"YOU WILL BE HEARD"

Yesterday morning, in that half waking state which often brings unusual perceptions, I saw vividly the words: “You will be heard”, as if typed on the lower part of a piece of paper which had some sort of innocently pleasant images above. The message was accompanied by a strong feeling of electricity and great importance which startled me.

I immediately associated “You will be heard” with my efforts to pray before I fell asleep late that night.

Prayer – which might be defined as human efforts to communicate (often verbally) with a higher power – is a vexing subject, as many posts in this blog attest. If “giving orders to the universe” is a form of prayer (see my previous post), I am back on that subject again because my prayer these days is based on myself as a lens focusing the power of the Source to achieve desired results. My words and mental images form effects which the Source will create in the human world. . . or so I believe.

The unusual thing about the night whose morning brought the message was that I had struggled over the dilemma whether or not to include among my positive orders for the benefit of myself and others, any negative commands aimed at people who are creating pain and injustice in the world. I knew the spiritual teaching that I should never let anger and hatred or a desire for revenge affect my wishes, and that praying bad things on others will rebound to injure me.

But during these days of the unholy Israeli massacres in Gaza I couldn't help feeling outrage of the most extreme degree, and so a few days ago I decided to let myself go and try to focus the Source on the destruction of those who are killing many hundreds of people, a third of them children, inside a relatively defenseless enclave forced on its population by their Israeli occupiers. My anger extended not only to Israel and its supporters in the United States, but also to the idea that there was some biblical “God” who was allowing such a thing to happen.

So for several days I did my best to focus the Source on those horrible murderers and asked for and visualized their defeat and destruction. As a concession to certain spiritual teachings I also tried to replace the bloody carnage with images of peace and of people moving back to cultivate the lands which the Israelis had stolen from them. I also tried to see myself in the role of a dispassionate gardener who must cut off a diseased branch in order to save the tree. I tried not to feel any hatred. A surgeon who removes a leg so that the body can be relieved of pain and poison is not motivated by anger or a desire for revenge, but instead by a positive desire to bring health.

Be that as it may, the night before the morning message I realized that a nagging discomfort I felt was coming from my “negative prayers”. Apparently I could not focus a destructive design to rid the earth of a source of injustice and pain without polluting my own spirit with anger. So, with a sense of guilt because I felt I was abandoning a good cause, I decided to end my prayers for destruction. That was not because I felt sorry for the people I might hurt, but because of a spiritual principle.

I do not know which of my words will be heard, but I know that “You will be heard” came to me with authority and created a feeling of ecstatic happiness. I was in an elevated mood throughout that morning, feeling that I had been favored with communication of a very unusual kind even though I have only my intuition to interpret it.


Please note that I have written extensively about Israel and its supporters in the United States in my other blog, VIEW FROM THE MOON.

CLAY MEN WALKING

These ideas came to me as I was thinking about the manifest inefficacy of prayer in the form of begging a deity to grant favors. Every year whole churches full of people are obliterated by storm or sea or earthquakes while earnestly beseeching their God to save them. Prayers for justice are answered by the victory of missiles and bombs. How many sick or dying people are not praying for relief as their condition worsens?

Spare me the arguments about “God's mysterious plan”. The fact is that in this life, on this planet, we see no evidence that a helpful deity is influenced by prayers to let one person succeed and another fail, or this tribe or army be victorious, because one person or group is better at praying than others.

I believe that our misguided concept of a potentially helpful God who is amenable to appeals to sympathy is related to the notion of a Creator molding man from clay scooped from a river bed. That widespread “mud” creation myth in different versions puts God in the place of a potter at his wheel, turning out creatures to populate the earth and then bringing them to life. This leads to the idea of a Master managing his creations. The general conclusion of such creation myths throughout the world is that the Creator was not merely creating robots to serve his needs, or to play with as toys, but instead that the Creator assumes a managerial role and is concerned with the welfare of his creatures. “The Lord is my shepherd.” And if this anthropomorphic Creator continues as a manager, some of his creatures may be able to get special favors if they play up to him in the right way, or fashion words or rituals to gain his approval and help.



A more accurate image of creation than the potter is that of a spring bubbling up from the earth to form a pool and overflow into as stream, or a fountain spraying water droplets into the air, or a fire throwing out sparks. An erupting volcano's lava populates the landscape with forms, but it is a spontaneous creative action rather than the planned art of a human potter.

When we conceive of the Source as a spring of being bringing potentialities into existence, rather than as a managing and judging superperson, we are on the path to looking to our own creative imaging and actions to form our condition and our destiny. You learn that instead of being a begging child you are a lens which can focus the brilliant power of the Source to achieve effects on ourselves, other people, and our universe. Thus I admired a poster I saw on the wall of an Olympic champion's room. A man stands looking up the vast expanse of the sky, saying “These are my orders for the Universe today.

Start them young! (From a Christian website.)

“DLTK's Bible Activities
Old Testament Bible Crafts for Kids

Creation Craft
Uses a gingerbread man to explain the creation of man!
Age 3+”

WHAT WE DO

Once we realize that we can know nothing, and that nothing matters, the charge, “You're wasting your time” has no meaning.

The notion that what we do is “worthwhile” only if it meets certain criteria evaporates like morning fog in the incomprehensible vastness of the Universe and the insoluble mystery of Being. This brings a certain sense of freedom – as did my realization long ago, as I looked up into the sky for that judgmental God I had been told about, that “Nobody out there cares!”. We no longer have to feel guilty if we aren't doing something “useful”.

My Romanian friend, Adriana, does higher mathematics for her own entertainment, and she told me that she sometimes asks herself, “Why am I doing this?”, just as I ask myself why I am playing computer games and learning 3D modeling and animation instead of doing something “constructive”.

The standard of activities becomes what interests us and what gives us pleasure – particularly if it keeps us in Now and leads us not into the temptation of the past or the future. The idea that we must be accomplishing something like making money or getting published or preparing for an examination or performance no longer torments us. If a man wants to spend his life lying around on beaches and riding waves, more power to him. If I would rather play Super Mario Galaxy or build a palace in Second Life or learn about ancient astrology instead of doing something that qualifies for the mythical title “useful”, more power to me.

I'm not implying that I, personally, can dispense with all values, however arbitrary they may seem. I'm talking only about how we choose fill our time – and I say that you can tell much more about what a person really wants by how she chooses to spend her time than by what she says she wants. Witness the man who wants to be a great author but spends his time figuring horse racing systems.

Speaking for myself, it feels like a good thing to try to decrease the amount of pain in the world, even if governments like Israel and the United States devote themselves to increasing the amount of pain in the world. Justice feels better than injustice. Honesty feels better than dishonesty. And most people are happiest if they can arrange to create a comfortable, tidy, attractive environment. The relative desirability of activities might be measured by those kinds of feelings, but hopefully without any sense of “should” or guilt.

For me the greatest pleasures beyond food and sex come from learning and creating. For somebody else it might be training horses or learning Greek or sailing or fishing. But let none of us be chained to the galley bench of “useful” or “worthwhile”.

A Memory

Emily Murphy recently posted the following comment on “Blitchton, Part 1”:

'Mr. Lee,
I'm a grad student in the University of Florida English Dept. and I'm currently working on a project with your papers. I was wondering if I might be able to ask you a few questions that would help me greatly in my work. If so I can be contacted at: . . .
Greatly enjoyed your memoirs. I laughed out loud several times :)'

She's referring to the collection of my papers in the archives of the University of Florida Library -- http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/guides/lee.htm


As we exchanged emails and I learned more about Emily's project, it occurred to me that she – working on her Master's degree in English – was sitting in some of the same classrooms where I sat when I was working on my Master's degree in English at the same university half a century ago. Carried on a wave of nostalgia, I remembered how I sat in those rooms at the age of 21 and dreamed that someday I would be a published writer. The image of my name on a book seemed as remote as an image of Jupiter in a telescope, but my conviction that I would be a published author stood up even against the kindly warnings of my professors that the odds against being a professional writer were millions to one, and that I should learn to look on writing as a hobby. More than once I was advised that even though I was a talented writer I should abandon the hope that I would someday see a book of mine on a bookstore shelf, simply because only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of people who wanted to be authors would ever find a publisher.

It was about five years later that my first children's book was published and won a national award.

I know this is a boastful post, but the memories that Emily evoked are too meaningful for me to ignore . . . and there's a lesson in this for students who'll be told by their professors of English, or art, or drama, or music that their dreams of professional success are too farfetched to bring to reality, and that they should resign themselves to enjoying their passion as a hobby while they earn a living doing something they really don't want to do. Teaching English, maybe?

Thank you, Emily.

More Photographs Posted

I have posted several more photographs on the Ocala and Blitchton posts. Thanks to my brother Gordon for finding the old pictures and scanning them for me.

To see a larger image, click on a photograph.

OCALA, Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 6

Papa and the Blitch Boys, Ocala, 1941

When I was growing up in Gainesville, the outermost reaches of our world – except for the stars – were Jacksonville, on the Atlantic coast about 70 miles to the northeast, where we went to buy school clothes and Christmas presents, and Lake Weir, a couple of hours’ drive to the south, where we spent our family vacation each August. But by far the most important features of the gameboard onto which I had been placed were the pretty town of Ocala, where my mother’s family lived, and Blitchton, the ranch where my father had been born and raised – both less than an hour from our home even at Daddy's cautious driving speeds, and less than half an hour from one another.

As I began to write these memoirs from the perspective of decades it vividly came to me what very different places Ocala and Blitchton were, what striking contrasts there were the families who lived in them, how each of my parents was represented by one of these places, and how important my experience of them was in my own evolution.

At the time I’m remembering, the 1940's and early 50's, my father’s family had been in Florida for generations, well before the Civil War, and my father’s father, who was a doctor, had developed a big ranch and farm at Blitchton, southwest of Gainesville, about a dozen miles north of Ocala. There my father and his brother and sister were born and raised, never in their lives to dwell for long more than a few miles from the soil of their childhood.

My mother’s family, on the other hand, came from Kentucky and Tennessee. Mother’s father, William Henry Fleming, had brought his wife, Frances, and my mother, then three years old, from Mufreesboro, Tennessee to Jacksonville in 1912, where he prospered in a wholesale grocery business in partnership with his wife’s brothers. The family grew to four daughters while the war brought great prosperity to the Batey-Fleming Company. After going back to Tennessee for awhile after the First World War, Papa and Mom Belle moved back to Florida, to Ocala, with Mother, Martha, Lorraine, and Shirley.

During the early 1940's I thought of both Ocala and Blitchton as being far from Gainesville, not just because of Daddy’s tortoise-like driving on two lane roads, but also because visits were rare and communications were almost entirely by letter. Long distance phone calls over those 30 miles or so must have been expensive; even urgent news of a birth or death would most likely come by Western Union telegram. I remember that my mother and her mother (Mom Belle to me) began, as time went on, to telephone one another more frequently, but still at intervals measured by months rather than days. Probably my first exposure to psychic phenomena was that the receiver of the call, whether my mother or Mom Belle, had almost always been just on the verge of picking up the phone to call the caller when the phone rang. On the other hand, I don’t recall any long distance calls between Gainesville and Blitchton except when Otis died.

A trip to Ocala began with Mother and Daddy in the front seat and me and Riley and Gordon the back seat – usually after a couple of minutes’ delay while I had to get out of the car and run back into the house for one reason or another. I was notorious for that. It was just assumed that as the car was pulling out of the driveway, Fleming would need to run back into the house.

Then we’d make our way down University Avenue past the blocks of brick academic buildings and out of town south on Route 441. After we had crossed Paynes Prairie I felt as though we had left the known world behind and were exploring Oz or Africa. The excitement of the three children of course translated quickly into unseemly activity in the back seat, sometimes degenerating into shoves, shouts, accusations, and counter-accusations.

“He started it.”

“I did not. He’s sliding over on my part of the seat.”

“I am not. Gordon bit me!”

And from the front seat, “You all just settle down.”

“But Riley’s . . .”

“Don’t make me stop this car!” says my father eventually.

Whimpering: “But I didn’t do anything! Fleming started it.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Mother says. “Look! There’s a white horse. Lick and stamp!”

My mother, like her mother always the pacifying spirit, would try to distract us with some game built on spotting license plates or billboards. Burma Shave advertising in particular, one small road sign following another to complete a verse, was a boon to parents.

Some of the sights and smells we experienced along the way – which was entirely rural except for a couple of tiny towns -- made such an impression on me that they are alive at this moment, monuments to the power of memory and imagination. The smell of freshly mown grass and of burning pine wood are the smells I most loved – and among the things most likely to lure me back for another incarnation. The dizzying sweet fragrance of cut grass might be generated in several ways fascinating to a child: A farmer mowing a pasture with spinning blades pulled behind his grumbling tractor. A State Road Department machine, its long arms of chattering pointed teeth spread like an airplane’s wings, would be trimming the right--of-way. Or, best of all, a gang of convicts in striped clothing would be felling roadside grass with slingers, each man chained at the ankles, one arm rhythmically swinging the wooden handle that split to hold the sharp horizontal blade, while lounging guards with shotguns lazily watched, swatting flies and nodding.

“Why are those men in jail?”

“Because they did bad things. If you break the law you get put in jail.”

“Gordon bit me. He oughta be out there with chains on.”

“I should not. Shut up!”

“Never say ‘shut up’ to anybody,” Mother says, reaching back to administer a gentle swat on whatever leg she happened to contact. She had formerly given us the biblical information that whoever calls his brother a fool goes to The Bad Place, but saying “shut up” was apparently less serious – in the realm of the impolite rather than the sinful. . . although in our family politeness (and what Daddy called courtesy) ran a close second to godliness.

Because of the convicts, Daddy might talk about his uncle who had been the warden of the Florida state penitentiary at Raiford, and might tell us again about the many reforms the warden had instituted, including a “trusty” system that let many prisoners out to work for the day without guards – a system that actually reduced the number of escapes. Daddy might also tell a story or two about our grandfather, who had been the state prison physician, in charge of the prison medical system, and in that role would tour facilities around Florida, including a trip to Miami by train when he took my father along with him. Daddy said that at that time you could see the entire town of Miami from the station platform.
“I could have bought half of what’s now downtown Miami for five hundred dollars.”

My father was always tantalizing us by mentioning real estate he could have bought for practically nothing which now would have made us millionaires -- including a strip of lots across University Avenue from the University of Florida later called “the Gold Coast”. Those tales did not enhance my opinion of his judgment and were one of the reasons I developed such scorn of his caution, his extreme avoidance of risk-taking. I interpreted what he told us as meaning that if he’d been willing to take a few chances when he was younger we’d be rich and own a movie camera and a big boat like Uncle Hugh Ray.

(I don’t think I knew at that time that Daddy had put a lot of inherited money into creating and selling lots in Lakeland during the Florida Boom in the 1920's, only to lose it when the bubble popped and people couldn’t make their payments. And only later did I come to fully appreciate that my father and his brother had greatly increased the size of Blitchton by buying hundreds and hundreds of acres of neighboring land at prices like two dollars an acre. The value increased by thousands of percent over the years, particularly after race horse breeders from Kentucky started a kind of gold rush to develop white-fenced race horse farms in the Ocala area that rivaled those of Lexington. By good fortune, the increase in Blitchton’s value was probably at its peak as my father reached retirement age, and sale of land there not only provided my parents with many comfortable years but also is now doing the same for me.)

“You never want to go to jail,” Daddy said. “I was visiting Raiford and walking past a maximum security cell and this prisoner said to me, ‘See if you can help me! They keep me locked up like an animal, and I’ll be here all my life.’ I told him, you should have thought of that before you killed those people.”

This tale of confinement created a farfetched association in my mind.

"Mother, remember what Dr. White said when you called him when Riley bit me?”

Mother responded, “He said, put some iodine on Fleming and a muzzle on Riley.” Everybody laughed.

The scent of stinging iodine, which with aspirin and Campho Phenique was the core of my parents’ medical arsenal, momentarily drives other smells from my mind, but now the overpowering beauty of wild wood smoke returns me to 1943. Sometimes it came from a forest fire, sometimes from a smoking, sparking pile in a farmer’s field, but most persistently it came from the small cabins, usually the homes of Negroes, which were scattered along both sides of the road during much of the trip.

From those homes, even in the summer when fireplaces and chimneys were idle, there always came a smell of smoke – hickory, pine, and oak. The most conspicuous source was the burning logs which boiled laundry in the huge black iron cauldron behind the house, but there were also wood stoves used for cooking (my own grandmother at Blitchton had one until she went exclusively to kerosene), and I think that the very walls of the wooden homes themselves emitted the smell of smoke stored up over years, abetted by meals abundant in smoked ham and bacon and sausage.

Oh, and there is one more wonderful smell which, like those cabins and steaming cauldrons, would be a rare find on Florida highways today. That was the incredibly rich odor of tobacco leaves hung to cure in tall ventilated barns. Sometimes we would stop next to a tobacco barn which was near the road just so we could sniff the delicious air which the warm breeze carried from it, and get glimpses of the broad leaves through the slats. I have driven hundreds of miles through the South in later years without seeing a single tobacco barn or a cabin like those that were the main features of our drives to Ocala and Blitchton.

Built of graying boards, whose character and beauty were greater for never having been painted, the small homes were topped with metal roofs, each with a brick or field stone chimney pointed to the sky. The whole structure was separated from the ground by piles of the limestones or flint which abounded in the surrounding fields. The design was always basically the same: An open front porch sheltered by the outcropping of the tin roof; the porch furnished with two or more chairs, the porch railing supporting pots of geraniums or petunias. The sand walk leading to the porch steps was likely to have decorative borders of half buried tires or interesting stones. The front door was right in the middle of the house and was usually open so that one could see straight out through the open back door. On either side of that central passage were the mysterious dim rooms which we would never see except for tantalizing glimpses through the windows as we sped by at fifty miles an hour.

“Darn Yankee!” my father would mutter, glaring into the rear view mirror as a more reckless driver approached him from behind. “Those Yankees drive through those mountains to get down here, and when they get on these flat roads they think they’re on a race track.”

I always silently gloating if, when the proclaimed Yankee car finally zipped around us, it turned out to have a local license plate.

At last we entered Ocala – driving east past the courthouse square on the road that went to Silver Springs, passing the ivy covered Ritz Apartments and their Spanish tiled roof on our left as the last landmark before Mom Belle and Papa’s house.

Mom Belle had been born Fannie Belle Batey on December 4, 1880 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and got her degree from Soule College as a music major, specializing in piano. For her whole life she spoke admiringly of her teacher, Professor Franz Josef Strohm. She also played on the college basketball team. After graduation she taught piano in her home and was organist at the Presbyterian church. During the summer season she would travel, chaperoned by a female relative or two, to stay at mountain resorts and provide their music. She even made such a performing trip to Chatauqua, New York.

Papa was born William Henry Fleming in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1883. He left school and started working in a grocery store when he was about twelve years old. The grocery business became his life. When he met Mom Belle, he owned a grocery store in Murfreesboro, in competition with his future wife’s father and brothers. During their courtship, young Henry and Fannie Belle went on picnics, and when violets were blooming Papa would pick a bouquet for Fannie Belle to pin to the scarf she wore when playing the church organ.

Feeling that Henry needed a little nudge, as my mother said, Fannie Belle suddenly said to Henry during one of those picnics, "When are we going to get married?" Henry's immediate reaction went undescribed, but the wedding took place in June 1907, and my mother, Jean, was born two years later.

The new family might have remained in Murfreesboro except for the wanderlust of one of Mom Belle’s brothers, the adventurous Uncle Buddy (Hal Batey), who preferred train travel to high school and in his youth ranged over much of the South in boxcars without bothering to buy tickets first. Uncle Buddy is a story in himself -- an unusual combination of jolly adventurer and hardworking businessman, who later became mayor of Gainesville, Florida (in the 1920's, I think) and lived there to be 101, a widower who fixed his own breakfast of sausage, eggs, and grits every morning and was fatter than a barrel. What I most remember best are his four chins and his wonderful laugh. Let him be an inspiration to all who believe that grease brings longevity, and that humor is more important than diet in promoting health and long life.

Anyway, young Hal returned from a railway excursion to Florida brimming with enthusiasm for the possibilities he saw there. He convinced his father and other family members – including Mom Belle and Papa – to move to Jacksonville during 1911-1912, where they set up a jointly owned wholesale grocery business, the Batey-Fleming Company. Mother’s sister Martha was born soon after the move, followed by Shirley and Lorraine.


The Fleming sisters at Jacksonville Beach -- Martha, Jean (standing), Shirley, Lorraine

My Mother told me that the First World War gave a big boost to the Batey-Fleming Company, and that Papa made a lot of money. She mentioned sugar and cigarettes as especially profitable. There’s a photograph of my mother from that time, expensively dressed, sitting in a big open car, looking the part of a little rich girl.

After the war was over, Mother’s parents decided they didn’t want to raise four girls in Jacksonville (my mother mentioned a large military camp nearby), and so in 1919 they moved back to Murfreesboro. But the Great Depression came early to Tennessee, while Florida was still doing all right economically, and so early in 1925 Papa moved his family back to Florida, where he preferred to become a salaried employee of Batey-Fleming Company rather than return as a co-owner. His mission was developing the business in Ocala.

It seems funny to me that although, according to my mother, Papa opposed anything that would cause his daughters to leave home – from marriage to having a job – Mother was married within two years after the move to Ocala, and three years later her sister Martha secretly eloped to Inverness and married Hugh Ray. It is amazing to me that Martha's marriage was kept secret from Papa for months; only Mom Belle knew. It goes without saying that Martha continued living at home for awhile after she married.

My father was the athletic coach and history teacher at Ocala High School. He was living at his parents’ home at Blitchton, where he had been born two days after Christmas in 1896. After periods of being away at school, voluntarily serving in the navy during the First World War, and developing real estate in Lakeland, Daddy had returned to where he needed to be to meet my mother.

As a newcomer (teased about her Tennessee accent, which is hard to imagine, considering what a 1920's Ocala, Florida accent must have been like), Jean Fleming was told by other high school girls that Coach Blitch was real cute, and so she should sign up for the basketball team. Thus began the swift undermining of Papa’s yearning to keep his girls at home, unmarried and unemployed.

Kodak photographs show Mother in her basketball uniform, with bobbed brown hair, posing prettily next to Daddy while his chaperone mother stands alongside like a gray granite obelisk, determined to enforce the most extreme requirements of Southern Baptist virtue.

I don’t know much about the courtship except for basketball trips and movie dates, and I also don’t know how my parents got around Papa’s objections, but in the summer of 1927 the wedding took place and the photograph albums are now filled with pictures of an attractive couple visiting places like Chimney Rock and Lake Lure in their long, angular car.


Newly Married Jean Fleming Blitch, Chimney Rock, September 1, 1927


By the time I knew Papa he no longer had a lot of money. He had been stricken by the two-headed dragon of the Great Depression and the chain stores. My mother, who rarely referred to anything negative, told us, “Papa hated the chain stores. He couldn’t compete with them and he won’t shop in them.”

Not only did Papa always do the grocery shopping for his household, but he also persisted in the grocery business in spite of Piggly Wiggly and A&P. For as long as I can remember, until not long before Papa went into a nursing home he owned a general store in Belleview, then a tiny town south of Ocala. It was called the Farmers’ Supply, and it sold everything from canned foods and overalls to milk, fresh meats , mule halters, pitchforks, seeds, and fertilizers.

When I was a little boy I spent a day there while Papa presided in a white apron, usually behind the glass-fronted meat display case at the back of the store with a helper or two alongside. The freshest meat in the store must have been chicken because the chickens were alive and running around outside the back door until a customer wanted one.

I liked exploring the walls and counters of the big store, tugging at tools and leather harnesses, stroking saddles, smelling the dry seed corn, feeling the coarse tough fabric of stiff new work clothes. More than anything else, though, I enjoyed the lunch: A bottle of ice cold chocolate milk and a wedge of sharp cheddar cheese sliced from a big round in the glass case, along with Saltine crackers and canned deviled ham and sardines.

I remember with equal sensual pleasure Papa’s black van, a Merita Bread truck in its previous incarnation, which he regularly drove to the west coast of Florida by way of Blitchton and Yankeetown to sell spices and coffee and tea and I don’t know what else in many places along the way. I loved to climb up in the back of that van and smell the hundred sweet and pungent smells -- cloves, black pepper, coffee beans, vanilla. . . that emanated from the bags and boxes and tins on the wooden shelves that filled both sides.

But I have left myself, my younger brothers, and my parents passing the Ritz Apartments, about to arrive at Mom Belle and Papa’s house on the next corner on the left.

It was a stucco, two-storied house on a double lot with a screened porch and a bay windowed sun room across the front; the livingroom preceded the dining room, with bedrooms and bath along the right side, and a stairway led up to the partially finished attic which was the dormitory for juvenile guests and the art gallery for my young aunts' pastels. The kitchen was at the back, with a view of the banana trees at the rear of the lot, and a garage apartment above a detached double garage, usually inhabited by a tenant.

It seems to me that every time we drove up the driveway into the porte au cochere on the right side of the house, Papa was outside pushing his lawn mower or raking leaves. He always wore khaki pants and a slightly beat up Stetson hat which must have been demoted from formal wear to yard wear as it aged and softened. If the weather was cool, he wore a zippered leather jacket. He was so lean and slender that his trousers were a bit baggy in the seat, and appeared on the brink of slipping down right past his hips.


Papa - William Henry Fleming, 1946

Maybe Papa looked a little stern in general, but on the occasions when I and my brothers were with him he was jovial and affectionate. He would hurry toward the car and hug, pick up, swat on the bottom, and pinch me and my brothers with such rough enthusiasm that I escaped as soon as possible with aching ribs and a stinging bottom. I don’t know where the pinching came from, but it hurt, and I told Mother that I wished she’d ask him not to do it.

Mom Belle, being heavier and less mobile than Papa, would greet us at the porch door. If Papa had a figure like a carving knife, Mombelle was just the opposite. She was very, very fat –- as round and soft as a cotton ball. In contrast to hugging Papa, hugging her was like hugging a big, sweet-smelling pillow.



Mom Belle, 1946

Mom Belle and Papa were different in other ways, too: As soon as we three boys arrived Papa would usually try to put us to work in some way – but Mom Belle – blissfully – would intervene and usually feed us. Papa would grumble about us being spoiled, and say that boys need to learn to work hard while they were young. Papa's gods were hard work and earning. Mom Belle's were food, poetry and music.

Entering the house, I always appreciated that even the interior walls of the home were sharp-edged stucco, like wind-whipped wavelets on the surface of water; I liked moving my finger across their edges and points. It was also curious that the ceiling lights were turned on and off with pairs of buttons on the wall rather than a single switch.

In my earliest visits to Ocala, Mother’s younger sisters, Lorraine and Shirley, still lived at home – Martha having by then revealed her elopement and moved to her own home a few blocks away. All four sisters were pretty. I remember Lo, the youngest, as a slim blond, and dark-haired Shirley as shorter and more filled out. To me Martha, a long-haired brunette, looked like a movie star and was glamorous in every way.

As I write this I find myself wondering what Lo and Shirley, girls in their late teens and beginning twenties, did all day after they'd finished high school and before they got married. When I asked Mother how her unmarried sisters spent their time, she hesitated before answering, "I never thought of that.” They didn't go to college, weren't allowed to have jobs (until Shirley, in Mother's words, "overruled Papa" and started working for the telephone company harvesting coins from pay phones), and probably didn't have many household chores except (in theory) making their beds.

In that world, even people with moderate income had a maid do the cleaning, and in families like Mom Belle’s it was considered bad practice to teach daughters to do housework because it implied they might be reduced someday to cleaning their own homes. Mom Belle refused to teach Mother to cook because she was brought up believing that genteel young ladies had servants to do that kind of thing.

Papa, on the other hand, was the self-appointed sole grocery shopper for the family, as well as the enthusiastic chef. Mom Belle was more keen on eating than cooking, but she had her own special recipes, most memorable of which for me were apple dumplings, which were immortalized in the following bit of history:

Once when we were all finishing a dinner at the Ocala dining room table, I – about 3 years old – asked, “Mom Belle, can I have another one of those apple dumpling things?” Why that would have been so humorous to the adults that they retold it in the family for years, I have no idea, but by now even I think it was funny.

Apple dumplings: peeled apples wrapped in crust open at the top, baked until apples soft and crust brown, sitting soaked in a pool of buttery sweet sauce.

Mom Belle and Papa's house always smelled of something good cooking. I recall breakfast and Papa as one: Hot biscuits (nobody ever heard of a biscuit from a can or mix in that house) with plenty of butter melted on them (and cane syrup to turn them into a sweet dish if one desired), sausages or bacon or both, sliced tomatoes, grits, mountains of scrambled eggs, damson plum preserves, and milk and orange juice and coffee. I particularly remember Papa and his coffee – which he drank at every meal unless there was iced tea – because of the hissing sipping sound he made as he sucked it from a full cup.

Biscuits sometimes gave rise to the story of the Yankee who was puzzled and therefore kept saying “no” when his Southern hostess offered him a “hotten”. Only later did he realize that he'd been offered a “hot one” from the latest batch of biscuits.

Speaking of Papa and breakfasts, my father recalled with an expression of appalled amusement that when “Mr. Fleming” went along to the Big Scrub (now part of the Ocala National Forest) with the Blitchton men on deer hunting/fishing trips (Otis would go in advance with a wagon loaded with tents, food, and other equipment) Papa would at dawn (with the essential coffee brewed over a campfire) eat cold, greasy, fried fish left in the frying pan from supper the night before.

Besides the huge breakfasts, the thing that comes to mind most often about eating at my grandparents' dining table was that I seemed to be fated to sit at Mom Belle's left hand, where she could prey on my plate. Yes, it's true. Unless I managed to empty my plate before she emptied hers – and she often ate at an eager pace, while I've always been a slow eater – her plump hand would dart over like a bird's quick beak and snatch tidbits of fried chicken or fish or steak or cake from under my nose. I don't even remember her asking, “Are you planning to eat that?” as some predators do.

Of course I wasn't allowed to go hungry. No one was. But we children were definitely at the mercy of adults in Ocala, as our plates were served by others, and the unfortunate who was seated next to Mom Belle might find his saved best last bite devoured by his grandmother just as he was about savor it.

Before Shirley and Lorraine married and moved to their own homes, here's what I remember: There was a lot of lolling on unmade beds and listening to phonograph records and talking about boys amid a tumult of stuffed animals and pillows and mirrors and perfumes and cosmetics. Loraine sang a song she had written about the boy she was eventually to marry: "Freddie, Freddie, he's the cutest boy in town. . ." A few years later, Lo and Freddie were married in that house, and we children watched through the screen doors as Freddie had to be supported among the flowers and potted palms by two friends lest he sag to the floor in a faint before the ceremony began.

Some of the records – 78 rpm -- particularly impressed me: “The Music Goes Round and Round,” volume turned up as loud as possible. (“I blow through here, the music goes round and round, whoa ho ho ho ho ho, and it comes out here.”) “A-Tisket, A-Tasket A green-and-yellow basket. . .” “Flat Foot Floogey” (I thought it went, “Flat Foot Floogey with the flawed jaw,” but the lyrics were actually even stranger, “The Flat Foot Floogey with the floy floy.”) “Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those peepers?” “Three Little Fishies”, “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh”, “Beer Barrel Polka”, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Two songs I liked to hear often: “The tumblin’ tumbleweed,” and “Cool, clear water,” had been found in an alley.

A few songs from those days were still being played when I was in high school: “Deep Purple”, ” “Falling in Love with Love”, “And the Angels Sing”, “South of the Border”, “Blueberry Hill.”

It seemed that the unmarried Ocala daughters were always trying to “protect” Papa by hiding facts from him — which I eventually began to suspect meant trying to keep him from finding out about something which would make him angry at his daughters.

For example, when I was visiting Ocala once, Shirley and Lorraine took me in the family car to the Pig Stand, and then for some reason they wanted to look at a vacant house. Maybe Papa was buying it for rental. Anyway, we drove over there, and into the port-au-cocher, which, like the house, was very small. (It seemed that for some time before the 1940's every house in Ocala was built with a port-au-cocher, which was nothing more than an open, roofed area for sheltering a car next to a side door of a home.) In backing out, Shirley scraped a fender on one of the supporting posts. The immediate concern was not the car, but Papa.

“He’ll die if he finds out!”

“He might have a heart attack!”

On occasions like this I got the impression that Papa’s health must be very fragile, since any upset was expected to make his heart stop functioning, and yet he lived strong and healthy, except for deteriorating eyesight (he refused cataract treatment), well into his eighties.

Somehow the girls managed to charm an auto repair man into having the fender repaired before the end of the day when Papa got home from his general store in his van -- thus saving his life one more time.

At some point Papa bought the girls a roadster, a kind of sports car with just a front seat that held three people if the one in the middle didn't mind getting intimate with the round-knobbed gear shift lever. I think it was that car which had a little crank on the dashboard that raised and lowered an air vent on the hood just in front of the windshield, and in the rear, where the trunk would have been, was a rumble seat. I loved riding in the rumble seat, which gave the sensation of riding in a padded bucket completely exposed to the wind.

My aunts (who, like all my mother’s sisters, banned the word “aunt” because it made them sound old) always took me to two big destinations: The Pig Stand was a drive-in which had been the main Ocala hangout for teenagers even before my mother was married . At the Pig Stand I always had a cherry smash while Shirley and Lorraine drank “cherry dope” (dope being the old slang for Coca Cola).

Our other destination was the tourist attraction that put the town on the national map -- Silver Springs. Although a less crowded place in the 1930s and early '40s than today, it was much more famous than it is today. Florida had no Disney World, Sea World, or other big “attractions”. Orlando was a sleepy small town with oak-lined streets, sustained by orange groves and cattle ranches. Silver Springs and Daytona Beach – and around St. Augustine the Alligator and Ostrich Farm, and Marine Studios – were the full menu as far as most Florida tourists were concerned, except for the “Live Giant Gator” and “Live Rattlesnake” hidden by high board fences behind assorted filling stations along U.S. 1 and U.S. 27.


Martha and Lorraine (seated) at Silver Springs

In addition to the glass-bottomed boats, the Jungle Cruise, the Seminole Indian village with its bead-clad Seminoles and dug-out canoe, and Ross Allen's reptile farm (you could hardly ever go to the movies without seeing a “short subject” of Ross Allen wrestling an alligator or milking a rattlesnake), Silver Springs was the widely publicized setting of most of Johnny Weismuller's underwater Tarzan exploits.

At Silver Springs, a thick aroma of orange blossom perfume extended even to far reaches of the parking lot from dozens of scented candles, liquids, fabrics, and even pottery for sale in the crescent of gift shops that faced the water. The thrill of going to “the Springs” was vastly increased by the fact that it was fifty percent owned by the Ray family into which Martha had married, Hugh being the son of the founder. Where other visitors paid admission, we just walked in. Our pride was increased by the fact that the glass bottomed electric boats were named after members of the Ray family, so that we could watch the “Martha Ray” pulling silently away from the concrete docking area with a load of camera laden tourists.

At that time, for the locals, Silver Springs was for swimming rather than for shopping or sightseeing. It had a narrow white sandy beach and a terrifying tall high dive tower. (There was a separate beach and picnic grounds for black people nearby around a bend in the river.) The clear-as-air water that boiled up from huge fissures far below the surface felt ice cold year round, but that didn’t deter people from swimming out to bask on the square float, or my aunts from trying to teach me to swim. My mother said that the first time I saw the smooth, crystal surface of the water there, when I was a toddler, I ran back in fear because I was at ease only with the rolling green whitecaps of the Atlantic at St. Augustine beach.

This is beginning to sound like a travelogue, so I’ll just mention the main thing that made Silver Springs a monumental, mystical part of my memories -- swimming underwater. Gliding in 72 degree totally transparent water in the shallow areas near the shore I could admire the pure white sandy bottom just two or three feet below the surface, undulating with refracted light . . . but when the snowy bottom abruptly dropped to the boil of the springs many yards below I’d find myself over a deep canyon, like a bird soaring low over the land suddenly passing a cliff’s edge and seeing the bottom of the Grand Canyon in miniature hundreds of feet below.

Martha and Hugh were the only wealthy wing of the family. Their one-story red brick house in Ocala was not ostentatious or particularly big, but there was something rich and exciting about its furnishings — the awnings above the windows, the venetian blinds, the glider and matching furniture on the glassed-in porch, and the big oval blue mirror over the fireplace, which, along with the huge stuffed swordfish Hugh had caught -- turned the house into a magical place. Besides, Hugh had every kind of gadget before anybody else did. In the 1930's he had a home movie camera, and a phonograph that made many recordings of adults talking and children laughing and singing. He even had his den air conditioned years before most people even knew air conditioners existed, and on a 90 degree summer day we would creep respectfully into that refrigerated sanctum and marvel at its wintry coldness.

I also admired Hugh because he was the first man in the family whom I realized drank alcohol. It turned out that several of his generation did, including my father on occasion, but Hugh was the first one I learned about. The parents of my parents had such a horror of the very idea of drinking alcohol that it was kept secret (to Papa, even playing rummy on Sunday was verboten, and the thought of a son in law drinking Black & White scotch whisky might have brought on the much-anticipated cardiac arrest). Martha told people that the bottle of club soda in their refrigerator was there because Hugh found it refreshing.

I began to see my own immediate family, at least my father, as being restricted and smallminded, while I began to admire and emulate the liberated and adventurous Hugh Ray. My father would sit and politely listen to female relatives talk all afternoon, and later complain about it bitterly and make the rest of us share his discomfort, whereas Hugh would just walk out of the room, go off alone, and stay in a good mood. He was notorious for sitting in his Cadillac outside some wedding receptions and listening to the radio while others made small talk. Of course I realized as I grew up that it's much easier for rich people to be impolitely independent and outspoken than it is for those in less gilded surroundings.

Papa supplemented his Farmers' Supply income with rental property. Remember, the country was still in Depression in those years. At one time he rented out a house and several apartments (from one of which came the upright piano on which I learned to play). Except for grocery shopping and cooking, fishing, and listening to the radio, particularly to football and baseball games, I don’t think he did much but work, nor had much interest in anything but work and renting. If he had a vacancy, he would put a sign out in his front yard, right on the main road from Ocala to Silver Springs, and spend as much time as possible sitting outdoors in sight of the sign. Several times he was absent from family gatherings because he would go on no trip or visit until the vacant place was rented.

One thing that he said impressed me so much that it has always stayed with me. It came from his telling me and my brothers something that he and his friends had done recently. He referred to his friends as “the boys.” Gordon or Riley, much too young to be tactful, laughed and asked, “Why do you say ‘boys’ when you’re old?”

Papa answered, “Your body grows up and gets bigger and gets older, but you never change. You’re just the same inside when you get older as you were when you were young.”

That image of an never-aging being trapped in an aging body has had great truth and poignancy for me all my life.

Mom Belle was the exact opposite physical type from Papa. They both ate copiously, but Papa stayed lean and wiry, while Mom Belle just got fatter. And while Papa had devoted his life to work and money, and thought that we boys were treated much too indulgently, Mom Belle was a poetic, artistic soul. She loved sitting on the screened front porch, and my most persistent Mom Belle memory is of her sitting in her white, wicker rocking chair on the porch, fanning herself with a cardboard church fan – perhaps with a gaudy picture of Jesus walking on water – or with a palmetto fan she asked me to cut for her. Palmettos look like small palm trees, have no spines on their stems, and with knife and scissors one of their leaves is easily converted into a rounded fan with a smooth natural handle.

Copies of “The Upper Room” Methodist periodical resided on a table next to Mom Belle, while her rocking chair had a kind of narrow basket woven as part of one arm, for holding knitting materials. One of my privileges was to comb and brush Mom Belle's long, long hair down over the back of her rocker, and then to braid it into a pigtail that reached to her waist when she stood. I recall that learning to braid didn't come effortlessly to a five year old, but that the process was fun and the result gratifying.

It was on that porch that Mom Belle introduced me to poetry. These lines have stayed in my memory while others have faded:

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill. . .”

Those were sweet hours with a relative I loved, before I was old enough to question and rebel and to be dulled by sophistication. I have her wicker chair with its knitting basket arm sitting not ten feet from me as I write this, and I try to invoke her presence because she is the soul departed from my family I most regret not having communicated with more and come to know better.

The emotion that rises from the proximity of her empty chair as I write of her sitting there whispers of some mystery here, and that I should be silent

BLITCHTON, Conclusion. Memoirs of Fleming Lee, Chapter 5, Part 2

Otis Jackson, Blitchton, Florida


Looking for Otis, we boys hurried down the back steps from the kitchen, past the long-handled well pump at the wash stand, near the low dome of the cistern, and entered a place even more removed from the green lawns and manicured shrubs of Gainesville and Ocala than the dwelling house. We walked on hot, dry sand among weathered, never-painted wooden buildings, each of which had its own special use and smell and charm. There was no grass in the yard — just snowy sand which Otis swept free of leaves with a brush broom he made by binding twigs together. Dr. Blitch had always insisted that the yard have no grass growing, and no debris, in order to protect the house from possible wildfires.


THE "HOMEPLACE"

The first outbuilding was an open-fronted shed with a huge, iron cauldron set into a rough masonry base next to a long, deep shelf. All three of us boys could have climbed into that black iron vessel with room to spare. The pot played a role in the cleaning of pigs after slaughter — which reminds me that I once attended a hog killing at Blitchton, probably when I was ten or eleven years old. It was a cold morning. As always when something important was to be done, Negroes appeared from all quarters of the compass to help with the work. Their families had lived in the area, for the most part, since slavery days. Now they farmed their own land or lived as sharecroppers and made extra money – or sometimes got paid in meat or other edibles as Dr. Blitch had often been paid -- doing work for my family.
THE OLD BLITCHTON STORE


THE BLITCHTON SCHOOL


The plump, uneasy pig was in a large pen. People leaned or sat on the surrounding board fence, visible puffs of breath coming from their noses and mouths into the cold air. The pig probably expected food, but Landis – wearing, like my father, khaki pants tucked into high boots laced up the front -- went to the fence close to the animal, aimed a .22 rifle carefully at its head, and fired. The pig dropped instantly to the ground, rolling onto its side, senseless, legs quivering. In the same second, Lorraine, a young colored man who worked regularly at Blitchton, jumped from the top of the fence, a much-honed knife in his hand, and ran to the pig, plunging the knife into its throat and slashing. Blood poured from the gash onto the earth, and squirted up onto Lorraine’s arms and trousers. The Negroes on the fence laughed and hooted, while Lorraine danced backwards, shaking his hands and his head, cussing under his breath.

In spite of my empathy with all animals, the primitive spectacle fascinated me more than it appalled me. This was where our pork roasts and bacon and sausage came from. It had to be done so we could all eat, and it was less gruesome than when Daddy tied chickens by their feet to a bowed over sweetgum sapling in our back yard and cut off their heads with a butcher knife.

The dead hog was dragged from the pen, and the next thing I remember is its carcass being plunged into the hot water of the big black cauldron. Then it was put on a table and scraped free of bristles. The next phase would be skinning, and then butchering, at which point the pig began to look like food. There was a building where parts were ground up and seasoned with salt and pepper and sage and forced into sausage casings, except for the ground meat that would be used for fresh sausage patties. The sausages, belly, and hams, were taken to the fired-up smokehouse to hang until cured to smoky richness.

At the end of the day some meat was distributed, money was paid, and what in the morning had been a snuffling pig had become pork, and at nightfall its fragrance rose over many homes among the pine trees, oaks, and cabbage palms.

The slaughter of the pig was not the only such activity I saw at Blitchton. Once I watched Daddy and Landis kill a sheep, then hang it up by its hind legs and skin it. Blitchton had lots of sheep in those days. We had a sheepskin rug in our den, and lamb chops in our freezer.

Also on the unpleasant side was the branding of cattle, and the castration of calves and young pigs with giant pincers — all attended with a swirling of excited horses and dust and shouting men and squealing victims wrested to the ground. At least the pain in each case was momentary, and after the glowing brand had been pressed quickly to the hide, or the pincers snapped shut, the men would roll away or jump back and the animal would jump to its feet, shake its head, and run away, shake its head again, and soon behave as if nothing had happened.

As we boys continued our search for Otis, we looked up over to our right at the tower with a windmill on top which pumped water from a well for use in the house. Later it was blown over by a hurricane and never replaced. We peered into a small, low, sweet-smelling shed where chicken feed was stored. The chicken house itself was not far away, low, tin-roofed, walled in part with chicken wire.  From inside came an unending low cackling and other tones of chicken talk, occasionally accentuated with loud squawking of irritation or alarm. Although the chicken house had its own fenced yard, probably to protect the chickens from hawks and foxes and wild dogs, there were always some chickens running loose all over the place. I remember Gramma, a container of chicken feed held to her waist, wading out into an excited, swirling, hopping sea of chickens, broadcasting seeds in every direction.
GRAMMA FEEDING THE CHICKENS - AROUND 1900


My favorite outbuilding was the smokehouse. Like most of the structures, its door was secured with a latch made of a short piece of smooth wood which swiveled on a nail, but unlike the other buildings scattered behind the main house it was thoroughly sealed. We would invariably open the door and peek inside. Even if the smokehouse were empty, its dark interior was impregnated with an incredibly wonderful smell which came from scores of years of smoldering hickory wood and darkening hams and bacon and links of sausage – the temple of a perfume so heavenly as to bring doubt into the mind of the most devout vegetarian.

By then we probably would have encountered Otis, but if not, we would go on toward the barn, which was vastly larger than the other buildings put together. Like the other buildings, it was built of rough, unpainted lumber roofed with rust covered corrugated metal. It combined stables for horses and mules with stalls for cows and a space for the shelter for farm machinery. A large fenced corral was overshadowed by a gigantic pecan tree whose nuts in season sprinkled the ground over a huge area.

In one part of the barn the milking was done. In another part great quantities of hay and dried corn were stored – so much loose hay that my cousins and I would leap from the ladder which led to the loft down into the soft, sweet-smelling hill of grass – and end up itching for a long time afterward. Up in the loft area there was a hand-operated device for stripping dried corn from the cob. A central passageway on the ground floor led along the stalls where horses and cows came up to their troughs to eat feed served up from a heavy wooden scoop. Much of the wood — the troughs, the scoop, the posts of the stalls, the door handles and latches, had been worn smooth and shiny over the years until it looked more like polished stone than something made from trees.

There were other buildings, further out. On the side of Gramma’s house opposite from Landis’s house was a big garage which held the tractor and other big machinery, as well as an impressive collection of license plates nailed to the wall, probably going back to the first automobile Dr. Blitch acquired.

Way out beyond the barn, on the other side of a pasture, was the place where cane syrup was made. From here come some of my favorite memories of Blitchton. In the autumn, a huge field of sugar cane would be cut and brought next to the syrup shed. As when animals were slaughtered, the occasion brought numerous colored people from their homes around the area to assist in the work. I gather that Gramma and Landis employed a few of them full time — for example to work as cowboys or to help with housework and cooking and laundry — but I think most of them got paid for helping with seasonal events like harvesting and the pig butchering.

Anyway, a lot of people turned out for cane grinding, including us who drove from Gainesville, and it was more like a festive holiday than a chore. The cane grinding mechanism consisted of two big upright steel rollers turned by a tractor engine linked to the machinery of the rollers by an endless belt. In older days or poorer farms the motive power was supplied by a mule walking in a large circle around and around rollers at the end of a long pole. The cane juice gushed from the rollers and was channeled into large galvanized metal tubs with a loose handle on each side. It would take two men to carry each tub over to the cooking vat in the mostly open shed. The vat was a long, bathtub-like container — only much longer than a bathtub — set into a bed of bricks and stone above a space for the wood fire which could be seen glowing and crackling brightly through the access hole at one end. The tubs of juice would be dumped into the vat until it was full, and the heat of the fire would very slowly simmer it down to the right consistency.
MOTHER AT A CANE GRINDING, 1927 (MY BROTHER RILEY TOLD ME THAT GRAMMA, EVEN THOUGH SHE WOULDN'T ALLOW ONE DROP OF ALCOHOL IN HER HOUSE, SOLD THE PRESSED CANE STALKS TO MOONSHINERS.)

Fresh squeezed sugar cane juice is almost sickeningly sweet. Pale, foamy, watery, it did not invite more than a sip — although my cousin, Sim, inadvertently took a bath in it when he backed into one of the tubs full of juice and sat down up to his neck in it. But once cooked down to a certain dark thickness it makes a most delicious syrup, as we would find by sticking pieces of cane stalk into the cooking vat and sampling the contents. I especially liked to collect the foam that rose to the top of the simmering syrup; it became thick, almost like candy, as it cooled on the piece of cane stalk. It was not, however, supposed to be part of the syrup, and men with wire skimmers kept clearing the top of the syrup of foam, bees, flies, and miscellaneous debris until it was time to drain the finished product from the vat. It ended up being funneled into bottles (some of which I think had begun as liquor or soft drink bottles), which were capped and for the most part labeled because they were to be sold to grocers. We always had unlabeled bottles at home. Everybody at the cane grinding took home syrup one way or another, and the rest went off to market. No pancake or waffle, or cornbread or biscuit for dessert would have been imaginable without that syrup. Daddy said that in the old days the black field workers would often bring their lunch in a bucket (called a syrup bucket — half a gallon or so in size, shiny metal, with an inset lid and a wire handle), with cane syrup in the bottom of the bucket, a drinking glass upside down in the syrup, and a piece of cornbread on top of the glass. Cane syrup, like sweet mixed pickles from Cairo (“Kayro”), Georgia, is something I’ve tried to have with me at all times, even when living in Washington State or England. I’ve always used cane syrup not only for pancakes and such, but also, along with catchup, mustard, and a little Worcester sauce, to improve canned pork and beans.

I feel compelled to explain to those unfortunate enough not to know the real thing that sugar cane syrup is not dark and strong like molasses, and bears no resemblance to the mixtures sold as “cane syrup” in supermarkets, and cannot be replaced by brown sugar. Molasses was to us was a strong-tasting, iron-flavored oddity from the north. The true cane syrup of Florida and Georgia is a little thinner than most honey but thick enough for fine control when pouring over a waffle. When you hold a good bottle up to the sky you see light through it. But it has to be the right amount of light. Little light or no light coming through the bottle means that the juice was cooked too long; too much light means that it is thin, cooked too little, or even adulterated with water or corn syrup. You can also tell a good batch by the way it moves about in the bottle when you tilt it back and forth: Leisurely, clinging to the glass, is good. Quickly means watery. Sluggishly means too thick and strong-tasting.

Back to our arrival at Blitchton and search for Otis. (Do you detect that I’m easily distracted by food?) We would usually meet him long before we even got to the barn, much less clear out at the gate which separated the home area and its outbuildings from the pastures and syrup shed beyond. When he came into view we would shout, “Otis! Otis!” and run toward him. It seems to me he was always carrying a bucket in one hand, with his other hand held out from his body for counterbalance. The lower part of his wizened black face was covered with white frost of whiskers, and his head was topped with that crumpled, stained Stetson hat. Otis was about Gramma’s age, getting old, a little stooped, his cheeks and lips drawn if he weren’t wearing his false teeth. When he saw us he would smile and put down whatever he was carrying — and he was never not carrying something — and hug us when we ran up to him. Considering that we saw him only a few times a year, and then usually for one day at a time, we were as fond of him and as eager to see him as if we had lived with him for years, and he was said to be very fond of us. We were much more enthusiastic about visiting him than Gramma or our cousins next door, although we liked them too.

I’ll tell Otis’s history soon, but for now I’ll stay with our being with him.

I don’t remember much conversation with Otis. He was probably not much practiced in conversation. Mostly we just followed him around and watched him do things and, theoretically, helped him do them. Feeding chickens was fun, but going into the henhouse and collecting eggs was more interesting. There was something miraculous about finding fresh, warm eggs in the straw of the nests, and I was intrigued by the glistening white china eggs that were put in some of the nests. (As I recall, Gramma was often involved with the chickens, her other special area being a very large fenced garden of vegetables, flowers, and fruit trees across the rutted road from the windmill.) Other high points were feeding the cows and horses from inside the barn, and milking the cow, a skill I never acquired. The best part of that was when Otis (or my cousin Sim, who often did the milking) would point an udder toward the waiting cat and squirt milk in its mouth — more or less in its mouth, anyway.

At Gramma’s kitchen door was the slop bucket, where peelings, and scrapings from dinner plates, stale bread, and milk, and all manner of edible garbage were collected for the pigs which lived in the field across the paved road from the house. Otis would take up the pungent bucket in one hand, throw out his other arm, and trudge around the house to the road with a group of children in tow — usually cousins Ann and Sim would have joined us by now — who contributed by carrying corn on the cob and other fairly clean and dry forms of nourishment.

The main reason that feeding the pigs was so exhilarating was the extreme excitement of the pigs when Otis called them. Otis would shout, high-pitched, “Soo pig! Soo pig!” and from all over that field pigs would come galloping like bulky race horses, heeling to forty-five degree angles in the turns, bumping one another, squealing so loudly that it hurt my ears. Otis and would lean over the fence and dump the bucket into the trough and onto the heads of the crowding, nudging, grunting, shrilly shrieking diners, and the rest of us would happily toss in our bits.

I visited Otis’s little wooden house only a few times, and I wish I could remember more about it. I don’t want to fill in with imagination. A bed covered with a patchwork quilt took up a third of the space, I think, and there was a chair or two and a table. A sweater and a worn leather jacket hung on hooks. There was a mirror on the wall, and on a chest of drawers under it were a basin and a straight razor. Some of the cigars and candy we gave Otis for Christmas might be visible.  Gordon remembers a collection of presidential campaign buttons, as well as other pins or badges. Under the bed Otis kept a lightning bolt he had found in a tree that had been struck in a storm. It protected against lightning. He said there was always a lightning bolt in or under a tree after lightning struck. The “bolts” he showed us were metal. He also sometimes saw blue lights in the woods at night and followed them, but never caught up with them.

How I wish now that I had learned more about Otis. I wonder what he did to pass his time when he was not working, what he thought, how he felt about things, whether he really had no friends outside my family, and if so, why. Otis’s story became much more important to me when I grew up and he was gone — buried in the Blitch family cemetery under a tombstone which read, “Well done, good and faithful servant” — than when I was a child and he was just a curious feature of my own life.

Otis Jackson was a black man with a small frame, bent with age, white-mustached, always wearing suspenders and, while working, a worn Stetson hat of the kind my father wore to go to church. Under the hat was a mostly bald head with sparse, tiny curls of gray hair. His destiny intersected that of my family at a turpentine camp many years before I ever saw him. My grandfather, as State Prison Physician, would tour the prisons and related facilities. Otis was a convict who had been leased by the State with others to work at the turpentine facility. The collection of pine tree sap for the manufacture of turpentine was a major industry in Florida at that time. Cups were attached to tree trunks for gathering the sticky sap that oozed from a slash in the bark. The sticky contents of the cups were collected and stored in wooden barrels to be processed into turpentine.

Anyway, Otis was working at a turpentine camp shortly after the turn of the century. He was young, imprisoned for killing a man. I think Daddy said that Otis had been working as a security guard when it happened. My mother said something about self-defense. Doctor Blitch found that Otis Jackson’s feet were in terrible shape, aggravated by walking in pine tree sap with inadequate shoes. That led to my grandfather having Otis released to his care.

And so Otis Jackson came to live at Blitchton when my father was a young boy — probably about 1906 or 1907 – and never left. My father said Otis was probably his best friend when Daddy was growing up.  For some time Otis lived in a cabin on the outskirts of the collection of buildings that was the home area, and then, at some point before Mother married Daddy in 1927, he moved into “Liza’s house” not far behind and to the side of the Blitch home. Liza had been a cook, and when she was gone Otis inherited the house. If he was over seventy when we knew him, he’d been living alone in that cabin for half a century.

Otis lived in the room of the house which had a fireplace — the other room being used for storage. It was basically a place for sleeping. He ate all of his meals and did a lot of sitting in the large kitchen area of the Blitch house. I remember that when he was not sitting in there, and Gramma wanted him, she’d go onto the back porch and call in a loud, shrill voice, “O-tis! O-tis!” from the back porch, prolonging the “O”, accent on the “t”. His work was restricted to the areas immediately around the house — feeding chickens and livestock, milking the cow, sweeping the yard, cranking the corn machine, and things of that kind. When I knew him he did not do field work or other heavy labor, although in the past he had worked side by side with my father and others in the fields, sometimes wielding the “snake stick” to kill a rattler disturbed by the farm machinery. And of course he did no house work, which was the province of several women. Mother said that while he had jobs to do, he was “pretty much his own boss” in deciding what to do, and where to be, and when. If he was not working, eating, sleeping, or relaxing in his house or the kitchen, he was most likely to be hunting. Mother told me he’d always loved hunting, and that Dr. Blitch gave him a shotgun not long after Otis came to live at Blitchton.

DADDY WITH HIS DOGS


Once Otis took me with him squirrel hunting. We went down to a pond in the hammock woods, Otis cradling his venerable shotgun under his arm. He told me to lie down on my back and watch the treetops. He lay down next to me and told me to just stay still and wait. Which reminds me that I cannot specifically remember anything else that Otis ever said. That’s mostly due to lost memories, but probably also because there was not much conversation. We watched the boughs of the hickories and oaks until a squirrel appeared, and Otis quietly but quickly pointed his shotgun to the sky, braced it against his shoulder, and fired. A squirrel came tumbling down through the leaves and plopped limply onto the ground. Back at the house, Otis showed me how to skin a squirrel, like pulling a sweater off over its head.

Otis never showed any desire to leave Blitchton, even for trips, even after Doctor Blitch, to whom he was devoted, passed away. He apparently never became attached to anyone outside my family. While he would go up to the store to buy tobacco, he didn’t spend much time there. On Sunday mornings he would put on a tie and a suit and go to church, where the other Negroes always addressed him respectfully as “Mister Otis.”
THE BLITCHTON CHURCH

At Christmas we, and Landis’s family, and Gramma, would give him things like sweaters and tobacco. Almost everything he had — from quilts to shirts and overalls to his shotgun and rifle and ammunition — were bought and given to him, rather than bought with money paid to him. Otis was simply indifferent to money and to the outer world. It was absolutely impossible to picture him anywhere but at Blitchton. The idea of Otis working at a gas station, or as a janitor in some city building, or at Morrison’s cafeteria as a waiter, or as a porter on the Orange Blossom Special, or in any of the other jobs which black men tended to have in those days, was frightening. It was as if Blitchton itself were a bubble from a former century which had somehow survived past its time, floating on the surface of the Twentieth Century with Otis and his cabin and Gramma and her house protected inside, until finally the bubble popped and all was gone except for the tombstones in the sandy family cemetery, surrounded by an ancient rusting metal fence.


This concludes the Blitchton chapter, but there will be more about Blitchton and my relatives there in future chapters.