“All right,” Mrs. McCrory said.
The girl finished bathing and Mrs. McCrory helped her dry herself off. Virgin Mary picked out a green dress with little yellow flowers on it. It hung on her like she was a little girl playing dress up. They had to tie a big knot in the skirt up around her waist to keep it from dragging the ground. They were finally ready to go, and Lester Ray put his pillow case and Mrs. McCrory’s suitcase in the tiny trunk. He kept the bottle on the floorboard next to the driver’s seat. V. M. climbed into the back seat. She settled back. “All right, good lookin,” she said, “haul our asses off to Pensacola.”
5
1936
Minnie washed glasses and dishes, swept up, dusted, made beds, did anything Miss Ida Hooten needed her to do. It was not much different from what she’d been doing for Ruby Frost for the last four years, except that she no longer had to milk the cow and churn. Miss Ida Hooten ran the old Coronado Hotel in Cedar Key, that dated back to the middle of the nineteenth century and had withstood several bankruptcies and countless hurricanes, and still stood in the same spot where it had originally been built, turning its weathered-board walls in a kind of stubborn, passive defiance to the Gulf of Mexico, the source of the storms and the very reason and justification for the hotel’s existence in the first place.
Since its inception, the Coronado Hotel had changed its emphasis and its clientele several times. In its early days it was a boarding house for the commercial fishermen on the island who manned the fish and shrimp boats that plied the shallow waters of the Gulf, supplying the cities of Gainesville and Tallahassee with fresh seafood; for a couple of decades, after the lovely little island was discovered by wealthy vacationers from those same cities, as well as ones from further north like Atlanta and Birmingham, the hotel became a fashionable resort and was remodeled and expanded. Around the turn of the century, the railroad bypassed the key, choosing a route further inland, that took those same rich sun-and-sand seekers to areas further down the peninsula—Crystal River, Tarpon Springs, Tampa, Sarasota and Fort Myers—and during the first years of the Great Depression the Coronado stood vacant, battered by sea winds and inhabited only by sand crabs, until the arrival of Miss Ida Hooten. She refurbished the hotel and made it a house of prostitution, servicing the sons and grandsons of those original commercial fishermen who had once boarded there; by the time of Minnie’s arrival, the Coronado was thriving and had become the most widely known and most highly recommended brothel on the Florida Gulf coast.
Miss Ida Hooten (she insisted on the appellation) was born in Houma, Louisiana, and grew up there before she went to New Orleans to seek her fortune. She landed in the notorious Storyville district, where she gradually worked herself up to Madam in a house on the Rue Toulouse. When the Depression hit, she had quite a sizable fortune in cash, so she went looking for an investment on the Gulf Coast, making her way from Biloxi to Mobile, from Pensacola to Panama City, around the armpit until she came to Cedar Key, where she bought the Coronado Hotel. She recruited her girls from all over Florida; they were all beautiful, and none were over twenty-two or younger than eighteen, though the minimum age was open to speculation and, according to the Cedar County Vice Squad, was violated on a regular basis.
Miss Ida Hooten gradually learned Minnie’s story, as she was certain from the start that there was one. A beautiful young girl with one blue eye and one green eye simply turning up one day had to be rich with understory, and Miss Hooten patiently got it out of her. She observed Minnie (or Anna Maria; Minnie confided her Gypsy name to Miss Hooten) closely, watching her every move, talking with her, judging her. Minnie had an incorruptible goodness and innocence about her, in spite of her eagerness to commence her career as one of the Coronado’s prostitutes. Her parents must have believed that someone would care for her, that she would somehow be better off for having been left all alone in the wilderness, which she was, though in ways that her parents likely would never have dreamed. Or they might have thought she would die, starve to death, or be killed by wild animals in the swamps. They must not have seen what was in her (Minnie, herself, told Miss Hooten that she had been a skinny, ugly little girl, a “freak,” she called her younger self), must not have remarked her intelligence, or her sensitivity, or else they did recognize it and it frightened them terribly. “It’s history,” Minnie told Miss Hooten, “I quit crying about it a long time ago.”
Cedar Key was accessible only by water, separated as it was from the mainland by salt marshes and the Cedar River, a wide stream that began nowhere and went nowhere and was prowled by several giant manatees. There was a ferry that ran four times a day, from the foot of Race Street across to where the straight sandy dirt road that ran through Rosewood, twelve miles to the east, ended abruptly at the water’s edge, this the selfsame road that Minnie had taken four years before, along with Silas Frost in his wagon, from the anonymous crossroads where he had found her to the Frost household in Rosewood. From which, after four uneventful years of milking cows, washing clothes, and helping with the cooking, she had eventually found her way to Cedar Key and Miss Ida Hooten.
Minnie had to content herself for the present with only being a maid for the older woman. It was not that Miss Ida Hooten did not see the potential in Minnie; she was pretty, and she was shaping out nicely, and those eyes were a definite advantage. Miss Ida Hooten herself was a tall woman, slim, with high proud breasts and a crown of curly red hair. Her face had numerous moles on it, as though it had been splattered with brown paint. She smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and rarely left the confines of the hotel, instead sending Minnie to the grocer’s market down the street or to the liquor store. The other girls saw Minnie’s potential as a whore as well.
“Them eyes,” said Margaret Hilton to the girl, “they gonna do you right.”
“Yeah,” said Clare. “And you gettin yourself a nice rack of boobs, too.”
The biggest problem, as Minnie perceived it, was that she did not look as old as she was. She spent hours studying her face and her eyes in the mirror. Even with the filling out, she still looked like a child. Miss Ida Hooten did not consider that a problem at all. Her plan was to begin selling Minnie, in her own little frilly room upstairs, as a virgin being deflowered over and over again. It was a trick she had picked up in Storyville, using animal blood after the real first time. With that gimmick, and the mismatched eyes, Minnie was sure to be popular and certain to generate a lot of cash.
“But Miss Hooten,” Minnie said, “suppose the man comes back? You know . . .”
“Oh, they don’t care, dear. It’s the fantasy of it. Some men will deflower you several times themselves and be the happier for it.”
The older girls had piqued Minnie’s curiosity about what went on in the upstairs rooms.
“It’s a great way to make a living,” a girl named Barbara told her, “especially if you like to fuck.”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Minnie said.
“Chances are you will,” Barbara said. “The only ones here who don’t like it are the dykes. But they manage to put on a pretty good act.”
By 1939, Cedar Key had become a mecca for the sport of deep sea fishing. With the waning of the depression and the new monetary feasibility of it, the sport was becoming popular again, and men and groups of men came from all over the Southeast to fish in the Gulf. Where once the harbor had been crowded only with fishing boats and shrimp boats, they now had to share with sleek charter boats. These men—salesmen, professional men, sportsmen, along with the men who worked the local fishing industry—made up the clientele of the Coronado. Much to Minnie’s surprise, even some women came to the hotel to purchase the wares of the prostitutes. Even though she had been raised early on in migrant camps and had slept nightly in the same room with her parents, and had, indeed, observed her sister fucking in the bushes with a boy, Minnie was virtually a naif in these areas.
One spring afternoon, as Minnie was putting clean glasses in their places in the downstairs lounge, there was a charter boat captain