Whispers & The Whisperers

It is pretty incredible what sticks in your mind from childhood to grown-up, and how those things can make such a sudden appearance from the far recessess of a mind that has already been overtaxed and burdened with the tribulations of a long existence. For me, the whisperings of the past have been locked and sealed in that place where such things are put to protect and safeguard you against the ugliness of what you would rather not remember. Not that all the whisperings were bad - just that if they had to be "whispered" you knew that those were things you weren't meant to hear. But, indeed, as a child who was precocious and ever curious I was proned to eavesdropping and...yes...snooping.

I never knew my biological father, as he and my mother parted shortly after I was born. Consequently, I spent my early years with my mother (Rose Marie) and grandmother. It was right at the end of WWII and we lived in a one room apartment above a grocery store in Miami, Florida. Yes, times were tough.

Mama worked and Grandmother raised. That's how it was for several years. We listened to radio shows like "The Shadow Knows," and "Amos and Andy" in the evenings, and always read bedtime stories. Every Saturday, Grandmother and I would take a bus "Downtown" to the Olympia Theater for the matinee. Then we'd meet Mama and all come home together. Oh, how I loved that theater! Back then, it was an escape into a world so majestic...so mesmerizing as to carry me into another plane of existence where there were always happy endings.

Madeline Mercedes Lopez Shehee O'Driscoll was a quiet, reserved, sweet and loving grandmother who doted on me from the start. The mother of six children, she was the most unassuming and provincial person I have ever known. Her life was somewhat tragic, and I believe, lonely. Losing all three of her sons, as well as my Grandfather, (Leroy Harvey Shehee), to tragic accidents had not made her bitter, just accepting of heartache. There was often a sadness about her that always touched my heart, and from my earliest memories she always seemed old, wise, and serene.



Born March 2, 1892, in Key West, Florida, to Quinton Lopez and Anna Oswald, Madeline was the third of five children, with two sisters, (Consuelo and Lulu) and two brothers, (Leocardia and Carl). Perhaps being the middle child left its' mark upon the quiet and docile woman, or perhaps it was the harsh reality of life during the times of death and economic depression.


Although I remember her fond mentions of Consuelo and Leo, I cannot remember ever having met them. As for Carl, I have no recollection of even an utterance. It is with great fondess and curiosity, however, that I remember Lulu whom we visited in Key West often and who plays a role in the "whisperings" to which I refer.



Lulu and Grandmother favored each other physically, but that is where the similarities ended. She lived in a large two-story house on Georgia Street - the kind of house that creaked and moaned with the weight of the past. The kind of house where the spirits and ghosts of long-forgotten seamen, and spongers, and treasure-hunters roamed the grounds and stood sentry over the inhabitants. The kind of house where sleepless nights led you to the veranda to savor the warm sea-breeze while the haints left their calling cards in the form of goose-bumps and shivers.



Lulu Russell filled that house. Between the doilies, the curios, and her laughter the house spoke volumes about the woman who lived there. Not to mention the foul-mouthed parrot that she doted upon.



Lulu was married to Joseph (Josie) Russell, better known as "Joe Grunts." Now, Josie died a few years before I was born, however, his legend is as much a part of Key West as is his best friend, Ernest Hemmingway.



Josie was, initially, a cigar maker in Key West during the time when cigar factories were booming along the landscape. But, Josie had a dream - and that dream was to own what he called a "Beer Garden," and, indeed, he brought that dream to fruition when he opened "Sloppy Joe's." That's where the parrot came from.

Lulu was full of superstition and stories about vodoo, and magic, and spells and such. I was never sure just how much of this came from first-hand knowledge and how much was Lulu's immagination, but I was always a little suspicious of the brew that seemed to be ever-present on the stove. Whatever the case, I loved her, her house, and Key West.

It seemed as if my childhood was spent trying to unravel the mysteries that surrounded me. The superstitions of Lulu seemed to be a "family thing," and my Grandmother had a ton of them. I remember as a child having an unsightly wart pop up on my cheek quite close to my lip. As I was quite upset by this development, Lulu worked her magic. Grabbing a piece of beef from the refrigerator she rubbed the raw and bloody steak on my blemish and sent me to the back yard to bury the meat with my Grandmother admonishing me to never tell anyone where I had interred the piece. At the time, I thought they had both gone totally daft - straight over the edge. Two days later the wart was gone and I don't believe I ever questioned their eccentricities again.

I can only speculate as to where much of the superstions and home remedies came from, but having an ancestral history deeply rooted in the Bahamas might very well be a plausible explanation since a form of "bush medicine" has been practiced there for centuries.

 

And then there were the names...the "Russels," the "Malone's," the "Sawyer's," the "Curry's," the "Pinder's," the "Roberts'," etc. That's how they were referred to back then as if by using the plural it was all inclusive of the families bearing that surname. But, what really puzzeld me was the oddity of so many of the given names that were bantied about. Sure, there were a ton of Sarah's and Elizabeth's, and John's and Joseph's - but Cephus? Eupemia? Eurterpie? These names were most curious to a child of my era, and I suspected that there must be some exotic origins to such dubbings as I had never met another individual with names so unusal.

But, it wasn't the names or the strange admonishments not to ever let anyone sweep under your feet lest you become an "Old Maid." It wasn't drinking the juice made by sugar and onions sitting overnight on the windowsill to cure "the grip." It was the whispers that beckoned me to lean in a little closer, lurk around the corner, and learn about the "family skeletons," of which there were many as I am just now finding out.

My mother was a tragic person. I mean that in the fondest kind of way. The youngest of my Grandmother's children, Mama had a past that shaped her future. As a young woman, Rose Marie was a beautiful dark-haired, brown-eyed beauty with a warm laugh and a love for life. She liked to dance and sing and wear the latest fashions.

Given the fact that her oldest sister (Anna) was married a year after Rose Marie was born, and the next-oldest (Lois) married when she was only eight, it's logical to assume that the bonding that generally happens between siblings during the growing-up period didn't take place in the usual manner. Adding to that, losing her father at the age of four, certainly didn't provide the ideal circumstance - especially, in pre-depression Key West.

Mama worked at Lerner's and got a discount on clothing. During the first six years of my life, I didn't seem to see a lot of her as she was either working or "being courted," by a good-looking truck driver by the name of Walter Glenn Stanton - better known as "Mike." However, the times that we were together were generally filled with laughter and fun.

We did visit with her older sisters a lot and that's when the low-tones and whispers became important to me. At first, many of the words and phrases were meaningless to a young child, however, as I became more experienced and adept at eavesdropping, I started to connect, at least the edges of the puzzle. Most alluring to me was the fact that when I would enter the room the laughter and the talk either stopped or abruptly changed course.

Grandmother always spoke of my Grandfather in glowing terms. That she loved him, there was no doubt. Yet, when around her two oldest daughters, the whispers were generally in reference to him. I knew that he loved baseball and fishing and that he was a deputy sheriff in Key West who later went to work on the railroad. However, when I started to pay really close attention was when I was about eight or nine years old. Prior to that, words like "gangreen," "tar-and-feather," "incantation," "El Isleno," "strung-up," and "Grand Dragon," were quite meaningless to me.

It was one evening, when I was supposed to be in bed, that I sat rapt in that place where a child realizes that what she is hearing or witnessing has some deeper, darker, and more compelling secrets than she can ever unravel on her own without lots of help and candor from the grown-ups in her life, yet knowing that what she is doing is sinfully wrong and that the explanations that she longs for will not be forthcoming any time soon. Of course, I rationalized much of my spying on the grown-ups was just me being seen and not heard as was the rightful place that all children were relegated to in that time.

My Aunt Lois and Grandmother were relaying a story to my older cousin, Margie. While all I was able to pick up were bits and pieces amidst the rise and fall of their lowered voices, it was certainly enough to occasion the rise and fall of the hair on the back of my neck and to guarantee the nightmares that would ensue.

It seemed there was a man who "messed with" a white woman some years back in Key West and in so doing he had angered a group of men known as "the Klan." This group of men had accosted this fellow, dipped him in hot tar and placed feathers onto him so as to make him later have to be "plucked" as a chicken. Not understanding the pain that this would cause, it seemed more curious to me than anything. But, as the story progressed, I realized that there was more...much more.

Apparently, after this happened, it didn't take long for the news to get around town. Apparently, my Aunt Lois, happened upon a robe and a hood in an old trunk, being as nosy and precocious, obviously, as I was.  Lois went immediately to  my Grandmother with her discovery. Now, Grandmother was none too happy, and she confronted Grandfather with the damning evidence.  He was, undoubtedly,  none too happy with her prying. According to Margie, Lois’s daughter, several Klan members showed up at the house that night and wanted Leroy to accompany them to the jail. He, reportedly, begged off stating that his wife was ill and that he had to remain at home.  Hopefully, this is an accurate depiction of the situation, as the Klan went to the jail where Manuel Cabeza was being held for shooting one of his assailants, drug him out of his cell, beat him, hung him from a tree, and proceeded to shoot him.  One of the  things that I gleaned from this late night girl-talk, many of the police and local characters were all members of this thing called the "Klan."

Racism and hatred in the 1950's in Florida was the norm. Separate water fountains, bathrooms, theater sections, etc., to a child, were all just the way things were. When riding a bus to and from town, it was not at all unusual to feel my mother or grandmother pull me a little closer or hold their packages a little tighter. Children were counseled by their parents to "keep your distance from the colored." For my family, it was not at all uncommon to travel through "the colored section," or as they called it, "Nigger Town" on a Sunday and mock the "Picaninnies," just for the fun of it. Of course, as I matured, and as the country grew, I realized this pure unadulterated hatred for the ignorance and fear that it was.

However, it wasn't until I was fifteen or sixteen that the whisperings I had stealthily overheard were given credence by my mother and grandmother when, in a particularly candid moment, they both added a few more pieces to this puzzle. You see, I had all four-corners and a good part of the edges, but the framework was lacking some odds and ends.

As it turned out, I had done a fine job of putting together the sometimes garbled clues that had unwittingly been given me. But, the whole picture would take decades to complete.

By this time, I knew what the Ku Klux Klan was and it scared the bejesus out of me to think that even the smallest part of me had, in some way, contributed to the heinous acts of this mob of sadistic and reprehensible individuals. Oh, I knew I wasn't to blame, and that I had nothing to do with the sins of the past. Yet, it was unsettling to a girl who loved Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Billie Holliday to think that any of "my people" could have been involved in the oppression of an entire race of people. Little did I know that some fifty years later I would discover even more skeletons that had been hidden in the recesses of those dark days of slavery and atrocities.

My grandmother told me of 1920's Key West and of the involvement of so many in the Klan. For all those who were involved, it seems there were three times as many sympathizers, including many of those who were so dear to me. Without relaying any of the sordid details, she did speak of a tar and feathering and subsequent murder that rocked the very foundations of the Keys.

As she spoke, her eyes grew cloudy and her voice took on that whispering quality that I had come to know so well, and she told me of a curse that had been placed upon all of those involved along with their male children - chilling in light of what I know today.

Several who were known by locals to have been involved in the crime of which she spoke met with what can only be called freak accidents. While she never implicated my grandfather, I know she had her suspicions.

The story that I was given, and accepted until recently, was that Leroy Harvey Shehee cut his leg on a piece of coral while fishing. After several surgeries, his leg was amputated but gangreen claimed his life. His sons, Robert, Leroy, and Hilliard all met with fatal accidents - one drowned, one was hit by a train, and one was believed lost in a fire. However, another accounting of what really happened is that Leroy fell off of the roof of a building and hurt his leg. Either way, he had several surgeries which were all performed at home. There are recollections of Anna and Lois speaking of the horrendous screams coming from Leroy – something not likely ever forgotten by either of them. Perhaps, this is the reason that Grandmother never elaborated on that time in her life. Whenever the subject emerged, a dark cloud descended upon her, and she seemed to withdraw into herself with but a few utterances of sadness.

While Grandmother lived to be quite old, I believe that she was always in mourning. My mother died at the age of 44, after a life of too much alcohol, too little love, and a lonely existence. Her sisters, Anna and Lois, both achieved old age and quiet lifestyles.

Rose Marie did eventually marry Mike and had three other daughters besides myself, (Victoria Gail, Lisa Lee, and Valerie Sue). As it was with her and her sisters, my life away from home came too soon for the bonding between us to ever begin. As I traverse into those years of becoming long in the tooth and grey in the temple, I have to admit that I wish it had been otherwise.

So...while the whisperers are long since departed, the whispers have become louder and more shrill. I believe that the man to whom my grandmother alluded was none other than Manuel Cabezo who was tarred, feathered, and sought revenge only to be beaten, hung, and shot by the Klan - the legendary Isleno, whose grave lies in the paupers section of Key West Cemetery, unkempt and forgotten.

As to weather my Grandfather was party to his death, I am uncertain. As I trace the various bloodlines and strands of a web that wove together to create the person that I am, I am awe-struck at the bravery, the intestinal fortitude, the determination and the foresight that so many of my ancestors had. For certain, there are many things to make me proud. And, regardless of the whispers and the suspicions, it is with great love and reverence that I unearth the past - both the good and the bad.

One of the most disturbing things in all of this, for me, is that so many who seek their ancestral truths look only for the positives and attempt to trivialize, hide, or negate the negatives. We all have skeletons in the closet. Each one of those skeletons has a story worth being told. Just as our future lies before us, the path lies behind. We have to walk in those footprints - better naked than shod.