Ambassadors of sunshine: An excerpt from Anne Hull’s ‘Through the Groves’

The magnitude of the groves always took visitors by surprise. Especially in March and April, when the orange blossoms turned the Ridge into an open-air perfume counter. But to drive 900 miles in a salt-caked vehicle just to see an orange?

They clogged the highways getting down to us. There was something about picking their own oranges that they liked, and they liked taking pictures of themselves doing it. Women in skimpy shorts on ladders arched their backs.

If they happened to take State Road 60, they were headed straight for the groves at Hopewell. A few miles out they’d start to see my great-aunt Dot’s signs hammered into the trees and propped in the grass.

HULL GROVES/FLORIDA’S SWEETEST NAVELS,

500 YARDS AHEAD!!!!

FRESH-SQUEEZED, YOU WON’T BE SORRY!!!!

START BRAKING NOW!!!!

Aunt Dot did her own advertising for the Hull Groves family fruit stand at the edge of our groves. She used five-by-five-foot sheets of plywood and painted urgent messages on them in tent-revival boldface. She said good visibility and a little bragging helped lure the motorists. The common strategy of roadside advertising was to pummel the wayfarers through hypnotic repetition. Not Aunt Dot’s — Dot’s signs were unique outcries of passion. Even from a car going 65 miles per hour, each sign was a jolt to the senses.

The apocalyptic signage put a certain mental picture in the minds of the travelers. They expected to see a fruit stand in a ring of fire. Instead they came to a wood plank box in a small clearing. Never had there been a more somber admonishment than the Hull Groves fruit stand. Not a single gold hinge glinted from its timber face. The roof was a sheet of aluminum and the floors were dirt. It looked like Abe Lincoln might be sleeping inside. Our fruit stand was a rebuke to modernity and the Yankees who had expected something more. When they pulled onto the grass out front, they sat in their cars and stared.

Dot had black eyes and had grown up going to primitive Baptist camp meetings in the woods. When she married Uncle Roy, my father’s uncle, she went to his indoor church, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night. Even so, she wore lipstick, a shade she called Drug Store Red. The fruit stand awakened a deep zest in her — for the hustle, for the money, for the chance to hear the different ways people talked. Maybe it was the closeness of the highway or the ring of the cash register, but around Dot, you felt the thrill of the game.

“Aunt Dot, some are here!” I called out.

Hardly any of them bounded from their cars. Dot said they probably had travelers’ legs. Let them alone, she said, and get away from the window.

The aromatic force of thousands of orange trees in bloom turned their faces blank. They stood in the grass, trying to adjust to the sweetness of the air. They pulled it in by the lungful. It was like a pot of marmalade burning on the stove. One of Dad’s cousins would come walking out of the dark-green wall of trees behind the fruit stand, carrying a crate of oranges. One lady began clapping with excitement when she saw it, like she was at a performance.

The 80 acres of groves behind the fruit stand at Hopewell had been in Dad’s family since 1902. Uncle Roy was in charge of the operation, being the eldest, but his sons worked alongside him in the groves that one day would be passed on to them. Dad and Aunt Anne owned their father’s 13 acres at Hopewell. Uncle Roy took care of the trees and Dot took care of Uncle Roy, and for three glorious months of the year, she ran the fruit stand.

I spent more time at the fruit stand that winter than I ever had. A vague memory suggests that my mother or father dropped me off there a lot.

It was the first season Dot entrusted me to operate the fruit washer. It was a noisy contraption with a conveyor belt, like a car wash for oranges. The dirty oranges moved, hopped and bounced like nervous victims toward their cleaning. The washer was a limb-sucking industrial accident waiting to happen. According to state law, no one under 16 was supposed to operate the machine, but Aunt Dot had the final word. If you were a child who had shown responsibility and didn’t cuss or act the fool, you got to work the fruit washer. “Tie your hair back, and keep your sleeves away from the feeder,” she said.

Dot left the fruit stand at 11:30 every day to get lunch ready for Uncle Roy and the field hands. She hauled butt down the dirt road in a cloud of dust, ran into the house, put on her apron, took the butter out to soften and started pulling the casseroles out of the fridge that she’d made at 5 that morning. Her kitchen was a work of art. She’d painted it herself, red and white, an homage to the strawberry. At noon sharp, she rang the heavy dinner bell on the back steps of the kitchen and the men appeared from the groves. She heaped their plates with pork chops, string beans, corn casserole and biscuits.

Uncle Roy thanked the Lord for this nourishment to their bodies and for dying on the cross on their behalf. They dug in while Dot speed-cleaned and got the sink ready for washing dishes. The uncles moved to softer chairs, where their heads dropped and their mouths fell open, carried off by Paul Harvey’s voice on the radio. A half-hour later they woke like startled babies and left by the back door to return to the groves. Dot’s car was already on the dirt road back to the fruit stand, kicking up dust as she put on her lipstick in the rearview mirror.

“Tell me what I missed,” she said when I got back.

She knew how to deal with the Yankees. She invited them out back to show how she made her own orange blossom honey from the beehives we kept in the groves. The white boxes were stacked six high and stuck together from the output of 500 bees. Dot would then sell the honey out of her front room from a wooden keg with a spigot.

The most famous customer to visit the fruit stand was Lucille Ball, who arrived in disguise, with a scarf over her hair and big sunglasses. She touched the various crates and smelled the different oranges, holding them up to the nose of her male friend. Aunt Dot didn’t recognize her. No one did, until the very end, when a dog recognized the familiar voice and jumped into Lucy’s convertible. Everybody helped get the dog out, and Lucy left with a half bushel of Hull oranges in the back seat.

When the customers drove off, sometimes Dot came out and watched them as they disappeared down the road.

Dot didn’t need my services all day. I rode horses with my cousins through the groves behind the fruit stand. Technically, we were second cousins; our fathers were the actual cousins who’d all grown up together. Callie was my brother Dwight’s age, a raspy-voiced blond girl who tore through the sand on her pony, Flag. Frances was my age and liked reenacting beauty pageants and religious experiences in the playhouse in Dot’s backyard. She played the preacher and I played the sinner who was supposed to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. I was never able to deliver the fervor she needed, and she was hungry for fervor. Frances had thick black hair and round violet-blue eyes, and even as a child, her charisma was fierce. Her eyes bored through me as she waited for my answer.

Okay, okay, I’ll take him as God’s only begotten son and my savior. Frances slumped, like a rag doll, losing all dramatic tension. I never tired of Frances, but Jesus, he was boring. I told Frances I had been saved enough for that day.

I’d stand at the edge of the trees and watch for cars on State Road 60. When one appeared, I tried to memorize it, making note of the color and model in case I ever needed to be a witness in a trial. I liked seeing the different license plates and guessing where the people were going. I watched for Panky Snow, the lady reporter for the Plant City Courier, who drove a wood-sided Rambler. I saw my father with his filthy Ford and his restlessness, his arm hanging from the open window and the hot wind making his face greasy.

Yankees often got stuck when they drove into the grove to help themselves to the fruit. They usually bogged down in the sandy rows driving out. A picker would have to climb down from his ladder to politely offer assistance. Even the lowly laborers who earned 10 dollars a day were expected to follow the directives set forth by Florida Citrus Mutual: Each of us was an ambassador of sunshine. We were all in this together, Citrus Mutual said.

Dot was in the back stacking honey when a man came into the fruit stand asking for the owner. He drove a white Plymouth with Pennsylvania tags. When Dot came out, he introduced himself and said he was interested in buying one of her hand-painted signs on the highway. Confusion gathered in Dot’s eyes. She never made sport of the Yankees. She came around the counter to get closer to the man. “Sugar,” she said, lowering her voice. “It’s the fruit that’s for sale.”

The man shifted his weight. He explained that he worked in an art gallery in Philadelphia. He told her about the different kinds of art he collected, native folk painters and Winslow Homer and on and on, Dot growing more restless by the second. Her eyes kept wandering to the bin of tangelos that needed restocking. Finally, she cracked her red drugstore smile and said, “Honey, if the signs mean that much to you, help yourself. There’s more out back.” The rest of the day she recounted the story to Uncle Roy, a friend from Sunday School, a friend from art club, at least two cousins and then whatever relatives who wandered into the fruit stand. “Don’t they just tickle you?” she asked.

The child Yankees were the ones I felt sorry for. Their parents had slathered white stuff on the tops of their ears. They reeked of camphoric sunburn ointments. Some wore hats and sunglasses. I had never seen children in sunglasses. They looked like small blind adults.

It wasn’t just our fruit stand; the entire geography of Central Florida was waiting for the tourists. The roadside vendors had taken up their positions, tent poles dug in and World War II parachutes strung over them. The flat horizon was alight with cooking fires tended by old men stirring vats of boiled peanuts with broom handles.

My father took me around to see some of these places. We drove out Highway 60 toward the county line, where the land opened up even more and the gravel flew into our car. We stopped at one place that was nothing more than a card table, a box of tangerines and peanuts boiling in a vat of salty water. Dad made a show out of looking over the anemic tangerines before saying he believed he’d take a dollar’s worth of the boiled peanuts. The hot paper bag sat on the seat between us as we drove home, digging in by the fistful and pitching the wet shells out the window.

When we got back to our fruit stand, it seemed like a cathedral.

This story is excerpted from “Through the Groves: A Memoir by Anne Hull.” Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2023 by Anne Hull. All rights reserved. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Hull spent nearly two decades as a national reporter for The Washington Post. She has written for The New Yorker and is a recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. A fifth-generation Floridian, she began her career at the Tampa Bay Times. She lives in Washington, D.C. “Through the Groves” is her first book.