Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Gas Station

By Roger Owens

My uncle Guy’s gas station sat just east of my Aunt Sue’s house, by the turn onto what is now known as North East 38th Street. But I much prefer the moniker it had back in the 1960s: “Buzzard Bay Road.” The station was just west of where Buzzard Bay met County Route 6, the main east-west highway, or what passed for one at the time, into Jasper, Florida. If you took Route 6 past the station and the house, you would arrive in Jasper proper in a few minutes; if you went Buzzard Bay way, you would meet up with County Route 51 north of town. The station sat on the north side of Route 6 facing a bit southeast, and across the road was a corn field that, to the eye of a child at least, appeared to begin at the barbed wire fence and form an impenetrable wall that just kept on going. Out the back was another just like it, but it contained some trees in the distance, which seemed to give a bit of perspective, and to suggest that these fields did not, indeed, continue unto the ends of the Earth.
    Now, the countryside surrounding Jasper is an interesting place. Towards the east is several miles of low, hammocky land, with dense stands of live and red oaks, cypress trees, and lots of lakes with interesting names like Buzzard Bay, Shaky Pond, and Bee Haven Bay. Bee Haven is a complicated, marshy lake, with a convoluted shoreline served by a tangle of old dirt tracks and firebreak roads. It is a favorite haunt of fishermen, hunters, and teenagers seeking an isolated spot for a party or a little hot petting in Daddy’s pickup truck. It was a joke at Sunday dinner that an awful lot of misbehavin’ was a’goin’ on at Bee Haven. It was a place of dark woods, black water, and mystery.
    From right about where the gas station sat, to the west and south, began a wide, flat, dry plain, whose natural grass cover had been replaced by those vast stands of corn. Surrounding it all is the Suwanee River, which begins up Georgia way in the awesome Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. It skirts to the east of the Cypress Creek Wildlife Management Area, cuts west, then back north, then south once again past Jasper, as if holding the entire area in the palm of a giant hand. It was to me as a kid a magical place, much different from the sandy, beachy Florida we lived in down on the east coast. And, right smack-dab in the middle of it, sat the Gas Station.
    The station was ground zero for my childhood adventures in Jasper because we always stayed at Aunt Sue’s house, which was maybe fifty yards away. It was just her, rattlin’ around that big old house by herself, although that old plantation house was very much the center of the family’s life, and Sunday dinner there was a permanent part of the schedule. This was before the old clapboard wooden structure was torn down and rebuilt as a red-brick ranch-style house. It rather resembled a church, with its raised façade over the front porch, which porch of course sported the requisite white wicker rockers and a glider swing hanging from chains. That rebuild happened when I was ten, so I was probably seven years old, around 1962, when I learned something, really learned it, for the first time. It was a lesson I have gone on to learn more and more about throughout my life, but that was when it started. I learned just how bad an idea it was to make the mistake of being born black in the Deep South.

The gas station had two double work bays on the left, each with a roll-down garage door to close it off at night. A minuscule office was entered by the glass door to the right of the bays, behind which on the left was a door into the work bays. Directly ahead was the bathroom, and a high counter began just right of that on which sat the cash register and some cans of oil. On the narrow wall behind the counter, an army of cigarette packs stood at attention. Standing behind the counter, one could look across the narrow room and out two full-length windows onto the gas pumps. In the left corner, two metal kitchen chairs with ugly green vinyl seats suffered in the brutal sun blasting in through those windows. A few wilted magazines faded in the glare on a tiny glass table on which one might fry eggs much of the day. No one ever sat there. By the time that corner was habitable, it was time to lock up and go home.
    The office had a light linoleum floor and its areas of wall not given over to glass and doors were tiled white like a bathroom, and it was always bright, cheery, and sparkling clean. Uncle Guy had a “cull’ud woman” come ’round right regular and see to it it stayed that way. Likewise, the cramped bathroom was a model of modern sanitation, with tiny square, light-gray tiles on the floor and the same tooth-paste-commercial white, 4-x-4 inch wall tiles as the office.
    And right smack-dab in the middle of the office counter was my favorite place of all in the rather mystical world that made up my young impression of Jasper. The counter had a glass cabinet, and that cabinet was filled with the dreams of many a young boy who had yet to discover girls: snacks. Yep. Snickers, Three Musketeers, Ten Thousand Dollar Bars, Rollos, Malted Milk Balls, Sugar Daddy, Bazooka Bubble Gum with cartoons right on the wrapper. A crunchy, peanut-buttery rod six inches long and as thick as a finger, called Chick-O Stix. And lest we forget, crackers with peanut butter between them, with cheese, with sugary candy paste between them like the filling in an Oreo. Not only was this bounty present, it was available. Dad gave us each a quarter a day to spend there while we spent weeks in the summer, rambling about this wide-open wonderland and doing things like picking tobacco and shucking horse-corn. When our money ran out, Uncle Guy would still give us each one thing, whatever we wanted. It was paradise.
    Uncle Guy was always nice to us kids, as were most of our aunts and uncles. He had a wooden leg where his left one used to be, and we all thought he must have lost it in “the war,” although which war was never clear. From what I’ve learned from a stint in the medical field, it was probably the four to five packs of Lucky Strikes and Camels he smoked every day, each one lit from the butt of the last. Like most such smokers then, the loss of a leg didn’t slow him down one bit; he kept right on sucking them down.
    No, all my uncles and aunts were really nice to us, the tanned, diminutive aliens visiting these here Boonies from the Planet Beach; it was only Grandpa Dedge who could be kind of mean now and again. But then, he could also be totally neat, and take you fishing, and you’d actually catch fish! Or to a tobacco auction where the men in the straw hats jabbered a mile a minute and truckloads of broad tan leaves that smelled a little like heaven were fork-lifted away at the seemingly magical lift of Grandpa’s finger. So, you kind of got used to him saying something a little harsh to you once in a while. But not Uncle Guy. Never Uncle Guy. That’s why his reaction, so out of character, was a real surprise to me.

One afternoon, I was alone at the station with Uncle Guy. Just him and me. I don’t remember how that happened, but sometimes the older boys got to drive out to Roberts Pond and go swimming, and the little kids got left behind. I was a little kid, so probably, as my daddy would say, I had been left holding the short end of the stick. Anyway, as Uncle Guy served the odd customer with gas or a can of oil or a pack of cigarettes, I wandered around the station and under the trees. It was then I saw something I’d never noticed before. It was a bit of a shed, kind of stuck off the back of the station, almost like a lean-to. Above the door was a sign printed on cardboard in dripping white spray paint: “BLACKS.” It was then I remembered that, above the door of that shining, antiseptic bathroom inside was a store-bought sign stamped in thick plastic, like the signs at school, that commanded “WHITES ONLY.” Although I knew in some vague way that blacks and whites were different, I hadn’t the slightest notion how they might be different. When I opened the creaking door, I could see that this was meant to be a bathroom. Did black people somehow go to the bathroom differently from white people? Why did they need a different bathroom? And, man oh man, why did it smell like that?
    I stepped inside the shed bathroom. A bare light bulb hung from the low ceiling, but low or not its pathetic remnant of a pull-chain did not come within the reach of a little boy. The floor was dirt. The outer walls and ceiling were the corrugated galvanized panels used for barns and equipment sheds, nailed to rotting round creosoted posts and beams that had undoubtedly started life as telephone poles. Structures made of these panels were without exception stifling sweat boxes, and this one was no different. The heat seemed to have a weight of its own, carrying the vile stench of ancient sewage like a sagging log truck loaded with yellow pines struggling up a hill. Against the block rear wall of the station itself stood a sink, but the faucets didn’t work when I turned them. A partial roll of toilet paper stood on the back of the sink. And right smack-dab in the center of that nasty place was a toilet, but not like any toilet I had ever seen. It was vile. The awful stench was coming from there. The bowl was stained black with the filth of years and apparently never cleaned. Spider webs waved from the shadows above my head. I had time to shudder before the breeze rippling them slammed the door closed. I was a little boy. I was still afraid of the dark, and I was terrified of spiders.
    I never really knew what happened with the door, but for some reason, when I ran to it and pulled, it wouldn’t open. I can’t imagine how any kind of latch, like on a screen door, could have latched itself, but whatever it was, I went from a curious little boy to a screaming, frightened mess in about a second. After what seemed like hours, but was probably no more than three minutes, Uncle Guy crashed in and yanked me out of there by the arm so hard I wailed louder. I expected he’d hug me and tell me it was all right. He always did, if we stubbed a toe or wrecked a bike. Instead he jerked me back and forth by that arm and shouted in my face, spit flying from his mouth. “What the hale yuh doin’, goin’ in the niggra bathroom?” With each what and hale, I went back and forth like a puppy on a leash being snatched around by a mean kid. If that wooden leg ever slowed Uncle Guy down from whipping my ass, I never noticed it. In there somewhere was the admonishment to never ever go in there again, yank, yank, yank, yank, my shoulder now a shrieking agony. And I didn’t. That’s why I never knew why the door wouldn’t open. Maybe it was just stuck. Or maybe I pushed instead of pulled. It didn’t matter. You couldn’t have gotten me in there with all the Ten Thousand Dollar Bars in the world.
    I had to stand hanging my head while Uncle Guy told the whole sordid tale to my mother, his niece, and I could tell she was not happy with me at all. She kept glaring at me when not nodding dutifully to her uncle. I wasn’t sure just how, but I had behaved badly, and that reflected on the whole family. I can still hear him telling Mom that we needed more discipline, hadn’t she learned nothin’ yet? “Them boys are jus’ ’spiled, Ruby, they’s jus’ plain ’spiled!” I suppose to Guy we were indeed spoiled, having not had to drop out of school in the eighth grade and go to work on the farm.

After that day, a serpent was loose in Paradise. I had known that blacks were looked down upon, but at our house it was more like somebody to tell stupid jokes about than any serious hatred. This was serious. The idea of anyone being forced to use that filthy, stinking shed, even kids like me, who would be just as scared as I was, made me sick. Don’t get me wrong. This did not spark in me some kind of crusader mentality. I did not go out and start my own branch of the Civil Rights movement. I just knew, deep in my heart, that being black in a place like that had to be about as bad a piece of luck as a person could have. But maybe, somehow, I did do something, because later I would befriend some of the black kids around Jasper, notably Jasper, a kid who lived up in Mayday, Georgia. And when the first black boy came to our junior high school, I was the first to make friends with him. Maybe I did do something. I’d like to think so.
    I have thought about that humble bathroom in an otherwise pristine gas station many times over the years and considered the real implications of it. There wasn’t just that bathroom. Practically every commercial building in America at one time had separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. We ate in different buildings, we worked and went to school in different buildings. We knew what we were doing. Architects had to design those accommodations; masons and carpenters and plumbers had to build them. Money had to be spent; surely, had they had a choice, many contractors would not have spent it, but if one builds a building and whites will not come there because there are no separate bathrooms, why, one is, as my daddy would say, left holding the short end of the stick. And it is not lost on me that I was as much a part of this system as anyone. Why didn’t I stand up, speak out? Today, that might happen. Kids regularly make a difference in this world, just because we can talk to almost anyone, anywhere. That’s not the world I lived in then, so it was those who had to endure the humiliation of things like that ghastly “bathroom” who truly ended up on the short end.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens