Mile Zero (12 page)

Abuelo had arrived in Key West from Havana filled with good nature, cocky promise, and a generous portion of luck, for he was born in 1878 at the end of the failed Ten Years’ War, when the Spaniards swung their sword of terrorism with dictatorial precision, cutting the throats crying “Cuba Libre,” releasing a flood of martyrs’ blood to fertilize the seeds of
Pinos Nuevos
. The seeds of
Pinos Nuevos
lay fallow through a desert of oppression, which would not show growth until 1895, when Martí called for all men to rise as one, and final revolt to begin. The revolution began without Abuelo. The Spaniards tried to conscript him into an army of brothers preparing to fight brothers. It was then Abuelo’s family was smuggled aboard a schooner to make passage across the Florida Straits to Cayo Hueso, Star of the Sea shining with bright promise of two hundred cigar factories producing one hundred million cigars a year, and a powerful cigarmakers’ union, La Liga, organizing among the six-thousand-man work force. Abuelo’s father was a true artist, who had risen rapidly through the rigid caste system of the cigar factories of Havana, from a lowly Stripper, who prepared the fan-shaped spread of thin-veined tobacco leaves for wrappers and filler, to become a Cigarmaker. His fingers knew the perfect airy weight of the cigar to be born, then
rolled and glued it with natural gum, all in a deft motion of such rapid fluidity only a mere trace of moisture escaped his skin to permeate the impressionable product, taint its natural perfume. The newborn cigar was in and out of his hands in less than a minute. Abuelo’s father was one of the few capable of constructing the difficult Cuban Bances Aristocrato. The Aristocrato was filled with the finest Vuelta tobacco, its pliant leaf wrapper tapered the shape of a delicate glass-blown bottle, its svelte end pinched to a flat pucker to meet the flame of a match with the ease of a kiss, releasing a smoky reminiscence of freshly turned humus on a deeply jungled mountainside. The muscles in Abuelo’s father’s arms grew and his fingers flew as he sat year after year in the center of the two-tiered cigarmaker’s table creating the finely balanced rolled contours of everything from cheap Cheroot Pinas to lordly Bances Aristocratos. Finally he was elevated to the position of Picker. Surrounded by the grand sweep of a crescent-shaped table where bundles of finished cigars were delivered to him, Abuelo’s father mastered the art of Spanish Picking. From the untied bundles he picked through thirty-two shades of leaf-wrapper colors, carefully matching the correct colorations required to pack four layers of cigars in a proper order demanded by tradition. Cedar box after cedar box he filled. The cedar wood guaranteed no worms or bugs would feast off the aromatic bounty. Only the most appreciative lips would suck on Cuba’s finest. All of this Abuelo’s father mastered and taught his son before the schooner they escaped on arrived in Key West.

Abuelo, like his father, worked his way up quickly in the cigar factories of his newly adopted country. As a youth he was a Stripper in a
Chinchalito
, a small, independent factory with only ten workers, men from villages around Havana, Spanish mountain towns and West Indies fishing ports, all working together in the confines of a plank-wood shack barged over from the Bahamas. The shacks had been shotgunned closely next to one another by the hundreds, along newly created streets inching across the island to house ever-growing numbers of cigar workers. The intimate working conditions of the
Chinchalito
was soon to give way to grander fortunes for Abuelo. His father had become one of the
Jefes
in La Liga, believing only the union could prevent the Spaniards from once again stealing what was rightfully Cuban. Too many Spaniards were being hired to work against the brotherhood of La Liga, so Abuelo’s father took his son from the independent
Chinchalito
and fixed a job for him as Cigarmaker
in one of the block-long, three-storied limestone factories off Duval Street. It was there Abuelo’s life was given two fortuitous twists to seal the fate of his manhood emerging at age seventeen.

The first twist came in the form of a female body taking every dangerous curve along the course of its supple frame to stop a man’s heart dead in its tracks. Her name was Pearl, the jewel in a family of nine brothers and one daughter. Pearl’s father was an Ibu, brought to the Bahamas as a boy in chains from West Africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the British. Freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man’s world, John Coe. John Coe worked flat-land crops of Bahamian plantations, but his eyes always went to the vast ocean’s reach, where wealth was held beyond the voracious grasp of slave masters. The sea surging between the thousands of islets woven through the great chain of Bahamian islands was a place where a man could fish, and sponge, and turtle. A place where an industrious man could dip his pole beneath the pristine water’s surface and stir up an honest meal or a lifetime’s fortune.

John Coe became a student of the sea when freed. The sea became John’s new master. Turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. John felt kinship with this marine creature’s abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. John was a simple man who knew not the turtle’s source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal’s daily inspiration. John learned the ways of thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles, cruising and blowing water stacks like sporting baby whales. He studied eight-hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens, which fed solely on vegetarian fare, content to snap through carpets of sea grass. He gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill, whose fast bite could gash a man’s hand swift as a machete blow and bleed him to death on flat water in hot sun.

John followed the turtles down the length of the Bahamas, around Hispaniola, across the Caribbean Sea, up the Central American coast, riding the warm current of the Gulf Stream. John mastered the harpoon, taking a turtle coming up for a blow with his first thrust, driving the harpoon’s sharpened steel peg cleanly into the precious shell. John never lost a turtle as it dove deep after the pegging, its weight strong against the whirring line, pulling for freedom. John
went wherever the turtles went. He could con his canoe-shaped longboat by eye through razor-sharp walls of coral, reading the deep-water blue surging with currents of urgency between the yellow-shadowed reefs. John could net turtles, harpoon them or take them by hand. He began to think like a turtle, the taste of ghost crab in his mouth, the brine of shipworms in his nostrils, turtle grass between his toes. In the polar pull of a late winter warming moon John could intuit the male turtle’s fervor of romance. It was during this mating season he would capture a she-turtle and heft her aboard his longboat, then wait patiently with his glistening prisoner of passion, until a trailing male thrust suddenly from water, attempting in a heroic leap of faith to hurl his amorous hulk over the edge of the longboat to be forever joined with his mate, not feeling the bite of John’s harpoon until it was too late. John knew where turtles roosted at night, deep in sleep beneath a float of soft kelp, wreathed in seaweed. John Coe had their dreams.

John migrated up the Florida Keys with leatherbacks and greens in spring. During nights of moonlight he stalked crescent-shaped trails left in damp sand where females stabbed flippers, heaving hard-shelled bodies beyond the tideline to nest their eggs safely. John turned the she-turtles in the vulnerable moment when their tidal surge of eggs flowed, flipping them over on their backs, where they remained helpless and immobile as he carved his initials, JC, into their soft undershells, the crude brand a warning to other Turtlers that these turtles were his. The flipped females were left stranded on the beach, the fresh cut of JC on their bellies glowed in moonlight as John worked quickly through the lengthening night on other beaches, turning as many females as he could before the moon disappeared from the heavens. In the dawn’s early light John returned exhausted and exhilarated to his females on the sandy beaches, laying claim to his prized catch of eggs, meat and shells. This was how John Coe came to Key West, to sell his skiffload of prizes from the sea of plenty, fresh brimming baskets of turtle eggs and live she-turtles, their pierced front and back flippers tied through with palm thatch.

Along the Key West docking wharves of the big turtle canning factory in 1855 talk among the Turtlers was of Sponger money and nurse sharks. Spongers were many in Key West, and many were from the Bahamas, both white and black Conchs, equal in their pursuit to take a livelihood from the sea. John knew their language, the clipped sounds of men given to few words and patient actions as they poled
skiffs across shallows. Through glass-bottom buckets dropped over the skiffs’ sides the Spongers searched briny depths during the long day’s tidal rise and fall for flowering black-skinned sheepswool sponges hiding deep in coral crevices and the wavering underwater flow of grassy flats. More than a thousand men in hundreds of boats left the Key West wharves before dawn each day to harvest the vast sponge beds of the back-country flats. Sharp three-pronged hooks at the tip of eighteen-foot poles brought up tons of yellow sponge, grass sponge, and thick sheepswool. There was plenty of Sponger money for all, but John Coe did not settle in Key West because he became a Sponger. John Coe became a Sharker.

Talk on the docks when John Coe arrived with his she-turtles in Key West was of how a man who knew his way with sharks could make as much or more than a Sponger. On those days when the bottoms of the flats were kicked up by distant stormy weather, sending chops and swells against the Keys for days on end, the Sponge-Hookers couldn’t spy their catch in the murk. Mistakenly they would strike at bulging coral heads, dancing sea fans and shadowy jellyfish, anything and everything but the desired object of their deft aim. They could not fill their skiffs. A Sponger who could not fill his skiff could not fill his children’s bellies and his glass with rum, so the Sharker became the Sponger’s friend fair and true. The Sharker possessed magic to clear storm-befouled waters. The Sharker had oil of the young nurse sharks. A Sponger could swish nurse shark oil a hundred feet across the water on both sides of his skiff, then the murk of the flats would part quick as an underwater stage curtain, the marine heaven shimmer clear beneath the gaze of the Sponge-Hooker standing tall at the bow. A Sponger needed a Sharker on a gray day when promise is dim and the skiff empty. John Coe knew the ways of the shark. To know the ways of the turtle is to know the ways of the shark.

The sea taught John Coe it’s a horseshoe conch-eats-shipworm world. John baited his hooks with mackerel heads and feathered chicken wings and searched the shallows of the Keys for the pale brown shadows of nurse sharks nosing across the sandy bottom. John dragged hundreds of six-foot nurses ashore, their mouths hooked, the noose of a rope cinched around their dangerously thrashing tails. Over an open fire John boiled gallons of oil from the freshly cut poundage of shark livers. John sold the skins to leather brokers from Texas, the dried fins to Chinese seamen to make a nourishing soup
while on the long clipper-ship passage back to China; where shark fin powder was a fabled aphrodisiac, believed to bestow upon man required properties to prowl through a woman’s sea with the stand-up certitude of a bull walrus. John Coe earned his money from sharks, Spongers, Chinese seamen and Texas bootmakers. From the sea of plenty John earned himself enough money to buy a wife.

John Coe was a man of superstitious faith. John believed the natural world exposed signs along the road of life for a man to obey. If the high cirrus clouds deserted the heavens by noon, and a curtain of rolling dark clouds descended on the western horizon, then John did not voyage out to shark on the following morn. When the moon grew full, spilled its silver illumination on a shimmering sea, John felt the shrimp move in his veins and set out on a path of light across the strong current of the Gulf Stream to find a schooling swarm of giant loggerheads. John had faith in the gods of men and animals in the old African world. He believed in the power of those gods to instruct him daily in a godless new world. That is why when the Slaver-schooner
Wildwind
sailed into Key West, its vast open deck crowded by unclothed shadow-dark African bodies thinned to the bone by hunger and fear, John Coe was there to take a wife.

John Coe did not know he was going to take a wife that fateful day. John knew only that the day before the thin wispy cirrus clouds pulled out of the heavens by noon, replaced by brooding thunderheads descending in the west, so instead of sharking he ambled down to the docks where he could hear the Bahamian accent so dear to his ears being bantered back and forth among Turtlers and Spongers. Talk was among the black Bahamians that a Slaver had sailed in from the West Coast of Africa; Mandingo, Ijo and Ibu were aboard. Rich cotton growers from Natchez and New Orleans had come to buy them. Talk was war was going to be fought in America, war over slaves. No one on the docks knew if this meant there were to be more slaves or none. All they knew for certain was sure as good weather follows bad a war was coming. John Coe decided to go among the crowd watching the human cargo from the Slaver being auctioned. This was something unnatural to him. The sea had made John free inside, yet some part of him still felt captured. An indentured piece of John’s soul lingered uncomfortably on the meathook of his recent history. John cared not to be around purveyors of human flesh. His eyes could not take the sad old sight, smells of desperation, wide lost look of Africa in the people’s eyes. All of this drummed on his heart
with the force of a hammer beating nails into a coffin. John had turned away from this dark corner of his life, closed the door on his own origins. Whatever compelled John to be standing among the crowd at the auction was not something to be questioned, it was instead a prayer about to be answered. The answer came when John heard the white auctioneer shout: “Brenda Bee! One Ibu wench age nineteen!”