Scream of the Mynah Bird

NOT PALM BEACH

“I knew you was a Yankee because you’re so fair.” 

This in the Upper Gulf accent of the Florida Panhandle.  A talk reminiscent to me of my father’s family, how they spoke to me as a child, a self delighting lilt, a lazy river of speech.  Although one I’d learned holding eddies, dangers, downstream.

I heard that on my arrival at last, in Madison coming by Greyhound from Mobile, and before that from New Orleans, before that from Little Rock, before that from St. Louis, and before that starting off from Kansas City.  It had been a desperate trip, an 1100 mile long escape attempt, only to find me in my same old self.  I sat numb my expiration date long gone, no more shelf life, like I’d been dumped for good in this sunshine acid-hangover place.

The trip finished in blinding bright Madison, Florida a theme park for a people who couldn’t get over ‘Gone With The Wind’. 

Not a prospect in sight I’d taken an offer from my brother to work for him on a greyhound farm in Florida. An escape for me from much that had dead ended.

Just turned 23, 1972. Still I couldn’t arrive, even after at last stepping off that bus, because I had no known destination, no intent other than the overweening desperation of so many youths on the Great Plains. You know:  ‘To get somewhere, do something,  be someone’ anything other than who I feared myself to be.  

I sat examining the place, thinking “So this is all? Isn’t there more?  I’ve left everything and come this way for what?”  Only a dinky bus office on a small town square. 

It was a long-time-ago scene, the Old South of Americana byways, part of our phony mythos.  It shined and shimmered at me both quaint and appalling.  Small town Madison, court house square dripping tatters of Spanish moss battle flags, streamers decorating the live oaks that shaded its empty streets and walks.

Directly across from me they’d erected their Confederate monument, Spanish moss draped it too.  The whole outside looked like it had died of old age.  

Madison County Courthouse stood hard in the middle, shabby symbol of justice where probably there was none.

“Ya all ought to know better than to dress like that for here,”  said the white woman gleefully. She ran the depot where no business except me was happening and me she looked at bored out of her mind and sick with curiosity about who I was, why I was there, what people I belonged to, or if a stray then wondering if she oughtn’t call for the town’s one saggy-baggy policeman to come with siren going to lead me away to the cell they kept for foreigners.  

First of February 1972,  heart of winter in Kansas so I’d left it in a down lined coat, sweater, flannel shirt, undershirt.  Far too much for the bygone Madison I’d arrived in where men were meandering in short sleeves, some wearing panama hats against the sun, carrying their palmetto fans.   A few pickups parked at angles on the square barging up against the brick walkways, mealy bricks crumpled like the truck bumpers by voracious tree roots more thriving than the town itself.

I had too much to learn everywhere but particularly down there in this sugar gummy South.  I didn’t yet know that the disheveled scene knew gross secrets exchanged between the bougainvillea, azalea and magnolia bushes in its blithe nights. A not so distant past, from 1972, of 16 lynchings in Madison County most of them on this Courthouse square. 

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.                                   Billie Holiday

Northwards Madison County directly borders Georgia.  For the rest it’s demarcated by its waters, border lines made by the Withlacoochee, Suwanee and Acela rivers.   The Suwanee river flows nearby to Madison. Mythic river of Stephen Foster– Way Down upon the Suwanee River—a sentimental journey hiding what we don’t want to see. 

Way down upon the Suwanee River,
Far, far away.
That’s where my heart is yearning ever,
Home where the old folks stay.

In the heart of the county lies Sand Pedro bay, not a bay, a dense swamp where people disappeared. The Gulf waters ran by, only 50 miles distant, giving Madison its sultry weather.  On most afternoons during my time there a squall line broke free briefly from above the Gulf to punctuate the almost always sunny days.

Hidden-away Madison County took me in its thrall.

Georgia, my sister in law, picked me up at the bus depot and drove me to the farm.  A far better look at Madison County than what I-!0 from Tallahassee had afforded.  Down the County road we went by an old black man with a mule pulling a cart heavy with watermelon.  He doffed his hat when we passed.

It was a mostly level land of extreme green, pine forests in all directions except where stripped back for broken, rotting farms. Kudzu made the green even greener.  It rolled over bushes and trees smothering them slowly to death.  Kudzu made fantastical shapes out of what it was killing, adding whimsy to the wearying expanse of sea level pine forest, bringing fantasy shapes from Japan to the Florida Panhandle.

Waiting for me was a sprawling slightly undulating farm of pristine white fences.  It was dotted, for shade, by ornamentally selected pines and pecan trees.  The area that had been cleared of forest for the farm amounted to about 100 acres.  It contained several small structures, including the trailer where I was to stay and the pleasant looking clapboard home for the manager, where my brother’s family lived.   

On a rise, in this stoically featureless land, on an actual low hill, the first I’d seen since leaving Madison, Mr. Oscar K. Duke’s occasional home thrust like a perched raptor surveying all through its expensive floor-to ceiling windows.   I’d seen nothing else new here since arriving, making this brick and glass architectural digest house all the more startling.

My traveling had been to arrive here, to get by Greyhound to the O. K. Duke Greyhound Farm.

More than 400 greyhounds were on the farm, of all ages. All of them with a far older pedigree than any American could claim. 

Dogs were bred there, dames and sires, their litters raised and trained for the south Florida Tracks, glitzy palaces setup by Capone in the 30s.  There were 19 tracks in Florida when I was there, with a take of more than 100 million dollars. Biscayne, Daytona Beach, Flagler and Hialeah are to name the more legendary. All big money betting machines, for high rollers drawn thick as flies to molasses.  

O.K. Duke with sparse sandy hair, bland and short, freckles on face and arms, showed a predilection for leisure suits and Clarks. He was a Miami businessman, in what remained obscure.  Known to us only that he owned racing kennels and a home in Palm Beach. 

He would appear on the farm for a few weekdays every-six weeks or so, arriving and leaving without announcement.  When he came he’d bring along his wife an even vaguer person, rarely seen, seldom speaking.   From the position of the house his presence remained undetected until he elected to drive down the rise in his Cushman four-wheel golf cart a jaunty red pennant hanging sickly in the thick air.

Soon after making his presence known we were expected up in our best for a bar-b-que on the terrace of the big house.  For that he’d also bring prize custom-cut steaks and boxes of French wine, French cheeses and Cuban cigars.

Along with the steaks the Dukes brought their Boston accents and too the aura of lifetimes spent in an interior-decorated world made for them to walk through.  On the rise, in his sleek house of big views, in the living room for all to see, O.K. positioned an extravagant telescope on a tripod clearly positioned for spying on us and the rest of his chattel. 

He was big brother’s boss, Georgia’s also, boss of Buddy. Of the greyhounds most importantly.  He was boss of the snakes in the fields, the kids, of Joe the Myna bird the family pet who knew one thing to say “call the dogs!” 

Of me too.  Duke knew with noblesse oblige innateness that he was one of the bosses of creation.

All this was his occasional plaything. Yet he wasn’t a bad sort, just not much of a sort at all.

In 1972 Madison County was poor, among the poorest counties in Florida.  Going with that it was said to be roughly 50-50 black to white, no one was saying for sure but it seemed to me that racial mix was far from accurate.  But true, most of the few whites I saw were poor too.  A small class of elite whites ruled the County. Lumbering the pine forest for big paper companies gave the county its only economy, employed its white people.  Simply enough black people were not employed.

Black citizens were for the most part uncounted in any census ever held.   Except it was known that when the county was first ‘discovered’ whites brought in black slaves to such an extent that they outnumbered whites three to one.  Same ratio for the resident white-fear-of-blacks factor.  

Madison was by far the largest town, population about 3,500, virtually all white.   The other three places of human habitation on the map, like Lee the nearest hamlet to the farm were also white and held fewer than 100 souls.   When living there I saw that the county claimed to have had some 13,000 people.  Where where they?  I couldn’t guess.  Hiding?  Peek a boo.

Brother said the black people lived back in the deep forest or in the swamps, mostly on the small stricken share-cropping places, no running water or electricity.   

Their number  was  guess-timated in order to keep up the district’s representation, its historic importance,  in Tallahassee and Washington,  To fend off its enemy to the far south, the new-rich power grabbers, Yankees come carpet bagging along the State’s gold coast. 

He told me that the black people were born without certificates.  Died without certificates.  Raised without schools they were for the most part, intentionally or not, kept illiterate and prevented by literacy tests from voting. The 1965 Voting Rights Act whizzed directly over the piney tip tops of Madison County.  Never landed.  No one knew of it.  No one cared as long as folks could keep it low, keep things the same.

Buddy was part of this wilderness culture.  He’d been a legacy when Duke bought the farm, then a small greyhound farm barely clear of the forest.  He just came along with the land.  His principal value in that he was exceptionally kind to the dogs, a great merit.

Buddy was the first black man I worked with.  First I’d ever known something about, my life to then being lived immersed in the utter pallid whiteness of Kansas.

In 1972, Buddy was a revelation.  He was a deep shade of black, blacker than I’d seen anywhere. In the beginning that made me uncomfortable, why I didn’t think to ask myself.   But being intelligent and differential by habit, such mitigated his skin tone. Best of all his features were not particularly ‘negroid’. He was when looked at quite handsome. Admittedly it took me a while to look closely since that wasn’t done then.  Above all he came prissily clean, always in fresh washed clothes, no musk offending my store bought sensibilities.

The extent of my knowledge of black America came from my admiring reading of Langston Hughes, Ralph Elliston, Richard Wright, Eldridge Cleaver (I was proud of being a safely middle-class radical) and of course James Baldwin.  They sensitized me to our yankee-doodle-dandy race culture, sensitized but didn’t cleanse me. 

I suppose I was giving Buddy a score of 80 on my Wichita High School North black-to-white acceptability test, somewhere between James Brown (bottom) and Harry Belafonte (top).  

Buddy was the one man I’ve encountered with 11 fingers. He had an extra small thumb grown onto one hand.  Inbreeding said Steve, just like the greyhounds.

Also, soon as shadows dripped deep off the kudzu Buddy prepared to go home.  He wouldn’t stay on the farm without sunlight.  “There be ghosts here,” he explained.  “Bad ones. It’s hainted.”  Said Steve, “It probably is.  Should be.”

Buddy  joined in for the breeding of Ballyleah Gearra, in the living room of the farm manager’s house.  Duke had bought her unproven for $25,000 from an Irish farm. Translated to 2020 value that’s more than $150,000.  

Ballyleah was a small young bitch from an exceptional Anglo-Irish bloodline.  Duke bought her from a farm in County Cork.  It was her first breeding.

Greyhounds are an ancient fantasy breed. For most of their long acquaintance with man they have always been the strict reserve of nobility, of royalty.  Their first man-made images are more than 8,000 years old.  They appear on the tombs of pharaohs in hunting scenes. Greyhound coursing, called ‘The Sport of Queens’ in tribute to Queen Elizabeth I who was so impassioned for the dogs, is the ancestor of greyhound racing.  

Through careful selection hey have been sculpted in time by man into finely wrought creatures of speed their life force focused on hunting, chasing for deer and other game in packs.  Their delicate long legs and aerodynamic snouts are symbols of speed. This heritage had its price.  Greyhounds have become inbred.  

Their foremost difficulty was in mating. Through multiple generations of being selected, they were bred only according to plan,  their abdomens have been made evermore petite to allow for throttling hind leg haunches until the dog’s penis is often too small to lock into the bitch.  This means they need human help, to be held together male and female until the procreative act is accomplished.

First time she came in heat that’s what we did in Steve and Georgia’s living room, glasses of gin and tonic in hand to celebrate. Buddy joined us but wouldn’t drink.

Duke himself had chosen ‘Mabel’s’ first mate, an especially fiery dog, a beautiful fawn fellow.  He was about 25% larger.  He proved a task to hold steady.  

Greyhounds have two names, one for their lineage chart and how they appear in the racetrack programs, the other for the kennel where they are raised and kept all their lives.  The Irish farm had dubbed her Mabel, as in ‘get off the table Mabel the quarter’s for the beer’, a joke on her aristocracy versus her purpose, 

The dog knew what he was expected to do, sometimes they didn’t.  Once he’d mounted her Mabel’s forelegs gave out and she nosedived to the carpet.  She showed the whites of her eyes and whined softly.  The two were kept braced together by Steve’s forearm wrapping them tightly under their loins.

Buddy held the dog by the leash.  He crooned to Mabel and stroked her in sympathy, repetitively.  “Mama got a cold?  Poor mama.”

Once a high pressure zone from the north got stuck over us on the farm.  For days the unusually high heat made work in the sun near untenable.  Steve went to town and bought a straw Panama hat for each of us, Georgia and kids too.  Buddy wouldn’t even touch his, refused it indignantly.  “I won’t never wear no boss man hat.” 

I was familiar with the American Old South.   My father was born and raised around Geneva, Alabama, as far south in Alabama as one can get. Same kind of landscape, same proximity to the Gulf, same culture.  We made several trips with him through the area so growing up I saw the ‘colored’ only signs on drinking fountains, even on grocery store doors—common for there to be two, one for each race as if contamination from a sack of Wonder Bread might diminish a white person’s God given superiority.  

On such trips we went by custom to visit Mizz Champion and Old Frances.  Mizz Champion lived in Lapine, Alabama.  A true hamlet in the pines.  She was a non-blood relation who my dad had known forever.  Hers was the largest house in the clearing, a rambling old place, not antebellum but nevertheless with dignity to it.  

My father always arranged for us to be there for lunch, that because Mizz Champion’s servant, Old Frances, was a cook of fame. Old Francis liked my dad so she’d lay the table with her best fare when we came by. 

Given her name it can be assumed ‘Old Frances’  was a black woman, the very same age as Mizz Champion.

Eventually Old Frances died leaving Mizz Champion in a lingering grief.   My wife and I visited her in Lapine.  She sat sad and alone in her house of many rooms.  She said, “Since Old Frances died on me things haven’t never been the same.  No other colored woman could take her place.  And though I tried with white women I just couldn’t make em into a good servant.”

Not long after I started work on the O.K. Duke Greyhound Farm I broke my nose.  Did it to myself.  In his intro course to me on farm labor Steve had emphasized the importance of standing a rake with its teeth away from you.  Late one afternoon I neglected this axiom and when returning for it stepped down so hard that the handle banged me in the face with all the force it possessed.  I saw the zodiac. 

When my face swelled into a black and green mush I knew I needed a doctor.   “I’ll call Dr. Bubb,” Georgia soothed me with this on seeing me come into the kitchen. “You know there are only two doctors in Madison County and he’s the only one who can read x-rays.”  So she called and got me an appointment in a week, a week? “The x-ray is a  mobile unit comes once a week from Tallahassee.”

My appointment was end of the morning, Dr. Bubb kept leisurely hours so it was the best time on offer.  He was in considerable demand.  In 1972 the people of Madison County, at least the whites,  where supposed to have their stools checked regularly for the various parasites living in the soil.  They were advised to always wear shoes.  The whites did.  Everywhere, rot and sucking worms.  

Amazing, I found the waiting room empty, although I could hear a low drone of conversation seeping mysteriously out of the walls. The nurse came through and when she opened a door to my surprise I was peering into a second waiting room full of black people.  In Madison County the sick and dying were segregated too.

Georgia said white people, those who could and could afford to, drove to Tallahassee for medical care.   I thought there was some link between this dereliction of civic duty, something obscured by sunshine and flowers, Confederate war dead memorials  and Spanish moss, that went with the fact that in 1972 there was not one public library in the county.

I rarely left the farm except to go once every two weeks to the farmers coop in Live Oak.  I drove the big farm truck to have the bed piled up high and fat with 60 bales of hay which would then be used for changing out the Brood bitch kennels.  I also went with Steve and Georgia every week on our booze run to Valdosta, Georgia, about an hour away across the beginnings of the Okefenokee swamp.  Chief among Madison County drawbacks, to us, was this problem.  It was Dry.  

For me that swamp drive was fascinating, so alien to anything I had known.  Sometimes on our way along the empty highway we’d startle up a consort pair of great sandhill cranes to go rising on their seven foot wing spans.

Beside going to Valdosta for several trays of cheap beer and a half dozen quarts of gin we’d stop at a small shack in the city’s colored town for bar-b-que.  At least spare ribs dripping with homemade sauce weren’t segregated.

Otherwise I was stuck on the farm, stifling my young man’s urges, perplexed and a bit frightened of the hazy, slow poke place where I’d landed.  Then the movie Shaft came to Madison. I borrowed Steve’s truck and drove into town to see it.

Courthouse Square was empty in the dark, the town lit only by the few wan street lights strung across intersections by frail lines. Theater, County’s one theater, showed Shaft once a day at 10.  

Georgia had wondered aloud.  “I hear this is the first ever black movie to show in Madison. I wonder they got permission to show it at all.”

After seeing it I wondered too.  It was only first appearing here a full year after its release so there might have been some hot debate.  My only conclusion was that someone had made a big mistake.

The ticket booth girl and the refreshment counter high school boy both white looked at me without alarm.   What could be alarming to them in Madison?

Pushing open the auditorium doors I heard a dull congestion.  Once inside, in the gloom, it got quiet.  Eyes once adjusted to the darkened theater I saw I was the one and only person in the audience.

Movie started, first up a hint of urban cool, the monster cricket pulsing, sonic thrusts of Isaac Hayes’ theme music.  Getting louder and louder, strutting its way up from out of the New York subway.  Times Square bedazzles, gets bedazzled.  Then comes the pure lounge lizard slink of the lordly head and swagger of Richard Roundtree. At end of the credits, screen fills with a black man’s ego, rare enough in Madison County, or anywhere in America: ‘Directed By Gordon Parks’. 

But in those heroic opening minutes nothing compared to when Shaft shoots the finger at a white cabby.   Things then came clear.   The theater suddenly erupted with clapping, stomping,  cheering.  It started raining popcorn, Dr. Pepper cups. I had ice in my hair.

Turning around to look up I saw that while I might be the only white man down below, the balcony above, of the Madison Bijou, was jam packed with jubilant black folks.

“It ain’t a Christian thing,” opined Buddy when I told him about the movie.

“Groovy!” said Georgia. 

Steve: “About time.”

“Call the dogs!” screamed Joe the Mynah bird.