FAMILY PHOTO ARCHIVE
Title: Papa (Joseph Vara, Grandfather) with Horse and Bull
Photographer: Doc (Joseph Vara, Great-Grandfather)?
Location: Vara Farm, Bonifay, FL
Date: Oct. 1934?
Medium: black and white print 3x4.5
There’s a small black and white photograph of you standing between a white horse and a brown bull. The bull is the same bull I’ve seen photos of you standing with at the county rodeo. I was told he won a blue ribbon and was sold to the highest bidder and you cried.
The white horse is the one you rode English saddle to school every day. I thought it was just family lore, but there she is. In the center of the frame with you and the bull. Your hands on their necks, their heads turned towards you.
On the right side of the image is a fence, metal posts and thick pine rounds strung together by five lines of barbed wire. I imagine the fence—two metal posts, one wood—repeating to the edge of the highway I can’t see but know is there. Across the road lie thick woods. The tops of yellow pines and bare live oaks and sycamores trees stand out against the sky. And on the left, across the field of short cut grass sits the old family ranch house.
You look about twelve. Maybe younger. Your big sister Joyce must have been in high school. Doc had her show the bull at the rodeo. He thought the judges would prefer a beautiful teenage girl to a little boy.
*
Through town and thirty miles east on Highway 90, sits Marianna. Last year it was hit by Hurricane Michael. I visited Florida this June and on a Sunday afternoon I made the trip from Bonifay. Driving towards the Jackson County seat, the acres of pines along the interstate were chopped in half like bodies cut at the hips. I had told friends in Bonifay I wanted to see what the town looked like after the storm. “You should. It's tragic,” they said.
*
Dad told me about the storm. A professor asked me if my family in Florida was okay. I pretended to know and said they were. I can go weeks without listening or reading the news.
On the phone, Dad said, “Marianna was wiped out by the hurricane.” He paused. “The place where I went to college is gone.”
All I could think of were the large live oaks in front of the courthouse. Part of me wanted them gone too, their roots pulled from under the city streets like dandelion and thistle stripped from flower beds.
*
Off the interstate, large branches lay across roofs, front yards, and driveways. Large broken limbs leaned against telephone wires pointing at the sky. In the center of town, every third or fourth building had windows and doors boarded up. One building was just gone, ripped out by some giant fist.
The town was deserted except for the corner of Caledonia Street and Constitution Lane where a small group of men and women sat on benches and in wheelchairs, smoking and talking, looking out over the hot pavement. Their eyes followed my car as I slowly drove past them.
I hadn’t been to Marianna in a decade but still knew my way to the courthouse. It was in the middle of town. A couple of branches snapped; moss hung over the courthouse entrance.
*
The lynching of Claude Neal on October 26, 1934, is said to have been the last spectacle lynching in the United States. It took place in Marianna. Invitations were announced on the radio and printed in the papers. Tickets were sold. Thousands of people gathered in front of the courthouse and the giant live oaks.
*
Doc moved the family from Georgia to Bonifay in 1925. When I asked Dad if Doc and Pearl had attended the lynching, he said, “They weren’t those kinds of people.”
*
If Aunt Joyce was seven years older than you, you must have been nine in the photo.
The trees were bare, so maybe it was October 1934.
I wonder if you heard the invitations on the radio.
