My
dad's family was from Florida, not fun Florida – swamp Florida. It
is a strange place which is rotting into the ground and the
infrastructure and social conventions seem like they got frozen some
time in the ambiguous past. Even at night the heat and humidity is
oppressive. The huge sounds of the bugs from the swamp is deafening
and barely masks the 'Deliverance' banjos that seem to echo in the
steamy darkness. Most of the family had moved out west permanently,
intermittently, or occasionally but there was a core of the faithful
that maintain a base of operations. One of the families that had
moved out to Utah for most of my life had moved back for a couple of
years and that summer before my senior year my sister and I flew out
for a ten day or so visit. It was the first time that I flew anywhere
by myself and in charge of my little sister to boot. We made it just
fine and my aunt was waiting at the airport in a minivan with two of
my cousins in tow. The oldest cousin from that family was a boy six
months younger than me and a foot taller. After we got into the van
with our luggage my cousin started talking to me about some of the
people of color that I may have noticed here in Florida that I may
not have noticed in Utah. He started rattling off a rather
impressive, for its width and breadth, list of rude or common
nicknames for African-Americans. I didn't really know what to say but
my aunt bailed me out by telling him that was inappropriate and we
should never repeat such terms. He lightly argued that he was only
informing me what I might hear in the wild from people not as classy
as us. She told him to shut up nonetheless. We got to their house and
settled in got to know everyone again and met some of their
intriguing lady friends. We decided to head off into the night to
play some racquetball and that almost cost us, if not our lives, some
major inconvenience.
