To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
—JAMES BALDWIN
DEREK MASON WAS A SCRAPPY FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLACK KID WHO’D been locked up in the Jacksonville version of little-kid prison for armed robbery. He wasn’t big—barely came to my shoulder—but was built like a loaded spring. He had the body of a flyweight boxer. His waist was trim, and his arms and torso had the sort of sinewy strength and grace that dancers have. Or adolescents who spend six months in a juvenile penitentiary fighting for their life.
Derek got dropped off two days early for a thirty-day canoe trip due to the wonders of bureaucracy emanating from some dingy office of the Department of Youth and Families in Jacksonville. Having finished orientation training and been baptized by the RIFA ants, I had been assigned a role as an assistant instructor for Outward Bound’s Youth At Risk program. I ended up stationed at the Yulee basecamp. Yulee is located in the very northeastern corner of Florida, a densely wooded, scrubby area filled with armadillos and snakes. All of a sudden, we had a kid at basecamp a few days early, and someone had to look after him. I got babysitting detail.
I never considered my privilege during the time I spent with Outward Bound. It never occurred to me that I was this looming, goofy white guy running river trips for kids who were predominantly African American. On my first trip the lead instructor, Emmett, was Black, which I think made for a smoother experience since he could relate to the kids in a way I couldn’t. On some level there was probably some white savior stuff going on. Here I was, in the Deep South, dragging young kids of color into the wilderness to teach them how to be accomplished humans. In retrospect, this had a neocolonial kind of feel—I would subdue their unacceptable tendencies. Totally ignorant of the systemic racism they’d experienced their whole lives, I approached the experience at face value. While not overtly evil, it was an ignorant way in which to engage with the kids we worked with. What I could have done was just see them. Be present for them. But I grew up in Vermont in the 1980s, where salt was considered a spice and you’d have to board an airplane to find soul food or a decent taco. There were very few people of color. My understanding of racial dynamics was right up there with my ability to repair O rings on the space shuttle: nonexistent.
I spent some time showing Derek around the camp. He said very little, just a nod now and then. It wasn’t much of a tour and was over in less than ten minutes. We sat on the steps leading up to the main building, digging our feet nervously into the dirt and slapping at bugs. Neither of us knew what to say, I think. Derek’s expression was inscrutable. Minutes ticked by, and I began to realize we’d need to figure out something to do.
I decided to try to make the most of the time and teach Derek to paddle a canoe. There was an estuary near the camp, and I figured we could haul a canoe to the water and paddle around. Get to know each other, build rapport and trust, and have a Hallmark After-School Special kind of moment. Some kumbaya magic.
I was a white guy asking a Black kid to get in a boat against his will. My ignorance of the traumatic, historical echo of the moment may rank up there with the dumbest things I’ve ever done. Upon suggesting we paddle out for a bit, Derek looked at me with what can only be described as intense skepticism. He stared hard at me, maybe trying to gauge my true intentions. Finally, he shrugged.
I convinced Derek to help me carry the canoe down to the water. The area surrounding Outward Bound’s Yulee basecamp was a mix of palm scrub, deciduous trees, and large biting insects. The nearby estuary was not sugar-sand-beach Florida, trim and anodyne. It was reedy, marshy, tea-colored-water Florida. It wasn’t the sort of coastline defined by artfully landscaped palms and sunburned New Jerseyites. It was tidal mudflats and saw grass. It was a decent setting for a pretty legitimate outdoor experience.
Spending time in the backwoods of Florida gave me an appreciation for all the stuff you hear about Florida: the bugs and heat and general uniqueness of the place. For the sheer weirdness of Florida, its mythology and history.
Derek and I gathered the paddles and life jackets for our expedition. To break the silence, I began chatting to him about the area and about the history of Florida. I was, at the time, particularly interested in Europeans who assimilated into Native American cultures. I had read The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper as a kid, and The Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day Lewis had been released the year before this trip. I realize now, in retrospect, that my impromptu lecture was an early symptom of what I call “Old Man Talks about WWII” disease, a chronic condition that affects men in their later years. The illness is evidenced by a propensity for long, rambling, pointless diatribes about history that no one wants to hear. As we pulled the canoe off the rack and began lugging it down the narrow forest trail toward the water, I told Derek some of the stories I knew of early Florida history, such as that of Juan Ortiz.
Juan Ortiz was a sailor on a Spanish expedition to Florida led by Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528. Ortiz and a few others were captured by the Tocobaga tribe near modern-day Tampa Bay. The plan was to burn Ortiz alive, which, given the destruction and genocide visited upon Native Americans by waves of Europeans over four hundred years, while unlucky for Ortiz, seems a fitting response to white colonial ambitions. Chief Uzita was moving ahead with the flambé de Spaniard when his daughter, according to legend, begged him to stop and spare Ortiz.
Herein lies the slippery slope of history. Did she really? I mean, I can imagine anyone watching a human burned alive might have second thoughts and request the event be adjourned. Or is this yet another tale told to reinforce pity for the struggles of white Europeans? What we do know is that a future European colonial from the 1600s, John Smith, may have pilfered the narrative of a white man saved by an empathetic Native American daughter. In his case, the young woman was named Pocahontas. Then, some four hundred years later, Mel Gibson, a racist, anti-Semitic Australian, would provide the voice of Smith in the Disney animated version of Pocahontas, which does have a weird symmetry, if you think about it.
The story goes on with Ortiz living for eleven years with the Tocobaga and Mocoso peoples, learning their languages and customs. Eventually, Hernando de Soto, another conquistador with buckets of blood on his hands, “found” Ortiz and “rescued” him.
I have a theory about this, based on a loose understanding of life for the average sixteenth-century European. Life for someone like Ortiz couldn’t have been all that great prior to his decade with the Native Americans of Florida. Spain, like all of Europe, suffered from periodic bouts of plague, starvation, despotism, and poor hygiene. The sheer lack of physical comforts was appalling. For example, accounts of the sea voyages from Europe to the Americas paint an ugly picture of what daily experiences were for sailors on these transatlantic voyages.
The son of Christopher Columbus, who traveled with him on one of these colonial conquest trips to the “new world,” was appalled by what he experienced onboard. “What with the dampness, our ship biscuit had become so wormy that, God help me, I saw many who waited for darkness to eat porridge made of it, that they might not see the maggots,” he wrote.
Columbus’s offspring was referring to hardtack biscuits, a staple of European oceanic travel, where hockey pucks of flour are baked and broken and baked again until their density is rivaled only by their lack of appeal. These orbs of digestive assault were created by the same misguided egoists who believed in Manifest Destiny, I might add. There were so many maggots in the food on these voyages, noted the adolescent Columbus, they actually comprised the main component of the food, “and others were so used to eating them that they didn’t even trouble to pick them out because they might lose their supper had they been so fastidious.”
So Ortiz left Spain—home of the Inquisition, where supposed “heretics” were thrown onto the rack to be stretched to death, made to drink gallons of water until their insides split, or covered in burning hot coals to extract confessions—and traveled on one of these ghastly ships with lice-infested sailors eating maggoty hardtack and trying to avoid sodomy at the hands of horny deckhands, and ended up as a prisoner of the native peoples of Florida. While we don’t know everything about how the Indigenous peoples such as the Timucua or Seminole lived, we know from human remains that they were actually pretty well-fed and healthy. In fact, Columbus himself observed that native islanders seemed healthy and not nutritionally deficient, as his own crew was. In his journals he noted that the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean had “good stature, a very handsome people” and that “their legs are very straight, all in one line, and no belly, but very well formed.” No doubt a pleasant contrast to his own malnourished, syphilitic crew of mealy sailors.
My guess is that Ortiz had a better chance at a well-fed, harmonious life with the Tocobaga than he would have had in Spain. Most Indigenous peoples had relatively egalitarian societies and fair amounts of personal liberty and freedom. Their lives weren’t perfect—there was internecine conflict between tribes, food shortages, all the challenges of the natural world, interpersonal disputes—but to be sure there was no crushing hierarchy or brutal religious persecution. There would have been opportunities to integrate into the rhythms and social fabric of the people. To live with a bit of ease and maybe dignity. This would have been in stark contrast to the strictures and oppressions of life for a sailor such as Ortiz. Perhaps he didn’t want to be rescued at all—at least, that’s how I imagine it.
I stopped talking for a bit and peeked over my shoulder at Derek. He was gamely carrying the stern of the canoe, facing downward with an expression of mute resignation. He looked smaller than I’d initially supposed him to be, dwarfed a bit by the bulky canoe and towering scrub palms surrounding us. Clearly, I was boring.
I began asking him some questions about himself, which he replied to with short, quiet answers. Derek Mason had never been out of Jacksonville. In fact, he had never really left his neighborhood. He’d never been camping, or hiking, or to a zoo. He’d never been on a boat. He could swim, but the only swimming he’d ever done was at a community pool. He’d never swum in the ocean. His experiences were anathema to my own privileged, New England upbringing. I was pathologically naïve, and never for a second tempered my nineteen-year-old bravado and considered he might be so completely out of his element that he was terrified.
At first, it was rough talking to Derek. And at second. And third. It was not easy. We didn’t have common ground. He had life experiences the likes of which I couldn’t imagine, but was still very childlike in many ways. It was challenging to deal with that contradiction; I didn’t have the skills. I talked a lot about a whole lot of nothing. I’m pretty sure he thought I was an idiot.
I situated Derek in the bow of the canoe and pushed us off into the estuary. Derek clung gamely to his beat-up paddle. I paddled us out into the main channel, headed toward the open water of the ocean. We cruised through the saw grass as the sun blazed off the brown water. It was summer in Florida, which means a kind of soupy, hazy heat reminiscent of breathing through wet wool while sadistic beauticians blast you with hair dryers.
Derek wasn’t really paddling. He was rigid in his seat, silly life vest up around his ears, his eyes frantically searching the water. He was scared, and deeply out of his element. I chatted about J-strokes and paddle techniques and other asinine subjects.
The fear was so intense Derek wouldn’t heft up the gallon water jug I’d given him to drink. He was too afraid the movement would make us tip. I could see his face, when he would whip his head from left to right, scanning the water for danger, and the rictus of fear galvanized his expression into a mask of pure terror.
It was at that moment the water around us started roiling and splashing and bubbling. It was as though some huge, multi-appendaged beast was beating the water from underneath. Derek screamed a number of colorful phrases, as the splashing and frothing reached a Class V whitewater-like intensity. The splashing had started off our bow, but had quickly surrounded the boat. We were under attack.
Then we saw the dorsal fins headed toward us.
Our little fifteen-foot canoe was floating in the middle of a hundred-yard-wide estuary that led to the ocean. The banks were exposed, intertidal flats of mud and tall, bladed grasses. In the distance, the Atlantic Ocean, opening up about a half mile distant of our bow, glimmered and flashed. I could see that there was a bit of wind out there. There was no civilization nearby that we could see.
At first I thought they were sharks. A natural assumption, considering I was raised on Jaws movies (Jaws III an underrated masterpiece, in my opinion). I assumed, like most children of the 1970s and ’80s, that every time I ventured into the ocean, huge great whites were cruising lazily underneath, revving up before launching upward to snap me in half.
The dorsal fins approaching me and a rapidly cursing and wide-eyed Derek did not, however, belong to sharks. They belonged to the Delphinus genus, otherwise known as dolphins.
One of the ways dolphins capture their prey is by herding fish toward shore, usually the muddy bank of an intertidal flat, and “washing” the fish up onto the bank. The dolphins then intentionally beach themselves as their prey flops on the bank and snatch up their lunch before flipping back into the water. The dolphins work in concert, much like border collies herding sheep.
The flopping, splashing frenzy around our boat was a school of mullet trying to escape from the dolphins. Derek and I were caught in the middle of a BBC nature program. We watched as the mullet-laden wave the dolphins pushed in front of them washed onto the shore, the luckless fish, white bellies flashing, strewn on the muddy bank. The dolphins lunged powerfully out of the water maybe fifty yards to our right. Dolphins, by the way, are BIG. Really big. There were three of them, and their battleship gray bodies looked like pure, rubber-coated muscle. Which they were.
Derek lost it. Completely, totally, and utterly lost it. It was all too much for him, understandably, and to his credit he kept a stiff upper lip for quite some time. But lunging cetaceans and rampaging mullet were just too intense. Derek was in touch with just enough sanity to realize that the boat was the only place to be safe. And that he was sharing that boat with the crazy white man responsible for putting him in this alien, terrifying, and unreal predicament.
Derek picked up his full gallon jug of water and whirled around to face me. His face was screwed up in rage, fear, and bitterness. He hurled the water jug at me.
Scientific point of reference: A full gallon of water weighs 8.35 pounds. When hurled with force, at point-blank range, it hurts like hell.
The jug hit me in the chest. Hard. The blow landed squarely, knocking me backward off my seat. The canoe rocked dangerously as I fell back, grasping at the gunwales to steady myself. Derek screamed as the boat pitched and rolled.
I picked myself up and tried to consider our options. A tipsy boat in a dolphin-and mullet-filled estuary was no place for a confrontation. I began to paddle us back toward the little creek inlet that we’d paddled down earlier. An awkward silence, heavy as the salty, humid air, descended.
Earlier, I noticed paddling seemed kind of easy. As we paddled our way toward the place we’d put in, I realized the tide had been going out—had gone out. Our little creek was gone, replaced by about three hundred feet of sulphurous, bubbling mud, crawling with crabs.
I explained to Derek that we were going to have to get out, into the thigh-deep mud, and haul the canoe back to shore over the exposed tidal flat. My suggestion was met with a stony stare that would put Mount Rushmore to shame. He was beyond annoyed, and in no mood to help. I ended up hauling him, and the canoe, through the mud. Derek sat in the canoe, clutching the sides in a death grip, his long-abandoned paddle at his feet.
We got to shore and I pulled the canoe up onto solid ground. Derek quickly jumped out of the boat. I bent to grab my water jug. Derek picked up his paddle, and as I stood, he swung. The paddle blade smacked my skull in a sharp blow.
I was knocked forward and sprawled against the canoe. I saw stars, which I had always thought was a trope reserved for Looney Toons. I raised my head woozily to see Derek’s back as he walked away up the path back to camp.
Technically I should’ve filled out an incident report, had some kind of mediation with Derek before we headed out into the wilds of Florida for the next thirty days together. What I did was nothing. I followed Derek back to camp, gingerly touching the welt on the back of my head.
Derek was sitting near the platform tents, on the edge of the sandy parking lot, and he looked plenty pissed. But, with his arms crossed over his knees and curled up like a defiant kid, he also looked young and vulnerable. I touched the squishy bump on the back of my head. Maybe not completely vulnerable, I thought.
There was an odd moment when he stared at me with a mixture of hate and confusion and hurt, where we shared an unspoken understanding. We were stuck together for the next month, and we’d have to figure it out. It was that simple. And that reality was probably terrifying for him; he would be with me for a month. After an awkward silence, he followed me back down the path to the scene of my near-beheading. We picked up the canoe and lugged it back to camp.
Soon the rest of the kids arrived, piling out of white vans. A whole bunch of new kids, including a twelve-year-old named Nick called “Nick and his little man” by the other kids because he had a vaguely anthropomorphically shaped scar on his forehead where his mother had burned him with a clothes iron in a fit of rage. And Damien, a seventeen-year-old who would labor over letters to his mother that absolutely seeped with thoughtfulness. Other instructors helped mitigate my otherworldly ineptitude.
We headed out on the river and spent a few weeks exploring the backwoods of Florida together. We had our share of adventures—including a lightning strike that was so close I smelled the ozone. We played and swam in the river, growing more comfortable around each other day by day. I listened to their stories and jokes, tried to mediate arguments. I remember one stifling day we waded into the river and played keep-away with a tennis ball for hours. Laughing and splashing, I was struck by a mundane yet profound realization as we charged and blocked, ran and threw Hail Mary passes: These kids are fun The day the kids left, the juvenile corrections vans showed up and waited as the kids shuffled around and gathered to get on.
As Derek sidled by me with the other kids headed for the van, he turned briefly and flashed a rare smile. His teeth were straight and white. He shook his head, half-laughing at me. “I’m gonna miss your skinny white ass,” he said. And then he turned, got in the van, and I never saw him again.