A Land Remembered

As previous chapters explored prejudice toward Native Americans, Chapter 11 depicts racism against black Americans after the Civil War. Although Skillit is no longer a slave after the war, he is far from free to live his life unmolested. When he builds a small cabin and farm, members of the Ku Klux Klan descend upon his homestead. Skillit says:

‘Wad’n long after that some men come to the house one night. Said they didn’t want no nigger building’ a house or runnin’ a farm. They was all dressed in white sheets and had hoods over their faces. I told them I was supposed to be free and I didn’t see how a garden could hurt nobody. They rawhided me good, whupped me like I ain’t never been whupped befo’; then they tromped down my garden with their horses, and set fire to the cabin’ (76).

Skillit’s experience is representative of what many newly freed slaves went through in the decades following the Civil War. Until 1870, when the US government passed laws to enforce the 14th Amendment, the Ku Klux Klan operated with near impunity in its efforts to harass, terrorize, and murder freedmen like Skillit and their white allies. Skillit also encounters racism in a more casual—though no less pernicious—form when the cafe proprietor in Punta Rassa demands that he eat on the back porch. There is no formal law enforcement to intervene on Skillit’s behalf; the proprietor only allows Skillit to sit inside under threat of frontier justice at the hands of Tobias and Frog. Skillit’s experiences detail the extent to which the abolition of slavery, though a crucial step forward for black Americans, did not mean that freedmen obtained equal rights nor “freedom” in any recognizable sense of the term. Were it not for Tobias’s intervention, Skillit’s life might not have been so different from the Seminoles’, as he is forced to drift from place to place under constant threat of danger or humiliation from whites.

Chapter 13 introduces another of the book’s major themes, one that also serves as the chief conflict between Tobias and Zech: land ownership. Ironically, Zech’s first exposure to the idea of property comes when Skillit details his experience of belonging to someone as a slave. When Zech proposes owning the land around the MacIvey homestead, Tobias says, “That’s foolish boy talk. Nobody will ever fence this land. There’s too much of it. This right here ain’t a drop in the bucket. There ain’t no man ever seen all of it. The Lord put it here for everyone to use” (88). Tobias’s insistence that all land belongs to God betrays both a naivete regarding the history of human civilization and a sanguine philosophy not unlike that of the Seminoles. It also foreshadows his future grandson Sol’s aggressiveness with respect to land deals and developments in the 20th century. The attitude toward land and who owns it is arguably what most separates the three generations of MacIvey men: Tobias believes the land belongs to no one but God, Sol believes a man has a right to profit on the land in any way he sees fit, and Zech represents a middle-ground between these two ideas.

The MacIveys also encounter the first of many devastating weather phenomena that will alter the course of the family’s multi-generational story. While on the inaugural MacIvey cattle drive, the family endures eight straight hours of “solid water...that felt like a river rushing over them” (94). While the family, the horses, and Nip and Tuck survive, the entire herd drowns. For all the dangers the MacIveys face at the homestead—predators, ruined crops, bushwhackers—they don’t compare to the sheer magnitude of the destruction the storm leaves in its wake. It is almost as if nature, having witnessed the MacIveys make huge strides in surviving and thriving in the wilderness, ups the urgency in its fight against man’s attempts to tame it. Emma suggests as much when she says, “Maybe the Lord didn’t mean for us to own [the cows]. Maybe He means for them to be wild and free, like the deer and the birds” (95).

This raises the question of what Tobias’s motivations are. Surviving the Florida wilderness is difficult enough, but conducting commerce in it is even more challenging. Meanwhile, Tobias’s attitude toward land ownership suggests a more harmonious, less contentious relationship with nature. The reader catches a glimpse of what drives Tobias when he tells Emma:

‘All those times me and Zech chased some scrawny cow through the woods and didn’t catch it, it wasn’t the money. I want the money now for you and Zech. For me, I guess I just been trying to prove something to myself. All my life when I tried to do something worth anything I never made it, not here or back in Georgia. It was the same with my daddy, and he finally gave up and quit trying’ (124).

This suggests that what drives Tobias’s quest to prevail in the wilderness is not money nor the comforts it provides, but a sense of human dignity and self-actualization missing from his life and that of his late father.