The Ghosts of Key West

Cayo Hueso was known as “bone key”, as it was once an Indian burial ground. English translators renamed it Weso, for its westernmost location among other islands in its vicinity. Beyond the long drive over the new seven mile bridge, shadows of reefs, lighthouses and buoys bobbed into the invisible horizon. Here the old highway could still be seen. It was more worn, where fishers cast their lines into the crystal-green waters. Was this once the old highway that my father came down with his grandparents so many times?

I came down to the island with something specific in mind. I was looking for records to help me piece together my Caribbean ancestry. But I was also looking for a glimpse of the land.  I wanted to get clear understanding of the land, the people and the region. These are the best indicators of what my ancestors were like, short of my father’s stories about living in the Caribbean.  It is very difficult for historians to relate to their subject without making a physical connection. Heritage and environment are two major factors which contribute to a spiritual or religious identity.

I was looking for the old Key West. I was searching for any of the remaining vestiges of the energy of the old landscape late at night and early in the morning. I was looking for something still hiding beneath the veneer of parrot-heads and twenty-four hour party people. The shipwrecking museum closed years ago. Mel Fisher’s nautical museum was a page out of a time of “finder’s keepers”. This was a time when nobody was required to return to Spain their stolen and lost treasures.  A once giant swamp, it was its own primeval ecosystem. Some of the banyan trees remained, gracing the yards of old stately homes-turned museums.

I dreamt of the islands for many years. My father’s stories were all I had for so long. The photos of my grandma were the photos of a single mother, playing with her children by a banyan tree. My father dreamed of the old bridge his grandfather drove down from the mainland many times before he died.  He told me stories about the first time he had taken my brothers to see the house of their ancestors. He talked about the curator’s amazement and curiosity at how much my brother resembled old Captain Geiger.

I came down once as a child, to the island of Marathon. And again, drove down as an adult to Key West. An early sunrise and an old man sitting on his porch, drinking out of a coconut shell. The sights and sounds of roosters on the streets was a familiar feeling that evoked memories of my childhood in Miami. I watched as roosters pecked at the bone white ground, near the cemetery entrance.  It wasn’t gated up, as many cemeteries often are, on the mainland. The ground was a mix of sand, limestone and concrete. It was like walking into an archaeological excavation. A walk through the cemetery provided a glimpse of the eclectic variety of former residents who belonged to religious orders and practiced a mixture of religious customs on the island.

The scent of the salt in the air electrified and energized the powerful feelings that the ocean evoked within me. Offerings were left on the old gravestones. Many of which were silk floral arrangements. I brought my own. After deciphering the old etchings nearly rubbed clean by the flow of time and water erosion, I made some notes to myself about my ancestors’ headstones. I had never known these people but felt that I should pay my respects just the same. I burned offerings of incense, and laid a beaded rosary of copper and gemstones upon the middle grave, connecting my faith to theirs. These were the people from whom my love for the ocean had come, and the reason that the ocean called me to this place and time. I sat on a rooftop patio drinking a soda, and gazing at the stars. The winds were soft and cool, like I remember them, growing up in Miami.

My aunt told many of the same stories that my father told me, and more about being raised by old Cuban, German and Bahamian women. In my own research I read stories about Bahamian women who died of yellow fever. Bahamian and Cuban women who as little girls flew to Cuba to bring their sister home, after she was kidnapped by their father.  They told me stories of Bahamian and Cuban women who were the matriarchs of their own families. One of whom once owned the rights to Boca Chica island, and sadly had to sell it to the United States government to pay a debt of $100. These are ladies who survive in my aunt’s memory and with whom I bare a slight connection through my father, through my fading Cuban features, and through the ghosts of the islands still calling me home.

As I approached one of the banyan trees, in the outdoor perimeter of the lighthouse museum, I felt a strange sense of home as I traced with my eyes the branches that grew both upward and threaded themselves back into the ground. It was an energy that had not yet finished transforming itself from one shape into another before being cast in stone. But there was nothing lifeless about the banyan tree. What began as a historical and ancestral journey quickly became a spiritual one. The branches evoked a strong sense of awe that reminded me of “the many paths that lead to one”.