From the Archives: Cedar Key is Changing, But Ghosts Still Linger
Cedar Key was always a spooky place.
My mom and I were driving back to Texas from one of our semi-annual visits to Florida when we made an impulse decision to take the one lonely road into Cedar Key, a little island town on the Big Bend of Florida.
It’s a tight, two-lane road with brush and trees climbing the fences and reaching out to the shoulder. There are still a few roads in Florida like this, where you feel like nothing has changed in 50 years, like you might see the same leaf floating off the same tree, perpetually suspended.
There’s not much chance to turn around until you reach Cedar Key, which looks exactly as you might imagine it: Everything built out of that dark, weathered wood. You see kids with coolers selling various morsels like oysters and clams on the side of the road. You drive on bridges running over muddy shoals.
John Muir visited, and if you know where to look, you can find some of the oldest traces of North American civilization not far away, as this place was once the home to now-gone American Indian tribes. History has a way of erasing itself in Cedar Key.
My family’s ancestors, The Gibsons, had a home near Cedar Key. We visited the Cedar Key Historical Society where we toured the modest museum in search of traces of our past. The man working there was from Michigan, and he told us that the influx of Northerners like himself were driving out many of the old Cedar Key folks. And the collapsing oyster business isn’t helping, either. Life is, to my eyes, changing in Cedar Key.
You wouldn’t have guessed that a little less than 20 years ago, when the family made its first trek up to Cedar Key in search of genealogical treasure. [Note: There is some debate as to whether or not I was actually on that first trip. My mom says yes and I say no. But it is possible, because I sat outside of countless graveyards and courthouses as a young kid]. Even to Floridians with roots there, Cedar Key was spooky.
Back then, Cedar Key was a clannish, frightening backwater secluded from the rest of the country. It was gritty, and the people were … odd. It was a gloomy, rough place, and you felt like something really terrible could happen there.
In fact, it did, 90 years ago last January. John Singleton made an excellent-but-somewhat-inaccurate movie about the Rosewood Massacre in the ’90s, and it’s a shame, because as much of the facts as are known should be repeated and told over and over again. That’s just the problem: The massacre was a secret lost to history and only disclosed in murmurs until the 1980s, when a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times, which is now the Tampa Bay Times, happened on the story.
The Rosewood Massacre was a frightening example of the unending history of racial violence in Florida, The South and the U.S., and I can’t help but wonder if the Michiganders know anything about it, or if they ever wonder about the people who used to inhabit the Victorian homes they are now lovingly restoring.
I wonder the same thing. My family’s ancestral history is a jumble thanks to adoptions, fires and all the other minor catastrophes by which entire lives are lost to history. But our people have always been loners who preferred the outskirts of civilized life to the mainstream. They were sailors who trolled off the Bahamian coasts, or woodsy country folk that we’ve recently found had, ahem, rather progressive sexual practices for their era. Or just good-for-nothing, moonshine-drinkin’ types. Hey, you can’t choose your people.
I’d like to believe that their removal from the mainstream kept them out of trouble, but it’s just as likely that it got them into it. But it’s all a guess — I don’t even know if my family was still in Cedar Key in 1923.
But I do know this: We the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of Southern hatred and fear are only complicit in their crimes so long as we ignore them, excuse them or, God forbid, reenact them. We are our own people, and we have our own lives to live. I think about this stuff a lot, and there’s a reason for it. I pray that no part of my life be a dark secret like the people of Levy County. I never want my decisions to fall prey to the flawed common-sense logic of the times.
So the demographics of Cedar Key are changing, but I think that’s OK. I’m the first to piss and moan when some ungrateful out-of-towner bulldozes a part of that beautiful, odd Florida we all love, but Cedar Key needed new blood. It needed outside influences to mix. It needed fresh water to flush out the stale. And times are still tough for many people in Cedar Key. More freshwater is needed.
So anyway, Cedar Key is changing. Lets hope that our attitudes are, too.
