The Tallahassee Civil Rights Story as told by Miss Jasmine
The Tallahassee Civil Rights Story as told by Miss Jasmine traces the racist history of Tallahassee, Florida from the point of view of a hundred-year-old black woman in 2020. The story details how in 1926 Jasmine’s mother became the live-in housekeeper of the Portuguese-speaking Sheriff Ortega, taking Jasmine to live with her and the sheriff.
Sheriff Ortega—childless and the son of a Brazilian egg farmer—teaches Miss Jasmine literary works of Portuguese from first grade through high school. Jasmine also studies Latin at the black high school. In the summer of 1937, as she is preparing to go to Spelman College, two Tallahassee teenagers are abducted from the Tallahassee jail and lynched. They are her cousins.
The incident throws Miss Jasmine into a dissociative trance until 1950, to the point where she is not even aware of World War II. In 1950 she has a chance encounter with the handsome Leopold Barnes—her former high school Latin teacher—and she begins to recover.
Miss Jasmine lived through the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycotts, the 1959 rape of a FAMU student and the trial of her white assailants, plus the 1960s lunch counter sit-ins and protests that resulted in the jailing of the Stephens sisters, both thrown in the clink by the infamous Judge Judd.
As Miss Jasmine starts to tell her story to Sam McArdle, eventually her house becomes a 2020 Tallahassee version of The Canterbury Tales. She is joined by her ancient dog Whale, Larry the Librarian, and McArdle’s elementary school classmate Kenneth, who can’t read, not to mention Spelman graduate Rosemary and pancake entrepreneur Jackson Jackson V.
While the tales they tell are grim, the tellings include many lighthearted moments, including white church lesbians, gospel music, prodigious church bosoms, and everybody’s favorite book, Green Eggs and Spam.