Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Slave Quarters

By Roger Owens

If one does an internet search for the Stephen Foster Memorial or the Stephen Foster “Culture Center State Park” in White Springs, Florida, a veritable cornucopia of interesting information is presented. Directions to the site from Jasper, where I spent summers as a child, are basically “Get on Highway 41 and drive southeast until you see White Springs.” One will be informed of the camping, the hiking, the bicycling, and the carillon bells playing Foster’s most popular songs all day long. There are demonstrations of quilting, blacksmithing, and the making of stained glass. In January, there is Stephen Foster Day, and in May there is the Florida Folk Festival. Of course, much of the most interesting information, as is true with many histories and Federal investigations, is what is not revealed.
    For instance, many people, even Floridians, are unaware that Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida. He was looking on a map for a river in the South that would fit in his latest racist ditty. The man was from Pennsylvania, and his hit “Camptown Races” was about a horse track there; most folks just assume Camptown must be in the South. The one trip he ever took to the South was on his honeymoon, on a paddleboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, which sounds like a song in itself. Most people do not know that the second verse to “Oh! Susannah” contains the words, purportedly sung by a black man, “I jump’d aboard de Telegraph, and trabbled down de ribber, de lectric fluid magnified, and kill’d five hundred Nigger….” But oh, the most interesting fact of all, the most intriguing and sublime, is buried even deeper than that, and I assure you that no search engine will tell you this: what the park blithely calls “the Spring House,” was in fact used at one time as slave quarters.
    I do not say this in the way of reporting something I heard, although it is true the place was known as the slave quarters when I was a kid. I was there. The Spring House indeed enclosed a free-flowing sulphur spring, which the site reports has been known as a healing bath for all of two thousand years. I would like to point out to them that the Greeks and Romans knew this long before that, but one may assume from this narrative alone that, on the subject of history, the great State of Florida is not too keen on the details.

The building I knew as an adolescent was in the middle of nowhere, down a dirt road in the woods with nothing around it but trees. It consisted of a wooden structure on top of a set of three-story concrete walls that encircled the spring, the water of which cascaded out the side adjacent to the Suwannee River through a square hole about halfway up.

    There were three balconies in the wooden house, which represented the ascending level of courage it took for a kid to jump into the water in what amounted to the courtyard of the building. The lowest was only about ten feet above the surface of the water; this was reserved for the girls and the smallest boys. The second was maybe eighteen feet; no small jump for older boys. The top was easily twenty-five feet, and most boys wouldn’t take that plunge until they were in their teens.
    In the body of the building, the rooms were lined with benches. Our local cousins educated us as to what these were: seats for the slaves. Their schooling was hardly necessary, though. The rows of shackles attached to the walls above the benches told the story plainly enough. And down under the benches, where one might almost miss them if one didn’t look closely, were tiny shackles for the children. Little iron bracelets on chains, so small even our youngest girls couldn’t have got their hands out of them, had they been fastened on. There were entire walls with no benches at all, just shackles, where it was clear recalcitrant slaves were chained to four points, standing up. A little below waist height were dark marks on the walls, where presumably chained slaves shat themselves when overcome and not released.
    The last time Cindy and I were there, in 1983, the top structure had been rebuilt as a walkway/pavilion sort of thing. Both the benches and the shackles were gone. I thought at the time that I might have wanted one of those shackles as some sort of historical memento, rather the way that my father collected Minnie balls and tin coffee cups from Civil War battlefields. But when I contemplated having something that freighted with evil and misery in my home, I decided that I would not have wanted one, even had they still been there. The utter erasure of the memory of all that hate, the true whitewashing of this place, is a bitter pill to swallow. It may be easy for other people to forget the evil and hatred represented by those times, but not for me. I love my state, I love the South, but I think I understand how rational Germans must feel concerning their past. Ours is an evil past, a past not yet atoned for, and it has been swept under the rug for far too long.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens