrowding, the disease, but most of all slavery.” We can almost hear the hissing of the arrows
coming out of the mangroves and see the stripe of war paint on a high cheekbone behind the blades of sawgrass. In the
chapter “The Free People,” Douglas introduces us to the Seminoles, whose name in the Muskogee language means “people
of distant fires.” We meet Tiger Tail and Billy Bowlegs, valiant heroes of the Glades, who resisted
forced migration as well as the cajoling and bribes of men who wanted their land. Probably the most intrepid
of all was young Osceola, who when forced to sign a treaty he knew the Americans would breach, walked up to signing table,
pulled out his knife and stabbed it into the table through the paper. “This is how I sign.”
he said. When Florida became a state, the legislature urged Congress to “examine and survey Everglades,
with a view to their reclamation.” Men with large handlebar mustaches and schoolboy logic made out
an impetuous plan to drain the Everglades with the goal of converting it to farmland. These men were the
first to be responsible for creating a change that would be as drastic as the glacial melting nearly four thousand years before.
Soon, the dredging began. The dynamiting began. Dikes and canals were constructed.
Railroads ran like metallic stitches through the peninsula, and towns swarmed like the hives of wasps. Douglas’ “systematic scales” soon went awry. The
cypress and oaks were hewn down and the ancient relics of the first Glades people were destroyed. Oil boats stirred up sediment,
and rainfall drainage became confused and inadequate. The once gentle meandering Kissimmee River ceased
to flow. Tourists invaded the Indian land, and old women with careworn faces and necks strung with beads
watched as their children learned to accept coins. Their existence had become a spectacle. Species,
from the microscopic world to those who soared just below the stratosphere, began to die rapidly. Douglas
writes, “What had been a river of grass and sweetwater that had given meaning and life and uniqueness to this whole
enormous geography through centuries in which man had no place here was made, in one chaotic gesture of greed and ignorance
and folly, a river of fire.” She ends the book, however, with a tone of hope: “Perhaps even
in this last hour, in a new relation of usefulness and beauty, the vast, magnificent, subtle and unique region of the Everglades
may not be utterly lost.” As a young woman, Douglas moved from Massachusetts to Miami to work for her father’s paper,
which would eventually become the Miami Herald. In addition to writing articles for the paper,
Douglas also wrote fiction and poetry. All of this experience shows in The Everglades: River of Grass,
in which storytelling, lyricism, nature description, and history combine in a work we would today call “creative non-fiction.” Douglas was not alone in her fervor. In the decades before Douglas’s
book, a national park had been proposed by other advocates such as Charles Torrey Simpson, John Kunkel Small, May Mann Jennings,
David Fairchild, and the fiery Ernest Coe who referred to the Everglades as the “great empire of solitude.” In
1947, the same year The Everglades: River of Grass was published, the Everglades National Park opened.
President Truman formally dedicated the park with a passionate speech. “For conservation of the human spirit,”
he said, “we need places such as the Everglades National Park.” But the area reserved for the park was only part
of the system, and the damage continued. By 1974, the legendary wading birds had been reduced by 90 percent.
Since 1984, the wood stork has been listed as a federal endangered species. The Florida panther, which once could be
seen slinking behind cypress trees all over the Everglades, is now in immediate danger of extinction. Generations
who have read Douglas have continued the struggle. In 1984, the Water Management District built steel walls
across the Kissimmee to recreate the river bends so that water could be pushed back down towards the Everglades. Bureaucrats,
scientist and tribal government leaders came together to discuss the restoration of the Everglades, and today projects continue—and
continue to be debated. Until her death in 1998, Douglas remained eminently active in rousing support in
saving the Everglades, and Friends of the Everglades, founded by Douglas in 1969, continues to work to guarantee that “her”
river will never cease to flow again. Statewide, schoolchildren read Douglas’s classic, and remembering the history
of the Everglades has become part of Florida’s ethical and social responsibility. Besides being a
powerful work of literature, the book is also a colorful atlas of the past, which can serve as a guide for those who shape
the Glades’ future. To look out into the panorama of the Everglades’ unbroken greenness is
to rediscover the concept of infinity. Douglas writes, “The water is timeless, forever new and eternal.”
Like the river she describes, Douglas’ voice is also immortal.
Jennifer Hearn lives in Miami where she writes
about nature and traveling. She would like to name her first born son Osceola.
The Corpse
Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan (Pocket, Paperback, 448 pages, $7.99) A Reconsideration by Susan Jo
Parsons
In the late 70’s and early
1980’s Miami became the black sheep of the Florida family as it went from a sleepy vacation resort to a major center
of crime. Some fled the influx of refugees and the violence surrounding the “cocaine cowboys,” but others were
drawn to the fascinations of this city in transition. Edna Buchanan is one of those people.
In The Corpse Had a Familiar Face Buchanan chronicles this period. As a reporter on the police beat at The
Miami Herald, Buchanan saw it all—and then some. The
book is written in a reporter’s style, with short synopses of numerous crimes, longer features of others and chapter
titles as simple and revealing as headlines. Buchanan also pauses to reflect along the way. “In my
sixteen years at the Herald, I have reported more than five thousand violent deaths,” she writes. “Many
of the corpses have had familiar faces: cops and killers, politicians and prostitutes, doctors and lawyers. Some
were my friends.” In addition to the crimes, Buchanan
tells her own story. She was the only child of a New Jersey divorcee and as a child she occasionally filled
in for her mother on the night shift at a candle factory. At an early age, she developed an interest in
crime and pored over the local newspaper crime section while her peers were still reading the comics. Eventually,
she and her mom went to Miami Beach for a vacation and Buchanan realized this was her true home. They relocated.
Buchanan earned her position at the Herald not with a fancy degree, but after years of
pounding the pavement for a smaller newspaper. She had to work a little harder than her coworkers since there weren’t
many female reporters on the police beat in the 1970’s. “A woman in my profession has to convince
the cops to forget she’s a woman,” she reflects. “You want them to think of you as a confidante, a professional
who will always be fair, or if nothing else, a piece of furniture they are so used to seeing they forget you are there.”
Buchanan won them over, and became so successful she was eventually awarded a Pulitzer. She expresses admiration for the Miami
cops, and writes about several local cops who she remembers as heroes. But she also remembers the cops who went bad.
Other criminals she recalls in the book include Murph the Surf, an enigmatic Miami Beach jewel thief, Willie the Actor,
a famous bank robber, and Robert Carr, a serial killer. She remembers the chaos the city faced when “the most ruthless
killers ever encountered in Miami, arrived among the Mariel refugees. Some men who would have, should have,
died in Cuban prisons or mental wards [opened] fire on strangers in crowded bars or cafeterias to prove quien es
mas macho.” And she recalls the 1980 riot when “Life would never be the same again…Hearts would break…Eighteen
men and women would die, and three hundred and fifty people, some of them children, would be hurt.”
And this brings us to the heart of the book. Buchanan remembers the victims, long after others have
forgotten. “The face of Miami changes so quickly,” she writes, “but the dead stay that way.
I feel haunted by the restless souls of those whose killers walk free.” “A
corpse has no privacy,” she explains, “…[homicide detectives have] a single mindedness matched only by
that of a jealous lover, they must know all about you…Secrets you wouldn’t tell your best friend. Particulars
you didn’t understand about yourself. Nothing is sacred…They will read your diary and your mail and scrutinize
the contents of your safety deposit box and your stomach.” She still wonders about the unsolved crimes, and
in the 2004 edition, she updated a few of the cases. In
the twenty years since The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, Buchanan has written several novels including Cold Case
Squad, and a popular mystery series about Britt Montero, a Miami reporter. Her most recent book in
the series, Love Kills, was released in June. But The Corpse Had a Familiar Face is her classic book.
It is a great history of crime in Miami and an inspirational story about a woman who realized she wasn’t just
writing stories for a deadline, she was writing about people.
Susan Jo Parsons is the Publisher of The Florida Book Review.
Continental Drift by Russell Banks
(Harper Perennial Modern Classics, Paperback, 448 pp, $14.95)
A
Reconsideration by Joe Clifford
In
Russell Banks's 1986 classic Continental Drift one sentiment prevails: the American Dream is a dangerous thing.
The novel tells the story of two characters worlds apart—Bob Dubois, a frustrated New Englander, and Vanise Dorsinvilles,
a Haitian national—and their crash course toward one another off the coast of Florida one fateful day.
What spurs the actions of both is that promise of a better life just over the horizon. For Bob,
a barely scraping by furnace repairman in New Hampshire, it can be realized in sunny Florida, where his brother, Eddie, and
best friend, Avery Boone, are flourishing in various illicit trades. For Vanise it can be found across
the Atlantic on American soil. With her young nephew, Claude, in tow, Vanise leaves the only home she’s
ever known to endure unspeakable atrocities for a place she has only heard tales about. Bob, too, forsakes
familiarity for the promise of the unknown, only to discover that his brother’s and best friend’s lives are equally
unfulfilling. Bob and Vanise are not stupid people. They are both resourceful and “good
hearted.” The odds, however, are stacked against them, and this seems to be what Banks is saying:
that some simply lack the requisite skills to rise above unfortunate circumstance. In short, races can
be lost before the starting gun sounds. Voodoo culture pervades the text. For
his narrator, Banks chooses a Haitian god, or Loa, named Legba. This unique variation on the omniscient narrator allows the author to enter the heads and deepest
motivations of his principals. One moment, we see their world from high above, the next we are privy to
their most intimate thoughts. For many of Banks’s readers, voodoo is, no doubt, a dark and terrifying
religion. It is not by coincidence that Banks uses one of its representatives to serve as his mouthpiece.
He wants the dark. He embraces the unfamiliar. Russell
Banks has proven he is not afraid to venture into uncomfortable territory. His short stories and novels
showcase men and women overwhelmed by their lives and forced to face unpleasant truths. Continental
Drift is no different. Vanise Dorsinvilles is subjected to hell during her journey to America.
Routinely sexually abused and humiliated, she suffers her fate with quiet dignity because every step, she believes,
is one closer to the Promised Land. Bob Dubois’s desperation is tantamount to a gambler’s.
He trades the paltry security up north for a shot at a big payday down south, and when nothing comes as advertised,
his move to Florida proving disastrous, Bob is forced to take increasingly drastic measures to get his family out of harm’s
way. Banks is masterful in showing how a “good guy” like Bob can be driven to smuggling human
beings. The American Dream is ruled by a singular principle: the belief in one’s own ability.
If one is willing to work hard enough, long enough—is willing to take a beating and continue to get back up—anything
can be achieved. This is a terrific speech to give to sixth graders, but it is simply not true.
We can dream all we want of playing right field for the New York Yankees. Few become astronauts;
fewer still become heroes. The constant, unrelenting reminder of everything we aren’t and will never
be taunts to the point of madness. Bob describes the phenomenon to his wife, Elaine. He
says, “Day and night, week after week, year in and year out, it’s the same, until finally my body catches up with
the rest of me, and it dies too.” It has been over twenty years since
the release of Continental Drift. Tonight, somewhere a raft will set sail under the cover of night.
Men and woman all over America will pack up everything they own and strike out for the promise of a brighter tomorrow.
And, tomorrow, the Coast Guard will fish some more refugees from the sea, and those same men and women will be profoundly
disappointed when the lights come up in their new towns. Banks’s view of humanity might not be a
rosy one, but in Continental Drift it strikes a soberly accurate tone that still rings true.
Joe Clifford’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Traveling:
An Anthology of Award-Winning Poetry, Helix, 3AM, Dos Passos Review, Bathhouse, Bryant
Literary Review, and Big Bridge. He is a student in the MFA Program at Florida International
University.
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