A Southward Tide

Along the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee built up on the sugar cane flats is a dump of a city. As you drive through en route to the placid gulf waters, you lock the door, remembering to fuel the car in Clewiston, and pity those that endure these baked Central Florida streets. In the 1980s, Belle Glade was crack central; it had the highest per capita AIDS rate in the country, a case study for STDs which were shown in sex-ed to horrified middle schoolers all over the state. In 2010, the average violent crime rate in Belle Glade was over four hundred percent higher than the national average. Institutional poverty runs along clear racial divides with a third of the population living under the poverty line. It’s Muck City, the Florida that intellectuals mock with blogs entitled “Florida Man.” It is a sugar cane migrant farmer gang wasteland.

It is with this impression in mind that I was recently floored by an archeological exhibit of artifacts from the Belle Glade Culture, a culture that existed from 1000 BC till 1700. The Mayaimi people were centered around Lake Okeechobee until Spanish raids all but obliterated them (the few survivors evacuated to Cuba).  As a Floridian, I knew the basics about local tribes, essentially those that existed just prior to the arrival of Ponce de Leon. But the Belle Glade Culture was 2700 years old before it was decimated.

There were native Floridians in 1000 BC. Not the ‘natives’ that came down when Flagler built the railroad, not the ‘natives’ that live here year round watching the flux of seasonal Northerners, not even the natives that run gaming enterprises and sell cigarettes on their Seminole reservations. Under the defunct Glades Correctional Institution may be burial mounds, shards of pottery and sculpture, arrowheads from violent battles, canoes for fishing, two millennia of hunters and gatherers, laughing, crying, having babies and lovers. And for some reason, this brightens my perspective – this melancholic palimpsest of forgotten history.