Fluid Space and Identity: The Everglades and the 1928 Hurricane Victim Skeletons

Article begins

I rounded the gentle curved corner of the walking trail through the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, a reclaimed section of the Everglades, about ten minutes from my home in South Florida. On my right was a towering mass of Cypress trees and Spanish moss that made up the replanted Cypress swamp. On my left were open grasslands and wetlands as far as I could see. Trails bisected canals filled with water lilies. Wading birds stalked fish and frogs and snakes, while giant dragonflies buzzed around me, and massive orange crickets scattered away from my feet with each step. It was quiet, just the sound of my feet crunching on the soil and ground shell footpath, and my breathing, as I worked to move just a bit faster. The sun is unrelenting in this space, and the 36 miles of open trails means that you can walk for an hour and not see another person. But you do see other things. As the corner gave way to the next long, flat stretch of trail, a familiar but never anticipated sight was before me: an alligator, perched on the top edge of the bank of the canal, sunning itself, just steps off of the path (Figure 1).

The moment like a still life, but the reality is that nothing is still in the Everglades. The Everglades is a space of movement—water, soil, people, alligators, egrets, snakes, sugarcane, mangroves. The alligator may have been still along that trail, but when ready, it would move fast and fluid through the water. An egret hunting along the bank may look like a statue, but it too can shift into action in a moment’s notice. The stillness is fleeting, temporary. The Everglades is fluid, perpetually in motion. Water flows from Lake Okeechobee in the north to the ocean in the south. It changes, flows, ebbs, and absorbs. It is also sticky, attaching to anything it touches. While the human-made trail I was on was crunchy with soil and ground-up shells, the actual Everglades soil is a thick black mud known as “muck.” It sticks to everything.

This includes the dead. Skeletons that emerge from the Everglades become more than just artifacts because of their time spent in the black muck soils. They become a part of the Everglades story. As a bioarchaeologist, someone who studies the dead to learn about the living, I have come to understand that also means learning about the landscapes where the dead are buried. Identity after death becomes as fluid as the landscape itself (Figure 2).

This realization came to me when I started working on two skeletons in my university’s collection that were labeled “1928 Hurricane Victims 1 and 2, Belle Glade.” The two skeletons have no records of their discovery, at least not anymore. When I came across them in the storage room of the university, all I had to go on was the label on the old Mott’s Apple Cider box and a small, moth-eaten slip of paper. No other records of their discovery and time after seems to exist  (Figure 3).

The 1928 Lake Okeechobee Hurricane was a Category 4 or 5 storm that caused extensive flooding along the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee in the interior of the state of Florida, including in the newly incorporated town of Belle Glade. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people died in a single night. Most were Black migrant laborers who worked in the newly cultivated fields, dug out of the muck soils of the Everglades. The storm is most famous for its portrayal in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, a fiction writer and anthropologist. Beyond that, the storm is largely overlooked by history. Despite being one of the largest natural disasters in US history, it is rarely remembered, in part because of who died in the storm: Black migrant laborers. These individuals were transient in the past and are anonymous in the historic record today. But they did exist, and thousands of them died that Sunday night in September 1928, when the lake overflowed its banks and washed away the homes and towns along its southeastern corner. 

On that terrible night, people sheltered in the sturdiest houses and buildings. Many of the hired laborers lived in temporary structures or out in the fields and were the most vulnerable. But even those with more permanent homes found houses lifted from foundations, flooded to their attics, crashing apart. People drowned out in the swirling waters in and around their homes. The exact death toll is unknown, as the exact number of people living in the area is unknown. Migrant laborers are fluid entities, moving through spaces and times, leaving their marks behind, but not necessarily their names.

It the aftermath of the storm, bodies emerged from the tangled grasses and fields of the area as the water slowly receded. The identifiable white bodies were put in coffins and sent to the coast for burial. The Black bodies were put in one of two mass graves: one in West Palm Beach, and one in Port Mayaca. As the days stretched on, bloating and decay made bodies unidentifiable, and those bodies, as well as many Black bodies, were burned in funeral pyres in the fields. The water table in the area is too high to bury bodies underground, and those who tried found they floated back up to the surface. Burning was the easiest method for disposal of the dead, and the landscape was dotted with thick black plumes of smoke where the pyres burned in the days and months to come.

But many bodies were never recovered. They remained tangled in the fields and wild spaces of the Everglades, flowing and mixing with the soil, the water, the animals, the landscape. They melted into and became a part of the space. The fluidity of what makes the Everglades the Everglades now included the bones of the dead, of those lost in the ravaging waters of Lake Okeechobee’s flood during the 1928 Hurricane. 

As time wore on, now-skeletonized remains would occasionally appear in fields as farmers ploughed. It was common enough that any bones found in the fields and towns around the southeastern corner of the lake were locally identified as hurricane victims. There are other possible identities for skeletons unearthed in this region, of course. Other archaeological identities, or other people who passed in the span of years and decades before and after the storm. While the artifacts and limited skeletal data tell us that these are not likely prehistoric remains, these anonymous dead could be anyone from a historic time period. But the storm left such a strong physical and psychological impact that those identities are rarely considered. The two skeletons found in the town of Belle Glade fall into that category. They were likely found in 1980, based on that moth-eaten slip of paper, and sometime thereafter made their way into the skeletal collections at my university. A previous researcher did some basic sorting of the bones and associated shoe heels and coat buttons, and tentatively identified two individuals, along with assorted commingled (mixed-up) bone. The box that the bones were in was then labeled 1928 Hurricane Victims 1 and 2, and the identity of the deceased thus made permanent with permanent marker on cardboard.

I encountered them for the first time in 2016. As someone who specializes in historic US time periods and has experience with commingled remains, I was intrigued by the bones in the box. However, they have not fared well from their time in the Everglades. They are crumbling, falling apart, all of the exterior bone flaking away. That exterior bone is what lets us estimate age and sex and see what traumas and diseases and life experiences have altered the bone. Without that exterior surface, there is not much we can learn about the lives of the people before they passed away. The best I could estimate is that both individuals were adults, possibly young or middle aged, and that one was likely, though not definitively, female.

Despite that, the bones remain fascinating. I began a seven-year research project into the bones and the storm. Eventually collaborators were able to retrieve some molecular information from the teeth: Dr. Will Pestle ran stable isotope analysis and found that signatures of drinking water and rock show that both individuals grew up in the US Southeast, perhaps southern Georgia, Alabama, or the Carolinas. Dr. Maria Nieves-Colon ran ancient DNA and, despite very poor DNA preservation, was able to determine that one individual was likely a female, and that both have some very tentative markers of African ancestry. All of this lines up well with what we know from the history of the area and with the limited skeletal analysis. But could this really tell us if these were indeed storm victims? 

No. That information is forever lost to time.

Yet there is other evidence that tells us that perhaps an exact answer here does not matter. That is the evidence from the Everglades itself. You see, the damage done to the bone by the water and soil and plants and animals of the Everglades may have disrupted my scientific exploration of the lived experiences of these people, but it also left behind a record of the time after their deaths as their bodies flowed into the landscape around them. Plant roots grow through the open spaces of the bones, entwining with the bone fibers and becoming one with the bone itself. Muck soil has stained the bone brown in some places, and black in others where it adheres even today. The checkerboard cracks and long flakes of bone that pull away from the surface are evidence of the water that seeped into the skeletal remains, separating layers apart. As the bone has deteriorated, and the Everglades infiltrated, it became one with the space where it rested after death. 

That tells us something important: even if we will never know for sure that these individuals died in the storm, the forces that made the storm what it was—the water, the landscape, the soil—have become a part of these individuals. They are hurricane victims, sanctified by their postmortem lives in the Everglades. That identity is recognized by everyone who comes into contact with them—the individuals who found them in the fields, the first researcher who labeled them, and even me, the researcher who accepted that identity and has spent years researching the story. Without that identity, imprinted on the bones and on the box label, such poorly preserved remains would likely not have garnered much attention. But because of that choice, we now have a chance to think about and remember a group of people who died in the storm, lives that are too often overlooked in history, and who deserved to be remembered. 

This project has taught me that identity is fluid. Just as the water from Lake Okeechobee flows through the Everglades to the ocean, the water that flowed through these bones altered their identity and made their story part of the story of the storm. As a bioarchaeologist who focuses on bodies, it reminds me that the story of identity does not stop after death. It also reminds us that the story of who people are is also about where they are. Just as I paused to look at the alligator along the trail—stationary for now, but ready to become fluid at a moment’s notice—so too should we pause and think about how the bodies we study are also part of the spaces where they died and were buried, and how their identities flow with those spaces.