To all of my regular readers, thank you. We have hung in there.
This is still a personal journal, but with a new twist. I have joined a writer’s group. I never thought this would be possible here in the tropics. I am grateful. Once a week I get to meet with other writers and artists. We have discussions about the how to get our work out there.
Continue reading I’m PregnantOut in the swamp, in Baldwin, Florida, under the earth, by a body of water, lay the bones of black men. Stolen from the streets of Jacksonville. Killed by vicious, backwoods moonshiners. Men who believed black people were like animals. Convinced they were animals. Put on this earth to be supportive of them. To provide a service; be it barking to protect, pulling a plow, or a source of transportation.
If they were of no use any longer. You kill ’em.
Now some people think killin means shootin. Not thinking, that if you want to kill a man, at an illegal whiskey operation, you don’t want to create an explosive sound. One that would draw attention to your egregious deed. You can slit their throat. Shove their face in the convenient mud. Suffocating their life’s energy. Laugh at their struggle. Why deprive yourself of the entertainment?
You could drown them in the creek and feed them to the gators. Save the time of diggin a grave. And you know those white, backwoods moonshiners didn’t do any digging. It would be a good guess those demoralized, threatened, tortured, helpless men, dug their own graves. Their flesh and bones long ago decayed. Now consumed by the swamp ooze that abounds in Florida.
Stagnant – missing – lost.
But all of this is an educated guess. We don’t know exactly who or how all of this happened. Pure evil murder.
But be sure it happened.
I am a Cracker by Birth – A Redneck by Default and a Peace Activist through reading, writing and education.
Happy New Year
Did the statues need to be removed? - Yes
Will it bring peace to Jacksonville – No
Black and White Black and White Black and White Black and White Black and White
Black in White White in Black Black in White White in Black Black in White White in Black
In 100 years, the population of Jacksonville is going to be people of color.
The question is….What will we fight about then?
Yet another peace and serenity debacle. This looks like death and destruction to some gringos. OMG
This pic is from home. I don’t surf fish there anymore either. It’s just too much. But that’s because people fish with four to eight rod and reels. Put there lines in, back from the tide. They try to tell me how to fish. Another OMG.
My husband was fishing on the beach in Potrero. He had a Jack on the line. His earlier catch were laying on the beach. He was picturing handing the fish in to the local ladies. He could see their smiles already.
When he landed the Jack, he looked where his fish had been.They were gone. Rooster asked a Tico man, “What happened to my fish?”
Some gringo stopped and threw them back in the water. WTF
That’s not the only crazy thing that has happened to us here while surf fishing. And if I went surf fishing today there would be some new craziness.
You travel two thousand miles to surf fish in peace and it ain’t going to happen. It use to be wonderful. But now there are people here who have a vision for Costa Rica. And they are going to make you do it their way.
NOT
This person (the fish savior) probably had all of the trees cut down on a lot to build themselves a huge house. And he probably has a cement pond. And he probably eats fish in restaurants.
So now we are going to have to get some sort of a water vehicle to get away from these people. Not unlike Amelia.
Today I surf.
Merry Christmas
*I do not write this blog to attract readers. I have no idea of making money. This is a private journal. I write and write. I look back. I like it.
I do prefer to live where there are no amenities. Where the electricity cuts off all of the time. Where there are few restaurants. Few people. Bad roads.
I prefer places that are paradise and others think they are hell. Because that’s when they are paradise.
Once a place is paradise to others, it is hell to me.
I’m not fighting – I’m running
Civilization is traumatizing ~
These are Whitehouse/Westside – Riverside ladies. My relatives and ancestors.
From the baby Suzanne, in her mother Naomi’s lap. To her mother Nell Sallas who came out of the woods and moved uptown to Riverside. To her mother Mary Elizabeth Lowe to her mother Eliza Parrish Lowe. Five generations of Westside girls.
Nell was a quiet lady. Like my grandmother, her sister. Stoics.
As a small child, I played Bingo with those two at the Jacksonville Trail Riders, on Halesema Rd. The bingo hall resembled a military bunker. I had actually forgotten about those excursions, until now. Old memories resurface. They began the games with a prayer and a bowed head. This was part of my introduction to the world of Baptists. We were Catholic. The neighbors were pagans as they were not a part of the One Holy Apostolic Church and we were unsaved because the pagans thought that we did not know that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. That’s what the neighborhood kids explained to me as we raced our stingray bikes. My mother reiterated the pagan concept as we passed the little corner church. I asked questions. I wanted to know.
Continue reading Whitehouse/Westside
The Westside – Blair Rd.
In Jacksonville if you head west out Normandy Blvd, you will cross a line of demarcation. A boundary, a separation, a distinction.
The people that grew up in this area know that border. As you cross Fouraker Rd. you are on different terrrain than the other areas of Jacksonville. The land has now been quartered and re-quartered. Subdivisions have been built on what was once sprawling pasture land.
It is no longer recognizable as the majestic acreage that it once was.
Cattle grazed under massive oaks. They lumbered to the creek for their daily water. They gave milk and beef, complimantary to the garden vegetables. Biscuits were a staple. No one knows biscuits like people who were raised on the Westide.
Even in my life time it was not uncommon to see someone traveling on horse. ( That was me! )
Many of us, whose family’s have been there since the 1840’s know we have a different history.
Peculiar personal histories.
Continue reading The Family Farm
A typical central nervous system.
I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Stories Old and Cold 1939
The priest was serving Mass
Kyrie Eleison Kyrie Eleison
No one heard them enter
They marched down the center aisle
The candles flickered
Pennies for the poor
Our Lady of the Angels was under siege
The cloth covered men were hunting
They passed under the Stations of the Cross.
Everyone held their breath
It was dangerous to be Catholic in the South
No words were said
The KKK left as they had entered, silently
They later found their prey
On Detroit St.
They drug him out of the house
It was a public display
He was in his underwear
Fashionable Tidy Whities
They beat his back and buttocks
Until the threads of his underwear were imbedded in his skin
No hanging
Just asphalt
This poem is about a young man who was Catholic. Living in Jacksonville, Florida. He had an extramarital affair and the KKK were going to set him straight. Teach him a lesson. My mother, who was 11 at this time, relayed the story of them coming into the church. My aunt would tell about his beating and the threads of his underwear being stuck into his skin. I researched underwear. And yes, they had just become fashionable.
The KKK chose to beat him and leave him laying in the street. Down the road on Old Kings Road they were prancing on their horses in full regalia. Lynching.
I do see this as an example of white privilege. I am beginning to understand through the course of conversation that those words have a different meaning to different people. It triggers alien internal contexts inside of us. Pulling dormant concepts to the surface.
I am a Cracker/by birth – A Redneck by Default – And a peace activist through reading, writing and education.
