Daring the Sun to Disinfect Them

By Marc D’avegan Rubin

Down the slippery slope
little man by little man,

pinch by pinch, down
past the bottom of the bottomless

dark pit of the past.
Out of the shrieking stretched

mouths of man-children in black
and blue big man suits

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.

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.