GET AWAY Down Upon the Suwannee River
real America pit stop #2
Last month I took a 12-day drive from Florida through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. I visited some historic sites with emotional significance for many Americans; Civil War and Revolutionary War museums; state parks; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to these places and the events and people they might commemorate, I looked at the signage, collected the literature, and talked to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, mined the gift shops!
Narrative Nation is my place to collect some thoughts and images about what I saw. Ideally, some parts of these reflections will be incorporated into the book I am developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: White Supremacist Revisions of the American Narrative. But for now these stories are drafts to help me think about what I’m seeing and hearing. I’ll also continue adding stories about what I find here in Florida. Please comment with corrections and add your own experiences with the way our nation’s story—past and present—is being told.
This Independence Day post comes out of order, interrupting the narration of my research trip somewhere between Glasgow and Sugartit, Kentucky.
A few days after I returned to Florida, we rented a place near the town of Branford, hoping for a peaceful weekend and some canoeing on the beautiful Suwannee River about 90 minutes west of our house in Jacksonville.
I expect to see Trump signs everywhere I go, flanked by DeSantis signs when I get to Florida, and increasing in number as I leave the city center. But I had never seen anything quite like the flag pictured below before arriving in Branford. A short distance away we turned on to the partially-flooded sand road that would lead us to our rental.
What we saw on Old River Road was also appalling. As we drove several miles past fence after fence, a fairly unified constellation of messages emerged.
Things they like: Trump, DeSantis, Confederate flags, liberty and freedom, and skull and crossbones images made from two guns behind a skull with flag pattern, which looks as awkward as it sounds.
Things they don’t like: strangers.
What they’re doing about it: mounting cameras everywhere with unfriendly signs (cameras in place! guess where?); keeping guard dogs in and out of cages and posting signs about it (I can get to the fence in 3 seconds, can you?); junking the whole place up with many small “private property” and “no trespassing” signs; and directly threatening to shoot people on sight, in writing.
Several variations on the old Trump theme are deployed. We all know the “Make America Great Again” slogan from 2016, in particular its implication of a forced return to something more like the pre-civil rights era. Some signs currently posted say “Keep America Great!” from the 2020 campaign. Signs for the 2024 campaign say “Take America Back” and “Save America Again.” On the DeSantis front, I saw several “Keep Florida Free” slogans.
This “Take America Back” sign is posted next to a Confederate flag, answering the obvious question, at least for that family, “take America back from whom?” The most common were the smaller “Save America Again” yard signs. In those, I can’t help but hear the voice of white Christian nationalism. I wonder if a person’s choice of Trump sign indicates something meaningful about their priorities, or if all these signs are more or less interchangeable displays of racism, xenophobia, and an irrational anti-government mindset.
Regardless, I wanted to take my run on that soft sand road in the morning. I ran along, looking at cypress roots sticking up in lakes of standing water and at young deer springing back into the woods just when I began to imagine I’d be touching one.
I saw a white pickup truck getting closer, slowing down in the way you know someone's going to pull up to you. The older white male driver asked if I was staying at the such-and-such place, but I really didn’t know. His reason for asking, he quickly clarified upon realizing I might not want to say where I’m staying, is because he’d been shooting all the armadillos on his property next door and didn’t want me to be surprised when I heard more shots.
This was a topic of conversation back at the house more than once throughout that day. The image of blowing little armadillos away with a shotgun wasn't leaving me. A good day on my college campus in Jacksonville is when I can get close to one of our resident armadillos rooting around. And the man's neighborly concern did nothing to erase the vision of my teenager accidentally shot dead in some woods by a river. I reminded my son how we hear about fatal hunting accidents. If shooting a little armadillo rooting around for food in your yard is hunting.
The next day, my husband and I went out to run together. As scary as parts of that road had been on some parts of the previous run, my knee could not pass up that luxurious sand surface. We got started too late, and the June heat felt especially brutal to me after spending a couple of weeks in and around the mountains. So Ryan ran ahead to the house while I walked for a while.
After a couple of minutes, a white pickup truck approached and slowed again. I hoped it was the old guy from the day before and not someone asking me why I was taking pictures. It was him, and this time he smiled again, but even more familiar than before. After encounters in that sparsely-populated place two days in a row, we were in some way family. With his elbow sticking out of the window, he leaned toward me and said, “you're gonna have to speed up if you're staying with him,” motioning down the road with his thumb. I smiled and only said, “impossible.” He laughed knowingly, threw his head back and drove on, pulling away gently without kicking up any sand.
I was unwillingly skin deep in my connection with this white man from Trump country. I don't know which one of those properties he came out of. He was protective and nice to me, an unarmed white woman on foot. But living there among all those menacing signs seems wrong.
Here’s my imaginary letter.
People of Old River Road,
So you still like Trump after all we’ve seen; that’s one stupid thing. And now you like DeSantis too, and that’s another equally stupid thing. And the Confederate flag, well that’s been stupid the whole time.
But when I stay at a VRBO house in your neighborhood, is it necessary for you to threaten to shoot me on closed circuit TV and then leave my body by the road to be torn apart by your guard dogs? That’s your community vibe.
In the few days we stayed, there was rarely anyone else in sight. I wonder, what’s the evidence that an occasional person coming down this road would have any need to come on to your particular little piece of land? Why would they need killing if they did?
I also wonder if you make any connections between your Trump and DeSantis signs and your paranoid death threats towards outsiders? I do.
I didn’t intend to learn or even think very much that weekend—we only wanted to spend some time on the river. I’ve been talking about the Suwannee since we visited a different spot ten years ago. So I want to recognize the beauty of this ancient-feeling place in this post, too. Not pictured is a huge sturgeon that jumped out of the water in front of us or the many families of white-tailed deer hanging around the edges of the road.
The country is often so beautiful, and the people in it can often be so disheartening. Little more than an hour from home down the Old River Road near or in the town of Branford, Florida, I was reminded again how some parts of the nation are choked with this overgrown anger, this paranoia about other humans coming too close or taking their things, and even violent imagined killings.
It’s 10 p.m. on the 4th of July, and these freedom crackers seem to get louder and come closer.
The white man with a shot gun in a pick up truck reminded me of Easy Rider especially the ending.
It hurts my soul when I try to put myself in the shoes of the people that live in that neighborhood. For the most part, I imagine they must be decent human beings, as evident in the friendly exchanges you had with White Truck. But the gleeful display of their prideful embrace of such indecent symbols and people makes it painful to empathize with them.