Hot stuff, eh?

The bottom pic is the only surviving portrait of my main man, Louis-Michel Aury. He was an insurgent pirate fighting the Spanish and Americans in the early 19th c. Caribbean. Although he helped found the first republic to offer the franchise to all men, regardless of skin color, his memory lives mostly in second-rate ghost stories circulating around NE Florida. Amelia Island, the site of the Republica de las Floridas, is now a white-supremacist golf holiday resort.

L. O. L.


The top painting is a self-portrait done by William Augustus Bowles, who married two Creek chicks and started a revolutionary United Nation of Creeks and Cherokees; the portrait hangs in the National Gallery. He was imprisoned in the Phillipines, escaped to West Africa, made his way to London and then back to Florida, and was finally killed while in jail in Havana. My man...