American Ghost Read Online Free Page A

don’t have fifty dollars,” she said.
    He gamely flipped a fried shrimp on the table between them. “I’ll bet you this shrimp I can tell you what your grandmother said you were.”
    Something in his sureness made her hesitate, though Lena was all for it. “Oh, come on, Jol. It’s all-you-can-eat, who cares?”
    Jolie met his eye a moment, then flipped a shrimp on the table. “Deal,” she said, then sat back and waited with a fair amount of certainty for him to name some obscure local tribe that would be a good educated guess. And completely wrong.
    He seemed to take a lot of enjoyment in her confidence, making a great show of wiping his mouth, then leaning in and confiding in that mild, instructive voice, “Little Black Dutch. ”
    The confidence was wiped from Jolie’s face in an instant, making her blink at him in wonder, while Lena asked, “Is he right, Jol? The Hoyts are Dutch ?”
    Jolie kept staring at him as she answered aside, “So they say,” and to Sam, “How the heck did you know that?”
    He looked sincerely pleased at her astonishment, picking up his winnings from the table and popping them in his mouth with great enjoyment. “Well, I do have a much sought-after degree in Florida history from UF—approximately worth the paper it’s printed on,” he allowed, “and it’s a fairly common colloquial term in the South, supposedly coined by Sephardic Jews when they were kicked off the Iberian Peninsula in the 1500s. They settled in Holland and created this mythical ethnic identity to explain their lack of height and dark hair and skin. They imported it with them to colonial America, and it really caught on in the South, became a convenient little ethnic dodge—the way mulattoes, half bloods, Turkish sailors, and anyone of color could outwit soldiers and census takers and pass for white in the days of slavery and Indian removal—and the Blackfoot are Canadian, in the upper Plains. There isn’t a Black feet tribe. It’s just another variation—Black Irish, Blackfeet, Black Dutch—they’re ethnic PR, indigenous to the South. They don’t exist.”
    Jolie had never heard of such a thing in her life and just blinked at him in wonder, though Lena asked, “What d’you mean, they don’t exist? What are they? Ghosts? ”
    Sam didn’t laugh at the gibe, but thoughtfully deposited a shrimp tail on his plate. “The Black Dutch are. The Muskogee Creek do exist, and are the flavor of the month, as far as Florida Indians are concerned, thanks to their very flexible cousins, the Seminole. None of them are actual aborigines, but a remnant of the Hitachi and Yuchi and all the little tribes of the Southeast, who were driven south by colonial expansionto the swamps on the Choctawhatchee and the Apalachicola. The Creek are trying for federal recognition, and one of my jobs is to track down the surnames from the last Creek census in 1834. Thought it’d be easy, but when I show up at their door and so much as whisper they’re not a hundred percent Scot-Irish, I get this blank, hostile look, like I’m one of Jackson’s soldiers on horseback.” He pointed a shrimp at Jolie. “Just like that icy stare you were giving me a while ago when I made the crack about your college. I’ve never met an isolate group with such an ethnic chip on their shoulder,” he mused. “God, they make the Tutsi look congenial. ”
    The flush on Jolie’s face was so comically guilty that Lena burst into laughter, though Sam didn’t press the matter. He just grinned at Jolie’s discomfort, then picked up his glass of tea and raised it above the table in a toast. “To the Lower Creek Nation,” he intoned, “and Big Mama, one of history’s great survivors. May her grandchildren haunt the swamp till the end of their days, and Old Hickory be her yard boy in