Made Ya Look

Living in the back woods of Florida along the Tamiami Trail was a rich experience. We had only three neighbors parsed out along a rock ridden dirt road. Our collective rural acreage butted up against the vast Everglades. As the few children of a place, that without affection was dubbed Swamp Water, we flirted with its obvious dangers. Rattlesnake rattler necklaces and baby alligators were common play things.

The only store in Swamp Water was a feed store a couple miles down the road. They didn't sell dry goods or staples. They didn't sell toiletries or aspirin. They sold hay and oats; hay and oats, and just one other thing.

In front of the store, which was really no more than a walled in lean-to, sat the most beautiful red and white refrigerated ice chest ever known to 'child kind' and in that ice chest was the one and only incentive needed to get us to come out of the cool dry hammocks of overgrown foliage and hardwood that provided relief on a Floridian summer day.

We would take our rare, hard earned and shiny quarters knowing we had no other place to spend them and run barefoot down the rock ridden dirt road, stubbing our toes bloody without care, singing 'Pinch, poke! You owe me a coke'. The lid to the chest was heavy. I had to stand on a milk crate to reach the bottles inside. They were stacked like gold on top of one another, cold and clinking, filled with dark amber fluid in thick blue-green glass. The elixir of life is what you make it.

In reality our secluded tropical lives were only separated by a canal and a few miles of road into Miami. But those miles might very well have been a universe away.

I'm not sure what they call Indian burns today. Perhaps they are called Native American burns. That's fine with me. I don't hold tenderly to some of the affectations of growing up within narrow minded margins of bigotry. I can admit though, that long before I knew it was a bad thing, my life would seem to be formed within those confines. Thank goodness for the civil rights movement. My earliest years recall my Aunt's home. She lived in Miami proper, inland away from the water. She had an African-American maid and held firmly to the thought that slavery should never have been abolished.

She would aptly share those thoughts among family and friends in whispers too low for the maid to supposedly hear. Long before the word 'nigger' was shown to me to be a word of hate and oppression, I was taught to sing, "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by his toe". My mother finally stopped calling Brazil nuts, nigger toes, in the late 1980's; at least I hope she did.

I didn't like my Aunt's property much; oppression seemed to cloud it. The backyard was dark and burdened with huge mango trees that were rarely harvested. Instead the fruit dropped naturally to the ground, creating cesspools of rotting mango flesh. The fermenting swill was a perfect matrix for prehistoric sized toads and the giant flies that kept them fed. I used to step along large stones to the very center of the brown bubbling pit of mango, which seemed quite the birth place of hell, fearing the toads and yet somehow strangely drawn to them. It was here in the tenderness and newness of my flesh, that I learned even the young have their dark side.

My arm had been scourged by that Indian burn. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to wear it as a badge of honor and keep playing or run to mother with tears in my eyes. After all, it had been rudely thrust upon me. My brother grabbed my forearm and began rubbing the skin roughly in many different directions. He even rubbed the faint hairs of my forearm into tiny knots. I chose the prudent course and continued to play.

The burn had been passed forward. My brother had received one just a moment earlier from Butch, our neighbor. Such were the nature of Indian burns. I hadn't at all agreed to the Indian burn as I had once agreed to the Hertz Donut or to playing 52 Card pick up. In those cases, my brother had simply made them sound so delicious that I had instantly agreed to them without knowing what they were. Before he gave me the Hertz Donut, he pinched my slim bicep very hard, twisting my flesh firmly until my eyes began to bulge. My eyes were bulging because they were helping my lips stay locked and my lips were locked so that I wouldn't scream and wake mom up.

Waking mom up sometimes led to a switching in the front yard. Don't ask me why this was embarrassing as there was no one to see it for miles. Still the very thought mortified me.

Agonized and ready to scream 'uncle' without having been asked, I held firm. I really wanted that donut. When he finally threw out the punch line, "Hurts don't it?" the whole idea had grabbed at my demented sense of humor and we both burst out laughing. Laughter is entirely possible in spite of ongoing pain.

The day of the Indian burn, mom was sleeping after working a late shift at Tiny Naylor's, a coffee shop on the fringes of Miami. For a time this was her life. She would leave in late afternoon, dressed in her waitress uniform. The uniform was peach in color with a white collar and pocket, along with that she had a white apron, white waitress shoes and a white waitress cap, which was really just a half moon shaped piece of cloth that she pinned to the crown of her scalp with bobby pins. She would make dinner before she left for work. Before she made dinner she would clean something with Clorox, or she would sit at the kitchen table writing lists and adding up columns while her foot nervously danced under the table.

It was up to my oldest brother or sister to put us to bed. Our house had two bedrooms and one bathroom, plus the Florida room. It was called the Florida room because it was mostly comprised of screened in windows that flooded the room with Florida sunshine. My sister was in her teens and so kept a room for own, even though there had been a set of bunk beds in it for my brother and myself. My mother and father shared a room but not a bed. She had a full size bed and he had a twin size bed in the corner of the room. My brother and I slept with my mother in her bed. My oldest brother slept in the Florida room. The next year he would enlist in the Vietnam War. My sister would leave home. And my parents soon would divorce. Times would change and a new scene would be upon us; The Age of Aquarius and The First Landing on the Moon, Protests and Love-Ins, Sex and Drugs and Rock n'Roll. We would leave that tropical sanctuary and forever loose our innocence.

Mother's sleep was precious and it was just an Indian burn after all, something even a six year old could take. Some injustices just aren't worth the time it takes to complain.