Florida's deepest roots

Jackson Blount, 76, plants sweet potatoes at his home in Jacob. “I grow enough for the family and give the rest to people around town,” he says. The retired heavy equipment operator has lived all but 13 years of his life in Jacob. His wife, four children and nine grandchildren live there, too.

© St. Petersburg Times
published June 30, 2002

Blink and you might miss Jacob, pop. 281, a town poor in money but rich in native Floridians.

JACOB -- The mayor of this Florida town reports to city hall wearing short pants. Here in the Panhandle, only a few steamy miles from the Alabama border, the merciless sun beats down hard enough to leave bruises.

Nobody is bent out of shape by Riley Henderson's summer wardrobe. In Jacob, where strangers stand out like scarecrows in a cornfield, everybody knows everybody else down to their favorite Bible verse. Folks born in Jacob usually die in Jacob. They are buried next to their fathers and mothers and grandparents and great grandparents in an ancient cemetery.

Although the rest of the world has paid Jacob scant notice for two centuries, now the U.S. Census Bureau has finally called attention to its specialness. Tiny Jacob, whose 281 forlorn souls fail to rate a dot on most road maps, boasts the highest percentage of Florida-born residents in the state.

Nearly 91 percent are down-home Florida natives. Contrast that to Tampa, where about 45 percent are true Floridians, and with St. Petersburg, where only 36 percent were born here.

Generations pass, but few names change. That has left Jacob stranded somewhere between antebellum Florida and the Florida most of us know, the Florida of Disney, tabloid fodder and international intrigue.

In Jacob, where an hour seems to drag on much longer, there is no such thing as small talk. Folks grace supper tables with home-grown collards, yams and fried chicken. Grown-ups relax on front porches in the summer evening and talk about the old days while their children play basketball in bare feet. After dark, the Milky Way -- illuminating every back yard -- serves as a reminder to the religious-minded townfolk of the presence of the Almighty.

Jackson Blount, 76, plants sweet potatoes at his home in Jacob. “I grow enough for the family and give the rest to people around town,” he says. The retired heavy equipment operator has lived all but 13 years of his life in Jacob. His wife, four children and nine grandchildren live there, too.

Here is something else about Jacob: It is virtually an all-black town. Mostly poor, 25 percent of families live below poverty level. Jacob has no doctor or library or school, or even a store to buy a Band-Aid. A thirsty resident has to drive several country miles to the big highway to find a Dr Pepper.

Isolation hasn't always been a bad thing. In Jacob, it blunted the harsh decades of Southern segregation, and because everyone was poor, no one felt poor. When desegregation arrived in Jackson County it carried a price.

"When things opened up for us after integration, and people felt better about going out of town, they could buy stuff cheaper than they could ever here," the mayor says. "Our businesses died."

Like many in Jacob, the mayor would welcome prosperity -- maybe more young people would choose to stay -- but he doesn't completely trust it. He wonders if it might ruin Jacob's small-town ways.

At 45, he has lived here all his life except for the four years he spent at Florida State University getting his degree in social work. His parents were born and raised in Jacob, as were his grandparents and several generations before. Manning his unpaid post at city hall, Henderson tries to define his little town.

"We're a fragile place," he finally says.

A lone resident crosses from the dirt to the paved road in front of Jacob City Hall. A person can walk the entire town in half an hour and drive though it in about 5 minutes.

Home and hearth

The mayor can walk around Jacob in about half an hour. He can drive through his town in about 5 minutes. Jacob has two paved roads and about half a dozen unpaved ones. It has stop signs but not even a traffic light that blinks.

When the mayor drives his old Nissan pickup through town, he usually has the dusty roads to himself, at least during the day. Most Jacobites work in nearby cities.

"We're a bedroom community for other towns now," he says. "There's no work here. It's just a place to live."

Jacob has about 100 modest houses and mobile homes. A few residents still live in shotgun shacks, so called because a buckshot load fired through the open front door would pass down the hall and exit through the open back door. Those old-timey houses have tin roofs and crawl spaces just right for sleeping dogs.

Everybody is wired for electricity, and many homes boast air-conditioning. Few people own computers, but almost everyone watches television, though cable has yet to arrive. Eleven percent of Jacob does without telephones.

A nondescript box awaits mail for the city of Jacob. The community incorporated in 1984 to take advantage of federal funds to improve the local housing stock, roads and city hall.

Years ago everybody depended on wells or rain for their water, but now Jacob has a water system. It's failing and most residents prefer getting their water from bottles bought outside of town. "One of our goals is to modernize our water system," the mayor says.

Most homes are neatly kept and have vegetable gardens in the back yard or flower gardens in the front yard. Some residents post religious scripture on their mailboxes or fences. "Gone to church," says a sign on the screen door of a house a few doors from city hall.

People count their blessings.

"Praise the Lord!" declares Ardelia Blount, at 78 a Jacob matriarch. "We were poor, but we never went hungry. And now we've got water, honey. We've got electricity. The Lord is with Jacob!"

What Jacob lacks in commerce it makes up in religion. It has two churches, including the community's oldest institution, St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church, with another in the offing. The old city hall, which over the years also served as a hellsapopping juke joint, is now the New Beginning Outreach Ministry.

Practically everybody on the city council is a church deacon somewhere and sprinkles conversation with Bible scripture. When Riley Henderson is not attending city business he's a pastor at St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church in Marianna, the nearest big town 10 miles away.

Jacob is a shady place with lots of pines, tall grass and overgrown lots. Surrounding the town are peanut and cotton fields, usually owned by outsiders.

Arthur Lee Rhynes, 58, is the exception. The last black farmer in Jacob, he devotes 20 acres to peanuts, 40 to corn and 20 to his cattle. He sells enough to break even, but it's a struggle. Outside Jacob, he works nights as a prison guard.

He also likes to argue with city hall about his tax bill.

"I don't mind paying city taxes," he says. "But just tax my house. Don't tax my farm. I can't afford it."

"I don't blame him," says mayor Henderson. "We hardly have a tax base. We're poor. We're always looking for money so we don't have to rely completely on state and federal funds."

'The beauty' of Jacob

Jacob got its name from Jake Jones, who lived down by the present railroad tracks about 250 years ago. Not much is known about Jones, except he was a white man. Only 5 percent of the population is white today, and when a white stranger drives through town, folks take notice. Moments later the phone rings at city hall. People ask the mayor what's going on.

Jacob Mayor Riley Henderson gets a playful hug from his wife, Wanda, before sitting down to Sunday dinner with his sister Edna Pittman, and her family at her house. Mayor Henderson left Jacob only to attend college at Florida State University.

The mayor is stocky and tall and wears metal-rimmed glasses, a White Sox T-shirt and sneakers. He's the third mayor since Jacob became an official city in 1984.

The advantage of incorporation was the ability to apply for federal and state funds needed to fix things. Government money paved roads, built modern homes and established a new city hall.

"We've come a long way," Henderson says. A few years ago, Jacob bought land for a city park. Recently, at a city council meeting, he accepted bids from contractors from outside of town who want to build a picnic shelter, a restroom and finish the basketball court.

"We've got $50,000 to do that work and that isn't much," Henderson says. He's put on hold his desire to bring Little League to Jacob.

Henderson draws no salary as mayor. One salaried city employee is Saundrette Taylor, who is the clerk, manager, receptionist and almost everything except handyman. Handyman is "Mister Buddy" -- his real name is Alfonso White -- who has spent virtually every day of his 84 years in Jacob.

"Mister Buddy" was a farmer until he got too old to handle a mule-hauled plow. He has yet to break himself of the habit of wearing farmer's bib overalls to work. The big-city lights of Marianna, population 6,230, hold no attraction for him.

Marianna is the seat of Jackson County, named after Florida's first governor, Andrew Jackson, who made war against Seminole Indians partly because they harbored escaped slaves. Henderson remembers visiting Marianna as a boy and automatically going through back doors so as not to upset white residents.

Integration in the Panhandle came late, long after it arrived elsewhere. In the 1970s, when Henderson was a teen, the municipal pool in Marianna closed for the summer rather than admit black children.

"But that was the beauty of living in Jacob," he says now. "In Jacob we weren't outsiders. It was our community. We had everything we needed."

Waste not, want not

The mayor graduated from an integrated high school, attended community college and finished at FSU. He worked as a mental health counselor for years until he heard God calling him into the ministry. He has never thought about living anywhere but Jacob.

"I travel, but I'm always glad to get home," he says. "I'm a small-town boy."

He points his truck down a red-clay road next to a forest.

"Hey, look back there. See, back there in the bushes? We had a hole. Our swimming hole. It's dried up now, but every day in the summer, that's where we kids went."

They caught catfish and bream in the swimming hole, and toted them home in time for dinner. Everybody had gardens and grew greens and field peas. Riley Henderson might be the only mayor in Florida whose resume could include the ability to shell peas and slaughter a hog.

The hog work always happened on a cold Saturday in winter. The young men would do the killing, their wives the butchering and their kids the removal of the hog's hair. Nothing went to waste. Lard was used to make lye soap and bones were saved for soup or for dogs. All the while the old men sat under the biggest oak tree in the community and played checkers on a homemade board using bottle caps for pieces.

The Jacob community had a grocery and a gas station. No more. It had a mill where farmers brought their corn to be ground into meal and grits. No more. One family had a sawmill. Gone. Others had mills to grind cane stalks into syrup. R.I.P. Jacob had its own school. Now kids go to Graceville or Cottondale, a 45-minute bus ride.

Jacob in the old days wasn't heaven, of course. It still was a hard place.

In segregated Florida, black communities often had to rely on folk medicine. Chicken pox was warded off by waving a hen over the fevered brow of the sick child. Mumps? "I still can't eat sardines," the mayor says. "The cure was rubbing sardine juice all over your body."

If somebody got really sick, if someone was badly injured, usually the white doctor in Marianna or Graceville would treat the black patient at the end of the day. Now modern medicine is accessible even to the poor.

"I grew up poor," Henderson says. It's a little better now. Median family income in Jacob is $22,292. "But at least when I was a kid, you didn't know you were poor. Now it's different. Everybody has TV. It doesn't take long for a kid to know he can't have those $100 Michael Jordan sneakers."

He drives past his old house, now a storage shed. His father, Mingo, now dead, worked four decades for the railroad. The mayor's mother, Lottie Mae, ruled her family with an iron hand.

"What was that book Mrs. Clinton wrote? Oh. It Takes a Village," says the mayor. "That's how it was in Jacob when I was coming up. You go down the street and throw a rock and Aunt Susie on her porch sees you and says 'Stop it!' And that night, when you come home, your momma knows about it. We didn't need no crime watch in Jacob."

Kid hurls a stick across the dirt road.

"See that?" asks the mayor, slowing down. "That's me. That's me as a boy. See, we could amuse ourselves. What bothers me today is kids don't have imagination. Don't have to. They have toys, they have computer games, that provide the imagination for them. I like a kid who throws a stick."

In the eyes of the Lord

Jacob has never lacked ministers who keep a stern but loving eye on its youth.

Members of St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church’s Sunday School class No. 6 wait to enter the church after their lesson. “I enjoy teaching them. They’re always well behaved,” says teacher Evie Tucker, right.

The Rev. George Bowers, 49, has been preaching since high school. For more than a dozen years he has been pastor of Jacob's largest institution, the red-brick, century-old St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church. Almost everyone in town is a member. He's baptized them, married them and buried them across the road in the cemetery among graves dug during slavery times.

"We're important," Bowers says, taking a break from preparing his next sermon, which will be based on Genesis, Chapter 37, about Jacob's family and the teenager, Joseph, the one who had such a fine, colorful coat and many jealous brothers.

"We devote a lot of time to working with the young people," says the Rev. Bowers. "We need to keep them on track."

His church has youth programs three nights a week. Basketball games go on way past dark. As boys work on their layups, girls practice dance steps nearby. "I want to be a singer like Brandy when I grow up," says Shantae Hall, a sophomore at Cottondale High School.

A pop-music career might be difficult for a kid who stays in Jacob. "I like it here, but there's not a lot to do," she says. A perfect night is a shopping trip to Wal-Mart in Marianna.

Bentrell Thomas, 12, leaps for a rebound at Jacob City Park. “Iverson!” he yells, imagining himself thousands of miles and millions of people away in Philadelphia, playing for the 76ers. That’s about as far away as you can get from Jacob -- population 281.

Many adults, including the mayor, worry about their restless children. They worry about the shack at the edge of town. Rumor is it's a drug house -- but they like to believe Jacob kids stay away. With no police department, Jacob has to rely on county law enforcement dispatched from miles away.

"We don't have a lot of crime to speak of," says the mayor. "At least nothing really violent. It's not like in the big cities where everybody is anonymous. Here, a kid who snatches a purse, why he's messing with somebody's mamma or grandmother."

The mayor and his wife, Wanda, have four children. The youngest, JJ, will be a freshman next fall at Graceville High School. He would like to be either a professional athlete or a lawyer when he grows up, even if it means leaving Jacob.

His sister, Leticia, 26, left Jacob. "It was hard," she says. She remembers when she arrived at the University of Florida to claim her scholarship. "It was so big," she says. "But after a while I loved it. It was the idea you could find anything you needed right there, like a hamburger."

She graduated with a psychology degree, then got her master's degree at Troy State University, just over the state line, in Dothan. She counsels the mentally ill in Marianna and lives there, too.

"My idea was not to stay around here," she says. "My idea was to get on my feet and then move on. That's what most people my age who grow up in Jacob do. They just come back for Mother's Day and Father's Day. But then being close to home grew on me again.

"I still go back to Jacob all the time. That's where my family is, and my church. I keep praying that something is going to happen, that maybe somebody will open a store or something, right there in Jacob.

"Sometimes I really believe that will happen."

Letting go of old ways

Over the years a lot of government money has been invested in building 40 new houses for residents. At one time, many folks lived in shacks that lacked running water, bathrooms and even electricity. Most people stood in line to get a modern home.

"Not everybody," Riley Henderson says. Change, even change that promises a better life, is greeted warily in Jacob.

One elderly couple refused to give up their old shack.

Lifelong resident Alphonso “Mister Buddy” White, 84, catches up with the Jackson County Floridian while on a break from his handyman duties at Jacob City Hall. “Not much goes on around here during the day,” says the former farmer.

"They just didn't trust government. They didn't even trust me, somebody they knew. See, a lot of the old people, years ago, they might leave town and go to the city and buy something, and sign their names on a contract, without really understanding what they were signing. What they were signing was an agreement to forfeit their property if they couldn't, say, pay off a piece of furniture. Some people actually lost their land because they signed the wrong piece of paper.

"Anyway, I couldn't get that couple to sign the piece of paper that would have gotten them a new home. Sure enough. We had a cold winter, a real cold night, and they stacked newspaper along their walls for insulation. They went to bed under their quilt, and somehow it caught fire. He was burned to death and she was horribly burned.

"We don't have a fire department."

-- Times staff writer Alicia Caldwell, Times researcher Cathy Wos and Times photographer Kinfay Moroti contributed to this story.

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