Five noted authors reflect on a Florida setting that inspires them.
It may be the cluttered kitchen in the apartment where you grew up, the serene beach you walk early in the morning, or the Greek Revival buildings that imbued you with a sense of awe and tradition on your college campus. It could even be the bench under the shady oak tree in the park outside your office where you like to sit and watch people passing by. Certain places speak to each of us and hold the secrets of our past and present selves. We asked five writers who live or grew up in Florida to tell us about a place in the state that resonates with them. Their stories couldn’t be more different, but each proves the truth of the old saying: “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
Life in a Chickee
By Chief James Billie
My family lives in a thatched-roof hut called a chickee. Wintertime you freeze, but in summertime you are cool and comfortable. It does not prevent spiders, cockroaches, mosquitoes, rats or spiders from visiting. It does not hold back the noises coming from the outside. Every morning we are awakened an hour before daylight to the cawing of the crows greeting the day. They are joined by redbirds (cardinals), mockingbirds, woodpeckers, and from a distance you can hear the whooping cranes. All are singing their songs and looking for breakfast. Jets flying overhead sound like they are coming through the roof. Listening to the rain on the roof and the lightning is especially nice though a little scary. But it’s our house, and we love it.
At the junction of Highway 70 and State Road 721 is a settlement named Brighton, and this reservation is in the proximity. It was named Brighton Seminole Indian Reservation with approximately 36,000 acres of land taken into trust in 1936.
On this land are zillions of sabal palms, or swamp cabbages. Because of this, Seminole Indians named it Tahi-chobee yo-gee, or “Land of the Palm Trees.”
I first set foot in Brighton around 1947. I was only three years old. My Bird Clan uncles Willie Tiger, Tom Smith and Dick Smith were living in the Bowling Camp area at that time. Morgan Smith was their brother. My mother and I stayed with Morgan and his wife Katie back in those days.
The tiki was the predominant dwelling throughout Tahi-chobee yo-gee.
If you live here in Brighton, you should try sitting outside under a palm tree and close your eyes and listen. The wind blowing through the fronds sounds like the ocean waves.
I like living in a chickee…probably because I was born under one. There are a few tribal members my age who grew up in chickee huts. God bless them. It’s an experience they will never forget. Hessaketvmesse heramahes, Sho-naa—bish. (Thank you; God is good.)
This story first appeared in the Seminole Tribune on April 30, 2015, when Billie was chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
Listening to the River
By Bill Maxwell
On a recent trip to Fort Lauderdale, my birthplace, I took my 13-year-old twin grandsons to the beach, a trip that was as much for them as it was for me.
As we drove on magnificent Las Olas Boulevard along New River, I talked about my love of the river, a love that began when I was 10 or 11. And I told them how New River, which the Seminoles call Himmarshee, meaning “new water” that miraculously appeared one night, endures as an integral part of my life.
Although they were barely listening, I described how the river and its many canals flow into the Intracoastal Waterway and then into the Atlantic Ocean. Their eyes glazed over when I said that Fort Lauderdale, the world’s yachting capital, is nicknamed the “Venice of America” because it has some 300 miles of inland waterways that traverse the greater municipality, and more than half of those miles run throughout the city proper.
They began to pay attention when I described how I escaped the bleakness of my neighborhood by walking or riding my bicycle to the beautiful downtown. One Saturday morning as I pedaled along New River, I saw three boys my age fishing from the bank, and I stopped and watched them haul in several largemouth bass and redfish.
I was so inspired, I told my grandsons, that I went to a secondhand store and bought an old Zebco reel and other gear. Next morning, I grabbed my gear, went to where the boys had fished and caught four monster sheepshead.
I described how I walked along the riverfront marveling at the yachts and some of their names: Seas the Day, Sunshine Forever, Mary Contrary and more. And I was captivated, I said, by the home ports lettered on the hulls: Kingston, Jamaica; Caracas, Venezuela; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Barcelona, Spain.
The urge to travel to such faraway places hit me, I said, as I strolled and noticed two young couples on the deck of a yacht named Fantasea. Scantily clad and deeply tanned, they luxuriated in recliners, chatting, laughing and sipping tall, colorful drinks. Calypso music played softly, and I stopped and stared when they got up and danced without seeming to mind my presence.
Those years on the river inspired me to seek work that allowed me to travel internationally. My career in journalism took me to London, Paris, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Lagos as well as Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, experiences that enriched my life in ways I cannot adequately describe.
Today I plan to rent a yacht on New River and have fun there with my grandsons. Perhaps the experience on the river will make them dream and fill them with wanderlust as it did me.
Bill Maxwell is a veteran journalist and author of Maximum Vantage, winner of the 2022 Florida Book Awards’ Silver Medal for Florida Nonfiction.
Miami Nights
By Medeia Sharif
I live in the city of Miami and love how walkable it is. Walking is one of my favorite types of exercise. Most times I listen to a nonfiction audiobook, but when I venture out at night, I like to savor a time of silent observation and meditation.
Avoiding main streets, I get to explore my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods without the distraction of lawn equipment and people coming in and out of their driveways. I live close to a cemetery that attracts wildlife at night. I’ve come across opossums and raccoons there. I’m especially thrilled when I spot foxes, since they tend to come out only late at night or early in the morning. Feral cat colonies also flourish here, with feeders putting food right up to the cemetery fence. I’ve locked eyes with some of these creatures, and we look at each other with recognition—“Oh, the night belongs to you as well.”
I come across few other walkers, so the night does feel like it belongs to me; and I sense that the city has something to tell me. I pass old houses and itch with curiosity about who lived in them decades past and how they must have looked several remodels ago. I would never dare write on wet cement, but other people have left their marks on the sidewalks, which makes me wonder if couples are still together or why someone hated disco. I want to know the origin of a crumbling coral wall in someone’s front yard. Arches, unique front doors, and chimneys (which aren’t common here) capture my attention. Every house, sidewalk slab and gnarled tree has a story behind it. I desire to know and embrace all of these stories.
Snippets of my nighttime walks have made it into my work. I even have a folder labeled “nighttime walks” and hope to write a story about my solitary nocturnal pastime. Every area has its own architectural flavor, and the designs of Miami homes have popped up in my manuscripts. I want to continue to write about the mystery and sensation of Miami nights: the swaying palm fronds, heady jasmine scents, huge moths clinging to porch walls and all the other delights of my city after the sun goes down.
Medeia Sharif is the author of picture books Frizzy Haired Zuzu and Remembering Mom’s Kubbat Halab, as well as several middle grade and young adult novels
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On Marjorie’s Porch
By Charlie Hailey
Winter sun crests the orange-grove canopy and hangs from the porch’s eaves. Sunlight washes its screens, which glow like white plaster, scratched with cobwebs. The morning waits, and the porch listens—conversations behind the house, cardinals chattering, the rattle of tea olive branches, a single magnolia leaf fluttering to sandy ground. Footfalls out on the road.
Someone calls out “Good morning!” and my cover is blown. I thought I was hidden behind the sun’s veiling reflection on this porch where I sit and write and think about how Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings sat here and wrote and thought eight decades ago. But the greeting is meant for the park’s rangers, who have come from behind the Cross Creek house to prepare for the day’s visitors.
Was the same veiling screen a comfort to Rawlings as she typed at her round table with its cabbage-palm base? “There is, of course, an affinity between people and places,” she wrote, and to be here on this late January morning is to feel her love for this porch and the imagination and conversations it sparked.
A squirrel scratches mulberry bark, and I wonder if Rawlings also looked through the places on the screen where shadows make windows, where she saw pine needles paint translucent air and heard breezes play palm leaves like harps. Where hummingbirds needle red hibiscus, lizards climb and stare, mallards shake their wings, oranges grow and clouds drift. Where you can watch time pass.
Gray stratus sheets melt away to a sky of robin’s-egg blue, and the screen’s mesh lightens into a smoky haze. Water in the bird bath catches fire with sunlight flaring like the pitch fires lit to save the orange trees. Walking to the porch, I had passed those crisscrossed logs that demonstrate how Rawlings warmed her grove—a fire for every four trees—when the temperature chilled to 28 degrees. She called those blazes “terrible beauty.”
A crow’s shadow flies across the floor, its unpainted grain begging for bare feet. Smells of tea olive treacle in, warming my breath, and wind from Orange Lake sounds like the sea. The sun slips above the roofline. Later, when the yard fills with light and with robins and chickadees and mockingbirds, my bare hands will be numb, but I will keep writing. And the porch, as ever, will keep time.
Charlie Hailey teaches architecture at the University of Florida and is the author of six books, most recently The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature.
Betting on the Farm
By Brad Edmondson
I asked my sister-in-law what my brother Brian wanted for his birthday. “Pick up the garbage along the fence by the farm,” she said. My wife and I were planning a three-day visit from our home in Ithaca, New York, to Florida. I would spend one of those days out in the summer sun, with a grabber in one hand and a garbage bag in the other, picking my way down a quarter mile of road frontage while my wife broiled at the beach. It was perfect.
We’re only about a mile east of the water, so our property was engulfed several decades ago by the sprawl that has locked up a 300-mile strip along the Gulf Coast, all the way from Crystal River to Everglades City. Every year my hometown looks and acts more like a humid version of Orange County, California. But Edmondson Farm isn’t going anywhere.
In 1947, my grandfather bought a 275-acre dairy in Nokomis for $12,500 (about $800 an acre in current dollars). By the time he died in 1974, he had sold everything but a 43-acre pasture and barns. My three siblings and I grew up playing on that farm, and Brian claimed it with his own sweat. My parents moved into the property’s 1923 house after Grandma died, and by the time my widowed mother died in January, the place was in serious disrepair. But we were lucky. Sarasota County bought 32 acres of our pasture and added it to an adjoining nature preserve. My siblings and I held on to 11 acres, thrilled that our new neighbors will be swallowtail kites and gopher tortoises.
Future archaeologists will know us by our plastic. Along the fence line, I dug out countless bags, containers and wrappers. I speared empty cans and bottles and retrieved three golf balls, several hundred feet of parachute cord and one empty leather wallet. I cleaned away four decades of careless discards by tourists, retirees, and locals who don’t give a damn about the land down here. At the end of the day, that version of Florida ended at our property line. Now Brian can plant a hedgerow of mulberries to feed the birds and our goats.
A small operation like ours can only hope to break even. So why bother, if one of our acres is worth hundreds of times what my grandfather paid for it? Unlike a lot of farm families, we hold on because we can afford to. More important, I don’t really own this place. It’s owned by my grandfather, whose spirit still hangs around in his old office; by my father, whose avocado tree bears fruit; and by my mother. Near the end she loved to sit in the shade by the barn and look south to the horses in the pasture and the swallowtails gliding above the trees. I can still see her there.
Our children are young adults now, and the fate of the farm will be up to them. For now, my siblings and I are privileged to be its stewards.
Brad Edmondson is a writer in Ithaca, New York. His latest book is A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks.