What Alligator Farms Taught Me About Murder
In 2012, I visited Amelia Island for my brother’s wedding. I’d grown up in Central Florida—think: Disney and the pastel subdivisions from Edward Scissorhands—so the island’s moody weather, uneven brick streets, and Victorian houses floored me. This was Florida? It felt like a fever dream.
When I began drafting my debut novel a decade later, I knew three things for sure. First, it would be Southern Gothic. Next, it would focus on a family living on Amelia Island. Finally, the antagonist would be a real character in the Southern sense of the word, her personality (gruff, bloodthirsty, single-minded) casting a shadow over her family.
Great start, I thought to myself. Now, how would a woman like that make her fortune?
The answer snapped into place: an alligator farm. Of course a Floridian Gothic villain would toss around gators all day.
The more I considered it, the more excited I became. It was like I’d found a cheat code for a Gothic villain.
*
In early drafts of The House Built on Alligator Bones, the family matriarch’s bloodthirstiness appeared to be connected to her job; because she killed and skinned gators all day—a brutal task—she was violent toward others. She had other, more specific reasons for hurting people, but the manuscript didn’t make that clear.
Back then, I could tell her character wasn’t quite right, but I wasn’t sure how. I put a pin in that problem and turned to a different one: how I’d portray the farm itself.
I already knew a fair amount about alligators; I grew up in Lakeland, Florida, where I heard gators bellow on strolls around Lake Hollingsworth and spotted them crossing the Circle B Bar Reserve trails. But I didn’t know much about working gator farms—i.e., farms where gators are raised for their hides and meat—besides the fact they existed.
Starting my research from the safe distance of my desk, I noticed that alligator farmers themselves weren’t what I’d anticipated. I didn’t think they’d be like my antagonist, who’s a special case, but I expected them to be tough and bold. Serious, at the very least. My research proved different.
On YouTube, I found an ad for small-business insurance featuring a soft-spoken gator farmer with a grandfatherly moustache and delightful Southern twang. Then I watched an old Dirty Jobs episode with two easygoing farmers quick to gently tease Mike Rowe as he tentatively held gators during the “sexing” process. (Determining their biological gender.)
Huh, I thought. Surprising.
Next, I turned to a nonfiction book by Rebecca Renner, Gator Country. In it, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Committee officer, Jeff Babauta, goes undercover as a gator farmer to bust illegal poaching activity. Jeff visits multiple farms, trying to slip into the secretive industry. From his point of view, many gator farmers seemed affable, like those I’d seen so far. But he noticed more variation. Some were messy, some were organized. Some were friendly, some were not. Their personalities weren’t a monolith.
From all of this research, the only constant I noticed was that the farmers bear no ill will toward gators. In fact, they’re more aware of (and concerned about) the delicate balance between nature and man than most people I know.
I decided to visit a proper alligator farm to capture its employees’ essences—and to catch a glimpse of its processing facility, which is, understandably, not readily available online. (Processing is an industry term for skinning gators and harvesting their meat.)
That was easier said than done. There are two types of farms: those that breed gators for tourists to view (like the St. Augustine Alligator Farm) and those that breed gators for skin and meat. The latter kind is more secretive. Often they have minimal websites, sometimes none. Most don’t offer tours. It makes sense; how many chicken farms encourage visitors?
Finally, I found a gator farm that not only offered tours but promoted them: The Greenwood Gator Farm in Gibson, Louisiana.
My partner and I stayed in New Orleans’ Garden District, close to one of Anne Rice’s residences. On our second day, after a one-hour drive through Louisiana’s countryside, we turned by a sign proclaiming WELCOME TO GREENWOOD GATOR FARM & TOURS. Then we bumped down the private drive, passing faded yellow barns with the words HATCHERY and GROW OUT PEN on their sides.
We parked and powerwalked through the oppressive heat, by an upright, grinning gator statue and into the main office, which doubled as a gator-themed shop.
The cheerful woman at the front desk, our future guide, explained that they’d moved their working operations to a larger location nearby. This farm was now a museum of sorts. She promised this was a better experience—working gator barns stink—but my heart sank. Now I’d never get a look at a real processing area. Would I have to cut it from the book? Still, maybe I’d learn something.
We followed the guide’s bouncing ponytail into a small, theatre-like room, where she described how wild eggs are collected, a process involving finding nests in the wild, counting eggs, and marking them—all while fending off mother gators with long sticks. (Yes, sticks!)
She proudly explained that they worked with the government to return a percent of farm-raised gators to the wild. In fact, they (and many other farms) had helped replenish Louisiana’s wild gator population since they were declared endangered in the early 60s.
After this introduction, she led us to the back of the room, where they’d built a replica of an egg-hatching barn, complete with overhanging red lights. I perked up; this was more like it. In the next room was a replica of a grow-out pen, filled with baby alligators with birth defects. (They wouldn’t be needed at the farm.)
I gazed at the hatchlings wriggling through the water, growing more excited about our next stop. Had they set up a replica processing area, too?
No, but they had the next best thing: a room lined with poster-sized photos showing every gory step of the skinning and harvesting process, including details of the facilities. I stared, delighted and slightly queasy, while the tour guide carefully described what we were looking at.
I thought I’d still be thinking about those photos while we drove away from the farm, drenched in sweat, but that wasn’t the moment that stuck with me.
Before leaving the first room, our tour guide walked over to a little heated cage. A tiny hatchling sat inside, its face tipped upward, toward the heater. She lifted him out carefully. Tenderly.
“You shouldn’t keep gators as pets,” she said, her voice gentle. “They’re wild animals. That’s how you get bit.”
She held the hatchling up to her eyes, a soft smile on her face. She might as well have been looking at a puppy.
“But this one’s mine,” she said. “He likes me better than anyone. Doesn’t want anybody else to feed him.”
She’d been calm and matter-of-fact as she chatted about the gators the farm kills and skins. But when she gazed at this gator, it was clear that, despite her extensive experience and industry knowledge, she loved the little guy.
*
Sheepishly, I returned to my novel. My antagonist was more of an extreme case than I’d suspected, both in her personality and hatred of the alligators she farms. I needed to separate her from her job. I reworked my draft to make it clear that she’s a gator farmer who happens to be disturbed, not a woman whose job influences her to hurt others. Her violence toward other people stems from desperation for her own grandmother’s love. Her employees hold a variety of attitudes toward the animals. Most feel neutral, while one actively pities them.
I should have already known that a job has no impact on someone’s propensity for violence. In the hundreds of mysteries and thrillers and Gothics I’ve read, how many housewives and schoolteachers have been murderers?
As a reader, I’ve always thought of course! when a character with a sharky job—high-level salesman, plastic surgeon—is violent. But in modern thrillers and crime fiction, that job is rarely connected to the character’s motivation; while a serial killer might be a nurse by day in order to have access to easy kills, the actual job isn’t the reason the nurse is killing.
Writing my debut novel reaffirmed a key craft lesson: Murder (in fiction, at least) stems from at least one universal cause, from love to jealousy to revenge. These universal causes must, in turn, be specific to the perpetrators’ unique experiences—the events and beliefs that twisted them into their current, maladapted selves.
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Dartrine Beaumont believes her mother’s sudden death has left her alone in the world–until she learns of long-lost wealthy relatives living in Florida. Confused but delighted by the possibility of extended family, Dart travels to her grandmother’s stately Gilded Age mansion on Amelia Island for answers, just in time to stake a claim on an unusual inheritance: an alligator farming empire.
Her arrival at Greer House isn’t everything she hoped. Without warning, Dart finds herself in fierce competition with her grandmother’s arrogant heir apparent, and tensions rise as threats escalate on one of the farms. More unsettling is her hostile grandmother’s fanatical belief that the danger stems from a curse; according to legend, a larger-than-life alligator hunted down by a bloodthirsty ancestor haunts the family. Yet Dart can’t deny that the farm’s alligators hiss only at Greers, or that a shadowy figure creeps through the mansion’s halls.
As Dart uncovers the truth about her violent birthright, she faces a terrible choice: accept her place in her family’s grim legacy or forge a new path by slaying a different beast entirely.
