A Land Remembered

“‘When I was about your age I followed some men on a hunt, and they come on some of these birds in a swamp. They shot one, and when it fell to the ground, the others flew off into the trees. In a few seconds one of them came back to the dead one, and then they all started coming back, one by one. They are the only birds I have ever known to do this. They kept coming back to the dead till the men just sat there and killed every one of them. Maybe they were coming back to grieve over the dead. I don’t rightly know. But when them men found out that if you kill one Carolina, then the others will keep coming back to the dead, they hunted them and shot every one in the county. Wiped them out clean.’”

Tobias’s horrifying anecdote about the Carolina parakeets is an early example of the lengths to which man will go in his destruction of nature. If man is willing to disrupt something as poignant and beautiful as the parakeet grieving ritual simply because he can, there’s no telling how far he will go in the pursuit of profit.

“In an instant the spectators were in the water, pulling the bulls ashore and up the bank. Men and women unsheathed knives and swarmed over the carcasses like ants, and in a matter of minutes there was no trace left of meat, hides, hooves or horns.”

The scene of the men and women at the Confederate camp behaving like animals as they tear apart the dead cows is a chilling reminder of the extreme starvation the Confederate Army experienced during the Civil War. It also puts the MacIveys’ own lingering starvation in perspective, suggesting that conditions are just as bad on the frontlines as they are on the frontier. 

“‘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.’”

This is the earliest and clearest indication of Tobias’s philosophy on land ownership. This reflects a sense of idealism that his son Zech will stray from considerably and that his grandson Sol will abandon altogether.

“‘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.’”

After the hurricane drowns the entire herd, Emma suggests that God is punishing them for attempting to tame nature. This is one of many instances in which nature is framed less as an impersonal antagonist and more as a self-aware adversary with conscious motives, capable of revenge and spite against those who cross it.

“‘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.’”

This is a rare glimpse into Tobias’s psyche that reveals the motivations behind his years of turmoil and survival amid the unforgiving Florida wilderness—motivations that had previously been rather opaque. Tobias is driven not by money but by a desire for the human dignity that eluded his father.

“The first forms that visited the stand were deer, and they were soon replaced by the smaller vague bodies of foxes and rabbits and raccoons. He lay there in the dry grass and watched a procession come in groups of their own kind: wolves, bears, a mother panther with a litter of cubs, all passing each other without comment, drinking and disappearing again into the night. There were no growls of anger, no warnings to move away, no snarling flashes of superiority—deadly natural enemies seemingly under a truce understood only by themselves, sharing equally a thing they all must have to survive.”

The sight of every animal on the prairie, predator and prey alike, gathering peacefully to share water during a drought has a profound impact on Zech. Throughout his life, whenever he witnesses men threatening or killing one another over a bit of grazing land or a chest of gold coins, Zech remembers this scene and ponders humanity’s refusal to share natural resources as the animals do.

“‘It don’t seem to be no end to the pestilence this land can bring. Sometimes I think the Lord is warning us to go away.’”

Although Tobias dismisses Emma’s theory that the hurricane was God’s punishment or warning, he is more inclined to believe this is the case after a swarm of mosquito hatchlings descends on the herd. The mosquito attack, while ultimately less deadly than the hurricane, possesses a plague-like quality that is inescapably reminiscent of the wrath of God in the Old Testament.

“When they returned to the camp Zech lay on his blanket wide awake, thinking of the things James Tiger told him, wondering why anyone would kill an Indian over a few scrub cows when they were numerous everywhere. He could not comprehend some people denying the Indians the right to even own a cow. None of it made sense to him, and he felt a deep sympathy for James Tiger and Willie Cypress and all the others who suffered hunger because of what he could only see as gross stupidity and greed. Even the animals were willing to share if it meant survival for all.”

Zech’s utopian ideas, informed by the harmonious display at the drought pond, are undercut by what he learns about the treatment of Seminoles at the hands of white men. Throughout the narrative, Zech observes men failing to live up to the example set by the animals on the prairie.

“The female smell of her made Zech dizzy, like the night he rode with Glenda, only this time the scent was not flowers; it was an outdoor smell, like smoke and crushed pine needles.”

For Zech, the differences between Tawanda and Glenda stand in for a broader schism within his character. While Glenda represents Zech’s place within polite, genteel society, Tawanda represents his wild spirit and the comfort he feels in nature.

“‘He thinks the land is a gift from the Lord for everybody’s use and it’s not right for anybody to lay claim to it. Maybe it ought to be that way, but it’s not.’”

While Zech and Tobias both believe the land ought to belong to everybody equally, what distinguishes Zech from his father is his ability to separate the way things ought to be with how they really are, and to act accordingly.

“It was a natural act between a man and a woman who cared for each other. What he had done with Tawanda belonged in the swamp and would remain there, and had nothing to do with his life with Glenda. These were two separate worlds, one real and one fantasy, and there was no reason for them to ever meet.”

Just as Zech is able to balance his feelings about the wilderness with the realities of living in a society of men, he compartmentalizes his feelings for Tawanda and Glenda. This allows Zech to absolve himself of guilt or a sense of responsibility over breaking his marital vows.

“Perhaps animals are smarter than men, he thought, taking only what they need to live today, leaving something for tomorrow. Even the hated wolf kills only for food and only for immediate need. Maybe it is man who will eventually perish as he destroys the land and all that it offers, taking the animals down with him.”

As the frontier becomes more crowded with tycoons and hired guns, Zech’s attitude toward man’s relationship with nature becomes even more pessimistic. But rather than lead to a sense of defeatism, Zech’s clear-eyed assessment of the fate of Florida’s wilderness leads him to act as its steward going forward.

“Rather than comparing Tawanda and Glenda as he often did in the past, he now compared Sol and Toby, finding them alike in many ways. Had they been allowed to grow up together as a pair, they would have been unstoppable, capable of accomplishing anything they desire; but because they were born of different races and cultures they were destined never to share the same hopes and dreams, or to even know each other. This saddened Zech, and he pondered the why of it.”

Sol and Toby, two similar boys of vastly different backgrounds, embody Zech’s own internal schism between civilization and the wilderness. This quote suggests that the schism is not inherently irreconcilable, but rather something society has thrust onto him, much in the same way systemic racism separates Sol and Toby.

“‘With all the gold in them trunks I could ‘a bought her fancy dresses and shoes and such as a woman likes, but all I ever gave her was that goddam cook stove. And now it’s too late to do anything. I waited too long.’”

The cook stove is a symbol for all the regrets Tobias carries with him in the wake of Emma’s death. Despite his earlier claim that he carries out his work on the frontier in service of his family, Tobias’s unintentional miserliness and lack of sensitivity toward his wife’s desires suggest otherwise.

“It seemed to Zech that all of the creatures had gone mad, driven to a bloody frenzy by the ice and snow and death that lingered because of it.”

In highly evocative terms, this quote highlights the severity of the Great Freeze of 1895, which for a short while decimated the wilderness Zech so loves.

“‘I guess you’re going to make out all right, Sol, but I sure wouldn’t want to do business with you.’”

This quote foreshadows the man Sol will become: a ruthless practitioner of the most extreme forms of capitalism. While his future endeavors are not so outwardly dishonest as his kookaben scheme, he repeatedly undertakes agricultural or financial operations that would shame his father if he were still alive to see them. 

“He wondered who these men were, where they came from, why they were here and what drove them to do what they were doing; he knew that soon now someone would die, maybe them and maybe himself. Is it really worth all this, he asked himself, all this approaching death because of cows? But he knew it was more than cows that brought him here, remembering the dogs and the horses and the bullet in Bonzo and the bushwhacking and the firefight and the murder of an unborn baby and the absolute need to take these men’s lives from them in order to stop it. But why had they started it in the first place? This he couldn’t answer, knowing only the fact that some men would rather take than share and would indeed as soon kill another man as a snake.”

Zech ponders the cycles of violence on the frontier, hoping to break one such cycle with his raid on McGraw’s compound. Unfortunately, a cycle of violence cannot be broken with more violence, and the wheel of suffering continues to turn long after the successful raid. In fact, Zech’s eventual death is the indirect result of the gunshot wound he suffers during the raid. In turn, Zech’s death removes his influence from Sol’s upbringing, leading the son to embark on a series of irresponsible endeavors that destroy the wilderness and many of its inhabitants.

“Glenda had been fascinated by his tales of the place, and wanted to see it, but he had never taken her there because of the nearby Indian village, fearing that she would somehow learn of Tawanda and Toby. He bought it because of not taking her there, wanting to leave it in its natural state and be sure that no one ever put axes or machines to it, destroying it as the land was destroyed around Palm Beach.”

In addition to reflecting Zech’s status as a steward of mother nature, this quote reveals how the act of buying land can represent more than simply protectionism amid the inconvenient realities of frontier capitalism. For Zech, buying land can also be an act of tribute, both to Glenda and to the wilderness itself.

“‘It is not just swamp! It is God you are killing. He put the land here for all creatures to enjoy, and you are destroying it. When you destroy the land you destroy God.’”

Toby’s exceedingly harsh words to Sol reflect a desire to reach the half-brother who has strayed so dramatically from the MacIvey philosophy. Unfortunately, they have the effect of further alienating Sol and leading to his total rejection of conservationism as a philosophy.

“‘You know, Bonnie, that bastard bulldozed two whole lifetimes. Everything Pappa and Grampy did is gone now. It’s a wonder he didn’t pull out the stones and plant trees there too.’”

Sol begins to understand Toby’s perspective on the destruction of the land around his sacred swamps. Unfortunately, this sense of understanding is short-lived, as Sol will soon declare all-out war against nature in the wake of Bonnie’s death during the Okeechobee Hurricane.

“The storm had turned paper millionaires into paupers overnight, former tycoons now pushing wheelbarrows and working with crews on dump trucks, shoveling up litter and salvaging what little the winds spared.”

This quote neatly encapsulates the boom-and-bust cycle of Florida development projects in the 1920s. It also reflects the extent to which mother nature can be just as formidable an adversary to the new class of city developers as it was to the frontiersmen on the prairie a generation earlier.

“It was all done with good intent and faith at the time but nevertheless created a travesty against nature that could never be reversed.”

The real-life damming of Lake Okeechobee disrupted the region’s natural water flow, resulting in the desiccation of Seminole lands. Even as recently as 2019, there were new adverse consequences of the engineering project, including toxic algae blooms that poisoned the lake’s fish.

“The name MacIvey became a phantom, not something real but meaningless letters across bank buildings, art centers and small parks.”

For Tobias’s and Zech’s generations, the MacIvey name represented a loving and faithful extended family that included blood relatives as well as Frog, Skillit, and Bonzo. Now, however, the name MacIvey signifies nothing more personal than a corporate logo.