Spiritualized Life

Written by Jeremy Ray Jewell

Photo: Cherry Walker Jewell

They were naming places in Florida after my family until they started naming my family after places in Florida. My mother was born in 1954 in a hospital on the St. John’s River at the end of Cherry Street. She was named Cherry. She was an extra in a movie once, but I can’t remember the name of it. She is gone, but the street goes on… from the river to College Street, at least. And the old Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railway, CSX’s Sanford Subdivision… the tracks which make Riverside the island it is.

Then you can turn around and walk it again. College Street: My brother once lived two houses from the corner. I’d walked there from Willowbranch Park, following my mother’s namesake route. Next intersection is Post and Cherry, the ONA church where I had to jump out of a moving truck one night as a child when the stranger driving started rubbing my leg… Could have been the end of the Jeremy show! But it wasn’t. I dropped my wallet with my social security card inside, and later found an unpaid JEA account in Murray Hill had been opened in my name. Cherry Street was a dead mother all along. My name lived on, with mixed results.

Forbes Street is still full of vegetation, Selma is still treeless. Remington: I may have known a girl on this corner, and I may have knocked on her door ten years later just to see if she’d be there. That was before I understood how decades work. It takes a long time to crack that code, and once you do there’s no use in it. Downing: hot summer day. Olga: shade. Sydney: the dugout, sitting with someone I can’t remember but cherished. This walk is really taking too long, and my mother is nowhere to be seen.

The library: printing school papers. Park: now we’re going places. Herschel: ancient places. Oak: brick places, paved brick and streetcar places. Riverside Avenue Christian Church, the Allman Brothers house, and a photo I took in the grass when visiting from Boston with my sleeves rolled up. Remember? St. John’s: bulk cargo in front of a plantation house. Get the boat ready for me. Cherry Street Park: the broken dock – wait until she comes… or walk the whole damn thing again. Pace it, make a home out of it. A deathly deed. Or make a deed that is not death. Move on.

I was born in Riverside Hospital in 1986… that’s the Publix by Memorial Park. I was born by the deli, perhaps. Oscar Mayer, not Boar’s Head. Maybe in the putrid backside of the Papa John’s. I was born with Charles Adrian Pillars’ Spiritualized Life in my eyes. It’s the globe of swirling world war dead at the foot of the angel.

Pillars said: “In this surging mass of waters, I shaped human figures, all striving to rise above this flood, struggling for mere existence. Last, surmounting these swirling waters, with their human freight, I placed the winged figure of Youth, representative of spiritual life, the spirit of these boys which was the spirit of victory. Immortality attained not through death, but deeds; not a victory of brute force, but of spirit. This figure of Youth Sacrificed wears his crown of laurels won. He holds aloft an olive branch, the emblem of peace.”

Youth sacrificed, laurels won. Deeds rather than death. Emblem of peace. Even looking at that statue today I get the urge to dig them all a grave so deep it reaches to China. But that’s not how graves work. I also remember asking my mom about it. Was it grandaddy’s world war? No, another, earlier one. How many had there been? She couldn’t say. She didn’t even tell me I was born looking at the damn thing, and I’d have never figured it out yet.

Portrait of Pellicer

Written by Jeremy Ray Jewell

Photo: “‘A Glimpse of one of the Turnbull Canals’, Van de Sande Studio, New Smyrna, Fla.”, from Dr. Andrew Turnbull and the New Smyrna Colony of Florida by Carita Doggett. Drew Press, 1919. Internet Archive & PALMM Florida Heritage Collection.

Pellicer left his home on the Mediterranean island of Minorca in the spring of 1768 as an indentured servant. He boarded a ship in a fleet of eight sailing to the newly acquired British possession of East Florida. Five years before, several thousand of that exotic land’s former occupants up and decided to permanently sojourn in Cuba and the newly-Spanish Louisiana, foolishly leaving their forts and garrisons unguarded against the onslaught of British capital investment. Among those lured to that tropical paradise by the great advertising ruckus which the new stakeholders created was one Scotsman by the name of Dr. Andrew Turnbull. 

After acquiring the necessary land, Dr. Turnbull set out to acquire the necessary Protestants to settle it. Fortunately for him, the keepers of the Anglican faith had unilaterally declared the Greek Orthodox faith to be, in fact, Protestant. Between this fact and Ottoman despotism, or perhaps between his Anatolia-born Greek wife and sheer expediency and businesslike calculation, Turnbull set upon his plan. He delegated out the clearing of land and other essentials and set forth to lead around five hundred faithful Hellenic Christians out of the tyranny of Turkish cotton, silk and indigo production and into the contractual freedom of British cotton, silk and indigo production. 

The first change in Turnbull’s plan came when he stopped at the port of Mahon on British Minorca, where he caught wind of and decided to collect and contract over a hundred Tuscan men from Livorno. After depositing this cargo back at Mahon and setting sail for Greece, the Scottish doctor found his recruiting efforts there significantly thwarted by officials of the Sultan. But upon returning to Mahon with less than the expected five hundred colonists, he found that the presence of the young Italian men in the city had added to his party nearly a hundred newlywed women, who arrived from elsewhere on the island. Off-setting this surge of Catholic colonists was the unexpected acquisition of two hundred Greeks from Corsica, thus completing the original number of five hundred. 

Despite this haphazard success, when word of the colonial enterprise spread throughout Minorca (as these things seemed to do), several hundred more Catholics flocked to escape their crop failures and start afresh in the land of Florida. Turnbull and the English governor of Minorca capitulated, and on April 17, 1768, over fourteen hundred colonists – mostly Catholic – set sail under the flag of the Anglican monarch, with two papist priests shoed-in for good measure. Among the passengers was Don Francisco. 

The voyage lasted eighty inhospitable days, with a portion of the Mediterranean passengers finding one or the other of them to be their last. Finally, the colonists sighted land. The long journey was over and having left the familiar sun, rocks, and vines of that ancient marine highway from which they came, they now saw before them the promising land surrounding Mosquito Inlet. It was good on its promise, to the point of malaria. The tangled shoreline of mangroves and swamps was at once impenetrable, teeming and stolid. 

In Turnbull’s absence, there had not been enough food gathered nor housing constructed, and an expected delivery of Africans had shipwrecked, leaving much of the land uncleared and undrained. In the absence of slaves and in the presence of non-British indentured servants, it was not long before the colonist’s indenturedness would begin to wear off under the auspices of the under-worked British slave drivers. With little more than the clothes falling apart on his back, Francisco Pellicer proved his worth as a carpenter, if only by his craft with the sharp, green fans of the palmetto bush from which the colony’s neighborhood of huts was to be built. 

From the scenic slopes of the rocky Mediterranean coasts, with its stacks of stone edifices and politely subdued environs, the altogether differently scenic flat-to-sunken land and illusory sloping scrub was too ridiculous to be Paradise and too absurd to be Hell. Whatever the manipulations the Scotsman may have utilized to compensate for his project’s misfortunes, or whatever may have been the barrier of power or intelligibility between Francisco and his contractual superiors, he could not stop repeating to himself, “It’s too late to turn back now.” Telling himself that made it feel as though it was his own conclusion. 

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The Higginbothams and the Seminoles

Written by Jeremy Ray Jewell

Illustration: “The Indians and Negroes Massacreing the Whites in Florida”, from A True and Authentic Account of the Indian War in Florida, Saunders & Van Welt, 1836. Internet Archive.

My great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was Burroughs “Burris” Higginbotham. Burroughs’ grandfather settled in Goochland (now Amherst County), Virginia sometime in the early 1700s. He was from a planter family with 4-5 generations of history in St. Philips, Barbados with roots before that in Cheshire, England. Lore concentrated in Virginia-based genealogies describes the Higginbothams as being Irish, owing likely to the Burroughs’ father marrying a Frances Riley, and that being the more distinct detail for a few generations.

Coming 40 or so years after other Barbados planters founded the Province of Carolina in the fertile lowlands to the south, the family’s choice to settle instead in the Virginia Piedmont might reflect a lesser status. And yet by 1813 Burroughs’ cousin David would become Thomas Jefferson’s friend and neighbor in Albemarle County. It is claimed that Jefferson once said that the United States ‘couldn’t keep its hands off Florida.’ A Higginbotham would help prove that right.

While another cousin, Thomas Higginbotham, would free his slave Archibald “Archy Carey” Higginbotham in the late 1820s, Burroughs had no such interest. Having fought in the Revolution, Burroughs was granted land by the state of Georgia in 1784 in exchange for his service: 287.5 acres in Washington County and 150 acres in Richmond County. He had every intention of utilizing enslaved labor. Burroughs then moved south to Spanish East Florida. He owned a plantation on the north side of the St. Mary’s River between Georgia and East Florida, and he owned and operated a ferry and traded livestock there.

In 1790 he married Isabella Donna Incy. According to tradition, Isabella was said to be Seminole, although later said to be Spanish or Florida Minorcan. By 1791 Burroughs was calling the Nassau, Spanish East Florida side of the river his home, at a place called Higginbotham’s Bluff, where he lived with his wife, 9 sons, and one slave. Presumably, he kept this enslaved person under close scrutiny, for the Spanish would offer an escaped slave freedom for converting to Catholicism and putting in some military service. Or, failing that, his slave could well have run off to live a semi-feudal existence under the Seminoles, and perhaps to mix with them as well.

Burroughs was living in Nassau when, in 1793, Edmund Genet came to South Carolina as the minister of the new French Republic. Burroughs may have been privy to Genet’s conspiracy to raise an army in the US together with Georgia state militia colonel Samuel Hammond to invade East Florida. John McIntosh, another veteran of the Revolution from a Georgia family which had acquired land in East Florida, was privy to it. Genet’s conspiracy was stopped, but in 1795 a force of 170 Georgians and East Floridians attacked two Spanish forts on the St. Johns River, with St. Augustine in their sights.

After their defeat, Burroughs would have witnessed the strengthening of Spanish fortifications with troops from Cuba and Mexico, as well as free people of color from all over the Spanish Caribbean. Burroughs was still living in Nassau during the West Florida controversy between Spain and the US, during which time the Treaty of San Lorenzo would be signed (1795), granting the US Mississippi navigation rights. 1800 saw the Spanish cession of New Orleans to France, and 1803 saw its purchase by the US. In 1804 President Jefferson signed the Mobile Act, incensing Spain with its stated intentions to annex all lands east of the Mississippi.

West Florida was filled with Anglo-Americans, including loyalists who had fled the Revolution and their descendants. It was also surrounded by US planters enraged to see their slaves escaping into Spanish lands and partnering with the Seminoles. These people, together with property speculators, organized in Baton Rouge to secede from Spain and form the Republic of West Florida in 1810 — the ‘bonnie blue flag that bears a single star’. Factions arose, some pro-Spanish, some pro-US, and some pro-independence.

The Spanish governor offered to surrender all of West Florida to the US if Havana or Veracruz provided him with no other instructions. In 1811 the US occupied the disputed territory in pursuit of further negotiations, although in January Congress had passed a secret act calling for the final acquisition of the Floridas. Burroughs may have lived a relatively more quiet life on his East Florida border, but that was bound to change.

On March 16, 1812, Georgia volunteers aided by 9 US Navy gunboats captured the Spanish outpost of Fernandina, an important smuggling port for goods and slaves bound for Georgia. By this time Anglo-Americans and other non-Spaniards formed a majority of the population north of the capital of San Agustin de la Florida, while Indian, Black Maroon, and runaway slave settlements were scattered farther south. Outlaw gangs such as that of poor cracker Daniel McGirtt also terrorized Anglo-American planters, stealing cattle and slaves. Taking a page from the Blackbeard playbook, when the Spanish offered McGirtt clemency in exchange for leaving Florida, McGritt accepted the clemency and stayed.

Now, in a pattern familiar throughout the history of American expansion, this so-called “Patriot War”, a plot hatched by President Madison, would be reenacting the Revolution all over again in order to end the Spanish rule so inconvenient for white Anglo-American planters. Their minutemen would be the poorer whites, bound with the promise of the share in the future cotton-based white supremacist Floridian utopia. These “patriots”, whose war would last until 1814 and run simultaneous to the War of 1812, wouldn’t succeed.

With British defeat in 1815 would come the rise of the populist Andrew Jackson to national prominence (Scots-Irish, but not from such a modest family as imagined) and the end of the idea of an “Indian barrier state” in the West. Defeated Creek Indians would join the ranks of the Seminoles. At the time of Burrough Higginbotham’s death in 1816, General Andrew Jackson was already poking along the East Florida border, engaging in raids against the Seminoles.

In 1818 Jackson invaded in earnest. By 1821 he had fully wrested control from the Spanish and the next year he became the first governor of the US territory of Florida. There was a fordable point across the St. Johns River on the King’s Road, built during the British period. It linked the cattle-rich lands of Florida with the markets in Georgia. The British called it Cowford. A few neighboring plantation owners, seeing the possibilities for the location opened up by this new, permanent reestablishment of Florida-Georgia commerce, decided to plat a town. Their name must have appeared obvious from the beginning: Jacksonville.

Among the founders was Isaiah D. Hart, another Georgian who had relocated to Spanish East Florida, and had been one of the 1812 “Patriots”. It was to this founder, Isaiah Hart, in his capacity as major of the local militia, that John Higginbotham would report on the morning of September 15, 1836.

Among the sons which survived Burroughs Higginbotham was John Higginbotham, named after Burroughs’ grandfather from Barbados. John was said to have been living 7 miles west of Jacksonville in 1836, around age 34. At about 10 o’clock that Thursday morning a band of Seminoles descended on the Higginbotham home. The family barricaded themselves inside their home. The Indians’ bullets left their marks against the sides of the house and inside it.

An unidentified woman who had left to gather water from a nearby branch found herself cut off from the house by the attack. The Seminoles fired at her, though the bullet merely passed through her clothes. Eventually, John Higginbotham successfully drove the Seminoles away and rode hastily into Jacksonville to notify Major Hart.

The Seminoles continued to the farm of a Fleming Johns. There they found Mr. and Mrs. Johns working in their yard and they shot Mr. Johns through the chest. The couple managed to make it back inside, however, the Seminoles kicked in the door and shot Mr. Johns dead. They then dragged Mrs. Johns to the door and told her to leave. At that very moment, however, a Seminole’s gun discharged and sent its bullet through her arm and neck. They brought her back inside and “with a large butcher knife” proceeded to scalp her.

They sacked the house and set it on fire. After the Seminoles left Mrs. Johns was able to pull herself out of the burning house. Bleeding profusely with her scalp-less skull bared to the morning sky, she passed out “at frequent intervals” while crawling her way towards a nearby swamp. She was rescued by 2pm. In the same period, the Seminoles would also kill an Allen Osteen, a William Barber, and “a man by the name of Hicks”. They would also steal a horse from a man named Eubank and wound several “in the vicinity of Brandy branch and the south prong of St. Mary’s river”.

Locals noted that “a few planters who had been kind to the Seminoles, remained on their farms and were never molested.” Thus arrived the Second Seminole War in the Higginbothams’ world… a war which was a long time coming… a war that arrived with my great-great-great-great uncle riding into a new town to tell its founder that the conflict incited by that town’s namesake had come home to roost.

“The government is in the wrong, and this is the chief cause of the persevering opposition of the Indians, who have nobly defended their country against our attempt to enforce a fraudulent treaty. The natives used every means to avoid a war, but were forced into it by the tyranny of our government.” Those were the words of Vermonter Ethan Allen Hancock on the Second Seminole War, which had begun the year before with an ambush of soldiers between present-day Tampa and Ocala. That’s one way to tell it, at least. Although the truth is that the conflict with the United States had been ongoing for a long time.

Andrew Jackson had become president in 1829 and signed the Indian removal act in 1830. The Seminoles merely refused to assent to being relocated. They refused with a memory of the constant conflict with the White supremacist, English-speaking slave owner. Memories which were Creek, Black, Choctaw… or even part White, like Osceola or Peter McQueen. They were memories brought together ever since the ethnic/cultural hybrid known as “Seminole” was invented in the 18th century, a frontier genesis, a birth on the borderlands of what was excluded from the body politic.

They were memories of betrayals, conspiracies, and an endless appetite of an invader. Now most of them are gone. Mr. Johns is also gone. But the Higginbothams survived. And when my father’s mother’s mother from the Tison planter family of Tisonia, Florida married a Higginbotham in 1919, they may have had some aristocratic-looking nostalgia penned in the inside cover of their family Bible. But by the time their daughter married the son of an Appalachian bootlegger in Fernandina named Jewell, you could safely say that something had truly changed.

It takes a while for the dust to settle from some of these scuff-ups. Some dusts settle sooner than others.

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“Jubilo Done Pass” Forthcoming Publication

Upcoming short story publication!

My short story “Jubilo Done Pass” will be featured in the forthcoming Footnote #5 from Alternating Current Press.

It’s a Civil War tale set in North Florida based loosely on Heart of Darkness. It speculates on the complacency of the powers that were in both North and South in the construction of the post-war order that saw the re-enshrining of white supremacy and the power of large landowners. Preorder your copy today!

~AND/OR~

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NEW PROJECTS!

Hello all,

I would like to thank everyone who has started following me here over the years. “That’s Not Southern Gothic” was born from the back of a semi-truck sleeper cab on America’s highways… Most people didn’t even seem to know I was the one writing it. Most of the works that were once here have been taken down to be circulated elsewhere.

I am excited to let y’all know about new things I’ve got cooking. First of all, as before, you can see a list of my published works at www.jeremyrayjewell.com

I also now have a Patreon account: www.patreon.com/jeremyrayjewell

My Patreon subscribers can help me continue to produce works such as my critical essays, my poetry featured previously on “That’s Not Southern Gothic”, and much more. “Reader” level subscribers ($10 a month) gain access to all of my works, unpublished and previously published. That includes poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.

It is very important to me that I create a group of readers who are engaged and who follow me in my future projects. Your financial support is only part of realizing that goal. In the future, as my reader, you can expect to see the following projects from me:

  • New blog on folklore from a psychoanalytically-informed and class-conscious perspective
  • Serialized novels
  • Physically published and commercially available poetry chapbook
  • Works of Spanish-English translation
  • Critical essays on in-depth topics of arts and culture with my signature style of critique
  • Collaborations with other artists from around the world
  • A new lease on life for “That’s Not Southern Gothic”, focused on recounting subaltern stories of real American life

Please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber so you can help make these things a reality.

Best,

Jeremy Ray Jewell

Tactile Afterlife

Originally published in Heron Clan VI

I was at the age to guard the way the creek flowed like
it was some penmanship of larger men into the brown Carolina
and since waited on the country road and backwoods bridge

to become the compassionate elder viewing young catastrophes
and stepping panic stricken out into the power line clearing
as into the incisions of the black bear through hickory bark.

Then the dogwood blossoms fell before you knew it,
and with a vomit of flora the pessimism echo was muffled
as only I now recall how one or the other will first die.

Though in that green fury I am elated that it may be me.
The revolutionist’s preference is to explode like spring spores.
To collapse like the winter buck is the blackest rot.

Such interest in the produce of minds, you know, but
Carolina grows and grows again out of the cavities of
unevacuated chests – it may only be so.

Good News Crackles

Originally published in Heron Clan VI

Driving through the Carolina forests late
at night and the radio moves from music with
advice to music with recipes. Then come the
Jesus stations – all 20 or so. One, then
another. Eventually one reaches out to you,
between the trees and through your headlights,
out of the products and pop songs, splitting
apart the comfortable and the beautiful and
the meaningful people like storm clouds overhead,
and it grabs you by the lapels. It’s been

looking for You, has a message for You. It
has a job. For You. An audio exit opens in
the highway and you’re on it. Exit 81.7 FM,
downtown Jerusalem, Edge of Empire, USA. When
it’s all over you keep it like a psalm in the
glove box, unfolding it for a second in the
parking lot before work, or you read it out
loud in the break room. Because Carolina has
some comfortable, beautiful, meaningful, dark
clouds hovering over it. Good news crackles

on the airwaves, and somewhere sometime it’s
got to rip. Prosperity will rain down on the
forests and the forest people will become
woodland titans. Pulled teeth will resprout.
Lost jobs will be found. We might even buy
back the farm. So think the dry bones
on the Carolina highways at night.

Hillbilly of Monterey Bay

Originally published in Heron Clan VI

Hillbilly Larry and I looked back on all
those America places that weren’t beaches
and we probably thunk a spell on all
those beach places that weren’t America.
We poked a dead bloated seal with a stick and
pointed to a flat otter on the road and he said
“you know I don’t read,” and I said, “neither
do most, honky,” an’ that’d be why the

Steinbeck Center was back in town and
Hillbilly Larry and I are walking among the
lettuce in flip-flops an’ West Virginia Reeboks
talkin’ the cardinal directions what organize us.
Lar never saw the ocean before and I
hadn’t seen a tent city for a few days but
I looked at Larry and I pointed out to sea
“I ain’t ‘splainin nothin’ to you, Larry. Go

get knocked around by a coupla waves,
then we’ll get drunk and I’ll talk about all the
beach towns I know back East.” Lar knew
better ‘an that… “‘slong as I don’t wind up
suppin’ on a young girl’s breast or lookin’
out there thinkin’ a rabbits,” “I’m tired of
your hillbilly crap, Larry,” I said, “go swim!
I want you to text me from China by noon.”