c. 1700 CE – Belle Glade Descendants and Seminole Refugees
The cypress knees rose like prayers from the water.
Bent, broken, some rotted through, but still reaching. Long after the last mound had sunk into the muck and the canals had closed their mouths, this grove held memory. Not in stone, but in shadow and song.
And in Wena, who came each dawn to speak with the fire that never fully died.
She was old, but not bowed. Her hair had silvered like the morning mist, and her eyes were marked with the white scars of smoke rituals. Wena lived in the hollow near the drowned mound, one of the last shaped by her grandmother’s hands, back when the earth was still carved in circles and no one had yet fled from musket or map.
Her people had dwindled. The Belle Glade names faded. Some starved. Others vanished into coastal bands or traded their tongue for survival.
Wena stayed.
Because someone had to remember.
Each day she lit the mound-fire. Not a blaze, just a smolder. Cypress bark and herb bundles, red clay dust scattered like prayer around the coals. She sang low, nothing elaborate, just tone and breath. The fire, she said, was how the lake listened now.
And one day, the fire listened back.
The youth who stumbled from the marsh was not of her people. His face was painted in streaks, his leggings torn by sawgrass, and he carried a musket heavier than his body could bear. A Seminole, though he barely looked the part.
He collapsed near her fire, one eye half shut, lips split. When Wena approached, he gripped the musket tight, as if unsure whether she was ghost or threat.
“I have no powder for that,” she said, sitting across from him. “And no use for dead boys.”
His name, when he could speak it, was Chitto. He had fled from a burning camp two nights north, chased by a patrol of Spanish scouts and their Creek allies. He didn’t know this place. He didn’t know the circle under the mud or the stories hidden in the trees.
But the fire warmed him.
And Wena fed him fish and yam and silence.
Over days, he healed.
He asked questions, first cautiously, then endlessly. Why were the cypress knees shaped like teeth? What were the carved stones under the moss? Who had built the rings in the earth?
Wena told him the stories.
Of Kala and her spirals.
Of canals that used to breathe.
Of the snake-marked pots now buried in ash.
Chitto listened, sometimes laughing, sometimes solemn. One morning, he took out a scrap of bark and began to draw, not mounds, but paths. Routes through the swamp, bridges between drowned places. He marked where he’d seen other Seminoles hiding. Where the scouts dared not go.
“If we traced the old water,” he said, “we could disappear for good.”
Wena did not answer. She only handed him a fire bundle, wrapped in woven reed and sealed with resin.
On the day he left, the lake was still.
Chitto knelt beside the coals and added a single item: a musket ball he would no longer use. Beside it, Wena placed a bit of red clay and whispered a blessing for footsteps that vanished clean.
They said no goodbye.
But seasons later, when the rains returned and the birds called from the west, Wena awoke to find something resting at the fire’s edge: a pouch of bark-wrapped dried fish, a Calusa spiral disk, and a simple drawing of a camp, hidden deep, but circled with symbols that matched her grandmother’s ring.
A new mound, perhaps.
Not made of earth, but of people who remembered.