Chapter One
Tuesdays during the years I lived on Amelia Island, I would drive down to American Beach and carry MaVynee Betsch back to Fernandina to go shopping. She could hardly have driven herself. MaVynee, who had grown up accustomed to Packards and Cadillacs, had sold her last car, a Pinto, long ago. She had no license and could probably not get a new one, considering the official confusion over her name--she'd amended "Marvyne" to remove the "R" when Ronald Reagan was elected--and the length of her hair and fingernails, either of which measurements would have qualified in the eyes of the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles as an impediment to the proper operation of an automobile. At any rate, she couldn't afford the gas.
In her current penury, her life was organized the way a millionaire's is, around foreseeable fluctuations in the markets, which meant, in MaVynee's case, that Tuesday was double discount day at the Nassau County Health Food store. The more holes they punched in her bonus card, the sooner she would earn a bumper crop of tofu and organic carrots when the card got full. So Tuesdays it was, and I would generally arrive in early afternoon and gather MaVynee into town. While she got her groceries, I would head around the corner to the Winn-Dixie for a bottle of her vintage of choice, a gallon of cranberry juice.
If her purpose was to stock up on provisions, mine (and I like to think part of hers, also) was to catch up on conversation. My anticipation of our talks was always freighted lightly with dread, for the least encounter with MaVynee could be an intense experience. To the island on which I was but a novice and a newcomer she had a long allegiance and adeep emotional attachment. Touring Amelia Island with MaVynee was like touring Troy with Schliemann. The least step on our journey could kick over some shard that, though dross in my eyes, shone in hers with moral significance and would instantly become an exhibit in her ongoing narrative. Her narrative had many ornate branches, hung heavy with folly and heroism, but they all sprang from a massive trunk: the betrayal of nature and humankind by the forces of progress and wealth. The island, it turns out, made an excellent case in point.
"Baby, let's go!" she would say when I picked her up. "We have so much to do!"
By that time, I would already have met the challenge of finding her, which was not always easy at the Beach, where she could be lost in the crowd or lost in solitude. American Beach has a permanent population of only 150, but it bursts with visitors on summer weekends. On Sunday evenings, when it is a popular party retreat for black teenagers from Jacksonville, the kids park their cars in yards and along the main street all the way back to the highway, and sheriff's deputies set up roadblocks and stand by in force, tensed for trouble. At other times, American Beach seems almost a ghost town, a cluster of aging, sunstruck, clapboard homes cupped in the palm of an enormous sand dune, its quiet narrow streets, under sheltering oaks, haunted (it often seemed) only by MaVynee. "I can go an entire week and not see a two-legged fool," she exulted to me. Usually I would find her at her mailbox, a bright orange tin contraption the size of an osprey's nest, set on an unsteady post by the beach and referred to by MaVynee as Revolutionary Headquarters, owing to the nature of thecorrespondence that flowed through it.
As we drove the sandy side streets back to the highway, the narrative would begin. She would point out for my enjoyment the phlox blooming on the huge dune's flank and the dense windswept tangle of live oaks at the edge of town. ("They're enchanted! An Enchanted Forest!") Or she would show me such monuments to municipal history as the house that sheriff's deputies had laid siege to one summer evening, blasting away until it was destroyed and its resident, whom they had come to question about a misdemeanor, dead. On the highway, she would identify the convenience store owned by a white man whose father had been especially generous to blacks in the bad years of the thirties, or the rundown roadside bar where, on the previous weekend, a black gentleman dressed in a suit had pulled up in a car with out-of-state plates, opened the trunk, retrieved a briefcase, walked inside, opened the briefcase, pulled out a shotgun and, turning to a customer at the bar, said, "You're the one," before killing him and neatly packing up the gun and returning the briefcase to the trunk and disappearing down the road. MaVynee's histories did not lack for drama.
Her critical eye was more commonly snagged by the ordinary run of things--how life was changing in this little world, how awful and absurd the changes were. "Tell me" she asked, as we passed one of the new luxury resort developments encroaching on American Beach, wherein palatial homes elbowed each other like factory shanties, "would you pay half a million dollars to listen to your neighbor's toilet flush?" The towers of the newly built Ritz-Carlton resembled those of a prison to her. Golf was a perplexity. Oneday, she could not forgo the opportunity the sport presented to compare one of her most admired species with the one that most disappointed her. "Look at the sea turtle," she instructed. "She comes here from afar to drop a little white sphere in a little hole, and she disturbs nothing and bestows life and ensures the abundance of nature. Now notice your white man; he comes from afar to drop a little white sphere in a little hole and destroys everything in his path."