swfl storytellers store shelves
Photography by Anna Nguyen

Four SWFL Storytellers Keep the Histories and Cultures of the Region Alive

Oral traditions preserve history and reveal the region’s lesser-known stories and cultural shifts through lived experiences.

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If history is a story, we must know its tellers.

Much of the past comes to us from non-historians. In creating the grand tapestry of human history, we gather scraps from found objects, written accounts, and, through the enduring tradition of oral storytelling, the most vibrant of threads. Storytellers give us meaning, a sense of identity and belonging, telling of where we came from, how we started and where we’re going—ideas of particular importance as our stretch of sand and soil undergoes rapid change. Centuries of heritage live on in the descendants of Southwest Florida’s pioneers, four of whom we meet here, each with a portrait of home at once strange and familiar. For these individuals, storytelling isn’t a craft learned or practiced; it’s a life lived and shared. They carry on the tradition from memory keepers, history holders—grandparents and great-grandparents who cradled them in the crook of their arms and remembered when. As generations pass, the narrators’ arcs sweep across history, keeping their cultures, ancestors and their own pasts alive long after everyone’s gone. 

Pine Island fisher Richard Lolly and LaBelle cattleman Joe Johnson tell of such lived memories and lore. Richard’s stories sketch a portrait of Pine Island as a series of floating fish shacks and ice houses in service to a booming commercial fishery. In 1955, Richard drifted from the Everglades to Cayo Costa on his mother’s houseboat. They patched together a new home with scavenged lumber from the remnants of makeshift cabins and palm-thatched huts left over from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ defense tests on the island. The Lollys dug shallow wells for drinking and washing, mimicking the resourcefulness of the Calusa before them. Using cotton or flax gill and seine nets, they pulled mullet and mackerel into large shoals. Richard often returns to his youth in his stories, his feet pressed against the ribs of a boat, trying to leverage the haul, his breath measured against the pulse of the net as the fish thrash.

As Pine Island grapples with the future of its working waterfront (one of only a handful in the state), his stories pass to eager ears. Fellow fishers, islanders and tourists gravitate to him at Capt’n Con’s Fish House, where he passes hours like minutes over coffee and pie, and at Jug Creek Marina & Fish House, congregating around a framed photo of Richard’s boat stocked with more than a thousand pounds of mullet (more than double what one may catch now on a good day). Flecked with iridescent scales, his hands rise at once: “A black cloud would chase you at night. I swear it. It’s one of the only times I’d hear my mama holler, ‘Shut that door now before they get inside!’ That was our lullaby out there. Those mosquitoes singing us to sleep,” Richard says with a laugh, his eyes watching the Bokeelia pier float into the sunlight.

It’s June in Southwest Florida, oyster spawning season. A gentle breeze stirs the longleaf pines as Richard notes the sweet perfume of yellow jasmine, a scent long diminished on the island, where it once grew wild. “You don’t see that here anymore, but I still smell it,” he says.

Nearly 100 years ago, Florida was a wide open space, with fishers and cattle ranchers applying a loose order. The state was first known to Indigenous peoples, then settlers, and stories passed on as a form of cultural preservation and survival. “I want this life to carry on,” Richard says. “It’s a way of living that’s fading at the edges. Stories carry it forward.”

Florida cowboys, the living legacies of the longest history of ranching in America, tell tales of the same frontier but with swirls of cattle fanning the land alongside acres of palmetto brush. A century ago, no fence laws existed, and cows roamed the beaches. The first cattle to set foot in this country arrived 500 years ago, adapting quickly to the sun and swamp. The Seminoles and Florida Crackers made use of the hardy breed alongside the Spanish. Though the ‘scrub cattle,’ as the cowboys called them, flourished, and ranches still dot the state, they’ve been whittled down to special little pockets of wild Old Florida. One of them is Joe Johnson’s sprawling Calusa Cattle Company, located on the outskirts of LaBelle. A descendant of Fort Myers’ founder Manuel A. Gonzalez, Joe introduces himself plainly: “I’m an Old Florida cowboy. Nothing more, nothing less,” his languid Southern drawl stretching out each syllable. Like Richard, Joe’s a generational storyteller, with tales absorbed throughout a childhood spent lying under moss-covered oaks as the older cattlemen swapped stories. He remembers them all, along with the pitchforks whittled out of mangrove roots, the hours spent carving wooden animals with Seminole cowboys and the huckleberries foraged for his grandmother’s pies.

A few steps into his sprawling ranch home, I see Joe’s folk art pieces, made with paper and pencil, some held together by Scotch tape. “I’m primitive through and through,” he says. The intricate drawings detail Florida Cracker horses and cows, each one a memory laid out on parchment. The collection is also on display at local art institution LaBelle Gallery and Cultural Center, where Joe often stops to share the narratives behind his sketches. Joe’s cattle drives come to life as we move from one drawing to the next. I see creeks carving through palmetto forests and cow dogs traipsing behind; tails pointed in anticipation. “These drawings, and the stories they prompt, have a way of bringing my life back to me and to others,” Joe says.

The artifacts of a cowboy’s life line the walls from the wood rafters to the stone arches. Hides and saddles in shades of chestnut and leather announce the aging cattleman. Joe brings me a makeshift pony, a long green palm stalk with a string tied around the end. A story begins: “The old folks took time with young children like me; we had no other way to learn. When I asked for my first horse—I was 5 years old—my great uncle said, ‘Let’s go down there yonder and get you a stalk out of the cabbage palm. We’ll bring it back up here, and I’ll fix it for you.’ So he breaks off a long cabbage stalk and cuts the fans from the bottom, leaving just a little tail on it … I’d ride my cabbage palm horse any which way. Gosh, I thought I was somebody.”

Joe tilts the stick pony toward the ground and taps it. A hushed crack whips through the room—a cowboy’s song. The noise beckons the imagination: I see the horses he speaks of, slicing morning fog as a young 1940s ranch hand whittles the pronged roots of a mangrove into a pitchfork. His feet fall light as feathers as he pushes the three-tined fork into a patch of hay and walks toward the hardwood hammock. Feral horses move ghostlike in and out of the thickets; the boy hopes to earn their trust.

While Richard and Joe’s stories reveal a way of life, Martha Bireda and Rev. Houston R. Cypress tell tales that reclaim space. “In my life, I have found myself as a colored, a negro, a Black, an African American, and a person of color. This is my reflection as a colored girl.” So begins each story from Reflections of a Colored Girl, a series of performative narratives detailing Martha’s early years in Punta Gorda. “It is the story of who I am, who I was, who I became. It wasn’t until I reached this age, nearly 80, that I understood the value of ancestors and what my responsibility is,” says Martha, a retired speech pathologist with a doctorate in counselor education. She draws from her background when she works with police departments to develop racial sensitivity trainings and as part of the Florida Humanities speaker program, which takes her to campuses and events across the state to share her tales. Each story weaves the threads of segregation and discrimination with the empowerment pedagogy (the critical-thinking and self-directional educational approach), which her family, school and community fostered. The system of beliefs, values and actions challenged Martha to be as she was—powerfully and beautifully human.

Growing up among the fishers of Punta Gorda and, before that, the country folk of Virginia holler, Martha leaned into the accounts of those who came before, recalling the importance of elders in African culture as storytellers, cultural transmitters and spiritual leaders. After she wrote Reflections, she was inspired to assume the role herself, her voice now preserving a vast heritage. “That’s when I saw all of the lessons. That’s when it all came back to me,” Martha says.

She remembered herself as a young African American girl arriving in Punta Gorda fresh from the Appalachian Mountains, a self-contained country community where the specter of race rarely emerged. Jim Crow announced himself at the local train depot: “c-o-l-o-r-e-d,” she remembers reading, her finger pointing to the painted oak sign, tracing the letters mid-air. She thought of Zora Neale Hurston—“I am not tragically colored”—and said to herself, “I am me, as gold as the South Florida sun.”

The stories of her mother and grandmother fill pages. Her mother, who founded The Blanchard House Museum of African American History and Culture in Punta Gorda, was proud of her ancestry. Martha’s great-grandfather James Andrews and great-uncle Dan Smith—who learned to read in the back of Punta Gorda’s first ‘colored’ school in 1902 as a grown man and child of an ex-slave—were two of the town’s early settlers. When she reflects on her childhood, memories of self-discovery and self-preservation arise. “I believe Black people have two personalities,” Martha says. “There is a performance personality that you put on in situations to protect yourself and keep your place. And then, there’s our authentic identity.” 

The challenge and benefit of a well-told story lies in its ability to illuminate a foreign world—to use empathy to reveal the vast similarities among our differences and make the impersonal personal. The storyteller focuses on the self while pointing outward. Martha does so with a deep and abiding lilt, her pitch rising in fits of excitement, each syllable drawn out for effect.

Houston Cypress similarly uses his voice while playing with the notion of language, its malleability and limits. As an Indigiqueer artist and environmentalist from the Otter Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, Houston’s stories often take the form of spoken word poetry, winding through the river of grass that raised him and served as a place of refuge for his ancestors. The lines of each poem stretch and shrink in the face of translation between Miccosukee and English, climbing toward a universal understanding. His mother, a Miccosukee fashion designer, told stories with fabrics, combining strips and pieces to craft a mosaic. Her work fed Houston’s literary loom of techniques, textures and patterns spun from varying ideas, images and languages.

Houston—whose oral poems often touch on tribal plant medicines and the Everglades’ broad landscape—also serves as the director of Love the Everglades Movement, an organization devoted to developing environmental protection and cultural preservation initiatives. “Nature is a living narrative with its own story to tell,” he says. In “…what endures…,” a 2021 multimedia project Houston produced, poetry and storytelling are interlaced on film. Houston walks the edges of the Everglades’ marsh and swamp land, cooing, “There’s a song for everything. Everything resounds triumphantly.” Through Love the Everglades Movement, Houston often guides groups of supporters through Big Cypress National Preserve; his voice rivaled only by the whooping call of an anhinga or the belted grunts of a cricket frog. Houston offers an invocation, or story, followed by drumming and singing, each voice forming a collective whir—a uniquely Florida tale. For him, the story, the teller and the audience are equally important. Houston uses the rise and fall of his voice to set the tone—a rhythm emerging. Something new is being created. The story will not end; you carry it with you.

Whether on a stage or a cattle ranch in LaBelle, the storytellers extend a hand. Every knowing nod, smile and foot tap synced to the natural cadence of their voices reminds us that we are not alone. Our experiences may differ, but with storytelling, the music—laughter, silence, bravado, voices rising triumphant—is universal.