If tonight you dream of this place, you can float down as if from the moon, burning bright and full over this place, and watch in this breathing moment like an angel sent to weigh the moments of the day for each member of this family inside the glowing warm walls of this home. You can drift close and drift through the walls and windows, outside of time you can in a moment drift down and see everyone and everything that has happened and is happening and will happen, all at once, but you must watch now and see one thing at a time and witness.
Storms are a part of life here, afternoon showers brief and violent cooling the air and breaking the ferocious heat of late day in summer. Autumn brings daily thundershowers that can swiftly turn into all night storms, wind howling through the swamps and pulling out trees by their shallow roots. The big storms, the huaracane of the Seminole, reshape this place and scour off topsoil and plant alike, driving creatures inland and mankind off the land when too much soil is removed. You ignore this kind of storm at your peril, many here have learned.
A different sort of storm cloud forms in this place now where we like angels drift and dream and watch. Some malevolent cumulus rises and roils and builds here. It comes and goes, no one can see where it will form but form it will, and form it does, over and over and we can only watch from above and not interfere, but that does not mean we will not witness its passage by, cold and dark and awful.
The same sort of evil cloud passed over Angola, Florida in 1821, on the orders of then-President Andrew Jackson. The survivors of that deadly storm fled to the Caribbean, and Angola was no more. Two hundred fifty and more times the storm cloud of hate has come to Florida. It came again to Ocoee in 1920. That time two men, wanting only to cast their lawful votes, were killed and half the town burned, hundreds were made homeless. A week after Perry was burned out in 1922, two men were lynched in Jacksonville for a murder no one bothered to prove they committed. Two years before, the residents of Cedar Key burned out the colored section of town and lynched a man for spending time with a white woman. A year before that a porter on the Atlantic Coastline train through Tampa was pulled off his railroad car, shot forty times and dumped on a back road in Lakeland. His crime was that he asked a white passenger to wait for him to fix her berth until he finished with another customer. Next to his body they left a card, which said: “This is what you get for insulting a white woman.”
The storm builds again and again. Florida newspapers report “Lynched for Remarks to a Lady." “Lynching in Churchyard." “Fairgrounds Flagpole Scene of Double Lynching." “Boy Lynched For No Special Cause." “Mob Holds Lynching Bee."
This malevolence, this storm cloud in the human heart, floats and drifts and waits and reappears, and reappears, and reappears.
We watch as angels watch, drifting and floating near but unable to affect this place. We see first a mother and a son embracing, standing quiet by the window as they watch over their hearth and home and family. She drifts off to sleep as she stands. With a small joke and a gentle shake he wakes her and walks her to her chair. A sweet embrace, she drifts off and he goes out of the kitchen onto the porch, slips on his coat and slides out the back door. Silently he glides from shadow to shadow, peering out into the bright moonlit fields and into the dark windows of his home. As he passes up the steps and across the porch he sees a shadow moving in the hall, first one shadow that splits and then becomes two shadows, and one again. He smiles, considers some mischief but decides on kindness, then moves on, remembering.
In the hall young lovers kiss, still thrilled to stand close and touch lips in the most innocent of kisses. Neither notices the shadow passing over the front door’s frosted glass, neither can see anything except the other at this moment. Neither knows that, nor does their uncle notice, two other lovers, even newer and even less sure, sitting in secret in the dark parlor. They sit and hold hands for the first time, wondering and full of passion. His head drifts down and sideways, down into her lap, and her fingers walk in darkness across the beauty of his face. They both sigh, shaking with love and fear and probably from the cold air; the parlor fire is unlit and they are in their nightclothes. But still, they linger for a few moments more, just a moment more.
In a room upstairs a woman weeps and another woman comforts her, tells her that soon all of this will pass and there will be no more pain and it will all seem like a dream, a bad dream but a dream nonetheless, a dream that will fade and be disremembered like all dreams eventually must be, faded and dim and forgotten except in other dreams. Her crying slows, she drifts and sleeps, finally, and begins one small nib of forgetting as she sleeps then dreams of forgetting. Soon the other woman sleeps and dreams, remembering her own forgetting in her own dreams as she sleeps.
One pair of lovers passes up the dim stairway, parting for a moment only to cling again, until finally the cold drives them to their separate beds. The other pair soon follows, holding each other as they climb the stairs to the cold hall but passing apart to their beds. Both pairs dream of their loves, dreams of holding and kissing so like the real embraces of the night that they sleep and wonder, Do I sleep? Am I awake? Is my lover, like me, dreaming of me as I dream of them?
In other rooms upstairs children sleep, children dream and drift and one begins a small nightmare, but a brush of one of your hands across the eyelids of the fearful one erases all bad thoughts and you can float on, knowing that they sleep and dream only good dreams. For now. For this night.
The lovers sleep, their loved ones sleep, beside them and in the beds near by them, lovers and aunties and uncles and cousins and sisters and brothers and all, all are drifting dreaming as their spirits are floating out of their beds and into the blue night, floating out of the blue moonlit house on the wings of dreams and off to where they go when they dream, and you can’t follow, for each of you must go to your own place of dreams, which is different for each person, and that is why you are so lonely when you dream.
Two spirits remain behind. The mother in her chair sleeps but does not dream any more, almost never does she dream as she grows older. Her thoughts keep her near the red hearth and near the warm heart of her family. What need of dreams can there be for one so content? She sits in her chair and thinks as she drifts through her thoughts; meals for the next day, clothes for children, work to do and chores to assign. She thinks of pleasure from the past, gratitude for one more day. No fear but only faith that all will be as it is willed and only God’s will can be done, and so there is no need for fear. Drifting in to sleep and out, she sits and thinks but never dreams.
The other who remains walks his path in the cold night, watching. He too rarely dreams, but thinks often of work and duty. And of love. Of happiness, and laughter, and battle, and of victory. He walks in silence from shadow to shadow, circling the house, and waits in the silence for the sound he both hopes for and fears, the sound of the beginning.
The indifferent moon floats high above, teasing the stars as she appears and disappears, dressed in ribbons of cloud that adorn her cold light. A ring forms around the bright moon as from the south a cloud of dust rises up from the road. Quietly it creeps then louder as its creators move forward, roaring as the terrible consequences of a hundred awful incidents coincide and coalesce into the dark cloud of inhumanity that approaches this quiet Eden.