Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daugters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlif: Eight Generations ... Republicans, And Other Florida Wildlife - Softcover

Roberts, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813030366 ISBN 13: 9780813030364

Verlag: UNIV PR OF FLORIDA, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A sweeping story of Florida told through eight generations of family history

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Part family memoir, part political commentary, part apologia, Dream State tells the grand and sometimes crazy story of Florida through the eyes of one of its native daughters. Acclaimed journalist and NPR commentator Diane Roberts has many family secrets to tell as she reveals how her ancestors settled in Florida and wove themselves into the very fabric of the state.

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With a storyteller's talent for setting great scenes, Roberts lays out the sweeping history of eight generations of Browards and Bradfords, Tuckers and Robertses. Continuing into the recent past with the botched presidential election of 2000, Roberts renders Florida's inhabitants with a deep, familial affection. While exposing the real people whom Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard fictionalized for years, Dream State ultimately reveals the cogs and wheels that make the state tick.

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Diane Roberts, professor of English at Florida State University, is author of The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region and Faulkner and Southern Womanhood.

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Dream State

Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daugters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida WildlifBy Diane Roberts

University Press of Florida

Copyright © 2006 Diane Roberts
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780813030364

Chapter 1: Everybody's Magic Kingdom

The story I was told, the story all Florida schoolchildren were once told, was that Juan Ponce de León came to Florida to find the Fountain of Youth. Maybe Spain was full of geriatric conquistadores, looking for a place to unfreeze their old bones and heat up their blood once more. This made sense to us. Florida was full of old people wearing shorts in fierce gum-ball colors, old people on golf carts, old people with burnt sienna tans and parasoled cocktails and fifty-dollar manicures, all trying to feel less old. It was as if Florida were some kind of American reward: Live most of your life in a place where you have to work in the cold, walk on ice, and shovel snow, then go south, go where you can play like a child in the sun.

Nobody now buys the miraculous waters idea. Juan Ponce's obsessively detailed royal charter, his asiento, enumerates gold, territory, gems, souls to be converted to the True Faith, but nothing about rejuvenation. In 1511 Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, aka Peter Martyr, an Italian priest at the court of the king of Aragon, drew a ghostly map of a place called la Isla de Beimeni Parte. It lies due north of Cuba, but all the map shows is a fractured, partial coastline, shores trailing off into nothingness, a phantasmagorical land. There was some rumor about Bimini and eternal youth, maybe brought back from one of Columbus's voyages. This fountain business didn't get attached to Juan Ponce until a hundred years after his voyage to Florida, when historian Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas picked up a line about a fountain the Indians said transformed geezers into lusty adolescents. The Bimini that's in the Bahamas, that tiny comma of land, gamely tries to wrap itself in the story. Denizens of Bimini will show you a well that's supposed to be Juan Ponce's fountain. They'll show you some ruins of Atlantis too.

In Florida fiction thrives like kudzu. We own the Fountain of Youth. We've got three or four Fountains of Youth. One burbles up in St. Augustine just north of the shrine of Our Lady of La Leche. Last time I was there it cost five bucks to get in. The water is covered by a hut with murals depicting Juan Ponce as a white-haired Don Quixote. It tastes of sulfur and smells like a basketful of rotten Easter eggs. Around the spring lie the graves of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Timucuas, many of whom died from the smallpox and measles given them by the good Christians come to save them.

There's a Fountain of Youth in Volusia County, too, not far from the Daytona International Speedway. When John James Audubon visited in 1831, the place was called Spring Garden. Then it became Garden Springs. In the 1880s, the residents took a shot at calling it "DeSota," but the post office informed them Florida already had one of those. So they decided to capitalize on the water pushing up out of the Eocene limestone and went for DeLeon Springs. Ponce de León, a tiny hamlet that happens to have a spring (in common with 319 other places in Florida), pulled the same move. The place is two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, but why ruin a good founding myth with geographical and historical facts? Maybe Juan Ponce got farther into Florida than he's given credit for. Maybe Jesus visited England, just like the monks at Glastonbury (and William Blake) said; maybe aliens visited New Mexico, just like The X-Files said. Any explorer worth a damn, from Odysseus onward, heads west.

West is the direction of magic, toward the sunset, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond the edge of the world. Out there you could find the Hesperides, Atlantis, Avalon. You could spread your faith, your language, your DNA, your animals, your laws, your viruses to new worlds -- or worlds new to you. Out there you could find silks, jewels, tobacco, sugar, cotton, spices, space. You could build an empire.

The Spanish always get the credit for being the first Europeans to see Florida. They may not have been. The Welsh tell how Madog, a twelfth-century prince, sailed around the Keys up into the Gulf of Mexico. One of my great-uncles said the first Robertses and Tuckers met a blue-eyed, red-haired Welsh-speaking Indian.

Or there were the Vikings, who may have got blown off course for Vinland and ended up camping on Amelia Island. St. Brendan set off in an oak boat sometime in the sixth century, heading southwest from Ireland. In the Western Sea, the saint and his fourteen companions saw a tall crystal column rising out of the sky, skirted the island where Judas, reprieved from damnation on Sundays, took the form of a man-shaped cloud, and came upon a warm land with waters so clear you could see the skeletons of ancient beasts far down on a white bed, just like the mastodon at the bottom of Wakulla Springs, in Wakulla County, Florida.

Maybe it was Wakulla Springs. Brendan could have wandered into the Gulf and got entangled in the lattice of rivers and creeks until one dead-ended in a round pool of boiling cold water, iridescent blues, greens, and violets, deep as hell and beautiful as paradise, silvery bones resting on far-down sand.

Or maybe Juan Ponce de León was the first Christian to look into the depths and declare it a miracle. Old guidebooks thought so; my great-uncle Malcolm thought so. Wakulla's waters, 400,000 gallons a minute, sharp as a winter midnight, push up from a great reservoir of accumulated rain below the clay, down in the limestone chambers that emerged when Florida rose from the sea for the last time ten million years ago. Wakulla is very deep, no one knows how deep, the visible end of a whole underworld of rivers and caves, the subterranean mansions of the earth. No one has ever found the source. You take it on faith, this wonder of the swamp.

West

The story always starts this way: A man, a European man, sails away from civilization and bumps into land not marked on his mappa mundi. He calls it empty, even if it isn't. He records some marvels, takes some treasures. He plants a flag and a cross. The New World is discovered.

The New World is also named, as if God had just finished making it. The Genoese navigator the Castilians called Cristóbal Colón played Adam: He describes an island its own people call Guanahani, but he declares it will now be San Salvador. The next one becomes Isla Santa Maria de Concepción, then Isabella and Fernandina after his employers, and Isla Juana after their daughter, the deranged princess called "la loca" (though not to her face) who would spend a lot of her life locked up in a tower. Every place the Spanish ships make landfall, they unfurl a banner with the red lions of León and yellow castles of Castile. They proclaim the place now a possession of los Reyes Católicos. They move on to the next milagro.

For Americans, Columbus's voyage is evidence of Divine Providence. The king and queen of Spain are sitting around one day and this guy comes in with a Big Idea about a round earth and sailing west to find the East. The queen sells some of her diamonds to buy him ships. He "discovers" America, getting the ball rolling on creating the greatest country the world has ever known. And that's enough history for us.

In 1492 the Christian rulers of northern Spain finally...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV PR OF FLORIDA
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0813030366
• ISBN 13: 9780813030364
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 355
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar