The Maroon women on the lake’s fringes taught her to paddle a canoe and swim underwater for near three minutes without coming up, and most importantly how to tell limey tracks in the sandy banks from those of deer…

There’s a tension between the desire to imbue a piece of art with a political core, and the possible function of that art as activism or propaganda even if it wasn’t designed to be so. In our era of social Internet, there’s also a tendency for pre-emptive strikes: take the trope map. With roots in fanfiction, its use as a marketing tool has spread to even traditionally-published books as promotional muscle is off-loaded onto the creator. Its shorthand serves a number of purposes. One is to alert potential audiences of plot mechanisms and character types they enjoy. Another is to signify the book as politically sound ahead of reading, to instill in future readers an assurance of its purity.

We all want to be understood. Maybe we want to believe we’re good enough artists for our works’ politics to be received organically, without being pointed out. I try pretty hard to avoid positioning my work as pertinent to this ongoing American moment, for distaste of being seen as capitalizing on real harm. But I want to talk about Florida, again. I’m sure none of you are falling prey to fascist branding and have been calling the Everglades concentration camp exactly that, if you have reason to talk about it. I’m sure all of us here are invested in the idea that words have meanings.

This summer, in between some new reads and some rereads, I’ve been making my way through American Scare by Robert W. Fieseler. It’s a chunky book, but also so replete with horror and dread that it’s not a fast read anyway. Similarly, my best friend has been listening to the audiobook of Devil in the Grove, with many breaks between chapters for other fare. We’re a curious duo. She went to film school, but I’m the Film Bro. Her feelings about our home state are more ambivalent and far less misty-eyed than mine, but she’s the one who stayed.

(Devil in the Grove was one of my first topics of serious consideration, alongside Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, many lifetimes ago when Blogger was still a vital force.)

The most terrible thing about American Scare, of course, is how time is a flat circle. The playbook has always been the same. Its topics are well within living memory; my mother was four years old when its history begins, while the story of its writing launches in 2021, when the complete record of the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee’s sedition came into Fieseler’s hands. I say sedition, a tantalizing and vintage-flavored word, because that’s what it was: a state body working to subvert federal law, in this case Brown vs. the Board of Education. Despite their official remit being post-HUAC Communist-hunting, FLIC—aka the Johns Committee—quickly went after the NAACP and then queer academics. Scratch a white queerphobe and you will get a racist, every time.

Incidentally, Moms for Liberty was also founded in 2021. My home county is responsible for a great deal of country-wide grief.

Fieseler’s book, published in mid-June of this year, is prescient from every conceivable angle of the fascist acceleration currently occurring in Florida. He cannily tags the state as an ur-America in certain ways, the template other states are eager to replicate and augment, an eternal cipher onto which anything can be written and tried—yet which always endures the same experiments. American Scare is prescient because all of this has happened before.

A very good Defector article came out a few weeks ago, examining the relationship between “Alligator Alley” and US chattel slavery. It’s hard to communicate the depthless, abject fury with which this newest strand of national agony fills me. What uselessness it is to sit here in New York merely feeling things! yet no action I take siphons even a teaspoon of that feeling; yet I can’t stop taking these actions. The moms, those Moms for Liberty, they need to be betrayed by a white countrywoman as often as possible. Every dime I spend on gay graphic novels and histories of the Black Panthers for teenage library patrons I can pretend those moms feel, like a snap of their bra strap.

I recently completed a novella, not a sequel to Little Nothing but a companion of sorts, set in the same Florida during the 1950s. I don’t know yet whether it will be published, but we’re never sorry to finish things, are we? It was an interesting challenge, writing my weird water horses but as outliers in a different kind of supernatural being’s story, writing this version of my world as comprehensible to new readers and welcoming to old ones. I tried hard to differentiate it from Little Nothing while also preserving the elements of that book which worked best. I realized, on my final edit, that while I had succeeded at a new plot and new protagonist, there will always be the same inexorable flow in these projects. I saw it in older short stories I revisited as I drafted. It’s in Little Nothing, too, this unquenchable belief that Florida is not a prison, but a refuge.

We’re not Southerners is a stance I think I inherited from my older sister. She had a lot of opinions about this when we were growing up, the South and whether Florida was truly part of it or something else. She lives in Georgia now. If “the South” is most often conceptualized by its ugly history, Florida is among the most Southern states. Its hideously open racial terror went underground in part due to the tourist boom, when northern dollars and development were at stake. By the time my sister and I learned US history from teachers who said things like “the War of Northern Aggression,” we were growing up within the mirage.

The reason I compared Devil in the Grove and Tampa back in the day was that I saw both books—one dramatized true crime, one harsh history—as explicating the Floridian urge to whitewash.

To accept the official narrative that our history began in St. Augustine, now a perfectly-preserved colonial tourist trap, and leap-frogged to Project Mercury in 1958 and then Disney World in 1971, a constellation of capitalist way-points that ignores all the other ways the state has generated capital.

To permit the postcards boasting pristine natural beauty while electing politicians bent on filling every swamp for development. To enlist that natural world in fascism’s cause, even metaphorically.

The Everglades themselves, contrary to fascist posturing, have historically been a refuge. In addition to the national park portions which protect giant mangrove systems and more than 300 species of bird, the Everglades have always been a cradle of human life. Slavery and the Seminole Wars brought runaways down the Florida peninsula; out of this time came the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Black Seminole people. Before colonialism, the wetlands south of Lake Okeechobee were inhabited by Calusa and Tequesta peoples, their cultures shaped around boats, fishing, and multifaceted water use.

This view of the Everglades as a hostile place, a wasteland only suitable for prison camps and as eager to kill as Donald Trump’s administration, is an unholy stance.

When Moonlight came out in 2016, a good deal of attention was paid to the scene where Juan brings Little to the beach and teaches him to swim. Backyard pools are so common for white Florida homes, regardless of tax bracket, that there were two in my family growing up. This tendency was the direct result of desegregating public swimming pools in the late 1950s. Moving backward through history, enslaved Black people were kept from learning to swim to remove one of their means of escape. By this point, we all know who’s likeliest to be exposed to unsafe drinking water and to lack swimming access. Water, the source of all life, has been systemically taken from people of color in this country.

To date, I’ve not written a story set in Florida that didn’t center water. The ocean occasionally, more often a spring, most often of all a river: water as a source of power, water as the element that empowers. Maria’s backstory in Little Nothing isn’t an accident. I thought as I wrote about how difficult it would be to move on foot south from Georgia if you weren’t able to swim and didn’t have a boat. At the end of her journey, her ultimate sign of safety is learning to swim well from the Maroons at Lake Okeechobee. After slavery, after flight, after the loss of her husband, the power and the joy of water are returned to her. She’s free to teach it to her daughter in turn.

These are my politics.

The flip side of American Scare, the gallows laughter running through the text, is that there were queer people for the Johns Committee to find at all. There were Black progressives and radicals in Florida, Black people throughout the state from the time the Spanish landed to the present. There was solidarity then and there is solidarity now. We have always been here—yes, even in the South, even in the 1950s, and in every era before and each to come.