Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: Paint Cans and Pecans

By Roger Owens

If you head out of Jasper, Florida, going north on State Road 129, before long you will cross the Georgia state line, and pass through the small town of Statenville. As recently as 2010, Statenville boasted a population of just over one thousand souls. Once known as “Troublesome,” Georgia, Statenville is named for Captain James Watson Staten, a Confederate officer who is said to have opened the first store in the town, selling staples like rice, beans, sugar, flour, and coffee to the loggers and turpentiners who “cat-faced” the slash pines for the turpentine, something like how maples are tapped for the sweet sap used for syrup. Turpentining is about the hardest, most dangerous, and least profitable work a man can do; it was mainly done by poor blacks and white men on the run from the law, usually in concert with their production of bootleg liquor.
    If you continue north on 129, also known locally as Echols County Route 100, you will come to a place called Mayday, which makes Statenville look like a metropolis. To this date Mayday is not so much as a “village,” a “township,” or even a “borough.” When I was a boy it was, and remains, nothing more than where the logging road, now known as Howell Road, met the railroad. My uncles and cousins would drive up the logging road to the “ridge” just west of Boggy Bay, one of thousands of such nameless ridges, to cut timber to sell to the passing trains. They would jack up whatever truck they were driving, attach a heavy strap to one of the drive wheels, and use it to run a table saw to cut up the trees they had felled by hand with axes. It was the kind of work that would kill the average city dweller today and was only marginally more profitable than turpentining. My family were hill folk and looked down on anyone so poor as to work the turpentine down on the flats. Being po-assed, dirt-floor crackers themselves, they seemed to look down on an awful lot of people.

One of my uncles, whose name I cannot now recall, ran what was known as the “company store,” down by the railroad tracks. Like so many of the loggers and farmers then, he was missing parts of his body; in his case, fingers from both hands. The story was, he had caught one hand in a hay-bailer and lost a couple fingers when the machine pulled the wires tight against the bale. He was showing someone, probably a girl he was sweet on, how it had happened, and caught the other and lost a couple more. As a result, the logging company had given him the store to run so he could make some kind of a living. These fellows were known for hard work and perseverance, but not necessarily intelligence.
    The store was a wooden structure with a floor that was partly warped planks and partly dirt. The planks did not join cleanly; if you dropped a penny, it might, tragically, be forever lost under the floorboards. You could buy a lot with a penny! The tarmac parking lot was speckled by soda-bottle tops, which in the relentless heat had sunk into the softened surface to become part of the pavement itself. We would spend weeks in the summer at the family house just down the tracks, and many an afternoon was spent sitting on the rocking chairs on the porch of the store, eating Moon Pies and drinking RC Colas.
    There was a black man who owned a farm and employed other blacks to pick cotton and tobacco, who was welcome to come sit on the porch with the white men, talking about the price of sow bellies and how the “widder woman” up the hill spent so much money and time growing grass in the yard around her house. Grass? It made no sense. You couldn’t eat grass, nor sell it. Yards were for raising chickens, which not only produced eggs but could be both eaten and sold. This was the only black man I ever saw wearing a straw cowboy hat, and was known to commiserate with the white farmers about what the hell they would do when the niggers came to town.

Despite the bitter enmity maintained between black and white adults, there seemed to be no prohibition against black and white children playing together, and this allowed us to go down the tracks to the west, into the pines, where several black families, squatters, lived in what was said to have been old slave shacks. Like all kids, we just wanted to play, but the black boys we played with were intent on making money, too, and the way they did it was by harvesting pecans. It wasn’t pronounced in the civilized, Virginia-accented way, “peh-cahns” – oh no, these were “pee-cans,” like cans you would pee in.
    Pecan trees are tall, slim and graceful, with nary a branch anywhere near the ground; you’d have to be a monkey to climb them and garner the bounty they held high and proud so far from the hard, flat ground. We weren’t monkeys, and in spite of the nasty things our elders said about them, neither were the black kids. But they knew something we didn’t. Pecans are held high on the tree but not very securely; a thrown stick would knock them down easily, and by the dozen. They also knew that, even though there were many wild pecan trees, the farms that raised them produced far more than the wild stock, and if a fellow knew where to get to the back of the fields where the owners wouldn’t see, he could collect a mess of the sweet nuts in a short time, with far less work.
    This arrangement held advantages for both the white and the black kids. Our harvest of pecans was easily tripled once we knew how to do it, thanks to their education, and there was no picking through the fallen nuts for good ones. To sell the nuts, you would bring them to the ubiquitous roadside stands, where locals and tourists both came to buy bags of nuts, orange blossom honey, orange marmalade, Vidalia onions, and the delicious concoction of sugar, syrup, and ground nuts known as “pralines.” The problem for the black kids was that the owners of the stands would gyp them, because they could get away with it. They got just half for a pound of pecans of what a white boy could expect, if that. Well, we had just the remedy for that. Why, our family was as thick on the ground around there as pine needles or cigarette butts. Our uncle ran the store. Our cousins lived in the only damn house in Mayday, for God’s sake – at least, the only one with white folks in it. Uncle John was the mayor of Jasper, just a hop, skip, and jump down Highway 129, and his furniture store supplied half the beds, davenports, recliners, and them new-fangled television sets, all the way to Valdosta. Wasn’t nobody in their right mind going to gyp us, not if they knew what was good for them. We got full price for our pecans, and we split the money fifty-fifty with the black kids, every time. Fair is fair.

One black boy about my age, named, coincidentally or not, Jasper, was my particular friend. He lived in the second slave shack down the tracks on the left side, under the pines, which continually whispered their ageless secrets to the constant summer wind. On the splintery, scuffed wooden porches of some of these clapboard shotgun shacks were stacks of old paint cans, still full of their long-congealed contents. The inhabitants of the shacks used them to sit on, along with the occasional broken toilet or discarded recliner, harvested from some roadside trash pile. My cousin James had told us once that his grand-daddy had had a pallet of left-over paint from some unfinished project, and had, as a gesture of charity, brought the paint down the tracks to give to the black families who lived there. It was, James said, simple proof of the shiftless nature of niggers that they had never used the paint to coat the houses they lived in. Just piled ‘em up and sat on ‘em. Worthless, that’s what they were, shiftless no-‘count niggers, good for nothin’ but eatin’ up good fried chicken and collard greens and sittin’ on the got-damned porch.
    I once asked Jasper about the paint cans, and why the black folk had never used the paint. His response was a stark testament to the depth of the chasm of misunderstanding that separated the denizens of these two utterly disparate worlds. “We ain’t own them shacks.”
    The black folk didn’t own those shacks. In fact, people in my family did, at least technically – they and the railroad. The black folk were squatters, and could be put out any day, for any reason. All it would take was one incident, one white girl caught messing with one black boy, one black man fed up with the hatred and injustice that dogged his life from birth unto death, saying one wrong word to any hate-filled white son of a bitch who cared to press the matter, to make that mountain out of a mole hill. One black woman who, on the verge of rape, took her razor to a white man who richly deserved it, and they would all be out on their asses in a second. In fact, they owned next to nothing, including their own lives. Any black male, even a child like Emmett Till, who put a foot wrong might have even that taken from him with no recourse. To paint the shacks would have been not only of little service to them, it would have been seen as doing a favor for the very people who oppressed them daily. No amount of paint could ever cover that stark reality.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens