Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

but it sure looks like we got nigger-lovers around here!” Earl was watching me so I got the idea this was a message that Bill House was supposed to take to Chokoloskee:
Mr. Earl Harden don’t care to eat with niggers even if the rest of ’em puts up with it.
“I would run you off, boy,” Earl told Henry, “but it ain’t my house.” Earl grabs his plate and marches out onto the stoop cause he can’t look his daddy in the eye.
    Richard Harden never liked commotion, and he ain’t figured out yet how to handle this. Watching his brother stomping out, Webster just laughs. From outside Earl hollers, “Go to Hell, Webster!” Hearing that language, his mother comes a-running from the cookhouse and whaps Earl’s ear a terrific lick with her wood ladle. I catch Webster’s eye and wish I hadn’t. He tried to smile, but I seen he was very angry and humiliated.
    Right from a boy, Earl Harden was out to prove something to Bay people, and I guess you could say he finally become friends with one or two families at Chokoloskee—Lopezes, mostly, who weren’t never really trusted, being Spanish. Earl tried to be friendly to me, too, but because he was so ornery with Henry, I could not warm up to him and never did, the whole rest of my life.

    Two weeks later Jean Chevelier showed up again with Captain Eben Carey, who aimed to go partners with us in the plume trade. With E. J. Watson not a half mile down the river, Chevelier wanted company, and to make sure he got it, he had promised Captain Carey a share of Calusa treasure. He was getting too old to dig all day in hot white shell mound with them bad snakes, heat, and wasps, but being a miser, he refused my help for fear I might let on at Chokoloskee if he found something.
    It was Cap’n Ebe who told us what took place at Key West in Bartlum’s produce auction room, how Ed Watson come in somewhat drunk and asked Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee for advice about filing a land claim on both banks of Chatham River. Surveys would be needed because almost all of southwest Florida was “swamp and overflowed,” turned over to the state back in 1850; the state had give most all that territory to the railroad companies. But the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands were still wilderness, and nobody really knew what was where nor who owned what.
    Dolphus Santini was one of the first settlers on Chokoloskee and its leading landowner and farmer. Along about 1877, Santinis filed a claim to “160 acres more or less on Chokoloskee Island among the Ten Thousand Islands of Florida.” That’s mostly less, cause there ain’t hardly one hundred fifty acres on our whole island. Except for Storters in Everglade, who was somewhat educated, people made do with quit-claim rights—pay me to quit my claim, get the heck off, that’s all it was, and maybe a handshake thrown in: Ed Watson wanted a real paper claim like Santinis and Storters. We figured later what he aimed to do was tie up as much high ground as he could from Chatham Bend to Lost Man’s River, then file a claim the way Santini done, but bad rumors about E. J. Watson had commenced to wander, so he figured he needed an upstanding citizen to back him up.
    Santini had heard a lot more than he cared to about this feller Watson down on Chatham River, how Watson raised the finest hogs, “how Watson could grow tomatoes on a orster bar, grow damn near anything and a lot of it.” He also heard rumors that Watson was an outlaw and a fugitive. Santini advised Watson that the State of Florida would never grant a land claim to any man “who has not paid his debt to society,” so Watson better tend to his own business.
    According to Ebe Carey, both men were drunk. Watson never spoke a word, just kind of nodded, like what the man was saying made good sense. But while he nodded, he was moving toward Santini, and the whole crowd skittered to the side