Coastal calamity

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This article was published 06/07/2024 (764 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An evil casino resort developer pounces when a hurricane suddenly makes a deserted Florida island accessible, but an 80-year-old Black woman claims she’s the last descendant of escaped slaves who settled the island — and that she owns the island.

Given that John Grisham is a lawyer who writes legal mysteries, we know this will end up in court with a verdict over which we’ll get all trembly.

But Camino Ghosts isn’t the usual straightforward John Grisham courtroom drama.

For one thing, there’s no one clear heroic protagonist, no young white male liberal-minded lawyer, modelled on how Grisham saw himself in his early 30s. The good lawyer is a senior citizen bankrolled (barely) by environmental groups to save places such as Dark Isle from being paved over and developed.

For Lovely Jackson, this is all about race. She and her mother were the last inhabitants of Dark Isle, but she left at age 15 when everyone else died off. As the jungle overran the entire island, and the panthers and deadly snakes and nasty bugs proliferated, she still returned every few months to tend to the graves dating all the way back to the 1700s.

Grisham serves up an interesting bit of history here: while Florida was still a Spanish colony prior to 1821, when it became part of the U.S., any escaped slave who made it there didn’t get handed back.

Lovely has turned centuries of oral history into a self-published book, in which she told how her African ancestor Nalla was kidnapped by slave traders, starved and beaten and brutalized and raped constantly in a march in chains to the coast, sold and sold again.

How Nalla got to Dark Isle you’ll have to read for yourself. And when the slavers came looking, really gruesome things happened, and Nalla placed a curse on any white man ever to come to the island. Indeed, ghastly illness, misadventure galore, sudden storms and even aircraft falling out of the sky doomed every white man who ever tried.

We learn that Florida has 800 deserted islands, all small and deemed unfit for development; here, a hurricane ravaged the seabed and scoured and swamped the land, and suddenly, a bridge from the mainland to Dark Isle was feasible.

Lovely is friends with an eccentric independent bookstore owner named Bruce, whose friend Mercer Mann has written one outstanding novel and is searching for another. Will Lovely allow Mercer to roll her book into a modern tale of the quest to save Dark Isle — which means, against all odds, proving that Lovely owns the small patch of dense jungle?

Camino Ghosts has fascinating characters galore, subplots aplenty and some arcane law.

Florida never built any infrastructure on Dark Isle — no electricity or water or roads or health care, no school. And certainly no paperwork, no birth or death certificates, no deeds.

Grisham is quite subtle in sporadic suggestions that Florida’s extreme right-wing government would be very happy for a grateful developer to build a bridge to Dark Isle, while opposing everything that Black citizens deserve to have.

Whether the tale captures you depends heavily on how you handle a rich white male author telling the story of generations of Black people — how Grisham gets inside the head of a woman ripped from her family, enslaved, raped, owned by white men — and how Grisham reads the thoughts of an actual witch doctor. The book assumes curses are real.

You may think that, like Mercer asking to use Lovely’s own memories for her book, Grisham will acknowledge that he did extensive research, that he consulted Black elders, that he read the history in the words of the people who lived those centuries of horror.

Nary a syllable.

Grisham leaves us assuming that since Camino Ghosts is a work of fiction, authors who write fiction simply make it all up, all by themselves.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin will take Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his word that woke people are not welcome in his state. He would have liked to see the Keys and the Everglades again.