Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (39 page)

“Bullshit.”

“You know about the security here? Impossible to get in with any kind of weapon.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Jock bent down, picked up the canvas bag, and put it on the table. He untied the drawstring that kept it closed. He reached in and pulled something out. Laid it on the table. Grinned. Baggett blanched, the blood draining from his face, a gag reflex kicking in and making him suck in air to keep from retching.

They both looked at the object on the table. A twenty-four-inch pair of bolt clippers.

Jock sat and stared at Baggett, giving him a minute to get hold of himself.

“You came very close to losing some fingers recently,” Jock said. “You’ll be in prison for a long time, and I can come and go as I please. Neither your fingers nor your dick is going to be safe unless you do exactly what I tell you to do.”

“What do you want?”

“Your boys tried to kill my friend Matt Royal a couple of days ago.”

“You can’t prove I had anything to do with that.”

“I don’t have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your contact with the outside world is, as of now, completely shut off. You’ll live in solitary confinement. Your meals will be brought to you. You’ll get two showers a week, alone with a guard watching. You’ll be allowed to exercise one hour twice a week in a room not much bigger than this. A guard will be with you. From time to time a government agent will come to ask you questions. You will answer them truthfully.”

“You can’t do that. The courts won’t let you.”

“Yes they will. You’ll get used to it. But, I’m going to give you one phone call, right now. You’re going to call your next in command at the Marauders and you’re going to tell them that Matt Royal and his friends are to never be messed with again. You got that?”

“And what if my people don’t listen.”

“Then I’ll come back and take some of your fingers. If anybody looks cross-eyed at them, I’ll come get a finger. Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” Baggett said quietly.

Jock gave him a cell phone, pulled another out of his pocket. “These phones are wired together. I’ll hear everything you have to say and anything said by your buddies. Remember, any threat will be met with the death of those who make it. And my bolt clippers and I will pay you a visit.”

Baggett took the phone in a hand shackled at the wrist and made the call.

Jock called me on Monday afternoon. “Sorry to hear about your problems on Saturday. I’d be surprised if J.D. ever went on another date with you.”

“It wasn’t exactly a date.”

“Well, whatever it was.”

“How did you hear about that?” I hadn’t called him.

“The date?”

“The other stuff.”

“I hear lots of things.”

“Well, it’s over, at least for now.”

“It’s over forever.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had a conversation with Mr. Baggett. We came to an understanding.”

I laughed. “Did bolt clippers come into the conversation?”

“May have. Take care, podner.” He was gone, disappearing into the ether like a guardian angel. And maybe that’s what he was, after all.

History is not immutable and most of it is told from the perspective of the historian, carrying with it the personal biases and other baggage of the teller of the story. However, over many years and through the diligence of those studying the historiography of an era, the truth tends to emerge, or at least a learned consensus of that truth, of what really happened in any given time period.

In this book, I have taken some liberties with the history of a courageous people, the Black Seminoles, who lived and loved and procreated and fought and died in the Florida wilderness, seeking only the right to be left alone to live their lives in freedom. There was, of course, never a protocol to the treaty of 1832, but there was a treaty and I have tried to be faithful to the intent of that document. The Camp Moultrie Treaty of 1823 is real and I have attempted to accurately convey some of its provisions, including the ones dealing with the large parcel of land, more than four million acres, reserved for the Seminoles.

The Seminole Tribes filed a lawsuit in 1950 seeking just compensation for the acreage given them in the Camp Moultrie Treaty and taken away by the 1832 pact. It took twenty-six years to settle the case, and the Indians were paid the sum of sixteen million dollars. What a deal. That land is today worth billions of dollars, but the Seminoles and their black allies only realized a pittance.

The saga of the Black Seminoles is little known to the world at large and that is a shame. These men and women blazed a glorious trail of courage, political astuteness, and diplomacy that is a shining chapter in the history of African Americans. For the better part of two centuries, until the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842, the free black people of
Florida changed the course of history and did so with the pride and dignity denied them by the United States Government.

The Black Seminoles were fierce warriors and astute diplomats who served as the Seminoles’ ambassadors to the white man. They were shrewd strategists and tacticians, often leading the war parties against the government troops. And they were men and women seeking that universal human desire: freedom.

For generations preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, black slaves had been escaping the plantations of the South and finding refuge in Florida. Often they would exchange their slavery to the whites for a benign bondage to the Indians. Other escapees lived in freedom as citizens of Spanish Florida and later as allies and friends of the Seminoles. These Seminole Negroes, as they were called, served as farmers, interpreters, spies, scouts, diplomats, and warriors. They were a proud and integral part of the Seminole Nation.

There were three Seminole wars, or one long Florida war, depending on one’s perspective, that were fought primarily over the issue of fugitive slaves. In a large sense the question of ownership of the Black Seminoles was the catalyst for the wars, rather than the issue of removal of the Seminoles to the Indian lands west of the Mississippi. Indeed, the Seminoles might have acquiesced in removal if not for the perfidy of the United States government on the question of the black people who lived among them.

These blacks were the slaves, friends, allies, and, not infrequently, the spouses and children of the Seminoles. They were warriors, advisers, and tribal councilors. Little wonder then that the Indians were less than willing to give up the blacks to the slave catchers of Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas.

The blacks cherished their freedom; for some the first ever experienced, and for others the result of generations of their families’ residence in Florida. They were willing to, and did, fight and die for the right to remain free. Many of the Seminole warriors were black, and in some cases, notably in the famed Osceola’s band, made up the majority.

At least as early as 1688, the Spanish government had encouraged black slaves from the British colonies to the north to seek refuge in Florida.
Although the Spanish themselves held slaves, they were smart enough to realize that it would not be possible to entice blacks to flee British territory if they were only to exchange British slavery for Spanish slavery. As it was to the benefit of the Spanish to weaken their enemies to the north by inducing the slaves to flee, the government allowed them their freedom. The runaway slaves established communities where the authorities treated them as citizens. These communities continued to thrive during the British occupation of 1763–1783, even though the British did not welcome the runaways with the same open arms policies as those of the Spanish. During this period, the Seminoles became the protectors of the blacks who lived among them. Florida was returned to Spain at the end of the American Revolution by the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Some of the Seminole chiefs purchased black slaves using wild cattle as payment. Forty cattle was said to be the price of a slave. However, the Seminole had no concept of what a slave should do, or how he should relate to the slave. The system developed into a semifeudal relationship rather than a system similar to the one found on the slaveholding plantations. The Seminoles’ slaves lived in separate villages, and as they were more sophisticated in agriculture than their masters, they were for the most part farmers. The blacks were allowed to carry arms, and the majority was under no more subordination to the chief than was the average tribesman.

In 1821, when Florida came under the control of the United States, there were thirty-four Seminole settlements with Indians occupying thirty-one and the blacks three. The villages were surrounded by cultivated fields, and the people lived in houses constructed in the Indian fashion with palmetto planks lashed to upright posts and covered with palmetto thatch. A part of the slave’s crop was paid to his Seminole master as a form of tribute, but it never exceeded ten bushels annually. At the beginning of the Second Seminole War in 1835, there were probably 1,200 free blacks and an estimated 200 slaves residing among the Seminoles.

Many of the slaves became prosperous from holdings in crops and livestock. These slaves could live among the free black population and intermarry with them. The Seminoles would on occasion also marry slaves, and the children of the marriage were free persons.

An apparently distinct class of blacks was the Maroons who had at
one time been fugitive slaves from the plantations, but who had lived among the Seminoles for so many generations that their antecedents had been completely forgotten. The word Maroon was derived from a Spanish word of East Indian origin meaning free Negroes. The Maroons had intermarried with the Seminoles and were thought of as brothers and allies.

All of the Black Seminoles spoke a European language. Those who had escaped from Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas spoke English, and those from Louisiana and the Florida plantations spoke French and Spanish. They quickly learned the Muskogee language of the Seminoles and became valuable as interpreters. Because the former slaves had knowledge of the customs of the white man, they could advise the Indians on what to expect from them. It has been said that one of the problems with interpretation of the treaties between the Americans and the Seminoles was that the precise English of the American statesmen was translated into Muskogee by blacks who spoke the dialect of the field hand. It is not difficult to see how this could lead to misunderstandings on both sides.

After Andrew Jackson won the presidency he was able to convince Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act, which was designed to move all Indians living east of the Mississippi River to the Oklahoma Territory. It was time for the government to abrogate the treaty of 1823.

The Indians gathered at Payne’s Landing on the Ocklawaha River in the spring of 1832, and on May 9 entered into a treaty signed by Commissioner James Gadsden for the United States and by several chiefs for the Seminoles. The treaty required that the Seminoles move to Arkansas and be reunited with the Creeks from whom they had separated many years before. There was however a proviso made a part of the preamble that was later to cause much consternation. The weight of authority seems to be that the proviso was a condition of the treaty. It provided that several chiefs and their black interpreter, Abraham, would travel at government expense to Arkansas to examine the country, and if they were favorably disposed to move, the articles of the treaty would be implemented. The provision seems to be quite clear that this was a choice to be made by the Indians. The Indian delegation inspected the new lands and was not happy with them. They refused to move and the seeds of the Second Seminole War were sown.

The Second Seminole War was the longest, and until then, the costliest the United States had engaged in. It began in 1835 and drew to its inevitable conclusion in 1842 when most of the Seminoles and many of their black friends and family were moved to Arkansas. The Seminoles did not surrender and several hundred of them disappeared into the trackless Everglades where they remain to this day.

After the First Seminole War and again after the Second, a number of the Black Seminoles refused to migrate to Oklahoma and instead fled Florida in canoes. They landed on Andros Island in the Bahamas, and established a settlement at Red Bays on the northwestern coast of the island. Many of their descendants reside there to this day. Well into the 1930s they were referred to as the “wild Indians of Andros.” Most of their Seminole heritage has disappeared, subsumed into the island culture of which they are a part. In appearance the Andros descendants do not seem any different from the other Bahamians, but occasionally, on close inspection, one can discern faintly the features of the Seminole on the faces of these Androsians.

H. Terrell Griffin
Longboat Key, Florida

On the last morning of his life, Jim Desmond woke to the sound of the gentle surf lapping on the beach, pushed by the onshore breeze that barely rippled the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Early light reflected off the water, the angle of the sun hanging over the mainland to the east giving the seascape a flat appearance, as if much of the color had been leeched out of the vivid hues that usually paint the southwest coast of Florida.

Desmond snuggled a little more deeply into the bed, a sheet and light blanket covering his naked body, protecting him from the cold air blowing from the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. He knew it was already hot out on the beach, the June humidity lying like a damp shroud over the entire island.

A hand slowly reached over him, caressed his chest. He felt breasts snuggle against his back, a long leg cross his. Heard a slight snicker, felt a wet kiss on his shoulder, the warm breath of his wife against his skin. He turned toward her, kissed her smiling face, and began to make love to the woman he’d married the day before on the beach in front of the Hilton.

Later, they lay in the bed, her head on his shoulder, her blonde hair tickling his nose. They were sated for a time, their physical need for each other slaked. Two people on the cusp of the future, a long life of success and children and growing old together stretched before them. Happiness was their due, for they were the children of the baby boomers, the generation that had known tranquility in their world, enjoyed the fruits of their parents’ success, gone off to college and joined fraternities and sororities, partied and studied, and moved into the wider world where they expected no less than life as they had always known it.