Prologue
2017
“Don’t shoot guns into the hurricane.”
Elsewhere this would go without saying, but Floridians need to be told.
This was an actual warning issued by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office just north of Tampa Bay as a major storm approached. After all, a local man had just been arrested for DUI when he tried to order a taco in a Bank of America drive-through.
The alert was a reaction to people posting plans on the Internet for a party to shoot at the hurricane and make it turn away. The sheriff’s notice even included a scientific diagram showing how the vortex of the core could curve bullet paths to come back and hit the shooter.
“Shooting at a hurricane!” said Serge. “That’s the most brainless thing I’ve ever heard!”
Coleman looked out the rear window of their muscle car racing over a bridge. “Why is everyone else driving the other way?”
“Because they’re evacuating. It’s the smart move.”
“Then shouldn’t we be evacuating?”
“Absolutely not,” said Serge, turning on tactical silicone windshield wipers. “They have to flee because they don’t know what they’re doing. We’re professionals.”
“How’s that?”
“Everyone else gets ready for storms according to the official instructions.” Serge reached under his seat. “Which is fine if you want to survive. But if you’re taking it to the next level, all that jazz will just slow you down. Hurricanes are the marrow of Florida history, and my history always goes bone-deep. That’s why I prepare for storms with an encyclopedic set of state guidebooks, every conceivable new gadget, and bags of provisions exclusively from the candy and snack aisles. Think about it: Little kids are programmed to thrive and that’s the first place they go. That’s how a pro has to think.”
“I’m still not sure.” Coleman flicked a Bic. “We’re like the only car heading this direction.”
“I’ve taken every conceivable precaution,” said Serge, absentmindedly waving a pistol out the window as Coleman did a bong hit. “What can possibly go wrong?”
1928
The bloated, decaying body rolled into the ditch.
It fell onto its back, cloudy eyes still wide open, creating a frozen expression that bookmarked the last thoughts from a long, brutal life of hardship, hunger, harrow and few complaints. The final thought in those eyes: What kind of shit now?
“It creeps me out the way he’s staring like that,” said a voice at the top of the ditch.
“He’s staring at God,” said someone else, grabbing a pair of lifeless ankles.
Another body tumbled down the dirt embankment, and another, and so forth. The dead were all African American, just like the dozens of perspiring, shirtless men laboring with shovels.
The shovel gang most likely would have pitched in anyway, out of a sense of community, but this time they didn’t have a choice. They occasionally glanced back at the white lawmen with shotguns propped against their shoulders and pools of tobacco spit at their feet.
“What are you looking at—!” The next word was impolite.
It actually should have been quite a nice day in late September. The sky was clear as a dream, and a cooling breeze swept over the fields covered with thousands of tulip-shaped orange wildflowers. The wind made the acres of bright petals sway as one, back and forth, like an immense school of tropical fish. Then the sun rose higher, and the breeze left. The air became stubbornly still, baking in that Central Florida humidity so thick it seemed to have weight. But worst of all:
It stank.
Blame history. It doesn’t bother to knock. It doesn’t even come in the front door. It’s like those newspaper articles about a car that crashes through the wall of a bedroom in the middle of the night. This was before storms had alphabetical names, and it was called the Great Hurricane of 1928. Later it would become the forgotten storm. The victims didn’t have money.
It began the afternoon of September 15. All the fancy weather instruments that now give residents a head start on hurricanes had yet to be invented. You’d be chopping carrots for a stew, and then a hurricane was just there. But if you were really paying attention over the years, there was one early-warning system. The Seminoles.
Something about pollen and a rapid blooming of the sawgrass. The Indians watched the plants down in the swamp, and when a low haze in front of the setting sun got that weird color, they seemed to know the exact moment to make for high ground. Many scientists have looked into the phenomenon and scoffed at the notion. But the Seminoles were always dependably on the move before each Big Wind, so they’d figured something out.
This time, the tribe had come up out of the Everglades on trails leading to the ramshackle towns of South Bay and Belle Glade, then made a right turn toward West Palm Beach. There was no panic in their march. Simply a parade of native families out for a very long stroll. Some of the townsfolk remembered a similar migration two years earlier, before a lesser hurricane, and decided to follow the Indians out. But most stayed put.
On the morning of September 17, the storm that had peaked at category five made landfall at the Jupiter Inlet lighthouse in northern Palm Beach County. More than a thousand homes were destroyed along the coast before it continued churning inland, unimpressed . . .
Now, a few days later, the digging of massive, macabre pits continued with a sense of urgency. Fear of disease swept the survivors, and in the immediate aftermath the locals were on their own. Many of them were about halfway up the east side of the big lake, which would be Okeechobee, in an empty place that would soon become known for its mass grave, which would be Port Mayaca.
The same frantic scene was replaying itself miles away, in opposite directions, at two other South Florida locations. Even as mass graves go, there wasn’t remotely enough room. At least two and a half thousand dead by most accounts. Some said more than three. The nation’s worst toll ever, save for the Galveston storm in 1900.
Here was the problem with the hurricane of ’28: the storm surge. That’s often the case, and almost without exception, the deadly waves come from the ocean. But this time around, death didn’t come from the sea; one of the strongest hurricanes in recorded history made a direct hit on the nation’s largest freshwater lake sitting within a state. Who saw that coming? There was no dike, and the storm’s rotation easily shoved much of the lake’s contents south, in an inescapable ten-to-twenty-foot wall of water that blanketed hundreds of square miles.
In the following hours and days, the water began to recede, and then came the snakes, but that’s another story.
As the overwhelming scale of death became clear, they started digging a second grave pit on the other side of the lake in some unknown place called Ortona, and then a third in West Palm Beach, just off Tamarind Avenue. It was back-numbing work for all those residents pressed into service. But here’s what really pissed them off: The bodies of black victims filled the pits as fast as they could be thrown in on top of one another. Each white person got their own private pine box.
Then those boxes were loaded onto wagons and taken to the nearby Woodlawn Cemetery for proper burial.
A shotgun man stuck two fingers in his mouth for a shrill whistle that got everyone’s attention. Shovels stopped.