Olden Times

I was reading the obits this morning, which is something I sometimes do. Not to see if anyone I know has died so much as to just acknowledge people's lives and passing and this morning I noticed that a woman had died whom I did not know, but I had known her father and reading her obituary brought back memories of him.
His name was McKinley Smith, Sr., although we all knew him as Smitty.
Smitty was a older black gentlemen who had a jook joint out in what used to be the boonies but which is now a high-dollar area of North Leon County, out on Bannerman Road. This was in the early 1970's and I'm not sure how Smitty and the local hippies formed an alliance but they did. One of the things about "those days" that I still don't quite understand is how all of a sudden (it seemed to me, anyway) black folks and white folks were interacting in ways that had previously been unheard of and by God, I'm claiming some of that action to be due to the hippies and our hippie ways. If there was anything hippies stood for besides good music and the right to go barefoot and smoke dope, it was that all the old societal rules should be kicked to the curb until further notice. And this included any bullshit about separation of the races. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that we were the first generation of kids who'd gone to integrated schools. Maybe it had something to do with all those rock bands playing old blues tunes and bringing the blues masters to the public eye. B.B. King, in his amazing autobiography which should be required reading in American high schools, gave credit to the hippies for making his career explode. Which goes back to kicking all the rules to the curb. Music was being made that had its roots everywhere and anywhere and there was an audience for it. Country, blues, folk, opera, soul- all these genres and more were mined and refined into newly minted music and along with all of that, I think people started paying attention and realizing that there was a lot of respect due where none had been given before and that differences were more interesting than something to fear.
Or something like that. I might be talking through my hat.
Anyway, Smitty had that jook joint out on Bannerman and he gladly let the local musicians make his club their home. There was even a band formed called Smitty's Band and I truly wish I could remember who all made it up.
The club itself was mostly one big room built on to a smaller section where Smitty himself lived and there was a kitchen in the back. There was a bar and there was a stage and there were tables. There was also a big wooden dance floor where hippies and hippie kids and black folks would dance but my favorite dancer was Smitty himself who would get his thin old bones in his neat buttoned-up shirt and his khaki pants out on the floor and do a sort of closed-eye shuffle that somehow hypnotized me. He loved the music. I don't know if he loved the hippies, but he tolerated us and we knew that if people were smoking dope in the parking lot, no one was going to call the cops.
The people who were developing Killearn at one point offered Smitty a million dollars to sell them his land. Now back in the seventies, a million dollars was an awful lot of money but he refused their offer.
"Where would I feed my pigs?" I distinctly remember him saying.
Nah. Smitty had everything he wanted. He had acres of beautiful land where his pigs could graze (and where several hippie weddings were performed) and he had his small, comfortable living quarters and he had his own club where bands would play music so he could dance. He always seemed to have a "niece" from up north living with him, too, and he seemed like a reasonably happy man to me.
My ex-husband and I used to drive out to see Smitty on Sunday's sometime. We'd buy a beer and sit and talk to him. Sometimes he'd get a watermelon out of the cooler and cut it up and we'd all sit around and eat that sweet cold fruit. I remember once we went out when our oldest was a little over a year old and he told us not to wait too long to have another. I forget what his reasoning was, but we must have listened to him because our next baby came along before the oldest was two.
I don't know if Smitty was wise or if he was just someone we thought was wise because he was old and black and had turned down an offer for a million dollars in order to maintain a relatively simple lifestyle that suited him but we respected him and he didn't treat hippies like they were second-class citizens, but just real people, like him, and it felt like we had a lot in common, despite all the glaring differences between us.
I remember when Smitty died. I went to his funeral, as many other hippies did. It was my first country funeral in a black church and there were indeed electric guitars and a lot of ladies in hats fanning themselves. I cried and a young man in a suit standing next to me handed me a starched white handkerchief and I'll never forget that.
They buried Smitty in the front yard of his club and the last time I was out that way, I stopped. The place had turned into some sort of restaurant and there was a little fence around Smitty's grave but no marker that I could see and that made me sad.
Thinking about a lot of things from those old days make me sad. We had such hope that things would change. Things like transcending differences between people based on race and age and upbringing and culture. Things like Smitty's club.
Maybe we're about to get our first black president and the ways of this world will take another halting jolt forward. God, I hope so. I wish Smitty were still around to see this possibility. I think he'd be proud.
I think he would have been proud of his daughter, too. She was too young to die- only 57- but I see by her obit that she'd done more than well by herself. She got a Master's Degree from FSU and was the budget director for the Department of Education Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.
My ex husband and I actually lived on Bannerman road for one long, hot summer before we ever had any children and Smitty's sister had a little jook of her own, two doors down from the house we rented and we used to go in there for fried chicken sandwiches. She was a sweet woman and I used to visit her now and then but I haven't for a long, long time. Still, the last time I went, it had been twenty years since I'd lived there and she knew who I was. She recognized me and hugged me hard. Other people in the club recognized me too. "You that white girl, used to be married to Jerry," they said.
Yep. That's me.
I'm that white girl, used to be married to Jerry. Used to dance at Smitty's Club. Used to think things were changing.
Maybe I still do. Not the way I used to when it seemed like all kinds of changes were happening overnight. Wars ending, presidents getting kicked out of office. Stuff like that.
Stuff that ought to be happening now, but isn't.
Anyway, I just wanted to say all of that. Pay a little tribute to people who have gone on, and to hippie ways and hippie hope and places like Smitty's club where people came together to make music and dance and laugh, despite differences.
Yeah. I just wanted to say that.
I wish I had a picture of Smitty or even his club to put here, but I don't. So this post is going pictureless. Just close your eyes and imagine a hot, small, smoky club, lit only by Christmas lights and neon beer signs, a thin old black man holding a beer, dancing with his eyes closed, little kids and their parents dancing around him, all sorts of folks sitting together at tables, drinking a little beer, getting a little buzz, happy to be alive in such good, colorful, musical, hopeful times while outside the crickets are buzzing and the moon is rising over fields where pigs are grazing, everyone happy.
Try to imagine that.
If you want to. If you can.