Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Chain Gang

By Roger Owens

The summer I was ten, I was riding with my grandpa, Amon William Dedge, in his brand-new F-100 Ford pickup truck along County Road 6, headed from Uncle Guy’s Shell gas station west towards the town of Jasper, Florida. At that time Old Red – as the pickup came to be known – was not old, but still Ford eggshell white, not the dull red it would be for many years after, red being the cheapest color you could buy to paint a truck back then. Its wide expanse of hood the day of our drive reflected the unforgiving Southern sun into our eyes as it descended, in infinitesimal increments, toward the distant, cool dream of evening. On either side of the flat, straight, jet-black brush stroke of the newly paved highway, fields of corn, soybeans, and tobacco baked their way ever so languidly up into the steaming July air. The deafening screams of cicadas filled the cab of the truck with their incredible hissing, a high-pitched screeching so ubiquitous that it became a silence more profound than that found in any graveyard. Grandpa didn’t much care for small talk, and, little chatterbox that I was, I had learned that if I wanted to stay on his good side, I would curb my wandering tongue or get left behind on trips like this one. I liked having Grandpa to myself; as one of four brothers it was all too easy to get lost in the crowd. That day was the first time I noticed that I had the same knobby bumps on my wrists that he did. My brothers didn’t have them. I had no idea then that those protruding bones were the early telegraphs of a debilitating arthritis; I thought it was cool that my hands looked the same as his. They made me feel connected, whole, complete.
    We came to a field on our left, south of the road, in which no crop was growing. It was being worked by a gang of men in a long line, chained together at their ankles. They wore blue jeans, but above their waists every man wore a real, sho-’nuff, no-shit, black-and-white-striped prison shirt. What was truly striking was that the prisoners weren’t all one color. Some were black, their skins glistening with sweat that seemed to stand out so much more clearly on their foreheads than on those of their paler counterparts, whose faces betrayed them by the flaming red burns that I knew would soon be blistered, peeling agonies by the time their present situation allowed them to return to the dubious shelter of the local work farm.
    The men were chopping at the hard-baked soil with hoes, shovels, and heavy pick-axes called mattocks. I wasn’t stupid; I knew what a mattock was. And I damned well knew what a chain gang was, too. But never before had I actually seen one; nor had I considered that blacks and whites would be chained in the same line. Such things were just not done. Blacks and whites went to different schools, shopped at different stores, drank at different water fountains, and did their private business in different bathrooms – even in my own, progressive home town of Eau Gallie, down on the east coast, where things were different. But not different enough, I see now, to live up to the Dream of Martin Luther King Jr., to make this world a place where our children would be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. The simple fact was: I was afraid of black men. I had been told every disturbing, disgusting, or sordid thing about them that the worst kind of racist could tell a kid. And the idea that if I screwed up and ended up on a chain gang, I was just as likely to be chained to one as not, terrified me. Until just now, as I write this, I never realized that is how I really felt at the age of ten. I was afraid.

A young white man in peg-legged Levis, scuffed Frye cowboy boots, a crisp, white, long-sleeved western shirt buttoned at the wrists, and with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun slung casually over his left elbow, tipped his Stetson hat to Grandpa as we slid to a stop beside him on the gritty shoulder of the road. “Afternoon, sir.” A tiny cloud of dust followed us, swirling about the young man’s legs before falling back, unnoticed, to the immortal earth. Grandpa touched his own hat in return. “Afternoon.” He tightened his brow a bit and said, “I believe I know your Daddy.” “Oh, yes sir, Deacon Dedge, I know who you are. I attended your Bible class when I was just a young’un.” “So, you’re Alton Duval’s boy, then. Would you be Galen, or Stanton?” “I’m Stanton, sir. Galen’s my older brother.” “I remember Galen,” Grandpa nodded. “Good Bible student. As I recall, you were, too.” The young prison guard straightened a little and smiled at this praise; its like didn’t come often from A.W. Dedge. And Grandpa seemed impressed that this young man remembered him; he had not lived in Jasper regular, as they say, for some time.
    I too was impressed; I had also attended Grandpa’s Bible class, in Key West, Florida, a mere three years before, when I was just seven. I remembered the bluff young offspring of a hard-assed Key West shrimper in the First Baptist Church of Key West, where Amon William Dedge was a resident deacon. A.W. had been such a Bible-thumper then that the kids called him “Amen William” behind his back. I knew him too well; I didn’t have the balls. If he ever found out, there would, as they say, be Hell to pay. We were instructed to learn a single Bible verse; mine was Peter, Chapter 5, Verse 8, which I dutifully delivered verbatim: “Be sober, be vigilant; for your adversary, the Devil, walketh about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” The shrimper’s son was next, but when it came his turn he sat back defiantly and said, “I ain’t gotta do nothin’ you say. Y’ar not my Daddy.” I put my face down on my desk, shaking my head back and forth. No, no, no, I wanted to say, you don’t wanna do that. In an instant Grandpa had snatched that kid over his knee and administered several hard-handed smacks to his rear, smacks I knew from bitter experience hurt like holy Hell. Lifted like a small, insignificant sack of beans to his feet by the scruff of his neck, the sniffling boy stood before a man who was like God Almighty in His righteous wrath. “You gotta do what I say now boy?” The kid stood crying, nodding his head, swearing to be good, but he still didn’t know the verse. Grandpa looked at me, his gaze hard as iron. My memory for written material is excellent; it has never served me better. With terror in my heart, I intoned Verse 9: “Whom resist, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren, that are in the world.” Every child in that class breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“My sister lives down the way, by the Shell station,” Grandpa said, and before he could say more the young man nodded. “Yes sir, Miss Dedge. She was my Sunday school teacher. I know where she lives.” The old clapboard plantation house had recently been knocked down and replaced with a single-story brick ranch with four bedrooms, high ceilings, big windows, and no new-fangled air-conditioning. We were sorry to hear that last bit until our first night sleeping there. In the central hallway, which was wide and even taller than the rooms themselves, was a huge fan that sucked air into the attic and kept the house so cool and pleasant of an evening that we never gave it a second thought. That construction, and the concurrent paving of Route 6, had inexplicably left a gap of ten feet or so between the traditional end of Aunt Sue’s driveway and the new edge of the road. Her 1964 Buick Electra was a boat on wheels, and bottomed out when she tried to cross the rutted dip this gap became after the first good rain. The young guard said that my Grandpa Dedge should immediately forget about the whole problem; he, Stanton Duval, would personally take care of every tiniest needful thing. “So, I can quit worrying about my sister’s car?” Stanton Duval insisted that my grandpa cease and desist any such worries, on the spot. “Well then,” Grandpa said, “I guess I was just done a’worryin’.” He reached down to pull the parking brake lever and hesitated, as if he had thought of one more detail.
    I looked up at the young fellow’s face, which was squinting into the setting sun; he was looking across the field at the chained prisoners. Every one of them looked away and did all they could not to appear like they were hanging on every word. They had been passing the subject of the conversation up and down the rows; I had been watching them doing it. Grandpa said, “I don’t want to cause these boys any trouble.” I was stunned. What more trouble could they possibly have? And the use of “boys” to include white men didn’t escape me either; unless you wanted to fight, grown men called boys were always and only men whose skin held the mark of Cain. Such, apparently, was Grandpa’s view of the worth of a white criminal: no better than a nigger. Stanton Duval appeared to be rather surprised at Grandpa’s statement too. He looked out at the sweating lines of men, black, white, and brown, with eyes whose penetrating black coldness had missed my notice until then, and shook his head. As his hat waved with his head, the sun came and went off his unlined young face, shaven “smooth as a spanked baby’s bottom.” The heavy, black beard-ends shown plainly under his tanned skin.
    “Don’t you worry yourself none about that neither, Deacon.” He broke the arm of his shotgun, as if he were checking the shells of double-ought Buck he knew perfectly well to be there. He raised a hand, seemingly to include the ragged lines of prisoners, the empty field, the productive fields nearby, the blistering sun, the road, Aunt Sue’s house, the whole world. He turned back to “Amen” William Dedge with a smile and said, “These boys…ain’t here to get done.” My blood literally ran cold. This horror never ended?
    Grandpa released the parking brake, which clunked open, touched his hat to Stanton, said “Afternoon,” and let out the clutch to drive away. “Afternoon, Deacon,” Stanton replied, touching his own as the truck moved off. An arrangement had been made. Ties of friendship, favors of faith, prerogatives of prejudice, had been remembered and repaid. When Grandpa and I returned from Jasper, the muddy rut in front of Aunt Sue’s house was perfectly filled with fine stones, and lined with larger stones that had been painted white. True to the word of Stanton Duval, Grandpa never had to worry about that driveway again. I cannot forget it.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens