Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife [NOOK Book]

Read an Excerpt

It's Tallahassee. It's Friday afternoon. It's November 17, 2000, ten days after the not-election. The votes -- chads dimpled, dangling, hinged, hanging, or pregnant -- still sit in boxes. The Motel 6 still declares NO VACANCY. News anchors still drink Bombay Sapphire martinis in the Doubletree, bugging the bartenders: "Could I have extra olives? A bowl would be good." Ex-secretaries of state still eat shrimp and grits at the Cypress Restaurant. Television trucks, their satellite dishes pointed at the cold heaven, still clog Duval Street. Walgreens is still sold out of collapsible umbrellas. Home Depot is still sold out of extension cords. Florida is still the center of the universe.

I'm walking around downtown, acting like a tourist in the place I was born, hoping maybe I'll run into Jesse Jackson or Warren Christopher or Tipper Gore (incognito in Audrey Hepburn sunglasses) or just somebody who feels like sucking down a couple of cosmos at Chez Pierre. Things have gone quiet. The "Sore Loserman" sign-toting rent-a-rabble have decamped to the high ground of the Holiday Inn. The lawyers are holed up in their offices navigating stacks of statutes, Lexis printouts, briefs, and mostly empty Pizza Hut boxes. The judges have disappeared behind the silver doors of the Florida Supreme Court, pondering their next Delphic pronouncement. The whole world is watching. There's just not much to see.

I pick my way over black TV cables, thick as a convention of king snakes, behind the New Capitol, reaching past the fountain that should have water splashing over white stone except it's been broken and dry since the 1980s. The State of Florida is too cheap to fix it. But beneath my feet, down through the concrete, down below the blanket of red clay on the hill, underground rivers course through limestone passages: you wouldn't have to dig far to hit water. Make a natural fountain. The Floridan Aquifer on parade. It would even be free.

I guess the governor and the legislature have bigger mullet to fry. Aesthetics has never been much of a priority around here. Every year legislators ritually complain about the James Rosenquist mural on the ground floor of the capitol: Why the giant orange peels? And a rock stuck to a rope? And a crab wearing a cowman's hat?

Political sensitivity isn't much of a priority, either. Unlike Alabama, Florida still flies its Confederate flag. The Second National, also known as the Stainless Banner, flaps near the defunct fountain along with the lions and castles of León and Castile, the Fleur de Lys, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes, emblems of the sovereign powers that have presided over Florida since 1513. Rumors run around Tallahassee that the governor would like to haul the Second National down and pack it off to the Museum of Florida History, where no one would notice it. A Rebel banner outside the statehouse in the year 2000 is embarrassing. The governor's had enough trouble with African American voters, too, ever since the 1994 campaign, when some reporter asked him what he planned to do for black people and he replied, "Nothing." Things went downhill from there: Nine months ago he unilaterally ended state affirmative action.

But it's an election year; he can't get rid of the thing now. The Sons of Confederate Veterans would have a hissy fit, white rural Republicans big on states' rights would get mad, and everybody would accuse him of sucking up to people who'd be about as likely to vote for a member of the Bush family as burst into a spontaneous rendition of "Dixie."

You can feel the governor's pain. Here in forward-looking, twenty-first-century Florida we don't like to be reminded of slavery days. Florida had plantations, sure, and Jim Crow and race riots and lynchings (lots of lynchings); Florida still has white guys with "Forget, HELL!" mud flaps and "Heritage Not Hate" bumper stickers, but Florida isn't Alabama. We promise. Or Georgia or South Carolina or Mississippi. We are bright, hopeful, and historyless. The current unpleasantness over the presidential election is like a hurricane. An act of God. Not our fault. This hurricane has ripped off a few roofs, rearranged the lawn furniture, and brought down some big tree limbs. But it will soon be over. The clouds will clear. Then we can go back to the Florida that's about fun, fun and sun and money, back to the Florida that pretends very hard that the past doesn't matter.

The eternal present almost works in South Florida, where most of the population recently arrived from Michigan or New Jersey; they bulldoze the old and wild places, evidence of a pre-air-conditioned, pre-condo, pre-golf-course era. The eternal present doesn't work in North Florida, where the ghosts are in residence year-round. I walk over the crest of the hill that sweeps down to the site of the Apalachee village of Anhaica, where, in 1539, the conquistador Hernando de Soto camped on his way to die on the banks of the Mississippi. I pass the Old Capitol, where, in January 1861, Catherine Murat, princess of France and great-grandniece of George Washington, pulled a silken rope and fired the cannon that announced Florida's secession from the Union. I cross College Avenue, which used to be called Clinton Street. It wasn't named for the forty-second president, though I wish it had been. To the west is a brick castle, towers, battlements, and all, the administration building of Florida State University. In the early 1970s, Time or Newsweek (nobody in Tallahassee can ever remember which) called FSU "the Berkeley of the South." Students for a Democratic Society flourished, Nixon-hating was a religion, and a guy named "Radical Jack" Lieberman used to teach a class on "How to Make a Revolution." Before World War II, FSU was the Florida State College for Women, and before that, it was the Seminary West of the Suwannee. My great-great-grandfather Luther Tucker was a cadet in 1865 when word came that Union troops were marching up from the Gulf to take Tallahassee. He got a note from his mama (required by the college), picked up his rifle, and, along with a bunch of other teenagers, engaged the Yankees at Natural Bridge.

Monroe Street is Tallahassee's main drag, unless you count the interstate (and we don't). During the lunch-counter protests of the early 1960s, students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University marched up and down the sidewalk with placards citing the Golden Rule and verses from the New Testament. My mother bought her lizard-skin stilettos and matching handbags from Miller's and her cocktail dresses from the Vogue. Her wedding presents came from Moon's Jewelers, where the carpet was as thick as custard and the salesladies members of the DAR. Old Mr. Moon, who would worry bees till they stung him (he thought this helped his arthritis), is dead now. The stores are gone, replaced by law offices, lobbying firms, citrus, cattle, construction, phosphate, and banking associations, all keeping a crocodilian eye on Florida government and thus their profits. The lobbyists always outnumber the legislators; over the last few weeks, the reporters have outnumbered the lobbyists, prowling the town like frat boys in search of cheap beer.

Actually, the reporters are often literally in search of beer, though to be fair, they prefer Sam Adams to Miller Lite. And that only after they've turned in the daily on last night's court ruling and what Al Gore's lawyers said about it and what George Bush's lawyers said about it and the spin put on all of it by Warren Christopher and James Baker, or maybe the weekender or magazine piece on the white-columned houses on Calhoun Street or the Indian mounds at Lake Jackson or the Florida panthers at the Junior Museum or the judge who writes mystery novels or the lawyer who raises polled Herefords or the Spanish moss thing or the manners thing or the "y'all" thing. A piece that uses "folksy," "drawl," "quaint," "Southern," "sleepy," and/or "legendary congressman Claude Pepper" in it. A piece that expresses astonishment (while trying to disguise it) that anything in Florida is older than Disney World.

You can't blame them. It's hard not to feel (though most of the reporters have stopped saying it) that a constitutional crisis should be happening somewhere with more gravitas: New York or Pennsylvania, even Illinois. It's hard not to feel that the whole country's fallen down a rabbit hole. To have the presidency, the very keystone of the Great Republic, coming unglued in a state where people march around in black-felt mouse ears, a state that boasts the world's only professional clown school, a state where a good percentage of the population confuse dirty glass in Clearwater with the Virgin Mary and a small Cuban boy in Miami with Jesus Christ, is not a paradigm shift but a paradigm violation. Where's the grandeur of democracy? The clarity of the Common Law? The majesty of the Bill of Rights? Hell, where's the beach?

It's not as much fun for the reporters as you might think. Most of them arrived from somewhere else, somewhere freezing, under the impression that they were going to Florida, a place of tropical ease and tropical warmth. They got to Tallahassee to find it wet and cold. They had to go to Nic's Toggery and buy tweed jackets and Mister Rogers' cardigans -- Nic's is now famous as the place where Warren Christopher went looking for a pair of pajamas. The reporters live out of carry-ons in beige rooms at the Doubletree or the Radisson or, if they were late getting down here, the Days Inn off Highway 19 in Thomasville, Georgia. They eat at Andrew's every day: the "Blackened Jeb-Burger," the "Bob Graham-Burger," the "Secretary of State Salad Plate." They get their underwear dry-cleaned.

The natives smile politely, though the reporters get the feeling that, instead of being interviewed for the New York Times or All Things Considered, the natives would rather be at the mall. There, with giant red bows everywhere and Santa on his throne, they can pretend that the biggest political story since Watergate isn't exploding like a truckload of cheap firecrackers in their backyard.

Still, they're friendly, the natives. As if somehow they see the whole town -- maybe the whole state -- as their living room and the reporters as their guests. The local lawyers for both Gore and Bush, the judges, the capital press corps, the political operatives, and the bartenders are all on multigenerational elbow-clutching terms with one another. These y'all-sayers want to make sure you've got something to drink, and have you been to Posey's at St. Marks for the smoked mullet? and have you been to Albert's Provence for the bouillabaise? and have you ridden out to Wakulla Springs and taken the Jungle Cruise to see the anhingas and the alligators and the place where they made Creature from the Black Lagoon? The natives tell you the difference between camellias and sasanquas, grouper and snapper, FSU's running game last year and FSU's running game this year. People in Miami or Palm Beach or Lauderdale don't behave this way. They don't give a shit if you've made it to the Seaquarium, Domino Park, Vizcaya, or the Polo Hall of Fame; they want to talk about it, the vote recount, the lawsuits, the word out of Austin, the word out of Washington. South Floridians will just come out and ask: Is Jeb Bush banging Katherine Harris? Is Al Gore as big a whiny asshole as he looks on TV? Tallahasseeans, citizens of the state's capital city, want to know -- God, do they want to know -- but they act like they're embarrassed, preferring maybe to pretend that the world's press has descended on them to cover the annual Jingle Bell 10K Run.

The reporters see their point. After all, banana republics are calling Florida a "banana republic." Fidel Castro has offered to send "democracy educators."

I begin to worry that something big is going on somewhere and I'm the only one who doesn't know about it. Walking through the Chain of Parks, five blocks' worth of grassy rectangles canopied with live oaks that were fully grown when Thomas Jefferson was president, I consider calling the St. Petersburg Times bureau or going home to check CNN. Then, in Lewis Park, I come upon a reporter for an up-north newspaper. I'd met him in Waterworks the other night. Waterworks is a postmodern tiki bar on the Thomasville Road with an ingenious yet low-tech system of artfully punctured Sears garden hoses hung at the top of its picture windows so that from the inside it always looks like there's a North Florida monsoon pouring down outside. The newspaper and magazine people, the younger wire people, the BBC correspondent in the motorcycle boots, and the Agence France-Presse girl with the suspicious tan like to go there for the martinis, which come with a little pink plastic monkey hanging off the side of the glass.

A couple of nights ago a BBC radio guy and the up-north reporter made their monkeys be George W. Bush and Al Gore. The monkeys duked it for the presidency of the United States of America on a sticky tabletop as Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" crashed out of the speakers. But now the up-north reporter is standing there on the still-verdant turf, staring at a stump.

It had been a very big oak tree, broad as a banker's desk. What's left is dry and gray as a dove. "Hey," I say. "What's going on?"

"It's dead," he says.

I look at the stump, then at the up-north reporter. "Yeah," I say, "it's dead. Struck by lightning in 1986."

"Why don't they dig it up?"

"You don't understand," I say.

He says, "Is there an election metaphor in here somewhere?"

I tell him this is -- was -- the May Oak, one of the holy things of Old Florida, a tree that is more than a tree, an iconic representation of who we think we are, we who came to Florida in Andrew Jackson's bloody wake. Under the May Oak's vaulted green branches more than a hundred May Queens were crowned, more than a hundred May Poles erected and beribboned to be danced around by the flower-garlanded children of considerable white people. The Tallahassee Floridian of 1848 declared that the May Party was "an ancient custom handed down from the days of romance and chivalry." Never mind that less than three miles away you could find wildcats and bear (or they could find you). Never mind that the considerable white people copied the May Party out of a book and that Florida had been a state for less than three years.

I tell the up-north reporter that in the late 1960s, I was one of the children singing "Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu!" without having a clue what the words meant and anyway concentrating on weaving a clumsy pink and green crepe paper braid around the May Pole. Mary Harmon Hunt was my May Pole partner; she was taller than me and better with the streamers. Mary Harmon's mother, Mary Cecilia, had been May Queen in 1950. She wore long white gloves up to her shoulders and a white organdy dress over a hoop. She carried a bouquet of yard flowers -- Queen Elizabeth roses, pinks, sweet william, night-blooming stock, and bronze iris -- made up by the ladies of the Garden Club. She sat in a huge white fan-back chair. The May Queen and her court got dressed in their crinolines in a house up the street. In 1865 a Union general had stood on the porch of that house and read the Emancipation Proclamation.

The up-north reporter wants to know if there are still May Queens and May Poles. I tell him that the May Party, like everything else in Florida, eventually became a political problem. Once the May Court came entirely from Leon High School, which was -- no shock here -- entirely white. But by 1974 Leon had been integrated. What if a black girl got on the May Court? Tallahassee wasn't just Gwynns and Lewises and Proctors and Moors and Duvals and Hopkinses, whose mothers were all in the Garden Club together and whose fathers had been KA or SAE brothers at UF. Tallahassee was getting to be like other places: There were two malls and three McDonald's. FSU had a black homecoming queen. Some civic worthies were agitating for a spring festival that would attract tourists to Tallahassee, with a parade and an arts and crafts show. Something for the new people; something to make money. The May Party didn't make money.

In 1973 Governor Reuben Askew declared his intention to drag Florida kicking and screaming out of the Old South. He was building us a new capitol, a real skyscraper shooting above the trees and the towers of the antebellum churches. This was partly an answer to the South Florida senators who'd been agitating to move the capital to Orlando, which would be, said the senators, more central, more like "Florida," with wide highways and orange groves and Yankees moving in and Mickey Mouse moving in. What they meant was that Tallahassee seemed too hysterically historical.

Lucky for Tallahassee, the usual gang of North Florida legislators, gallus-wearing Machiavels who weren't about to let the prize porker run off downstate, killed the plan dead. Can you imagine the vote recount coverage as officials held press conferences in the Haunted Mansion, reporters from The News Hour with Jim Lehrer interviewing Goofy and Snow White, Pocahontas appearing on Larry King Live, giving her assessment of Supreme Court rulings? Askew had wanted to tear down the Old Capitol, with its plantation house porticos where tradition says slaves were bought and sold and its memories of secession fever and battle-flag-waving atavism, but the ladies of the Garden Club, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and half of middle-class Tallahassee, bowed up and threatened to chain themselves to the fat Doric columns in front for all the world -- or at least everybody driving up Apalachee Parkway -- to see.

Askew lost the Old Capitol battle but got his New Capitol, rising behind the old one, a piece of cement brutalism with miserly windows. At about the same time, the May Party died like a frostbit bud, leaving just the tree, its rheumatic limbs getting too heavy for it, and a list of queens dating back to the 1840s. The New Capitol replaced the oak as the symbol of the New Florida. Tallahasseeans call the building "Reuben's Erection." Look at it from the top of the hill a mile to the east, the shaft thrusting up twenty-two stories, flanked on either side by the domed chambers of the House of Representatives and the Senate; you'll see why.

"If you still want a metaphor," I say to the up-north reporter, "what about the New Capitol?"

"I've been to Florida lots of times," he says, "mostly the part with the palm trees and poolside cocktail service. I've covered Florida politics. But a lot of what goes on up here is people talking about who they were at law school with. And who their cousins are. And their daddies. Everybody has daddies. Are you sure this is Florida?"

"We were here first," I say.

"Okay, I've been in this town two weeks. I even like it. It's just not the ticket I thought I bought."

"Or the ballot you thought you punched."

My way-back cousin Enid Broward was May Queen in 1907. Her daddy was Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, known as the Fighting Democrat. The Browards had once been big plantation people in East Florida, but they lost it all in the Civil War. Napoleon Bonaparte had to work for a living, cod fishing, captaining a tugboat, and running guns to Cuban revolutionaries. As governor, he wanted to drain the Everglades, make some money off all that land doing nothing but lying around underwater. Napoleon Bonaparte was planning on going to Washington, but about the time he was fixing to ignite his senatorial campaign he died. My great-aunt Vivienne, ruthless ruler of the Winnie Davis Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, would say that at least he lived to see Enid enthroned under the May Oak. In 1915 the state named a new county after him, a vast lozenge of land containing much of the still-liquid eastern Everglades. Now Broward County is famous as the natural habitat of the chad that may change the world.

The up-north reporter is looking at the stump, shaking his head. "I need a beer."

It's only three in the afternoon, but what the hell. Andrew's two-for-one cheap chardonnay'll be starting soon. It's either drink or go home and watch nervous rehashes of the Volusia County totals or exegeses of circuit court opinions to make Thomas Aquinas twitch with impatience or still more footage of George W. clearing still more brush from his ranch. Or worse. CNN is an unrelenting magic mirror, reflecting Florida's secret self. Instead of Miami sunshine, there's Tallahassee rain. Instead of icing sugar sand and peacock blue water, fluorescent-lit courtrooms. Instead of Worth Avenue babes in Versace, lawyers in bow ties.

The Red Queen says, "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place."

One night late, maybe 2 A.M., on rerun Headline News tape of a Katherine Harris press conference, I even saw myself. We are all the way through the looking glass now.

Tallahassee's been a political town for a thousand years. At about the same time French stonemasons were building Chartres Cathedral, aboriginal Floridians were building the six great mounds on the northwestern shore of Lake Jackson. The mounds aren't graves: they probably had a ceremonial or religious function. Like the towers of Chartres, they stuck up higher than anything else around and so showed who was boss in these parts.

In 1823, two years after Spain offloaded Florida (cheap) to the United States, territorial governor William DuVal decided it needed a new capital. So he got two solid citizens, William Simmons of St. Augustine and John Lee Williams of Pensacola, to start walking from the eastern and western extremities of the territory. Tallahassee, the "old fields" of the Apalachees, domains of a people whose ancestors had arrived ten thousand years ago, was about the midway point.

Simmons and Williams met with Mikasuki chiefs Neamathla and Chifixico to "negotiate" property rights. Not that the chiefs were fooled. Simmons tells how Chifixico grabbed up a handful of Tallahassee dirt and demanded, "Is this not my land?" You hope Simmons had the grace to look ashamed. But Tallahassee had to be the capital, even though Tallahassee was twenty-five miles from the sea and five miles from the nearest good-size river. They built Washington, D.C., in a bog. I guess some places just smell of power.

I come from a political family. Until 1976 we were, pretty much all of us, Democrats, though some belonged to the To Kill a Mockingbird wing of the party and others to the Gone with the Wind wing. Jimmy Carter caused a schism: as one of my aunts said, he was "for the Negroes." She voted for George Wallace. A lot of them later turned to Ronald Reagan.

During the recount I watch us on television, my cousins by blood or marriage, distant or close or just claimed. L. Clayton "Clay" Roberts, director of the State Division of Elections, the tough-jawed young man always whispering in the secretary of state's pearl-decked ear, is an eighth-generation Floridian like me. Charlie Francis, one of the judges press-ganged into hand-counting votes, is married to my cousin Brenda Roberts. Dexter Douglass, general counsel to Governor Lawton Chiles, lead local attorney for Vice President Al Gore, is some kind of relation by marriage to the Browards. And probably still poltergeisting around the State Supreme Court Building, unable to bear missing the biggest court case in Florida history, is B. K. Roberts: in life chief justice for twenty-seven years, in death the name stuck over the door of the Florida State University law school, alma mater of several lawyers on both sides of the vote recount imbroglio.

Here in North Florida, kin -- however remote, however politically misguided, however many times indicted -- is kin.

My great-aunts' doxology was "Remember who you are." As if I'd be allowed to forget. The first of us arrived in Florida a little more than two hundred years ago. The rest came after Jackson's ethnic cleansing campaign made the territory safe for white men with seed cotton and slaves. We've more than flirted with power. My cousin Donald Tucker, a two-term Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, looked like he'd be a star in the national Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter nominated him for a federal post. Sadly, Donald never made it. It could be that the Carter administration eventually got around to reading some of the newspaper accounts of his high-smelling business deals. It couldn't have helped that his brother Kit -- Luther Christopher Tucker, Jr. -- had been indicted (though not convicted) for larceny, forgery, and uttering. My Roberts grandfather (whose mother was a Tucker) said that Kit took after his daddy.

Senator Luther Christopher Tucker, Sr., was a member of the Pork Chop Gang, a farrow of rural legislators in the '50s and '60s who took up a disproportionate amount of space at the public trough. The Lamb Choppers, the Pork Choppers' largely urban opposition, adhered to the radical notion that the legislature should pass laws for the good of the state as a whole, rather than, say, Wakulla County, population 5,467, all of whom were kin to you. Luther Tucker, glad-handing, womanizing, and bellicose, was the Pork Chopper's Pork Chopper, and nothing some pink-cocktail-drinking, white-shoe-wearing, New York Times-reading Lamb Chop sumbitch from Miamuh said was fixing to cut any ice with him. Tucker brought the bacon, cured, sweet, and fat, home to Wakulla County: roads, bridges, even a schoolhouse or two. When he wasn't in trouble with the law, that is.

The up-north reporter wants to know if I've ever worn a hoopskirt. You should see the look on his face when I say yes.

The hoopskirt is the tribal costume of the white-girl South, I say.

He says he's still having trouble understanding that he's in the South and not Florida. Or the Florida that's the South. Or something. He's still amazed at the judges who talk like Foghorn Leghorn, the legislators with the Queen of Cotton smiles, the "honey" this and the "sugar" that. "What's a hoopskirt made of?" he says. "How do you walk in it?" He's actually writing this down.

I tell him it's constructed of concentric circles of plastic covered in cotton and tied at the waist. It holds out your dress. It feels good to wear, especially in the summer, when the way it swings around cools your legs. You do have to be careful to wriggle your hindquarters back at an angle when you sit down or else the hoop will fly up in your face and reveal your Maidenforms or your thong or whatever it is you keep under there.

"I'll tell you this much," I say. "Driving a Honda Civic in a hoopskirt is no damn joke."

My friend Stuart and I were going to this costume party, and we were too lazy to outfit ourselves as Elvis or Alice in Wonderland or a rack of toast, so, being white girls from Tallahassee, we did the belle thing. We had to get all the way over the Georgia border, and our dresses were so vast we came close to wrecking twice. For thirty miles we fought the fabric and the fabric nearly won. Once we got to the party, we shook out our ruffles, got a couple of glasses of Cuvée Napa down us, and swooped around like we inhabited these contraptions every day of our lives.

"But before we drove home," I say, "I took the thing off and stuffed it in the trunk. I didn't care who saw me, either."

There are hoops stored in attics and guest-room closets all over Tallahassee. Sorority houses keep five or six of them around for girls who get invited to Kappa Alpha Old South Weekend. I tell the up-north reporter about how, in 1978, I sashayed with my sisters out of the Sigma Kappa house between a double line of boys with upraised swords, dressed in the gray coats and yellow braid of General Lee's officers -- no raggedy conscript cannon fodder in this Confederate Army.

At a barbecue held at some alum's pretend plantation house, we drank several quarts of cheap bourbon with limp mint leaves floating around in it. Later the girls, having switched to Tab, would spread our flounces out on the veranda steps, smoke Kools, and talk about the boys. The boys, having removed their swords, would be collapsing onto the alum's putting green or vomiting into the azaleas.

The Kappa Alphas call themselves "the last Southern gentlemen."

The up-north reporter says that he thinks he's sleeping at the Kappa Alpha house tonight. Unless it's the Pi Kap or the Kappa Sig house; he's got it written down somewhere. He's been kicked out of his hotel.

Most of the reporters have been kicked out of their hotels. This isn't a breakdown of Tallahassee's much-touted hospitality or an attack on the free press, it's a matter of priorities. There's a football game, the football game, Florida versus Florida State. Fifty thousand people calling themselves Gators or Seminoles, their Land Rovers and Chevy Suburbans flying window flags with the grinning Gator head of the University of Florida or the politically (and historically) incorrect profile of Florida State's Chief Osceola, fifty thousand people dressed in orange-and-blue tracksuits or garnet-and-gold sweater sets sporting buttons that say "Criminoles" or "Go to Hell, Gators," have reservations in every hotel, motel, flea-pit, rooming house, and state park campsite within a thirty-mile radius, reservations they made in 1999. The journalists, the campaign staffers, the freelancers, and the Washington power dogs have resorted to the Ramada in Americus, Georgia, the dorms at Tallahassee's Soviet-style community college, a friend of a friend's sofa, or the kindness of strangers. Some Tallahasseeans have decided to treat the recountistas as a strange class of refugee, offering them a place to sleep, a hot shower, and a full grits, eggs, biscuits, and locally made sausage breakfast for free.

FSU fraternities, on the other hand, don't want karmic credit, just money. So they are renting out their best-not-closely-inquired-into beds. The brothers can crash anywhere (girlfriends' place, library, back of the truck) and have a righteous party with what they make off the out-of-town geeks.

Most of the displaced are going quietly; others are fussing. Don't these rubes know that the government of the United States hangs in the balance? James Baker, George Bush, Sr.'s, secretary of state, George Bush, Jr.'s, Florida fixer, a man who knew several Russian premiers by their vodka-night nicknames, was told to vacate his suite at the Doubletree. It had been prebooked by a Bull Gator, a big donor to the

University of Florida. Baker had to move into a rented apartment that probably doesn't even have HBO. But the sports fans, even the Republican ones, are unmoved: Presidents come and presidents go. This game is about the national championship.

Walking back toward the TV tent city, the up-north reporter and I notice town isn't as quiet as it had been. A CNN blonde in a cobalt suit is doing a stand-up by the Confederate Memorial: "Today in Tallahassee -- " She looks at her cameraman. "I'll start that over. Today in Tallahassee, there's a pause in the legal maneuvering as this small Florida town turns its attention to football..." A gaggle of Seminoles and Gators in team regalia crowd around, probably ruining the shot.

"Hey," says a guy in a jacket embroidered with an alligator wearing a sweater but no pants. "Is that Greta Van Susteren? She's hot."

Outside Clyde's, the sticky-floored bar of choice for business lobbyists and their legislative protégés, the television above the door blares Fox News. They're relaying tape of George W.'s flack Ari Fleischer explaining about the Palm Beach butterfly ballot and the oddly large number of votes Pat Buchanan pulled in a place where a number of citizens still have a concentration camp number tattooed on their forearms. "Obviously," says Fleischer, with a Tweedledee smile, "Palm Beach County is a Buchanan stronghold."

"Well," says the up-north reporter, "obviously a bunch of old Jews are going to vote for a guy who believes in the superiority of Christianity and Western Civilization. Obviously."

At 7:52 P.M. on November 7, John Ellis of the Fox Network Decision 2000 team called Florida for Al Gore. ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN had already projected a win for Gore. At 7:58 P.M., John Ellis phoned his first cousin John Ellis Bush, better known as Jeb, to say he was awfully sorry, old man, but Junior was about to crash and burn in Florida. Shortly before 2:15 A.M. on November 8, John Ellis dialed the governor's mansion in Austin, Texas. Good news: Republican numbers have shot up. At 2:17 A.M., John Ellis declared Florida a win for Cousin George W. The other channels followed like sheep. Marvin Bush, the brother you've never heard of (as opposed to Neil Bush, the brother involved in the 1990 Silverado savings and loan scandal, the one that cost taxpayers one billion dollars), reportedly said to the governor of Florida, "Hey, Jebby! You can come in off the ledge now!"

Jeb Bush named his dog Marvin.

At this point on election night, I'd drunk an entire bottle of pink champagne by myself (for the Gore victory at 8 P.M.), then two shots of Lagavulin and a Snickers bar (after Gore lost at 2:18 A.M.). I was about to down a big glass of sweet tea and a Xanax on my way to bed, but for some reason I stayed on the sofa, pushing buttons on the remote. At three-something Al Gore conceded. Just before 4 A.M. he deconceded. The networks reported the conversation between George W. Bush and Al Gore:

The Governor of Texas: "You're calling back to retract that concession?"

The Vice President of the United States: "You don't have to get snippy about it."

George W. thinks he won. The Bush logic goes like this: 1. Jeb said he would win Florida; 2. Cousin John Ellis said he did win Florida; 3. On national TV, damn it.

We haven't had this much excitement in Tallahassee since the Secession Convention of 1861.

While the up-north reporter talks on his cell phone, I beat a suit with a BUSH CHENEY 2000 button on his Brooks Brothers lapel to the last outside table at Andrew's. He's a Republican fixer from D.C. He has two cell phones. He using them both, clamped to his ears, looking like the Hear-No-Evil monkey, but he's so good at multitasking he can still give me a snarly don't-you-know-who-I-am look while, no doubt, conferring with the Austin war room and making reservations at Chez Pierre. The up-north reporter hits the hang-up button. Stories are floating around like pine pollen about Republicans getting overseas military to vote late, after the postmark deadline, and send in the ballots anyway, daring Florida not to count them. The up-north reporter says, "Nobody can prove it: If you ask the Bush people, they wrap themselves in the flag and start singing the Marine Corps hymn. And the Gore people just talk about giving the benefit of the doubt to our brave fighting men and women."

"Speaking technically," I say, "this is fucked up."

When I was thirteen, I lost my faith in democracy. Lost it right there in the House of Representatives, where I was working as a page. I fetched resolutions and bills, copies of the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald, Cokes and MoonPies for fat, loud white men in outfits that knew no natural fibers, while they ate, snored, joked, and smoked their way through the spring legislative session. For this I got a pit-side view of Florida democracy in action, a week off school, and $51.20.

I don't remember being obsessed by politics and the law the way my uncles and aunts and older cousins were. As a fifth-grader, I had supported Richard Nixon. I've no idea why, except the other guy had got fatally confused in my mind with Humpty Dumpty. But my week as a page in the capitol exploded the propaganda of civics class. When we weren't delivering junk food or stacks of paper to legislative desks, we sat, dressed in patent leather shoes and clip-on ties, against the wall of the House, watching our elected representatives honk chaw into their coffee cups and pat their secretaries on the fanny. During one of the many debates on open government, a bunch of West Florida Dixiecrats started fencing with cane fishing poles and giggling, not even stopping when the Speaker banged the gavel. We decided it would be good to get back to the relative decorum of the seventh grade.

We would walk over to Morrison's Cafeteria and eat nothing but coconut cream pie for lunch if we wanted. Sometimes we'd see a member there who'd look up from his meat loaf and iceberg salad, and he'd say your mamas would have a fit if they saw you pages eating nothing but dessert. But we took no notice; we knew that the really important legislators ate at the Silver Slipper or the F&T. You don't have to be in Tallahassee long to figure out that some animals are more equal than others.

Morrison's is gone now. Andrew's, where the up-north reporter and I sit with two glasses of house merlot each, occupies the old Morrison's site. Everybody comes to Andrew's. Or at least walks past. There's Tom Feeney, current Speaker of the House and Jeb Bush's running mate in his first, failed governor's race. Two pale-eyed girls with ironed blond hair walk behind, hissing into cells or writing in little books. In 1994 Feeney called for Florida to secede from the United States if the national debt topped $6 trillion.

There's Dexter Douglass, Gore's Tallahassee attorney, hired because he knows everything in the world about the Florida Constitution, what with him helping to write it. Douglass has been lawyering in Tallahassee since the Eisenhower administration. His first case was defending Martin Van Buren Tanner, the governor's butler and an unparoled convict who got caught up in a bolita sting at the local moonshiners' place. There's Barry Richard, the Democrat who's running the Republicans' Florida case, skinny as a stork with a meringue of hair. The up-north reporter has, like all the other journos within squealing distance, leapt up after these people. Feeney and Richard claim nothing much is happening. Dexter Douglass says, "Gators by seven."

"You know Barry Richard's wife writes messages in lipstick on his bathroom mirror every morning," says the up-north reporter, returning to his drink.

"Like what?" I say.

"The one I heard was 'Go get 'em, Stud.'"

I need another two-handed merlot.

One night a week or so ago I sneaked into the capitol. Students from Florida A&M were holding a sleep-in to protest the disenfranchisement of African American voters. The capitol cops were madder than wet hens. They'd been blindsided earlier by the kids, who looked like clean-cut young folks out to have a look at the seat of state government instead of dangerous radicals planning on lying down on the floor. The cops wouldn't let reporters in. The cops wouldn't let the Domino's Pizza dude in. The cops kept obsessing over the time, back that spring, when a couple of black legislators sat on the governor's sofa and wouldn't get up, protesting the governor's dismantling of affirmative action programs. There were reporters around then, too, reporters who caught the governor barking, "Kick their asses out," on camera, the governor forgetting that their asses had a right to be in a public building.

The cops weren't inclined to err on the side of constitutional liberality this time. "No, ma'am," they said, standing in the way.

But I knew there was a door on the south side that hadn't been locked since 1977. A guy from Knight Ridder, a woman from the St. Petersburg Times, and I got all the way down to the rotunda without getting nabbed (you stick to the staircases, don't use the elevators) and found ourselves in the middle of what looked like a slumber party with heavy security. While the cops stood glaring out at the night, FAMU students, apparently a lot of them freshmen who'd voted in their first election -- or tried to -- sat around playing hearts, playing with Game Boys, drinking Pepsi, and eating Chee-tos next to the Great Seal of the State of Florida, with its Indian maiden pitching orange blossoms at a Spanish galleon. One kid had a Winnie the Pooh sleeping bag.

I guess the cops decided that if you got in, they couldn't be bothered to kick you out, especially with those TV cameras peering through the glass doors. The real reporters got to work interviewing. I just took notes. A girl in a Barbie nightshirt offered me some Church's fried chicken out of her bucket. "We just want to see justice done," she said.

The St. Petersburg Times reporter came up and hissed in my ear. "Go into the ladies' room by the visitor information desk. Check out the graffiti in the last stall."

It was written in black grease pencil. It said:

One little hut among de Bushes,

One dat I love,

Still sadly to my memory rushes,

No matter where I Rove.

"Get the hell out of here," says the up-north reporter. "What is that, anyway?"

I tell him that it took me a couple of days, but eventually I got it: it's verse three of the state song. "Old Folks at Home" by Stephen Foster is a lament for "de ole plantation," written in de ole slave dialect.

"But 'Rove' wouldn't be capitalized," says the up-north reporter.

"Not usually," I say. "'Bushes' either. Maybe it's a sign."

Adams Street is starting to fill up, not just with eight-foot cameramen lugging battery packs like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill and tiny black-jacketed NPR correspondents toting digital recorders no bigger than an evening bag -- they've been here for ten days -- but sports fans hollering "Goooooo Gators!" or "F! S! U! F! S! U!"

This is the "Downtown Get-Down," a city-sanctioned street party held every Friday evening before a Florida State home game. Large men in orange-and-blue or garnet-and-gold satin jackets squire women with orange-and-blue bows in their hair or hats spray-painted gold with garnet streamers. Small boys in too-large University of Florida jerseys and small girls in Florida State cheerleader outfits cling to their parents' hands and demand French fries now.

"Well," says the up-north reporter as he gets ready to launch into the crowd and gather local color, "at least this isn't political."

Which shows what he knows. Florida State's team is called the Seminoles, after the native people dispossessed or slaughtered by Andrew Jackson's empire-making machine. When the Seminoles were nearly gone, and so safely romanticizable, Florida State chose them for its mascot. In the 1940s and '50s, the few real Seminoles left made a tourist attraction out of fighting what was assumed to be their bitterest enemy (aside from white people), the American Alligator. For a dollar, a Seminole would wrestle a live one.

The up-north reporter and I debate whether to decamp for pecan-encrusted grouper at Cypress or stay here and eat. It's getting colder. But Adams Street, smelling faintly of Bud Lite and tequila, is getting interesting. In front of Clyde's, two guys in chinos and blazers and two girls in cashmere twin sets are lined up swaying and singing "We are the boys of old Florida, F-L-O-R-I-D-A -- " Somewhere over by the First Baptist Church I hear the FSU fight song: "We're gonna fight, fight, fight for FSU, we're gonna scalp 'em, Seminoles -- ."

UF's mascot, a guy in a green plush gator suit the color of Astroturf, starts mock-tussling with an FSU cheerleader, trying to mess with her pom-poms. More camera crews are showing up. More orange and blue. More garnet and gold. And now the signs: "Bush-whacked"; "This Is America: Count Every Vote"; and the theologically dubious "God Made George W. President." The singing-cum-spelling competition intensifies, the well-dressed young white professionals bellowing "F-L-O-R-I-D-A! Where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest -- " and the Seminoles, now backed by an unseen brass section, maybe part of the FSU Marching Chiefs, yowling "For FSU is on the warpath now and at the battle's end she's great! So fight fight fight fight for vic-to-ry, the Seminoles of Florida State! F-L-O-R-I-D-A S-T-A-T-E!"

A fight starts on Adams Street in front of the offices of the Florida Education Association. One staggering FSU frat boy and one staggering UF frat boy, veterans of happy hour somewhere else, each accuse the other of dissing him. Then a guy in a "Gators for Gore" T-shirt steps in to defend his fellow UF fan, who looks at his shirt and yells, "Sore Loserman!" The Gator for Gore, who put football before politics, is insulted and gives the Sore Loserman a push. A couple of the frat boys holler (not helpfully), "Are you ready to RUMBLE?" and laugh like tickled toddlers. One of the well-dressed young white professional men quits his crooning and heads in that direction, despite one of the cashmered-up girls hanging onto the sleeve of his Hugo Boss jacket and saying "Now, Peyton, now, darlin' -- "

Suddenly there are a few dozen people shoving one another and yelling "Asshole Republican!" and "Go to hell, Gators!" and "You lost!" and "Gator bait!"

The headline in today's local paper said: "Officials Hope Game's Fans Behave in Front of Company."

There have always been fisticuffs between Seminoles and Gators, especially when they get liquored up. Florida State and Florida were forced to play each other in the 1950s (Florida didn't think FSU was good enough) by the governor and legislature: They threatened to pass an actual law. At the 1999 game in Gainesville, I witnessed a phosphate millionaire with senatorial ambitions punch a corporate lawyer and big contributor to the Democratic Party. Their wives didn't even try to now-Peyton-now-darlin' them, but just stood there, holding their husbands' sport coats, looking apologetically at each other.

Football, politics, bare-knuckle fights: We get them confused. Earlier this summer, a couple of Republican legislators went mano a mano in a Miami parking lot when one's daddy supposedly insulted the other one's daddy on Radio Mambi. Representative Carlos Lacasa whomped on and was, in turn, smacked upside the head by Representative Renier Diaz de la Portilla (not to be confused with his brother Senator Alex Diaz de la Portilla or Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, who's a cousin of Fidel Castro, though the Diaz-Balarts don't like to talk about that) in a matter of family honor. Martha Flores, a Radio Mambi talk show host, shrieked on air: "Hail Mary, Mother of God, the Diaz de la Portillas are out there!" She begged the listeners to call Miami PD. They did, crashing the whole 911 system.

In 1876 Florida stole a presidential election. Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular ballot, but in Florida he and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes were within fewer than one hundred votes of each other. Hayes was about to concede, but one of his strategists, General Daniel E. Sickles, who'd recently been acquitted of murdering his wife, sent "visiting statesmen" to Tallahassee with the message "Hold your state!" The Democrats, looking to capitalize on the plantation gentry's frustration with a Reconstruction government in which Negroes held state cabinet posts, sent their own "visiting statesmen" to Florida. Democrats told stories of bribes to "correct" ballots. Ballots disappeared. Republicans charged Democrats with trying to impose mob rule -- there were demonstrations in the streets with citizens demanding "Tilden or blood!"

We're not far off that now. "Visiting statesmen" stage "spontaneous demonstrations" now in front of courthouses across the state. Back in 1876, Susan Bradford, a distaff relation of mine (all these cousins!), witnessed the invasion of Florida by Washington political operatives. She wrote: "Fraud and corruption stalked in hideous nakedness throughout the length and breadth of the land."

The Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount that time around, too. Hayes suddenly gained votes; Tilden mysteriously lost them. Democrats cut a deal. Federal troops were withdrawn from Florida and the rest of Johnny Reb territory. White rule was restored. The state constitution disenfranchised a lot of black people by means of the poll tax and a bar on voting by anyone convicted of a felony (which could be nothing but petty larceny or sassing white folks) since, as its proponents baldly stated, ex-slaves would be most likely to commit such crimes. Susan Bradford, relieved, said, "There was a very noticeable decrease in the black hordes, which had paraded the streets so noisily a short time before."

White Southerners called this "Redemption."

The up-north reporter is standing on his chair, taking notes on the fight. It looks to me like the miniature melee, which never quite rose to the level of a first-rate brawl, is winding down. The up-north reporter asks me to translate a T-shirt for him: It's of a cartoon Seminole garrotting a cartoon alligator with a cartoon necktie. The shirt says "The Choke at Doak."

I say that it refers to the epic 1994 matchup at FSU's Doak Campbell Stadium. The Gators were beating the Seminoles like the family mule. The Seminoles, down by four touchdowns at the beginning of the fourth quarter, came from behind and scored twenty-eight points in about ten minutes. The game ended in a tie: 31-31.

"Why am I not surprised?" says the up-north reporter.

Suddenly there's a commotion nearby, and everybody packing a camera or a notebook stampedes. The great doors of the members-only (get on the waiting list), ten-bucks-a-cocktail, ice-sculpture-centerpieced Governor's Club swing open like the emerald gates of the city of Oz, and out sweeps Katherine Harris, secretary of state, the cabinet officer charged by the Florida Constitution with seeing that Florida runs a free and fair election. She wears a Hermès scarf tied jauntily around her tanned neck. She wears lipstick the color of the orange juice concentrate her citrus baron granddaddy, Ben Hill Griffin, got rich manufacturing. She wears big gold earrings with eagles clutching pearls in their talons. Her hair is stiff; her smile is stiff. She clearly hasn't noticed the big run up the side of her black stockings. She's followed by a phalanx of young men who look as if they've been polished with Johnson's Wax. I try to see if my cousin Clay Roberts is among them but he's not -- I guess somebody has to run state elections.

This week's round-the-bar-stool story is that Katherine Harris thinks of herself as Queen Esther. Which is nice because J. M. "Mac the Knife" Stipanovich, the wiliest Republican coyote in town, the political consultant who's been sneaking into Harris's capitol office every day, calls her husband, a Scandinavian businessman, "the king of Sweden."

Mean old King Xerxes wanted to kill all the Jews, but Esther, the prettiest girl in the Babylon harem, came out as a Jew and begged for mercy for her people. "If I perish, I perish," she said tragically, bravely. Xerxes fell in love with her flashing dark eyes and her ability to energize the party base. He decided he'd spare the Jews after all.

During the recount, Harris has been sweeping around the capitol in invisible robes, declaring "If I perish, I perish" and gazing nobly into the middle distance, especially if anyone brings up Florida's massively screwed-up index of "ineligible" voters. The State of Florida paid a private company $4 million to identify felons on the rolls. Some of those "felons" were surprised to find themselves unable to exercise the franchise. Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found herself branded a felon. The pastor at Leon County's House of Prayer Church found himself branded a felon. People who really were felons but who had had their civil rights restored were not allowed to vote. People whose names were similar to those of other people who really were felons were not allowed to vote. The state wasn't too worried about precision.

Cousin Clay said, "The decision was made to do the match in such as way as not to be terribly strict on the name." The list had some people convicted of felonies in 2007.

"'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'"

As Katherine Harris sails down Adams Street like the battleship Florida, waving to the right and left, she doesn't look worried about disenfranchising several thousand African American voters, doesn't look aware of the conflagration of politics and sports all around her. The up-north reporter, who isn't even bothering to try and get a quote this time, watches her make her way toward the capitol with something like awe. "I'll bet she knows how to wear a hoopskirt," he says. "I'll bet she knows how to do Scarlett-fucking-O'Hara and, as God is her witness, never go hungry again."

You were going to get a family tree with this book, a map to help you keep the Vauses, Tuckers, Revells, McKenzies, Bradfords, Browards, Gilberts, and Robertses of Florida straight. That was the plan.

I got a big piece of paper and started drawing, eight generations from my brother and me to the first Broward, born in 1755. When I started on my mother's people, I realized that this was fixing to get harder. The Bradfords go back at least five hundred years. I got a bigger piece of paper, this one the size of the kitchen table. It was still tough to get them all in. My great-great-grandmothers had, on average, ten children each, who then had ten children each -- you see my problem. The family tree ended up covering a space so large it could be rented out as a flat in London or New York. I used different colored inks so I could tell which branch was which. When I got through, the thing had reached a level of incomprehensibility like unto the diagram of a particularly baroque multinational corporation or of a complex molecule. There were crisscrossing lines (we intermarry in the South, just as you've always suspected), arrows, blanks where we're not sure exactly what the connection is, the same names repeating over and over, generation upon generation. The publisher took one look at it and said no.

So you're not getting the family tree after all. You would have needed Ariadne's ball of string to find your way through it anyway. But that's okay: the book is the family tree, in all its wandering tangle of roots and branches. When I started writing Dream State, I thought it would be a pretty straightforward story of two families. I'd use them to tell the history of Florida. Then I'd start tracing a limb back and find that it was never one but multiple, as vast and tangled as a briar patch. The Bradfords led me to Susan, the Dixie diarist, and Roxanne, the teenaged bride who became the mother of thirteen children; the Robertses led me to Richard, the man of mystery wounded over and over in the Civil War yet refused to lie down and die; the Browards led me to Jane, who left the luxuries of her East Florida plantation to live in the swamp, and FranÇois, who came to Florida in the first place because the king of Spain was giving away free land; the Gilberts led me to John Wesley -- he may have left a wife and two children behind in Carolina; and the Tuckers led me to Mary Elizabeth, who knew how to smash up a moonshine still.

There are too many stories to tell in one book. Yet the story of my family is the story of Florida. Not the only story, of course: the descendants of Spanish land grant families, the descendants of slaves brought from Africa, and now the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, Canadians, midwesterners, New Yorkers -- they all have their own stories and their own experiences of Florida. What's different about my kin is that we are so dug in, so long-rooted. Over the past hundred years, we have been involved, for good or ill, in the shaping of this strangest of American states. We're a bit like the May Oak -- holders of the deep memory of Florida.

Copyright © 2004 by Diane Roberts

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.

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 conquered Granada, the last caliphate, ending 750 years of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula. Muslims and Jews were expelled or forcibly converted. This was Christ's country now. If the converts didn't seem sufficiently enthusiastic in their Catholicism, Tomás de Torquemada, the queen's confessor, would introduce them to the Inquisition. Isabella and Ferdinand meant to scour Spain clean of any un-Christian taint, even if they drew blood doing it. They occupied the Alhambra, hanging images of martyrs on Boabdil's delicately carved walls. The patron saint of Spain, the apostle whose bones the pilgrims traveled to Compostela to supplicate, was transformed into Santiago Matamoros, St. James killer of Moors, even though St. James probably never even met a Moor, much less violated the dictates of his Lord and offed one.

Columbus's voyage was an extension of the Reconquista, energized by a sort of Catholic Spanish Manifest Destiny. The farthest reaches of the globe would be embraced and purified by the envoys of Isabella and Ferdinand, vice-regents of Christ. And if there was profit to be made in the process, all the better to finance a state of perpetual crusade, dedicated to retaking the biggest prize of all, the Holy Land. The road to Jerusalem ran through Cuba, Puerto Rico, Florida. Marking these maravillosa islands for Spain, three thousand miles away, chopping down mangroves and palms to make crosses that Isabella and Ferdinand would never see, hammering them into alien sand -- this would gain the favor of God. Columbus called it "la gran vitoria," the great victory.

The Spanish could hardly have imagined they'd spend all that time and energy in the Reconquista, kicking the Jews and the heretics and the Muslims out of Spain, only to have, four hundred years later, the Jews and the heretics (by now called Protestants) and even some of the Muslims buying time-shares and condos and three-bedroom ranch houses in their old colony of Florida.

The worldwide Reconquista became a career for noblemen who found the pious court of los Reyes Católicos (after there were no more Moors to kill) stifling. In 1513 Juan Ponce de León went looking for the legendary Isla de Beimeni Parte. He came from an aristocratic family in Valladolid, and ever since seeing the warm wonders of the Caribbean with Columbus in 1493, he preferred New Spain to Old Spain. He had plenty of money and plenty of time; he'd been governor of the colony of Puerto Rico, one of the oldest in the "New World," but lost his job to Columbus's son Diego in a political power struggle. Ponce de León was only thirty-nine years old and ready for a few more adventures, a few more amazing sights, before he retired to the starched lace and autos-da-fé of Castile.

Juan Ponce got his asiento, the royal charter spelling out the goals of the Bimini mission: land and gold. Miracles were extra. He got two caravels (light, fast ships) and a bergantina. He got Antón de Alaminos, the best pilot in the Caribbean. He assembled a band of adventurers, a New World Argo, with young hidalgos bored with a Moor-free Spain, some Taíno-speaking native guides from Puerto Rico, two African freemen -- Juan Gárrido and Juan González Ponce de León -- even two women, Juana Jiménez and Beatriz Jiménez.

Four weeks out of Añasco Bay, on April 2, 1513, Juan Ponce sighted a strand long and smooth as a court lady's neck. Bush-headed palms and tall grasses with leaves sharp enough to cut skin met the sand, and everywhere there were flowers -- sun-colored lantana and wild allamanda, milkwort and spiderwort and pink purslane, columbine and cattail, Tread Softly and Venus' looking-glass, sumac and sea daisy -- such flowers it seemed a sign from God, a memorial of the Resurrection. Juan Ponce came upon this place in Easter season, after all. His three ships celebrated the holy day at sea, the calls of Allelujah! Christ is risen! singing out over the waves and mixing with the cries of the gulls.

Juan Ponce's Argo made landfall not far from Cape Canaveral, dropping anchor between what's now Launch Pad A and Launch Pad B at the Apollo/Saturn V Center. He rowed ashore to take possession of the new land, surely taking some men-at-arms with him, Toledo blades at the ready, maybe one of the Taínos, too, and his namesake Juan GonzÁlez Ponce de León. Beatriz and Juana probably waited in the boat. Still, it was a multicultural posse wading through the jade shallows of the Atlantic, a preview of the Florida to come. Instead of declaring it Bimini, Juan Ponce named it after Pascua Florida, the Easter Feast of Flowers, and claimed it for Fernando II and Jesus. The travelers stood on the sand for a while, looked at the lantana and wild allamanda, milkwort and spiderwort and pink purslane, columbine and cattail, Tread Softly and Venus' looking-glass, sumac and sea daisy. No monsters, no treasure, no golden fleece, just a beach. Juan Ponce's Argonauts went back to their ships.

They sailed farther down a curve of sand past what would become, in four hundred years, the Philippe Starck hotels and Armani boutiques, the condo gulches and Mercedes showrooms of Bal Harbor and South Beach and Key Biscayne. They were beset by uncooperative Tequesta warriors, who, perhaps having met Spanish slave expeditions before, were in no mood to share. Juan Ponce headed south and west, following a chain of elongated little islands, cayos. He named them Los Martires because, he said, they "seemed like men suffering." He couldn't know that, 490 years later, those cayos, especially the one at the end, would be full of men partying.

Juan Ponce had gone back to Spain in 1514, intending to return soon to the western seas: The king had named him governor of the island of Florida and the still-elusive Bimini. But his wife had died and his daughters were too young to be left alone with the duenna. He didn't get back to Florida until early 1521. Now his mission was to colonize the place, not just look at it.

He assembled an expedition that was more ark than Argo, with two hundred men and women, horses and cattle, pigs and mules, bags of seed, orange and olive saplings. They sailed from Puerto Rico on February 26. They landed, well, somewhere, most likely near the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. The soil looked promising and there was fresh water. On the minus side, the place was inhabited by Calusas -- their name means "fierce people." Maybe the adelantado of Bimini and Florida, agent of Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V, wasn't about to let a bunch of moss-wearing heathens push him around. Maybe he went back to show the Calusas that his god was tougher than theirs. Or maybe Juan Ponce's ark didn't stop there at all but sailed up to Tampa Bay or Waccasassa Bay or Suwannee Sound or Ochlockonee Bay. Maybe they found themselves marveling at the green-roofed Wakulla River, until the Apalachees materialized out of the cypresses like ghosts.

Whichever tribe it was and wherever they were, the Spanish were perpetually harassed. The seedlings withered, the crops died. Some of the colonists died, too. Juan Ponce was wounded in the thigh. The Spanish decided it wasn't worth it. So they upped anchor and headed south, leaving their wooden crosses, which soon rotted, their unsown fields, and their cattle. Juan Ponce's wound became infected. He died in Cuba in July 1521, lost in fevered dreams of fabulous islands just beyond the horizon, the Fata Morgana Bimini just beyond the reach of his ship.

The truth is Juan Ponce had found Bimini. Florida is Bimini, the magical western island with the incomplete outline, as much as anywhere can be. In their New World, the Spanish expected treasure and wonder in equal measures. They saw manatees and called them mermaids. Columbus said that people from a certain part of Cuba were born with tails. They imagined they were in the fabulous Indies, where anything was possible, where fish would sing and water would make you young, the same way later Floridians imagined they had come to a land where the laws of gravity (thanks to plastic surgeons) and the laws of astronomy and the rule of the seasons were suspended, and there could be flowers in January.

Liberty County, west of Wakulla in the Panhandle, is the original Garden of Eden. It is supposedly the only place in the world where the Torreya taxifolia, the gopherwood tree, grows. Noah's ark was made of gopherwood; gopherwood grew in Eden. Ergo, according to E. E. Callaway, a contrary old cuss, a white NAACP lawyer who ran as a Republican for governor of Florida in 1936 when Republicans were rarer than talking serpents, Florida owns paradise.

"The Bible tells us that 'a river went out of Eden to water the Garden and became four heads,'" said Old Man Callaway. "Well, the Apalachicola is the only four-head river system in the world. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' map shows you that. God created the Adamic man one mile east of Bristol. Then he created the Garden of Eden just north of town."

Old Man Callaway is dead now. But many in the Full Bible, Free Will, and Pentecostal towns from the Georgia line to the Gulf still believe.

The Revolutionary was the first of us, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. In 1799 he crossed the St. Marys River, passing from the relative order of Georgia into the protean country to the south, where borders were drawn and discarded almost weekly; where in the streets of San Agustín you could hear English, Creole, Gaelic, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, Hitchiti, Temne, Malinke; where there is a creek named for a massacre, an island named for the Resurrection, and a great river named for St. John, the voice crying in the wilderness.

Never mind that the protean country was, at least officially, Spanish, and the Revolutionary was French -- and First Consul Bonaparte sat in the Elysée Palace lusting openly after Spain, not to mention Russia, Austria, Italy, and England. Never mind that he had fought with the American insurgents, who, having won their thirteen colonies, started eyeing a fourteenth, down there in Spanish territory. Never mind that he said he was a democrat, a freedom fighter, yet owned African slaves. The Revolutionary was protean himself.

The king of Spain was giving away land in East Florida: a hundred acres to each head of a household, plus fifty acres for each dependent and slave. The Revolutionary claimed a wife, five children, and eleven slaves. On November 6, 1800, he registered with the governor in San Agustín, declaring himself a labrador, a farmer, a native of La Provincia de Perche en Francia. He swore allegiance to the Bourbon Carlos IV. The governor's lieutenant signed his name with a crisscrossing flourish, fancy as lacing on a court dress. The Revolutionary signed his name in plain letters, easily legible two hundred years on: Francois Brouard.

Francois Brouard was born somewhere in the Perche region of Normandy in 1755. He washed up in Charleston in time to join the polyglot cavalry under Casimir Pulaski, the Polish count who got tired of fighting the Russians at home and so came to America to fight the British.

Being French, Francois Brouard probably needed no encouragement to go after the ancient enemy on new soil. The family story is that he soldiered in the siege of Charleston in 1779 and made a dashing raid through British lines in Savannah to bring quinine to Count Pulaski's malaria-ridden troops. He got promoted to captain. Maybe he cherished elevated ideas about reason, equality, and liberty; maybe he admired his fellow Norman the Marquis de la Fayette; maybe he had read Rousseau. Or maybe he just saw an opportunity to transform himself from farm boy to landed gentleman. Charleston was full of French made good. You could build a fine house on one of the fine squares and own a country plantation fat with rice, cotton, and indigo. You could be like Thomas Jefferson or Richard Henry Lee, at once a seigneur and a revolté, especially in the South. And still farther south, in the endlessly mutable realm of Florida, you might turn into, what -- a prince? an emperor?

Francois Brouard became the fountainhead of a family now so absorbed into the groundwater of Florida that they barely notice their names on the maps and the buildings anymore, Big Daddy of ten generations' worth of plantation owners, poor white trash, governors, lawyers, loggers, doyennes of the Daughters of the Confederacy, soldiers who fought everybody from the Seminoles to the Viet Cong, engineers who drained the marshes and built the roads that let the rest of the world into Florida, and politicians -- lots of politicians. His Roberts and Tucker descendants call him Francis Broward, forgetting (or preferring not to admit) that the first of our ancestors to become a Floridian was also a Frenchman. And likely a Roman Catholic -- at least he claimed to be a Catholic when he moved to Catholic Spanish Florida. Nobody minded about him being a slaveholder.

He parked wagons, family, slaves, and mules in an enchanted forest just north of a river that would later be named for him. Some of his land was high, raisin-colored alluvial soil; some of his land was drowned; some was a cocktail of water, earth, and grass. John Bartram, botanist to His Majesty (that would be King George III), traveled to the St. Johns country in 1765 and saw what became the Broward fiefdom. Bartram tells of "monstrous grape vines," Magnolia grandiflora seventy feet high, oak trees six feet across. He came upon a "hammock of oak and hickory and a fine spring of clean water almost big enough to turn a mill." Bartram thought Florida would be a grand place to grow rhubarb, lychees, pistachios, and opium poppies. He also thought that the Floridian air acted as an aphrodisiac, noting solemnly that Spanish women had more babies in Florida than back in Spain, "where they are generally accounted but indifferent breeders."

John Bartram could have worked for the Duval County chamber of commerce. He swears he only saw two snakes on his whole journey and insists that Florida has fewer insects than anywhere else in America -- Florida, with the mosquitoes big as tire irons. Bartram was either myopic or a liar. Florida's best boosters have often been both.

The Spanish land grant records list the Revolutionary as "Breard," "Breward," "Broward," and sometimes even "Brevard" -- which is another old Florida family entirely. Francois Brouard, the rebel, the immigrant, the Frenchman, began to disappear into Francis Broward the landowner, the paterfamilias, the American gentleman. He was a small-time farmer when he married Rebecca Sarah Bell, a girl from a good Scots family in Carolina, in 1784. He risked his life to detach America from its colonial master but decided to leave it for a land ruled by another colonial power, swapping one king for another. Florida had been Loyalist in the War of Independence; in 1783 Britain traded it back to Spain in exchange for the Bahamas. But then Francois Brouard had noticed that countries had a way of changing hands. A clever fellow could turn that to his advantage.

Sarah and Francois had at least five children, probably more, but only four made it out of the fatal fevers of childhood: Charles, Sarah Elizabeth, John, and Francis. Future generations of Browards would remember that they were the progeny of a revolutionary and stick their children with revolutionary handles: George Washington Broward, Montcalm Broward (after the French general who died defending Quebec against the British in 1759), Pulaski Broward, Osceola Broward, and two Napoleon Bonaparte Browards (one of whom had a sister called Josephine). But Sarah and Francois chose names for their own offspring that sounded as if they could have come over on the Arbella, instead of a rackety old ship from Brest, solid British names that would also survive in the family for two centuries, reflecting Sarah's heritage more than FranÇois's. If John was ever Jean or Francis Francois, there's no evidence of it. In Spanish Florida, the Brouards began to shed their Frenchness like an old skin.

It's hard to tell if Francois shed his Catholicism, too. In San AgustÍn, there were still missions with Franciscan friars in brown habits, and the mass was sung every day in a long coquina church with a New World baroque facade. Outside the city, though, in the new settlements, Protestants were becoming the majority. The Brouard lands lay in Nassau, a region in the top right-hand corner of Florida named by the British for the ancestral palatinate of the anti-Papist William III.

It may be that Sarah, very likely a Presbyterian, converted him, or Francois wasn't Catholic, after all. There's some evidence that he may have been a Huguenot, a passenger on a boatload of 371 French Calvinists that docked in Charleston Harbor in 1764. He would have been nine years old. Many of his kin prefer that story because it better conforms to what Americans think their country is about: flight from persecution. Or he might have shifted his affiliation to suit his setting -- Catholic, Protestant, whatever worked. This we know for sure: His eldest son, Charles, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, became a Methodist minister. And many of his descendants turned foot-washing Baptist in the swamp.

Maybe Francois Brouard was prescient in moving to Florida, figuring that the Americans eventually would conquer or finagle Florida away from the exhausted Spanish. Everybody, from Juan Ponce de León to John Bartram, gushed over Florida's trees and Florida's sunsets and Florida's seafood and Florida's flowers, but, landed with the place again, the Spanish felt they'd got shafted. For three hundred hard, bleeding, expensive years, they never got much of a return on their Florida investment. Still, they hung on to the peninsula despite there being no gold, no emeralds, none of the profitable commodities that made Peru and Mexico worth the trouble of killing all those people. The gaudy maps they passed around at the Spanish court -- vast waters with pictures of sea serpents smiling ominously in the waves, weird configurations of terra incognita promising cities strewn with gems, countries populated by Amazons or anthropophagi or talking animals -- translated into nothing more than pretty beaches and bad-tempered inhabitants with very sharp arrows.

Florida was nothing but trouble: pirates, plagues, the heat, the storms, the French, the English, the Indians, and eventually Andrew Jackson. In 1586 Francis Drake raided San AgustÍn, the chief Spanish city, mostly for fun and profit but also to impress upon Philip II that Elizabeth I would not tolerate any trespassing on her Atlantic ambitions. There were border skirmishes. On the logic of old maps with the land labeled "Florida" extending as far as Texas, the Spanish fought French encroachment from the west. Some of these same old maps showed "Florida" reaching up into Virginia, so the Spanish argued that the Carolinas, at least, were theirs. The British took a dim view. They had a proprietary grant down to the twenty-ninth parallel, below where Daytona Beach is now.

In 1794 a bunch of Georgia farmers, hopped up and giddy over the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (death to all tyrants!), decided to invade East Florida and declare it an independent republic. They burned the fortification of San NicolÁs, singing "La Marseillaise" and proclaiming that they were, in fact, French forces come to overthrow the Spanish monarchy. It took several months for the adelantado's soldiers to drive the Cracker sansculottes back across the St. Marys.

The Spanish, threatened in Europe by real Frenchmen, their forces stretched too thin from Santa Fe to the Strait of Magellan, looked almost ready to give up. Maybe FranÇois Brouard, in addition to becoming rich and important, looked forward to outlasting them. It would leave him, the underground Frenchman, in possession of lands that had once been French, lands where much French blood had been shed.

In the spring of 1562, Jean Ribaut and a handful of would-be settlers camped by a wide river that flowed north like the Nile. Ribaut named it after the month of May and claimed this land for Catherine de Médicis, queen regent of France. The French wanted to make clear to the Spanish that they did not acknowledge that the papal donations gave Spain exclusive rights over North America. And Queen Catherine wanted somewhere to ship her troublemaking Protestants. Ribaut's band did all right for a bit. The Timucuas and the Mocamas were bemused but not hostile, even bringing grapes and maize to these overdressed, underprepared people who went around proclaiming the territory from the Atlantic to the great swamp to the Gulf and beyond to be la Nouvelle France.

Meanwhile, the Spanish got wind that not only had Frenchmen beat them to planting a colony in a corner of Nueva Hispania, the colony was full of followers of the excommunicate Luther, polluting the virgin land with outlaw doctrines. The governor of Cuba sent a ship to investigate. But by the time they got to the Riviere de Mai (the San Juan to the Spanish and the St. Johns to the rest of us), all they found was one Guillaume Rouffi. He'd been left by his turn-tail colleagues, a French consul among the Timucuas, who fed him and took care of him like a pet chicken. Havana reported back to Madrid that the French colony had failed.

Busy with spying on the French queen and trying to destabilize the English queen, the Spanish still didn't get around to establishing their own colony, and the French tried again. In 1564 René de Laudonnière brought an even bigger consignment of Protestants to Florida: nobles, peasants, men, women, children. They might have been anathema to Catholic Spain but they weren't wildly popular in Catholic France, either. They built a fort inside the mouth of the north-flowing river, a stylized triangle of a stockade that looked like a giant arrowhead. They named it Fort Caroline.

In a few months food ran short. There were mutinies and rebellions. Some of the colonists stole boats and took to Caribbean pirating. At least there was money in that. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, named by Philip II governor of Florida -- even though the Spanish had no actual settlements in Florida -- attacked Fort Caroline and killed pretty much everyone. Menéndez sanctified himself before battle by celebrating the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo, on August 28, 1565. Then he named the patch of Florida he stood on for the saint, the church father who prayed, "O Lord, give me chastity and self-control -- but not yet!"

When Ribaut returned with reinforcements, they killed him, too. Anyone who didn't die in battle was hanged. Menéndez stuck signs over their heads: "I do this, not as to Frenchmen, but as to Heretics." He renamed the arrowhead-shaped fort San Mateo, after the author of the first Gospel, and called the inlet nearby Matanzas, "slaughter."

It was a holy killing, you understand. They were infidels. Menéndez considered himself a righteous man. He planned to found a school in Havana where the Jesuits could educate the children of the native people. He wanted to plant missions in the land of the Guales from St. Augustine up the Georgia coast. The Guales, whose territory he occupied, called him "Mico Santamaría," Mary's high chief.

Mary or no Mary, on Good Friday 1568, the French came looking for revenge. Dominique de Gourges, an angry French aristocrat (a Catholic, even), sailed into the mouth of the St. Johns. He burned San Mateo and hanged anybody he could find. Above the gallows he placed his own sign: "Not as to Spaniards, but as to Traitors, Robbers and Murderers." Honor satisfied, de Gourges thanked God, resupplied his ships, and headed back to Dieppe. France declared victory and never fooled with East Florida again.

There's an engraving from 1591 of this monument the French erected near the mouth of the St. Johns. It's so stylish -- anyone could build a fort, but the French defied the might of England and Spain with a marble column carved with the crown of the Capets and the lilies of St. Louis. In the engraving, it's draped with flower garlands. Baskets of fruit and corn are sat around its base. A dozen long-haired, bare-breasted Timucuas in moss skirts kneel before the column, their hands uplifted. The explorer René de Laudonnière looks on, impassive (and probably very hot) in his beard, padded doublet, and lace collar.

Next to Laudonnière stands the Timucua chief. He's naked except for a breechcloth and necklaces of shells. Two panther tails are worked into his headdress. He's tall, six inches taller than Laudonnière, and muscled like a statue of Hercules. One hand rests lightly on LaudonniÈre's shoulder. The other gestures toward the column, the symbol of French civilization in savage lands, the marker of French possession. The nails on the chief's hand are long and filed to sharp points like arrowheads.

I don't know what Jane Broward looked like. If she'd stayed in East Florida, on the Broward domains, in what passed for civilization, maybe there would be a portrait or something. But Francois Brouard's grandchild, my great-great-great-grandmother, would be carried off to the west, to the wild places.

Jane Broward was the eldest surviving daughter of Francois Brouard's eldest surviving son Charles. She was born on the Broward plantation in 1814, the year the British burned Washington, the year the emperor Napoléon was exiled to a small island off the coast of Italy. Florida still belonged to Spain.

Francois Brouard's properties occupied what had once been Saturiwa lands, then the mission lands of Santa Maria and Santa Catalina de Guale. His sons soon expanded the family holdings. The Browards didn't own as much as Moses Levy, who bought the title to an old royal land grant of sixty thousand acres, or Zephaniah Kingsley, who lived with his Senegalese wife, a freed slave named Anna Madgigaine Jai, in a great house on Fort George Island. The Browards weren't as aristocratic as the Spanish families who went back 250 years in Florida, then another 250 years in León or Aragon. Still, Charles Broward had three hundred acres and planted Sea Island cotton; his brother John got a grant of sixteen thousand acres from José Coppinger, the last Spanish governor, and ran a sawmill on Broward River. They were rich enough. Jane Broward was a catch.

In 1824, when Jane was ten, her uncle John married Margaret Tucker, whose people planted at Black Hammock near the mouth of the Nassau River. Margaret's father, Andrew Tucker, had got his royal dispensation of land in 1804, but in 1812, when some American farmers, bored ex-soldiers and assorted no 'counts decided to "liberate" the land south of the St. Marys, the Tuckers went the other direction, back to a farm they owned in Camden County, Georgia.

Maybe the Tuckers thought Spanish land-grant plantation holders would get short shrift from these "patriots." Their flag showed a lunging infantryman, bayonet at the ready, and declared, "Salus Populi Lex Suprema," Safety of the People the Supreme Law. Which people remained unclear. Or, perhaps demonstrating the political agility the Tuckers would display throughout the twentieth century, they just didn't want to be around when the shooting started. In any case, when President James Madison refused to recognize the revolt, the Tuckers came back to Florida. They settled back in Black Hammock as if nothing had happened.

Margaret Tucker had a little brother named Rufus, nine years younger than she. He had been born in Georgia during the territorial spat but grew up at Black Hammock. There must have been a lot of visiting between the Tucker and Broward households; they were kin now. Margaret Tucker Broward probably thought it would be a fine thing if her brother and her brother-in-law's girl got engaged. So tidy, keeping the family properties together. No doubt she gave things a shove. There would have been river picnics and suppers organized by the Big House ladies in the region. There would have been fancy balls sometimes in San AgustÍn, which had become, now that Florida was American, St. Augustine. The Browards might travel to the old Spanish city maybe twice a year for business and elevated entertainment. Great-Aunt Vivienne always said that Rufus and Jane danced a quadrille there in 1833, at a winter ball given by one of the old Castilian families, friends of her grandfather from the days of the adelantados. Jane wore a hyacinth blue satin dress with a white camellia in her hair. Great-Aunt Vivienne got that from her cousin Miss Hortense Broward. She was sure it was a quadrille.

No matter what dance or what dress or where it was, in January 1834 Rufus Tucker and Jane Broward got married. Jane's father, the Reverend Charles Broward, didn't perform the ceremony; one of her Eubanks uncles on her mother's side, a justice of the peace, pronounced them man and wife. We don't know why Jane's Methodist minister father didn't preside over his daughter's wedding. Maybe he didn't like Rufus. Maybe he didn't like the Tuckers, who might have developed a reputation, even by 1834. Maybe it was that Rufus had a notion to take Jane off to West Florida, a hundred miles away.

Rufus wasn't heir to the Black Hammock plantation, but with his father's and wife's family's help, he could have acquired land in Nassau or Duval or started a livery stable in the thriving new town of Jacksonville. Jane could have stayed near home. But Rufus was tired of home, tired of how cultivated everything and everyone was getting, tired, too, of hearing what a big deal the Browards were, hearing how Jane's cousin was going to Harvard and Jane's uncles were friends with Governor DuVal and Jane's father had met the Marquis de la Fayette. He figured he'd go to a part of Florida that was as yet unclaimed (and with good reason, said the horrified Browards), south of the capital.

A well-connected young couple like Rufus and Jane could have become part of the Beautiful People of the Red Hills -- the Red Hills was what they called the plantation country to the north, east, and west of Tallahassee. The governor would have received them at Mount Aventine, the plantation he'd named for one of the seven hills of Rome. Rufus could have gone into politics or speculated in the Whig versus Democrat banking wars. Jane could have been on calling terms with the likes of Ellen White of Casa Bianca Plantation, a famous belle who inspired Edward Bulwer-Lytton to write poetry for her and who was nicknamed "Florida," as if she were the territorial mascot. Rufus and Jane could have spent a lot of time dancing quadrilles with Virginia Randolphs and Carolina Bradfords. Jane would need a lot more satin dresses.

Rufus, though, wanted to make his way in the empty lands, figuring to log and fish and farm in the river country instead of clearing hundreds of acres for cotton in the uplands, where he'd be expected to live like a planter, like his daddy, wearing a tie every day. So in 1835 Jane and Rufus packed up the wedding presents -- a few pieces of silver, an old French soup tureen, a slave named Sarey -- and followed the Spanish camino real to Tallahassee. They got to the foot of the rise on which the capitol stood and turned toward the sea.

The capitol hill isn't a hill, exactly, but the Cody Scarp, a high, long ridge, curving east to the Withlacoochee River and west to the Chipola. It's an ancient shoreline. A million years ago the waters of the Gulf of Mexico slapped at its roots. The Cody Scarp is also a dividing line. To the north the soil is the color of carnelians. Live oaks like it, roses like it, and magnolias. More important, cotton likes it, and tobacco. To the south the soil is sandy, gray, and thin -- when it's dry -- and full of broken shells from Pleistocene times. Turkey oaks like it, tupelos like it, and pines. To the north lay the clean fields and great houses with their poetical names; to the south it often seemed that the land was trying to return to the sea.

Jane Broward must have wondered what she was doing, stirring her coffee with a silver spoon at the bottom of America. Her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren wondered, too, and took themselves off to the seminary in Tallahassee, battlefields in Virginia, poinciana-lined streets in Miami, law school in Gainesville. Then they'd come back to the swamp, compelled, exasperated. Their country was half water, half land, with green-black sloughs, acres of thick chartreuse grasses that would merge with the Gulf if there was a big storm, pines thin as pencils growing out of saw palmettos, brown water rivers that curled like cast-aside ribbons. There were forests where cypress, hawthorn, and sweetgum grew so thick you could only see blue shards of sky. Sometimes the ground would just open up and your house or your barn would disappear down a sinkhole.

In the mid-1830s, when Jane and Rufus set up housekeeping in a dogtrot cabin the color of the earth it sat on, most of the places didn't yet have white-people names. The British and a few of the French had been through here but didn't stay. William Bartram, son of the royal botanist, visited swamp country in 1765 with his father and met the Seminoles. They called him "Puc Puggy" -- flower gatherer. The Spanish spent mosquito-bitten years there, looking for elusive riches, trying to convert the Apalachees, dying in great numbers, killing in even greater numbers. For them the place was haunted.

Panfílo de Narváez, a red-haired, one-eyed, mean son of Spain, famous for ordering the slaughter of 2,500 native people in Cuba, got the license to run Florida after Juan Ponce de León succumbed to that Calusa arrow. He brought the usual church decrees, diseases, and swords, along with settlers, slaves, and wannabe conquistadors. He also brought with him a literarily inclined Andalucian, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The "cow head" part of Álvar Núñez's name comes from an ancestor who, in 1212, saved Christian soldiers from the Moors by showing the way through a mountain pass using a bovine skull pointed in the right direction. "Cabeza de Vaca" is a title of honor.

Cabeza de Vaca called his Florida best seller Naufragios, or "Shipwrecks." This is all part of the myth: the tempest that blows you to a strange land which might be blessed or bad, home to a beautiful princess or a witch who turns men into pigs. Florida has a wealth of shipwreck stories. In 1696 a clutch of Quakers got caught in an August storm on their way from Jamaica and crashed somewhere near Jupiter. Their sheep and pigs swam ashore and escaped. The Quakers swam ashore, too, but the Indians waiting there took almost everything they had, including their clothes. There they were, naked as Adam and Eve after the Fall. They covered their shame with pages torn out of their Bibles. (Bibles were large in those days.)

Jonathan Dickinson, who wrote his own best seller about the ordeal, said that only "Protecting Providence" saved them from the "cruel devouring Jaws of the inhuman Cannibals of Florida." There is a little state park dedicated to Dickinson and the other Quakers, off Highway 1 not far from Hobe Sound.

In April 1528 Narváez landed in Tampa Bay. When the Spaniards waded ashore, somewhere near Abercrombie Park in St. Petersburg, the Tocobagas were waiting. They had already decided they didn't want to cut sugar cane for His Catholic Majesty, so they applied a little preemptive misinformation. The Tocobaga cacique assured Narváez that Florida's good stuff -- the gold, the emeralds -- were way up in the chiefdom of the Apalachees. Narváez, greedy, bought the story. This could be the new Peru. He could be richer than the king. He sent four ships, the ones with the women and the food and the fresh water, north to rendezvous with him at a bay the Tocobagas assured him would be so full of fish he could practically walk on the surface. Then he took off for the Apalachee capital of Aute with three hundred men, forty horses, and Cabeza de Vaca, who was taking notes.

The interior was alien, but Cabeza de Vaca calls it "wonderful to look upon" with trees of "liquid amber," trees taller than any they'd seen, but "riven from top to bottom by bolts of lightning which fell in that country of frequent storms." Cabeza de Vaca writes admiringly of Indians, assuring his readers that most of them will take to Christianity eventually. Maybe not the ones he met in North Florida, though. A decidedly un-Christian Apalachee shot a Spaniard's horse full of arrows. Armor wasn't a lot of use, since these arrows had such force they could pierce a pine. They shot a young gentleman named Avanellada clean through his neck. The Apalachees were scarily superhuman, six or eight inches taller than the Spaniards. They wore almost nothing, even on cold nights.

Narváez was looking for a river emptying out into a bay, as advertised by the Tocobagas and described in earlier expeditions. It may have been the St. Marks, it may have been the Ochlockonee. NarvÁez decided he would name the river after Mary Magdalen, the fallen woman redeemed by Jesus. She had red hair, too. Only the Magdalen's river was nowhere to be found. Narváez and his men got lost in boggy-bottomed, thick-canopied woods where the sun barely penetrated. Finally they tripped into a bay the color of the beads the Moors used to ward off the evil eye. The ships weren't there. Rations were almost gone. The Spaniards decided they would die if they didn't try to sail to Mexico, where there were palaces and cathedrals and apothecaries and food, plenty of food, and los Indios were servants.

Florida made Narváez sick. Florida made all of them sick. Cabeza de Vaca was forced to take notes on bits of bark. The Apalachees were still shooting at them from the forests at the edge of the beach. Every three days they killed a horse and ate it. They named the bay BahÍa de Caballos to mark it in their misery. Or maybe to honor the horses.

None of them knew how to make a boat. But they tried. The ones who weren't half dead of dysentery managed to build rafts with young trees caulked with palmetto fiber and lashed together with ropes plaited from the dead horses' manes. They used what was left of their cambric shirts for sails. Narváez, in a fit of temper and despair, drank sea water. He turned delirious, but in one moment of lucidity he told them, according to Cabeza de Vaca, "Each man should do what he thought best to save his own life. That's what I shall do."

Narváez died. Most of them died. Cabeza de Vaca says of the 600 who set sail from Spain, 140 died of disease and hunger. Almost 200 were killed by the Apalachees. Of the ones who left on rafts from BahÍa de Caballos, fifteen lived for a while, shipwrecked somewhere between Tate's Hell and Texas, gradually shedding the shards of their armor and their European clothes, starving, thirsty. Cabeza de Vaca hints that when one died, the rest ate him.

Finally there were only four: two hidalgos, one African servant named Estévan, and Cabeza de Vaca, now taking notes in his head. They survived by sometimes trading with the natives or more often being their slaves. After a few years they began to be taken for shamans. They began to wear necklaces of shells. They learned some of the language of the people. When they finally got to Mexico City in 1536, eight years after sailing from Havana, Cabeza de Vaca said that he could barely wear clothes again. He preferred to sleep on the bare floor. He had become a real American.

Jane Broward would have known the history of the Spanish in Florida. She had lived on old mission lands among the ruins of Franciscan chapels; she had met descendants of the settlers Governor Menéndez had brought to populate his city of San Agustín, high-toned Castilians with gold crosses and long memories; she knew that her family's land came from a Spanish king. She heard the stories about the Spanish in her own neck of the swamp, thrashing around lost, hungry. Maybe she picked up a rosary bead in the grounds of the fort at St. Marks.

But the Spanish were rapidly becoming just a romantic story, a fairy story, like their own fantastic tales of the Fountains of Youth or the mermaids Columbus says he heard singing off the Atlantic coast. Jane and Rufus and their children and all those other heretic white folks would live in the swamp where the Spanish died. Nobody had to worry about the Calusas or the Ocales or the Apalachees anymore: Thousands were taken as slaves to Cuba or Puerto Rico. Many died in battle. Most died of illnesses they had no words for: measles, typhoid fever, smallpox, Old World pathogens spat out in the New World. By 1720 they were almost all gone, dead because Europeans came to Florida and breathed their air.

By the time Hernando de Soto was dispatched to Florida in 1539, the Spanish were no longer interested in miracles and wonders. This time they meant business. They wanted the place conquered, whipped, slapped around, beaten into submission, and tidily absorbed into the Spanish empire. Florida needed to make money -- the Reconquista was expensive. Fighting wars with heretics was expensive. The Inquisition was expensive.

De Soto had studied Hispano-Indian relations with Francisco Pizarro in Peru as they slashed and burned their way through the early 1530s, looting the great Inca cities, piling up bodies, and piling up treasure. When he headed back to Spain in 1535, he was insanely rich and seriously ambitious. He asked Carlos V if he could have Ecuador; the king gave him Florida.

De Soto was smarter than Narváez: He left the supply ships safe in Tampa Bay, guarded by cavalry, until he sent men back with a road map and precise instructions where to meet him. He took a large, slow company into the interior, heading for Apalachee lands: soldiers, priests, horses, mules, long-legged range hogs. De Soto was no Cabeza de Vaca liberal. When the Spanish came across a Tocobaga or Ocale village, a priest would read out the Requirimiento, a proclamation of the necessity and supremacy of the Roman Catholic faith. The Requirimiento was, of course, in Spanish. The Tocobagas and the Ocales hadn't the least idea what they were hearing, but if one of them so much as looked sideways at these small, pallid people with their beards and their beads and their images of a suffering god nailed to a tree, de Soto's soldiers might cut off his nose or ear or hand, or maybe take his daughter or wife the way they had probably already taken the village's supply of corn.

De Soto and his hard-liners had waded ashore in midsummer; it was October when they got to Apalachee lands west of the Aucilla River. The Apalachees were no more accommodating than they were the last time they met a conquistador. They burned their own villages and their own corn, withdrawing inland, waiting for a chance to ambush. In December the Spanish passed through fields of winter crops, hills rising up around them and cool little streams lacing across the land. At the St. Marks River, the Spanish fought a pitched battle with the Apalachees. It was ugly. The blood soaked into the red clay of the riverbanks and spilled into the water like poison. This time the crossbows and swords of the Spaniards beat the medicine-charged arrows of the Apalachees. De Soto occupied the Apalachee town of Anhaica, where on December 25, 1539, the priests sang the Christmas mass to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.

A hundred years later, Spanish soldiers had raised mud and coquina forts along the coasts. Spanish monks had strung missions along the Red Hills, each with its little pine chapel dedicated to an archangel, a saint, or a martyr. There was even one, San Martín de Tomoli, there on the Cody Scarp where one day the Americans would build a log hut and call it a capital. In the spring, if it wasn't raining, you could see all the way down to the Bay of Horses.

Two hundred years later, the Spanish forts needed repairing, and the missions were mostly just a few rickety walls covered in trumpet vine. A Carolina Scot, John McIver, built his house on what was left of San Martin de Tomoli. He said he liked the view. But the "royal road" the Spanish had made between San AgustÍn and Pensacola was more or less intact, if full of thigh-deep ruts. Rufus and Jane rode down it past de Soto's 1539 camp in the middle of the old capital, Anhaica, now part of the new capital, Tallahassee.

These days the site is asphalted over with offices and condominiums (the Florida curse), obscuring the ancient earth. But before the buildings went up in the late 1980s, the state archaeologist found a tiny piece of chain mail. Then a few blown glass beads. Then the iron point of a crossbow and a copper coin, a four-maravedi piece, minted when Ferdinand and Isabella still sat on the twin thrones of Castile and Aragon. Then the jawbone of a pig.

In the uncertain lands between the Cody Scarp and the sea, kin of that pig got good at avoiding alligators in the creeks and feeding off poison ivy. Their forefathers and mothers had been hardy, resourceful range pigs from the hot scrublands of Extremadura. The Spanish abandoned Florida, but their swine never left, thriving generation upon generation in the very swamps that defeated Narváez and confounded de Soto. My Roberts grandfather -- we called him Papa -- would tell how his great-grandmother Jane would hear them at night, trying to get into her vegetable garden. "Great-Granddaddy Rufus would get up and try to shoot him one," said my grandfather. "Those old conquistador hogs were lean as a cat," he said. Not so tasty as domesticated, slop-fed hogs, but they cured up okay for the winter.

Down at the River, as Papa referred to our ancestral swamp, he kept a pen of respectable pigs. He'd let me help scoop out their feed, hard corn kernels yellow as mustard, and tell me about the conquistador hogs that ran in packs like wild dogs. "The old king hog, he had them living over on Mack Island." Papa would gesture out in the direction of a piece of liquid ground out there in the labyrinth of bays, landings, hammocks, marshes, and forest. Once when I was down there I saw six or seven of these wild pigs, their bloodlines going back to the Reconquista, swimming across our slough. They held their brindled snouts out of the brown water as daintily as sorority girls trying not to get their hair wet in the pool. Their eyes were hard as bone. Papa told us that a hog bite is worse than a cottonmouth bite or a rattlesnake bite. It's worse than anything except a human bite. I ran back to the car and hit the automatic lock, as if conquistador hogs would know how to open doors.

Jane Broward Tucker wrote to her father back at the Broward place that his grandson Charles Broward Tucker, born in 1842, was doing well, and that she and Rufus had a hundred acres or so now. She didn't tell him that half of it was underwater. The important thing was that once again a French Brouard had stuck it out where the Spanish had turned tail and run.

Before Port Leon got wrecked in the big hurricane of 1843, Jane and Rufus would drive down there, or to Kings Bay to buy oysters. Rufus loved oysters. Jane would walk on the beach carrying the parasol her Uncle John had brought her from Jamaica. She had heard that you could still see crosses carved in the bark by the desperate and starving Spanish, who hoped that God, at least, hadn't forgotten them in the land of the Apalachees. Some of the old people, part African, part Indian, who made potions and conjures in the swamp, said that once the white sand there had been covered with the skulls of horses.

Luther Tucker, Jane and Rufus's third son, would tell how one time Rufus and Jane took him and his brothers Charlie and Washington over to St. Marks. Franklin and Milton were too little, so they were left home with Sarey. Rufus hired a skiff from a fellow and took them up the Wakulla River (Charlie was big enough to help row) all the way to the springs. Rufus said that this was the genuine Fountain of Youth that the old Spaniard Ponce de León was looking for hundreds of years ago. Rufus told how de Soto kept going once he discovered that the Fountain of Youth didn't work and there was no city of El Dorado in Florida. "He went to Georgia and he went to the Carolinas and Tennessee and Alabama. He ran smack into the Mississippi River. Got sick as a dog and died." Rufus always repeated that part, "Got sick as a dog and died."

The remnants of de Soto's conquering Christians buried him in a secret place in the bed of the river, where maybe the catfish feasted on his mortal remains.

Rufus would tell this story at Wakulla Springs. Jane would trail her hand in the rock-cold water. They'd let the skiff drift a little in the middle of the round spring, while Rufus would show the boys the bones of a giant beast on the bottom. Papa's grandfather Luther thought it was a dragon. Luther's brother Charlie said there were no dragons, it was some old animal that had died even before the Spanish came. Jane wondered if maybe it had drowned in the Flood that covered the earth in Bible times, maybe at the very beginning of the world.

Copyright © 2004 by Diane Roberts