By Lee Smith

Half New Orleans, half Caribbean island, Key West is not like anywhere else in the South. In fact, Key West is not like anywhere else on earth. Truly, it’s another country. You feel different the minute you get off the plane—happy-go-lucky! Younger! There’s a sense of freedom, of possibility. “Conch Republic” announces the airport sign, and you’ll see those “Conch Republic” flags everyplace—flying from the backs of bicycles, scrawled on walls and sidewalks—for the citizens of this unique republic prize personal freedom above all. This is the place where you come to be yourself, whoever you may be, or the place where you come to figure that out. Suddenly, you’re surrounded by brightness: the lush vegetation; the colorful houses, stores, and clothing; the luminous, ever-changing sea and sky. You feel as if you’ve been living in an old black-and-white photograph. You’ve got a spring in your step as you hail a pink cab. Key West is magic. But is it Southern?

Well, sure it is. As the guidebooks endlessly proclaim, it’s the “southernmost”…everything! Literally the southernmost point of the continental United States (Cuba is about ninety miles thataway), Key West boasts the southernmost guesthouse, the southernmost motel, the southernmost Laundromat. Key West is the ultimate, the apogee of “Southern.” Just look: All the houseplants that we grow in pots back in North Carolina are trees here in Key West’s jungly landscaping, with its rattling palms, orchids, and garish bougainvillea. Here, Charleston’s architecture has reached a Gothic apotheosis, the white gingerbread trim on all the houses morphing into fanciful carved mermaids, lizards, fish, dogs, you name it.

Key West’s rich history dates from the sixteenth century, when Ponce de León first found human bones and named the place Cayo Hueso, or “bone island.” It includes pirates, presidents, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, dreamers, adventurers, and individualists of every kind. Key West prizes its Civil War forts and sites, its aquarium and Butterfly & Nature Conservatory, its nearby mangrove swamps and Dry Tortugas National Park, plus its extraordinary maritime, artistic, and literary history. Don’t miss the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum, the Audubon House Gallery, or the Turtle Kraals Museum, and those tall ships over at the old waterfront at the end of Margaret Street.

Key West’s isolation and density of population (25,000 people on an island about four miles long) have also produced a strong sense of community here, like any small Southern town. You have to know your neighbor. Bums and millionaires rub elbows at Pepe’s and know each other’s names. People take care of each other; there’s always some kind of benefit going on. Walking down Duval Street, I notice a hand-lettered sign at Salsa Loco restaurant: “Please come in for dinner, Nancy has to pay for 2 crowns.” Jimmy Buffett was recently in town, giving a free concert for his Margaritaville employees, their families, and old friends.

Real characters abound, and everybody has got a story, anyplace you go. Boy, have they got a story! The old guy who sits down next to you in the Internet café, for instance, with the giant bird on his shoulder, or the tattooed girl on the other side, wiping her tears on her scarf as she types. It’s hard to concentrate on an e-mail to your kids with her weeping and that parrot screaming, “Go to hell, I say. Go to hell!” The attractive maid in your hotel used to be a man, back in Ohio. The guy who lives next door to your rented cottage is a professional sword swallower, performing down on the Mallory dock every evening at sunset. He’s straight out of Flannery O’Connor.

Writers, like me, love Key West. I first came here fifty years ago with my parents, staying at the Blue Marlin Motel—along with Tony Curtis, Cary Grant, and all the other cast members of Operation Petticoat, which was then being filmed on a pink submarine out in the harbor. We were the only “regular people,” as my mother put it, staying there. We had simply lucked out, driving down from Virginia and checking into the last available room by chance. My mother was in heaven, being the only person I have ever known who had an actual subscription to the National Enquirer, which we pored over every week back home. Mama went around Key West in high-heel sandals, with a red hibiscus in her hair.

My father was sometimes mistaken for F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he resembled, and whose glamorous life was the exact opposite of Daddy’s, just as Key West was the opposite of Grundy, Virginia, the coal-mining town where we lived. We came to Key West because Daddy had been stationed here in the Navy, and now he was recovering from a nervous breakdown, as they called it then. So this trip was a kind of geographical cure, prescribed by a doctor. And it worked. Daddy went home refreshed and ran his dime store for the rest of his life.

Key West was magic, as it has always been for me on subsequent trips, way too many to count. I came here with my college girlfriends, then with my first husband and our little boys. We stayed at a renovated cigar-makers compound, while their daddy went bonefishing on the flats. I have come to visit good friends, on solo getaways to write, sometimes to participate in the extraordinary Key West Literary Seminars, and on countless January escapes with my husband, Hal Crowther, usually bringing my beloved son Josh along. Josh, who waged a heroic battle with schizophrenia, adored Key West, where he felt right at home. He made friends everyplace and played piano in bars all over town. We never missed our annual sunset sail on the giant schooner Western Union. Now the sunset sail is always a treasured ritual for us to remember Josh, who died of a heart attack five years ago.

We’ll do all our favorite things: spend a day at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, with the great earthen fort in the background, surrounded by its moat, while on the beach children shriek, well-oiled bodies glisten, and gulls soar as the little waves race onto the sand between the stone jetties and great rocks. Other people are picnicking or napping or playing chess or lounging in the shade beneath the blowing casuarina trees. You feel very European here, as if you are in an Impressionist painting. We’ll have café con leche at Five Brothers; lunch outside at Blue Heaven, with those ubiquitous chickens pecking at our feet; drinks at Louie’s Backyard, the most beautiful bar in the world, hanging out over the water. You can watch stingrays move across the ocean floor. I’ll spend a morning writing in Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden down Free School Lane, several acres of jungle and art where I have written chunks of many books and stories over the years.

Mainly we’ll walk, because we know that anywhere we walk in Key West we’ll see something arresting, something beautiful, or mysterious, or intriguing—an open door, a glimpse of light and patio beyond, with piano music and laughter floating out on the soft air. Everything comes together for me here in Key West, in image after image: my beautiful young mother, with that red hibiscus in her hair; my little boys playing in the sand at Higgs Beach; palm fronds rattling against the wooden shades during hundreds of nights in rented rooms, with a rooster crowing someplace nearby; and the schooner Western Union heading out to sea across a glorious red sunset.