Gator Country by Rebecca Renner

Author:Rebecca Renner [Renner, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250842572
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2023-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

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In the year 1960, Jonnie turned eleven. By then, great change had already befallen Chokoloskee. In the very early years of Jonnie’s life, neither road nor electricity connected the island to the mainland. Jonnie attended a one-room schoolhouse on the island. Some other kids rode in on a boat that acted as their school bus.

The Browns lived on a “house-lighter,” their word for what outsiders might call a houseboat. Rather than floating on the water, it stood on stilts overlooking the tide. It was white with blue trim. Jonnie’s father had built it himself when he came back from the war.

They had no electricity. Neither did any of their neighbors. Jonnie did his homework by the light of kerosene lamps. Not that he always did it. Jonnie was what he would later call a “real mean” kid. He would shoot cans from their garbage pile with his BB gun and teach innocent neighbor kids how to cuss. He had plenty to be ornery about, but he didn’t fully realize it at the time.

In 1956, the state built a bridge that connected Everglades City on the mainland with Chokoloskee. With the bridge came all sorts of outsiders. According to the adults in Jonnie’s life, the two worst types of outsiders were the tourists and the environmentalists. Even a journalist had started poking around. Peter Matthiessen was working on a book about endangered species, he said. Yet he kept asking all kinds of questions to anybody who gave him the time of day. He was in love with the mystique of the Everglades, like most of the outsiders were, but he also seemed transfixed by a murder that had happened at the trading post about half a century before. The Brown clan and the Daniels clan, by then united by marriage, had both been involved. Unlike with their other alleged undertakings, they were more than happy to tell the story of how in 1910 they killed Edgar Watson, a violent sugarcane planter who treated his workers like slaves.

“The bastard deserved it,” Jonnie said. “Nobody knows who shot him, because near every man in town was there with his gun, and they all shot at once.”

Chokoloskee was proud of the Wild West–style justice they had meted out. Uncle Totch had taken it upon himself to become the island’s unofficial historian and storyteller (Kent’s spiritual predecessor), and so he befriended Matthiessen and showed him around, hoping to catch a little bit of fame along the way.

All this new attention brought newfound trouble. Peg had always made his living fishing and poaching alligators. In those days, the numbers of alligators had shrunk in some parts, while in others, like around Big Fox Lake, they remained plentiful. The outsiders seemed preoccupied with the alligators, even more so than the people whose livelihoods depended on them. They came in seeking to change everything rather than realizing it was the change they had brought that started the problems in the first place. If everyone had just

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