CHAPTER 1
A dirt road took us there. When we reached the grove, the Ford hesitated, as if sizing up the chances of a square metal machine penetrating the round world of oranges.
“Hold on, Sister,” my father said, shifting gear.
His CB radio antenna whipped in the air like a nine-foot machete. It caught in the tree branches and bent backward, then THWACK. Leaves and busted twigs rained down on us inside the car. Pesticide dust exploded off the trees. And oranges—big heavy oranges—dropped through the windows like bombs.
“Look out for Bouncing Betties!” Dad yelled when one hit the front seat.
Slats of raw sunlight bore down through the shade of the trees as the dirty beige Ford moved through the flickering movie. My father studied each tree we rolled past, glaring at it with suspicion, looking for all the ways it might be trying to trick him. He let the car steer itself as he tore the cellophane off a new pack of Winstons.
It was the summer of 1967 and he had just started his new job as a fruit buyer for HP Hood, the juice processor. He was supposed to make sure Hood got the best quality oranges and grapefruit for juice production. After he bought the citrus from growers, he had to keep the trees healthy until the fruit was ready to be picked, and then he had to ensure that the truckloads of citrus arrived at Hood’s juice house on time.
“The variables out to defeat a man are many,” he said, exhaling smoke. “Bugs, drought, freezes, aphids, red mites, canker, labor problems.”
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Sweat trickled down the side of my father’s face as he brooded. He was six feet and lanky, loose-limbed, with one hand draped over the steering wheel and perspiration coming through his white oxford shirt.
“How old are you, anyway?” I asked. I had just turned six.
“Your old daddy is twenty-eight,” he said.
His dashboard was covered in cigarette ash and pesticide dust. Dead bug skeletons were down along the windshield, piles of them, crispy as croutons, and every time a breeze hit, they lifted up in midair before settling back down. My father’s attention was out his window, on the Valencia orange trees. Valencias were juicers and soon to be in cartons in grocery stores if the variables didn’t defeat Hood’s new man in the field.
We crept along at three miles an hour. All of a sudden, he hit the brakes.
“Stay in the car,” he said, stalking off with his magnifying glass. I kept an eye on him as I unwrapped the bacon sandwich my mother made for me. He held his magnifying glass over some leaves, Sherlock Holmes–style.
My mother had given me lots of instruction. Don’t talk too much. Don’t pester the man with questions. Drink plenty of water. Speak up if I need to use the bathroom.
A bathroom! Of all the misinformed advice. So far that day the closest I saw to a bathroom was a tar paper shack next to an irrigation ditch. When I had to go, Dad reached under his seat for a roll of toilet paper. “Take this,” he said. Two rows over, I squatted in the sand, holding a stick for snake protection.
“Best not to shatter all your mama’s illusions by telling her every detail,” Dad said when I got back in the car.
Withholding confidential information from my mother—how exciting. I was obsessed with spy craft. Dad helped me with my correspondence to the cereal companies of Battle Creek, Michigan, mailing away for Captain Quisp decoder rings, invisible ink, and secret compartment watches. Whatever I owned that was worth owning came from Battle Creek. Dad and I would sit at the kitchen table together in the evening and think of reasons why I was qualified to own the tools of espionage.
I’d noticed the box of test tubes rattling on his back seat. I asked him why he needed test tubes with stoppers. He said Hood required him to test juice samples for sugars and acids. I could see the test tubes were unused. None of the seals were broken. That didn’t seem right. “Are you going to get in trouble for not testing the juice?” I asked.
He said he preferred what he called the old-fashioned taste test. I would watch him do it a hundred times that summer. He stood by a tree with his pocketknife, cut a hole into the orange, and sucked the juice out. He held it in his mouth for a few seconds, calculating the juice into yields, pallets, and truckloads, then spat into the dirt. He had his answers.
My father gave me one rule to follow: don’t touch the glove box. “Understand?”
Whenever he left me alone in the car, I opened the glove box. It let out a puff of scent, like dirty pennies. Inside was a pistol. I moved it aside to examine the rattlesnake kit. The small briefcase of death was at the back of the glove box. Military lettering stamped on the box said: “Mine Safety Appliances Company.” That was just to throw off interested parties. The clasp of the rattlesnake kit popped open. Inside, the miniature surgical instruments were strapped down—tourniquet, suction cup, and a lancet covered in creased white tissue.
* * *
MY FATHER’S territory was the citrus-growing region of Central Florida known as the Ridge. It ran a hundred miles from north to south, from up around Clermont straight down to Lake Placid. It wasn’t a large area but in the 1960s the Ridge had the heaviest concentration of citrus groves in the world. One botanical grid after another, dark green regiments of trees marching up and down the middle of the state. We lived at the bottom of the Ridge in a town called Sebring.
In spring when the orange blossoms opened, it was like God had knocked over a bottle of Ladies of Gardenia. The smell was so strong it burned into my hair and clothes, and the dog’s fur. The blossoms heaved and sighed for three weeks straight, and just as they started to fade the cooking houses started processing fruit for juice. For ten hours a day, the cook houses pumped caramelized smoke into the air that smelled of spun brown sugar.
Once we’d gone to Jacksonville, three hours north of the Ridge, a paper mill town on the St. Johns River. When that rotten-egg breeze came rolling off the river, it left me gasping in the back seat, dazed by the realization that the world could stink. I was glad we weren’t in paper. I was glad we were in oranges.
* * *
IF THE history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph, it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians, the Calusa Indians, the Tocobaga Indians, Ponce de León, runaway slaves, snuff-dipping white settlers, the US Army, Osceola, the great Seminole warrior, malaria, cattle, citrus, and a dull heat that left it undesirable for much besides oranges until the early 1960s, when Walt Disney took a plane ride over the vast emptiness, looked down, and said, “There.”
The interior of Central Florida was so desolate that my father kept a gallon of water and a box of Saltines in his car. He said you could eat all the oranges you wanted, but good luck if you needed a flush toilet or a pay phone. He also said it was no place for a child, though Disney was betting otherwise.
Florida’s other citrus-growing region was much smaller, east of the Ridge, along the coast, and it was called Indian River. The Indian River people did a better job marketing their fruit, rhapsodizing about tidal Indian breezes that rang like poetry in the Yankee ear. Their fruit was prettier to look at because each piece of fruit was buffed out to the shine of a Cadillac.
On the Ridge, we didn’t mind if an orange left your hands dirty as long as juice dripped down your chin. Plus, we had more groves, wall-to-wall.
The competition was from California, though it was hardly a contest. The unremitting heat and humidity on the Ridge made our citrus exceptional juice bombs. What had started to pose a threat was a variety coming out of California called the seedless clementine. It was a no fuss version of the Florida tangerine, which was loaded with seeds. Dad said it might ruin us for good.
* * *
MY FATHER regularly had one citrus problem or another gnawing at him. A lower demand for navel oranges. Ortho raising the price on pesticide. He chewed so much Dentyne gum during that one that he cracked a molar.
The seedless clementine seemed a threat of a higher magnitude.
One day my father and I were parked in a grove while he talked about it with the other citrus men on the CB radio. One said that the clementine could knock out 25 percent of our citrus business. Dad listened, jotting down numbers on a pad of paper, crop yield versus net sales. George LaMartin’s voice cut through the ear-busting static. He and Dad were the same age, but George cussed more.
George said America was going to hell in a handcart if people were too lazy to spit out a few goddamn seeds.
The crackle and scratch started to drown out the voices. “Go to 32!” someone said, before they lost each other. Switching channels, they met back up on 32 and kept talking.
Astronauts were constantly flying overhead in Florida in those days, but the citrus men hardly bothered to look up. Nothing took their focus from the oranges. The moon was not an orange. The moon was a fad. Citrus was king and it would last forever.
* * *
LOOKING OUT my father’s windshield, I was seeing things I would never see again. Places that weren’t even on maps, where the sky disappeared and the radio went dead. Whole towns were entombed in Spanish moss, with gnarled branches of live oaks and blackjacks strangling each other in the tannic darkness. We rumbled past old pioneer settlements rotting in the humidity. Black creeks wound like tangled snakes. Birds spread their skeletal wings but never flew off. When it seemed we might not ever see daylight again, the road deposited us into blinding sunlight.
Dad’s fruit-buying territory for Hood crossed over four counties, or about four thousand square miles of rural land and unmarked roads. He had maps in the car, seven or eight of them, but I’d yet to see him consult one. When he came to a cattle gate with a yellow rag tied to the middle rung, that’s where we turned left. He didn’t disparage maps, but I got the feeling from him and the other citrus men that freestyle navigating was a point of pride. He also favored the “back way” or the “old way.” Old Highway 98 or Old Highway 64, we were always on Old Something.
One day we passed a group of men clearing brush on the side of the highway. They had chains attached to their ankles. They moved slowly, dragging their leg irons as they scythed through the tall grass in the ditches. Just in front of them was a truck that crept along and a guard on back holding a shotgun next to a watercooler.
As we passed the shackled contingent, some of the men looked up. Their faces were slick with sweat. Dad said it was impolite to stare at the prisoners. I turned back around in my seat but watched them in the rearview mirror until they were a speck and gone. My father scrounged in his shirt pocket for a Winston, probably trying to think of a parable about the uneven justice of captivity. Instead, he asked if I knew any chain gang songs.
The hobo told the bum
If you got any cornbread, save me some.
We sang it together a couple times. It made me thirsty, thinking of the cottony insides of the prisoners’ mouths and the water truck they’d never reach.
Every Friday we had a car full of money. Dad paid the labor crews on Friday afternoon, so first thing in the morning we went to the bank in Sebring. It was ice-cold and brand-new, and our teller looked like Jeannie C. Riley who sang “Harper Valley P.T.A.” She counted out a thick stack of bills that she put into a leather bank pouch and slid toward Dad. Out on the road we were Bonnie and Clyde. It was my job to hold the bank pouch.
“Would you mind keeping this safe for me?” Dad had said. He also took his gun out of the glove box and put it under his seat.
Knowing the money was going to orange pickers, the bank teller must have dug into her drawer for the most beat-up money she could find. The bills were greasy and thin, defaced with scrawling—Masonic symbols, Halloween bats, and the Egyptian eye, or devil horns on Abe Lincoln. The messages people wrote were in large block letters that spelled out HELP ME!!!! Or, PLEASE CALL LAMAR AT AVON PARK CORRECTIONAL. From going through the bank pouch and studying the money, I learned the word “pussy” and the first two lines of John 3:16.
As abused as that currency was, my father said it worked fine. You’ll see.
Most of the pickers knocked off for the summer, working other jobs, but there were still plenty who were fertilizing, watering, hoeing, and disking. My father didn’t pay each individual laborer; he paid their crew chief, Booker Sanders.
We found Booker in one grove or another by spotting his truck. It was a heap, like a pile of scrap metal someone abandoned in the hot sand.
“Well, Booker, another week,” my father said, after they shook hands.
Booker was an oak tree in bib overalls. His forearms were scarred with cross marks from picking oranges. The branches were stiff and sharp, daring any human to reach in and snap off a piece of fruit. Some of the fruit hung beautifully at the outer edges, but much of it was inside the tree, and this meant the picker’s face and neck would be slashed as he leaned into the middle of the tree. Booker’s arms spoke to his years picking oranges until he finally moved up to manage a crew of his own.
He was at least fifteen years older than my father, a deacon at Zion Hills Missionary Baptist, and so thoroughly networked that he fixed up the white people in town with domestic help, lawn men, and citrus workers. But his gift and genius was citrus. Dad said Booker had a ten-key adding machine in his head and reams of spreadsheets that mere mortals could not keep up with.
Under different circumstances, Booker Sanders would have been the mayor of Sebring or owned ten thousand acres of groves and cattle. In his current circumstances as a Black man in 1967 rural Florida, his role was to cede authority to the less knowledgeable white man in charge.
Dad handed the payroll cash to Booker and watched Booker count out the grimy bills on the hood of the Ford. After that, Dad said he wanted to show Booker a grove that was nearby.
“Get in the car, Booker. I’ll carry us over there,” Dad said.
“I’ll take my truck,” Booker said.
“Well, I need to show you where it is,” Dad said, standing at the open door.
“I know where it is,” Booker said, getting in his truck.
Dad got in the car and we followed behind Booker.
By four o’clock that afternoon, the bank pouch was empty. The cinder block taverns blinked to life and men at the gas station ripped into ten-pound bags of North Pole ice for their coolers. The sagging grocery store was suddenly a madhouse of wire buggies trundling out with pork shoulders and collards. Dad and I watched the payday fever through the windshield.
Of all the days in the week, Friday was the day my mother most wanted me to ride with Dad. My presence was supposed to keep him from succumbing to the Friday afternoon fever. With me in the car, he’d steer clear of the red neon Schlitz signs that called to him on his drive home. The bar didn’t even have to be on a map, but he knew where it was, based on animal instinct for red neon signs. A bar could be a half mile off the main road, next to an abandoned turpentine camp and hidden by moss, and he’d somehow end up there. My mother’s hopeful logic that a child might act as a human shield against this intuition was worth a try.
Copyright © 2023 by Anne Hull
