When the hippies met the Klan

SUE RIDDLE CRONKITE has done it again.

Barely a year after the Holmes County native and pioneering newspaper editor published her first novel, Louette’s Wake, she’s finished and recently published her second. This one is called White Sheets, and it tells of the time a gaggle of long-haired hippies set up camp near her home in the New Hope community, in Holmes County’s northwest corner, and promptly attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan.

While it’s a work of fiction, Cronkite says the book is based on actual events she remembers from the late ’60s. “The setting is a real place,” she says. “The names, characters and specific incidents are products of the author’s imagination.”

But you’ll recognize these people.

Rose and Josh run the Daylight Grocery, which sounds as if it could be Hamp Berry’s or one of the other crossroads stores on Highway 2. Their kids, Pidge and Luke, ride the school bus to what sounds a lot like Bethlehem School. Neighbors come and go, stopping to fish a cold drink out of the ice box or gas up their pickup trucks. Even Two Toe Tom, Esto’s legendary alligator, puts in an appearance.

What doesn’t sound quite real is the neighborliness many of the locals show the band of hippies camping in a pasture near the Choctawhatchee River, after they take a wrong turn on their way to protest the Vietnam war. My recollection, from growing up during that era a few miles away in Esto, is that none of our neighbors had any sympathy for long-haired hippies or war protesters. And marijuana, if we’d heard of it at all, wasn’t laughed away as harmless, unlike Camels and Marlboros and Lucky Strikes.

But Sue Cronkite tells a kinder and gentler story. Some of her characters shout:
“Hippies, hippies, sitting on the fence,
Couldn’t tell a dollar from fifteen cents.”
Her locals take in and take care of one of the barefoot hippies who’s about to have a baby, and resist their harder-hearted neighbors who side with the Klan. 

It’s a fun read, intensely local, and it captures the best — and some of the worst — of our neighbors. Not many books come out of New Hope, or elsewhere in Holmes County, so that alone makes it worth the price ($14.95).

And there are more of her books to come.

“Two down and 10 to go,” Cronkite said recently. “I hope to publish at least two a year.” That will get her into her 90s, but she shows no signs of slowing down. As the new year began, she was busy clearing land to build a new home at Lake Victor, near her family’s old home place in New Hope.

But she’ll take a minute to send you a copy if you email cronkitesue@gmail.com or call (850) 653-6965. Or you can order a paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon.

EARLIER: “Louette’s Wake is an uplifting tale“