1920s to 1930s – Migrant labor, survival, and silent alliances
The air smelled of scorched grass and diesel.
Black smoke curled above the horizon, where fields of sugarcane burned in neat rows. The fire cleared the leaves. The machetes came after. Then came the trucks, the scales, the men with clipboards and small clocks in their pockets. They measured sweat by weight and time.
To some, it was progress.
To Eliézer, it was just the season again.
He swung his machete in rhythm.
Three cuts per stalk, twist, stack, repeat. The cane sliced the air with a hiss and bled sweet at the break. His hands, already calloused and wrapped in rough cloth, trembled from the heat. He did not look up. The overseer on the truck liked to count how often they stopped to breathe.
Around him, other workers moved like ghosts. Mostly men from Haiti and Puerto Rico. A few from Georgia. No one spoke much by noon. The sun beat the words out of them.
Eliézer was not from here, but he knew the land now. He knew which cane rows were wettest, where the soil turned soft beneath the muckboots, where the red worms curled before storms. He knew the old cypress line too, far at the field’s edge, where no tractor ever passed.
The bosses called it useless ground.
Eliézer called it alive.
He went there in the evenings, after the fires.
Past the canals. Past the levee scar. Into the tangle of wax myrtle and mosquito hum. There, hidden between two sagging cabbage palms, was the chickee. Old, patched with new fronds, roof leaning, but it stood. And so did she.
Naha, Seminole matron, older than the railroad, older than the lake’s new name. She said little. Smoked often. Wove baskets with one good hand and used the other to stir stews that tasted like root and memory.
They did not speak the same language.
But they shared what could be shared: food, silence, warmth.
He brought dried fish or broken tools. She gave him roots for his lungs, a pouch of ash for his sore feet, and a name he never asked for, Katchi, which meant “the one who keeps fire low.”
Then came the storm.
The one that tore roofs like leaves and flooded the lake into the fields. The workers were trapped—hundreds of them, between the dike and the water’s rise. No one came to warn them. No one came at all.
Except Naha.
She appeared at dusk, soaked and silent, standing beside Eliézer’s row. She pointed, not north, not south, but into the marsh. The bosses laughed. The others hesitated.
Eliézer followed.
He took only what he could carry. Others joined. Sixteen men, two women, and a child no one claimed. They followed her through water chest-deep, through cuts in the land only she seemed to know.
By nightfall, they stood atop a small tree island. A fire burned there, smokeless, ringed with shells. They huddled for warmth as the lake roared around them, washing over the sugar rows, dragging lives and wagons and men with clocks down into the black.
In the morning, they sang.
Not one song. Many. Kreyòl, Creek, Spanish. They sang as the lake receded, as the sky broke blue. They sang for the ones who didn’t run and the ones who couldn’t. They sang for the fire and the shell ring and the woman who had already vanished back into the reeds.
When the government came days later with body counts and clipboards, no one mentioned Naha. No one ever did.
But years later, a little boy, one born that night on the island, carved a spiral into his school desk and said it meant “safe place.”
No one knew where he learned it.
But the lake remembered.