2009B FRQ #2

         Sawley, the town, is in west Florida, on the famous 

     Suwanee River. It is flanked on the south by the 

     curving course of the river which Stephen Foster* 

     made famous without ever having looked upon its 

5  waters, running swift and deep through the primitive 

     forests, and reddened by the chemicals leeched out 

     of drinking roots. On the north, the town is flanked 

     by cultivated fields planted to corn, cane, potatoes, 

     tobacco and small patches of cotton. 

10     However, few of these fields were intensively 

     cultivated. For the most part they were scratchy 

     plantings, the people being mostly occupied in 

     the production of turpentine and lumber. The life 

     of Sawley streamed out from the sawmill and the 

15 “teppentime ‘still.” Then too, there was ignorance 

     and poverty, and the ever-present hookworm. The 

     farms and the scanty flowers in front yards and in 

     tin cans and buckets looked like the people. Trees 

     and plants always look like the people they live 

20 with, somehow. 

         This was in the first decade of the new century, 

     when the automobile was known as the horseless 

     carriage, and had not exerted its tremendous influence 

     on the roads of the nation. There was then no U.S. 90, 

25 the legendary Old Spanish Trail, stretching straight 

     broad concrete from Jacksonville on the Atlantic to 

     San Diego on the Pacific. There was the sandy pike, 

     deeply rutted by wagon wheels over which the folks 

     of Sawley hauled their tobacco to market at Live Oak, 

30 or fresh-killed hogmeat, corn and peanuts to Madison 

     or Monticello on the west. Few ever dreamed of 

     venturing any farther east nor west. 

         Few were concerned with the past. They had heard 

     that the stubbornly resisting Indians had been there 

35 where they now lived, but they were dead and gone. 

     Osceola, Miccanope, Billy Bow-Legs were nothing 

     more than names that had even lost their bitter flavor. 

     The conquering Spaniards had done their murdering, 

     robbing, and raping and had long ago withdrawn from 

40 the Floridas. Few knew and nobody cared that the 

     Hidalgos under De Sota had moved westward along 

     this very route. The people thought no more of them 

     than they did the magnolias and bay and other 

     ornamental trees which grew so plentifully in the 

45 swamps along the river, nor the fame of the stream. 

     They knew that there were plenty of black bass, 

     locally known as trout, in the Suwanee, and bream 

     and perch and cat-fish. There were soft-shell turtles 

     that made a mighty nice dish when stewed down to 

50 a low gravy, or the “chicken meat” of those same 

     turtles fried crisp and brown. Fresh water turtles were 

     a mighty fine article of food anyway you looked at it. 

     It was commonly said that a turtle had every kind of 

     meat on him. The white “chicken meat,” the dark 

55 “beef” and the in-between “pork.” You could stew, 

     boil and fry, and none of it cost you a cent. All you 

     needed was a strip of white side-meat on the hook, 

     and you had you some turtle meat. 

        *American songwriter (1826-1864) whose song “Old Folks at Home” 

        begins “Way down upon the Swanee River”