———————————————————————
It was about fifteen years ago, maybe longer when the goat, a neighbor, told me about Black Bottom. We were standing in his mother’s driveway, surrounded by moss and azaleas. The conversation was wrapped up. I had to leave. It was at this interim that my friend told me about Black Bottom. Black men being kidnapped – made to work on shine stills, believing they would be returned home. But they weren’t. They never returned home. They were killed. Never to be seen by their loved ones again. It left me numb. Puzzled. Wondering. What the —— ? I went into a state of shock.
I have heard and seen many disturbing things in my life. This was another one. How shattering are these words to my mind. It’s a hammer. A sledge hammer. Hammering.
Disturbing and nefarious conditions can rule a man’s mind. A lust for power, no longer wanting to be the gum stuck on the bottom of a man’s shoe. Sitting in front of a five and dime, in a rocker. The sun shining, the trees shading the park. And the gum growing grittier and dirtier. Dirty enough to want change the situation.
I’m a fifth generation Westsider.
Some of my ancestors have been moonshiners. All were farmers and dairy people. Some were meaner than others. They were all racists and all capable of killing. Some had made their way from Suwannee County. Those were the true pine people. The bottom of the barrel. There’s no one lower than the people of the pines. Only blacks. In a poor white’s mind.
They lived together, worked together. It was all unusual and peculiar. But people wanted work. No one wants to starve.
Black Bottom was not something I talked about to anyone, There are many things that have been told to me, or I over heard. But nothing like that. What do you do with that kind of information?
Then one day, years later, I stumbled onto a writing. It mentioned – Black Bottom.
Black Bottom – a specific place. A creek bank along highway ninety.
Jacksonville is a big spread of land.
Its population has always been a high percentage of blacks. They were originially brought here from Senegal Africa as slaves, in 1814 where they continuted to worked as slaves until 1865.
My great- grandmother Elizabeth Peterson Lowe was Scotch Irish, born on the other side of town. Not by the Kingsley Plantation, but on a dusty trail in the woods. In the pines. She was born in 1861 the year the civil war began, in the family farm house on Blair Road. In what’s known as Whitehouse/ Westside. The far west of Jacksonville.
‘There are three distinct divisions of the Westside. From the elite wealth of the St.Johns/ Ortega River – the people that I went to school with – to the dusty trails and cedar swamp of Whitehouse. My mother went to Whitehouse Elementary and also St. Paul’s in Riverside. Many of my family still live on Blair Rd.
And there like everywhere else, people are just being typical people. Everybody wants. And they want more. And they’ll go to great lengths to get it.
Cummer is a name we’re all familiar with. They made their way in the logging industry. But they weren’t Southerners. They came from down from Michigan. They weren’t part of the poor immigrants making their way to Florida through South Georgia. Feeding on swamp cabbage. They had their sabal palms graced on their lawns as they should be. They were the top.The bosses.The ones who gave the orders to the turpentine workers, logging men and all involved. If you ever saw a man with extra long thumbs, you knew he had either been kidnapped off the highway to work in the pines or had been hung by his digits, as a punishment. And would be forever deformed, marked and handicapped.
The people who ran the pine tree industry were brutal people. I’m sure some weren’t as mean as others. Like the ladies.There were the debutante bridge parties. They had their China tea cups filled with the finest homemade liquor. Many of them, a part of Carrie Nation’s failed, nobal social experiment. This is the Wealthy Westside.
The middle starts at Roosevelt Bvld. And ends at Cahoon Rd. They are simply the people, in the middle. I don’t know much as much about them.
And you know the little Whitehouse/Westside ladies dipping snuff and snapping peas had their hooch in a tin can. – Their elements of escape were not a game. It didn’t hurt to carry a , small of course, iron skillet in your knitting bag.
Prohibition years were 1920 – 1933. Just go ahead and tell people they can’t do something, like drink a beer. And see what happens. The wealthy will create drinks so expensive, there couldn’t possibly be anything illegal about that. And do you really think any of them went to jail for their offenses.
No one ever saw or heard a thing.
The Hyslers are an old Jax family that came from Jones County and settled in Whitehouse. Many are still there.
My family, the Peterson, Lowes were their neighbors.
A close neighbor being two or three miles down the road.
Both families have been there for two hundred years, mas o menos.
Now, my people were Irish settlers, farmers and gamblers. They were Catholics with holy cards and crucifixes, a whiskey at five o’clock. A bit off beat with the general population of the neighborhood, who were hard shell Baptists, bringing in the sheeves. We were heathens and they were pagans.
And their drinks were, well, let’s just say they didn’t drink.
All these ole Jax folks are now laying dead, somewhere.
Last year, meeting with a journalist/writer/ not historian — my ancestors laying in their graves in the Historic Gravely Hill section of Riverside Memorial were called miscreants. All of them. Lumped together and thrown into the barrel of devious despair.
I was shocked. But before I could be truly shocked, I had to look up the word miscreant.
a person who behaves badly in a way that breaks the law –
Ok – I might be a miscreant, but I am not a criminal. First. You have to be caught and then you have to be convicted, to qualify. And even then you could be innocent.
Some of you here to day might be. No worries – I’m not going to ask you to raise your hand.
And this fictional story that I have written is just that. Fiction.
And even if stories are printed in the news. Journalized. They could still be untrue.
Today, we live in a time of gotcha journalism.
And there they all lay, my ancestors. Dead. In death we are all on the same level. Dead.
No one cares who you are or where you came from. Sometimes your life just becomes a story. Open for criticism from the puritanical, to the worshipers of evil.
As of today, I am not dead and I do care. That’s why I want tell this story the best I can.
Black Bottom, it is at the nadar of our collective conciousness, of Jackonville Florida. All of Jacksonville.
That is Black Bottom.
Woe – O Black Bottom
The earth shook the bones loose. Over the course of passing years and many hurricanes,
Irma had been the one. She sent the normally sedintery waters rushing. The trees bent and the river rose. All human life had run for cover. The animals were the first to evacuate. Mother Nature was at work. The sediment, soaked and satureated, pulled the mud from the bones. They loosened. Bit by bit they rose The fast moving water sucked them to the surface. They saw the sunlight on the day the storm settled. In the eye they winked. Finally. We are here once again.
