American Ghost Read online

  Jolie was used to Lena and her mouth and loved her enough to set aside her own disappointment and let her exalt in this, her last night on the strip. Jolie just lay back on the slant of the windshield and watched the stars, listened with half an ear to Lena’s increasingly far-fetched nonsense till she made one of her curious, magical proclamations, that one day she intended to build a house on the side of a mountain in Colorado and decorate it like the Kremlin, “down to the onion spires and red silk wallpaper.”

  Sam, who had also lain back on the windshield, didn’t laugh or question it, just glanced aside at Jolie and, in a delicate move of communication, lifted one eyebrow in an unspoken acknowledgment that Lena was fun and great and entertaining and lovely—but, hey, was it his imagination, or was she a goof?

  It was the first time in living memory that any man had withstood Lena’s charms long enough to acknowledge this patented truth, making Jolie flash the famous Hoyt grin in reply, one she seldom showed to strangers, which answered, Yes. But we love her anyway.

  Lena was none the wiser, just kept up her steady, stream-of-consciousness prattle till eleven o’clock finally came around and it was time to head back to Hendrix. Even then, she kept talking, Jolie not saying a word on the long ride through the woods, till they stopped at the concession stand to drop Sam off and Jolie turned to say good-bye over the seat, adding in the most natural, reasonable voice, “We’re going to the beach tomorrow, to St. Andrews. Want to go?”

  He said yes without pause, offered to bring towels and sunscreen, blankets and Pepsi; said he could be ready at seven, did they need him to drive or bring ice?

  For the first time that night, there was silence in the car, as Lena was struck momentarily speechless, though she recovered quickly enough, stammered sure, to bring whatever he wanted, that they’d pick him up at nine.

  It made for a quiet drive to the parsonage, Lena not saying a word till she halted in the drive, when she turned to Jolie with a face that was mischievously amused and chanted, “Jolie, Jolie, Jolie—who didn’t want to have supper with no damn Yankee, but went and invited him to the beach for our last run of the summer.”

  Jolie couldn’t deny or explain it, just gave a small shrug in reply. She was gathering her purse to get out when Lena added with teasing smugness, “I assume you’ll want to borrow a bathing suit tomorrow. Which will it be—the red or the black?”

  For a moment, Jolie paused, then answered in a small voice, “The red,” making Lena burst into laughter.

  “Oh, Jolie, Jolie, Jolie Hoyt, who wouldn’t pierce her ears or cut her hair or go to the prom. Falling for a big-talking man from Miami. The Hoyts are gonna looove that.”

  Chapter Three

  So Jolie wore the cherry-red, bandanna-print bikini to the beach the next day, and on such a trivial choice, the fate of many was sealed.

  Or so she would eventually think.

  At the time, she was too young to be farsighted, too inexperienced with human sexuality to realize that a public outing of the Hoyt genetic ladder in the shape of her sweat-glistened, eighteen-year-old body might pack a more powerful punch than she intended, dynamite strong enough to blast her into another life. She was only concerned with the glorious present: walking in the foaming surf; feeding the dolphins off the jetties; lying out side by side on sand-covered blankets, with Sam most solicitous that she not get sunburnt, rubbing on so much Hawaiian Tropic that by the time they made it to the air-conditioned bliss of Taco Bell, she smelled like a walking piña colada.

  She was already on the brink of love by then, staring over the edge of the cliff, considering a great leap. Her first such leap—not due to the strictness of her religion (where child brides were common) as much as her own reticence, and the unspoken rules of the county mating game, in which Hendrix girls were rated high in sheer animal attractiveness, but seldom considered marriage material (too dark, too poor, and too unstable, in that order). Historically, they were the girls you took to the fish camp for the weekend, who eventually grew into the women you let live in a shack on the edge of your farm in return for certain favors, a tradition Jolie’s own Big Mama had lived out, first in Hendrix, and later, in a trailer on the Cleary end of the Cottondale Highway, where she died in ’86. Jolie had bypassed such a fate by virtue of her shyness, and because even the horniest Cleary blue blood was wise enough to take one look at the Reverend Hoyt—he of the lazy eye and the size-fifty belt—and rightly conclude that there were less hazardous ways of satisfying adolescent lust than trifling with such a man’s daughter.

  Jolie appreciated the wiggle room his protectiveness gave her against the old thief of youth in Hendrix—sexuality—and hesitated on the brink of love for just that reason, intrigued but not so quick to jump. She understood there were hidden shoals and deadly currents in the waters below and, without a mother in the house, had only Lena to guide her, as men and sex and the whole living organism of attraction was hardly the subject of dinner conversation at a Pentecostal preacher’s table. It was, like so many things in Hendrix, drowned in silence, so that Jolie moved through the shock of her first true infatuation with the mute beauty of a newly minted mermaid: curious, darting, easily startled.

  Sam found her minnow flightiness as charming as anything else about her, as he’d been smitten by her that very first night, blindsided, no one more surprised than he. For he’d known Lena for weeks, had seen her zipping around on her father’s golf cart in her ridiculous string bikinis; yet he had remained untouched by her schoolgirl chatter, her friendly camaraderie. She was a beautiful, carefree child, and he’d expected her best friend, Jolie (whom she spoke of incessantly), to be the same.

  He’d offered to take them to supper as a sort of big-brother gesture before Lena left for college and was unprepared for the brooding outsider he’d faced across the table at the café, who stared at mainstream Anglo-Southern life with the same mix of envy and contempt that he always had, growing up in Miami. She clearly wasn’t the Indian princess of Lena’s imagination, but an amazing example of yet another well-known American archetype, one variously described as Black Dutch or Mestee or the mysterious Melungeon.

  As he’d tried to explain at supper, they weren’t a documented ethnicity per se, but a recurring ethnic phenomenon—triracial Southerners of mostly Anglo and Indian descent whose ancestors had been too dark to pass for white in the rigid caste systems of the antebellum South. Pursued by the twin specters of slavery and Indian removal, they’d retreated to their swamps and hollows and intermarried for generations. They created small isolate societies that had been documented in enclaves from Appalachia to Louisiana since the mid-1600s, wherever Indian removals had left a sizable nonwhite population. West Florida certainly qualified for such status, though Sam was surprised that such a thing had endured the fluidity and blasé homogeneity of modern American life to survive this late in the century.

  It was a fascinating discovery in its way, and when Sam got back to his camper that night, he stayed up till two in the morning writing the lead professor on the Creek study a long and enthusiastic letter on his new find. Running nearly twelve pages, single-spaced, it was crammed full of insight and vigor, hints to his real “find” evidenced in the emphasis he placed on one obscure theory of the Melungeons’ supposed origins as the descendants of Gypsies who were kept as concubines in the Spanish royal court.

  Professor Keyes might find such conjecture doubtful and unsupported, but then again, Professor Keyes had never seen Jolie running in the surf in her borrowed red bikini—an image that transcended anything as boring as hard documentation and explained so much.

  Sam was so intrigued that he put aside caution and openly plotted romantic strategy with Lena while they drove back to the campground the next afternoon from the beach. Lena couldn’t have been happier and easily fell into the role of wise younger sister, cautioning him to go slow, and easy.

  “Not because of the Hoyts,” she explained. “They’re a pretty flexible bunch. Nutty, but flexible. It�
�s Bethel I’m talking about. The old Sisters are sweet, but they’re kind of—rigid, I guess you’d say, and they practically raised Jol. Be careful of the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “Well, they’re kind of hard to explain,” she said as she parked in front of the camper. “They were hard on me, at first. The main thing is, don’t cuss or drink or smoke or gamble or mention that your parents do. And don’t go to dances or bars or concerts or R-rated movies—or if you do, don’t say a word about it; not a peep.”

  Sam looked at her a moment to see if she was serious. When he realized she was, he rubbed his chin. “Huh. And I was kind of hoping we could have sex tomorrow. I guess that’s out, too.”

  He said it as a joke, though Lena faced him with unsmiling frankness. “If you’re gonna talk like that—even think like that—you better pack up that ratty old camper and get the hell out of Hendrix tonight. These people will go medieval on you, in a heartbeat.”

  Sam was amazed at her intensity. “You mean her father?”

  “I mean Jolie. Listen—me and her brother, Carl, we used to date. He was my boyfriend. Well, Jolie came home early one night and caught us on the couch in what you might call a compromising position, and she flipped out.”

  “How old were you?” Sam inserted in a small, prissy voice, truly that of an older brother.

  Lena cast him a weary look. “I was six teen. I was plenty old, and we weren’t in the most compromising position, we— Listen, I didn’t have a shirt on, okay? Anyway, Jolie started throwing stuff at him, yelling who did he think he was, treating me like a field whore—that’s exactly the word she used, I swear to God. She was livid.”

  “What’d you do?”

  Lena shrugged. “Well, I couldn’t do much—finally just grabbed my shirt and ran out, and me and Jolie didn’t speak for two whole days, which was, like, an eternity. But she finally broke down and came over, asked in this weeny little voice if I could go down to the dock with her. That’s where we used to sit and talk, on the fishing bench on the river, so I said okay and we went down there and talked half the night, and she told me all kinds of stuff I never knew, about her mother and how she died—”

  “How did she die?”

  Lena paused a moment. “Well, of breast cancer, I think. At least, that’s what it was at first. They found it on a doctor’s visit when she was pregnant with Jolie, so she was basically dying the whole time she knew her. She doesn’t talk about it much—Carl does; he remembers a lot more. But she talked about her that night, and about how lonely she’d always been, how she was afraid she’d never get out of Hendrix. She said that’s why she was so mad about me and Carl, because God hadn’t given the Hoyt women much, just a brain and a hymen, and if they lost either one, they’d be stuck in Hendrix the rest of their lives.”

  When Sam made a noise of wonder, Lena assured him, “And she means it, she really does. She told me how her Big Mama, she used to run around with men in town, rich men, but when she got old and lost her looks, she had to make a living taking in ironing, sometimes from the very same men. That’s how Jolie remembers her, bent over an ironing board, sweat running down her nose. That’s her idea of hell, living in some run-down trailer around here, pressing a razor crease in some guy from the country club’s dress pants.”

  Sam just stared at the windshield. “I think it might be mine, too.”

  Such was his honesty that Lena’s face lightened in an instant. “See there? You two were made for each other.”

  • • •

  Sam had taken her warning seriously. He was old enough to realize he’d better tread softly, but too intrigued to politely back out, captivated on more levels than he cared to share with anyone, especially a chatterbox such as Lena. When she left that night, he retired to the cot fitted above the cab of the camper and a battered box filled with notes and documents connected to the real riddle that had brought him to Hendrix: nothing to do with the Creek at all, but a bit of sleuthing around an old Florida mystery—one he’d taken great pains to hide from both his steering committee (who would have objected on grounds of personal interest) and his father (who would have had a stroke).

  Sam suffered no pains of guilt at the deception, as this project was a strictly personal obsession, powerful enough that it had quietly steered his education since he’d arrived at UF five years before. His long-suffering parents had sent him there to major in accounting, and he’d indulged them till halfway through his junior year, when cramming for a statistics exam had proven that a life of numbers and filtering raw, quantitative data wasn’t for him.

  To their great teeth-grinding despair, he’d switched colleges, majors, and apartments in the same week, to history for his BA, then cultural anthropology for his master’s, and all in all, it had been a happy accommodation. He was by nature curious as a cat, brilliant in the absorption of data, and so aggressive in research that he’d landed a rare first-year position at the Museum of Natural History doing grunt work. He’d been casting about for a hands-on field position that spring when he’d come upon a cheap mimeographed notice pinned to the departmental boards between offers of Overseas Study and Summers in Berlin, which included three block-lettered words that had leapt off the board and caught his attention, APALACHICOLA NATIONAL FOREST, and to seal the deal, in smaller print, HENDRIX. They were enough to make him yank the notice from the board and reread it with more interest, as he had a bit of unresolved family history with the area, and specifically the town, which was old by Florida standards, but so far off the tourist maps that you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone east of the Suwannee who’d ever heard of it.

  He only knew of it himself thanks to the notoriety of the Hendrix Lynching—the one he’d mentioned to Jolie and Lena as they stood on the sidewalk of the café. The entire incident was well-known to him, and indeed, most Florida historians. In 1938 a white shop owner had been killed in a blatant daytime robbery by a black man named Henry Kite, who’d shot the shopkeeper in the face, in view of a storeful of eyewitnesses. When the town sheriff had come to arrest him, Kite shot him, too. Given the number of witnesses and the standing of the sheriff, his execution would have been a given. But the Hendrix locals hadn’t put much faith in the county law enforcement and had meted out their own form of frontier justice, killing Kite’s mother, brother-in-law, two uncles, and youngest sister, who was eight months pregnant. Not content with their slaughter, they’d dragged Kite’s corpse to the courthouse in Cleary, and left it for public display.

  Such a thing wasn’t uncommon on the Florida frontier, and the Kite lynching was mostly remarkable for the late date—1938—and the advent of modern media, which added a particularly gruesome element of public complicity to the deed. Local radio stations and newspapers posted invitations to the lynching well in advance, and when Kite himself was caught, the fever had reached such a pitch that his murder approached the level of human sacrifice, complete with mutilation, castration, torture, and public display of his body, pictures taken before and after and later sold as postcards at the drugstore.

  The bestial nature of his end, combined with modern press coverage, was enough to blow this fairly routine bit of vigilante justice onto the national stage. Calls for an investigation were universal, and the weight of a few grisly eyewitness accounts (not to mention the postcards) reignited calls for a federal antilynching bill, which helped bring the greater era of lynching to a long-overdue end.

  The inadvertent result was that Hendrix was entered into Florida history books as one truly creepy little hamlet, though Kite’s murder was never as much of a cause célèbre as Rosewood, Florida. It was simply too messy for anyone to mold into anything approaching heroic. Kite was shamelessly guilty, but his punishment so disproportionately cruel that any close reading of the matter—especially the wanton murder of his family—ended in head-scratching wonder that human beings could turn so quickly feral. Sam himself had scratched his head the first time he’d read the small print, though his obsession with parsin
g the details of the lynching wasn’t prurient as much as personal: the murdered shopkeeper was his great-grandfather.

  • • •

  His immigration papers listed him as Moshe Lensky, though on the rare occasions he appeared in the legal records after Ellis Island, he was renamed Morris Lens, whether by coercion or willingly, Sam had no idea. Even after two years searching, old Morris was to his great-grandson nothing more than a dry, lost figure in a larger family mythos; another hapless immigrant washed ashore at Ellis Island with a great American dream that had hit the shoals in a particularly deadly way. The violence of his end had produced a sort of familial PTSD, and even Sam’s grandfather, who’d been an eyewitness to the murder, never spoke of it willingly, to Sam or any of his generation.

  Sam’s father had passed on the bare-bones details: yes, a murder; yes, it was tragic. In the end, Sam was forced to reconstruct his great-grandfather’s abbreviated life by more scientific methods: ship rolls, census, Ellis Island lists. From the third floor of the UF library, he’d painstakingly traced Morris’s journey, from his birth in Tauragé, Lithuania, to his abrupt departure at seventeen, when he’d left his family and an ancient Jewish community as many a young Jew had before him, by bribing a guard and jumping the border to Poland to escape the torment of a lifelong, mandatory conscription in the Russian army. He exited Hamburg on a steamer in 1920 and showed up in Ellis Island later the same year, his occupation listed as tailor, his name made more palatable to the American mouth.

  He lived briefly with a brother in Baltimore, then appeared randomly up and down the Eastern Seaboard for a dozen years, working as a peddler, and searching for an opening to start a store of his own. The primo spots of established Southern Jewry had long been filled, and Morris’s search had taken him to the far edge of civilization, deep in the no-man’s-land of a West Florida turpentine camp, an hour upriver from the port in Apalachicola.