Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County by Amy Hill Hearth

they keep talking about construction jobs which will pay better than working in the fields or fishing. Plus, once the development is built, there will be jobs in retail, at restaurants, all kinds of new opportunities.”
    â€œWell, I’m all for new jobs but at what price?” I said, my tone bitter. “You want opportunity, go to a city! You need a job, then go to where the jobs are. Why ruin what we have here? What about nature? And what about the people who live back there and would have to leave?”
    Back at my cottage later, I thought about all those who would lose their way of life, and have nowhere to go. All of them were already dirt poor. To my knowledge they weren’t bothering anybody. It was almost as though the folks who ran Naples were upset that those poor folk existed . I’d heard it over and over again while I was coming up: Why don’t they go somewhere else ?
    â€œThey” were hardscrabble white folks like Dolores Simpson, a few Indians, and a small village of colored people who had been there since slavery days ended. The Negro settlement included Priscilla’s grandmother. If poor, backwoods white folks and Indians were seen as a nuisance, Negroes were considered a threat, and there had been a not-so-subtle effort to relocate them where they could be watched and contained, notably, the construction of a complex of nine buildings called McDonald’s Quarters in downtown Naples near the train depot. Every progressive Southern town had its Negro quarters, and in this regard,Naples refused to be left behind. The new complex was presented to the Negroes as a step up—a safe, modern environment with indoor plumbing and running water. Truth be told, it operated more like a prison, especially at night, since a curfew kept Negroes off the streets of Naples after sundown.
    Some of the Negroes had refused to go to McDonald’s Quarters, however. It wasn’t lost on them that the place was called the Quarters, which was reminiscent of the slave quarters of yesteryear. Their rejection was denounced by the rich folks as sheer folly and a lack of gratitude. Occasionally there was some fussing about the “renegade” Negroes who had insulted the good people of Naples by refusing the town’s hospitality and generosity.
    And then it would die down again. I confess I didn’t pay much attention unless Mama brought it up, which she did often. Mama always took the side of poor folks, regardless of color.
    I wondered what Mama would have said about Darryl’s project, and the words came through strong and straight from heaven. Darryl’s a shortsighted and greedy jerk , I heard her say inside my head, and just thinking those words made me almost laugh out loud.
    Was I imagining Mama’s words or did I have a direct line to her, reposing as she was, beyond the pearly gates? It didn’t matter. Her words rang true either way. The fact is I’d been assuming that moving poor folks away from the river would be a consequence of Darryl’s project. Knowing my hometown, I now realized it was possible that getting rid of them was an underlying reason for the groundswell of support for Darryl in the first place.

Seven
    J udd Hart showed up at my cottage the next morning with a small snapper whose shell had been damaged, probably by a lawn mower.
    â€œLook, I fixed him up,” Judd said, beaming but a little hesitant. He had used gauze and first-aid tape, and I wondered aloud if it would do the job. “Oh, I’ve been studying,” Judd said. “Not that you were doing anything wrong,” he added quickly, “but I read a copy of National Geographic magazine, and it said the shell has to breathe. We should never use any kind of epoxy, or heavy tape.”
    I had used anything I could think of over the years, even duct tape in emergencies, to hold an injured turtle’s shell together. And here was Judd, at thirteen years old, showing me