Como Las Vacas – Live Like The Cows – This is a Costa Rican dicho. Near and dear to my heart. I was raised with cattle. A North Florida, educated Cracker. I once lived in a cow pasture. I like to live close to the the earth/with nature. I slow down. I turtle trot. I swim like a fish unchased. I swim like a fish not hungry. It’s not about me. I am blessed. Pura Vida……amigos….
Choose your path – with a moral compass.
Good morning y’all. It’s 3:30. A good time to write. I have been absent, due to the fact that people were reading this blog.
And AI’s interference. They are demeaning. I get enough of that walking in the street. I don’t need to be bothered, and I don’t want to be told by them about my writing.
I know people are loving it. They’re writing books left and write. This is dangerous. The dumb down of America.
Ok, enough of that.
I am going to have to re-familiarize myself with my blog. An entire gallery widget was removed. And I don’t know what’s happening with my photos, but they keep tagging them screen shot. That might mean that someone has stolen them and it looks like they are the photographer of my photos. That’s what I get for being so damn good.
I am full of complaints.
My family….hahaha. Now that people actually read this shitty blog. I have to think about what I say differently. Yes, I will be censoring my mind. A self monitoring, censor. Not AI coming at me. Go figure. – Me censoring. This is a bold statement I just made and possibly untrue. As some of my stories might be. Not all, but some.
It’s a new start. Difficult, but worth it. Many of the best things in life are earned. Trudging the road to our happy destiny.
Putting this post together is difficult. I have to read. I have to think. It’s good exercise.
By the way. Have you ever tried Pilates?
Noir – are you out there, buddy.
—– add on —- I’m searching for my categories – Dates and years. AI has prompted me to choose The New You. I guess they mean the new me. noOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
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Yet another coincidence. Opening my blog, this prompt was directed at me.
I feel like I need to say something about the statue being removed from Confederate/Springfield Park. I had no idea this was taking place. I think many people didn’t know. There was no uproar like the recent past of Mayor Curry’s term in office. Recently people fought hard to remove other statues honoring the Confederacy.
Some have compared it to honoring Hitler. That got responses. “How dare you!” But truth be known the whites were fighting for the right to enslave a race of people. To maintain the right to treat them like animals. To own them. To make money off of their labor. To violently whip them. To rape the women. To believe in White Supremacy. That is like Hitler. He believed he was of a superior race. Well, guess what? He wasn’t. He lost the war. His beliefs were wrong and the opposition prevailed.
Jacksonville is a hard headed city. Severely slow to change. For the most part it is Baptist. Evangelist. Continuing to boil the soup of racism. People will deny it – but
The statue needed to come down.
It was said, that maybe it could be placed in a cemetery, by the graves of soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
I thought of Gravely Hill where my ancestors are buried. Wonderful, historical, people who were branded miscreants an evil by a local writer. I was shocked. One Tommy gun toting gangster does not define the whole group. Not to mention, they were people of their time. This cat might be a bit prejudice as he touted his father as being like Jimmy Carter after having told a story numerous time about his father enjoying the story of a black man being killed. That is not like Jimmy Carter. Sorry.
We twist the past into the present. We color it with whatever Crayola we choose.
The statue is a woman holding a baby. She portrays the mother of the south. The Confederate South.
For one thing, that concrete Southern lady could not go there because the section my ancestors are buried in is historical. It is a part of Jacksonville public land. It’s on land that was once a plantation. It is as Southern as it gets. They were all Crackers by birth.
I cringe to think of that statue being there further prompting the fictitious idea that there was something good about slavery and white dominance.
But many do not see it like that. They continue to romance the idea of the south, with our Confederate Jasmine.
We have a distinct culture. Saying hello, nodding, hugging, fighting, and drinking sweet tea. No matter if we only went to the fifth grade or have a PhD. We are part of the United States. And that encompasses a large land mass. Separated by our cultures. In New York they hate the Puerto Ricans. Out west they are still circling the wagons. South West it the whites against the Mexicans. Every division of our country is divided by our pasts. Our culture is disappearing. Along with the statue all of our ways are being erased. And truth be known, there are many things about our way of being that I much prefer over anything northern.
It’s funny, most people that I meet from up North assume because of my Southern drawl, I am uneducated and untravelled. Ugh. Prejudices abound.
A fellow Westsider, portrayed my family as people who are low IQ and mocked our Whitehouse/Westside accent like we are toothless fools. Good Lord. One extreme to another.
We have ALL been through a lot. Things have changed. We were forced to change by affirmative action. We were forced to integrate.
I have beautiful stories of people my age who grew up in this era. I also can tell ugly stories.
Today as I am writing this. Having lived through the 64′ riots. Yes, I was a child but I remember them well. There is no way I am going to portray all of the black people as being good wonderful, minstrels in LaVilla minding their own business and all of the white people as being evil killers. That is a convoluted and twisted image to portray in this day and age. Yes, it will get you attention and sell your books. It will coincide with todays climate of opposition, separation and hate. Why take these painful steps climbing the stairs out of darkness, only for a hand to reach out and push us backwards.
I am for peace.
It’s much more difficult to walk a path of peace. Than to stir the pot of problems.
Take a look at Jacksonville. Because of affirmative action forced on us, fighting and scratching all the way, we have educators, firemen, policemen, city workers, meter readers, electricians, plumbers, who are people of color. We have neighbors of color. Many interracial marriages. ( Which by the way, produce the most beautiful babies you’ve ever seen.) This is not the old south. This is the new south and it’s going to get newer.
With people like Donna Deegan, our mayor, pulling us forward, the change is accelerating. Once again we’re feeling the pain, like babies cutting teeth. But it’s just another progressive step towards equanimity. Jacksonville is growing up.
One day it could very well, ALL be people of color. Does that mean we will all be happy, joyous and free? I don’t think so. People are people.
But in the meantime, I will not participate in the hate and denigration of all white people.
My race is human.
I am a Cracker by Birth / A redneck by default / A peace activist through reading, writing and education.
Celeste knew from the birth of her death, that the family she had been born in to; the home where she had laid in her coffin, was a place of hiding.
Hide in the room. Run. Hide. Hide in the garbage can. The big man was on his way and a wide path had to be cleared.
When she moved to the pines, things changed. She had been brought to a land of violence, and money. Money Money Money.
The Skinny Boy called her from the desert. In a gravelly voice he abrasively, threatened Celeste.
There seemed to be a problem as to who f*cked who. Now, normally it was a matter of who shot who.
“Don’t you be starting rumors.” He threatened.
Then he carried on about his family. Never mind his own moral inventory.
Celeste thought to herself. And then she thought some. More.
One life, born into death.
In the background she could hear his wife. The 1/8 – Of the purple robes.
Celeste laughed.
What else is there to do?
———————————————————————
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.
I graduated with a BFA in figure painting in 1996. When I left the university some teachers were complaining that the students wouldn’t even bother to draw. “Why should we? We can just trace.”
I left the convenience of a studio I had created. I walked away from the world I knew to go surfing and to live in CR. There has been one adventure/blustering sand filled, mud slung piece of hell after another. With rays from heaven piercing the clouds, like arrows, to my soul. And now here I am.
Fish Eye. Looking at the big picture.
I’m looking back. It’s hard to believe.
Continue reading Granny Grunt Goes Fishing
I don’t know.
And neither does anyone else.
I have no clear sense of direction. How could I? One does certain things in life, expecting things to occur. The results of your hard work and perseverance. MML That just doesn’t work for me. I truly have to live my life one day at a time.
It’s 4 in the morning. Once again, I am hitting the road. A ride with a friend, to the airport, to Atlanta, switch luggage. Re-enter the country. On to Jax. Be met by a happy leprechaun who will speak with a brogue and inform us, in a light hearted yet serious manner, the antics, adventures and misadventures, of our island. Amelia.
This has been an extensive stay, here in Surfside, Costa Rica.
I never in my imagination could have come up with the life style that I now lead.
I was taught by the best.
This post is an annual check up of my blog.
Hhhhmmmm. A year ago, I was writing – I felt as if the flesh was being torn from the bones of my soul.
I can read that poem and remember. Oh, it was awful.
I came here to Potrero, thinking I was going to help, the kid, go to the University. Nada, no way Jose. This boy is going to swing a machete the rest of his life. – Okay – that took a while to process – to come down from. What a crock of mierda. – Who knows, the many piles of manure that I have stepped in, have become fertilizer in my life.
Continue reading Annual Blog Check Up
I do not understand the New Gringos. But I have witnessed it over and over. No desire to assimilate into the culture of the country.
A ride to the beach use to be like a dream and now it’s a nightmare.
I don’t care to elaborate on this freaky manner that tourism and immigration (progress) has caused.
After surviving my life’s traumas I woke up to an unrecognizable world. But I am not “woke”. According to Trump the KKK are good people. Homeless people are sleeping on the sidewalks, dying from phentanol, and some people think all white people are bad and all black people are good.
I give up. I surrender. It’s best for me to work to have a good day and be kind to the people in front of me.
To provide details of the misery I have created for myself, would be stirring the cauldron. I can’t straighten this world out. Kimberly and Kristy are behaving like mean girls, but chances are they are oblivious to their ignorance. And Ellen can remember when. I do too. The change is horrific. The people on the beach are being bull dozed over. Pura vida.
I know my heart. I am not greedy or jealous of anyone. I don’t even understand those two character defects at the moment. I can’t imagine being angry at some poor woman trying to feed her kids. Or hurt some child; not wanting them to experience a lunch, in the school hours. I’m not fearful. That’s the worst. And the best.
The answer is meditation.