Cauthen has showcased the people and places of The Bellamy Road Project in exhibits mounted at The Florida Museum of Natural History and The Thomas Center in Gainesville. More recently, NFCDS composed an exhibit of black and white photographs with accompanying excerpts from local oral history interviews that traveled the Suwannee River Valley before it came home for permanent installation at the White Springs Community Center.

This more recent exhibit, entitled THE HEALING GROUND, takes its name from local legend that describes all within the seven-mile radius of White Springs’ sulphur springs as “The Peace Ground” where Native Americans came to rest and recuperate from sickness and war and, within this space, protected from harm all those who entered. Sudye Cauthen lives and works at NFCDS within the "Peace Ground" radius, at the edge of Florida’s famed Suwannee River.

Cauthen’s fieldwork in Alachua County, upon which SOUTHERN COMFORTS is based, was driven by her sense that the Florida she loved was disappearing. This is no less true in Hamilton County which hugs the Georgia-Florida line, 519 square miles encompassing 14,000 people, three cities (the county seat of Jasper, White Springs, and Jennings), with an average per capita income of $10,562. Largest contributor to the county’s tax base is the phosphate industry; White Springs, just off I-75, boasts "Florida's Nature and Heritage Tourism Center" and its only whitewater shoals. The Suwannee River forms the borders between Hamilton County and other Florida counties in one of the world’s richest areas of first-magnitude springs.

Fieldwork in this area of rapid change can preserve more than memories, recipes for mayhaw jelly, and instructions for how to grind cane. NFCDS is committed to documenting this still vibrant sense of place.

THE HEALING GROUND

is dedicated to

the memory of Ron Hunt,

gifted artist, humanitarian, and friend

and to the people of White Springs

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Sacred place is storied place: the tree where two lovers cut their initials, the spot where DeSoto is said to have crossed, the ditch where a pet dog died. White Springs, locus of Native American peacekeeping, unfolds in pot sherds, petrified sand dollars, a trail rubbed in the sand where a snake passed beneath my window, unseen. Birdcall and cicada hum, a single leaf curling into dust: in the natural world of which we humans are but a part, each moment is only a fragment of the whole. Mystery surrounds us: indeed, we are mysteries ourselves, for one never knows but that a god or goddess observes us through another person’s eyes. Most of the time, we do not know the ground we stand on. For instance, the very room in which this exhibit hangs covers hallowed spots where crucial words were said, children born, and promises were made.

The Healing Ground began as a personal inquiry into place, my setting down in words the restorative dance of wildness and quiet. Each day that I troubled to record my observations, wind, water, light, and soil grew new again. The camera led me further.

I was already well into this project before I realized that when I came to live on the river near Bettie McCall, she told me this was The Peace Ground, a place held sacred by Native Americans who protected all those who moved within a seven-mile radius of the spring that bubbled up near today’s Stephen Foster State Folklife Center. Bettie said The Peace Ground, but I had titled this work differently, and went about asking people what the name meant to them, trying to see the place as they do.

I’ve been recording voices for forty years, always in the quietest settings I could find, never allowing on my tapes even the whir of a ceiling fan. In these new tapes, human voices compete with those of birds, crickets, wind, and frogs.

Although tradition holds that the best oral histories are conversations between friends and that first establishing trust is essential, more than half these people had never before met me. How lackluster the older tapes seem now, as I listen to Healing Ground voices caught on a cheap recorder against the exuberant sounds of life in outdoor locations where I watched the moving images that appeared in other people’s eyes.

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You drive in, heading north from Lake City on S.R. 41 or east from I-75, and you notice first a handful of houses with historic markers in front. Near the water tower on Bridge Street, one marker describes Native American and pioneer life, the epic healing powers of the white sulphur spring that, until recently, flowed near the Stephen Foster entrance.

There are a post office, an antiques shop, the old barn with painted-on wisteria twining across its width, the flat white face of a high storefront, a restaurant whose four walls mark each season, celebrating the Suwannee River Basin's flora and fauna. Then a family grocery, gas station, convenience store, the school, a bank, and Suwannee Hardware to which, when the inevitable winter freeze sets in, people stream in pickup trucks, refilling portable gas tanks and purchasing cans of kerosene for their heaters. In the back of the hardware store, Bud Parker keeps used furniture: old armoires, bunk beds, fat sofas. The unceasing roar of crickets comes from one corner.

Lonnie Alford, Jr., was watching the police work an auto accident near where he was on duty as a school crossing guard. I’ve known Lonnie since my second residency in White Springs in 1997, when I spent an entire year on the river in an 8’ x 30’ travel trailer. Whenever I ran out of gas, Lonnie took my empty canisters into Suwannee Hardware and a refilled them. The cold November morning my cat died, Lonnie brought post hole diggers. As he worked, his breath rose in white circles above his head.

Julia Beatrice Byrd was born here, once lived in New York, but came back years ago. Listening to Byrd’s taped talk about White Springs--regularly interrupted by the language necessary to her work as a school crossing guard--puts me back where we stood at the edge of S. R. 41 in ninety-five degree heat, the racket of traffic obscuring some of our words. In every other sentence, Byrd interrupts her dialogue with me, calling out to the children leaving school. She waves and smiles at each person passing in pickups, semis, and on motorcycles.

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Over the swoosh of traffic, I ask Julia what she thinks of the exhibit’s title:

Alex and Sam Reed: Alex is a fountain of a storyteller, his words tumbling whole decades, polishing them like stones, in a cadence as inevitable as daylight. His son, Sam: a hard worker, with language of his own. Early one morning, I went to the father’s home and found him in the garden, sowing seed by hand.

The interviews were spontaneous, offhand. Listening to them now--to Odeen Cooks, for example--I am transported, sitting cross-legged again on the lawn of the New Jerusalem Baptist Church. While the Bob Whites grow louder and louder, shadows lengthen across the grass. Mr. Cooks shows me the long, segmented stalks of collar green plants he has cropped all winter.

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On the tape, the recorded Bob White calls grow thunderous. A wind stirs in the trees above us. The sun disappears and a lightening bug blinks in the foliage above Mr. Cooks’s head.

On the trail of other people's feelings about place, I was not after facts, but flavor, how its people perceive White Springs. Nearly everyone emphasized a sense of being joined, part of something larger than themselves. There is nothing formal or self-conscious in these interviews. May Frances Marshall, standing in a backyard that borders the Suwannee, reacted as if strangers routinely pull out recorders and ask her for talk. She dropped the weeds just pulled from her employer’s lawn, opened her mouth, and made way for the song I asked for.

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At this point on the tape, my voice asks, “What would you sing right now?”

Amazing Grace. God’s amazing grace. Everybody know Amazing Grace, and it’s something that soothes the heart.

Her song's words sift their way through the reaching boughs of enormous Live Oaks and into the river's channel. Listening, I imagine them reaching all the way across Florida, to the Gulf:

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