Florida Studies : Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association [1 ed.] 9781443811712, 9781443806176

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Florida Studies

Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association

Edited by

Claudia Slate (General Editor) and April Van Camp (Executive Editor)

Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association, Edited by Claudia Slate (General Editor) and April Van Camp (Executive Editor) This book first published 2009 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 © 2009 by Claudia Slate, April Van Camp 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): 1-4438-0617-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0617-6

To Maurice O’Sullivan, Rollins College, Past FCEA President and Vice President, mentor, enthusiastic collaborator and premier scholar of Florida literature.

President April Van Camp Indian River State College Vice President Carole Policy Palm Beach Community College Secretary Stone Shiflet Capella University; University of South Florida Treasurer Rich McKee Manatee Community College: Venice 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 Jill Jones Rollins College Maxine Montgomery Florida State University Stephen Zeigler Embry Riddle Aeronautical University Donald Pharr St. Leo's University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii Pedagogy Building a Community of Honors Scholars through Primary Archival Research ...................................................................................................... 3 Charlotte Pressler Blogging Florida’s Reputations in First-Year Composition ...................... 11 Kyle D. Stedman Exploring First Coast Writers: Bringing Scholarship to Duval County Public School Teachers ............................................................................. 25 Betsy Nies Teaching Service Learning Memoirs: Gargantua, Maimonides, and Lake Hollingsworth ............................................................................ 33 Catherine Eskin Old Florida General Jorge Biassou Acting as a Site of Re-membering ........................ 43 Sara Olsen The Power of the Pen: The “Invitation Letters” to Florida and Their Writers....................................................................................... 51 Doris Van Kampen and Carol Ann Moon Coming of Age in Antebellum Florida: George Morton and the Young Marooners ......................................................................... 65 Maurice O’Sullivan

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Table of Contents

Finding Edith Pope .................................................................................... 77 Jane Anderson Jones Wish You Weren’t Here: African American Portrayals in Vintage Florida Postcards ....................................................................................... 91 Claudia Slate The Donaldsons: The First Black Family in Lower Pinellas County ...... 101 Valerie Kasper William Pope DuVal and Washington Irving: Fiction as Fact and Fact as Fiction—an Exploration of Early American Folklore Florida’s Antebellum Frontier ................................................................................ 107 James M. Denham Chasing the Faces of Florida’s Colonial Ladies: A Brief Memoir on Assembling Primary Source Material for the study of Gender and Sexuality in the British Floridas, 1763-1784 .................................... 119 Deborah L. Bauer The Faces of Racism: Jim Crow in Florida ............................................. 135 Salena Coller Modern Landscapes, Modern Labyrinths: Wallace Stevens and Ways of Escape ................................................................................................. 155 Julia Rawa Contemporary Florida Colonial Showcase Lagoon: The Architecture of the Colonized/ Colonizer in Walt Disney World's EPCOT Theme Park ......................... 167 CR Junkins Poor White Southerners: Beyond the Stereotype .................................... 177 Diane Baird Fighting the Good Fight on All Fronts: Carl Hiaasen and the Rhetoric of Eco-criticism ....................................................................................... 181 Larry Byrne

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Florida’s Heroes of the New News: Gannett Dailies Lose and (Maybe) Find Their Net.................................................................... 189 Stephen Zeigler Natural Florida “Sinks, Snakes, Caves w/ Water”: Floridian Imagery in the Poetry of Jim Morrison ....................................................................................... 215 Lee Campbell and Debra Jacobs Creative Showcase Pineapple Grill......................................................................................... 227 Lizbeth Keiley

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association (FCEA) in Tampa, Florida—Ybor City to be exact—was such a success. Attendees soaked up the history and culture of this distinctive part of Tampa while enjoying well-executed, intriguing presentations. Donald Pharr of St. Leo University did a yeoman’s job organizing the conference location and sessions while collaborating with Hillsborough Community College-Ybor Campus for breakout rooms. FCEA board members also contributed to the conference planning and its smooth execution. At the conference, Anna Lillios of the University of Central Florida received the seventh annual Distinguished Colleague Award, given for "significant and sustained contributions in teaching, scholarship, and service." Just one look at Anna’s accomplishments is enough to see how deserving she is. She served as Vice President and President of FCEA from 1997-99 and is currently the Executive Director of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society and on the Executive Board of the International Lawrence Durrell Society. She is the editor of Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World and is author of the forthcoming Zora and Miss Marjorie: The Friendship of Two American Writers as well as numerous scholarly articles and papers. I am indebted to several individuals, without which this volume would not have been possible. As executive editor, April Van Camp of Indian River State College spent hours reviewing submissions and giving perceptive advice. Karen Tolchin of Florida Gulf Coast University once again proved to be an amazing associate editor, never turning down my plea for “one more review.” Florida Southern College has granted me indispensable help for the third year: my student production assistant Shay Lessman, who has made this all come together with his word processing skills, akin to magic, if you ask me. When we just cannot seem to get spacing or pagination right, Shay is the one with the patience and the proud attention to detail who makes it right, insuring this publication’s professionalism. My husband, a professor and scholar in his own right, is forever propping me up when I wither and cheering me on when I once again bend over the keyboard. Light and love to him.

PREFACE

This is my third year as general editor, and each year my respect for my colleagues increases. With courage and conviction, they submitted essays that were revised, and sometimes lengthened, from their Florida College English Association conference 2008 presentations for our consideration, taking themselves from that public arena to the possibility of an even broader audience. After these submissions were passed through a review process, the final selections were made, further edited, polished for publication, and organized into categories—finally arriving in the published form that you see here. This volume contains a lot of variety, an eclectic mix of fine scholarship. The first section, Pedagogy, includes essays about employing service learning, blogging, and primary archival research into the classroom, among other techniques. Old Florida is the largest section, with essays exploring the following: the first black general in Florida (1791), antebellum Florida, racism in Florida, connections between a Florida territorial governor and Washington Irving, poet Wallace Stevens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, early twentieth century author Edith Pope, and the memoirs of colonial Florida women. The next section—Contemporary Florida—has essays that discuss EPCOT theme park, Florida newspapers, the rhetoric of Carl Haissen, and the stereotyped poor white Southerner. Jim Morrison’s use of Floridian imagery is the topic of the essay in Natural Florida, and the poem “Pineapple Grill” falls into the category Creative Showcase. These selections showcase the diverse and bold culture of Florida as they enrich and broaden the canon of Florida Studies.

Claudia Slate, editor Karen Tolchin, associate editor

PEDAGOGY

BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF HONORS SCHOLARS THROUGH PRIMARY ARCHIVAL RESEARCH CHARLOTTE PRESSLER

For four or five years now, I have been requiring students in my Freshman English I courses at South Florida Community College to write “Florida-themed” research papers. That is, they may write their papers on any topic that has a connection to Florida. As a result, I receive many papers each term on alligators, panthers, and manatees, “the gentle giants of the sea.” I also receive at least one paper on NASCAR, half a dozen on various hurricanes (gradually, Charley has been displacing Andrew as the hurricane of choice), and several on the Seminoles, “the Everglades” (“it’s a very big topic, you’ll have to narrow it”), St. Augustine (“you can’t leave out what happened at Fort Caroline”), and coral reefs. Few now do papers on the citrus industry, but one or two each year write on the Land Boom of the 1920s, and several – more each year – have approached the contested issues of slavery, Indian removal, segregation, and the civil rights era. I tend to remember the outliers among these papers best: the sad story of Dr. Perrine on Indian Key, a spirited defense of the Key West Wreckers by one of their descendents, and a description of Titusville as it was before NASA (according to the student, half a dozen fishing shacks, a couple of bars, and a whorehouse). From time to time in the first years I was trying this method, I would receive a paper proposal on some aspect of local history. Here the student would run into trouble almost immediately, because relatively little was available in the way of sources. Thanks to the work of Dr. James M. Denham, Canter Brown, Jr., Spessard Stone, and others, the histories of Polk County, Hardee County, and the Peace River Frontier have been recovered for us, but Highlands County, home to most of my students, is rarely discussed in the works of professional historians. Even the Great Okeechobee/San Felipe Hurricane of 1928 had had only one book-length treatment until recently, Lawrence E. Will’s locally printed and hard to find The Okeechobee Hurricane and the Hoover Dike. Students wanting to research their local histories were thus all but forced to work with primary

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Building a Community of Honors Scholars

sources, while the few secondary sources available had to be treated with as much caution as primary sources would normally be. Three years ago, in the midst of these discoveries, I was asked to become director of the South Florida Community College Honors Program, when Dr. Theresa James, who revived it and made it a viable program, became chair of the Humanities Department. Among the requirements students in the SFCC Honors Program must fulfill for graduation is: “Complete and log 25 hours of service-learning.” Thus, the syllabus of every Honors class offers, for extra credit, some sort of service-learning project, completion of which earns the student at least five hours toward the graduation requirement. As I soon discovered, it is not easy to keep up a meaningful servicelearning program at a two-year college. We teach general education courses, and our students have general-education skills; we can’t partner with service agencies in any sort of quasi-professional way, and there are limitations on our students’ time and availability as well. So when I began teaching the Honors version of Freshman English I, it became a priority for me to find a good service-learning project that could fit into the most basic of all required gen ed courses while giving the students a minimum of time and transportation problems. Searching for a way to combine a service-learning project with the English I research paper, I contacted the Avon Park Depot Museum. This local museum is operated by the Historical Society of Avon Park, and housed in the old Seaboard Air Line depot. It maintains archival records and displays of the material culture of the town of Avon Park and its surrounding area. The museum needed volunteers able to help digitize their large collection of photographs for presentation on CDs, and they were less than a mile from the College. Knowing that local histories could not be written for our area without primary archival research, and knowing that the Depot Museum had such archives, it seemed a fair trade. After some initial explorations, we began a partnership between Honors Program ENC 1101 students and the Depot Museum in the fall semester of 2007. My initial goals were these: my students would learn about primary archival research, help to satisfy their service-learning requirements, and make connections in the wider community. The Avon Park Depot Museum would receive help with their digitization project otherwise unobtainable, and would acquaint a new generation of Highlands County residents with their museum and archives (insurance against the future). I would bring my students into relationship with the Museum Director and President of the Historical Society, two welleducated professionals, and bring the college into relationship with an

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important part of our local community, something that is part of the mission of any community college. With these goals in mind, I took my ENC 1101 students on a tour of the Museum early in the fall of 2007, before any of the students who had selected their topics. I have found that a tour is critical to getting students interested in primary research on local history projects. Before the tour, such topics are abstractions to the students. The Depot Museum, which is exceptionally strong on exhibits of the region’s material culture, gives a felt reality to the otherwise abstract notions of local histories, as does the physicality, the “touchableness” of the newspapers, telephone books, diaries and typescripts in their archives. The Depot Museum then came up with a second project for my students. They needed someone to research and write up selected aspects of local history. Their plan was to make brochures available at the Museum to interested visitors. I suggested that they present their needs to my students as topics for their research papers, promising my students that if their research papers went well, they could (perhaps with some editing) write the brochures the Museum would publish. Several of them went to work on museum-suggested topics, which included the history of the Sebring Regional Airport, the Civilian Conservation Corps activities in Highlands County, and – everyone’s favorite – the bombing of Frostproof. (It happened during World War II, and it was “friendly fire”; no one was hurt.) These students made trips on their own to research their topics and work on the Museum’s digitization project. The lessons I had given them in class on primary and secondary sources did turn out to be useful, but what really mattered to the success of their papers were the Museum volunteers, who directed the students to the typescripts, diaries, and other unpublished materials in the Museum archives and helped them to locate and contextualize the primary sources in a narrative. These one-on-one conversations with Museum volunteers taught the students, in a hands-on, direct way what research is like, and what participation in a research community is like. Personal connections of this kind had been so often missing from their previous education, as I will show in the second half of the paper. Three of the students went on to present their papers at a well-received panel at the Florida Collegiate Honors Conference in the spring of 2008. Their experiences have inspired other Honors students to pull together their own conference presentations. This year, we hope it will be a physics group presenting at the FCHC conference.

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While it might be routine at a larger college or university for Honors students to do activities of this kind, it is entirely new to my students. These Honors students are discovering all parts of the cycle of in-depth research among a community of scholars – an entire way of life – by participating in it, and they are liking it, too. I’d like now to explore some of the theoretical frames I bring to my own reflections on this work. I cannot say the theory came first. In fact, I have tended to move forward in a more intuitive way, but what I’ve been doing intuitively can be understood as consistent with theoretical approaches that connect student success with student engagement, especially among first-generation college students—our students. It is true that South Florida Community College has in recent years been attracting more traditionally-aged college students, with more traditional ambitions. Yet these students, among whom are our Honors students, continue to face a number of challenges, some unique to rural areas such as ours. We are still, officially, a rural area. Highlands, the largest and wealthiest county in our tri-county area, has a population of just under 100,000. Of that population, just 13.5% have completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. The national average, in contrast, is nearly twice that number. Over 34% of Highlands County residents have completed no more than the high school degree or equivalency. These figures are skewed to an unknown degree by the fact that a large percentage of our residents are retirees, who may well be better educated than their younger counterparts in the workforce – at least, this is my own observation. The census figures do not really tell us this. We can certainly assume that most SFCC students will be first-generation college students. Not surprisingly, our students are also poorer than average. The median household income in 2000 in Highlands County was $30,160, compared to a national average of $41,994, but again these figures do not tell the whole story. The greatest income deficits relative to the national median can be seen in the age brackets between 35 and 54, where the Highlands County median income is 65% of the national median. As the parents of our college students would fall into this age bracket, we can presume that our students will tend to be from lower-income homes. The final and perhaps most important challenge our students face stems from the cultural isolation of the area. Like many other rural Florida communities, Highlands County is intensely inward-looking. One sign of this is that well over 50 percent of Highlands County students who go on to higher education enroll at SFCC first. Very few go directly to a fouryear university or college. Last year, for example:

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with a graduating class of about 180 students, Lake Placid High had 11 students accepted to USF and five accepted to the University of Florida, but one of those students decided to go to Georgia Tech. (Valero)

Not quite 10% of the graduating class went directly to university, in other words. Considering that the dropout rate for the County (as currently measured) hovers around 30%, the percentage of entering high school students who graduate and go directly to a university falls to around 7%. In addition, many SFCC graduates who continue to the baccalaureate degree do so through classes offered at SFCC’s University Center. They do not, in other words, leave the area or move physically to the campus of a four-year college. Often the reason is cost, but students and their parents have also frequently expressed unease at the prospect of moving to a big university or urban area. Dual-enrollment students in our Honors courses have further challenges. These students, whether they are from private, usually denominational schools that lack a full upper division, or whether they have been home-schooled, have often experienced a mosaic-style education, assembled from face-to-face classes, 2-way TV classes, Florida Virtual High School classes, and home-schooling, essentially whatever was available to make up requirements. The course content may be sufficiently rigorous, but the variety of delivery methods and experiences gives students little sense of membership in a stable community of learners. What do these students need that we can give them? A number of researchers have identified non-cognitive factors of importance to student success. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is well known. The economist James Heckman’s studies stress, in contrast, the importance of such character traits as persistence, work ethic, and the ability to defer gratification. I am most interested in a third set of factors, however. At one time called “acculturation” or “socialization,” these are now known collectively as “student engagement,” a generalized label that describes students’ relationships to their instructors, their relationships to other students, and to the college environment overall. Several recent studies have shown that student engagement is a nonimmutable characteristic particularly critical to the success of firstgeneration college students. Thus, Gary R. Pike and George D. Kuh’s comparative study of student engagement emphasizes that: learning requires both active participation in a variety of academic and social activities and integration of these diverse experiences into a meaningful whole. A considerable body of research points to the positive

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Building a Community of Honors Scholars influence of student engagement in educationally purposeful activities on learning. (279)

First-generation college students, however, were typically less engaged overall (289), perhaps because they know less about the importance of engagement and about how to become engaged. That is, compared to second-generation college students, they have less tacit knowledge of and fewer experiences with college campuses and related activities, behaviors, and role models. In addition, parents are unable to help much, even if they are so inclined, as they, too, lack knowledge of, or in some instances may find off-putting, certain activities that could lead to greater levels of engagement (290). Yet, Pike and Kuh assert, engagement is crucial: [g]ains in student learning were directly related to [….] integration, or the extent to which students were able to incorporate information from their courses and other learning activities in their conversations with peers and others. (289-90)

“Cultural capital,” the “ease and familiarity one has with the dominant culture of one’s society” (Pascarella et. al. 251-52), is another term in common use. This not-quite metaphor derived from Pierre Bordieu’s sociological work calls attention to the fact that college students on entrance are presumed already to have some knowledge and understanding of the cultural and social milieu of higher education. This will become the foundation for the additional understanding they will acquire in the course of their college education. Even well-prepared students who lack this “cultural capital”—and many first generation college students do lack it – may feel lost, disengaged, “put off,” and disconnected, and fail to get the full benefit of their education as a result. Pascarella et.al. found that first generation college students benefit more than their multi-generational counterparts do from experiences, in and out of the classroom, that build up cultural capital. Despite this, however, they find that first-generation college students are significantly less likely than their counterparts to engage in such experiences. Based on these findings, they argue that, as a matter of educational policy, firstgeneration college students must be ensured “access to the full range of college experiences” if they are to succeed (278-81). Encouraging student engagement has become, as a matter of policy, a cornerstone of the SFCC Honors Program. However it is defined, the importance of becoming connected to a community of scholars, of feeling “part of the college,” part of the academic world, is something we strive to

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foster in our students. Although formal learning communities for Honors students will not be initiated until next year, we have been making every effort to bolster our students’ sense that they are part of a community of scholars. Pike and Kuh’s preferred method of fostering student engagement is to require freshmen to live on campus. While this is not an option open to our community college students, we hope to replicate the experience Pike and Kuh describe of “immersion,” of the “close physical presence” of a “community of scholars,” through academic projects involving a cohort of students connected through service-learning. For, as Nancy Stanlick has written, Honors is not Honors unless a community of Honors students is fostered. “For an honors community,” she argues, “‘honor’ is the shared practice and commitment of the group.” In her virtue-theoretic approach to Honors education, such communities form in order to further “a community goal shared by the individuals” who make it up. Communities of this kind have a “shared conception of the good” such that “individual excellence may manifest itself in the search for the good for all” (79-80). Stanlick’s model is one of mutuality, in which “benefits for the individual come about only through the strength of community [while] the community gains its strength, honor, and reputation from the individuals who comprise it” (86). It is pleasant to see Stanlick’s Aristotelian model, with its roots in the ancient Greek polis, being confirmed by the latest statistical research in education. It is still more gratifying to watch the Honors students at SFCC benefiting from the growing strength of their connection to the community of scholars. And now, by way of conclusion: The SFCC Honors Program has just begun a new joint project with the Avon Park Historical Society and Depot Museum. They have received a mini-grant from the Florida Humanities Council for their pilot project in oral history: “The early days of integration in Avon Park.” This project will collect, preserve, and present to the public first-person narratives of the 1950s and 1960s, as experienced by both African-American and white residents of a rural South Central Florida community. South Florida Community College will lend its recording facilities, making podcasts of the interviews available on the Depot Museum’s website. Mike Denham is joining us as our Humanities scholar. SFCC Honors students will earn service-learning credit for primary research in the Depot Museum’s archives in support of the project. We’ll have a public forum and museum exhibit as a capstone, again with more assistance from the Honors students. In fact, one of SFCC’s Honors graduates has been hired as an assistant to the project. We

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call him our one-person WPA. He’s about to join a long and honorable tradition in the scholarly community. It’s really just the beginning.

Works Cited Pascarella, Ernest T., Christopher T. Pierson, Gregory C. Wolniak, and Patrick T. Terenzini. “First-Generation College Students: Additional Evidence on College Experiences and Outcomes.” Journal of Higher Education 75.3: 249-284. Pike, Gary R., and George D. Kuh. “First- and Second-Generation College Students: A Comparison of Their Engagement and Intellectual Development.” Journal of Higher Education 76 .3: 276-300. Stanlick, Nancy A. “Creating an Honors Community: A Virtue Ethics Approach.” JNCHC 7.1 (2006): 75-92. Valero, Marc. “University Admission Not a Given Anymore.” Highlands Today. Online Ed. 2 Jun. 2008. 12 Dec. 2008. http://www.highlandstoday.com/.

BLOGGING FLORIDA’S REPUTATIONS IN FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION KYLE D. STEDMAN

A Google search for "Florida reputation" yields the following results: we learn that "Antebellum Florida carried the reputation of a 'rogue's paradise'" (Miller), that "Florida's reputation for flakiness is at stake" (Feldstein), that it is "the destination for migrating 'snowbirds' from northerly climes" (Wearmouth), that "Florida's reputation for electoral integrity has been called into question in recent years" ("Help Verify"), and that "Florida's reputation as the 'Sunshine State' has made it a popular destination for immigrants as well as folks within the U.S." ("Florida History"). And that's just from the first page of results. Our undergraduate students come to Florida universities with many of these ideas about Florida already simmering in their minds. Those new to the state may have had no prior experiences here except a Disney vacation years earlier, while others may have worked in our citrus orchards or rowed crew on our lakes. As a first-year composition instructor, I try to attune my pedagogy to the real concerns and embodied lives of my students, pushing them to write in real contexts with real audiences as much as possible. This project emerged when that concern for relevancy intersected with my realization that Florida, perhaps more than other places, has a thick series of reputations that students are dealing with, whether we address them in class or not. This work also grows out of my interest in Tim Lindgren's and Derek Owen's work on "place blogging." Lindgren resists any neat definition of place blogging, describing it in his 2005 Kairos article as "an adaptation, or perhaps more precisely, a localization of blogging with both generic and geographic qualities." This movement is growing: we can read various personal accounts of life in Florida--or practically anywhere else--by browsing any of the 120 Florida-themed "placeblogs" listed at placeblogger.com, a site whose subtitle is "towards an annotated world with blogs, wikis, forums, maps..." (Placeblogger) .

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Blogging Florida’s Reputations in First-Year Composition

Lindgren implies that place blogging can be a sort of healing for the distressed, fractured lives so many of us lead. In fact, he sounds as if he is describing frantic undergraduate students coming to school in Florida for the first time when he writes: [P]lace blogging displays characteristics that suggest it is responding to additional elements of cultural kairos, namely, the need to construct a meaningful sense of place in the midst of widespread social mobility and rapid environmental transformation. In other words, place bloggers may be actively constructing a sense of self, but it is a self which is deeply informed by place as a central category of identity. (Lindgren)

These lines suggest that I can shape my course activities to participate in this place-based construction of identity that students are already experiencing, encouraging them to add a layer of thoughtful reflection to their interactions with new places. I can create spaces where students' lives away from their computers are fed back into their writing, writing which then shapes their perspective on the physical spaces they encounter; Lindgren and Owens describe this as a "feedback loop" in their 2007 book chapter (197). Ideally, I want students to investigate what Edward W. Soja calls a "trialectics" of space in his book Thirdspace, teaching them to use writing to mediate their understandings of how they conceive, perceive, and live in their various spaces. And as Adrienne Rich reminds us in "Notes toward a Politics of Location," attuning ourselves to our embodied selves--selves embodied in specific places--can be a crucial first step toward becoming more ethical and resistant subjects. As a first step of inquiry into these questions of space and writing online, I developed a series of three blogging prompts designed for firstyear composition classes at a large public university in Florida. Blogs are an especially appropriate medium with which to consider issues of space, since they inhabit both a digital space characterized by their specific html and RSS addresses and because they so often reflect writers' perceptions of their lived spaces. I'm reminded of Kathleen M. Kirby's claim in "Thinking through the Boundary: The Politics of Location, Subjects, and Space" that "Space brings together the material and the abstract, the body and the mind, the objective interaction of physical subjects and the elusive transience of consciousness (or the unconscious)" (174). It sounds to me as if she's describing a physical human extending tendrils of consciousness into a computer for a writing task. In these prompts, I ask students to consider their relationship to Florida, read other Florida-themed blogs, and to practice writing from different subject positions in order to consider the complex interaction

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between place, identity, and audience in writing--a tall order for three brief prompts, I know.1 I received IRB exemption for this project because the classes assigning these prompts already assign public blogging to their students, because students read an informed consent document before accessing the assignments, and because of the anonymity I give to all students: any identifying markers have been left out or changed. I admit that my approach was rather unscientific: in late summer of this year, I e-mailed the list of almost 80 FYC instructors at my school and asked them to consider assigning my blog topics to their students early in the semester. I had previously created a simple website with student and instructor pages that included suggestions on discussing the prompts in class and technical help on blogging.2 Seven instructors agreed, and I asked them to share with me the links to their students' blogs when they were completed. However, of those seven, I only received data from two sections, both taught by the same instructor; some of the other teachers apparently only assigned these options as extra credit, which no students so early in the semester felt was necessary. Nevertheless, I still find my results engaging and casually suggestive, as the results of pilot projects like this often are. The first prompt, "Your Florida Experience," reminds students of Florida's many reputations and asks them to write a blog post "about [their] relationship with Florida." It closes by asking, "How do you want to situate yourself in relation to Florida? What choices do you want to make when writing to communicate your chosen stance toward the state?" Two things stood out in their responses: first, I read many of their posts as choices to align themselves with or against Florida's reputation as the sunshine state. In a state filled with premade images—Florida as sunny, as a place to go to the beach—it was very common for students to state emphatically how much they either love or hate Florida’s weather and beaches, much in the way that we often hear a song and naturally align ourselves as someone who likes it or doesn't like it. Of course, these posts often bordered on the banal, a situation that suggests a teachable moment. What techniques do experienced writers use when approaching hackneyed topics? Second, many students expressed their relationships to Florida by comparing it to other places, which seems to support a conclusion that writing about place almost necessarily involves writing about multiple places. One student who has only been in Florida for about a year writes, "Florida is like the redheaded step child of California. Florida's beaches are good, but not quite as good as Cali. The waves are good, but not quite as good as Cali. The fresh organic food is good, but not quite as

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Blogging Florida’s Reputations in First-Year Composition

good as Cali's. The plastic surgery is good, but again not quite as good as Cali's."3 Another student who grew up in Florida writes, "I remember going up to Virginia a few times with my family. As soon as we hit the border of the state it was as if everyone became a bit more friendly and considerate." Another from Florida writes, "I have 28 cousins that live in Texas and whenever I go over there to visit, the way they dress and what is important to them is completely different. They are all about appearances, make up, clothes, hair, being popular, the works. My mom even said that when she lived in Texas she felt like she had to put on make up just to go outside and check her mail down the driveway." One student from South America aligns himself with both Florida's reputations and with the U.S.'s larger reputation as a "land of opportunity." Perhaps in future assignments I will encourage these comparisons in further depth by asking students to choose two or more places and blog regularly about them, given the way our minds naturally make connections. This approach might align with Nedra Reynolds's extended metaphor of composing as an encounter with a city in her book, Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference (33). I wonder what it would look like to invite students to see their lived experiences in places as a sort of city of memory, which they can then explore through informal public writing--sometimes by blogging their "high rises," the places they work and focus their energies, and sometimes by blogging their "ghettoes," the hidden places they travel that often remain hidden from the mainstream. My second prompt asks students to read selected readings from two blogs. The first, A Guide to All Things Tacky Fabulous in Orlando, is the collection of "tacky fabulous" places, events, people, and signs in Central Florida, written by a blogger known as "Tacky Fabulous." Common posts include ridiculous bumper stickers and signs sighted in the Orlando area, extravagant items for sale (sometimes in the blog's Tacky Fabulous Gift Shop), and reflections on current events around town. The second blog students read is Welcome to the Real, the blog of an anonymous former student at my university who identifies himself only as "Jakob Free." My relationship with this blog has been complex, and decidedly place-based. I saw a flier for it in the stairwell of my department's building on campus, and I was intrigued by its blend of disrespectful political imagery (mustaches and pirate patches drawn onto images of presidential candidates) with comic-book style art—not to mention Jakob’s brazen crossing of the boundary between digital and print media, using cut-out letters in a ransom-note style to write "digital guerilla warfare." When I started reading his blog, I had a complex series of

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reactions: I was amazed at the strength of his desire to regularly share with the world his disgust with corporate, shallow America (I think I saw a little bit of my more intense, high-school self), but I also felt distaste with his brash determination to not be politically correct in any way, which often meant offensively expressing his hatred for people he didn't want to put up with—especially Floridians. Here's a typical excerpt of his Florida-themed posts: Goodbye Florida. You smell like geriatric filled hospices and death and freshly cut grass (for the golf y'know). Goodbye Florida. You backward thinking, conservative cesspool. Goodbye Florida. I've never contemplated suicide more than when I was within your borders. Goodbye Florida. You desolate wasteland of hot stickiness and sweat and fat girls.

However, I've seen a shift in Jakob's posts in the last few months. Instead of posts like the one I just quoted, he seems to have grown increasingly subdued, more interested in intelligently discussing politics than in bashing people who don't share his views. It reminds me of Lorianne, a placeblogger that Lindgren quotes, who writes, "One of the joys of blogging is the experimental nature of it all: one day you can try your hand at a serious post; the next you can experiment with a lighter, more zany voice. In a word, blogging provides a forum where you can let all of your personalities (if you happen to have several) out of the bag, each with a day and a spotlight all their own." This is at the heart of my three blogging prompts and this project: my desire to ask students to read and practice this experimental trying on of different identities. The first part of that goal is reflected in my second blogging prompt, "Blogging Florida," which asks students to read posts by both Tacky Fabulous and Jakob Free and answer four questions about each, including a question that encourages them to see these authors' relationship to Florida as consciously shaped and situated, and two more questions that focus on the potential audience of this discourse about Florida. Most students posted forcefully and defensively, both on their class blog site and some in comments on Welcome to the Real. A couple illustrative examples: "This blogger in particular seemed to do everything he could to establish that he is NOT a part of Florida, and I could really care less. He can take his anger and potty mouth with him when he gets the hell out." Another writes, "And honestly, I have no idea who would find these blogs interesting… maybe fellow Florida haters, or perhaps someone who's thinking about moving here? Or maybe sick people in

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general. The second blogger is just creepy, in my opinion." Some seemed to identify his blanket statements about Florida with other forms of prejudice: "It shows how ignorant the blogger is; it is a stereotype of Florida and cruel." One even went so far as to assume that Jakob Free was a bad driver, just because he criticizes Florida drivers, writing, "This blogger sees himself as part of the mess, but not one of the horrible drivers. Maybe he just doesn't realize his own driving skill, or lack of. Many people believe they are the best drivers around when other people may think they're not so great." And perhaps my favorite student response is, "I have to say (sorry) that I'm glad that this is the last week for this particular blog. I don't so much like anything that says, straight out, F*** Florida. I've learned from reading these negative posts that I really like Florida. I was insulted by how harsh they were. So there you have it. Florida is a great place to live. It took disturbing, disturbing posts to help me relize that. So thanks! I love Florida!" What surprised me was that many students read All Things Tacky Fabulous in Orlando as similarly insulting. I've learned from teaching other blogging assignments that students often get especially vocal when they feel that they've been cornered into a stereotype, as if they are being forced to lose some of their identity. For example, one student writes, "Yea there are some weird people out there like the beer can collector and stupid merchandise like those high heel scuba fins but that is just what makes Florida unique. So what they are saying are just examples of specific events, not of the state in a whole. They obviously don't live here or else their viewpoints would change in my opinion." Notice the interesting contradictions here: this student labels Tacky Fabulous's descriptions approvingly as "what makes Florida unique" but then claims that Tacky Fabulous isn't really describing "the state as a whole," implying that we should zoom our focus out, away from these oddities. Similarly, another student writes, "I feel really insulted by this blog! Their comments are definitely not well thought into, and they need to take a closer look into Florida, not just the silly things that catch the eye!" It's such an interesting dichotomy: on one hand, a positive impression of the details we see when we take a "closer look into Florida," and on the other, a negative impression of "the silly things that catch the eye." I left these student posts with a sense of how much first-year writing students value honesty in depictions of place; they reject whatever they perceive as stereotypical or lacking complexity, whether the topic is social class, people groups, or places they care about. But when I consider this attitude toward truth in light of their sometimes banal posts in response to my first prompt, I can't help but wonder: if they crave nuance and detailed

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truth, why do they settle for writing generalizations themselves when describing their own relationships to the state? The answer might sometimes lie in their level of cognitive development, as described by William G. Perry Jr. in Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. But I think regardless of the reasons, this tension between nuance and generalization is a pedagogical moment that can be addressed through careful assigning and discussion of place blogging with students. Per IRB instructions, I have no way of contacting these students, but I would love to have the opportunity to ask them, "How do you think writers should describe details about places but not fall into stereotypes?" Furthermore, I would remind them that we really don't know that the attitudes expressed by Tacky Fabulous and Jakob Free actually represent their deepest opinions about these places--which in any case are liable to shift with the day or hour, even after they've been solidified into text. Anyone can pose in a blog, and many do. This is my aim in the third prompt: to ask students to practice trying on different points of view to which they may or may not personally subscribe. The third prompt begins by reminding students that the authors of the two blogs they read the week before "made choices about how to portray Florida, choices that are likely to attract certain readers but not others." It then asks the students to choose "a place [they]'re familiar with and that [they] have strong feelings about," and to then write one paragraph designed for people who feel the same way about the place and another for people who feel the opposite way. (My example in the prompt is a bar, which they might describe alternately as too loud or comfortingly delightful.) In one sense, the wide-openness of this prompt offers students something much closer to the experience of typical bloggers, who rarely find themselves constrained to specific questions, like those I assigned in the first and second prompts. But obviously, this prompt is still an intermediary step toward asking students to seriously engage place; to better test the effect of these lessons, I would have to provide students with the opportunity to blog freely on any topic both before and after my threeweek sequence, and then try to determine the extent to which their playfulness with identity and audience increased after practicing writing about places from opposing perspectives. My biggest surprise when reading these prompts was that the students were able to fool me completely with their language. In almost no situation was it somehow naturally obvious which description the student aligned him or herself with. This was a good reminder for me, the powerful prompt-giver, of the inherent disconnection between writer, text,

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and reader. Like Candace Spigelman in “Teaching Expressive Writing as a Narrative Fiction,” I’m intrigued by students' ability to play with history and identity in informal writing situations in potentially empowering and disruptive ways. One thing I noticed in their responses to Prompt Three was their occasional tendency to fall into the role of travel guide, using the second person. My language didn't ask them to argue that one point of view about their chosen place was superior, only to describe it, but their posts often sounded casually persuasive, with one speaker trying to convince another-the you--to come along for the ride and agree with the speaker. An illustrative example is, "The breeze of fresh air is so lovely, and if you get too hot out while you're having your fun in the sun, the water is right there. You can just jump on in! Take a little swim. Get your exercise and have fun doing it. While you're at it, have a picnic!" These sentences reflect what the author identifies as her position; when she writes about the beach from the opposite point of view, she writes with characteristic extravagance of students taking the other side, "Simply put, I hate the beach. It's like some cruel torture device of nature. There are always so many people, all crowding together and sweating all over the place. The sun is just too hot, and then you start sweating and the sand sticks to you." She ends with, "I personally cannot understand why anyone would ever put themselves through such a ridiculous activity." In addition to the continuation of the second-person you, the word personally stands out, as if the writer suspected that readers would see through her deception and wanted to drive home the farce. I also asked them to write an explanatory paragraph that preceded the two opposite paragraphs so that readers could understand the exercise and to give students the chance to provide readers with some metacommentary. (As a side note, I also hoped that writing an introductory paragraph after they had written their two "body" paragraphs might serve as a reminder about the inherent mobility and unsolidified nature of digital text.) Their opinions varied on which paragraph was easier to write. Some described that their everyday proximity to others' opinions made it easy it was to mimic those opinions. For example, one writes, "I found it pretty easy to write both of the paragraphs, probably because I've heard both perspectives multiple times from many people." By that paradigm, it seems clear that many of these writers are used to hearing various points of view thrown about on these topics. They have no problem staking a claim on one side or the other (it seems to matter little which), but they still need practice making their argumentative stances appealing to a wide audience. In other words, it's one thing to try on the

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coat of another point of view and repeat the things that are usually said about it, but it's another thing to effectively shape an opinionated blog post so that a wide audience will feel both engaged with the material and willing to read on. Lastly, there were also a few students who used their explanatory paragraph to describe the emotions they felt when writing something they disagreed with. One writes, "Because I love [my city], I enjoyed writing the next paragraph, but in the last paragraph, I felt kind of sad degrading the city." Another adds, "the second paragraph was almost painful to write because to me it's a complete lie." I know it seems shortsighted of me, but I hadn't considered that students might write about their emotional reaction to the exercise. (I simply asked that they "explain" the "changes" they made from one to the other.) I think this signals interesting possibilities for future writing assignments, in which we can teach young writers to attune themselves to their emotional reactions to their subject matter and to themselves, as they write sentences that more or less approximate their feelings on a subject. Of course, this pedagogy could quickly transgress ethical boundaries, if we make students' grades depend on their characterization of their emotions. As a beginning, though, I'm interested in considering possibilities of how the blogosphere might welcome applications of Amy E. Robillard's recent work on emotions in the composition classroom. In closing, thinking about the connections between place and emotions reminds me of why I'm interested in place-based pedagogy in the first place: I've always self-identified as a person who builds strong connections with places I've frequented—houses I've lived in, secret places on college campuses, favorite trails in the woods. What's funny, though, is that I started this project without actively remembering this quality about myself; the project started, in fact, when I saw that the 2008 conference of the Florida College English Association was focused on the "Faces of Florida" and wondered how I might apply it to blogging. It wasn't until I was taking notes on Tim Lindgren's Kairos article that I remembered how much I personally am enthralled by place. He quotes a post by a placeblogger who writes about visiting San Diego for a honeymoon and then returning home to Knoxville. She writes, "Here were my trees, so many and so striking in their late winter starkness. They washed over me, like coming home must feel. I don’t think I realized before right then that I had formed such an attachment to this place." These lines were particularly moving to me, partly because I was born in Knoxville and grew up in San Diego. Yet it took the conscious choice that a blogger made to write about place to make me see the

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connection between my love of place and my decision to focus my scholarly attention to it. My hope is that attuning students to place blogging will similarly help train them to see connections between their various lives: embodied, discursive, constructed, and digitized.

Notes 1

These prompts are available in an appendix. This site is still available at http://collegewriting.us/online/stedman/ Shared%20Documents/floridablogging.aspx. 3 Throughout this essay, I have chosen not to edit student blog posts on grammatical or mechanical grounds. It seems more economical to give this alert early on than to laboriously enter "[sic]" each time it seems appropriate. 2

Appendix: Blogging Prompts Week 1: Your Florida Experience Florida's inhabitants are a mixed bag. We have a unique blend of tourists, students, the elderly, long-time city residents, long-time country residents, immigrants, children of immigrants, snowbirds, developers, environmentalists, Jimmy Buffet fans, American Indians, and gator wrestlers. The individuals making up these and other groups all have their own attitudes toward Florida, some of which come from their roles as members of different groups and some from their own personal experiences. For instance, a person might love Florida's tourist attractions because he lives in a part of the country with no amusement parks, but he might hate the sun because of a bad sunburn he once got. Another person might love the ecological diversity of the Everglades because of her training as an environmental engineer, but she might hate Miami because an ex-lover lives there. Write a well-developed blog post about your relationship with Florida. Focus on things that people who read blogs about Florida might be interested in hearing. Don't try to tell too much--focus on a story or two. Remember that you will be posting on a public site, and that others may choose to read your posts. How do you want to situate yourself in relation to Florida? What choices do you want to make when writing to communicate your chosen stance toward the state? Week 2: Blogging Florida Florida is a complicated place. Individuals who write or speak about Florida often choose to focus on one or many of the state's reputations, declaring whether they think Florida is pristine, overdeveloped, entertaining, or bizarre, and whether they think of Floridians as primarily old, tanned, stupid, hip, annoying, fabulous, or an intriguing mixture of them all.

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Of course, in different places and times, Florida can be all of these things, and more. But to engage their audiences, writers characterizing Florida often choose to ignore certain reputations in favor of others. This may result in unfair caricatures or engaging, new understandings of the people or places the writer focuses on. In today's blog, you will respond to two bloggers' characterizations of Florida. First, read some posts from two blogs:

x

x

A Guide to All Things Tacky Fabulous in Orlando: an individual's collection of "tacky fabulous" places, events, people, and signs in Central Florida o Browse around and read some posts from a few different categories. (Don't just read the most recent posts.) Welcome to the Real: an anonymous USF student's blog o Please read the following posts: o 1/26/08: Rednecks versus Hillbillies. An battle of epic proportions. o 2/28/08: Learn To Fucking Drive. o 3/11/08: Elliot Spitzer and Goodbye Florida o 3/16/08: Respond. o 4/16/08: Okay, I'm Back With Girls Getting Beaten And Polygamists With Uni-Brows.

Then, write a blog post that incorporates your answers to the following questions: x How do these bloggers describe Florida? x How do these bloggers situate themselves in relation to Florida? In other words, do they see themselves as part of the Florida they describe, or separate from it? x What kind of people do you think would be most attracted to each blog? x Were there any parts of their attitudes toward Florida that you particularly enjoyed or disagreed with? Week 3: Considering Audience In different ways, the authors of A Guide to All Things Tacky Fabulous in Orlando and Welcome to the Real are responding to the Florida reputation they choose to see. In other words, you might say that one author sees Florida as fabulously weird and thus chooses to enjoy its weirdness, while the other sees Florida as full of frustratingly unintelligent people and thus chooses to deride it. Of course, neither interpretation is completely wrong nor completely right. Both authors made choices about how to portray Florida, choices that are likely to attract certain readers but not others. To practice making choices about portraying places for different audiences, write a single blog post with three very different paragraphs as described below. Write

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about a place you're familiar with and that you have strong feelings about. (You may choose a place in Florida or a place somewhere else.) 1.

2.

3.

In your first paragraph, write a few sentences describing the place, imagining that you're writing to people who feel the same way you do about that place. (If it's a bar that you think is too loud and smelly, write a description that people who feel the same way will appreciate and agree with.) Then in your second paragraph, rewrite your description of the same place, pretending that you feel the opposite way and that you're writing to people who also feel the opposite. (In other words, pretend that you really think it's the best bar ever, and write a description that will appeal to others who love it.) Then, because your blog is public and your post might seem confusing, write a brief introductory paragraph BEFORE paragraph 1 that explains what you're doing and what kinds of changes you had to make between your two main paragraphs.

I know that sounds a little complicated. Here's a short example: [Paragraph about a place written for people who feel the same way.] I don't know why it always smells so weird in the "It's a Small World" ride at Disney's Magic Kingdom. Maybe I only imagine the smell--but whenever I'm there I'm so annoyed at the music that I get in a bad mood, and everything else seems bad too. [And on for a few more sentences.] [Paragraph about the same place written for people who feel the opposite way.] I can't help it: I start tapping my foot and moving my head to the music whenever I hear the music in the "It's a Small World" ride at Disney's Magic Kingdom. I just love catchy tunes! [And on for a few more sentences.] [Paragraph that will go BEFORE the other two paragraphs.] The following two paragraphs show two very different perspectives on the same ride at Disney. I thought it would be easier to write the paragraph that I agree with, but I found that it was harder to write because I wanted people to understand my point of view exactly. On the other hand.... Maybe that's because... [And on for a few more sentences.]

Works Cited A Guide to All Things Tacky Fabulous in Orlando. Ed. Tacky Fabulous. 2008. 1 Oct. 2008 . Feldstein, Alex. “Florida’s Reputation for Flakiness is at Stake.” Comments on Software Development, Photography, and Life. 19 Feb.

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2008. 1 Oct. 2008 . “Florida History and Government.” Florida State Guide. Superpages. 1 Oct. 2008 . “Help Verify Florida Elections!” Common Cause. 1 Oct. 2008 . Kirby, Kathleen M. "Thinking through the Boundary: The Politics of Location, Subjects, and Space." boundary 2 20.2 (1993): 173-89. Lindgren, Tim. "Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs." Kairos 10.1 (2005). 15 Oct. 2008 . Lindgren, Tim, and Derek Owens. "From Site to Screen, from Screen to Site: Merging Place-based Pedagogy with Web-based Technology." The Locations of Composition. Ed. Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. 195-212. Miller, Vivien M. L. Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida’s Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. Google Book Search. 1 Oct. 2008 . Perry, William G., Jr. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Placeblogger. 2008. 15 Oct. 2008 . Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Rich, Adrienne. "Notes toward a Politics of Location." Blood, Bread, and Poetry : Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986. 210231. Robillard, Amy E. "We Won't Get Fooled again: On the Absence of Angry Responses to Plagiarism in Composition Studies." College English 70.1 (2007): 10-31. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Realand-Imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996. Spigelman, Candace. “Teaching Expressive Writing as a Narrative Fiction.” JAC 16 (1996): 119-40. Wearmouth, Alistair. “Florida Keys: The End of the Road.” Away.com. 1 Oct. 2008 . Welcome to the Real. Ed. Jakob Free. 2008. 1 Oct. 2008 http://realandfree.blogspot.com/

EXPLORING FIRST COAST WRITERS: BRINGING SCHOLARSHIP TO DUVAL COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS BETSY L. NIES

In 2005, as a member of the University of North Florida Department of English, I joined a group of public school teachers and faculty from UNF and Jacksonville University who travelled to Yale and Princeton to observe their summer institutes for teachers. These institutes offer contentrich seminars for public school teachers who want to bring fresh energy and content knowledge into the classroom. The Yale-New Haven Institute, formed in 1978, was particularly rigorous, requiring teachers to write extensive research-based units, beyond the scope of what our teachers might have the time accomplish. The Princeton Teachers as Scholars Summer Institute, inaugurated in 2004, provided seminars that focused on discussion of readings and outside field trips; they required no research component or unit development. We decided to draw on both models for our purposes. With faculty from our two local universities and public school teachers who attended seminars at Yale or Princeton, and with funding and leadership provided by the Schultz Center for Teaching and Leadership (the professional development arm of the Duval County Public Schools), we started a program, dubbing it First Coast Scholars. We formed an advisory council, wrote operating procedures, and built an organizational structure so that we could offer content-intensive seminars taught by university faculty (in contrast to the pedagogically based inservice workshops taught by curriculum developers) to teachers who want to earn in-service credit. We have offered nine seminars to date, servicing ninety-six teachers, with four fully enrolled seminars funded for this upcoming spring. Like Yale and Princeton institutes, we emphasize creating a collegial atmosphere; instructors go by their first names and offer phone and e-mail access as needed. Both universities provide seminar rooms with large cushy chairs and easy access to university libraries. Much like program administrators do at Yale, we’ve allowed teachers a voice in generating seminar topic choices. We’ve limited unit

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requirements, keeping in mind the severe time constraints our public school teachers face. While only forty-eight teachers have produced units so far (published on the school system’s website), we continue to restructure the seminars so that teachers can give their units proper attention. We’ve experienced tremendous successes and failures, one of the greatest successes being facilitating interdisciplinary discussions between people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. As Edward Larbi of Nathan B. Forrest High School noted of my first seminar on children’s literature in 2007, “This group’s diversity was a factor not to be forgotten. We were diverse in thought, background, and experience” (Deridder). Teachers from Ghana and the Caribbean openly engaged in discussions about race, nationality, and child-rearing with African-Americans and Southern whites in ways that opened the eyes of the participants to both differences and continuities; we became a global village. Without grades, these teachers could explore comfortably topics they might have avoided in a traditional college classroom; they examined cultural, historical, and literary material that forced them to rethink their own world view. Enriched by their experience—what one teacher described as a “vacation” from her daily life, a time she looked forward to all week—they again became scholars, doing research in UNF’s extensive library, developing interdisciplinary units for their classrooms that brought together information and skills from a range of fields—literature and geometry, fairy tales and world cultures, oral storytelling and West African traditions. Teachers in all seminars shared unit ideas with each other, demonstrating their expertise not only as pedagogues, but also as researchers. In the spring of 2008, I decided to offer a new seminar based on the requests of teachers who were interested in studying local literature. Seminars to date had included the evolution of the St. John’s River (taught by a biologist), the bridges of Jacksonville (taught by an art historian), Disney’s American Dream (taught by a children’s literature expert) among others. We required that all seminars be interdisciplinary to strengthen everyone’s ability to think beyond traditional curriculum parameters. I decided to call the seminar Exploring First Coast Writers, focusing on those who had traveled through Jacksonville, or settled here, integrating a range of genres and disciplines. I drew on a number of resources to create the course—travel writing, oral recordings and histories, songs, and literary texts. I also invited in other UNF faculty members who specialize in studying the First Coast to speak so that participants might have exposure to a host of disciplines.

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Highlights included a visit from historian Daniel Schafer, Professor Emeritus of History. Dan is an expert on North Florida plantation owner, merchant, and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley and his wife (and former slave) Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley. His research has included four trips to Senegal in his investigation of Anna’s Wolof background; he interviewed the grandson of the last griot of the Wolof kingdom who remembered—perhaps with some “home-cooking,” as Dan noted—Anna’s family history (e-mail). Dan also has completed extensive geographical and historical research on the journeys of John and son William Bartram down the St. John’s River. William, while not a Florida writer per se by birth or living circumstances, remains one of our most valuable literary resources for historians, naturalists, and Romantic literary critics for the extent to which he recorded the early wildlife and landscape of eighteenth century Florida in addition to offering Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge a romantic view of the New World. William traveled down the St. John’s River with his father in 1765 and ’66; John, whose diary has now been published as Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765 to April 10, 1766, had been appointed the King’s royal botanist to determine the suitabilityof the landscape of East Florida for future settlers. William repeated the journey in 1774 during which time he wrote his now famous Travels of William Bartram. Dan shared with us his extensive website titled “New World in a State of Nature: John Bartram’s Travels on the St. John’s River, 1765-1766.” Here Dan juxtaposes aerial photographs of the father’s and son’s campsites during their river trip, with accompanying dairy or journal entries by both parties; he also integrates some of William’s drawings along with other photographic and artistic records of the locations. This particular combination of history, geography, travel writing, photography, and illustration speaks to the heart of the purpose of the seminar, namely to create an interdisciplinary experience based on scholarly work and primary texts for participants, so that they might feel stimulated to conduct their own research and in turn encourage their students to do so. Participants responded with enthusiasm to the primary texts, enjoying the alligator attack in William Bartram’s Travels and the bizarre contradictions present in Zephaniah Kingsley’s “Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Cooperative System of Society,” a proslavery piece in which Kingsley argues for the natural aptitude of Africans for slavery and the rights of free blacks. Additionally, the seminar focused on writers of the 1930’s, including Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and those hired in the state by the Works Progress Administration. Hurston came through Jacksonville

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in 1938, serving as a junior writer for the WPA; working with Stetson Kennedy, she recorded songs and stories of the turpentine camps of Cross City in 1939. Seminar participants listened to her recordings. Participants also read slave narratives and life histories of Jacksonville citizens of the decade, collected by WPA writers. Teachers were amazed to discover some of the attitudes and living conditions of interviewees; they discovered the depth of the poverty from that time period and recognized many historical locations. For example, the watchman for the historically black Edward Waters College Samuel Simeon Andrews tells his story of slavery, which ended with his extensive service to the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Jacksonville; the voices of the past from this city are still with us in memorable ways. Participants also read selections from James Weldon Johnson’s Along this Way (1933), his autobiography that details his early years being raised in the city. He attended segregated Edwin M. Stanton Elementary School (now the nationally known college preparatory school) where he later served as principle, expanding the grade levels to the eighth grade. The teachers were familiar with many of the landmarks in the text—the school, the church Johnson attended, the park where he was nearly lynched. Their own background experiences and knowledge of the history of the city helped bring Johnson’s autobiography to life. Teachers went on to develop units from material they read and from their own research. Perhaps most impressive was the work completed by Victoria Lindsey, a second grade teacher at Sheffield Elementary School, who went onto to create a unit for her second graders on the Kingsleys as a means for teaching an interdisciplinary social studies/historical fiction unit that met state curricular standards. Vicki discovered a historical fiction book on Anna and her children, The Treasure of Amelia Island by M.C. Finotti (2008). Set in 1883, the book portrays the American Patriots’ effort to overtake La Florida, still under Spanish rule, an event that would change Spain’s slave holding policies that allowed for interracial marriage into the more oppressive rules of the United States that prohibited interracial marriage, making Zephaniah and Anna’s union obsolete. Vicki had already read in class Zephaniah’s “Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Cooperative System of Society.” Zephaniah had been appointed to the East Florida Territorial Council in 1823, two years after the United States bought Florida from Spain. His intent was, in part, to protect his family from the invasive laws of the United States. Kingsley had married Anna in 1811, after buying her and impregnating her five years earlier; she gave birth to four of his children. Freed at eighteen in 1812, she received five acres of land across the river from one of Kingsley’s plantations, in

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modern day Mandarin in Southern Jacksonville, through a Spanish land grant. She went on to own twelve of her own slaves. She’s well known historically for her resistance to the American Patriots, raiders who invaded from Georgia; she burned down her own plantation so that Patriots could not seize her property (Schafer 30-46). This historical background proved the perfect launching point for Vicki to share with students the international intricacies of Florida’s history. She read Dan Schafer’s book Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner (2003) three times in her efforts to understand Anna’s life and to separate fiction from fact in Finotti’s text. She provided within her unit plan the historical background necessary for other teachers to adopt her unit. Another teacher, Suzanne Copley of Paxon Middle School, developed a life history unit for eighth graders, teaching them how to not only interview, photograph, and write about their elders, but also investigate the lives of local writers and historical figures, such as Zephaniah Kingsley and seventeenth-century French journalist and artist René Goulaine de Laudonnière, who accompanied seventeenth-century French explorer Jean Ribault on his journey to the mouth of the St. John’s River. Suzanne integrated documents of Anna’s and Zephaniah’s—namely the only written record we have of Anna’s—her will, in which she bequeaths her money and slaves to her children in 1860, and her manumission paper, written by Zephaniah, and Laudonnière’s 1562 manuscript History of the First Attempt of the French (The Huguenots) to Colonize the Newly Discovered Country of Florida. In addition to visiting sites including the Kingsley Plantation and the Fort Caroline National Monument (which house Laudonnière’s manuscript), students wrote their own family histories. This participant, spurred by her work in this seminar, continued her research after we stopped meeting. She discovered the local Arlington historical society, which has traced Anna’s grave to a place near JU. Additionally, she’s tracked the land owned by Anna to land she’s longed to buy; she now knows a school board member with a heritage linked to Anna’s and traced genealogical connections between Anna and Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida’s first black millionaire and life insurance company owner in Jacksonville, founder of American Beach, Florida’s all black beach of the Jim Crow South located on Amelia Island, just north of Jacksonville. These seminars—while still in their infancy—have the potential to help strengthen teaching in our public schools, offering university faculty an opportunity to reach beyond institutional walls to those who have a broader impact on our youngsters. With the right resources and external

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support, we, as university teachers, can help teachers find the space and time to think more deeply about questions that we enjoy exploring. The program has been funded by the Duval County Public Schools, UNF, JU, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the Jesse Ball duPont Fund, and the Schultz Center for Teaching and Leadership. Princeton alumni have funded two groups of teachers to date to attend summer seminars at the University. The Schultz Center is now exploring and successfully recruiting local businesses to fund seminars for topics related to the business world. The enthusiasm among the original faculty members and teachers who participated in seminars at Yale and Princeton remains strong. The impact on teachers may not be measurable, but the feedback continues to be positive. As chemistry teacher Connie Boone of Fletcher High School wrote about her 2007 seminar experience, “I was energized after our seminar . . . and I had arrived very tired from a busy week. I like the discussion format, suggested topics, collaboration among members, and looking at a topic from several directions. I can’t wait until tonight’s session!” (Deridder). Such enthusiastic responses keep commitment to the program strong. Teachers receive thirty in-service points for completing the seminar and sixty for completing both the seminar and unit plan. The costs of the program have been significant, yet the rewards are great, particularly for those of us who lead the seminars, who have the opportunity to step outside the confines of grading systems to embrace a more informal, engaged style of teaching and leadership that renews our commitment to the profession.

Works Cited Andrews, Samuel Simeon. Personal Interview with Martin Richardson. 18 Mar. 1937. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States. 2003-2008. Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. 15 Dec. 2008. < http://www.gutenberg.org>. Bartram, John. Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765 to April 10, 1766. American Philosophical Society, 1942. Bartram, William. Travels of William Bartram. Ed. Mark van Doren. New York: Dover, 1928. Deridder, David. “Quotes from the Princeton Experience.” E-mail to the author. 19 December 2008. Finotti, M.C. The Treasure of Amelia Island. Florida: Pineapple Press, 2008.

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“Zora Neale Hurston.” Florida Folklife Collection. Florida Memory: State Archives of Florida. 15 Dec. 2008. http://www.floridamemory.com/COLLECTIONS/FOLKLIFE/sound_h urston.cfm Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973. Kingsley, Anna. “Will.” Excerpt.Timucuan and Ecological Preserve and Fort Caroline National Park. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. 15 Dec. 2008. . Kingsley, Zephaniah. “Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Cooperative System of Society, (1828-1834).” Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley. Ed. Daniel Stowell. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2000. 39-75. —. “Manumission Paper, 1 March 1811.” Timucuan and Ecological Preserve and Fort Caroline National Park. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. 15 Dec. 2008. . —. “Papers Concerning the Will of Zephaniah Kingsley, 1846, 1848.” Florida Memory Project. (n.d.) Florida Memory: State Archives of Florida. 15 Dec. 2008. . Laudonnière, René Goulaine de, History of the First Attempt of the French (The Huguenots) to Colonize the Newly Discovered Country of Florida. 2003. Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Library and Archives, Document No. AJ-141. 15 Dec. 2008. . Schafer, Daniel. Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slave owner. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2003. —. E-mail to author. 17 December 2008. . —. “New World in a State of Nature: John Bartram’s Travels on the St. John’s River, 1765-1766.” Florida History Online. 15 Dec. 2008. . “WPA Life Histories from Florida.” American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940. 1998. Library of Congress. 15 Dec. 2008. .

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Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United State From Interviews with Former Slaves: Florida Narratives. 2003-2008. Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. 15 Dec. 2008. .

TEACHING SERVICE LEARNING MEMOIRS: GARGANTUA, MAIMONIDES, AND LAKE HOLLINGSWORTH CATHERINE R. ESKIN

When I first agreed to teach a service learning class, I was blissfully unaware of what I was really getting myself into. It all began innocently enough. About two years ago, after a board meeting at Temple Emanuel in Lakeland, I spoke briefly with one of my fellow congregants about a cache of pictures, films, slides, files, and ephemera from the synagogue which he and his parents had saved and transported to the basement of his law office. The items, which dated back to the 1930s, were a hair’s breadth from the dumpster. We both clucked sympathetically, shook our heads in disdain, and left for home. Less than two weeks later, the academic dean at Florida Southern College (FSC) sent out a call for proposals for service learning grants—the Florida Campus Compact would fund course development for classes with substantial service learning components. “Okay,” I thought, “maybe I can double-task.” Less than six months after a casual conversation, I was awarded the small grant and I went to work figuring out how I was going to actually pull off what I had proposed. I don’t want to appear flippant—I take my job as a professor very seriously. I feel strongly that I can make a difference in the academic and subsequently wider lives of my students. As an English teacher working primarily with non-majors, I am aware of the oftentimes stubborn and always erroneous beliefs of these students about the efficacy and ultimate practical application of their composition requirements. When I proposed my service-learning course, I had been idealistic and perhaps--okay, DEFINITELY--ambitious. My reasons for being so were good ones. If I could show students the wider applications of research and also open their eyes to new cultural and ethnic worlds, we’d all come out the richer. The challenge remained: how best to turn ambitions into action.

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I quickly learned that my original plan, though admirable, was unrealistic. I can’t help but blush as I admit that I honestly thought I could preserve all of the items salvaged by my fellow board member, collect others from synagogue members, record interviews with aging congregants, create a system to catalog and electronically store images in a web-ready format, and basically save the Jewish universe while teaching students about research and writing. As an early modern literary scholar, Gargantua, conceived by François Rabelais in 1534, came to mind as I now shudder at the plan I had so seriously considered. While I have plenty of chutzpah, I’m no dumkopf. So recognizing the realities of the time-space continuum, I rolled up my sleeves and thought about my goals. The course I had proposed was Effective Writing II, FSC’s research and writing requirement. I am not new to the course (I’ve also taught others like it at several institutions). It, like other “General Education” classes, is not often a top-seller among students. Most of our English majors “place out” of the course, and nonmajors dread it. The class is especially onerous for some because of the intense work that students must accomplish as they come to understand critical thinking, “real” research, and the importance of actually forming and supporting an opinion of their own. English teachers know research composition is one of the most important classes college students will take their first year. Yet its unappetizing presentation is often an insult to the student-perceived injury of the requirements in the first place. I hoped that service learning—and service learning with a local and multi-ethnic bent—would help change these perceptions. Laudable goals look great on paper. At a meeting of the recipients of the Campus Compact grants, I immediately noticed that my general education/first year course was substantially different from the others which had won funding: those other courses were upper-level major requirements at the junior and senior levels. There was a reason for that. While my notions were noble—firstyear students deserve to have challenging courses which broaden their areas of experience—the course I proposed required some maturity and a genuine sense of purpose. The students had to be willing to find a way into the course and its unfamiliar (for most of my students) material. Many in my class during the spring term of 2008 did rise to the occasion, but, sadly, not all. Still, I wouldn’t change my goals: 1) to show non-major students the importance of what they often believe is esoteric research; 2) to demonstrate the plethora of practical uses to which research can be put; and, finally, 3) to help students explore local, social, religious, and ethnic worlds with which they are unfamiliar. This last, however, is jumping

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ahead: at this point, I am still concerned to make the general education requirement that so riles students relevant to their studies and their college experience. Maimonides, that great Jewish philosopher, was also a believer in general education: “Be convinced that, if man were able to reach the end without preparatory studies, such studies would not be preparatory but tiresome and utterly superfluous.” Off to the grand adventure. As I began to prepare my syllabus and leaf through the volumes of paperwork for the creation of a service learning course, I began to realize my underestimation of the complexity of my task. Most service learning help pages on the web and in books available at the library suggest first laying out pedagogical goals for a course and then considering what kind of service experience would best offer practical application of and performance opportunities for those principles. Once the instructor has identified the organization that might be well-served by the practice of his or her students, the teacher should make contact and arrange for such an exchange of services. Many colleges and universities have offices that specialize in service learning and/or outreach and are familiar with the plethora of service opportunities available in a given area. From there, the logistics of course-required service hours and hours of availability with the community partner become the main irritants of course preparation. As I had been working on instinct rather than by a book, I had done things the wrong way round. I already had a community partner, and that community partner was I. I was thus in a unique position. Quite simply, I was in some deep trouble. The way I had decided to best utilize the items rescued by my fellow congregant and help with Temple morale was to create an archive—an electronic archive to be precise. I had used archives in the past. I heard electronic ones were available on the web. I did not, however, know anything about creating one, and neither did I have funding to procure the services of someone who did. Without the necessary materials and equipment to begin one, I floundered. You see, community partners in general are not-for-profit organizations which, once approached and in agreement, offer their professional staffs to act as guides into the particulars of service, usually providing the necessary training and materials for students and faculty to serve. My rather incestuous situation was creating a veritable goldmine of complications. Other dysfunctional family relations were yet to come: I began tackling the necessary academic internal paperwork—IRB (Internal Review Board) approval for my HRP (Human Research Protocols), Service Learning permissions, Community Partner Agreements (though I was mostly agreeing with myself), student

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releases and agreements, and, of course, assessment surveys. Yet the institutional organization was really just a tip of the looming iceberg. I had a course to teach and the clock was ticking. After breathing into a paper bag for a few hours, I began to recognize that in the end, the course’s success or failure was going to be dependent upon the students’ willingness to enter into the challenges and perhaps even discomfort of the experience. For the mechanics—where we would house our archives, how I would come up with computers, scanners, forms for the project, what I would do with these materials once I got them—I was blessed in my colleagues, librarians, administrators and cajones. For the students, I had to have faith that they could do it or would be willing to try. I tried to trust in the lofty goals set out by Donna Denize, who insists that English teachers need “to give students the tools to analyze social conditions and their requirements, to engage in community action, and to investigate the truth on their own” (221). In the end, my students were a small, but adventurous, group. The academic infrastructure--my Dean, my Division Chair, and my Department Coordinator--were all willing and supportive. But I needed more ground troops—I couldn’t take the mountain alone. I decided on an assistant. With no real budget, I needed to involve that most gullible and good-natured of animals for help: the English major. He needed to be someone who was curious about Judaism, interested in writing, had leadership skills, and worked well independently. I considered several students before I approached the young man seated with me here today: Wil Posey.1 His role evolved, giving me a unique opportunity to consider how my project might work on various developmental levels. Originally I had envisioned his role as “intern” with limited credit hours attached. What it became was a 300-level experimental course in English which was then approved by the Honors Committee to work as a juniorlevel seminar. If the mountain was high before, it was now looking more and more like Everest. I’ve got a staff of one, a lovely space upstairs in a Frank Lloyd Wright Chapel, two computers, one (and a half) scanners, and a host of guest speakers and willing participants from the community. I’ve written a syllabus, planned at least two (actually three) class trips, and I’ve JUST secured the required numbers for my courses to “make.” Armed with a textbook called What to Do When You’re Dating a Jew (I got more than one phone call from the bookstore, and students tell stories of being accosted in coffee shops), a packet of readings, and the Little Brown Handbook, we were off.

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As classes got underway in January, I began by familiarizing the students with the area they would be studying—a Jewish synagogue in Lakeland, Florida. Not all of my students were from the south, and none of them were Jewish. Though I worried about the theological aspect of the course, it turned out to be the most memorable for the students. I get emails from the students about how their Jewish cultural and religious knowledge has come in handy; I’m still hoping to get an email about how their research skills have been profitable. The planned trips—to the synagogue, to the public library’s special collections library, to the county genealogical library and history museum—were generally successful. More memorable were the guest speakers. As I admitted from the outset, archiving was not my area of expertise. In order to make up for that lack, I brought in people who actually knew what they were doing. A local historian spoke about Polk County, our educational technology librarian talked about electronic archives, an NPR reporter spoke about interviewing, a photographer spoke about digital reproductions and old photographs, and members of the Jewish community came and inspired the students.2 These visits, which I was concerned would interrupt my teaching and provide too much information for my students, became a real source of excitement for the classes. They looked forward to these visits and talked excitedly to their friends and to each other. The class moved. It REALLY moved. Before too long, it was half-way finished. My advanced student and I worked out schedules so that we could allow for 25 hours of community service from each student without overwhelming our small resources or ourselves. We trained the students in the tasks we wanted them to do, not always knowing if we were doing it right. We often had to RE-train them a few weeks later—and fix the things that had been done wrong. Yet along the way, each student emerged as “the expert” in a particular task. Many felt a sense of mastery. Some students fell behind in their hours; some finished in record time. At least one managed to figure out how to complete her requirement as a studentathlete juggling practices, games, travel schedules and a full course-load. Oh, and they learned, too. As each chose his or her subject—some aspect of Jewish life in Polk County—and began researching, the class(es) bonded. The student studying bar-mitzvahs ran across a picture from a party; she called excitedly to a classmate who was studying Temple social life. The students who were having trouble working out where they were headed found that their classmates cared and wanted to help. I sometimes felt shut out of this process: much of it, I believe, took place during the hours spent with Wil Posey (a peer leader in their eyes) in the upper-

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reaches of Danforth Chapel.3 But the spirit of cooperative learning was there; the course was working. That said, the experience was not all roses. The schedule was hectic. Papers came and went quickly; one student observed in a student evaluation, “I felt a little crowded and overwhelmed with the amount of papers we had, the time we had to produce the papers and the service hours. I felt it was too much.” I was also aware of the loss of instructional time due to the guest speakers and trips. Historically, I will spend at least twenty minutes per week on grammar and mechanics in Effective Writing II. I don’t know that I spent that much time in a month that spring! Students who were experiencing trouble getting “into” their research were often left stranded. I was so busy organizing speakers, teaching my other classes, and figuring out how to run an Archive, those students who did not seek help were left behind. I tried requiring meetings with students who appeared to be slipping, but without a desire on their part to find a “way in,” I was unable to effectively advise and ultimately direct them. Meanwhile, my assistant was climbing higher, and I had neglected to provide him with an oxygen tank. My intentions were good, but my practice was often harried and under-structured. I was lucky that so few of the first-year students struggled and my aide-de-camp was a good hiker. Now, not quite six months later, I’m still feeling a happy glow—a feeling like I did something really good for not just my community partner (there I go exhibiting schizophrenic tendencies again), but for myself as a teacher, and for my students. “I really enjoyed learning about the culture of the Jewish community,” reads another of my student evaluation comments. “I feel that it broadened my horizon with life itself.” Yet another adds, “I also made many friends while performing 25 hours of community service working on the Temple Emanuel Archive Collection with my peers.” If our goals as teachers go beyond the offering of information about our own little piece of the academic puzzle to our students, as I believe they do, projects like this one are a way to achieve them. Our schools want us to reach out to the communities (and world) around us while strengthening the students’ bond with our institutions and with each other. Service learning is one way to achieve a variety of ends at once. No, it isn’t all halos. Yes, it is a mammoth amount of work. But as Jewish tradition dictates, we are all responsible for tikkun olam, for “healing the world.” I believe that healing can be achieved through teaching. As I revise this essay for publication, I am teaching another service learning course, this time for juniors. You’d think I’d have learned.

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Notes 1

This paper was presented as part of a panel that involved three of my students from the Spring semester of 2008. Wil Posey gave a paper on his own experiences “In the Trenches.” 2 These speakers also agreed to meet with my advanced students for higher-level discussions about particular subject matter—all for the price of a cup of coffee. 3 Danforth is the Frank Lloyd Wright building on FSC’s campus where I had been given space to house the Archives.

Works Cited Denize, Donna. “Unfinished Business: An African-American Teacher Talk about Race and Othello.” In Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello, ed. Peggy O’Brien. NY: Washington Square Press, 1995. 215-222.

OLD FLORIDA

GENERAL JORGE BIASSOU ACTING AS A SITE OF RE-MEMBERING SARA OLSEN

A little known figure in American history, Jorge Biassou was the first black general in Florida. As an ex-Haitian-slave, Biassou was one of the original leaders of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and, being on a losing Spanish-side of the war, was exiled to St. Augustine, at the government’s expense, in 1796. By using his depictions in both Victor Hugo’s historical novel Bug-Jargal and Jane Landers’ text Black Society in Spanish Florida, one can see the significance of the role Biassou plays as an almost prophetic performer in the circum-Atlantic arena which necessarily includes St. Augustine, Florida, as it is (and was) one of those, “imperfectly integrated areas of the United States, where vestiges of Spanish and French colonization persist” (Benítez Rojo 449). Depicted as a self-aware, self-authorizing figure by the nature of his performances, Biassou’s role as a revolutionary “decorated black military figure” is born of a Caribbean performance that necessitates an audience’s seduction in order to transcend boarders (Landers 212, Benítez Rojo 447).This concept of performance, as a culturally and racially coded seduction, is detailed in Joseph Roach’s text, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, and Antonio Benítez Rojo’s “The repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective.” Both theorists define performance in the contact zone as an everyday acting; Caribbean and circum-Atlantic performance is in, “…the invisible rituals of everyday life,” and that “[t]o perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest and to transmit” (Roach xi). By re-membering Biassou through the text that Hugo wrote, Biassou the pre-text, that is the unperformed and unwitnessed man, gets transformed into a site on which the spectacular “‘Viceroy of the Conquered Territories’” gets performed (Landers 209). The figure “‘Jean Biassou, generalissimo of the conquered Territories and Brigadier of su magestad catolica’” becomes a performer through his dress, speech and religion in order to claim power as a site of contact and a re-membering (Hugo 118). According to Roach,

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General Jorge Biassou Acting as a Site of Re-membering [t]he key to understanding how performances worked within a culture… is to understand how circum-Atlantic societies, confronted with revolutionary circumstances for which few precedents existed have invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others. (Roach 5)

This is to say that performance has a generating quality that, when applied to the context of the contact zone, a space where, “people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict,” becomes an authorizing act, a selfaware performance that is at once defining the Self and the Other within the binaries of the actor/audience (Pratt). In this case the Self is that which is being performed and the Other is the audience. However, not only is the Other the audience but a subject as well. Antonio Benítez Rojo suggests that a Caribbean performance, like Biassou’s, is, “an attempt to seduce the ‘other’; mediated through the performer’s wish to set himself up at the ‘other’s’ object of desire” (446). In reading accounts of Biassou, the language of performance is always surrounding him; he is always described as a “spectacle” (Hugo 124). Thus Biassou as “spectacle” becomes a generative force, one that is aware of its power and consciously manipulating it to work for him—constantly seducing. Biassou often used his power as a performer to impress his militia and prisoners. Captain D’Auverney recalls, [t]he state of perplexity that this strange scene had just thrown me into was broke, if only temporarily, by the start of the next act, which followed closely upon the ridiculous comedy that Biassou and the obi had just played out in front of me and their astounded band of followers. (Hugo 133)

Biassou is seemingly aware that he is performing on several stages at once. He performs for his fellow revolutionaries, he performs for the white Europeans in St. Domingo, and he performs for the society of St. Augustine. Though he could not perform physically on all of these spaces at once, as a re-membered text Biassou’s performances and seductions transcend the boundaries of the Caribbean which Benítez Rojo defines as a space without a center in which “African, European, Indoamerican, arid Asian,” contexts assimilate until “none of them can be differentiated” (449). It is because of this awareness that Biassou’s performances gain significance. With each layering of Self/performer, Audience/Other Biassou is establishing and subverting his role as a re-membered contact zone.

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As a performer Biassou used all of the tools of Selfhood, speech, dress, economy, religion, affiliations etc., in order to project himself as a bodily representation of the contact zone—a member on which the indicators of the space are written. Hugo describes him as using mixed speech, “frequently mixing creole and Spanish phrases in with his bad French” (Hugo 121). The implication of this type of “mixing creole, Spanish and bad French” and the cross-cultural subversive power it wields is not lost on Biassou. To read this speech act fully is to hear Biassou speaking and performing in the language of the contact zone. Through his speech Biassou is authoring text that he is both originally creating and re-creating, at once, through performance. In Benítez Rojo’s terms Biassou’s speech is performing a double seduction, “with each reading the reader seduces the text, transforms it, makes it his or her own; with each reading the text seduces the reader, transforming, making him or her its own” (447). While Biassou’s speech is not initially a text, it gets recorded through Hugo and becomes a site of memory for the reader. In this way, the memory denies the ability of a claim like Haiti has, “no proper language and [therefore] no right to history” to have any validity (Dayan 7). Biassou is inter-textual, performing various seductions, each of which is creating a new text, speaking as I and Other, in these moments of speech through an enactment of multiple languages at once. However, knowingly speaking and dressing on a global scale, Biassou is necessarily intimately acquainted with the problem of performance; the problem of performing the Other in the eyes of the audience’s Self, that is the white European Self and Afro-Creole Self, ”they could not perform themselves, however, unless they also performed what and who they thought they were not. By defining themselves in opposition to others, they produced mutual representations” (Roach 5). Biassou, as a figure, is generating an image that is fully present and represented to him both in St. Domingo as well as St. Augustine; this is the image of the European/white/colonizer Self. This performance of that Self is also based on violence, the clothes he wears have been ripped off the bodies of that dead Self, “most of this finery was now little more than shredded, blood-soaked rags” (Hugo 115). European depictions of Biassou often focus on the way he dressed, in essence, the costume he wore as a way to undermine Biassou’s authority. Hugo writes, “His outfit was ridiculous”: however, for Biassou, the effect of dressing up is to mimic and thus mock the regalia of his Other, that is the European Self, and gain subversive power by re-approproating the power of that Self (117). Biassou’s dress was masterfully composed, in Hugo’s novel, of all of the finery of European pomp on a black body:

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General Jorge Biassou Acting as a Site of Re-membering A magnificent silk-plaited belt, from which dangled a Saint-Louis Cross, was keeping a pair of blue breeches made out of coarse fabric up around the level of his navel; a jacket of white dimity, too small to reach down to his belt…He was wearing grey boots, a round hat topped with a red cockade, and a pair of epaulettes, one of which was made of gold, with two silver stars for brigadier-generals, and the other of yellow wool. Fastened onto the latter, no doubt in order to make it worthy of figuring next to its sparkling companion, were two copper stars that seemed to have been the rowels from a set of spurs. These two epaulettes, not being secured in their natural place with crosswise braids, were dangling down both sides of his chest. (117)

The image of the mixed symbols is made even more powerful by this inclusion: “A saber and several impressively inlaid pistols were to be found on the feather carpet next to him” (Hugo 117). This image of violence, the guns of the Haitian revolution, is then juxtaposed with the image of “splendid silk.” Here in its performed glory are the symbols of the contact zone worn by, what could be argued as, the ultimate Other, the black, ex-slave revolutionary. While Biassou gets re-membered for his performances, “the high cost of such symbolic violence” is that “The imagination of future generations of Haitians would be handicapped by the theatricality of the past” and this becomes a legacy of the revolution and re-membering Biassou (Dayan 7). This site/image, which is Biassou, in all of its inter-textuality gets exported to St. Augustine from St. Domingo in 1796. With him Biassou brings a fully fleshed out knowledge of the circum-Atlantic complete with both African voodoo and assimilated European customs to this stage. According to Landers, Biassou attempted to maintain the lifestyle expected of a caudillo in St. Augustine. He wore fine clothes trimmed in gold, a silver-trimmed saber, and a fancy ivory and silver dagger. (215)

Here we see the repetition of the significance of Biassou’s dress again coupled again with an air of violence. It can be understood that this lifestyle and dress certainly would not have been new or unexpected in St. Augustine; however, add to it, “The gold medal of Charles IV,” and Biassou, an ex-slave, and he must have, “…impressed the townspeople of St. Augustine, [who were] unaccustomed to seeing such finery on a black man” (Landers 215). It is by mixing the expected with the unexpected that Biassou controls his performance. However, no matter how good, the performance of Biassou must also be considered within its specific context—the contact zone.

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Using Joseph Roach’s understanding of “vortices of behavior” as the “‘places’ or sites of memory,” a “vortex” being, “a kind of spatially induced carnival, a center of cultural self-invention,” one can begin to understand the special significance of St. Augustine as one of Jorge Biassou’s stages (Roach 27,28). It is while in St. Augustine that Biassou gains an audience whom he can truly seduce and did successfully according to Landers. Understanding that there is a performance even within the “ritual everyday acts of life” and the “ordinary act of walking” makes the public and even private spaces of St. Augustine stages (Rojo 446). St. Augustine’s status as a port and a site that is fully involved in the circum-Atlantic trade and economy becomes, according to Roach, a vortex which, frequently [can] provide the crux in the semiotext of the circum-Atlantic cityscape—the grand boulevard, the marketplace, the theatre district, the square, the burial ground—where the gravitational pull of social necessity brings audiences together and produces performers…from their midst. (Roach 28)

Understanding the spaces in which Biassou was expected to perform in this way allows for a meaningful reading of Landers’ depiction of Biassou’s house, “The Salcedo house” on St. George St., as an arena for his continued performance of “decorated black military figure” (213). According to Landers “The garrison soldiers, attracted by the novelty, took to gathering at Biassou’s house to ogle him…” (212).The act of being “ogled” by his European/white Other allows Biassou a status that serves to promote him as a performer. In essence being watched gives Biassou’s subversions authority; simply put, without an audience there can be no performance: “the text is born when it is read by the ‘other’” (Benítez Rojo 447). According to Roach, Biassou’s St. Augustine house is an officiating space, “…a place in which everyday practices and attitudes may be legitimated, ‘brought out into the open,’ reinforced, celebrated, or intensified” (Roach 28). This legitimizing moment reveals the ways in which Biassou is involved with St. Augustine’s society. Through his performances and subversions of Self and Other, Biassou legitimizes his place in circum-Atlantic society. According to Benítez Rojo the circumAtlantic, Caribbean society is the only space that Biassou’s performance can claim its full power: “the only people who can be seduced ‘in a certain kind of way’ are the people of the Caribbean, or if you like the Peoples of the Sea” (448).

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General Jorge Biassou Acting as a Site of Re-membering

The significance of Biassou’s performance of “decorated black military officer” is what ultimately makes him a prophetic player. According to Roach, even as parody, performances propose possible candidates for succession. They raise the possibility of the replacement of the authors of the representations by those whom they imagined into existence as their definitive opposites. (6)

So, within the white-mind of the Self, which is watching, as made clear by their “ogling” of Biassou’s house, Biassou’s mimicry supplants the slaveOther with an Other who is in part their recognition of Self. This supplanting continued to signify, everything from vodou to the military, [was] calling attention to the Haitians’ love of artifice, their propensity to exaggerate and mime, and the apparent indifference to the continuing and bloody revolutions that followed independence in 1804. (Dayan 6)

It is in the wake of being cast as the Other, the antithesis to all things cultured/European and white, Biassou performs a reversal. Keeping within certain expectations of performance as subversive reinvention, “To perform also means, though often more secretly, to reinvent,” Biassou takes that which is culturally Other, himself, and transforms it through a performance of pageantry and costume into the very thing he is by definition not (Roach xi). Self-authorizing through performance, Biassou is aware of “…the demanding psychological obligations of double consciousness, the self-reflexive interaction of identity and role” and is depicted as successfully navigating these terrains (Roach 1). Harnessing a power of performance that subjugates Biassou as a performer creates himself as a site of contact as he becomes represented in memory. The problem of this memory becomes a problem of humanity however. In remembering Biassou as seduction-performing-site-of-violence he’s become non-human, perhaps a zombi. This specifically circum-Atlantic problem of re-membering is fleshed out by Joan Dayan in the shape of the problematic position of being a Haitian historian. She says, “The labor of writing history demanded that the historian be seen as human while remaining Haitian”; this implies that to create a Haitian history is to not be human (Dayan 9). Thus, in Biassou’s act of violence while performing his Other, he is surrogated in the reader’s memory as not-human—simply the body of the Haitian revolution.

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Works Cited Benítez Rojo, Antonio. “The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and Postmodern Perspective.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly. Vol. VII: 4, 1985, 430-52. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History and the Gods. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995. Hugo, Victor. Bug-Jargal. Ed. Chris Bongie. New York: Broadview Press, 2004. Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Florence: Routledge, 1992. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

THE POWER OF THE PEN: THE “INVITATION LETTERS” TO FLORIDA AND THEIR WRITERS DORIS VAN KAMPEN AND CAROL ANN MOON

“Because diaries and letters are unique firsthand accounts, they transport the reader to a moment in history through an immediate eyewitness record of events and reflections.” —From the Preface of The American Journey: United States History Through Letters and Diaries, Vol. II, compiled and edited by Markman, Boe, and Corey

Introduction When Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edmund F. Dunne each came and lived in Florida, they were drawn by the power of the possible. Each felt that the lands in Florida had the potential to deliver people from precarious pecuniary situations, and to offer a fresh start for society’s people on the fringe. Each wrote eloquently and elegantly about Florida, sending their missives and invitations out to their respective audiences. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Episcopalian, and Edmund F. Dunne, Roman Catholic, wrote about similar topics in their letters to their readers describing their experiences with, hopes about, and dreams for Florida. Because of the communication abilities and prior reputations of these writers, because firsthand letters in general have the power to move their readers to connect with faraway events and to moments in time they are not directly experiencing, and finally because life in Florida evoked images of an attainable paradise for many different people—snowbirds, the disease-ridden, the persecuted, the entrepreneurs, and the immigrants—their readers came, their descendants stayed, and new residents are still arriving to this day! Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote magazines articles and personal letters to family and friends, many of whom thought she was crazy to venture to the South only one year after the War Between the States ended. They assumed that she would return home after a brief stay. Brave and

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determined soul that she was, she made a winter home in Mandarin, Florida, and proved them all wrong. Edmund Dunne wrote letters that were addressed to Catholic newspaper editors (many of whom he wrote personal notes to on a regular basis as they were also his acquaintances of many years). His vision of a Catholic Colony in the South did not go unattained: the colony at San Antonio, Florida, grew and flourished, and is still a unique town, retaining much of its Catholic character and small town ambiance in West-Central Florida. On first glance, this behavior on their part was not so unusual. Both were well-connected and well-used to writing about what was on their minds, one in novels and articles, and the other in preparing briefs for the courtroom. On second glance, they did leave their comfortable lives to venture deep into the Reconstruction South, encouraging others of less fortunate situations to come and live in Florida, a wild and untamed state, where alligators and Indians were hiding in the swamps. Each writer may have had ulterior motives for writing their respective missives. Dunne wanted to offer the oppressed Irish Catholics in Northern cities a better life, and he had Florida land he needed to sell in order to obtain more land from the Disston purchase. Stowe wanted to provide schools and churches for freed slaves, to get away from the cold Northern climes into a warmer, healthier locale, and to help a troubled son with an addiction, by providing a home for him and plenty of hard work. But who alive has not hoped for letters to do double or even triple duty, to at once inform the readers and to offer them hope and maybe, on a good day, even inspire them to act? What was really unusual was that this was a “good day” for Florida, because the writers found an attentive audience, an informed and inspired readership willing to respond to their respective missives in sizeable numbers. The effect the letters had on Stowe and Dunne’s respective constituents, when read at their destinations or when published as a semi-regular newspaper column and mass produced, was simply amazing. Without telephones or televisions, telemarketers or the Internet, the letters penned by Stowe and by Dunne literally swept readers up by their siren-like calls: Land-Food-Work-Health. The missives transported readers vicariously and, moreover, inspired them to relocate to Florida, following the letters’ invitations: Land-Food-Work-Health for You. As the above quote from The American Journey asserts, letters can definitely make their readers “feel like” they are transported and invited to somewhere else on the planet and to someone else’s moment in history. In this case Stowe and

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Dunne’s respective letters were extra powerful, for they also caused the literal movement of their readers to another place. So powerful and so motivating were the letters that Stowe and Dunne each wrote, that Stowe has been credited with launching the first wave of serious tourism to Florida, and Dunne inspired hundreds of people to move to desolate west Central Florida, with not even a railway to bring them to their land purchase. The letter readers, some of whom eventually became Florida-promoting-letter-writers themselves, and some of whose relatives still live in Florida today, felt compelled by the information in the Dunne and Stowe letters, by the captivating descriptions, and by the daring of an “ordinary” person. They felt moved to take real action and real risk, and not just dream about Florida or see it on the page expressed in words, as told through someone else’s eyes, but to see for themselves. The letters the transplanted northerners wrote, with no advertising budget and no trained promotional staff, were detailed accounts of day-today experiences in the southern frontier. Through these pictures painted in words of the on-the-spot happenings in Jacksonville and in the Catholic Colony of San Antonio, both Stowe and Dunne won for their new state its future citizens and its future partners in promoting and populating the sandy, sunny, and, yes, dreamy wilderness of the state of Florida. According to Mormino in his book entitled Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, “Generations of Americans, Europeans, and Asians have invested in the Florida dream. … the Florida Dream is accessible and obtainable.” In this paper we take a look at two members of the generation who lived through and survived the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edmund F. Dunne, and the impact their letters had on the colonization of Florida.

Countdown to Colonization The Great Pre-emption Act of 1841 and the Swamp and Overflow Lands Act of 1850 gave Florida control of 21,000,000 acres (Florida Department of Environmental Protection). The Florida Internal Improvement Act of 1854 allowed the state to use some of the land for roads, county seats, railroads, bridges, canals, and other improvements. Bonds were sold in order to improve some of these lands, with the “St. Johns-Indian River Canal, the Florida Railroad, and the Pensacola Atlantic Railroad, and few others” being the primary beneficiaries. Construction crews (mostly slaves) built the rails through a mostly uninhabited land. “The first section from Fernandina to Lofton was completed on August 1, 1856, and Gainesville by February 1, 1859. When finished, it ran through 155.5 miles of wilderness, creeks, rivers, and marsh lands of Florida using

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only one locomotive to transport equipment and slave labor to lay the track” (Zerfas, 2006). Unfortunately, the War Between the States intervened in these improvement plans. Many of the projects lay fallow for the duration of the war, with many of the railroad trusses being pulled up to make cannons and other military equipment during the war. When the war ended in 1865, it was already clear to many that some assistance to the newly freed slaves was needed immediately. Thus, the Homestead Act for the Southern States was passed in 1866.

Enter the Lady Enter Harriet Beecher Stowe, the little lady who started the big war. She had dreams of helping former slaves rebuild the South with a place in it for them. Schools, places of worship, and land were all needed. She wrote of her thoughts to her brother Charles Beecher, “My plan of going to Florida, as it lies in my mind, is not in any sense a mere worldly enterprise. …. My heart is with that poor people whose course in words I have tried to plead, …” (Graff, 1968). She headed south right after the Civil War, determined to find a way to help, despite warnings from her friends that she might not find a warm welcome in the South. She took along her nephew’s family and her husband Calvin. Upon their arrival, it was clear that Harriet was already enthralled with her new surroundings. The air was heavy with the smell of orange blossoms, and she “stripped off the woolen garments of my winter captivity” (Hedrick, 1994), then broke off an orange blossom sprig and placed it in her hair. “I felt as if I had wings–every thing is so bright and the air is so soft” (ibid). Stowe’s son Frederick, who had been wounded in the war and had then become addicted to alcohol, may have gone ahead to Florida; she hoped a fresh start in a new land would enable him to slay his monsters. She purchased a plantation called Laurel Grove and left her son and two of his friends in charge. After only two years this turned out to be a financial disaster, but as it had been the reason for coming south, it also piqued her interest in a small town called Mandarin, near where the plantation was located. She decided this would be the town where her missionary work with former slaves would be focused, writing “I am now corresponding with the Bishop of Florida with a view of establishing a line of churches along the St. Johns River, and if I settle in Mandarin it will be one of my stations. … I long to be at this work, and cannot think of it without my heart burning within me” (Stowe, 1934). She wrote to her brother Charles, “I wish you could know of the sorrowing & suffering I see–among people

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one cannot help pitying, …, yet a brighter day is breaking both for white & black” (Hedrick, 1994). Stowe knew at this point that the plantation was not the solution to the problem for her son or for the freed slaves. She focused on establishing schools, churches, and “a wide-embracing scheme of Christian activity for the whole State where I can form the nucleus of a Christian neighborhood, whose influence shall be felt far beyond its own limits" (Stowe, 1889). Florida was not just her mission field, however. It was also her refuge from the hounding of publishers, and the ill health she felt in winter while the snows fell. “My thoughts never run free till the sap begins to rise in the trees–winter months freeze me. … Cold weather really seems to torpify my brain…” (Hedrick,1994). Stowe also began writing about Mandarin and her life in Florida, the joys and refuge, the gardens and flowers, the land and its possibilities. Her unsolicited manuscript about her domestic tranquility was sent to her brother for his perusal, as he was living in the panhandle of Florida, and to James R. Osgood, the publisher of the Christian Union. The Christian Union published her sketches in 1873. “This was probably the first unsolicited promotion writing to interest the northern tourist in Florida” (Graff, 1968). It also struck a chord with many non-tourists as well. Snowbirds and transplants began coming to Florida in droves. In 1873, 14,000 tourists visited Florida; in 1874 the number was 33,000, an increase which Harriet was proud to take credit for in her report to Annie Fields, an Atlantic Monthly author and friend. In the North, word of the beauty and available lands in Florida had begun to spread.

The Immigrants The great Potato Famine of 1846-1854 had brought more than 1.4 million immigrants to the United States, and between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died in Ireland of starvation (Gleeson, 2001). These and other immigrants huddled in the great northern cities, with New York and Boston containing large tenements filled with the displaced and despairing Irish diaspora. While some found work in the cities or went west where work was available digging canals and building railroads, many found themselves in dire circumstances. “Irish emigration to America continued to rise until 1855, when it was severely disrupted by the Civil War. …. New York City had 203,740 Irish people in 1860, making up 25 percent of the population, …” (ibid). This large influx of mostly Catholic immigrants had a significant effect on the American experience, and shaped the nation’s attitude towards immigrants. “The contrast between the dynamic,

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urban, modern, and Protestant United States and the conservative, rural, traditional, and Catholic experience of the Irish emigrant was too much of a dislocation to allow for easy integration” (ibid). The Irish who came between 1841 and 1851 had left small plots of land in Ireland, usually between 1 to 4 acres. This land was not owned by them, and had not been sufficient to support their families. Land represented oppression to the Irish peasant, and as such was not the first choice when seeking opportunities in their new country (O’Grady, 1971). Catholic colonies gradually sprang up like small thistles in the Midwest, seeding the country with hope, and offering a place to call home to the newly arrived. Bishop Ireland of Saint Paul helped found one of the most successful of these colonies by securing 72 square miles of railroad lands in 1876. Others had similar ideas, including a young man named Edmund Dunne. His father, John O’Dunne, emigrated from Ireland to Quebec in 1820 “with the intention of establishing a colony” (Horgan, 1989). He died in 1877, his dream of founding a Catholic colony somewhere in the United States or Canada unrealized, but his son did not allow the dream to die with him. Edmund Francis Dunne became well known in the United States when he was appointed Chief Justice of the Arizona Territory by President Ulysses S. Grant. He had previously served in the judiciary for eight terms in Nevada, where he was highly regarded for his integrity and fairness. However, after being appointed Chief Justice, he used his position to promote the idea that “Catholics should be given a share of tax money to support their own separate school system” (Horgan, 1989). He believed and stated publicly that the State had no right to educate, and that by doing so, the State was promoting not a democracy, but a Socialistic or communistic system. He gave a lecture, which was later published in San Francisco as a pamphlet of 40 pages, airing his views on this subject to the Arizona governing body. His views had a core of well reasoned and sound arguments, but he also used language which polarized the community as to whether he should remain on the bench. “As a federal judge, Edmund Dunne had plunged himself most injudiciously into a public controversy. Protests flooded the White House” (ibid). Ultimately President Grant requested his resignation in 1875. From 1875 until 1881 Dunne practiced law in the Midwest, and continued to think about founding a colony, awaiting the right opportunity for his plans. He wrote, “The object of the movement is not to plant Catholic colonies, but to settle Catholic families, and to settle them in such manner that they can have access to Catholic churches and Catholic schools” (Dunne, 1881).

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Dunne’s Deal Florida had a problem after the Civil War: freed men were in need of education and jobs, homes and land, and the State had little to no money with which to assist them, even with the passage of the Southern Homestead Act in 1866. Its internal improvements had come to a standstill, and there was rampant discrimination against former slaves. Without slave labor, without funds, and with many of the internal improvement projects derelict and in need of a fresh start, it was time to begin again. But the Southern Homestead Act was repealed in 1876, a mere ten years after its enactment, and the federal courts sued the state. The “Trust Fund, …, was forbidden by a Federal Court injunction from selling or donating lands to benefit other improvements until the bonds, which had been issued with lands a(s) collateral, were paid in full” (Florida Department of Environmental Protection). This left the Trust Fund without the means to begin the process of rebuilding and renewing the construction projects it had started before the Civil War, although it could sell other lands it owned, primarily those given back to the State by the repeal of the Southern Homestead Act. The Trust Fund and the state of Florida were on the verge of bankruptcy; the State needed to find buyers quickly. Selling small parcels of land was not in the State’s best interest if raising funds was the priority. “The trustees of the public land board made the state holdings available for 40 cents an acre for the purchase of one million acres, 30 cents for a sale of three million, and 25 cents an acre to anyone who would buy a block of four million acres” (Horgan, 1989). Hamilton Disston saw the immediate advantage of being able to buy and then resell the land, and offered to buy four million acres. Dunne would finally realize the vision of his father’s dream: a Catholic Colony. Instead of taking cash as his attorney fee, Judge Dunne received control of 100,000 acres that were to be personally chosen by him as the first disposition of the Disston land. Judge Dunne enlisted the help of his cousin Hugh Dunne, who had traveled Florida on foot and horseback, and was familiar with its terrain. He took the train from Chicago to Jacksonville, and upon disembarking in July or August of 1881, he immediately sent his impressions concerning the city to a Catholic Newspaper, the Catholic Review. “Jacksonville is named after an Irish American soldier, Andrew Jackson…. You have to see the beauty of the orange tree growing in its own state for yourself…. Hotels are large and numerous; this is the New York of Florida or Saratoga of the South” (Dunne, 1881).

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Judge Dunne left Jacksonville shortly thereafter; he and his cousin Hugh Dunne traveled on horseback and foot for several months before locating the site which was to become the town of San Antonio in February, 1882. The site was selected for its natural beauty, and favorable location. While it was many miles to the nearest railroad or other form of mass and commercial shipping opportunities, and off the beaten path for most travelers, it had the advantage of being high and dry, with little to fear from malaria or Indians. “Our Catholic people looking for homes will find in Florida inducements enough if they study them, to cause the migration of a million or more of them hither” (Dunne, 1881).

Letters Home The U.S. population in 1870 totaled 38,558,371, of which 188,000 lived in Florida. By 1880 the U.S. population had increased to 50 million, with Florida’s population ballooning to 270,000. According to the 1900 Census, the country grew to just over 76 million and the state’s population had nearly doubled to 528,542. Much of the increase in Florida’s population was due at least in part to the invitation letters written by Stowe and Dunne to their respective audiences. Stowe’s missives were printed at first in the Christian Union, then as a book called Palmetto Leaves, and then again in the Atlantic Monthly, a very popular magazine of the time. Dunne’s 50 letters, all of which appear to be labeled “Prospecting Florida,” were printed in the Catholic Review, a leading Catholic newspaper of the time. Interestingly, each writer chose many overlapping topics on which to focus, extolling the healthful lifestyle for individuals and invalids, the ability to grow a variety of cash crops over most of the year, the ability to relocate at a modest cost, and the low cost of living. These themes were not necessarily new; there is evidence that other writers had also urged the settlement of Florida for many of the same reasons. Florida had the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine, and had been fought over for a couple of centuries by the Spanish and French before the English and the Americans came to claim their share. While Florida was considered by John J. Audubon and several other notable and distinguished visitors to be a wild, uninhabitable place filled with alligators and mosquitoes, others found that the sea breezes and climate more than made up for a lack of amenities and an abundance of swamp. Dunne once stated in an interview for the Catholic Mirror that health was “so plentiful down in Florida that it goes around begging for somebody to have it” (Horgan, 1989).

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Harriet Beecher Stowe was always quick to defend any writings or perceived misrepresentations of Florida, which she came across in her voracious reading sessions; one article most particularly struck a chord, as she was well acquainted with the author. When he wrote in the Independent of his utter disgust with the weather and the swamps of Florida, and its less than healthy climate, she rose to its defense. “It is true, as the doctor says, that some invalids do come here, expose themselves imprudently, and die” (Stowe, 1873). But she prefaced this admission with this comment: “As we have elsewhere remarked, every place, like a bit of tapestry, has its right side and its wrong side; and both are true and real, the wrong side with its tags and rags, and seams and knots, and thrums of worsted, and the right side with its pretty picture” (ibid). Mrs. Stowe also used data gathered from government records to defend her claims, and to promote the healthy climate offered by living in Florida, especially in winter. “The census of 1860 showed that the number of deaths from pulmonary complaints is less to the population than in any State in the Union. In Massachusetts, the rate is 1 in 254; in California, 1 in 727; in Florida, 1 in 1447” (Stowe, 1873). Having felt the difference in the climate, and observed the benefit to herself and family, she was not interested in someone claiming that the climate was less than beneficial, even with an abundance of swamps and mosquitoes. At this time in history, it was thought that living near newly turned earth or low lying areas and swamps would cause a person to catch malaria, or an “ague”. The cause of malaria would be discovered in just a few short years, but that discovery had yet to be made. Therefore, defending Florida from a reputation which would make people think that perhaps there were other better places to relocate was important. Dunne also spent a considerable amount of column space explaining how the town of San Antonio was ideal for a malaria-free location. “The selection was made after many weeks tramping on foot through the country, with the particular object of trying to find a high, dry country, free from malaria” (Dunne, 1881). He further claimed to his readers that the death rate “is less than half of what it is in what are called healthy cities North” (ibid). In the decades leading up to the 20th century, the United States had plenty of land, but needed people to fill it. Florida up to this time had attracted fewer settlers than some of the other Southern States, although some tourism in Florida had begun. Henry Flagler visited Florida only a decade after Harriet, and only five years after her first Florida missive. However, when Mrs. Stowe came in 1865, transportation options were primarily water-based, allowing for the growth of towns along the Saint

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Johns river, and along the East Coast. Dunne and Stowe each wrote of their travels to reach the state. Dunne traveled to Florida using the railroads as far as Jacksonville; he wrote of his travel from Chicago to Atlanta first, noting that it was a mere eighteen hours by train. Mrs. Stowe wrote of her travels on a Savannah steamer, the feeling of sea sickness, the weather, and a bit about her fellow passengers. With the coming of the railroads and the establishments of a few outposts of civilization along the water routes, including St. Augustine (population 4,000), Jacksonville (population 17,000) and Key West (population 18,000), Florida was beginning to see an enlargement of the population, which helped bring needed manpower to the state for commercial enterprises and agricultural development. But the letter writers do not appear to be substantially concerned with whether the state had sufficient revenue to operate; they were much more interested in helping people to climb out of poverty, to come to a land where they saw opportunities awaiting. Edmund Dunne saw an opportunity to help the Irish diaspora find a place to call home away from the cities, away from the poverty, and away from the temptations of alcohol. He wanted to leave a legacy, a Catholic colony for people to live and worship together, a place where they could educate their children, worship as they wished, and provide a stable income for their family. In 1884, a mere three years after his first letter to the Catholic Review, Judge Dunne was able to report that the colony of San Antonio had increased from a lone settler to a small town with solid amenities and several hundred people. "We have now a resident priest, a church, school, a congregation of two hundred and fifty souls, the number increasing rapidly, and lots of good colony land left” (Dunne, 1884). Mrs. Stowe told her readers about the founding of schools and the beauty of Florida at Easter, the ability to worship with others of the Christian faith, including some Catholic neighbors and nuns. “At Gethsemane, the Cross, and the Sepulchre, Christians feel together” (Gilbertson, 2006). Mrs. Stowe’s sister-in-law Eunice, another writer of Florida’s amenities, concurred with Harriet on the opportunities that awaited those who had a little put aside, who were willing to work hard and take some risk. “How I long to see those who at the North are weary, seeking work and finding none, down here in Florida, where for fifty dollars forty acres of land can be purchased, …; or for fourteen dollars and sixty cents a quarter section of Government land can be ‘entered,’ free from taxes for five years, … till an orange grove is well established, …” (Beecher, 1879). At this point in its history, the United States was a primarily agrarian society, and so the logical means of securing a comfortable living for

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oneself and one’s family was in agricultural pursuits. Florida’s climate was ideally situated for raising oranges and other crops which could tolerate the sandy soil, or for those crops which could be grown in the winter months, allowing a larger profit to be made by the savvy southern farmer. The crops which Dunne and Stowe perceived as being most valuable varied somewhat. Dunne was farther south and his land ran along what is now known as Sloan’s Ridge, creating a warmer climate for a larger part of the winter months. He extolled the profitability of raising rice in Florida: “This used to require expensive machinery, which prevented rice culture by poor men, but that difficulty has been removed by the invention of a simple machine costing twenty five dollars, and now anybody can grow and market rice” (Dunne, 1881). Judge Dunne also believed there was a good profit to be made by harvesting turpentine. “The turpentine orchards of Florida are becoming very valuable, as the supply elsewhere is giving out” (Dunne, 1881). Turpentine continues to be a profitable crop to this day, although the method of harvesting the product has changed significantly; previously, the harvesting of the turpentine was done over the course of a few years, and it killed the tree. At the same time Dunne often observed and remarked that winter favored the growing of oranges and garden vegetables. “In Florida you can plant some crop to advantage every month in the year” (Dunne, 1881). Mrs. Stowe favored oranges, and had high hopes of making a decent living on her orange grove, which she purchased with the house in Mandarin in 1867. “We have made diligent inquiry from old, experienced cultivators, and from those who have collected the traditions of orangegrowing; …, apart from the danger of frost, the orange crop is the most steady and certain of any known fruit” (Stowe, 1873). Her oranges were shipped north in wooden orange crates labeled “Oranges from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mandarin, Fla.” She also tried many other cash crops, including sugar cane and garden vegetables; she reported on four years’ worth of yield for a variety of crops, and was most satisfied with sugar cane, cucumbers, and Irish potatoes. She advised that the sweet potatoes, “… on good land with very heavy manuring, [are] decidedly profitable at two dollars per bushel” (Stowe, 1873).

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In Conclusion Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edmund Francis Dunne accomplished through their letter writing efforts the populating of the State of Florida during the latter half of the 19th century. Today there are still thriving communities living in Mandarin and in San Antonio, signs of their founders’ effectiveness in founding their original settlements. It is also safe to say that the history of Florida is the richer because of the pioneering communities of Mandarin and San Antonio. When one of the invitation letters reached a northern reader, who then fell in love with Florida and relocated, the tradition of the Sunshine State becoming a haven for so many transplanted residents truly took hold. The letters at a minimum attracted more tourists than had previously visited, and reinforced the turn of the century mindset that Florida was a natural vacation destination. It is a lesson for modern advertising and marketing teams that the power of the pen, or in other words, a direct appeal to an audience through firsthand account letters, can move not only the imagination, but can motivate the reader to move to places unknown, begin a new life, and create history.

Works Cited Beecher, H.W. “Letters from Florida.” 1879. Dunne, E. F. “Prospecting Florida” and “Florida Prospected” in the Catholic Review. 1881-1884. Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “Florida’s Public Land Steward.” 2005. Gilbertson, C. “Harriet Beecher Stowe.” 2006. Gleeson, D. “The Irish in the South, 1817-1877.” 2001. Graff, M. “Introductory Matter.” in Palmetto Leaves. 1968. Hedrick, J. “Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.” 1994 Horgan, J. “Pioneer College.” 1989. Markman, M., Boe, J., and Corey, S. “The American Journey: United States History Through Letters and Diaries.” 2003. Mormino, G. “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.” 2008. O’Grady, J. “Catholic Charities in the United States.” 1971. Stowe, C. “The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” 1889. http://fcit.usf.edu/Florida/docs/s/stowe.htm

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Stowe, H. “Palmetto Leaves.” 1873. Stowe, L. “Saints, Sinners and Beechers.” 1934. Zerfas, L. “Constructing the New Railroad.” Florida Railroad Museum. 2006. http://www.frrm.org/history/zerfas_pg2.html

COMING OF AGE IN ANTEBELLUM FLORIDA: GEORGE MORTON AND THE YOUNG MAROONERS MAURICE O’SULLIVAN

Although we in Florida have the oldest, most diverse, and richest literary tradition in North America, by the mid-1850s only ten novels had been set in the state. Despite that small number, a majority of them were the work of the country’s most important writers. Like Florida’s first novelist, François-René, the vicomte de Chateaubriand, whose enormously popular 1801 story of a doomed romance among the Native Americans in La Florida, Atala, influenced French literature for generations, most of those early novelists look either to the past or to the complex diversity of the region’s population for tales that mix adventure and romance, legend and history. Two bestselling authors, Joseph Holt Ingraham and Ned Buntline, for example, wrote potboilers about Spanish pirates ravaging the Florida coasts, Rafael; or The Twice Condemned (1845) and The Red Revenger; or The Pirate King of Florida (1847), while the iconic James Fenimore Cooper published Jack Tier; or The Florida Reef (1848), a sea yarn about a modern pirate during the Mexican-American War. The prolific Ned Buntline, who produced over 400 novels during his colorful life, also wrote a story about the bloody sixteenth-century conflict between Spanish and French Huguenot colonists, Matanzas (1848). South Carolina’s William Gilmore Simms, considered by Edgar Allen Poe a greater writer than Cooper, returned to the same period in Vasconselos (1853), a more thoughtful exploration of the clash of cultures between Cuba and Florida, Europeans and natives, while the antebellum South’s most popular novelist, Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz, used her Marcus Warland; or The Long Moss Spring (1852) for a defense of slavery and plantation life. Unlike those works and a handful of other novels set in the state is an odd pair of novels about teenagers learning to accept adult responsibilities and values. Both deal with simpler adventures and more homogeneous characters than their predecessors. The first of these—second in popularity

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among all our first novels only to Chateaubriand’s Atala—is Francis Robert Goulding’s Robert and Harold; or The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast (1853). Goulding’s Young Marooners, which went through 19 editions in a little over half a century, is the story of the three Gordon children (Robert 13, Mary 11 and Frank 7) and their cousin Harold MacIntosh (14) who come to Tampa for the winter in 1830. The Gordon children’s father, a physician, thinks a temperate climate will help their ailing mother, so he sets up a home across from Fort Brooke. Accidentally marooned in a remarkably well equipped boat—it carries everything from goats and books to medications and even an umbrella—the four children find themselves stranded on an island just south of Tampa. The second exception is a manuscript recently found in the Rollins College Library by the college’s archivist, Professor Wenxian Zhang. That manuscript, a gift to the college by the renowned bibliophile Frederick Dau, consists of an 1855 novel about a seventeen year old New Yorker’s visit to Florida. Scheduled for publication by the Florida Historical Society, A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport, apparently written by Cyrus Parkhurst Condit (1830-1861), is set largely along the St. Johns River in Welaka and the Lake George area. In its detailed portrait of how the handful of Welaka residents and the farmers who surround them work and socialize, marry and worship, hunt and fish, Condit has made a rich contribution to our understanding of antebellum Florida. The story’s incidents and descriptions are so circumstantial in detail that they appear clearly based on first-hand experience or taken from familiar local anecdote. It is the book’s record of those distinctively Floridian customs, the large and small events of day-by-day life, that makes it so valuable. Influenced by Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss Family Robinson and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Francis Robert Goulding’s Robert and Harold reads much like an instruction manual for youngsters who might find themselves marooned on one of Florida’s barrier islands. The author’s fascination with Florida, machinery, religion, social class and individual nobility may stem from his background as a native of Georgia who invented the first sewing machine used in the South and a Presbyterian minister who turned to writing when his voice failed him. A strong believer in the Southern cause, Goulding (1810-84) edited a confederate Soldier’s Hymn Book in 1863. In recognition of his contributions to the South, Joel Chandler Harris wrote a preface for a posthumous 1887 edition of Robert and Harold, praising its “enduring popularity” and strange and thrilling incidents” (iii) and pointing out that “underneath all is a moral purpose sanely put” (iv)

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Goulding characterizes his remarkably disciplined and devout protagonists as “a fearless Harold, an intelligent Robert, a womanly Mary, and a merry Frank” (viii). The two older boys—Harold the robust cousin who had learned woodcraft from a wise old Indian, Torgah, and the frail and bookish Robert—share leadership. While Robert’s knowledge is based largely on the scientific principles learned from his physician father, Harold teaches him how to turn those concepts into realities. One of the charms of the book is its practical lessons; at various times we are shown how to test air in caves and wells to avoid dangerous fumes and how to use cobwebs to stop bleeding. That didactic impulse carries over into footnotes on a variety of subjects from how arteries work (33) to why flames ascend (396). While the marooners regularly demonstrate creativity and adaptability, they even more consistently demonstrate their faith. Goulding’s characters reflect solid American Presbyterian values with Harold undergoing an emotional conversion to Christianity and all four children easily agreeing on daily Bible readings and formal Sabbath services. Unlike the marooned British children in William Golding’s 1954 allegory, none of Goulding’s youngsters is ever even tempted to worship the lord of the flies. A key principle of Robert and Harold is God’s providence, which is especially evident in the lives of those who rely not only on their faith but also on resilience, diligence, ingenuity and knowledge based on experience, observation and reading. Instead of allowing nature to shape them, the marooners domesticate it by imposing their will on the Florida wilds with a combination of Southern gentility and Victorian American enterprise. The Florida they experience, however, is limited largely to the environment. The only Floridian they encounter, for example, is Riley, a native described in the clearly hierarchical world of Goulding’s antebellum South as a half breed. Like the African slaves in the book, his primary purpose is to serve the needs of the white settlers, providing day labor and food as necessary. Part of the children’s maturation in Gould’s universe is learning the basis for a racial hierarchy. After hearing Riley discuss his affection for his wife, Mary, who has been so properly raised that she refuses to talk with an Army officer who visits the house until she is properly introduced and discovers that the officer is actually her cousin, finds herself surprised “to perceive that a savage could feel and act so much like a civilized being” (59). But her respect only lasts until she hears that he has drowned his newborn baby after discovering the child had a cleft palate. In Goulding’s vision of providential justice, Riley, of course, must suffer before the end of the book for his savagery.

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The family’s slaves—Old Sam, Peter, and Judy—are primarily characterized by their devotion and simple sentiments. They consistently act like entertaining children with a capacity for comic dialogue and endearing loyalty. When the cook Judy, for example, is asked to make tea, she answers in a way that would clearly appeal to Joel Chandler Harris, “But wey I gwine fin’ de tea?” (53) The Gordons, of course, gently show her how. While Goulding never offers an explicit defense of the plantation system or slavery—no one in his novel would think to challenge either— his story reflects many elements of the essential myth underlying both: the unequal interdependence of black and white, the instinctive loyalty of blacks, and the superior intellect and skills of whites. For all the affection the children show to their slaves, they never actually identify with them. When Dr. Gordon first proposes going marooning, for example, no one responds positively to his explanation. After pointing out that the term originated among Africans in the Caribbean islands, he adds, “To maroon therefore means to go from here, and live like a runaway negro.” (81) Only when he continues and points out that it also means to camp and live on what you catch, do the children become enthusiastic about marooning. After the marooners find Old Sam washed by one of the book’s convenient hurricanes onto the shore of their island, they nurse him back to health as part of their Christian duty. Once recovered, Sam’s only goal is to help his young masters (and mistress) and marvel at their cleverness. And when the youngsters find Sam’s brother Peter and a white sailor dead with their arms wrapped one another in a small boat, they bury both men in a single grave. Of course, the reader might wonder if that symbol of brotherhood would have occurred had the children known the sailor or had he had been a cousin of theirs. It seems clear that these devout, principled youngsters are predestined by a benevolent deity to return home. Just before they prepare to leave, after months on the island, they go to sleep “happy—yes, actually happy— when they knew that their nearest neighbors were treacherous savages, and that they were surrounded nightly by fierce beasts, from whose devouring jaws they had already escaped more than once, only by the blessing of God upon brave hearts and steady hands. How came this change? It was by cheerful habit” (416). While they do have brave hearts and steady hands, they really do not change much. Harold becomes a little more reflective, Robert more physical, and Mary more confident. But those simply suggest patterns of development apparent from the beginning of the book and reinforced by months on their enchanted island learning woodcraft and demonstrating

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Christian virtue. Goulding’s ending reinforces his own sense of their maturation and development. Another of the novel’s useful hurricanes allows them to rescue Dr. and Mrs. Gordon and Harold’s mother, Mrs. MacIntosh, from the wrecked ship they had used to search for their lost children. As the children save their parents and bring them to the home they have created in the wilderness, their author clearly wants his readers to recognize how well they have matured and adapted to their environment. As his passage about the children’s ability to sleep without fear suggests, Goulding’s vision is actually a less breathless version of Jonathan Dickinson’s rather creative memoir God’s Protecting Providence from 1699, in which Dickinson tells his story of a shipwreck off the coast of East Florida. Goulding’s language simply tamps down what Dickinson describes in his full title as an escape from “the More Cruelly Devouring Jawes of the Inhumane Cannibals of Florida.” Of course, neither he nor the young marooners ever encounter any cannibals. Unlike Goulding’s youngsters, the seventeen-year-old hero of Cyrus Condit’s A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport, George Morton, never loses contact with adults. When his sheltered life in a country boarding school is shattered by his father’s death a year before the story begins, his protective mother decides to move him home to New York City. There he develops a cold and cough, clearly external, physical symptoms of his psychological and emotional sense of loss, displacement and uncertainty. His Uncle James, worried about his health, offers to take him to Florida for the winter, and his mother reluctantly agrees. It seems hardly accidental that George spends part of the steamboat voyage south ill and inside protective walls, either in his own room or the First Engineer’s cabin on deck, separated from nature, or that one of his first experiences is to see a ship beached and its displaced passengers rescued. Only when this first stage of the journey, with its repeated parallels to the protagonist’s condition, ends in Welaka can the author begin George’s Florida odyssey of regeneration and growth. At first, George’s physical and mental health place limits on his activity and development. On one of his early deer hunts, for example, he hesitates to go out in the rain until he is offered a horse. At another time his companions, worried about his health, stop him from going on an evening fire hunt because it will cross wetlands. But his physical health is only one indication of what he lacks. When he goes for an extended visit to local farm and is given an empty cotton storehouse for privacy, a nervous George invites the family’s younger son, John, to stay with him.

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In the story’s early chapters, Uncle James serves as his nephew’s guide. But the two-dimensional James is an awkward figure who offers lectures rather than conversation, facts rather than comfort, and advice rather than challenge. Condit must have realized the inadequacy of this chilly, distant figure, who largely disappears from the story after the first chapter. Eventually, about a third of the way through the book, George’s uncle disappears entirely, leaving on a convenient business trip for most of the rest of the story. His excursion to New Orleans allows his nephew to continue growing under a far more effective mentor. While this absence might simply reflect the adolescent dream of the disappearance of familial authority, it also gives George a chance to prove himself with adults and peers who have no assumptions about him. Unlike Uncle James, the eponymous Mr. Hunter is an ideal mentor for this city mouse in the country, a young man who enters the unknown, the wilderness, to find himself. The Florida settler steps in to provide direction just as the young New Yorker begins coming to terms with this new world. Many of the most interesting parts of the book involve George’s visits to the Hunters’ farm and this wise older role model’s stories about his adventures, stories which extend George’s imagination and his awareness of what life can involve. When George and his new Florida friend David first visit the Hunters, for example, their host tells them a story of his wrestling match with a massively antlered buck. During the story in Chapter III, Mr. Hunter calls his opponent “Mr. Buck” and, in describing him with personal rather than impersonal pronouns, presents the battle as an epic struggle between two relatively equally matched opponents: “I partly dodged him, caught him by the beams of his horns, and threw my whole weight on his neck, thinking I would get him down and hold him, until my dogs came.” That battle would appear very different if the narrator substituted “it” and “its” for “him” and “his,” distancing and objectifying the buck. When the farmer’s faithful dog, Old Sam, finally comes to help finish the fight with the now one-antlered buck, Sam becomes an almost human partner: “Then the old fellow came to me wagging his tail and licking the blood off his chops, and looked as if he wanted to know if I was hurt. I tell you I had to hug that dog.” While his dogs hold a special place in his heart, Mr. Hunter’s stories individualize almost all of the animals he encounters. And he sees them as far more than food or sport. After describing that fight with the buck, he discusses the challenges of trying to raise a fawn in an account that sounds a little like an early draft of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s The Yearling.

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Mr. Hunter both tests and evaluates his young guest. When George wants to go on a night hunt, his host takes him outside to try his skill. After George seems to miss a reasonable shot, his guide criticizes him and explains why he missed. But Mr. Hunter is equally proud of George for deferring a chance to shoot a deer to a younger companion, for killing his first deer on his own, and for the initiatives George takes around the farm. The more the young man is tested, the more he learns and grows. The Hunters also introduce George to the life of ordinary people who need to go to work regularly in their fields, negotiate for cattle, attend makeshift religious and social events, and cooperate with and rely on neighbors. During his stay on the farm, George grows from an inexperienced young man to a skilful companion on adventures. The boy who feared sleeping alone becomes a young man who mentors the Hunters’ boys, learns to feel at home alone in the woods, and finds ways to repay his hosts. He not only builds a new path from the Hunters’ house to the main road, a clear symbol of the new path he has fashioned for himself, he also designs and builds a fence for their house and garden, emblematic of his growing ability to help protect others. The key to George’s maturation occurs on his hunts, which graduate in significance and danger from shooting ducks to hunting bear. As his encounters with animals in the wild become increasingly more challenging, they allow him to gain a deeper sense of identity with his new environment. Preparing for his trip south on the opening pages, he thinks about hunting as a recreational activity in which the prey are simply objects. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, however, the more carefully he examines that new world, the more fully alive it becomes and the more he finds himself developing bonds with other species. As in much of George’s personal development, Mr. Hunter provides a catalytic role in this expansion of his sympathies and imagination. All of Mr. Hunter’s stories about hunting deer, bear, panthers, and alligators reflect his respect for and sense of a connection with his prey. He will quickly eliminate predators that attack his food supplies or make life around the farm more dangerous, but he never loses his admiration for them. His stories also tend to reveal a good deal about human nature among his neighbors. One story about a crooked-footed buck shows the way human rivalries and jealousies crop up even at the edge of the Florida frontier; another, a tale of a heroic bear standing up to a party of hunters and withstanding attack after attack, ends only when Mr. Hunter needs to restrain the local parson, frustrated at the bear’s endurance, from leaping on it with a knife in his bloodthirsty rage.

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That humanizing influence becomes quickly apparent in George when the young Northerner, soon after hearing these tales, demonstrates some ambivalence about shooting a bear, which he calls “poor Bruin,” on his return from a logging camp in Chapter V: “As to killing it, he felt very pleased at having a hand in the hunt, although he did not think it was a thing to brag of as they had every advantage of the poor creature.” In much the same spirit, George thinks it a pity to kill graceful squirrels; and watching a cow being manhandled into his friend Captain Ambler’s schooner, he calls it “the poor beast” and “the poor brute.” As George learns more about his new world, his empathy grows. While hunting, he never approves of killing just for the sake of killing. But he also understands that almost everything shot becomes food, from venison steaks to squirrel pie. Toward the end of the story, as his ability to identify to with even his most dangerous prey expands, he describes an alligator he wants to punish for daring to threaten him in almost familiar terms as “that fellow.” Despite George’s growth, he is still young enough to daydream. On his last outing at the Hunters, for example, George sits on a log and fantasizes: And this was his last hunt—he felt a little melancholy to think he must give up this free sort of life, and return to the habits and customs of city life. He was really having some vague ideas of giving up all the prospects and plans which he and his friends had formed for his future, and coming to Florida to settle.

Early in the novel the author’s voice often breaks into his narrative to provide everything from stern warnings about the dangers for young boys of running off to sea to editorial asides about setting fishing lures. Once he finds Mr. Hunter, he generally allows the story to tell itself with this alter ego’s stories providing the adult perspective. George’s daydream, however, brings out the author’s need once again to speak directly to his audience with only the slightest hint of melancholy: “He only saw the romance of a life in the woods. The novelty of them had not yet worn off and he was an enthusiast though so young” (Chapter X). By teaching George admiration and a limited affection for all creatures, Mr. Hunter provides him with a remarkably humane understanding of frontier life. In that world animals deserve respect, although human rights, both for food and for safety, will always prevail. When the teenager finally manages to kill a deer on his own during another visit to the Hunters in Chapter VIII, “he felt almost sorry that he had shot it.” But he accepts the principle of a hierarchy among species, believing that “animals were made for man’s use” and knowing that all of his deer would eventually become

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food or clothing. For Condit, at the top of that hierarchy are those animals which aid humans, like the prized hunting dogs, and those whose size or courage make them notable foes. At the bottom are varmints who raid food supplies or threaten life. That philosophy may well be why the book’s hunting dogs, like many of the animals who are hunted, often have more personality than many of the people George meets. The wily Old Sam who eventually gets eaten by alligators, David’s squirrel-hunter Pat who gets perfumed by a skunk, the relentlessly quiet Dragon, the ill-fated Old Caesar, and the eager young Ruler all play critical roles in either hunts or stories. Even Mr. Hunter’s mare, the skittish, mischievous Nelly, is a stronger and more developed character than most of the novel’s humans. Mrs. Morton and Mrs. Hunter, for example, do little more than admire, fret, or provide food, while the Hunters’ sons, James and John, simply and almost wordlessly let George lead them. Other farmers in the Welaka area, like Mr. Pierce, Mr. Lyndale, and the nervous Mr. Bliss, make up hunting parties but do little more. Aside from Mr. Hunter and his dogs, the other three most interesting characters in the countryside may well be the farmer’s Revolutionary War musket, his rifle, Danger, and his shotgun, Rattlesnake. George’s Welaka friends have a little more life, especially the logical David, who usually offers scientific explanations for odd experiences, like why George catches more fish than he or a visitor, Captain Ambler. The genial Captain Ambler is a jolly, generous, constantly accommodating companion while he waits for a shipment of cattle to arrive; and Captain Stebbins is a practical adult with lots of stories of the Indian Wars. Many of the others serve, as do Mr. Hunter’s neighbors, only as background. Some never even earn full names, like the local doctor and General H. Oddest of all is the young man who joins George and David on a number of adventures, an apparent peer of theirs whom the author curiously refers to only as Mr. Hastings. The formal address and lack of biographical background make him an even more shadowy figure than the others. One of the novel’s best figures is a comic one, the boastful, inept guide Hirly, who takes the boys on a deer hunt when George returns from his long stay at the Hunters. Although he appears only briefly at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh chapters, he becomes the antithesis of what George aspires to be. Hirly, as the narrator tells us in an unusual ironic comment, “pretended to be a great hunter” but sends misleading trumpet signals, complains constantly, and shows a marked talent for creating excuses when he fails to find any turkeys for dinner. In a world which respects skill and competence, George, after his visits to the

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Hunters, now shows himself far more skillful and competent than the professional guide. Both of these early novels, Francis Robert Goulding’s Robert and Harold; or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast and Cyrus Condit’s A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport, anticipate a new direction for the state’s fiction. Although many writers would continue to see Florida as a romantic, mysterious fringe state attracting the restless, the desperate and the outcast, a vision which would make our state a magnet for crime writers, others began introducing a literature that built largely on Florida’s natural environment. Soon after the Civil War ended, writers like Ledyard Bill, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sidney Lanier and Silvia Sunshine sparked a wide interest in the state’s climate, flora, fauna, culture and customs. While those accounts offered relatively precise descriptions of the southernmost state’s physical and social environments, it was fiction which excited the nation’s imagination. In the second decade of the twentieth century, publishers began offering adventure series for teenagers. And the many popular examples of what we call today Young Adult Literature—the M’s alone include the Motor Boat Club, the Motorboat Boys, the Motor Maids, and the Mystery Boys—almost always included a volume about the group’s adventures in Florida. Following that tradition, Nancy Drew finally visited the state almost a century later in The Clue of the Black Keys (1951) and the Hardy Boys even later in The Mystery of Smuggler’s Cove (1980). Goulding and Condit foreshadow not only these writers and their tales of young visitors braving the southern frontier but also the large body of post-Civil War travel literature celebrating Florida. Although both novels tell the story of young people encountering the state’s lush but challenging environment decades before it became a popular tourist destination and both admire initiative, skill, resilience and courage, the two works differ significantly in their ultimate purposes. Aside from focusing almost entirely on the dynamics among four children who interact with only a single Floridian and a couple of soldiers from Tampa’s Fort Brooke, Goulding’s Robert and Harold emphasizes the need to use knowledge gained from books and formal lessons to tame the wilderness and shape it into a reasonable approximation of a Southern plantation. George Morton, on the other hand, learns he must adjust to his new environment; he can live in it but he will never subdue it. And he realizes that the new skills and knowledge he has gained from his own experiences and those of his mentors are essential in adapting to this frontier world. In addition, while Condit seems to follow James Fenimore Cooper in believing that a

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communion with nature provides the best and truest connection with the divine, Goulding, a far more orthodox Presbyterian minister, expects even children marooned on an island to engage in daily prayer and clearly hopes his readers will recognize that God’s providence invariably blesses those with “brave hearts and steady hands” (416).

Works Cited Bill, Ledyard. A Winter in Florida: Observations on the Soil, Climate, and Products of Our Semi-Tropical State; with Sketches of the Principal Towns and Cities in Eastern Florida; to which is added A Brief Historical Summary; together with Hints to the Tourist, Invalid, and Sportsman. New York: Wood and Holbrook, 1869. Buntline, Ned (Edward Zane Carroll Judson). Matanzas; or, a Brother’s Revenge. New York: G.H. Williams, 1848. —. The Red Revenger; or, The Pirate King of the Floridas. New York: Samuel French, 1847. Chateaubriand, François René de. Atala, ou, Les amours de deux sauvages,dans le desert. Paris: Migneret, 1801. Condit, Cyrus Parkhurst. A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport. MS, Rollins College Archives [1855]. Cooper, James Fenimore. Jack Tier; or, The Florida Reef. New York: Burgess, Stinger, 1848. Dau, Ferederick. Florida Old and New. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1934. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. London: W. Taylor, 1719. Dickinson, Jonathan. God’s Protecting Providence Man’s Surest Help and Defence in the Times of the Greatest Difficulty and Most Imminent Dangers; Evidenced in the Remarkable Deliverance of Divers Persons, from the Devouring Waves of the Sea, amongst Which They Suffered Shipwrack. And also from the More Cruelly Devouring Jawes of the Inhumane Canibals of Florida. Faithfully Related by One of the Persons Concerned Therein. Philadelphia: Reinier Janson, 1699. Dixon, Franklin W. The Mystery of Smuggler’s Cove. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. London: Faber & Faber. 1954. Goulding, Francis Robert. Robert and Harold; or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast. Philadelphia: W.S. Martien, 1853. The Soldier’s Hymn Book. Charleston, S.C.: South Carolina Tract Society, 1863. Hentz, Carolyn Lee. Marcus Warland; or, The Long Moss Spring: A Tale of the South. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852.

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—. The Planter’s Northern Wife. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1854. Ingraham, Joseph Holt. Rafael; or, The Twice Condemned. A Tale of Key West. Boston: H.L. Williams, 1845. Keene, Carolyn. The Clue of the Black Keys. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951. Lanier, Sidney. Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1876. Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. The Yearling. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1938. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. c.1610-11. Simms, William Gilmore. The Lily and the Totem: The Huguenots in Florida. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850. Vasconselos: A Romance of the New World. New York: Redfield Co, 1853. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Palmetto Leaves. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1873. Sunshine, Silvia. Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes. Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1879. Wyss, Johann David. Swiss Family Robinson. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 18—.

FINDING EDITH POPE JANE ANDERSON JONES

I was born and brought up in St. Augustine at just the right time, before Bay Street was part of an artery leading to Miami, and when a child could play hopscotch on it or on the terreplein of the Fort, and feel she owned the Fort Green. In those days the town was less self-conscious about its quaintness and more self-contained. It was a fascinating and very personal place, and its history, which one learned as effortlessly as one learned the geography of the town, seemed personal too, like family lore, so that I can’t remember when first I heard of Osceola or Coacoochie anymore that I remember learning my way from the Plaza to the City Gates. I never had a home anywhere but in St. Augustine and it’s with pleasure that I calculate the chances of my living here the balance of my life.” —Edith Pope, book jacket of River in the Wind, 1954.

Edith Everett Taylor was born in St. Augustine on July 23, 1905, to Florence and A.M. Taylor. Her father, influential in local and state clubs, was the manager of the Casino at the Hotel Alcazar and served as a Florida State Senator from 1925-1931 (A.M. and Florence Taylor Papers). In 1928 she earned a B.A. from Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University), and in 1931 an M.A. from Columbia University. In 1933 she married Verle A. Pope, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, receiving a Croix de Guerre for heroism from the French government, and in the Florida Senate from 1949-1972 (“Verle A. Pope”). Edith Pope died in 1961 having suffered many years from rheumatoid arthritis (Brown vi). Pope’s literary career began early. When she was still a college student in 1926, Edith Everett Taylor published a volume of poetry, The Black Lagoon and Other Verse. Most of the poems in the volume are short lyrics, cinquains, triolets and sonnets, rather typical of what one would expect from a dreamy young poet in the 1920s. In his Foreword and Appreciation to the volume, W. Livingston Larnad [sic] writes, “This volume of verse is a peep into a playground-garden of thoughts: a flowered sanctuary of subtle whims, gay, irresponsible, born of a mind gloriously youthful, yet

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for all this, rich in a wisdom that is as old as the centuries.” The author, however, seems to send herself up a bit in her first novel, Not Magnolia with the character, Jessie Baker. “What romance!” breathed Jessie. “A silent figure striding through the night. Isn’t it too picturesque?” The couple regarded each other, both were laughing at Jessie. “You must write a poem about it, they suggested, their manner very solemn. “Oh, do you want me to? Should you really like it?” (50)

Yet, the long title poem, “The Black Lagoon,” reveals the powers of description that Pope will call upon in her later novels, especially description of the Florida landscape she knows so well. What I remember is a black lagoon, Edged round with cypress trees and great live oaks That drip their flowing beards of Spanish moss Into dark water. On a slime-green log A water moccasin, a-drowse with sun Lies gleaming and uncoiled, while hyacinths Float perilously out of reach: they mock The eager fingers that would grasp and mar Their orchid beauty glassily recast In water shining as mahogany. On the tall banks of my antique lagoon Between the bulbous moss-gray cypress trunks That rise in nightmare growth for forty feet And there are crowned by green more delicate Than any dream of glades in paradise, The dogwood raise their pallid dead white stars Up the dark night of tree trunks; china trees Are exquisite with bloom of lavender. And here there is a cloud of green and gold That is acacia at its blossoming. For all the flowers are so delicate The thorns that guard them are most poisonous! Nor are the lush banks firm, but treacherous, Corroded at their base by the still pool. In all this beauty there is treachery. (ll. 34-58)

From her poetic literary debut, Edith Everett Taylor quickly turned to novel writing. In the same year she graduated from college, she contracted with E.P Dutton & Co. to publish Not Magnolia, a jazz-age college novel. The protagonist of the book, Leigh Monroe, is an undergraduate at Florida

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College for Women, facing a life-crisis. Her foster brother, childhood friend and anticipated husband, Simon, has suffered a nervous breakdown. Courted by a young New York novelist, Oliver Varn, and surrounded by fellow co-eds and sorority sisters trying to make a “good catch,” Leigh wavers between depression and confusion. As the spring semester ends, she is snatched from campus by her guardian and aunt, Beulah Love Pomeroy, who encourages Leigh to invite her friends to a fortnight’s house party at Goodwind, the family estate in West Florida. Just as Leigh decides she is in love with Oliver, Simon reappears, and Leigh is torn between her love for Oliver and what she feels is her duty to Simon. She is also torn between her two aunts, nicknamed “Ante-Bellum” and “Anti-Boredom” by Oliver. Belle, the elegant wife of a Southern aristocrat, is horrified at the possibility of her niece marrying an upstart Yankee novelist and plays on Leigh’s sense of guilt and duty. Beulah, a robust spinster, counters: “Love is not a lace paper Valentine,” she said fiercely. “Nor life a flower to be prettily worn. Will you choose to stagnate here, Leigh? No love and no duty excuses a woman marrying a man who is not her peer in strength, and in vitality. Will you live like Belle, like Sarah, like the other women of Goodwind, pretty and passionless, flowering like a magnolia, against a dying background? Choose to be anything, but not magnolia.” (212-13)

Kathryn Seidel has pointed out that “Pope deftly used the magnolia, the standard emblem of the purity and beauty of the southern belle in nineteenth-century fiction, as a symbol of decay and sterility” (36). But it is the novelist’s emphasis on the need for a woman to exercise her strength and vitality to live a full life that runs as an underlying theme throughout her novels. Published in 1934, Old Lady Esteroy is a delicious novel about a wealthy, wicked old lady, Valeria Esteroy, in Reconstruction Florida. Thwarted in love and thoroughly disappointed by the drunken men in her family, she becomes a schemer and meddler in the lives of others, including her granddaughter. She dotes on the adolescent Alicia because she sees herself in her. But Valeria Esteroy seeks vengeance for what she perceives to be the wrongs done to her and her frustrated life. Although she has managed her estate successfully and rules her family with a strong hand, she has more energy than she knows what to do with. She despises toadies yet depends upon them and expects everyone to defer to her. The panoply of women she seeks to control, Lizzie Wintle, her companion; Flora Martine Winfrey, the daughter of the lover who failed her; Corinne Esteroy, her daughter-in-law, and Alicia, her granddaughter represent a cross-section of Southern womanhood from the fallen woman to the frail

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sprite looking for true love to the faded magnolia. And there is Alicia, who is challenged to break away by an “unsuitable” young Cracker named Will Monsey: “If you stay what will you be? Just another pretty lady riding around under an umbrella, having less fun than a fish out of water, you’ll be mostly dead and you won’t know it….I want to marry you because you’ve got the makings of the sort of woman I could admire all my life, take my hat off to.” (134-35).

In considering whether to leave her comfortable life for an uncertain adventure with Will, Alicia considers her family: Alicia looked around the table at the three women, examining them with a new interest, as if they were strangers. Wintle disgustingly licked her forefinger, then rubbed it over her plate, collecting pie crust…Her hungry eyes were fixed on the dark mound of fruit cake that Valeria had not offered to anyone as yet, and that should not be offered to her. Corinne was drinking tea, the little finger of her right hand delicately crooked. Awful beauty was lashing the earth; and her eyes expressed no excitement, no wonder and no interest. Yes, Alicia thought, their eyes were they; and she glanced from Corinne’s placid brow to Valeria. A sneering mouth, a crafty sweet smile, eyes that never wavered, those were Grandma. Wintle’s tired brown eyes were two shaggy, whining little poodles that had been left out in the rain all night. Valeria’s were mastiffs, with eager fangs. (177-78)

The novel is a fascinating character study of an old woman who is mostly on to herself, but who finally creates her own lonely fate. The New York Times reviewer praised Old Lady Esteroy for its “intricate psychological plots” and for the mystery at the heart of the book: “Yet one never knows…whether Valeria is as sane as most persons and elaborately evil, or whether she is actually mad and to be pitied.” Half-Holiday (1938) evokes the late 1930s when the businesses in the sleepy Florida town of St. Acacius (St. Augustine) close down on a Thursday afternoon. The fashionable housewives are playing bridge, and Irma Lee Bryson goes off to a tryst with her lover in a hotel. Three men, Jim Bryson, the owner of Bryson’s Nite and Day Garage; Dan Wilder, the part-owner of the St. Acacius News, and Paul Leith, a writer, bump into each other at Nip’s Fount of Youth Sweet Shop and decide to borrow a rowboat and go fishing on the river – they don’t return. The novel focuses on the reactions and characters of their wives: Irma Lee Bryson, Phyllis Wilder and Eunice Leith; and on Kate Claire Stuart, the wife of the aviator

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who flies out to search for the lost men. Once again, Pope reveals a crosssection of women, most of whom are dependent upon their husbands, some for their financial well-being and some for their sense of identity. While this novel doesn’t have the psychological depth of Old Lady Esteroy, it is an appealing window into the times and lives and dilemmas of couples in a very particular time and place. Sometime between 1936 and 1938 Edith Pope and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings became acquainted with each other and soon became close friends (Edith Pope Papers). When Rawlings married Norton Baskin in 1941 at the St. Johns County Courthouse in St. Augustine, Edith and her husband, Verle Pope, were the witnesses to the ceremony (Margo Pope). It was Rawlings who introduced Edith Pope to Maxwell Perkins and persuaded him to take her on as an author for Scribners (Nolan 71). Rawlings may also have been influential in the subject for Pope’s next novel Colcorton. According to Gary L. Harmon, Rawlings considered writing a novel based on the life of Zephaniah Kingsley and his Senegalese wife, Anna Madgigane Jai, but abandoned the idea in 1940 and wrote Cross Creek instead (Harmon 16). However, Pope’s obituary in the New York Times states that she spent seven years writing Colcorton, which was published in 1944 (“Edith Pope”) – so she would have started work on the novel in the mid-1930s, probably before she knew Rawlings. Colcorton is Pope’s most acclaimed and honored work. It was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 (losing to John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano) and received glowing reviews. Orville Prescott in the New York Times called it “a sound, honest, engrossing novel …. a genuinely good book” and compared it to Strange Fruit: “ In Lillian Smith, author of ‘Strange Fruit’ and Edith Pope the South has two new authors of whom it should be justly proud.” Another New York Times review by William Du Bois invokes both the tragedy of the novel and Pope’s strong imagery: But the overtones in “Colcorton are too rich and too deep, to suggest any synopsis. Only a second reading will show how well Mrs. Pope has built a classic pattern for tragedy out of living minds and hearts – and how she has made the aloof ruin of Colcorton a major actor in the story (as real in its way as the teeming tenement in “Street Scene”). Those twin miasmas – a blasted family name and an evil environment – have choked a generation of unwary authors. Colcorton’s creator has tamed her “atmosphere” to her purpose with a true artist’s hand. Her descriptive writing compares with the best this reviewer has encountered on the Florida scene. It creates a drama of its own, even when it serves as obbligato to a greater tragedy.

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In the novel, the Colcorton estate has fallen on hard times. The wind blows through its paneless windows, and the front porch has been sold for lumber to pay school fees. Its lone heirs, Abby and Jared Clanghearne, are orphans, left without the wherewithal to even think about keeping up appearances. Abby, fifteen years old when her father dies, has dreams of restoring the family: Always and always she had dinned it into Jared that the Clanghearnes wasn’t crackers and Minorcans, mixed, like folks thought they was. The first Jared Clanghearne, her grandpaw, was rich and looked up to. More than a hundred years ago he built their house and lived like a lord, coming and going from Colcorton to his plantations up the country. What the first one was so could Jared be. (8)

She has scrimped and saved to put Jared through college and law school, and he has landed a job with a law firm in St. Augustine – she sees his future as a state senator and her own as his devoted housekeeper. But Jared returns from Tallahassee madly in love and married to a child-bride, Beth, another orphan, who has eloped from an unhappy family situation in Alabama. Abby’s worst fears come to haunt her. Jared goes to Tallahassee to research a deed for a family friend and returns a changed man. He turns to gambling and drink. When Beth tells Jared of her pregnancy, he becomes even more despondent. Jared’s change of character comes as a result of his discovery of his true identity -- it’s a secret that Abby has kept from Jared all his life, and now Jared keeps his knowledge a secret from Abby – and it is within this toxic secret of race in the Jim Crow society of early twentieth-century Florida that tragedy arises. Abby and Jared are the mulatto grandchildren of a former slave-trader and the African wife he bought as a slave. Abby has found her grandfather’s Will in an old book in the library, and Jared finds it in the state records in Tallahassee. Pope borrowed the words of the Will, nearly, but not quite, verbatim, from Zephaniah Kingsley’s Will written in 1843, the year of his death.

Jane Anderson Jones Jared Clanghearne’s Will, Colcorton I solemnly enjoin my legitimate and natural children, that as the illiberal and iniquitous laws of this Territory will not afford to them and to their children that protection and justice, which is due in civilized society to every human being: Always to keep by them a Will, directing the disposal of their properties, until they can remove themselves and properties to some land of Liberty and equal rights; Where the conditions of society are governed by some law less damnably Absurd than that of colour. This I strongly recommend, not knowing in what light the law may consider my Beloved wife, Abby Magdigaine Iah, as our connubial relations took place in a foreign land, where the marriage was solemnized by her native African customs, although never celebrated according to the forms of Christian usage; Yet has she always been respected as my Wife and as such I acknowledge her; Nor do I think that her truth, honour, integrity, moral conduct or good sense will lose by comparison with any one. (italics mine) (283-84)

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Zephaniah Kingsley’s Will I do also solemnly enjoin my colored and natural children, that seeing the illiberal and inequitable laws of this territory will not afford to them and to their children that protection and justice, which is due in civilized society to every human being: Always to keep by them a Will, ready made and legally executed, directing the disposal of their property, after their death until they can remove hemselves and properties to some land of liberty and equal rights, where the conditions of society are governed by some law less absurd than that of color. This I strongly recommend, nor do I know in what light the law may consider my acknowledged wife Ann Madgigene Jai, as our connubial relation took place in a foreign land, where our marriage was celebrated and solemnizes by her native African custom altho never celebrated according to the forms of Christian usage: Yet she has always been respected as my wife and as such I acknowledge her nor do I think that her truth, honor, integrity, moral conduct or good sense will loose in comparison with any one. (italics mine)

The minor shifts in language that Pope makes are telling: “legitimate and natural children,” rather than “colored and natural children;” “illiberal and iniquitous laws” rather than “illiberal and inequitable laws;” some law less damnably Absurd than that of colour” rather than “some law less absurd than that of color;” and “my Beloved wife” rather than “my acknowledged wife.” Abby has spent her life hiding her racial heritage, not only from Jared, but from the society around her. After Jared is murdered in a brawl, Abby shifts her fierce devotion to Beth and their son, Jad. Destiny comes to visit in the person of the famous Northern novelist, Clement Johnson, who

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stumbles upon Colcorton and falls in love with the decaying, but grand, old mansion. When he rents living quarters, he provides much needed cash to pay hospital bills and buy needed supplies, but on the hunt for novel material, he sniffs out Abby’s secret: America, Johnson thought, what have you done, what have you done to our children? That was the angle he’d play up; he’d make it implicit in every page. What have you done to your defenseless minorities, America, who look with such righteous horror across the sea? We grant you, Abby a right to happiness, we guarantee you freedom in which to sit shuddering in your house, to hide in your woods, fearfully to wonder when the other citizens will hold you to a lifelong strict account of a crime you never committed….The Gestapo’s name was prejudice, its name was legion. Its speech had many accents. It said, “A good old time darky is all right.” “Give the others an inch and they take a mile,” it said. And throughout the south it did not bother to state the incontrovertible fact: “One drop of black blood makes of you a negro; there is no appeal from it this side of heaven. The best thing you can hope for is to be let alone.” (261)

Abby knows that once Johnson publishes a novel based on the Colcorton story, she will never be left alone; she has to tell Beth in order to protect Jad: Abby knew what agonizing that boy’s blood might lead him to. She remembered the frights she had had when she thought folks looked at her kind of queer. Many’s the day she had nearly scrubbed her skin off fancying it was getting black; and the times she had studied her fingernails, and that once – she was young then and foolish – she had bruised them with a stone to make white marks come that she could play like they was moons; and how she had baked her brains to a frazzle going bareheaded so as to bleach her hair. It had taken her twenty years to know that for herself she could stare the world down. (286)

The two women decide that they must leave and forge a new life for themselves. They settle with Johnson and strike out in new directions – both survivors. Abby and Beth prove their various strengths throughout the novel. Beth grows from a romantic, but intuitive child-woman, into an insightful, ambitious woman of the world. Abby is indomitable, but stubborn; in many ways, she is as much a part of the Florida landscape as the land she has farmed, the mullet she has fished and the storms she has weathered. An early chapter in which she and her friend, Danny Strikeleather, take advantage of an early north-easter to go hunting marsh hens captures a Florida day as rare as Abby herself:

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They were tented in by the rain. They scrambled for the woods and huddled beneath a dripping dwarf oak. Before them the river was hidden from view. The downpour lessened into a steady drizzle. They saw mullet jumping. A porpoise raised its snout, rolled lazily and disappeared. In the dampness all the smells of the woods and beach were intensified. The musty scent of the old leaves, the odour of mussels, the salty tang of the marsh grass, these were the ripe, sweet smell of autumn itself. (41)

The wonder of Pope’s last published novel River in the Wind (1954) is its incredible descriptions of Florida nature -- swamps, groves, forests and shores – and the characters’ intimate connections with that nature. River in the Wind is an historical novel about the Second Seminole War and St. Augustine, her hometown. The protagonist of the novel, Thad Renfro, is the son of the overseer of an orange plantation owned by Judge William King. Thad and Judge King's daughter, Medora, have grown up together and fallen in love, but their fates, at fifteen, are about to be determined by others. Medora is married off to a Northern businessman, Moncure Lauren, whose ambition is to found the Bank of Florida. Thad is orphaned in a Seminole raid and joins the US Army to conquer the Seminoles and exile them from Florida to Oklahoma. The selective omniscient narrative stance of the novel focuses on Thad and Judge King: the two share an intense love for the nature of Florida, a fond if grudging admiration of the Native Americans, a sense of honor and duty, and adoration for Medora. They are caught in the inexorable grindings of the mills of history. William King and Thad Renfro are intimately connected with the landscape and feel it in their bones, but it is Medora King who embodies the lost promise of Florida. She escapes her confined life into the Carnival Festival before Lent and runs off to a shanty on Anastasia Island with Thad – only to be somewhat disillusioned: “Never could she get away from ennui but was rooted, untranslatable, in an ugly bog of self-contempt; her anger was for him, who had promised so much with no word spoken but ‘Medora” and given nothing” (113). Medora defies convention, her husband, and her parents to embrace the wildness and life that she believes is Thad Renfro – but he is a creature of his times. He idolizes Judge King and is caught up in the events of history: “He loved Medora dearly, as a wife; but he could not remember when he had been as infatuated with Medora as he was with war” (222). Pope knows her history well; we see the American generals, Scott, Gaines and Jessup, befuddled by Seminole insurgent tactics, as well as the firebrands, Osceola and Coacoochee, untempered by the wiser heads of

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their fathers and chiefs. Orville Prescott in the New York Times noted the following: Indian Wars are a familiar theme in American fiction, but Mrs. Pope writes of the Seminole Wars as if she had been there and no one had ever written of them before. Her knowledge of soldiers, of Indians, of official bungling and of the fluctuations of the fortunes of war is thorough. Her feeling for and apparent understanding of the Seminoles, hounded and betrayed by greedy whites who could never bring themselves to regard Indians as fellow human beings, is impressive.

Edith Pope has no romantic notions about the glories of war -- and, indeed, her account of the Second Seminole War reminds the modern reader of the unfortunate forays in Vietnam and Iraq of our own times. Such wars engender desolation, wasted lives and disillusionment. Pope also continues her subtle – or not so subtle -- critique of race relations in River in the Wind, particularly in the person of Judge King. The Judge has close friends among the Seminoles and works hard to broker a peaceful agreement between them and the American army. He is scornful of the officers’ assessment of the character of the Seminoles and their misguided policies. Yet he is blind to his own perverse relations with his slaves. He sometimes considers that it would be the correct moral action to free his slaves, but the economic well-being of his groves depends upon their labor. Scip, his hunting and traveling companion, often disappears for days into a retreat on Anastasia Island to drink and savor a taste a freedom – but the Judge won’t seriously consider letting him buy his own freedom, or even more importantly, the freedom of Scip’s granddaughter, Delphie. Delphie, the age of the Judge’s daughter, Medora, has become the comfort of his middle-age. He has set her up in a house, and she has borne him a son. It is only when Delphie faces death from an infected foot, that the Judge learns that she is very likely, not only his lover, but his daughter. Pope lobs these critiques of the slave system and how it corrupts all involved somewhat quietly into the texture of the novel – Judge King is generally regarded as a sympathetic character – but the undercurrent can be a riptide for the observant reader. The Judge’s failure in judgment about people is shared by Thad when it comes to their relationships with women. Once again, Pope is subtle in her critique. Georgiana King, the Judge’s wife is initially seen as an “officious termagant” (Prescott), but she is just another of Pope’s strong women, frustrated by their lack of useful activity. When the family fortunes fall on hard times, and she brings into the household the widows of fallen army officers to board, she is in her element: “Now that financial disaster had

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come to Georgianna she was no longer discontented; indeed, she had not the time. She lingered by her husband’s chair, and drew a liberated breath” (378).

The Judge has also deviously tried to control his daughter. Having married her off to a hollow husband, he recognizes the strength of her relationship with Thad. But divorce was socially unthinkable. In her new metamorphosis Medora could not be controlled. Whatever was done would have to be done through Thad. The passion that had the boy was not lightly to be dismissed. It could be combated only by a conversion of a different sort. Its place would have to be usurped; but by what on earth? Was there at sixteen, anything more powerful than that beautiful fond girl? Ideas are powerful, William thought. Of all drugs and intoxicants, ideas are the most violent and lasting. And the headiest is honor. (142-43)

The Judge plays on Thad’s devotion to his mother, to his country, and even to the Judge himself, to lure him away from Medora into what he sees as his duty. But Medora finally has her own agenda – as Thad is lured into one campaign after another, she continues on with her own life and taking care for her children, one of whom is Thad’s. When the war seems finally over, Medora, now widowed, is not willing to simply go off and be a farmer’s wife – especially when she hears that her father has deeded over to Thad half his estate. “Caged. That’s what it would amount to. To spend my life on the St. Johns, looking at what? The pickerel weed? No, no, no. We’ve got to get away.” …“One marries a life, not only a man. Texas, -- or the Southern Continent. You wouldn’t be happy in Picolata. You can’t take me there now you what it means – So many things I want, things I have to do. We can’t go anywhere, when we haven’t any money.” (389)

And as they continue to argue, Medora asserts: I’m different from what you know. I could hide for a while, not a lifetime, and why should I? You’d want me made over. I’d have to pretend---“ She added with momentary, startling gayety, “Don’t think I couldn’t.” In a deepening tone of resentment, she went on, “I’m to make the compromises. It’s a man’s world, I know, but I can’t spend my one life waiting around, waiting. We’d get settled at Beulah, then the war would be on again, you’d go off – You would be right, undoubtedly right. I know… But I am a person, too.” (390)

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The Judge collapses, Medora leaves, and Thad remains to support the Judge. Thad had a sense of having reached a moment that he had always known would happen: the unpredictable, the encanted, the feral was running out of his life. He might as well cry for the return or early youth as to expect Medora back. She had belonged to him in a world now changed. (391)

So – final conclusions?? All of Edith Pope’s works are out-of-print. It’s not too difficult to find copies of Colcorton, River in the Wind, or even Not Magnolia. But Old Lady Esteroy and Half-Holiday are nowhere to be found except in rare libraries. It’s time to reclaim an important Florida novelist and get her back in print.

Works Cited A.M. and Florence Taylor Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 11 Oct. 2008. . Brown, Rita Mae. Introduction. Colcorton by Edith Pope. Plume American Women Writers, NY: Plume/Penguin, 1990. Du Bois, William. “Colcorton’s Secret.” Rev. of Colcorton by Edith Pope. The New York Times. 26 Mar. 1944. 13 Oct. 2008. NYTimes.com. “Edith Pope, Author of ‘Colcorton’, 55.” Obituary. The New York Times. 1 Feb. 1961. 13 Oct. 2008. NYTimes.com. Edith Pope Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 11 Oct. 2008 < http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/guides/pope.htm>. Harmon, Gary. “Fernandina Beach to Picolata and Olustee.” The Book Lover’s Guide to Florida. Ed. Kevin McCarthy. Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1992. 8-58. Kingsley, Zephaniah. Will, 1843. Florida Memory: State Archives of Florida. 14 Oct. 2008

Nolan, David. “St. Augustine to Astor.” The Book Lover’s Guide to Florida. Ed. Kevin McCarthy. Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1992. 62-133. Pope, Edith. Brutally with Love. Rpt. of Colcorton (1944). NY: Dell Books, 1953. —. Colcorton. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944. —. Colcorton. Introduction by Rita Mae Brown. Plume American Women Writers. NY: Plume/Penguin. 1990.

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—. River in the Wind. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954. Pope, Margo. “Perspective: Remembering Two Dedicated Women.” The St. Augustine Record. 07 Dec. 2003. staugustine.com 08 Oct. 2008. < http://staugustine.com/stories/120703/opi_1976720.shtml > Prescott, Orville. “Books of the Times.” Rev. of Colcorton by Edith Pope. The New York Times. 13 Mar. 1944. 13 Oct. 2008. NYTimes.com.

WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE: AFRICAN AMERICAN PORTRAYAL IN VINTAGE FLORIDA POSTCARDS CLAUDIA SLATE

Popular culture can be an accurate indicator of societal attitudes, in particular racial prejudices. The images from the early 20th century—the Golden Age of postcards—are no exception. Florida vintage postcards all the way up to the 1950s depict African American babies and adult males being threatened by or actually bitten by large toothy alligators. These colorful postcards though printed out of Florida--in Chicago, Asheville, North Carolina, and even Germany—are postmarked from such tourist spots as Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Miami Beach, Clearwater, and Pompano Beach and sent to points north: New York, Maryland, Ohio. They were sent during a period when lynching was not uncommon in the South. Containment of African Americans was a top priority for Southern whites, and instilling fear, whether by actual ropes or by imagined reptile attacks, served this purpose. The postcards portrayed African Americans as weak victims with little or no means of escape. In contrast, in the same era, postcards displayed white children gleefully riding on alligators and Seminole Indians, in their native dress, wrestling and successfully mastering these reptiles. With some speculation, historical context provides possibilities about attitude and motive for the popularity of these cards. The first American picture postcards were sold at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In the 1890s several companies began to produce picture postcards for tourists, and in 1898 Congress passed an act that allowed picture postcards to be mailed for one cent— hence the penny postcards, a cent below the first class letter (Lear 78). Postcards became quite the national obsession. Businesses advertised by mailing postcards or having their salesmen distribute them (Mashburn 7). Publishers took advantage of the new fad by sending photographers to resort areas to take photographs (7). During the fiscal year 1907-1908,

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Americans mailed over six hundred million postcards (Ryan 3), amounting to about seven per person. Within just a few years, the total was over a billion a year (Ryan 3). Pushcart vendors and corner store owners found selling postcards to be very profitable because they could purchase “a thousand assorted cards for five to ten dollars and then sell them for a few cents each, reaping a handsome return” (Lear 79). During a time before interstates and fast cars, travel was not as frequent as today and was to be celebrated and bragged about. Sending postcards back home accomplished that—an added bonus was their speed of delivery compared to letters, sometimes within a day. Most of the postcards portraying African Americans were published from 1908-1914, which were the most prominent of the postcard “Golden Years.” (Mashburn 9). An 1897 Lithograph by McCrary & Branson of Knoxville, Tennessee titled “Alligator Bait” portrayed several naked black babies alone, no setting, with no alligator in sight. Postcard companies began to use variations on this image of children—often in exactly the same poses--initially for Florida and the Panama Canal but eventually covering the entire range of alligator habitats (and beyond) (“Variations on a Theme”). Advertisements and memorabilia items also employed the juxtaposition of black babies and alligators. Some of these items were pipes and ceramics or cast iron, like banks, ashtrays, bottle openers, and even pencil sharpeners. An advertisement for the product Stainilgo, a toilet and bath soap, uses an image of a cartoon-like black baby being pursued by a toothy alligator, emerging from a swamp (“African American Stereotypes: Alligator Theme”). The advertisement claims that the product is for “the removal of discolorations.” The idea of extermination or containment of the black race is not a far stretch. Another advertisement is of a late 19th century trade card for Little African Licorice Drops, showing the subject which would be employed by postcard makers for the next 50+ years: an alligator attacking a human victim, who is almost always black, and often a child or infant (“African American Stereotypes: Alligator Theme”).

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[Figure 1]

Florida postcards of the early 20th century contained similar images of black babies and alligators. One is an early "Alligator Bait" postcard, in which no reptile is actually pictured, and the babies' fate at the edge of a swamp is simply suggested by the caption (“Stereotypes of African Americans). In a 1909 postcard the babies—who are male--are hanging onto a limb in a swamp, naked, with an alligator on the bank (“Stereotypes of African Americans) [See Figure 1]. These postcards with black children being threatened or attacked by alligators hinted that “blacks let their children run wild” ( Turner 77). A 1910 postcard shows the babies clad in diapers and hats but still unsupervised and dispensable (“Stereotypes of African Americans). In 1936 the Asheville Postcard Co. distributed a similar card entitled “Alligator Bait” but with a verse: Three little piccaninnies sitting on a log Along came an alligator sliding through the bog; If you’ll look you’ll understand just what is the matter— Alligator thinks he’ll feast—likes the taste of ‘nigger’ But they’ll beat him in the race—this he doesn’t ‘figger.’ —E. Hale. (“Alligator Bait”)

The poem identifies the children by the racist terms “piccaninnies” and “nigger” but uses correct English, not dialect because the voice is that of the presumably white writer. “They’ll beat him in the race” indicates that the babies get away from the alligator—maybe to assuage the sensibilities of the tourists. A card postmarked 1932 “Waiting for a Bite in Florida” shows a young boy fishing—his nonchalant attitude could hint at his mastery over the alligator but could also suggest his demise. It is not clear

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whether the alligator will be rewarded “waiting for a bite” or the boy will be (“Waiting for a Bite in Florida”). One of the most disturbing images is from the 1930s postcard "Free Lunch in The Florida Everglades” [See Figure 2]. An alligator has a screaming barefoot boy with a red shirt in his jaws. One version of the card has a verse that reads, The Florida Gator: Have you met the Florida gator? He is the champion negro hater. Although he finds many things to eat His favorite morsel is negro meat. (“Stereotypes of African Americans)

[Figure 2]

Postcards did not picture only black children being attacked by alligators: black men were also victims. From the 1920s-1940s A Darky’s Prayer” was depicted in several similar forms. One example is one with a black man dressed in white shirt, pants, and a tie is in a jungle-like setting on his knees, his hands in prayer, being attacked from the rear by three alligators, one of which has his pants in his teeth [See Figure 3]. There are several versions to this prayer. One reads, “A Darky’s Prayer, Florida: Dese gators looked so feary/ And yet dey ‘peered so tame/But now that I done met ‘em/ I’ll never be de same” (“Darky’s Prayer”). A similar card has this prayer: Darky's Prayer,Florida.Oh,Lord,my Loving Creator,Delivah me from dis yer Gator, De chuch ah gwine to jine,No mo' moonshine,Chicken 'n de crap game not for me,A good nigger ah gwine to be.Praise de Lord! Bless

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de Lam'!Glory Hallelujah.-am,I'se gwine back to Alabam'. (“Variations on a Theme”)

The broken English on such cards suggests the man’s “otherness” and intellectual inferiority, as does the man’s facial expressions, ones of bewilderment and “simplemindness” (Melinger 424). Overcome by alligators, he is no longer a threat but rather being threatened and controlled. The “I’ll never be the same” indicates that he has been taught a lesson, but that he now knows better than to think that he is the master of his fate. The second version indicates that the man has been drinking and gambling but that this experience has tamed him, made him religious. African Americans were stereotyped by whites as lacking in “emotional control and moral constraint” and so prone to drunkenness and criminal behavior (Melinger 425). The postcard’s message appears to be that intimidation and fear works wonders at combating these tendencies.

[Figure 3]

Reminiscent of some of the lynching postcards but in caricature and attempting humor is a postcard postmarked 1959 that pictures a black male being chased up a palm tree by an alligator with the caption “Honey Come Down, We All Are Waiting For You in Florida” (“Stereotypes of African

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Americans”) [See Figure 4]. Another gator waits on the other side of the tree. The black figure, tightly hugging the tree, has stereotypically grotesquely large eyes and wide lips, accentuating his primitive nature. The location is next to the ocean, which is inexplicable, given that Florida alligators live in fresh water. The phrase “We all are waiting for you” suggests a consensus amongst not just the alligators but the white majority as well, who are more likely to gather on vacation at the beach than in a swampy setting.

[Figure 4]

Another postcard "Honey, Come Down, We're Waiting for you" is an unusual photographic version of the popular palm tree cards; it is also unusual due to its late appearance, in the 1960s, after most of the racist cards had ceased being produced (“Variations on a Theme”). The sure

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demise of this man—the tree is at a precarious angle and the man’s foot is firmly in the alligator’s mouth—combines with the photographic nature of this card to make it particularly vicious. Ironically, blacks were pictured as being bested by reptiles whose African ancestors were familiar—though in the form of crocodiles, rather than alligators: “In many east and west African societies the crocodile represents a source of power, an animal to be feared only when it is treated with disrespect” (Turner 76). For the Adinkras of Ghana, the symbol for the crocodile is adaptability because of its ability to travel in two realms: in the water and on the land; thus, reptiles are “appropriate symbols of messages between the spirit and human domains” (Walker 199). In striking contrast to the ways postcards depicted black children and black men as the victims of alligators was how white babies and Seminole Indians were shown. The most popular and common postcards featuring white children show them riding alligators, either on their backs or in a small carriage attached to the reptile with a bridle (Spencer 71, 77). They have tamed the alligators, who appear to be no threat to the children at all. Seminoles were shown wrestling alligators at the tourist attraction Musa Isle and at Tropical Hobbyland Indian Village (Spencer 66) Florida tourist attractions during the first half of the 20th century proved very popular for their shows with captive alligators, touting the message that the reptiles were exotic and dangerous, but entertaining when controlled. Alligator wrestling was a symbol of pride for Seminoles, a way for Seminoles to become “active participants who helped control their own destiny, not passive victims or pawns” (West xvii). On the back of the card the tourist information reads, “The Alligator hide is an important Source of Livelihood to the Seminoles. They are Taught from Childhood to Stalk and Capture these Saurians. Exhibition Alligator Wrestling Hourly From 9 A.M. to 6 P.M.” (“Musa Isle”). The senders’ messages on the backs of the cards indicate how they were in awe of the alligators and the Seminoles’ skill at wrestling them: “How would you like to see these alligators?” and “This is were [sic] he turn over the crocodile [sic] and puts him to sleep and then he wakes him by a crocodile call.” The message on the back of another card reads, “This was very interesting to see also. Boy you should of [sic] seen me. I was really scared. The alligator weigh t[sic] 240 lbs and the boy weight [sic] 145 lbs. I don’t know how they do it” (“Musa Isle”). In contrast, the postcards with blacks and alligators have messages that do not mention the front of the card at all but instead refer to working on a suntan, enjoying the weather, and picking oranges. As early as 1948, there is evidence that while whites saw Florida postcards with blacks being attached by alligators as humorous, blacks

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considered them harmful. In The Journal of Negro Education in Autumn of 1948, Edgar Rogie Clark in his article “Pictorial Cards” uses postcard images as example of “stereotypes…based on more fiction than facts” and claims that “It is our responsibility to stamp out these patterns” (549). His call must have been heard because in the 1950s and 1960s the NAACP put pressure on stores, such as Kress and Woolworths, and they began to take these postcards off of the shelves. Popular culture, of which postcards are a part, mirrors and reinforces societal fears, stereotypes, and ideologies. As Russel Nye points out, “Popular art has been an unusually sensitive and accurate reflector of the attitudes and concerns of the society for which it is produced” (4). Using blacks as “alligator bait” alleviates whites’ fear of the reptiles and of blacks themselves. The underlying message of the postcards of blacks being threatened by alligators was that violence was acceptable, and even humorous, in these circumstances because blacks were sub-human, not worthy of sympathy. In fact, at the time that these postcards were popular, whites in Florida—fearing that blacks would intermingle with them and take their jobs—had resorted to lynching of African Americans at least 257 times from 1882-1950 (the period for which the Tuskegee Institute kept records). Patricia Turner in her article “Alligator Bait” goes so far as to say that these postcard images “depict more than just the presence of a negative stereotype; they implicitly represent a form of aggression in eradicating an unwanted people” (77). Certainly the image of a black man in supplication in the “Darky’s Prayer” postcard indicates that he has been controlled, literally thrown to his knees and is no threat. Dehumanizing blacks and intimidating them could have enhanced the superiority of the whites purchasing the cards and those receiving them. The “humorous” readings and puns reinforced the ideological content of these texts and allowed the sender to feel superior: “While the senders of racist postcards may not be required to ‘read’ the card in the way preferred by the visual text, no “oppositional” decodings of these images were located in the flip-side messages” (Melinger 430). For example, one postcard depicting a black man being treed by an alligator was sent from North Miami Beach to Clinton, Maryland, in August, 1959, and reads, “Dear Vicki, Having a wonderful time. It is too hot here, just right. Trying to get a suntan but not successful. See you soon. Love, Margaret and Tommy” (“Honey”). Another postmarked December 23, 1910, with the image of three black babies being threatened by a huge pink mouthed alligator reads, “Dock, I am picking oranges and we don’t use gloves” (“An All-in-Gator in Florida”). The senders do not seem disturbed by the racist images that they have chosen to share.

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As Brooke Baldwin points out in “On the Verso: Postcard Messages as a Key to Popular Prejudices,” “The cards thrived in the mainstream of society because racism, rather than being stigmatized, was socially legitimized” (17). Fifty years later, that is not the case. Ball faced racism is not acceptable. Today our messages are more subtle and veiled and are in the form of mass emails or blogs: such as “If Obama wins, will his wife plant watermelons and cotton on the White House lawn” or “Barack Obama is a Muslim.” There is even a photo from the 2008 Republican convention on an internet blog that shows a man wearing a stuffed alligator as a hat, and in the jaws of the alligator is an Obama action figure. The blog master on this site explains the significance of “alligator bait” and includes a redeeming response from one oblivious blogger— identified as “The Sea Hag”: Holy cow. I'd never heard of the term "alligator bait" before reading this post (and now that I have, it's something that will stick in my head forever and make me sick and sad every time I think of it) so my initial reaction was just against the violence of the image. And that was quite bad enough, but with the added reference to racial violence, it's just infuriating. I keep thinking I can't be shocked anymore and yet it just keeps happening. (“Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch, #74)

Blogs and residual racism aside, 21st century tourists to Florida who send postcards home no longer have available to them despicable racial images of alligators and African Americans. We can only hope that the attitudes that sanctioned them will also become a thing of the past.

Works Cited “An All-in-Gator in Florida.” H. & W.B. Crew Co. Jacksonville, Florida. In possession of the author. “Alligator Bait.” Asheville Postcard Company. Asheville, N.C. In possession of the author. Baldwin, Brooke. “On the Verso: Postcard Messages as a Key to Popular Prejudices.” Journal of Popular Culture. 22.3 (1988): 15-28. Clark, Edgar Rogie. “Negro Stereotypes.” The Journal of Negro Education. 17.4 (Autumn 1948): 545-549. “Darky’s Prayer.” Genuine Curteich. Chicago, Ill. In possession of the author. “Honey Come On Down.” Asheville Postcard Company. Asheville, N.C. In possession of the author.

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“Indian Boy, Wrestling Alligator at Musa Isle Indian Village, Miami, Florida.” Playle’s Online Auction. October 6, 2008. http://www.playle.com/listing.php?i=HEM23310 Lear, Bernadette. “Wishing They Were There: Old Postcards and Library History.” Libraries and the Cultural Record. 43.1 (2008): 77-101. Mashburn, J.L. Black Americana Postcard Price Guide. Enka, North Carolina: Colonial House,1996. Melinger, Wayne. “Postcards from the Edge of the Color Line.” Symbolic Interaction. 15.4 (1992): 413-433. Nye, Russel. The Embarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York: The Dial Press. 1970. “Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch, #74”.” Shakesville.com. posted by Melissa McEwan . September 4, 2008. http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/09/obamaracismmuslimun patrioticscary.html Ryan, Dorothy. Picture Postcards in the United States, 1893-1918). New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982. Spencer, Donald. The Florida Alligator in Old Picture Postcards. Ormond Beach, Florida: Camelot Publishing Co., 2000. “Stereotypes of African Americans: Alligator Theme.” Authentic history.com. October 6, 2008. http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/alligator/01.html Turner, Patricia. “Alligator Bait.” International Folklore Review 7(1990): 75-79. “Variations on a Theme.” Maproom Systems. August 8, 2008. http://maproomsystems.org/galleries/variations/index.html “Waiting for a Bite in Florida.” Asheville, N.C. In possession of the author. Walker, Sheila. African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. West, Patsy. The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism. Gainesville, FL:U Press of FL, 1998. .

THE DONALDSONS: THE FIRST BLACK FAMILY IN LOWER PINELLAS COUNTY VALERIE E. KASPER

In reaction to the Civil War, but before Jim Crow was created in 1876, there were black codes, laws passed mainly in the south to limit the newly obtained civil rights of black Americans and facilitate white control and social dominance. These codes were used to abolish social equality and regulate the employment, movement, and action of freed slaves, who were told where they could live, whom they could marry, and what employment they could obtain. The codes almost nullified the emancipation proclamation and caused many freed slaves to feel they would never achieve the freedom promised them, let alone equality. By 1920, segregation was well established in the south, which required separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites. However, in a city called St. Petersburg, Florida, segregation was anything but equal. In 1921 Dream Theater, a newly built theater for blacks, was bombed “because whites residents of the section… objected to the Negros congregating in the place” (Peck and Wilson 9). The [Andrew] Carnegie library was off limits, despite “Carnegie’s wishes… the facility would serve every St. Petersburg resident” (Peck and Wilson 109), and the education system that only allowed blacks to attend school through sixth grade was “a belated attempt to showcase a nonexistent equality between the races and an incomplete measure designed to pacify black parents” (Peck and Wilson 20). However, despite black codes, Jim Crow, and segregation, one black family, the Donaldsons, lived on the lower peninsula of what would eventually become Gulfport in Pinellas County, Florida untouched by these codes and laws and well respected by their white neighbors throughout the decades. According to historian John A. Bethell, the Donaldsons “were highly respected by all in this section, for honesty and thrift” (Pinellas Point 26). They were not only highly respected, but they

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were considered one of the “best well off” families in the region (Grismer 188). John Donaldson’s story began three years after the Civil War ended. Around the age of 17, John Donaldson moved from Alabama to Florida with his former master, Louis Bell, Jr. After 30 days of arduous travel by ox cart, Bell, his wife and two sons, Donaldson, and a mulatto house servant, Anna Geramin, reached the lower peninsula. Only five families had lived in the area, and that was before the Civil War drove them away, but after the war, some resettled. At this time, the bay area consisted of one county: Hillsborough. The town of St. Petersburg would not be established until the 1890s, though according to Hampton Dunn “the beginning of St. Petersburg can be said to be the year of 1875” (17), and Pinellas County would not secede from Hillsborough until 1912. Until then, the area was known as West Hillsborough. When Bell reached the lower peninsula in 1868, he bought three acres of land and planted sugar cane, a profitable crop. However, Bell had two problems: the Christmas freeze of 1868 and an experiment on hammock land. The cane he grew on hammock land, as opposed to the pine land used previously, proved undesirable because the cane wasn’t sweet. After those two attempts, Bell tried the traditional crops of corn, melons, and pumpkins with little success. After this, he moved back to Alabama, but Donaldson and Anna Germaine remained. According to the 1870 census, John was a 17-year-old black farm laborer who could not read or write during his years with Bell, and Anna, whose last name was listed as Harrison, was a 20-year-old black house servant who also could not read or write. They are both listed as being born in Florida, despite the fact Donaldson was born in Alabama. Donaldson was well respected and trusted during his years with Bell, to the point Bell would leave him in charge of the farm when he had to leave the homestead, even though he had white workers. One year after the census, Donaldson purchased 40 acres for $36 in what would eventually become Gulfport in St. Petersburg. According to historian Walter P. Fuller, who knew the Donaldson family for almost seven decades, Donaldson “cleared and fenced five acres and planted it with sugar cane, sweet potatoes, and truck garden. He also bought some cattle and hogs and set out a small orange grove” (“City’s Oldest Negro”). Donaldson was successful as a farmer, and in addition to his 40 acres, he owned horses, oxen, and cattle. According to his son, Edward, his father made the best sausage and cured hams around the area. He was also known as one of the hardest working settlers in the lower peninsula, and possibly one of the most well off. Donaldson once said he “was the best

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man off on [the] point” because he owned “forty acres of land, two horses, two yoke of oxen, and wagons, a bunch of cattle, [and] a good potato and cane patch” (Bethell, Pinellas Point 27). Donaldson not only farmed his own land, but he delivered the mail in the area on horseback. Donaldson carried the mail for five years and eventually became postmaster. According to Bethell, Donaldson refused to take the route unless he received a hefty payment. He ultimately accepted the job for “only a trifle less than the contract called for” (Pinellas: A Brief History 20). Ten years later, by the 1880 census, Donaldson was now listed as 31 and born in Alabama, where both his parents were born. Anna was listed as his 33-year-old wife who was born in Florida, with her father born in Florida and her mother born in South Carolina. Although the census records indicate John and Anna were married by the 1880 census, author Scott Taylor Hartzell, who interviewed the great grandson of John Donaldson for his book, Voices of American: St. Petersburg an Oral History, said they were married in 1884, but historian Karl Grismer maintains they were married a year after arriving in Florida (“City’s Oldest Negro”). No marriage record was found, and since Pinellas wasn’t a county at the time, the couple would have had to travel to Tampa for an official license. It is certainly possible they didn’t make the grueling journey since Tampa was “two days each way” by ox cart or by foot (Marth 4). At this time, the couple had four children – three girls and one boy, ages 3 to 8. They would eventually have 11 children. Edward, the 3year-son, would go on to be well-known in Pinellas County. Donaldson was listed as a farmer, and Anna as “keeping house.” All are listed as unable to read or write, and it says none of the children attended school. However, the Donaldson siblings did attend school. As segregation began to take hold in the south, the Donaldson siblings attended Disston City School alongside their white neighbors during the late 1880s. The integrated school, also know as Prop College because pine logs propped up the sides of the school, had one teacher: Arthur Norwood, an Englishman who would eventually become mayor of St. Petersburg. Despite segregation, the lower peninsula saw little change because the area could only afford one school, and because whites in the area were not concerned with racial issues, so “nobody thought a thing about it” (Fuller 328). The Donaldsons lived and raised their children on the lower peninsula until their deaths. One of the last events Donaldson participated in was the secession of the Pinellas peninsula from Hillsborough County. In 1897, Donaldson signed a petition to separate from Hillsborough County.

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Donaldson, along with most of the Pinellas population, lived in the southern region of the peninsula and contended Hillsborough County was not meeting their needs. The lower peninsula paid taxes to Hillsborough County; however, “tax dollars collected in Pinellas were spent by Tampa politicians, usually on Tampa roads, schools, and buildings” (Pinellas County Planning Committee 25). As a result, the lower peninsula received an inadequate share of the tax money, and in addition, were disregarded and overlooked during the construction of roads and bridges, school appropriations, and the need for government buildings. By 1907, the secessionist movement was unstoppable, but it took four more years to receive the separation, so it wasn’t until November 14, 1911 that Pinellas County seceded. Unfortunately, Donaldson died of tuberculosis in 1901. He was buried alongside his white neighbors in Glen Oaks Cemetery, and he is also listed with 300 other pioneers on a memorial in Pioneer Park in St. Petersburg. Glen Oaks cemetery is the oldest in lower Pinellas County and contains the graves of many important early settlers and their descendants. Although John Donaldson died before segregation took hold of the area, his son, Edward Donaldson, lived through much of the city’s racial turmoil. St. Petersburg began to change during Edward’s teenage years when the Orange Belt Railway came to town in 1888 and brought the first influx of black families into St. Petersburg. Until that time, the Donaldsons had been the only black family in the area for 20 years. But now, the arrival of more black families into the area started the wheels of segregation turning. The Orange Belt Railway was constructed by black labor, and many of those families decided to stay in St. Petersburg when the railway was completed in 1889. The men became day laborers, and the women obtained jobs as servants for white families. Towns such as Pepper Town, the first black community, and Methodist town and Cooper’s Quarters began to appear. Blacks were segregated into these areas because whites owned much of the land in St. Petersburg, which allowed them to limit the areas within which black families could settle. Most of the black families rented from whites, and only a few, like the Donaldson, were able to build or purchase their own homes. By the 1900s, these black communities were self-sustaining. They founded their own grocery stores, doctors and lawyers offices, churches, and schools. By the 1920s, these communities were fighting for equality. However, amid these segregational changes, Edward and his family prospered because they were regarded and treated differently by the white community. Like his father, Edward’s family had earned the respect of the white community. Although Edward was only educated for a few years at

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Disston City School, he became a first rate engineer. He helped construct the railroad pier in 1889 and the Brantley Pier in 1896. He was also a pile driver for the first railroad pier built in deep water in 1897 and helped supervise the construction on Fort Dade and Fort Desoto. Edward worked for the Fuller company and was responsible for their construction projects, which included “the electric power plant, the street car line, two boat lines and eventually a number of subdivisions and a hotel or two” (Fuller 90). When the company failed in 1918, the street car line was bought by the city of St. Petersburg, and Edward decided to work for the city. The St. Petersburg Times referred to Edward Donaldson as one of the men “who quite literally helped build St. Petersburg” (“City’s Oldest Negro”). Edward retired from the city in 1945 after 31 years and became a businessman. First, he sold barbecue ribs from his home at 401 12th Street N. Then, he expanded to a concession stand at South Mole Beach in downtown St. Petersburg, where he sold ribs, sandwiches, and candy. And according to the locals, “they’d be crowds there especially on Saturdays and Sundays” (Hartzell 16). Edward married Roxanna, his fourth of fifth wife, and had eight children. Roxanna, who was known as “Mother Roxanna Simpkins,” was a licensed traveling midwife. In the days of Jim Crow, many hospitals would not treat blacks, so the community “created their own amenities and made their own way” (Peck and Wilson 78). Mercy Hospital eventually opened for the black community in 1923, but even after it opened, Roxanna contended that hospitals were for “people with heart trouble and all that kind of business” (“Roxanna Donaldson, ‘Traveling Midwife’” 25). Roxanna was said to have delivered about 500 babies during her 18 years of midwifery. She was part of the Pinellas County Health Department’s midwife program, a group that provided healthcare for women who were unable to afford it or who lived in remote areas and lacked access to the hospital. Roxanna delivered Goliath Davis, St. Petersburg’s first black police chief and deputy mayor. She later became a practical nurse. When Edward died at approximately age 89 on November 13, 1967, he was considered to be the city’s oldest living native of St. Petersburg. Roxanna died on March 18, 1976. Ironically, the Donaldson family lived through a time period of civil war, reconstruction, black codes, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and a very turbulent time in civil rights history, but the city never saw them as anything but well respected people. Edward Donaldson’s grandson, Roger Hammond, said, “More than likely, he was treated better [than the blacks were when he died]” (Hartzell 16).

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Works Cited Bethell, John A. Pinellas Point. St. Petersburg: Press of the Independent Job Department, 1962. Pinellas: A Brief History of the Lower Point. St. Petersburg: Press of the Independent Job Department, 1914. “City’s Oldest Negro.” St. Petersburg Times. 5 July 1966. Dunn, Hampton. Yesterday’s St. Petersburg. Miami: E.A.Seemann Publishing, Inc, 1973. Fuller, Walter P. St. Petersburg and its People. St. Petersburg: Great Outdoors Publishing Co., 1972. Gould,Rita Slaght. Pioneer St. Petersburg Life in and around 1888. St. Petersburg, Page Creations, 1987. Grismer, Karl H. The Story of St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg: P.K. Smith & Company, 1948. Hartzell, Scott Taylor. Voices of America: St. Petersburg an Oral History. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2002. Marth, Del. St. Petersburg: Once Upon a Time. St. Petersburg: Suwannee River Press, 1996. Peck, Rosalie and Jon Wilson. St. Petersburg’s Historic 22nd Street South. Charleston: The History Press, 2006. Pinellas County Planning Committee. Pinellas County Historical Background. October 1986. “Roxanna Donaldson, ‘Traveling Midwife’.” The Evening Independent 19 Mar. 1976.

WILLIAM POPE DUVAL AND WASHINGTON IRVING: FICTION AS FACT AND FACT AS FICTION— AN EXPLORATION OF EARLY AMERICAN FOLKLORE IN FLORIDA’S ANTEBELLUM FRONTIER JAMES M. DENHAM

In 1848 William Pope DuVal was in the political battle of his life. His decision to run for Congress in his adopted state of Florida as a Democrat put him in the unenviable position of defending a long political career that had seen him change political positions often. The sixty-four year old candidate had represented Kentucky in the 13th Congress, and now thirtytwo years later he was running against fellow Richmond, Virginia, native Edward Cabell for Florida’s lone congressional seat. DuVal’s long career in Florida began in 1821 with a judicial appointment, but a year later he succeeded Andrew Jackson as territorial governor. DuVal served three consecutive terms as Florida’s territorial governor until 1834, holding appointments from Presidents Monroe, Adams, and Jackson. Since leaving the governor’s chair, DuVal had remained involved--at least peripherally—in political affairs. He had participated in the state’s constitutional convention in 1838, and had served as leader of the Florida Senate. In the spring of 1848, one of Florida’s leading Whig newspapers called for DuVal to make “necessary explanations” for contrary positions he had taken through a long career. Accordingly, the paper as well as other critics charged that he was a Federalist in 1815, a supporter of the National Bank, but later became a Democrat and changed his position once Andrew Jackson called for the institution’s demise: He was for Van Buren in 1836—for Harrison in 1840—Tyler in 1841—for Polk in 1844—for Taylor six months ago, and is for Cass now. In 1840 we

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William Pope DuVal and Washington Irving heardhim advocating for Tippecanoe and Tyler Too on the stump, and that he should accept no office under that administration—but one or two months after, he repented and took the office of the United States Law Agent in East Florida. [As governor] he founded the Union Bank and now is opposed to that monster. (Apalachicola Commercial Advertiser)

The Whig press excoriated DuVal as a joker, a trickster, and hack politician who changed course whenever he thought it would benefit his career: “We think it is clear that Gov. DuVal has been dodging about, not a little all his life, discharging his blunderbuss (Apalachicola Commercial Advertiser).”1 While DuVal was well know in Florida, most Americans had learned of DuVal’s eventful career as a lawyer, politician, and frontiersman through the writings of Washington Irving, who first wrote of the governor’s exploits in the “Ralph Ringwood Tales,” a fictionalized account of DuVal’s earlier life. But during his campaign for Congress the “hero” in Irving’s “Ralph Ringwood Tales” faced charges that he was a broken down politician in pursuit of one last political plum. (“The Crayon Papers” 152-65, 258-66). 2 Irving’s stories appeared first in 1840 as “The Crayon Papers, the Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent,” in the Knickerbocker or New York Monthly Magazine. Based on Irving’s conversations with William P. DuVal in the early 1830s, the stories, though embellished, told of DuVal’s coming of age on the Kentucky frontier. Neither DuVal nor Irving made any attempt to hide Ringwood’s true identity. Indeed as Irving’s narrator Geoffrey Crayon noted in 1840, “Ralph Ringwood though a fictitious name, is a real personage: the worthy original is now living and flourishing in humble station. I have given some anecdotes of his early and eccentric career in . . . the very words in which he related them.” The stories, Crayon continued, “certainly afforded strong temptations to the embellishments of fiction; but I thought them so strikingly characteristic of the individual and of the scenes and society into which his peculiar humors carried him, and I preferred give them in their original simplicity.” (“Crayon Papers” 152n). This paper explores, investigates and analyzes the the DuVal-Irving connection in the context of his political career. But now back to the 1848 congressional campaign. In a satirical fashion common to early nineteenth century journalism, the Pensacola Gazette printed a spoof depiction of the 1848 Florida Democratic nominating convention. As the mock description goes, delegates were deploring the lack of electable candidates, when a man from Tallahassee puts DuVal’s name in nomination, “hisses from several parts of the house”

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are heard and a voice cries out, “he is an old turn-coat!” But as the man explains, the issue is the following: not whom we will have but whom we can elect. I know of no other Individual whom we can elect. And you yourselves gentlemen can’t mention one. Now, I will tell you what my reasons are for thinking that we can elect ex-governor DuVal. In the first place—though he has been hitherto a little somewhat erratic in his course, “I think he is now a good and sound democrat. He goes in for the Mexican War tooth and toenail and is in favor of all the other good old Jeffersonian measures. And fellow members, you all know his powers at stumping. You all know his felicity at telling an anecdote. I tell you, gentlemen, Cabell will be no where before him. The old governor will be able to upset every thing he can say, with one good laughable story. But, gentlemen, these matters are but trifles compared with what I am going to mention to you—it is that upon which I base my preference for him as an available candidate. Fellow Democrats! Did any of you ever meet with a tale by Washington Irving called Ralph Ringwood? The hero of the story is said to be old Governor DuVal—the tale is one of Irving’s masterpieces. He has brought all the powers of his splendid imagination to bear upon it. You know what favorites he always makes his heroes. That story, gentleman, will be irresistible. We ourselves know that most of it came out of Irving’s head—but what of it? The people don’t know it—they will believe it true as the gospel. It will take mightily with the Whigs of West Florida, and with the romance loving Creoles of Pensacola. As to the Democrats, gentlemen, it will make no difference to them who we nominate—they will vote for the nominee of the convention let it be who it will. All we want to do is, to gain over a few of the Whig votes. And, gentlemen, is it my opinion, that we will be certain to do that with the help of Washington Irving and a few of the old governor’s anecdotes.” [A stir among the members.] Capital!! [Cries of Capital from all sides] The West Florida Member: “Well, I will declare! Who would have thought of that? Why the old man won’t be so bad after all. Three cheers, gentlemen, for governor Duval (three tremendous cheers). Now three cheers for Washington Irving (Cheers)” . . . . Governor DuVal was unanimously nominated. (“Ralph Ringwood”)

Even before the publication of the Irving’s stories, DuVal had nurtured the “Ralph Ringwood Myth” when it served his purposes. But in the 1848 campaign, the notoriety backfired. It seemed only to confirm DuVal’s shifty stances on issues, his playing fast and loose with the facts, and the exaggeration of his record. According to the “Ringwood Myth,” DuVal left his Richmond home as a young lad after an argument with his father, promising never to return to Virginia unless as a member of Congress

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from Kentucky. Migrating to Kentucky he lived in the woods, hunting, surviving by his own resources, and eventually reading law. After thirteen years in the wilderness DuVal had married a rustic beauty, fathered a large family, became a successful lawyer, was elected to Congress, and returned home on his way to Washington to redeem his promise. DuVal had told this story so often to friends, assembled gatherings, and of course, Irving himself that the myth took on a life of its own. By 1840 Irving’s stories were widely circulated and soon became available to Floridians via newspaper reprints. The positive political spin for DuVal, a candidate for office in 1840, was not lost on the reader. For example, on October 5, 1840 the St. Joseph Times reprinted the stories and added, We extract from the Knickerbocker Magazine on our first page the quaint graphic and original narrative of Ralph Ringwood and commend it to the perusal of our Florida friends, many of whom have heard these tales orally from Ralph himself. This spirited auto-biographist, is now a candidate for the Senate from Middle Florida, has drank the good old Vernacular, talked politics, religion, love, and poetry (as the case might be) with almost every man, woman and child in Middle Florida. The fun, the frolic and the indomitable enterprise of his youth, is as sparkling and fresh yet, as when he first set out for the Buffalo or tracked the wild deer to its covert.

Like most myths, the story carried some elements of truth, but most of the facts of DuVal’s past were quite different. Born one year after the winning of American Independence in Richmond, Virginia, and dying six years before the Civil War, William Pope DuVal lived a life full of excitement, adventure, triumph, tragedies, and disappointments. The son of a well-to-do Richmond lawyer, Revolutionary War hero, and scion of the prominent Huguenot family, DuVal joined thousands of other Virginians heading west to Kentucky in 1800 with his older brother. But DuVal had advantages that other migrants lacked. And this was cash and connections. Legal records show that the motive of DuVal’s journey to the “Dark and Bloody Ground” of Kentucky had nothing to do with a young boy’s dispute with his father. In actuality, the DuVal brothers’ real purpose was to patent thousands of acres of Kentucky land their father had acquired from his service in the American Revolution. While the dangers of migration was real enough, DuVal, with a loan from his father and land warrants in his saddlebags, found relatives and his father’s business associates who eased the transition from urbane Richmond to Kentucky frontier.

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Reading law in the Bardstown area, DuVal achieved notoriety as a lawyer and local politician. In 1812 he was elected to Congress, but before going to Washington he volunteered for service in the War of 1812. DuVal’s service in the Illinois Country in the War of 1812 and as a member of 13th Congress was brief and inauspicious, but as a “War Hawk” congressman from Kentucky, DuVal made a record for himself as he debated controversial legislation of the day, including the embargo, conscription, and the national bank. And in the Fall of 1814, he was among other members of the 13th Congress who arrived to find the capital in ashes after the British attack. Most importantly, DuVal met many men who would have a significant impact on his future career in politics. Among these was his life-long mentor, John C. Calhoun. Returning to Kentucky after one term, he practiced law, but fell on hard times during the Panic of 1819. But relief came in 1821 when Calhoun, James Monroe’s Secretary of War, used his influence to have DuVal appointed judge in the newly created Florida territory. The next year, also through Calhoun’s influence, Monroe appointed DuVal the territory’s second governor, succeeding Andrew Jackson’s brief three month tenure. DuVal served three consecutive terms as territorial governor until 1834. In those years he presided over the first civil territorial government of Florida, and the founding of the capital at Tallahassee. As territorial governor, DuVal labored under extreme hardships. When he arrived in the territory in 1822 Florida contained only a few thousand white inhabitants that were clustered around two Spanish towns, Pensacola and St. Augustine, separated by almost 500 miles of wilderness. Also in Florida were roughly 5,000 Indians, many of them refuge Creeks, recently arrived from conflicts in Alabama. They joined other Creeks of varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds, collectively referred to as Seminoles. In the Peninsula some bands lived alongside their black allies in towns. Other Creeks, who had allied themselves with Andrew Jackson during the First Seminole War, lived on reservations along the Apalachicola River. Still other bands of Indians lived in “Middle Florida,” the region that would form the focal point of white settlements, in years following the founding of Tallahassee. As ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs, DuVal worked closely with Washington officials, and in overseeing the initial negotiations with the Seminole Indians. Careful examination of DuVal’s correspondence shows a mixed picture of his attitudes regarding Florida’s Native Americans. Some of his writings reflect extreme compassion while others reflect frustration and anger. One close student of the Seminole Wars summarizes these conflicting emotions well:

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William Pope DuVal and Washington Irving One can assume the double burden of governorship and superintendency had frayed his nerves. After all, he was under steady attack from all quarters. The tender-minded assailed him for having used force” with the Indians in various agreements with the Indians (which he denied); “the economy-minded criticized him for spending money to feed the Indians (yet if he had not done so, they would have starved); while day in and day out the slaveholders carped at him for every move. (Mahon 61)

Though tension existed between DuVal and Seminole leaders, the majority trusted him, and the fact that there was no major rebellion until he left office is a tribute to his skill. As a political appointee DuVal was closely linked to national politics in the 1820s-1840s. During his tenure as governor and throughout his life DuVal maintained close political ties to Kentucky, Washington, and to the Virginia Dynasty. A Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican politician turned Jacksonian Democrat, DuVal, though a Kentuckian, opposed Henry Clay throughout his career. Even before the “Corrupt Bargain” episode, DuVal was convinced that Jackson’s elevation to the Whitehouse was inevitable. Joining his Kentucky associates in earnest, DuVal worked hard for Old Hickory’s election in 1824 and 1828. He and his friend Richard Keith Call, visited the Hermitage often during those years. Not long after the election, however, DuVal was one of the many casualties of the Peggy Eaton Affair and the Nullification Crisis. The Jackson-Calhoun split was catastrophic for DuVal’s political fortunes. The fallout soured DuVal and Jackson’s cordial relationship and the result was that John Eaton himself supplanted DuVal as territorial governor of Florida in 1834. The break also wrecked John C. Calhoun’s presidential aspirations, elevating Martin Van Buren to the presidency in 1836. Not surprisingly DuVal and his friend Call were luke-warm on Van Buren, and eventually broke with his administration. Both supported William Henry Harrison (DuVal’s old War of 1812 comrade) and the Whig Party in the Election of 1840. DuVal eventually returned to the Democrats but the temporary departure from party orthodoxy damaged his standing in the party—both nationally and also later in Florida. After DuVal left the governor’s chair, he lent his efforts to the cause of Texas Independence. Two of his sons participated in that conflict: Burr, his oldest was killed in the Goliad Massacre, while another son John C. was one of the few survivors. In 1836 DuVal he was appointed an honorary brigadier general by the Republic of Texas, and traveled throughout the South raising men and supplies. Returning to Florida, DuVal was elected to the Florida State Constitutional Convention (1838) and the Florida Senate in 1839, becoming its President in 1841. After his

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wife’s death that year, he resigned from the Florida Senate and moved with his daughter and son-in-law to St. Augustine. From that time until his quixotic run for Congress in 1848 as a Democrat, DuVal dabbled in law and sought unsuccessfully to obtain other federal offices. DuVal lost his bid for Congress in 1848 and soon thereafter migrated to Galveston and then Austin, Texas, joining his Thomas’s law practice and playing the role of elder statesman. In his later years, DuVal despaired of future of the Union. By the middle of the 1840s DuVal renewed his relationship with John C. Calhoun, writing the aging statesman on pressing issues of the day such as the annexation of Texas, the growing fissures between the North and South, and his sentiments regarding the inevitable breakup of the Union. More than just the ramblings of a bitter, disenchanted, and frustrated man, DuVal’s sentiments are emblematic of an older “War-Hawk” generation, whose ideas and leadership is cast aside as obsolete. DuVal eventually set up shop in Washington, where as a kind of Washington “insider,” he represented claimants before Congress, and in this he was well-known and successful. In 1854 he died there. While these broad outlines of DuVal’s career in politics are interesting and eventful, these facts do not tell us much about the man, his personality, or what made him so compelling. DuVal cultivated the art of oratory and story-telling while witnessing and participating in courtroom and political battles in the West. Traveling often on stages, sloops, and steamboats between Kentucky, Washington and Florida, DuVal was a convivial companion. DuVal delighted in telling stories, jokes, and personal anecdotes. His charismatic, jovial personality captivated his listeners, even as it antagonized his opponents. He also drank--sometimes to excess. According to one observer, DuVal was a “manly, vigorous speaker” and his speeches were “characterized by exalted sentiments and a fervid patriotism.” He possessed “unswerving integrity and all the genial graces that mark the perfect gentleman.” Later in life he was described as a short, fleshy, heavy-set man, not over five feet six inches high, flabby cheeks, and an inveterate tobacco chewer.” DuVal, the man continued, was a “man of rare gifts,” known more for rare colloquial powers, than for professional labors and ability” (Little 171, 193-4). It is in this vein as a flamboyant stump speaker, singer, and tall-taleteller, that DuVal became the model for the main character in Washington Irving's “Ralph Ringwood Tales.” DuVal’s precise relationship to the famous writer is obscure, but they may have become acquainted with one another as early as 1807, when the New Yorker visited Richmond as a newspaper correspondent reporting on Aaron Burr’s treason trial. As a young man Irving’s friend Martin Van Buren also visited Richmond often,

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taking in the urbane conviviality and hospitality of the town. DuVal’s father’s house in Richmond was a focal point in the community and his hospitality was legion. The town was crowded during the exciting trial and it is plausible that DuVal--though living in Kentucky at the time—was also in town. Another likely meeting may have occurred in 1814 when DuVal was a member of Congress. That year Irving, his brother (who had been appointed to Congress), and their brother-in-law James Kirke Paulding, also an aspiring writer, came to the capital together. The Irving brothers and Paulding were popular, especially among younger members of Congress. Paulding, according to one account, was irresistibly funny--“his grave hawk-nosed countenance gave no clue to the dry humor of his conversation which delighted his friends.” One can almost envision DuVal regaling the Irving brothers and Paulding with the songs, stories, and ribaldry of the wild realms of the Kentucky frontier (Johnston 87-89, 123). Paulding, like Irving, would go on to write many books, including the play The Lion of the West, which also appeared as a play. According to some, DuVal inspired Paulding’s hero in the play, the Nimrod Wildfire character.3 Nearly fifteen years later in 1833, circumstances found DuVal and Irving in the capital again. Irving had just completed a diplomatic stint in England and DuVal was nearing the completion of his fourth term as territorial governor of Florida. It is during that brief period in Washington that Irving carefully recorded DuVal’s stories of his experiences in Virginia, Kentucky, and Florida. Irving quotes Ringwood and when he does we can reasonably believe, with embellishments, that it is DuVal himself sharing his memories with Irving. While the tales form a kind of fictional autobiography as DuVal narrated them to Irving, they conform pretty closely chronologically to DuVal’s life. Though fictional, the “Ralph Ringwood Tales,” offer us a window into DuVal’s life and times, or at least the image that he hoped to convey to the public at large. Irving’s and Paulding’s “historical record” of DuVal’s exploits lived on in future writing about the family. Betty Paschal O’Conner, DuVal’s grand-daughter, herself an accomplished author, essentially repeats Irving’s sketch of the governor in her My Beloved South, (1913). A fanciful “moon-light and magnolia” image of the South, O’Conner uses her family as the back drop. Though she never met her grandfather, she used Irving’s stories and familial oral traditions to paint a picture of the son of a well-to-do Virginia aristocrat who strikes out on his own for the “dark and bloody ground” of Kentucky, lives by hunting, and then settles down to read law and take a wife. Redeeming his promise not to return to

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Virginia until elected as a member of Congress, the hero eventually becomes territorial governor of Florida, where he tames hostile Indians and civilizes the frontier. Separating the fact from fiction in William Pope DuVal’s life is difficult, and at times impossible. Yet the exercise is interesting and productive on a number of counts. Through DuVal's life, many elements of America’s early national and antebellum history can be brought to light. For example, the son a well-todo Virginian of the Revolutionary War generation, evidence suggests that William P. DuVal disagreed with his father’s growing ambivalence about slavery. DuVal’s father emancipated his slaves. The son himself never was a large slaveholder. But to him, as well as most others of his time and place, DuVal was certain that the future settlement, development, and prosperity of the Old Southwest was directly linked to maintaining and extending the Peculiar Institution. During his twelve years as Florida’s territorial governor, this political calculus dominated his thinking and action. An examination of DuVal's political career can also tell us a great deal more about Southern history. Living a long life, DuVal was forced to alter long held beliefs based on changing political and economic realities. He was often accused of inconsistency or in modern-day parlance--“flipflopping,” as he adjusted to new realities. His stance on banking is only one case in point. DuVal’s life—especially as Irving wrote about it, also helps us understand early early nineteenth-century American literature. While Irving’s “Ralph Ringwood Tales” can not be classified as Southwestern humor, the stories must have influenced writers like Johnson J. Hooper. (One can see DuVal as Hooper’s hero Capt. Simon Suggs: “It is good to be shifty in a new country.”) Perhaps Davy Crockett, whose autobiography captured the imagination of Americans at about the same time is a more apt comparison. Both men left their states for the Lone Star State after humiliating political setbacks. (Crockett in Tennessee and DuVal in Florida). One can imagine William Pope DuVal, paraphrasing Crockett after losing the 1848 race for Congress: “I am going to Texas, and the voters of Florida can go to Hell!”

Notes 1

Another newspaper likened the congressional campaign to a horse race between Ned (Cabell) and Old Mico (DuVal), who “had been on the turf long; has run many hard races, though most of them on the scrub order. He was first brought on the turf in Kentucky, under the very injudicious trainer John Pope. His success over that course was of short duration—the track being entirely composed of Clay,

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it very soon broke him down. He to this day, at the mention of Clay becomes infuriated, and kicks everything near him. . . . In some of his scrub races he has acquired that ugly habit of bolting, or flying the track, which he will do again if the course becomes very heavy. He is also known to be an aged racer, and of course will have to carry extra weights. (Union Bank Faith Bonds)--which will be more destructive to him than the clay of Kentucky.” Ocala Argus, June 8, 1848. 2 Frank L. Snyder carefully explores the Irving- DuVal relationship in Frank L. Snyder, “William Pope DuVal: An Extraordinary Folklorist,” Florida Historical Quarterly 69 (October 1990): 204-07. Some writers have accepted Irving’s account of DuVal’s life essentially at face value. See also Owen Knauss, “William Pope DuVal: Pioneer and State Builder,” Florida Historical Quarterly 11 (January 1933), 97; Roy L. Swift, Civilizers: The DuVals of Texas from Virginia through Kentucky and Florida, (Austin: Eakin Press, 1992), 6-7, 15-17. Other stories of DuVal’s exploits appeared in “The Seminoles,” “The Origin of the White, the Red, and the Black Men: A Seminole Tradition,” and “Conspiracy of Neamathla: Authentic Sketch,” in Knickerbocker or New York Monthly Magazine 16 (October 1840) 339-41; 341-2, 343-47. The stories were reprinted in New Yorker 10 (October 10, 17, 1840) 55-6, 71. Ralph Ringwood is specifically identified as Governor William Pope Duval of Florida in the first edition of the published book in 1855, p. 249n published first in book form as Chronicles of Wolfert’s Roost and other Papers (London, 1855) American Edition with title: Woolfort’s Roost and other Papers (New York 1855). 3 The Lion of the West first appeared in Park Theatre, New York on April 25, 1831 In March 1833 the play debuted in England under the title, “A Kentuckian’s Trip to New York in 1815” at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. After playing in theatres in Edinburgh and Dublin, the Nimrod Wildfire character played to enthusiastic audiences in New York and other United States for more than twenty years. Arnold, James Kirke Paulding, 99; James N. Tidwell, ed. The Lion of the West: Retitled the Kentuckian, or a Trip to New York, (Stanford, California: Standard University Press, 1954), 8-9. Whether or not DuVal is actually the inspiration of Paulding’s Nimrod Wildfire character is a matter of dispute. Some scholars claim the Nimrod Wildfire character was modeled after Davy Crockett. James Tidwell makes no mention of DuVal being the character for Nimrod Wildfire. He also disputes the contention that Davy Crockett was the inspiration for the character. The plausible Crockett connection to the Nimrod Wildfire character is explored in John Seelye, “A Well-Wrought Crockett, Or How the Fakelorists Passed through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky,” in Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy, 1786-1986, edited by Michael A. Lofaro, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 23. Richard Boyd Hauck contends that Crockett was likely the source but admits that he “was not the sole inspiration for Wildfire.” Hauck, “Making it all up: Davy Crockett in the Theatre,” in ibid, 103-111; Mark Derr, The Frontiersman: The Real Life and Many Legends of Davy Crockett, (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993), 189-91. Also on Paulding see Amos L. Herold, James Kirke Paulding: Versatile American, (New York: AMS Press, Inc. 1966); Joseph J. Arpad, “John Wesley Jarvis, James Kirke Paulding, and Colonel Nimrod Wildfire,” New York Folklore

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Quarterly 21 (1965): 92-106; Ralph M. Alderman, ed. The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), vxi, xviii.

Works Cited Apalachicola Commercial Advertiser (September 16, 1848). “The Crayon Papers, the Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood, Noted Down from His Conversations by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” in the Knickerbocker or New York Monthly Magazine 16 (August 1840): 152-65, 152n, and (September 1840): 258-66. “Ralph Ringwood, Or a Scene in the Late Democratic State Convention,” Pensacola Gazette, May 13, 1848; Marianna Florida Whig, May 24, 1848. Johnston, Johanna. The Heart that Would Not Hold: A Biography of Washington Irving, (New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc. 1971 Little, Lucius. Ben Hardin and his Times. Louisville, KY: Courier-Journal, 1887. Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War. Gainesville: U. of FL Press, 1971. St. Joseph Times (October 5, 1840).

CHASING THE FACES OF FLORIDA’S COLONIAL LADIES: A BRIEF MEMOIR ON ASSEMBLING PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL FOR THE STUDY OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE BRITISH FLORIDAS, 1763-1784 DEBORAH L. BAUER

Betsey Pilot, the wife of one of the [31st] regiment's officers who survived this epidemic and who was at the center of social life wherever she lived, wrote an account years later of her time in Pensacola and, after the regiment moved to East Florida, of her experiences in St. Augustine. A woman's depiction of life in the British Floridas this unique and still unpublished manuscript reveals that women in the British Floridas had to endure at least as many hardships as the men. 1

A brief paragraph to be sure, but the two sentences written by Robin F.A. Fabel in his survey article on the history of the British Floridas are what launched my career as a historian of colonial Florida. As a graduate student at the University of North Florida (UNF) in Jacksonville, I had declared myself as an Europeanist. I was in the process of completing a Masters thesis on medieval Irish history at UNF when I found myself in the very common position of having to fulfill the program's requirements of completing coursework in a non-primary field. At that point in my young career, I fully embraced my dreams of becoming a British medievalist and vowed that I would take the academic world by storm once I had completed my groundbreaking research on gender and sexuality in medieval English history. As a result of my declaration of a European specialization, the program requirements considered any graduate seminar in American history to satisfy the non-primary field graduate coursework required to complete my degree. Unfortunately for me, an American history graduate seminar was only offered twice a year, one graduate

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seminar offered every fall semester. There was no certainty as to what topic might be taught by certain professors during the fall semester. I had avoided taking the American history graduate seminar offered during my first semester at UNF. The topic of the graduate seminar in American history taught that fall concentrated on the study of the involvement of the United States in World War II. As I had always considered any historical topic that occurred after 1865 to be boring and of little interest to me, I decided to take a chance that when the next American history graduate seminar was offered the following year, its thematic topic had to be of more interest to me than the modern twentieth century. As luck would have it, the next graduate seminar offered was a course taught by Dr. Daniel L. Schafer entitled Florida History. My knowledge of Florida history was somewhat more developed than most non-native Floridians in that, as a graduate of the Florida public school system, in the eighth grade, I had taken the obligatorily traditional fieldtrip to "the Oldest City" of St. Augustine. Located on the east coast of Florida approximately 45 minutes south of Jacksonville, St. Augustine was founded 1565 by Spanish colonists under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. Menéndez and his soldiers were eager to eradicate a French settlement located north of Jacksonville near Amelia Island. French Huguenots had established the French settlement, known as Fort Caroline, under the leadership of Jean Ribault and René de Laudonnière in 1564. The presence of French Protestants, on what the Spanish viewed as their Roman Catholic lands, infuriated the Spanish crown as they claimed ownership of La Florida dating to the March 1513 expedition of Juan Ponce de León. More famous for its “discovery” of the so-called Fountain of Youth, de León’s tenure in Florida had been brief. He left Florida after a few months because his scouts determined that no large native empires, rich in gold and silver mineral wealth, existed on the Florida peninsula ripe for conquest. Unlike later conquistadors, such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, who proved that obscene amounts of gold and silver could be plundered in New Spain, as exemplified by the conquests of the Aztec Empire in Mexico in 1521 and the Incan Empire in Peru in 1533, the value of Florida to the Spanish was its strategic importance. The Gulf Stream’s currents, which would carry Spanish treasures galleons weighted down with plunder from the Caribbean and South America, turned north towards Europe just off the coast of St. Augustine. As the last stop where pirates might attack the treasure fleets before the galleons travelled into the relative safety of the open seas, north Florida provided a perfect spot to ambush ships, unless the Spanish built a fort there to protect their interests. That fort, as I learned during my fieldtrip to St. Augustine on a very cold

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day in March, was completed in 1695 and still guards St. Augustine’s harbor today – the Castillo de San Marcos. Besides the fact that I knew the Spanish had built the Castillo, an impressive structure made out of coquina—a local building material made out of limestone and shells—and that the Spanish had stayed in Florida a very long time, I didn’t know much about Florida’s colonial past. As I walked down the picturesque St. George and Charlotte Streets in St. Augustine that are home to trendy cafes, gift shops, and boutiques making the oldest streets in the city home to St. John’s County’s equivalent of International Drive in Orlando, I didn’t imagine that I was walking the same path that thousands of women had walked every day throughout over four hundred years of history. While the influence of the Spanish’ tenure in St. Augustine during the First Spanish Period (1513-1763) and the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821) has left its mark on the city, another socio-cultural influence can be found, if one knows where to look. For twenty-one years, the British Empire had controlled St. Augustine, and Florida, between 1763 and 1784. St. Augustine served as the capital of East Florida, the fourteenth British colony in North America, and one of only two American colonies that remained completely loyal to the British crown during the war. The tour guides in St. Augustine somehow neglected to mention that part, and so I had no idea that the history of Florida’s colonial past had a British tint if one knew where to look. Buoyed with my incomplete knowledge of Spanish Florida, I walked into Dr. Schafer's classroom figuring that the Spanish presence in Florida would ensure that at least some portion of the class’s topical content wouldn't be devoted to post-1865 personages and events. I would love to admit that I clearly remember the day Dr. Schafer handed me the seminar's reading list for the semester, but I don't. I would love to admit that during the class's first meeting I clearly remember Dr. Schafer explaining that a significant portion of the semester's coursework would be devoted to developing individual research projects based on topics of personal interest, but I can't. What I do remember is that Dr. Schafer told the class a date by which original research topics had to be approved and his suggestion that if we needed any inspiration, we consult the monograph that would serve as the seminar's textbook. At the time, my early graduate school research had focused on gender and sexuality in medieval British history. My interest in women's issues carried over to American history, and I hoped that I might be able to carry that focus over into the research project that I would work on during the course of the semester for Dr. Schafer. At the end of one class meeting, I patiently waited in line for the rest of the students who needed to consult

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individually with Dr. Schafer on their research project topics in a one-onone discussion with the professor. When it was my turn, I had only a simple answer to offer to Dr. Schafer’s very complex question--"And what topic is it that you wish to conduct research on during the course of the semester?” I remember my response was something along the lines of "I'd like to know if it would be possible to focus on a research topic related to the role of women and their experiences in Florida." Dr. Schafer was silent for a moment before he nodded and said, "Well, there is this one woman that I know of... she was married to a parson who lived in St. Augustine during the British period. I know a portrait of her has survived and some of her papers can be found somewhere in Massachusetts." At the mention of the word “Massachusetts," my heart fell a thousand feet. Setting aside my confusion over the reason why a woman who had lived in East Florida would have her portrait and papers located in a state that was hundreds of miles away, I still knew that Massachusetts was not a place I could easily drive to in order to scour archives myself for relevant primary source documentation. For a historian, the procurement of primary sources from just about any private archive or library manuscript collection is not an easy thing. The process through which historians normally obtain relevant research materials is first to identify the archive where they think pertinent documents may exist, identify the collection within the archive that they think contains the actual documents, and then proceed to page through file folder after file folder to find relevant documents. If a finding aide has been written for the relevant manuscript collection, a historian's job is much easier. It may be possible, depending on the holding institutions research policies, to request photocopies of the primary source documents via email or postal letter. The research and duplication fees can be expensive, but not as expensive as the cost of a research trip to travel to the actual archive and go through the collection, which is often the only option available if no finding aid has been written for the collection. In this particular case, at the point in time where Dr. Schafer had the initial conversation with me, he had only a name. "Dolly Forbes," he had told me. "She was married to John Forbes, the chief Anglican clergyman in East Florida during the British years." He nodded, "See what you can find out between now and next week's class, and we'll talk again then." I left that class with a single name and headed home to utilize a researcher's best friend—Google. Over the next week, I found out several things. “Dolly Forbes,” more formally known as Dorothy Murray Forbes, was born on February 9, 1745, in London, before her family immigrated to North Carolina. Her father, John Murray, was a prominent Scot who

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earned dabbled in many professions, including farming at the family plantation of Pointe Repose in Wilmington and local politics. Murray, a fiercely devoted Loyalist, remained staunch in his support of the British crown during the years of the imperial crisis and American Revolution in 1760s and 1770s. John Murray’s younger sister Elizabeth, who lived in Boston, became a surrogate mother to young Dorothy when her own mother died shortly after giving birth in February 1757. She spent the rest of her childhood diving her time between her aunt’s home in Massachusetts and her father’s plantation in North Carolina until she met John Forbes. A young Scottish reverend, John Forbes had travelled to Massachusetts to receive medical treatment not available in his remote home of East Florida. John Forbes was a prominent governmental official and landholder in East Florida, and he became interested in Dorothy Murray during his visit in late 1767. The couple married on February 2, 1769, and the newly married Dorothy Murray Forbes traveled with her new husband to live in St. Augustine, East Florida's capital and largest settlement. Google, and a few other pertinent tools favored by amateur and professional researchers alike, including the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), the Library of Congress Catalog, and WorldCat, identified that manuscript collections at several institutions possessed documents that listed Dorothy as the author or recipient of various correspondence. I determined that the two most promising leads were archives housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Baker Library at the Harvard University School of Business.2 Each institution was located near Boston, but there was simply not enough information available to remotely request copies of the primary source documents without visiting the archives myself. I also knew that it would be necessary to visit the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the museum I discovered which owned the surviving portrait of a young Dorothy that renowned colonial artist John Singleton Copley had painted c. 1765. For the topic of a dissertation, Dr. Schafer's tip would prove ideal. However, I feared that its suitability of the topic for a semester-long research project would prove unrealistic. I went to class the next week with a heavy heart, ready to report to Dr. Schafer my findings. At the end of class, I once again waited until the line of students needing to speak with Dr. Schafer had dwindled, and it was my turn to report my findings. I must admit that I was a bit confused when he stated that he was confused as to why I was discouraged with my findings because he said we would be able to use some grant money he had available to finance a research trip to Boston.

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The magic words had been spoken, my doom and gloom dissipated almost instantaneously, and I was on a plane to Boston about six weeks later. My initial foray into conducting primary source research at historical archives was influenced by the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the logistics of working at the institutions in the manuscript collections. Aside from the fact that I knew I would need letters of reference to establish my academic creditentials to gain access to certain archives, I knew very little about what to do once I got into the research rooms. I learned quickly. Research librarians and directors of manuscript collections can make your life either very easy or very difficult depending on how much they decide they want to help you. Archivists and research librarians are the ones who know who has touched what collection when, where, and why, and if they do not know what is contained within a collection, they can tell you that as well. Archivists and research librarians are also the hardworking souls who decide what can be touched by whom, what will be pulled from the library’s stacks and when, and most importantly, what can be photographed or photocopied when researchers submit duplication requests. Befriending every archivist and research librarian I can is of paramount importance whenever I go to a new research institution. I am not above admitting to passing along “thank you” bribes, running the gamut of written letters of thanks on institutional letterhead that can be put in a personnel file to gold-foil wrapped boxes chocked full of Godiva chocolate-yumminess. You never know if, and when, you may need to return to a research institution, and so it is always best to leave a positive image in the archivists’ and research librarian’s minds… “just in case.” Such blatant pandering to the many hardworking souls who rarely get credit for their labors, aside from a brief line of thanks in someone’s acknowledgements if someone publishes, deserve whatever thanks I can provide… and more. They make any historian’s job, particularly a historian researching such far-reaching topics as I, less painful, and more importantly, realistic to complete. Realistic expectations of fulfilling research goals are the guide by which all historians measure their choices in pursuit of publishing scholarly monographs and journal articles. If a historian cannot realistically complete the research necessary for such a publication in a reasonable amount of time, the research topic being considered becomes immensely less attractive. After all, what is the point in exerting a tremendous amount of time, effort, and other resources in conducting research if it can never be fully realized in a publication of some form? Such a quandary weighed heavily on my mind as I continued to track the surviving sources that told the story of Dorothy Murray Forbes’ life in British Florida.

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While my first research trip to Massachusetts proved fruitful because I saw Forbes’ painting by Copley, and I had returned to Florida with a slew of information about her childhood and her later life, there was an astonishing gap in the information I hadn’t been able to find out about her life in Florida. While sometimes a gap is indicative of papers that did not survive to the modern day, such a specific gap in the correspondence indicated to me that maybe the papers I sought were just deposited at another research institution. I went back to the proverbial drawing board to search the pathways of the internet for a new lead on the research. A few weeks later, I hit pay dirt once again as I thought I had found a reference to Forbes in a manuscript collection labeled primarily referencing the fortunes of Forbes’ paternal family in New York.3 A subsequent research trip to the New York Historical Society to collect manuscript materials on the life of Dorothy Murray Forbes resulted in one such claim. "We know that the collection is extensive, and there isn't a detailed finding aide for it, per se," one archivist had told me. "But, just because I can't tell you that papers about her aren't in there, doesn't mean they aren't. I just don't know because no one has touched those manuscript boxes for quite some time." The plight of a historian is often at the whim of fate, as we are left to the tender mercy of trial and error. Six manuscript boxes yielded nothing on Forbes during that research trip to New York. One hour before closing time, well after the deadline for final materials to be paged from the stacks had passed, I pulled the final manuscript box towards me. I have never believed that seven is my lucky number, but in that particular case, it was. I hit the jackpot as I pulled letter after letter about Forbes out of the manuscript box and found even more relevant information about the four years that she had lived in St. Augustine than I had during my research trip to Boston. In the spring of 1773, Forbes found herself pregnant for the third time in four years. Living on the southernmost frontier of Great Britain's colonial empire, East Florida had limited medical care, and the fact that Forbes’ mother had died from complications due to childbirth may have swayed her to write to her father to come to take her "home" to Boston before her third confinement ended. John Murray did as his daughter pleaded, and Dorothy arrived in Boston in May 1773 just a few weeks before she gave birth to her youngest son on June 11, 1773. Forbes never returned to live in St. Augustine but stayed in Massachusetts to raise her family during the years of the American Revolution. Her experience is quite reflective of that which many other women who lived in the British Floridas between 1763 and 1784 underwent. Such women did not stay for very long in the fourteenth and fifteenth British colonies in North

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America, and when they left, they took their newspapers, diaries and journals, private papers, and their letter books of personal correspondence with them. Unlike many of the other colonies, such as Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, the men and women who lived in East and West Florida during the British years never made bequests of those papers to any research institutions that would act to safe guard the wealth of primary source documents left to the public. In 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, Great Britain found itself the loser. Spain had invaded West Florida and had taken it by conquest in 1781. East Florida remained a British stronghold until the end of the war, but the British traded it to Spain for the more important naval base of the Bahamas that had been captured by General Bernardo de Gálvez in 1782. The British period in Florida history lasted for twenty-one years. In 1784, the Spanish returned to La Florida, and the British population evacuated, leaving Florida for many different destinations. Some colonists returned to Great Britain, taking refuge in family homes scattered throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. For others, the Old World was too different from the one they had grown to know in the early years of the imperial crisis. Other British colonies, like Nova Scotia in the north, and Bermuda in the southern Caribbean, offered much more palatable choices. For some, despite the loss of their colonies to the Patriot cause, the new United States remained the most attractive place to seek their fortunes, and so many evacuees immigrated to the new states of Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. Wherever these women who lived in Florida during the British years decided to go, they took their papers with them. In the early weeks of my research chase to find these faces of the colonial ladies of British Florida, I wondered why no one had ever attempted to treat the topic before. I knew from prior research that other historians of colonial America and of Florida recognized the value and importance of such a study. At a roundtable discussion held in 1969 at the first annual Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference about the current state of research in British Florida, Jeanette Long commented that "...the women played an important part. I think we need to do some further research on the women.”4 In the spring of 1995, Robin F.A. Fabel, echoed Long's sentiments when he called for "a social history of the colony and an in-depth look at its women.”5 Thirteen years after Fabel’s comments, and almost forty years after Long voiced her hope that women’s role in shaping the history of the British Floridas would receive more historical treatment, those desires remain unrealized. To date, a scholarly publication

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on the status of gender, sexuality, and social relationships that shaped daily life in the British Floridas between 1763 and 1784 remains unpublished. Now, having chased more than the paper trail of just Dorothy Murray Forbes, I can state emphatically why no one has ever published on the lives of women in British Florida to date--it is an insane logistical nightmare that I doubt very seriously could have been accomplished before the age of the internet. There is neither rhyme nor reason as to where a woman's papers may have survived and been deposited after her death. The only constant that exists in conducting research about the lives of women who lived in East and West Florida during the British years is that you will never find more than a few isolated jewels in one place, and most of the time, what will be uncovered by the historical researcher is the result of a vaguely abstract clue and lots of luck. One such vague clue that led me down the path that would develop into my second major chase to research a woman who had lived in the British Floridas was found in the pages of the first article I had read about British Florida during Dr. Schafer's research seminar. This is the same article that contained the two sentences about Betsey Pilot and her “unique and still unpublished manuscript” about life in East and West Florida during the British period.6 While the reference to the mysterious “Betsey Pilot” and her diary has fascinated me from the very first time I had read about it, the tale of “Betsey” and her diary has always bothered me as well. I immediately began to ponder the possible reasons as to what had prompted the article's author, Dr. Robin F.A. Fabel, Professor of History Emeritus, Auburn University, to mention a source without any corresponding citation or footnote about its provenance. This was a matter worthy of query to be sure, as I have known since I took my very first history class as an undergraduate student in history, the first skill we are taught is how to footnote any information pertinent to the sources we use in our writings. Considering Dr. Fabel’s stature as a preeminent historian in the field, it was incomprehensible that he had forgotten to include the information. Perhaps, then, a citation had gone astray during the editorial process? Possible, but unlikely. The only logical answer left to me by the process of elimination was that there had to be a third alternative that I had not considered. When I asked Dr. Schafer his opinion as to why Dr. Fabel, a leading historian in the field of colonial British Florida history, had omitted such a vital citation, he remained as confused as I did. Dr. Schafer’s only suggestion was that I needed to inquire of Dr. Fabel myself for an answer. The search for the answer to my question about the Pilot diary is long and complex. Suffice to say, Dr. Fabel's retirement from the history department at Auburn made it quite difficult to find up-to-date

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contact information so t hatI could ask the question. Several months went by before luck once again stepped in, and a mutual colleague provided me with a current postal address. Since that time, I have maintained a delightful correspondence with Dr. Fabel on a multitude of issues related to researching the history of colonial British Florida. Unfortunately, his response to my query as to why he omitted the citation about the Pilot diary was unsatisfying--he had omitted the footnote simply because he had no accurate information to include in the citation about the manuscript and its current ownership. The Pilot diary remains in the private holding of the descendants of Elizabeth Digby Pilot, the woman Dr. Fabel had initially referred to as "Betsey Pilot.” Elizabeth Digby Pilot was born in 1742 in Geashill, County Laois, Ireland to the Reverend Benjamin and Mary Jones Digby. Against her father’s wishes, she married a young army officer, Henry Pilot at Kilmalogue House, Portarlington, Ireland on February 4, 1762. The couple had seven children, six daughters and one son. Pilot traveled with her husband to the British Floridas in 1765, living in Pensacola and St. Augustine in the late 1760s and early 1770s, before the American Revolution resulted in the family’s return to Great Britain. Dr. Fabel’s inability to comment on the specific details of Pilot’s life stemmed from the fact that he had never even seen a copy of the diary himself when he wrote his own article on the British Floridas in 1996. Dr. Fabel’s knowledge of the Pilot diary stemmed from an exchange he briefly maintained in the late 1980s with a young woman who claimed to be one of Pilot’s descendants. The young woman had been put into contact with Dr. Fabel when she was trying to gather background information about West Florida during the British years. Her overall goal was to shape the diary, using appropriate annotations and explanatory references, into a scholarly format that was marketable to publishing companies. Pilot’s descendants, including the young woman who contacted Dr. Fabel, are scattered throughout the British Isles, particularly in southern England and Northern Ireland. In the late 1980s, the young woman had provided Dr. Fabel with a summary of the diary’s contents, but she never actually provided a copy of the actual diary for him to examine. His correspondence with the young woman eventually ceased, and to the best of both his and my knowledge, the diary remains unpublished. However, when Dr. Fabel wrote his article on the history of British Florida, the existence of the diary proved too tempting a historical morsel to completely leave out of his narrative. Thus, in 1996, he included the vague reference, perhaps with a hope that one day another scholar might be able to find the Pilot diary and help place

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its contents in the larger scope of the history of colonial British Florida. I have wondered many times since if fate had intended that person should be me. Dr. Fabel’s story about the Pilot diary proved to be an excellent starting point from which I could pursue my research on Elizabeth Digby Pilot. My initial pursuit of the Pilot diary did not very last long. Ironically, in my search to find information about the young woman who had contacted Dr. Fabel about the diary in the 1980s, I found another relative descended from the Pilot family. While the gentleman who was a distant relative of Elizabeth Digby Pilot knew little about the current family member I sought, he did have knowledge of the Pilot diary itself. His exact words when I asked if he knew where the diary was… “Why, a copy is sitting in front of me on my desk at this very moment.”7 After feeling my heart jump into my throat, I know it took me almost sixty seconds to ask, “And how do you feel about photocopies?” On a subsequent, but unrelated, journey to Ireland, I took a day to travel to Belfast, and then to the coastal town of Bangor in Northern Ireland, to visit the diary myself. My initial attempts to seek photo duplication or a new transcription of the diary proved to be unfeasible and too expensive. A visit to a private family’s holdings proved very different compared to working in the more formalized and rule-restricted reading rooms of university libraries and historical societies. With only an explanation of what my research project was, and when I would be in Northern Ireland, Elizabeth Digby Pilot’s descendants made their ancestress very proud with the generous hospitality they offered a lone American researcher who was very far from home. My time in Northern Ireland was short, due to the threat of an impending rail strike that placed me at the mercy of the local bus schedules. I had approximately two hours to converse with the couple, eat the delicious home-cooked luncheon they offered me of shrimp in an Alfredo sauce over penne pasta, before I began to work with the diary. In such a time constrained situation, scanning each page of the diary proved too time-consuming, and so I relied on my backup plan – a pocket digital camera with an extra large memory card. I continued to point and click frame after frame to catch as much of the diary as I could on “film.” As I rapidly turned each page, clicked, waited for the flash, and repeated the process, I had no idea how the images would turn out in the assessment of viability for transcription purposes. Two hours later, I was back at the rail station, having been driven there by the couple that had so kindly welcomed me into their home with no thought to ask for anything in return. A week later, once I had returned home to Florida, I nervously unpacked my digital flash memory card,

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plugged it into my computer, and prayed as I waited to see the quality of the images I had taken while in Northern Ireland. Somewhat surprising to myself, as I tend to anticipate the worst possible outcomes in such research situations, I was able to transcribe the diary from the digital images I had taken of the manuscript. Everything was legible and easy to read, with only a few minor exceptions on a number of pages that had not photographed well because the bottom was cut off as the result of improper photographic skills on my part. Thus, I finally procured a copy of the diary, even though it was not the original copy of the manuscript. The story of the Pilot diary remains partially unsolved. The Pilot descendants that had been so kind to me during my visit to their home in Northern Ireland actually owned a complete transcription of the diary that had been made in the early 1900s by one of the family’s amateur genealogists. Whether the young woman who contacted Dr. Fabel in the 1980s owned the original diary, or merely another transcript, remains unknown. A postscript to my adventure with the diary of Elizabeth Digby Pilot is as follows. First, when examining the documents I had procured while in Massachusetts and New York in my research on the life of Dorothy Murray Forbes, I finally realized that one of her correspondents was none other than Elizabeth Digby Pilot. Second, when digging through some records at the PK Yonge Library of Florida History at the Smathers Library, University of Florida, in Gainesville, I stumbled upon an interesting fact about the history of the Pilot diary and previous attempts to achieve its publication. In August 1943, one Reverend R. Wyse Jackson of St. Michael’s Rectory on Barrington Street in Limerick, Ireland, contacted Marion T. Gaines in Pensacola. Gaines, in turn, forwarded Jackson’s correspondence to Julien C. Yonge, the Director of the PK Yonge Library of History.8 In a series of letters exchanged between Yonge and Jackson between late-1943 and mid-1945, the pair discussed the potential of publishing the diary, or at least the relevant portion detailing life in East and West Florida during the British years, in the Florida Historical Quarterly. Yonge was uncertain about agreeing to such an arrangement without first seeing the diary. Jackson, acting as an intermediary for the Pilot descendants who owned the diary, became eager “to undertake an edition of the Pilot journal, as you suggest.”9 However, even Jackson may not have had access to the original manuscript as he said that he would have to “do my best to get at the original Mss. It will probably take some time, but I shall get it done for you.” 10 Apparently, the Pilot descendants remained nervous about letting the family relic out of their sight, especially during a time of war when Nazi u-boats might have sunk the ship transporting it back across the

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Atlantic Ocean to the United States. The last letter written to Jackson in June 1945 by Yonge, in his role as editor of Florida Historical Quarterly, acknowledged the delay in having access to review the diary and a reaffirmation of his belief in its importance to Florida historians. “There is so little of such literary material here [in Florida] relating to our British period. We have the liveliest interest in that period and a journal of the era could create unbounded interest among our readers.” 11 While the interest in publishing the Pilot diary never waned among Florida historians, obviously, something kept the diary safely hidden away among the possessions of the Pilot family’s descendants in Great Britain and Ireland after World War II, as nothing was ever published in the Florida Historical Quarterly. My experience with the papers of Dorothy Murray Forbes and the diary of Elizabeth Digby Pilot represent but two of the more colorful cases that have collectively become known as my chase to find the women of colonial British Florida. Some of the subsequent source procurements have been far less exciting. For example, the story of Rebecca Walker Durnford, the wife of Elias Durnford, the lieutenant governor of West Florida, had been collected by one of her descendants in the late 1800s.12 All I had to do to find information about Rebecca Durnford’s story was to submit the appropriate request through my university’s Interlibrary Loan office. Someone once said that finding and assembling primary source documents to use in historical writing was not an easy task. Such an individual obviously would have considered his appraisal to be a gross understatement if he had been assessing the specific task of historians interested in the study of sex and gender in colonial British Florida. Such a task remains vital to the historiographic narrative of Florida. Without these elusive primary source documents, the forgotten stories of the unremembered women who lived in East and West Florida between 1763 and 1784 cannot be written. This gross oversight would prove a great disservice to all students of Florida history. I like to think that my continued pursuit of Florida’s colonial ladies, as I hunt for their papers and personal correspondence is a way that I am helping to ensure that their faces will be seen and their voices will be heard once more. I have yet to think of a nobler task for a historian to undertake, and, quite willingly, I plan to continue the chase …for who knows what remains to be discovered about the lives of women in the British Floridas, if, with a lot of perseverance and a bit of luck, I look in the right place.

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Notes 1

Robin F.A. Fabel, "British Rule in the Floridas," in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville, FL: UP of FL, 1996) 137. 2 The Forbes Collection, (Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and The James Murray Robbins Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts). 3 The Murray Papers (New York Historical Society, New York, New York). 4 Robert E. Rea, "Resources and Research Opportunities for British West Florida, 1763-1783," chap. in In Search of Gulf Coast Colonial History, eds. Ernest F. Dibble and Earle W. Newton (Pensacola, Fla.: Historical Pensacola Preservation Board, 1970), 37. 5 John Sledge, "Parting Shots: A Retrospective of the Career of Robert Right Rea, Doyen British West Florida Historians," Gulf Coast Historical Review 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995), 74. 6 Robin F.A. Fabel, "British Rule in the Floridas," in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville, FL: UP of FL, 1996) 137. 7 Elizabeth Digby Pilot, The Autobiography of Mrs. Elizabeth Pilot (nee Digby) Born 1742 Died 1826 With a Concluding Memoir By Her Daughter Judith Henrietta Pilot and Notes on the Autobiography by P. L. Pielou. Unpublished Ms. Private Collection. (Bangor, Northern Ireland). 8 The Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, to Marion T. Gaines, Pensacola, August 1943, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL and Julien Chandler Yonge, Gainesville, to the Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, October 1, 1943, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. 9 The Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, to Julien Chandler Yonge, Gainesville, December 1944, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. 10 The Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, to Julien Chandler Yonge, Gainesville, December 1944, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. 11 Julien Chandler Yonge, Gainesville, to the Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, June 2, 1945, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. 12 Mary Durnford, Family Recollections of Lieutenant General Elias Walker Durnford (Montreal: 1863).

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Works Cited Durnford, Mary. Family Recollections of Lieutenant General Elias Walker Durnford. Montreal: 1863. Fabel, Robin F.A. "British Rule in the Floridas.” In The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 1996. 134-149. The Forbes Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. The James Murray Robbins Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. Julien Chandler Yonge, Gainesville, to the Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, October 21, 1943, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. —. to the Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, October 29, 1944, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. —. to the Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, June 2, 1945, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. The Murray Papers, New York Historical Society, New York, NY. Pilot, Elizabeth Digby. The Autobiography of Mrs. Elizabeth Pilot (nee Digby) Born 1742 Died 1826 With a Concluding Memoir By Her Daughter Judith Henrietta Pilot and Notes on the Autobiography by P. L. Pielou. Unpublished Ms. Private Collection. Bangor, Northern Ireland. Rea, Robert R. "Resources and Research Opportunities for British West Florida, 1763-1783." In In Search of Gulf Coast Colonial History, eds. Ernest F. Dibble and Earle W. Newton. Pensacola, FL.: Historical Pensacola Preservation Board, 1970. 23-47. Sledge, John. "Parting Shots: A Retrospective of the Career of Robert Right Rea, Doyen of British West Florida Historians." Gulf Coast Historical Review 10.2 (Spring 1995): 67-77. The Reverend R. Wyse Jackson, Limerick, to Marion T. Gaines, Pensacola, August 1943, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of

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Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL. —. to Julien Chandler Yonge, Gainesville, December 1944, "Pilot, Elizabeth Digby," Florida History Biography Packets at the University of Florida, PK Yonge Library of Florida History, Smathers Library Special Collections, U of FL, Gainesville, FL.

THE FACES OF RACISM: JIM CROW IN FLORIDA SALENA COLLER

Jim Crow laws and customs are a part of Florida’s past and present that many people would rather ignore. The people that represent the public faces of Jim Crow, such as the politicians, judges and journalists, said that “separate but equal” accommodations are constitutional and are the best way to maintain harmony. On the other hand the private faces of Jim Crow such as the members of the KKK and other white supremacists engaged in unlawful activities, such as violence, murder, and planting bombs. This paper explores the connections between the Jim Crow laws and the occurrences of lynching that took place in Florida after the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865. The Jim Crow laws and social practices negatively impacted African Americans in all aspects of their daily lives. African American workers were frequently abused by their white bosses. They were also frequently arrested on bogus or trumped up charges by local law enforcement. Black prisoners within jails and prisons were frequently neglected, abused and murdered. There was also widespread voter disenfranchisement. Racism in the twenty-first century is more subtle but still exists even though the Jim Crow laws were repelled many decades ago. Some Americans think that Jim Crow traditions were alive and well during the 2000 and 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections. I argue that the ongoing struggle for civil rights is a constant political struggle that Floridians and other citizens of the United States of America must continue for as long as our nation exists.

Origins of Jim Crow Ronald L. F. Davis explains that the term “Jim Crow” is believed to have originated around 1830 and was made popular by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a minstrel show entertainer, who blackened his face and sang the song “Jump Jim Crow” during his shows (par. 1). Davis says that during the 1850’s “Jim Crow” was a stereotypical image of Black inferiority that

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was part of the minstrel shows throughout the United States. Jim Crow laws and etiquette began to spread like wild fire in the U.S. when the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional (Davis, par. 2). Chief Justice Joseph Bradley believed that the 14th Amendment, which gave black people citizenship, “does not protect black people from discrimination by private business owners and individuals” (Davis, par. 5). Plessy v. Ferguson is an influential court case that ruled that Homére Plessy’s civil rights were not violated when he was arrested on the train for sitting in an area reserved for whites because “separate but equal” accommodations were constitutional (Davis, par. 6). The outcome of the Plessy court case had a profoundly negative impact upon African Americans throughout Florida and the United States and helped to encourage the creation of more Jim Crow laws and social customs. The main purpose of Jim Crow was to replace the institution of slavery with another racist institution that would deny African Americans their civil rights. Jim Crow is a two-faced social and legal system that says publicly that black and white people are equal under the law but should be separated for everyone’s benefit. On the other hand, the private face of Jim Crow advocates murder and violence towards any person who questions the status quo of white supremacy. There are constitutional amendments protecting the civil rights of African American citizens after slavery, but the laws were often times ignored by people living in the Southern States. The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery in December 6, 1865. After slavery ended the U.S. Congress took more then two years to grant African Americans citizenship and more then four years to grant African Americans the right to vote. The 14th Amendment gave African American citizenship in July 9, 1868. Then the 15th Amendment was ratified in February 3, 1870 and says that a citizen’s right to vote “shall not be denied or abridge by the US or any State on the account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The public faces of the U.S. Congress granted African Americans their citizenship and voting rights but within the private realm of everyday life blacks were often times denied their citizenship and their right to vote by Jim Crow Laws and unwritten social customs. The federal government granted African Americans civil rights but the state, county, and city governments worked to undermine those civil rights. Throughout the 1890’s the elected leaders within the Southern States rewrote their state constitutions and established strict voter registrations requirements such as literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and white only primaries (Pilgrim, par. 7). The state governors, state congress

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members, and state senators worked vigorously to add Jim Crow Laws into their state constitutions in order to undermine the civil rights of African American citizens. The Jim Crow Educational Outreach Team states that within the State of Florida a total of 19 Jim Crow Segregation statutes, constitutional amendments, or city ordinances were created between 1865 and 1967 (par. 1). Many of the laws were used to enforce the segregation of schools, streetcars, public accommodations, public carriers, and railroads. Three of the statues dealt with the illegal nature of interracial marriage which became illegal in 1881. Another statue created in 1944 outlawed interracial adultery. One of the nineteen Jim Crow laws mentioned by the Jim Crow Educational Outreach Team actually benefited black Floridians by repealing the State’s Poll Tax in 1941.

Occurrences of Lynching in Florida Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines lynching as condemning a person “to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction” (par. 1). Lynching is murder and an essential part of Jim Crow in Florida. The fear of lynching was used to control and punish the African American populations in Florida. Lynching was also a punishment for any African American who dared to violate social norms of Jim Crow. W. Fitzhugh Brundage mentions that in the Southern States between the years of 1880 and 1930 that approximately 3,943 people were lynched (qtd. in Gualtieri 67). On the other hand, Davis claims that about 3,700 recorded incidents of lynching took place within the United States between 1889 and 1990 (par. 4). Whereas the Archives at the Tuskegee Institute believes that between the years of 1881 and 1968 that 3,446 blacks were lynched and 1,297 whites were lynched which places the total number of people lynched in the United Sates at 4,743 (cited by Browner). Since occurrences of lynching were frequently kept secret by the local townspeople it is difficult to document exactly how many incidents of lynching took place. The various lynching statistics available cover different geographic locations and different time periods. The Archives at the Tuskegee Institute show that the Floridians who believed in vigilante justice lynched a total of 282 people between the years of 1882 and 1968 of those people lynched 25 were Caucasian and 257 were African American (cited by Browner). The differences between the numbers of lynching that took place between the two races are significant. The data at the Archives at the Tuskegee Institute shows that after the U.S. Civil War

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ended that white supremacists in Florida saved the punishment of lynching for African Americans and rarely lynched white people. When slavery was legal the majority of people lynched were Caucasians because legally African Americans were considered to be slave property, and it was against the law to damage a white person’s slave property (Gualtieri 67). On rare occasions after the Civil War some white people or immigrants from “not-quite-white” or “honorary white” ethnic groups like the Syrians and the Arabs were also lynched (Gualtieri 65).For example, on May 17, 1929 the New York Evening World News reported that two “white” Syrian immigrants named Nicholas and Fannie Romey were lynched in Lake City, Florida, because they had a disagreement with Sheriff Baker (Gualtieri 63). There were also two highly publicized cases of whites getting lynched in Florida after the Civil War. One of the men was John Hodaz, a Hungarian immigrant, who was accused of a crime and was lynched in Plant City, Florida, in 1930. The other man was named Joseph Shoemaker, a labor activist with socialist views, who was lynched in Tampa, Florida, in 1935 (Gualtieri 67). Three white members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union were captured by the Tampa police and flogged by the Klan in 1936, and one of the flogged men, Joseph Shoemaker, was tortured to death and none of the KKK members were charged with murder (Newton 36). Typically the white people who were lynched violated the local community’s customs or were involved in union activity. James Allen has an unusual collection of postcards documenting occurrences of lynching in the United States. Allen has a published a book and a website which are both entitled Without Sanctuary. The book contains essays and photographs of the postcard collection. More than eighty postcards are posted on the website. The images on the website display incidents of lynching that took place in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. On the website are three postcards showing incidents of lynching that took place in Florida. One of the three postcards documents a rare occurrence of white people being lynched in Florida. The gelatin silver print postcard is dated for September 9, 1910 and displays the image of “two Italian immigrants, Castenego Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano,” whose corpses were discovered, “hanging in a Florida swamp” (Allen & Littlefield). Allen says that the two immigrants were accused of supporting the union and shooting the bookkeeper of the West Tampa Cigar Factory. The second Florida postcard shows James Clark handcuffed and hanging from a tree on July 11, 1926 in Eau Gallie, Florida. The back of the postcard says, “[it] was the third lynching of a black man in that region in two months” (Allen & Littlefield). The third

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postcard shows Rubin Stacy hanging from a tree in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the photo’s date is July 19, 1935 and no reason for the lynching is mentioned on the back of the postcard (Allen & Littlefield). The postcards of the lynching victims are gruesome and disturbing. On most of the postcards in Allen’s collection, the viewer sees images of children and adults posing with the corpses. Claude Neal of Jackson County, Florida, was accused of murdering a teenage female (Newton 36). Neal was moved to an Alabama jail, kidnapped by a mob of 300 to 400 people, returned to Florida, and tortured for two days before he died in October of 1934 (Newton 36-37). Newton notes that the mob of people that murdered Claude was never indicted by the grand jury despite the fact that the murder was well publicized by the media, and the FBI agents were ordered not to investigate the lynching by Angus MacLean, the Assistant Attorney General (Newton 36-37). The next morning after the lynching the mob started attacking all the black people remaining in the town of Marianna because they were angry that the sheriff removed Neal’s body from the tree sitting in front of the court house, and the behavior of the mob was so outrageous that the National Guard was called to restore order (PBS “Claude”). Neal’s very public death was another example of the hypocrisy of the white police officers, judges and members of white juries who allowed white people to murder black people without any legal consequences. On January 2, 1944 in Live Oak, Florida, Willie James Howard, a fifteen year old African American youth, was “drowned in the Suwannee River while his father was forced to watch” (Shofner 425). Willie’s mother Lula Howard said in an affidavit made in Orange County that Mr. Phil Goff visited her home with two other men, and they were looking for Willie. Lula says that when she tried to protect her son from the group of men that Mr. Goff pointed a gun at her and dragged William into a car (Howard). Goff states in an affidavit written in Live Oak that he, Reg Scott, and S. B. McCuller took Willie into the car and went to the BondHowell Lumber Company to talk with Willie’s father James about the letter Willie wrote to Goff’s daughter on January 1. Goff also claims that James willingly went with them to the Suwannee River. Goff says that he tied Willie’s hands and feet so that James could whip his son for the “misdeed” of writing the letter. Goff says that Willie refused to be whipped by anyone and that he ran away and jumped into the river. Goff claims that James did nothing to save his son from drowning. Goff also says that he and the other men tried to save Willie. Afraid for their safety Lula and James Howard decided to sell their home, and they moved to Orlando, Florida, on January 7, 1944 (Howard). Thurgood Marshall wrote

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a letter to the Governor Holland of Florida and asked him to order an investigation of the murder (PBS, “Willie”). The civil rights activist Harry T. Moore was a former classmate of Lula Howard and was outraged by the murder of the woman's son and decided to investigate the crime (PBS, “Willie”). Moore traveled to Orlando and had Mrs. Howard complete an affidavit, and he wrote letters to NAACP representatives Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall and encouraged them to demand a federal investigation (PBS, “Willie”). This is one of the most tragic occurrences of lynching since Willie was so young and innocent. The lynching of Payne was another famous murder case that Moore investigated in Florida. During 1954 when Jesse James Payne, a sharecropper, needed money to pay for medicine for his sick child, and his boss D. L. Goodman of Madison County, Florida refused a loan against his share of crop, so Payne asked the Farm Security Administration for a loan (Shofner 423). Shofner believes that Goodman had illegal planted too much tobacco and wanted to punish Payne for bringing federal agents on his farm (423). A few days later Goodman and his two sons kidnapped Payne (Shofner 423). During the kidnapping Goodman attempted to shot Payne in the head but the gun misfired, and Payne ran away into the swamp (Shofner 423). Goodman told everyone in the town that Payne had molested his daughter, and a lynch mob was formed to guarantee that Payne would never receive a trial (Shofner 424). I suspect that the accusations of child molestation were completely false and that Goodman lied in order to get the support of the townspeople. When Payne was later captured in Jefferson County, he plead “not guilty” in court (Shofner 423).He was then placed in the Jefferson County Jail, sent to Raiford Penitentiary, and returned to the Madison County Jail where Sheriff Lonnie Davis, who was Goodman’s brother-in-law, left Payne unguarded (Shofner 424). The next day on October 11, 1954, seven miles outside of town Jesse James Payne’s body was found with a gun shot wound (Shofner 424). Shofner explains that due to national outcry over the lynching of Payne, Governor Caldwell of Florida sent W.H. Gasque to conduct an independent investigation of the murder, and he had Judge R. H. Rowe create a grand jury to investigate Sheriff Davis’s conduct in the case of Payne’s imprisonment (424). Gasque concluded that “95% percent” of the citizens living within Madison County, Florida, refused to help him with the investigation and were delighted that the lynching occurred (Shofner 425). The grand jury created by Judge Rowe adjourned without charging Sheriff Davis with any crime or misconduct (Shofner 425). Unfortunately for Payne and his family, the legal system in Florida during that time was completely racist. Goodman was never charged with

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kidnapping, attempted murder and murder. Sheriff Davis was never suspended or charged with any crime. Payne was murdered under very suspicious circumstances and his murder was never properly investigated by legal authorities because of the color of his skin. Moore was a secretary for the NAACP and the “first President of the Florida State Conference of NAACP branches,” and he created the Progressive Voters’ League (Shofner 424; Emmons 441; PBS, “Biographical”). Starting in 1943 Moore investigated every single lynching that took place in Florida until his death (PBS, “Biographical”). Moore investigated the infamous Groveland Rape Case and gathered evidence that the black defendants were savagely beaten, and he leveled charges against Sheriff Willis McCall (PBS, “Biographical”). Moore demanded that McCall be suspended and be charged with murder when two of the Groveland defendants under his supervision were shot (PBS, “Biographical”). One of the men, Sammy Shepherd was shot dead and the other man, Walter Irvin, survived two gunshot wounds (PBS, “Biographical”). A few weeks after Shepherd and Irvin were shot Harry and Harriett Moore were assassinated when a person or persons planted a bomb that exploded under their bed on December 25, 1951 (Emmons 455). Their murder case remains unsolved and the former site of the Moore’s house was made into the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Park and Cultural Center (Cobb 347). All Floridians need to remember that Moore and his wife sacrificed their lives to improve the lives of black Floridians. Moore, like many Florida civil rights activists, remains unknown by the general population. Moore deserves more recognition from historians and Floridians living outside of his former county of residence. One main characteristic of Jim Crow is that the white people committing the lynching are rarely investigated, rarely charged and rarely convicted for their crimes because they murdered black people. The local law enforcement agencies, the judges, the juries, and the FBI frequently ignored evidence, eye witness accounts and suspicious circumstances. Often times the local police officers participated or conspired in the lynching. The murders remained unsolved and there was no justice for the victims, their families or their communities. In all cases of lynching the victims were denied their 5th Amendment right to “due process of law.” They are denied their 6th Amendment rights “to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury,” assistance from a layer, and a chance to confront and obtain witnesses. They are also denied their 7th Amendment right to a “trial by jury” and their 8th Amendment protection from “cruel and unusual punishment.”

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Jim Crow in Restaurants and Other Places During the time of Jim Crow African Americans lacked a safe haven from violence and murder. The KKK and other white supremacists targeted any black people who dared to question the social hierarchy of white domination. During this time it was a crime for a black person to visit a beach, a public school, a movie theatre or any area reserved for white people. Thousands of civil rights activists in Florida participated in sit-ins, protests and voter registration drives in order to end racial segregation. The KKK in Florida also targeted churches and religious leaders. Michael Newton mentions that during July of 1910 the FBI failed to investigate the death of three churchgoers who were murdered when terrorists fired guns into a black church in Tampa, Florida (12). In 1920 Miami Klansmen tarred and feathered “a black Episcopal archdeacon” for the social taboo of “preaching racial equality” (Newton 21). The members of the KKK were obsessed with white power and frequently engaged in immoral, unethical and illegal activity to further the organization’s goals. Hank Thomas was the first person to start sit-ins in the city of Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1960 when he sat at a Woolworth restaurant and was arrested (Cobb 349). In Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27, 1960 one hundred-fifty KKK members armed with axes attacked the NAACP Youth Council activists who had participated in sit-in protests in downtown restaurants (Cobb 351). The members of the local black gang called the Boomerangs worked together to protect the civil rights activists from the KKK members so only fifty people were injured during the outbreak of violence (Cobb 352). These are just a few out of the large numbers of the sit-tins and protests that took place throughout Florida. Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due’s book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights tells the frequently untold stories of the civil rights activists in Florida who risked their lives and livelihoods in order to participate in protests and sit-ins. Two sisters Patricia and Priscilla Stephens, twelve Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU) students, two high school students and one middle-aged woman were arrested for sitting in the white section of a Woolworth’s Restaurant in Tallahassee, Florida, on February 20, 1960, and the Stephens sisters refused to post bail and spent forty-nine days in jail (Due 4 & 48). Patricia Stephens, a student of Florida A& M University, was an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and recruited white students from the Florida State University (FSU) to participate in non-violent protests and sit-ins. She organized and participated in many protests and sit-ins in several counties in Florida. Her

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husband John Dorsey Due, Jr., a lawyer, worked on civil rights cases. Mr. and Mrs. Due are extremely important civil rights activists in Florida who deserve more recognition for their dedication and activism. The story of the Due Family’s activism should appear in Florida’s history books and textbooks. Martin Luther King, Jr. has become the official icon of the African American Civil Rights Movement, but his story should not overshadow the stories of other activists who took the same risks as King and sacrificed their lives. Thousands of people in Florida have been abused, tortured or murder while trying to achieve civil rights for African Americans. Most people are also familiar with the contributions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but many people are ignorant about the activities of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) which is extremely unfortunate since Patricia Stephens Due and other members of the organization worked with the NAACP and organized sit-ins, protests and demonstrations throughout the State of Florida. Unfortunately, Jim Crow practices were still alive and well in Florida during 2001. The St. Petersburg Times reported that Talmadge Branch, a Maryland House Delegate, was refused service at the Perry Package and Lounge in Perry, Florida, in 2001 (“Perry”). After receiving Branch’s complaints the Florida States Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco and other government agencies are investigating Jim Crow racism in Perry, Florida (“Perry”). The bartender and the bar owner who refused Branch service have been charged with a second-degree misdemeanors, forced to pay a $500 fine and required write letters of apology to Branch (“Perry”). This case of discrimination is upsetting but at the same time this incident of racism demonstrates how much progress has been made in the legal system. In previous decades before the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s this sort of discrimination was normal and nothing would have been done to correct the situation.

The New Era of Slavery: Abuse of Convicts and Workers Four racist economic traditions were created to replace the institution of slavery: convict leasing, vagrancy laws, contract-labor laws, and the crop-lien system. David M. Oshinsky mentions that convict leasing “[begin] in Mississippi in the late 1860s” and finally ended in Alabama in the late 1920s (56). During the year of 1876 black prisoners from the jail in Live Oak, Florida were leased to the St. Johns, Lake Eustics, and Gulf Railroad Company and they were forced to lay railroad track through the swamps and marshes (Oshinsky 55-56). The railroad company failed to

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provide the prisoners with medical attention and enough food to survive, so the men were forced to locate their own food within the wilderness of Florida (Oshinsky 56). Forty-five out of the seventy-two convicts died from starvation, exposure, scurvy, dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, or torture (Oshinsky 56). This abuse and neglect of black prisoners was common place for many decades throughout the state of Florida. In the year of 1915 the State of Florida lacked a state prison and leased twelve hundred convicts to C. H. Barnes who turned around and made a huge profit subleasing the convicts to multiple famer owners in North Florida (Oshinsky 70). These are just some of the examples of government officials helping businessmen make huge profits at the expense of Black Floridians. Jerrell H. Shofner says that vague vagrancy laws made between 1870's and early 1900's were used by the local law enforcement officers and local farm owners for the purpose of forcing black people to harvest crops for free (413). Richard Barry, a journalist for the Cosmopolitan Magazine, noted in 1907 that in Florida there was local conspiracy between a police officer, a judge, and a turpentine operator to arrest and convict eighty black men with minor criminal charges and put them to work harvesting turpentine (Oshinsky 71). For example, in 1937 Miami Police Chief J.B. Rowland ordered sixteen police officers to visit the black part of town (Shofner 417). The police officers arrested thirty seven black men for vagrancy who were offered the options of spending their time at “the city prison farm or harvesting vegetables” that belonged to the local farm owners (Shofner 417). In 1943 Sheriff Walter Clark of Broward County also used vagrancy laws to help with the recruitment of soldiers for World War II (Shofner 417). During 1945 the Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall was responsible for ordering police officer to arrest idle people for vagrancy and those people who couldn’t pay the $25 fine were forced to work in the citrus fields (Shofner 421). In two months McCall and his deputies arrested forty men for vagrancy (Shofner 421). Sheriff McCall was infamous for abusing and murdering black people. A black man named Mack Fryar from Lessburg, who worked for the Grove Market Company, received a concussion when Sheriff McCall hit him in the side of the head with a blackjack for refusing to accompany the sheriff (Shofner 421). Mr. and Mrs. Fryar were afraid that they would be lynched, so the couple went to Miami before moving to New York (Shofner 421). One can only imagine how many thousands of innocent African Americans were wrongful arrested on bogus charges and forced to work at farms against their will.

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The workplace was also a dangerous environment for African Americans living in Florida. People who lack money also lack political power. Another goal of the Jim Crow laws was to keep black people in the lower economic classes. When slavery was outlawed the landowners in Florida used contract-labor law to keep the black sharecroppers legally enslaved by debt (Shofner 413). The contract-labor law allowed the landowners to accuse the sharecroppers of fraud without evidence which gave them a great amount of power and control over the black sharecroppers (Shofner 413). Gail Hollander proclaims that northern industrialists’ who invested in the South’s farming industry depended upon the racism of the Southern landowners and law enforcement agencies to make profit (Hollander 267). Jim Crow laws and customs were used by the Florida companies and landowners to keep wages low and to limit the power of the black workers (Hollander 279). Companies like the United States Sugar Corporation (USSC) wanted workers who were easy to control and recruited black people from Jim Crow States who were accustomed to living without civil liberties (Hollander 275). The USSC and other Florida agricultural companies also recruited workers from the Caribbean islands and the Bahamas, and the workers were forced to live on the farm (Hollander 279, 283). Between 1942 and 1943 FBI agents interviewed dozens of USSC workers, and they discovered that the black workers were frequently arrested, beaten or shot with guns if they tried to leave or demand better wages (Hollander 281). USSC and four employees were charged with two-counts of violating the black workers’ 13th Amendment rights in November of 1942 but the case was dismissed in the spring of 1943 when the judge ruled that the members of the grand jury was incorrectly selected (Hollander 281). Allison French, an official for the U.S. Employment Service Office, admitted in a 1942 Bureau of Employment Security report that the blacks working for USSC were sometimes forced to work eighteen hour days and were beaten when they tried to leave (Hollander 282). Hollander notes that government regulators and local agricultural business owners in Florida worked together to keep the workers’ wages low and that their relationship was incestuous (278). The federal, state, and local governments continuously failed to protect black workers from abuse from employers. Racism in the workplace is still an ongoing problem in Florida during the twenty-first century. During 2008 Jason Booker who worked for the Hernando County Utilities Department was sick of the racial jokes, the horseplay and the bad assignments and quit his job (Anderson & Behrendt). Booker’s mother Martha Rodriquez sent an email to David Hamilton, the County Administrator, complaining about the racial

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harassment her son received (Anderson & Behrendt). Since the start of the investigation Booker's supervisor Mike Smith resigned after being suspended, Booker's co-works were suspended and reprimanded, and Barbara Dupre, the human resources director for the Hernando County government, “was forced to resign because of the way she handled the complaints and other issues” (Anderson & Behrendt). Floyd Moore, a former Hernando County utilities employee, claims that that “racial epithets and jokes about nooses in the workplace,” were common when Moore started working for the county in 2002 (Anderson & Behrendt). The occurrences of racism in Hernando County’s government are unfortunate, but at least this case of workplace discrimination was investigated by the county administrator and people were punished. The local newspaper even reported the story which would have never happened any time before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.

Voter Disenfranchisement in Florida during the Ninetieth and Twentieth Centuries One of the main reasons that our American Forefathers and ancestors participated in the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolutionary War was because the colonists were taxed without representation in the British Parliament. This reason is included the Declaration of Independence written in by Thomas Jefferson which states “[f]or imposing taxes on us without our [c]onsent” as one of the many justifications for the American Revolution. African Americans are taxed like other American citizens, but they were frequently denied the right to vote. This is one of the many reasons why African Americans since they were granted the right to vote in 1870 have been engaging in community activism, protest or civil disobedience for over 138 years. During this ongoing struggle for equality and justice small groups of white activists who believe that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights applies to all citizens have been assisting in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. There were many occurrences of violence against civil rights activists in Florida. One of the primary goals of Jim Crow laws is to deny black people their right to vote in order to ensure that their political power is limited. Many people have been lynched when trying to help black people register to vote. Paul Ortiz says that the day before the 1888 election the Pensacola Daily Commercial warned blacks to avoid voting or risk bodily harm (199). During 1919 and 1920, African Americans within thirty Florida counties created a voter registration movement by participating in secret societies, clubs, unions, churches and other organizations to combat the

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injustice of white supremacy (Ortiz 197). T.S. Harris, a leading member of the black voter registration movement in Suwannee County, helped hundreds of people register to vote, and he was murdered when terrorists firebombed his home (Ortiz 201). The Colored Knights of Pythias was Florida’s “largest black secret society” and aid association by 1919 and proclaimed that over fifteen thousand adult males belonged to the organization (Ortiz 198). The members of the Tampa branch asked all the members through out the State of Florida “to pay their poll taxes and register to vote” in order to avoid the suspension of their membership (Ortiz 198).Close to the time of the election four Knights of Pythias club houses in Gadsden and Liberty counties were set on fire (Ortiz 214). Starting in the 1920’s Eartha White of Jacksonville organized voter registration activities during a twenty year period (Ortiz 1999). In Fort Pierce the African American women created their own voter education clubs (Ortiz 199). Many white supremacists in Florida were angry that African Americans were registering to vote and voting in elections (Ortiz 199). In 1920 B.J. Jones, the black chairman of the Columbia County Republican Club of Lake City, was kidnapped by a mob, taken miles from Jacksonville, had a noose placed around his neck, and was made to believe he would be lynched (Gualtieri 71-72). The white mob allowed Jones to escape, but the message was clear that the white mob might lynch him for real if he continued his voter registration activities (Gualtieri 72). In Miami during 1920, the local Klansmen distributed flyers warning blacks to abstain from voting in order to avoid death (Ortiz 199). In the year 1919 Sheriff R.C. Baker and the election officials of Palm Beach County threatened to arrest black people who attempted to vote at the polls (Ortiz 214).On Election Day in November of 1920 African Americans’ battled with the KKK members who attacked their homes in Ocoee, Florida (Newton 21). In the State of Florida the KKK was an extremely active and powerful terrorist group which caused the state to have the highest per capital lynching rate in the USA during the years of 1900 and 1930 (Ortiz 199). One can only imagine how many innocent voter registration activists were murdered or abused by the KKK during this violent time period in Florida. Some progress was made for African Americans when the State of Florida repealed its poll tax in 1941 (Jim Crow Educational Outreach Team). The U.S. Congress finally abolished all the state governments’ right to charge a poll tax when the 24th Amendment was passed on January 23, 1964, which says that people are not required to pay a poll tax in order to vote in an election.The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1944 Smith v. Allwright court case that the all white Democratic Party primary was

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unconstitutional (PBS, “Biographical”). Harry T. Moore was influenced by the positive outcome of the court case and created the Progressive Voters’ League which helped 116,000 African American voters register in the Florida Democratic Party within a six year period (PBS, “Biographical”). Civil rights activists and black voters risked their lives to obtain the right to vote, and they were vindicated when President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law.

Voter Disenfranchisement in the Twenty-first Century Most Americans are unaware of Greg Palast’s book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters which explores the election irregularities that took place during the 2000 Presidential Election, and Ian Inaba’s documentary entitled American Blackout which explores the election irregularities taking place during the 2000 and 2004 Presidential Elections. Linda Howell, the Supervisor of Elections in Madison County, received a letter in the mail notifying her that she was ineligible to vote because her name was on Florida’s felony purge list (Inaba). Howell says that she is not a felon (Inaba). Greg Palast claims that he obtained two CD-ROM disks that have a database file listing 57,700 people who were classified as felons by the Florida Secretary of Sate Katherine Harris, and he also says that over 90% of the people on the database file are not convicted felons and that most of the people on the list are African Americans, Hispanics and registered Democrats (11-12). After the first edition of his book Palast discovered that thousands more people on the list who were classified as felons but had conviction dates set in the future, so he now estimates that over 90,000 people were incorrectly placed on the state’s felon list and denied their right to vote (13). Many mainstream journalists and politicians argue that there is no conspiracy and that George W. Bush won the 2000 and 2004 elections. The people who were disenfranchised during the elections in Florida and Ohio have very different opinions about the elections.In the film U.S. Congress Woman Cynthia McKinney (Democrat, Georgia) and the other members of the U.S. Congress’ Black Caucus had a public hearing in Georgia to discuss the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida. James Lee, the Vice President of Choice Point, testified that the State of Florida told the company when making their exfelon list to only look for 80% matches in the names. In the film there is the following statement displayed, “[u]nder legal pressure from the NAACP Choice Point/DBT admitted to improperly identifying over 90,000 suspected felons.”

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During the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election strange things were happening in the state of Ohio. Inaba documents people at multiple voting precedents in Columbus, Ohio, waiting in line to vote for three hours or more. Most of the people waiting in line were African Americans who were registered as members of the Democrat Party. Kenneth Blackwell, the Supervisor of Elections, in Ohio during 2004 is an African American man which makes this occurrence of voting disenfranchisement even more disturbing. Inaba and his team located paperwork that shows that 125 voting machines were moved from precedents in the inner-city of Columbus, Ohio, and moved to suburban areas dominated by white and conservative Republicans. Why would Blackwell disenfranchise his own ethnic group? Blackwell will most likely never answer that question publicly. The reader should know that Blackwell was the Republican Chair of the Bush and Cheney Presidential Campaign in Ohio while he was serving as the Supervisor of Elections in 2004 (Inaba). Katherine Harris, the Supervisor of Elections, in Florida during 2000 was also a Republican Chair of the Bush and Cheney Presidential Campaign in her state (Inaba). Both Harris and Blackwell had political motives for violating the voter rights of thousands of citizens. The underlying issue of voter disenfranchisement continues for former felons in the State of Florida into the twenty-first century. This disenfranchisement negatively impacts innocent people who have never been convicted of a felony and have been incorrectly added to the felony purge list. The disenfranchisement of these groups makes a significant impact upon Florida’s elections. Jeff Manza believes that 27% of 800,000 ex-felony offenders living in Florida would have voted during the 2000 election and that their votes would have changed the outcome of the Presidential Election (178). The Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections shows that Bush won 2,912,790 votes and Gore won 2,912,253 votes, which resulted in Bush winning the 2000 General Election by 537 votes. During the 2000 election former felons were denied their right to vote and were required to apply for the Restoration of Civil Rights which is a tedious and cumbersome application process that requires each applicant’s request to be reviewed and approved by the Governor’s Office of Executive Clemency (ACLU, “Florida”). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other organizations have been involved in various law suits since 2001 in order to get the laws changed in Florida so that exfelons will have their voting rights automatically restored after they are released from prison (ACLU, “Community”). During 2004 the ACLU of Florida, former felons, and several organizations filed a lawsuit against the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) for ignoring the Florida Statue

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(944.293) that requires the DOC to inform and assist inmates with the process of apply for the restoration of their civil rights before they are released (ACLU, “DOC”). The restoration process is also important because it removes barriers to employment since ex-felons who lack their civil rights in Florida cannot obtain state issued occupational licenses (ACLU, “Clemency”). Judge P. Kevin Davey of the Leon County Circuit Court discovered that the DOC failed to obey the law and help 124,769 felons released between 1992 and 2001 (ACLU, “DOC”). Several years after the controversial Florida election in 2000 the Miami Herald discovered in the year 2004 that approximately 2,100 voters were wrongfully added to the felony purge list, and the ACLU of Florida thinks that there might be more errors on the list (ACLU, “News”). The ACLU is demanding that the restoration process in Florida become “automatic, immediate and paperless” (ACLU, “Clemency”). The ACLU argues that the new rules for restoration of civil rights that were created in 2007 are ambiguous, complex and difficult because of the record collection requirements (ACLU, “Clemency”). The new rules also stipulate that all financial restitution requirements be completely paid off in order for exfelon’s civil rights to be restored (ACLU, “Clemency”). If the State of Florida failed to accurately create a felony purge list in 2000 and 2004 then this practice of stripping former felons of their civil rights should be abolished since it is unconstitutional to deny citizens their right to vote.

Conclusion The struggle for African American civil rights in Florida has been long and violent. African Americans living in Florida after the U.S. Civil War had to overcome many obstacles before gaining their civil rights. Generations of African Americans living in Florida were subjected to violence, bombings, murder, torture, neglect, wrongful imprisonment, and forced labor. Lynching was a popular method of controlling, torturing and punishing African Americans. The criminals who participated in the lynching of 282 Floridians were rarely investigated, rarely charged, and never convicted. Segregation laws within schools, public places and private businesses were used to perpetuate a tradition of white supremacy. Jim Crow traditions such as convict leasing, vagrancy laws, contract-labor laws, and the crop-lien system were used to replace the intuition of slavery with new institutions of injustice and repression. Like the Jim Crow days of the past, the suspects in the case of voter disenfranchisement Katherine Harris in Florida’s 2000 election and Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio’s 2004 election were never fully investigated by legal authorities or charged with

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any crime despite their gross incompetence and suspicious actions. The failure of Florida’s state government in the twenty-first century to automatically restore the civil rights of former felons and the creation of inaccurate felony purge lists have replaced the literacy tests, the poll taxes, the grandfather clauses and the white-only primaries of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, justice remains a rare occurrence in the State of Florida.

Works Cited Allen, James and John Littlefield. “Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.” Without Sanctuary. 2005. 1 October 2008. . American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “ACLU Says Florida DOC Failed to Assist Former Felons with Restoration of Civil, Voting Rights as Require by Law.” 15 June 2004. American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. 22 September 2008 . American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “ACLU Says News Report Document Error-ridden Felon List Demonstrates Negligence on Part of State Officials.” 2 July 2004. American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. 22 September 2008 . American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Clemency Reform Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be.” 5 April 2007. American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. 22 September 2008 . American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Community Groups Sponsor Town Hall Meeting to Help Ex-Offenders Restore Voting Rights.” 18 January 2001. American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. 22 September 2008 . American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Florida’s Voting Ban.” American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.31 September 2008 .

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Anderson, Joel and Barbara Behrendt. “Hernando’s Racial Divide Runs Deep.” St. Petersburg Times (South Pinellas). 19 May 2008.Newsbank. 27 May 2008. Browner, Stephanie P., ed. “Lynchings, by State and Race, 1882-1968.” Classroom: The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive. 1999. Berea College. 12 September 2008

Cobb, Charles E. One the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008. Davis, Ronald L. F. “Creating Jim Crow: In Depth Essay.” The History of Jim Crow. 9 September 2008 . 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. Emmons, Caroline. “A Bland, Scholarly, Teetotalling Sort of Man”: Harry T. Moore and the Struggle for Black Equality in Florida. !” Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 18501950. Eds. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 440-458. Florida Department of State Division of Elections. “November 7, 2000 General Election Official Results: President of the United States.” Florida Department of State: Election Results. 2000. 10 September 2008 . Gualtieri, Sarah. “Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South.” Arab Studies Quarterly 26.3(Summer 2004): 63-85. Guff, A. P. “Willie James Howard Lynching: Goff’s Statement.” The Legacy of Harry T. Moore. 2000. 9 September 2008 . Hollander, Gail M. “‘Subject to Control’: Shifting Geographies of Race and Labour in the US Sugar Agroindustry 1930-1950.” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 266-292. Howard, Lula. “Affidavit, State of Florida, County of Orange (Page 1).” 2000. The Legacy of Harry T. Moore. 2000. 31 September 2008 . Howard, Lula. “Affidavit, State of Florida, County of Orange (Page 2).” The Legacy of Harry T. Moore. 2000. 31 September 2008 .

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Inaba, Ian, dir. American Blackout. Perf. Cynthia McKinney. Act Now Productions, 2006. Jefferson, Thomas. U.S. Constitution with the Declaration of Independence. U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO). 18 August 2008. . Jim Crow Educational Outreach Team. “Jim Crow Laws: Florida.” The History of Jim Crow. 2 October 2008.