Blast those old war pilots, Ted Hart thought with disgust. He knew it was wrong to think that way
about his fellow veterans, but they were still making it awfully hard to bring civilization to Florida. He
was beginning to suspect that some of them enjoyed rough landings. More than once, he’d heard them
laughing and boasting about cutting things a little close. “This is a business and these are passengers,”
Ted implored after another complaint. The pilots responded in nearly identical ways. “Well, that’s the
way we flew in the war and we survived, so don’t tell us how to fly,” they’d say. “Especially since you
were a foot soldier, fella. Your kind doesn’t know the first thing about flying.” The latter part was
true. Ted didn’t even know how to fly a kite. But he was in charge and he figured these guys should
listen to him. He’d have fired them all but they were the only qualified pilots who had applied. A few
crop dusters had answered the ads and while they didn’t make the grade, Ted secretly wondered if
they might not have done a better job from a customer-service perspective. On one particularly awful
day, a pilot failed to secure the nose hatch on a plane flying south from Tampa. Unfortunately, the
hatch sprang open in midflight, sending airbags belonging to the U. S. Postal Service straight into the
right engine propeller. The result was a shower of shredded mail dispersed over Fort Myers, followed
by an engine fire which resulted in a noteworthy emergency landing on a golf course. Meanwhile, Mr.
Toomb was starting to lean harder on Ted. None of the routes, which now crisscrossed the state, were
making a profit and were not likely to for months. Most of the airports were not up to par, and several
lacked hangar space for planes bigger than a two-seater Beechcraft. Ted
needed to persuade local officials that Wild Blue Yonder Airways would be a boon to their
communities. He traveled the state with mixed results. At times, officials wouldn’t even meet with
him unless Mr. Toomb called first on his behalf. Finally, Ted found his niche. When the mayor of
Daytona Beach mentioned he was going on a fishing trip to Crescent City, the “Bass Capital,” Ted
remarked that he’d spent several summers on a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Next
thing Ted knew, he was invited not only to fish for bass by the Daytona Beach mayor but to go
de ep-sea fishing with the mayor of Fort Lauderdale. As word got out that Ted not only liked to fish
but was quite good at it, he found doors opening to his sales pitch. His wardrobe of navy blue suits
was pushed to the back of the closet. Jackie wasn’t thrilled with this development. In fact, she was
furious. “Oh, Ted, where are you going this week?” she would ask on Sunday nights. “Shall we pack
your new Brooks Brothers suit, or would you prefer your fishing regalia?” Try as he might, he wasn’t
able to convince her that he was, in fact, working. “This is the way I have to do business here,” he
would say. But she would give him what he thought of as “the look,” a sideways glance of her
suddenly chilly blue eyes. What he hesitated to tell her was that he ought to be working on his golf
game, too. He tried to interest Jackie with stories from his time on the road. Sometimes she was so
resentful of his being away that she didn’t want to hear them. But there were other times—the best
times—when he and Jackie talked late into the night about this surprising place called Florida. The
biggest shock had been learning that the state was, in fact, a part of the South. From a Bostonian’s
point of view, America consisted of Northern and Southern states, the Great Plains and the West
Coast. Of course, there were subcategories: New England was one, but also border states (people who
could not make up their mind which side of the Civil War they were on), the De ep South (a place
where cotton was grown and people walked barefoot all the time), Texas (cowboys, the Alamo, oil
rigs), the Rockies (extremely tall mountains), Chicago (a notable area of civilization in the vast and
confusingly laid-out Midwest), California (Hollywood people), and Seattle (so far away that it was
exotic). Hawaii? That was a honeymoon
destination for the well-heeled. And Alaska? A place that got more snow than Boston and had an
unusual variety of wild animals. That pretty much left Florida, a place that didn’t fit into any category
exc ept its own. More than thirteen hundred miles of coastline gave the impression that the whole state
was a tropical paradise. Many inland communities, however, were afflicted by the type of De ep South
poverty Ted had thought existed only in states such as Alabama or Mississippi, or in the Appalachian
Mountains of Kentucky. This inland poverty affected both whites and blacks. It was the one thing the
two races had in common. Ted felt badly for blacks living in Florida—especially those living inland.
They often had a sort of downcast look, like they were trapped and knew it was hopeless. The sorrow
in their eyes reminded him of the displaced persons he had seen in Europe, civilians who had lost
everything in the war and had nowhere to go. At least the black people seemed to be living in reality,
Ted thought. He was not so sure about the whites. Like an episode of the TV show The Twilight Zone,
many white people acted as if someone had set their clocks back a hundred years and they hadn’t
noticed. Again and again, Ted would be told that Union troops had “invaded” the South, ending a
perfectly decent way of life, and that colored folks were “happier in the old days.” Ted concluded that
white Southerners, generally speaking, were looking backward, clinging to the past with increasing
desperation at the very same time that Northerners were fixated on the future. In April, New York City
had opened the 1964 World’s Fair with a hopeful theme called “Peace Through Understanding.” From
what Ted had read in Time magazine, the fair focused on marvelous inventions that would make life
better. But what good was any of it, he thought, if we didn’t fix the big problems first, like race and
poverty? In the last year, he noted that it seemed to have become more difficult being a Yankee, unless
you were a typical beach tourist. Comments were made. Looks were exchanged. Previously, his
Boston accent had been tolerated or even met with friendly curiosity; now it seemed an invitation to
be harassed. There was, for example, the restaurant owner in Hardee County who sat down uninvited
opposite Ted and grinned menacingly. All Ted had wanted was a lousy cup of coffee and a doughnut
but instead he was treated to a disgusting lecture about “the inferiority of the Negro race”
and how Yankees needed to mind their own business. Ted had not taken the bait. He was
expected, he knew, to get up and walk out or throw a punch but he did neither. While the old redneck
droned on and on, Ted had simply pulled out a recent copy of the Wall Street Journal and began to
read it. He munched slowly on the doughnut and, after he finished his coffee, he left. In his free time
he visited libraries and historical societies, especially when work took him to larger cities. The
territory of Florida, Ted learned, had been in Spanish hands, then English, and back to Spanish again,
until Spain ceded the territory to the United States in 1821. Slavery of blacks (and also Indians) was
fully entrenched long before Florida became a state in 1845. When Southern slave states began to
secede from the Union, starting with South Carolina in December 1860, Florida was third in line.
More than 15,000 Florida troops fought for the Confederacy. Now, this was the part Ted really wanted
to know about: What happened after the Civil War? To his surprise, he found that black Floridians
endured decades of intimidation and violence by whites that rivaled—and even surpassed—other
Southern states. Ted was appalled that in one particularly heinous act, an NAACP leader named Harry
T. Moore and his wife were murdered on Christmas Day 1951 in their home in the small town of
Mims in Brevard County. One thing Ted was trying to figure out was whether he should use the term
colored, Negro, Afro-American, or black. After thinking it through, he started habitually using the
latter since it seemed to have been the term preferred by the Massachusetts-born Dr. W. E. B. Du
Bois, a black scholar and one of the founders of the NAACP who had died the previous year. Anger
and anxiety was not about race only, Ted was discovering. Longtime Floridians both black and white
were increasingly at odds with the tourist industry. How could Old Florida hang onto its proud past as
part of the Confederacy and remain a place that tolerated the KKK while attracting Northern tourists?
By downplaying the true identity of the state and painting a lovely portrait of endless beaches, golf,
and fishing. That was the truth that Ted was beginning to understand. Meanwhile, his children, most
unfortunately, were starting to speak like the local rednecks. This was worrisome. How would they
ever get ahead in life? The twins insisted that if they spoke in their native tongue—that is, a
Northern dialect—they would never be acc epted, never get a date, and simply die of boredom.
They picked up the far-south accent almost immediately, probably, Ted thought, because they were so
young. Judd, too, sounded like he belonged on that TV show The Beverly Hillbillies. But Judd and the
twins could turn it on and off with a natural ease, d epending on who they were talking to. To Ted, it
was the darndest thing. He couldn’t even say “y’all” without the word sounding like a chicken bone
were stuck in his throat. On one hurtful day, all three kids announced that they felt humiliated by their
parents, who sounded like the Kennedys. Those Boston accents, the kids insisted, had become grating
to their ears. The kids pointed out that Jackie, when she’d had her radio show, had learned from the
station manager that by speaking very slowly, and dragging out the syllables, she could hide it. She
was aghast that they would ask her to try to adapt her radio technique to everyday speech. No way, she
said. As for Ted, he was a hopeless case. He didn’t seem to be able to drop the accent even when he
tried. Jackie ended the family quarrel with a linguistic triumph: A Boston accent, she noted, was not
that dissimilar from a Charleston accent. “And, heck,” she said, “Charleston is in South Carolina,
which, by anyone’s definition, is a Rebel state.” (“Tell that to your friends next time they make fun of
the way your mother talks,” she added.) These were the issues Ted hadn’t foreseen when they moved
here. When he was in the Army twenty years earlier, there was some teasing about accents but mostly
it was good-natured. Then again, it was wartime and they were all facing a common enemy. It didn’t
matter if you were the son of a factory worker from Massachusetts or the son of a wealthy landowner
from Tennessee. You could be a ranch hand from Texas or a college boy from Milwaukee, but when
each of you was wearing a U. S. Army uniform fighting side by side against the Axis forces, you were
American, that’s all. Now, for the first time in his life, Ted was self-conscious about his Northern
background. In the tight smile of a waitress or the cool, perfunctory nod of a gas station attendant, he
felt a wall descend the second he spoke. Sometimes he wondered if he was reliving the exact
dynamics of the Civil War era, a de eply troubling thought for a man who had lived with the
assumption that he would always be welcome anywhere in the USA. He
had noticed more and more people calling him “Yankee,” and not in a playful way. Someone
leaving a bar in Tallahassee had even called him “carpetbagger,” which shocked him. He trudged back
to his hotel, thinking, They’d rather live in the past and be left behind. But he was an interloper, a
harbinger of change in the same way that a mackerel sky indicates rain. If there was one thing that
Southerners found disturbing, it was change. Especially, Ted had learned, when it wasn’t their idea.