Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: Straw Hat

By Roger Owens

Jasper, Florida, is a little hole in the road near the confluence of Highways 41 and 129 in North Florida, in the shady area somewhere between Live Oak Florida and Statenville, Georgia. It is the county seat of Hamilton County, and today it owns the dubious distinction as the home of Hamilton County Correctional Institution, the site of recent gang riots. Hamilton Correctional has boosted the population of Jasper, as of the last census, to the astonishing number of four thousand, five hundred, and forty-six souls; I don’t know whether the inmate population is counted as real people or not. The growth is astonishing because, back in the 1960s, the population of this backwater was around six hundred. I know for a fact, however, that the black population in what might have been considered the “greater Jasper area” in today’s parlance was not counted back then; Jasper was a “sundown town.” Anyone driving in to town on County Road 6, from east or west, would see signs that stated, in plain block letters, “NIGGER. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE.” The black population of the town of Jasper, Florida, was, precisely, zero.
    Furthermore, though my immediate family lived on the east coast of Florida, ten minutes across the Indian River from the beach, you could not swing a dead cat in the town of Jasper at that time without hitting one of my relatives. My great uncle John Dedge was the mayor. He also owned the furniture store and the movie house. His son, my uncle John Junior, sold boiled peanuts on the street in front of the movie house. He was young enough to be my cousin, and we used to hang out when my brothers and I would spend summers there. Once, some black boys, no more than ten or twelve, had the temerity to be selling boiled peanuts on the same street. Like John Junior, they had cardboard flats they held in front of their chests with a strap over their shoulders, with little beer-bags of peanuts stacked in rows, like the cigarette girls we used to see in the movies. On this occasion, John told me to hold the flat for him, and took his soda, which we could get for free from the concession stand in the lobby because Uncle John owned the place, and walked over to the smaller of the two black boys. He dumped the soda into the boy’s peanut box, then smashed his fist down into the box, scattering the boy’s peanuts across the sidewalk. He told the terrified little boy that the next time it would be his face. I was surprised when the black boy didn’t cry. No stranger to the cruelty of older boys, I would have cried.
    My uncle T.W. ran the local sawmill and was the only Dedge who employed black men. That was acceptable; the sawmill was on “the ridge,” and well outside the city limits. Uncle Guy, the youngest of the Dedge brothers, had the Shell gas station on the east side of town. It sported the old gas pumps that had little glass gumball-thingies on the side with what looked like the tails of a barroom dart that spun around as the gas flowed, which supposedly proved to the skeptical traveler that the gas was actually flowing, and he wasn’t being cheated. Trust in those days was a commodity in short supply.
    The black traveler in particular had reason to be concerned; had he suspected he was being cheated there would have been absolutely nothing he could do about it. There was something in those days called the Green Book. It was a publication for black vacationers and travelling salesmen and preachers that told of places he could expect to be welcomed, and places he could not. Jasper was listed prominently in the latter category. Had Uncle Guy been able to cheat a black man, he would have done so without compunction. He would in fact have bragged about it to his friends and relatives; it was at times the subject of conversation at Sunday dinner. The separation of the races was rationalized in various creative and interesting ways. If a black man could not be caught in town after dark at the risk of his life, why, a white man had better not go down to the black bar down the dirt road to Shaky Pond on a Saturday night. If he did and was killed, why, that was his own fault for going to a nigger bar in the first place, wasn’t it? It happened from time to time; white men lusted after black women fairly often, and if they were poor crackers and drunk they might be stupid or smitten enough to wind up floating in Shaky Pond with their throats cut. The whites swam in Roberts Pond, just east of the city limits; the blacks swam in the much larger Shaky Pond another mile or two towards Jacksonville, an eternity away by the Atlantic Ocean. Not one person from Jasper, black or white, rich or poor, had ever seen the ocean. Any ocean.

Sunday dinner was usually at Aunt Sue’s house, which sat just to the west of Guy’s gas station, where Highway 41 met County Road 6. It was a two-story white clapboard cracker home presided over by Sue, our spinster aunt, whose left leg was shorter than her right, for which reason she wore on her left foot a huge, clunky black shoe raised several inches so she could walk more or less normally – more less, in reality, than more. The kitchen was huge, taking up nearly half of the ground floor, with counters along the back and one side with enormous, deep porcelain sinks and a monstrous enameled gas stove with six burners, an oven, a broiler, a fryer, a griddle, a Dutch oven, and a clock on the back panel that governed the production of prodigious amounts of exquisite Southern cuisine. The kitchen had once accommodated what had been a plantation, complete with slaves, which had produced cotton, tobacco, soybeans, and corn, enough to feed half the Chinese Army, which, we were assured as children, was truly gargantuan, albeit somehow created from all those starving Chinese children we heard so much about. From the windows in front of the sinks protruded a tin trough, long unused, which had once transported the considerable remains of these remarkable dinners into the pig pen that once existed directly outside. As the relatively civilized offspring of 1960s suburban America, my brothers and I often wondered, in private of course, what the incredible stench and flies from those pig pens must have been like.
    My grandpa, A.W. Dedge, and his several brothers (John, T.W., and Guy), their sisters (Sue and Mavel), and their wives, including Grandma Lola Dedge and T.W.s’ wife Cecil –yes, Cecil – and their sons John Junior and James, and all the rest of my family there in North Florida, were, every one, good Southern Baptists. They were good Southern Democrats. And every one of the men were proud, card-carrying members of the KKK. To a man they were hard-assed, gap-toothed, tobacco-spitting redneck farmers; to a man they were vile, unrepentant racists; and to a man they wore straw cowboy hats. Oh, and they had the pointy-toed boots for riding horses, which none of them ever did; they had the peg-legged jeans with the round imprint on their back pockets of their Red Man and Yellow Dog chaw tobacco tins; they wore their button-down plaid shirts with the false pearl snaps on the cuffs. But the straw hats were their real badges of honor. These days it is much more common to see Mexicans and Seminole Indian cowboys wearing those hats, but back then those hats were the flag, the emblem, their very own swastikas, of white Southern supremacy. I loved these men, they were my family; but as I grew into a “modern” young wannabe revolutionary punk with long hair, my weed in a leather bag at my waist and my faux attitude on my shoulder, I swore to God I would never, ever wear a God-damned straw cowboy hat.

Truth to tell, I had never worn hats much except for ball caps, first to prevent my motorcycle helmet from tearing out my hair, and later, when I got into the pest control business, to prevent the straps of my filter mask from doing the same. But later, as my photo above shows, I got into the habit of wearing canvas Panama Jack hats. And as I got older and began paying for my years as a beach-loving surfer boy and began financing my dermatologist’s BMWs, I went looking for more wide-brimmed such hats to help protect me from the brutal Florida sun, but they were not to be found. So it was that on a visit to Saint Augustine my wife spotted a Stetson Cool-Aire wide-brimmed straw hat. She said I was being foolish; I should try it on. And I thought, why not? Racists these days don’t even wear hats, they shave their heads and tattoo real swastikas on the bare skin of their stupid, ignorant pates. And the Stetson fit. I was lost. I paid sixty-five dollars to give up a life-long promise that no longer made any sense.
    It all came together with my third straw hat, a Genuine Panama Straw Hat, which, by the way, are actually made in Ecuador. I kid you not. They use some special kind of straw or palm that is uniquely suitable for the softest, most durable hats. Wearing it in our local liquor store, I asked the cute girl behind the counter if she liked my new hat – my third straw cowboy hat, I told her. I’m old enough now to be able to flirt with cute young girls and be considered harmless; I’m not sure if that pleases me or not. I told her the short version of why I had never worn a straw cowboy hat, and it was only when she said, “Well I’m glad you aren’t like them!” that I realized she was colored.

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens