Diane Roberts is Professor of English at the University of Alabama and a commentator for NPR and the BBC.

Prologue: Debatable Land It's Tallahassee. It's Friday afternoon. It's November 17, 2000, ten days after the not-election. The votes -- chads dimpled, dangling, hinged, hanging, or pregnant -- still sit in boxes. The Motel 6 still declares NO VACANCY. News anchors still drink Bombay Sapphire martinis in the Doubletree, bugging the bartenders: "Could I have extra olives? A bowl would be good." Ex-secretaries of state still eat shrimp and grits at the Cypress Restaurant. Television trucks, their satellite dishes pointed at the cold heaven, still clog Duval Street. Walgreens is still sold out of collapsible umbrellas. Home Depot is still sold out of extension cords. Florida is still the center of the universe.I'm walking around downtown, acting like a tourist in the place I was born, hoping maybe I'll run into Jesse Jackson or Warren Christopher or Tipper Gore (incognito in Audrey Hepburn sunglasses) or just somebody who feels like sucking down a couple of cosmos at Chez Pierre. Things have gone quiet. The "Sore Loserman" sign-toting rent-a-rabble have decamped to the high ground of the Holiday Inn. The lawyers are holed up in their offices navigating stacks of statutes, Lexis printouts, briefs, and mostly empty Pizza Hut boxes. The judges have disappeared behind the silver doors of the Florida Supreme Court, pondering their next Delphic pronouncement. The whole world is watching. There's just not much to see.I pick my way over black TV cables, thick as a convention of king snakes, behind the New Capitol, reaching past the fountain that should have water splashing over white stone except it's been broken and dry since the 1980s. The State of Florida is too cheap to fix it. But beneath my feet, down through the concrete, down below the blanket of red clay on the hill, underground rivers course through limestone passages: you wouldn't have to dig far to hit water. Make a natural fountain. The Floridan Aquifer on parade. It would even be free.I guess the governor and the legislature have bigger mullet to fry. Aesthetics has never been much of a priority around here. Every year legislators ritually complain about the James Rosenquist mural on the ground floor of the capitol: Why the giant orange peels? And a rock stuck to a rope? And a crab wearing a cowman's hat?Political sensitivity isn't much of a priority, either. Unlike Alabama, Florida still flies its Confederate flag. The Second National, also known as the Stainless Banner, flaps near the defunct fountain along with the lions and castles of Leon and Castile, the Fleur de Lys, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes, emblems of the sovereign powers that have presided over Florida since 1513. Rumors run around Tallahassee that the governor would like to haul the Second National down and pack it off to the Museum of Florida History, where no one would notice it. A Rebel banner outside the statehouse in the year 2000 is embarrassing. The governor's had enough trouble with African American voters, too, ever since the 1994 campaign, when some reporter asked him what he planned to do for black people and he replied, "Nothing." Things went downhill from there: Nine months ago he unilaterally ended state affirmative action.But it's an election year; he can't get rid of the thing now. The Sons of Confederate Veterans would have a hissy fit, white rural Republicans big on states' rights would get mad, and everybody would accuse him of sucking up to people who'd be about as likely to vote for a member of the Bush family as burst into a spontaneous rendition of "Dixie."You can feel the governor's pain. Here in forward-looking, twenty-first-century Florida we don't like to be reminded of slavery days. Florida had plantations, sure, and Jim Crow and race riots and lynchings (lots of lynchings); Florida still has white guys with "Forget, HELL!" mud flaps and "Heritage Not Hate" bumper stickers, but Florida isn't Al