Jookin’ at the local joints

I’VE GOT A bone to pick with Hazel Tison.

In her column published in last week’s Advertiser, she writes about beer joints once popular in our part of the country. She recalls the Blue Moon and the Cat’s Eye near Vernon, where she went to school. And the Green Lantern, near Chipley, which later became Chuck & Eddie’s (and is now a church!). Plus several at the state line in Esto.

But she calls them “juke joints,” a cleaned-up citified spelling of what we actually called them — jook joints — which my friend Malcolm B. Johnson spent his entire life battling.

Malcolm was the longtime editor of the Tallahassee Democrat. He wrote a daily front-page column called “I Declare.” I first read his columns republished on the editorial page of the Advertiser, back before it was consumed with national politics. Malcolm syndicated his columns to the Advertiser and other papers around the state only minimally for the money ($1 a column). Mostly he wanted to extend his influence. I came to know him first as a fearsome presence in the newsroom and later as a friend and co-conspirator when I whittled his prodigious output down to the book of his columns we published in 1983 called — what else? — “I Declare.”

Malcolm insisted we include the column he wrote in July 1977 headlined “Scholars Have Corrupted Jook.” It started: “If I were a ‘Roots’-inclined black academic, I’d work up a research project on what the white intelligentsia has done with our word ‘jook.’ They’ve gone to spelling it and pronouncing it ‘juke,’ a corruption at which I have protested off and on for two or three decades with declining influence.”

Malcolm insisted: “It was spelled ‘jook’ when anyone attempted to write it back in the 1930s, and it was pronounced to rhyme with ‘book’ and ‘look’ — and the boys at the University of Florida were given to ‘jooking’ when they took leave of booking on Saturday nights.”

Malcolm claimed personal knowledge of the matter.

“You see, I have some authority on this point” he wrote, “because I claim to have moved the word into national language and literature from the lumber camps and college campuses of Florida.”

Here’s the story, as he told it:

When I came to Tallahassee as a reporter in 1937, I picked up odd change by submitting items to Billboard magazine and various other publications. The Florida State College for Women Flambeau one week published a list of the 10 most popular records being playing on coin-operated phonographs at off-campus soda shops. Called it a “jookbox poll.” I submitted the list to Billboard, which promptly replied it didn’t care what the girls were playing, but what in heck was a “jookbox”? The magazine printed my explanation and sent me 75 cents for my work. And the word was in currency.

The college kids had brought the word out of Africa, via generations of use in the South as the name for a place where black lumber and turpentine camp workers congregated at night and whooped it up.

Malcolm even offered Florida Supreme Court citations to support his argument.

The late Supreme Court Justice Glenn Terrell referred to them in one opinion as “arch incubators of vice, immorality and low impulses.” In another he mentioned a “jook where beer and other species of fire water are dispensed.” He spelled it “jook,” drawing on his long Cracker experience. So we entered his opinions via the news wires into the growing debate over how to spell it.

His contemporary, Justice Roy Chapman, shook us one day by spelling it “juke” in one of his opinions. We called to ask if he and the court were reversing themselves on this important matter. He said no, it was a slip. He went personally to the clerk’s office and changed the spelling to “jook.”

However it’s spelled, Malcolm acknowledged: “Jooks, to be sure, were not classy joints.”

On that, he and Hazel Tison agree.

“I could only imagine what went on in those places,” she writes. “I grew up with the idea that such places were devil’s dens and women who frequented them were harlots or trollops (my mother’s terms).”