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Description
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When there were too many threats against me in Immokalee, I fled out to the Indian reservation where I was allowed to stay in one of these palm leaf huts.
Described my book: “I soon received so many death threats because of my photography that I, like the runaway black slaves of long ago, found refuge with the Indians outside the city. I lived here with this Seminole woman. I found it romantic to live in a palm-leaf hut, but the romance wasn’t to last only a couple of days. One night I was awoken by shouts ordering me out of the hut. I felt my last hour had come but had no choice other than to step out into the headlights of a pickup truck from which men with guns shouted to me in Mexican accents: “You be out of town before sunrise. If not, you will never see another sunrise!”
I knew they were deadly serious, and the woman didn’t dare to harbor me any longer, so I slipped out of town like a shadow, grateful that the Seminoles had given me shelter as they once had done for blacks.
That I had indeed lived outside the law I saw years later when I returned and found that the Seminoles had set up the United States’ first Native American casino, laying the groundwork for a multibillion-dollar industry to replace alligator wrestling and their previous types of gambling. Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if whites long ago took it over in the same way they took over so many black businesses.”
Seminole Reservation outside Immokalee, FL – April 8th, 1974
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