Top row (L-R): Roughrider, Jeff Thaggard, Eddie from Buffalo’s Tallahassee, Uncle Joseph Walter Jones,
Front Row (L-R): Shane (Boutwell Jones), John Bradley, Mack Mitchell, and Frog.
The photograph was taken around 1992.
Eight of us on the dock at midday. A pink laundry basket. White sneakers gone dark at the toe.
Reds laid out on the concrete in a pile that went on longer than the frame could hold.
Rough Rider was there.
Uncle Joey was there.
They called me Ice at the time but that era was melting away….
I am the shirtless one kneeling in front of Rough Rider, holding the kingfish like it weighed something.
There was Mack. John Bradley. Jeff Thaggard. Eddie from Buffalo’s in Tallahassee.
And Frog.
That alone should tell you this was not a board meeting.
I was in Athens then, still a college student.
I would come home and go south with these men,
out toward the Gulf after grouper and red snapper.
J. Lovic Jones had fished those waters.
The L in H&L was Lovic.
The plant sat in Pelham, Georgia, but the roads ran much farther.
Albany. Valdosta. Tallahassee.
Then Monticello. Dothan. Panama City Beach.
Red clay on one end. Red Hills on the other.
Food moved through it. People moved through it. Families did too.
The trucks were already feeding kitchens whose names would become familiar later.
Guthrie’s was already on the road.
Layne’s in College Station meant nothing to any of us yet.
My daughter would graduate from Florida State and love Tallahassee.
My son would go to College Station.
Friends would settle there.
Family already had.
The same names and places kept showing up decades later,
as if the map had been drawn before any of us learned to read it.
You think you are going fishing.
You think somebody is just running a route.
You think a warehouse in Pelham is only a warehouse.
Then enough years pass.
You look at an old photograph.
A marina. A pile of fish.
A pink basket somebody will carry home.
And Lovic still running through all of it.
Boutwell Jones
redclaygospel.com
