John Nathan Spearing’s Grave / Non-Grave

by Tim Gilmore, 1/27/2024

Sometimes something cried out at night that Willie Browne could not identify. He knew the sounds of panthers and coyotes. Supposedly there was a baby out here, but he’d never heard it. “It was before my time,” he’d say. He’d heard about it in his earliest years. Wasn’t even sure whose it was. Somewhere alongside “the Indian trail” it was buried.

“The colored folks that belonged to Spearing used to say,” said Willie in 1968, “they could hear the baby crying in the night.”

Willie, this strange old man, beloved by so many people, who lived alone on these bluffs, knew how history disappeared in the land. Strange things from the time of the Spearings, who preceded the Brownes. “Seems like,” he’d say, “there used to be a well just under that tree when Spearing owned the land. And a young man took a mooring rope one night and hung himself down in the well.”

He couldn’t recall who the young man was, nor what tragedy drove him to such desperation. Tragedy and desperation too easily dissipated into the earth. He wasn’t sure if the well was below that ancient cedar tree or just west of the three palms that grew from one trunk. Most assuredly the well had been filled in. Maybe Spearing did it. Maybe they covered it up and the bluff shifted.

This grave marker that lies by the trail like an afterthought is not the grave marker. People place oyster shells scooped from the garbage middens of the Mocama Indians along the top of the stone. Someone places fake flowers that fade and crust over and start to look like the remains of ancient sea creatures, and thus much more real than they looked with their brightly colored polyester petals. Sometimes someone sticks a little plastic Confederate flag in the ground.

Despite what the epitaph says, however, the bones of Confederate Sergeant John Nathan Spearing do not lie below. Spearing was born in Maine, but fought for the Confederate States of America. Willie Browne, though born in Jax, which largely supported the United States in the Civil War, said that in light of long historic oppression, white people had a “duty to see that when the pie’s divided, the black man gets an equal share. But I’ve noticed the black man never gets his share.” He described a situation he’d seen a thousand times. He said “the black man” will “work for a white man who’ll cheat him. Just for the sake of a job. He’ll work for a man with a moonshine still and then he’s the one gets arrested.”

This land on this bluff high over the marshes holds more mysteries than anyone can count, more mystery than anyone can measure. Willie Browne used to say he heard horses pass his cabin in the afternoons, but there were no horses. The bones of the ancient Mocama, the local group of Timucuan Indians, lie in these riparian lands. Unless storms have taken them elsewhere, the bones of the pilot of the Corsair that crashed in 1945 lie in the marsh. Every now and then, cannonballs surface from the shell and the mire.

Willie Browne was already firmly ensconced in history and his legend was rounding out to mythos. He’d spent his life guarding this sacred land, then bequeathed it to be preserved for future generations to visit. Conflicting records and oral histories and recollections, however, call into question the usually accepted genesis story. If his father gave a young Willie Browne this land and the sacred trust to protect it at this date or that date, how did William, Sr. and Lily Browne come to it in the first place? The question of how the Spearings’ land became the Brownes’ land comprises dozens of mysteries, deeper questions and questionable facts.

“I am the great granddaughter of John Nathan Spearing and the one that had the marker placed on the grave site,” wrote Mignonette Spearing Carter from her little woodframe house on Floral Bluff Road in 1988.

John Spearing died while his wife Margaret was pregnant, Mignonette wrote, “so [she] left the place in care of her neighbor the Browns [sic]. She sold them the property about five years later in 1884.”

When I speak to George Carter, Mignonette’s son, and I mention Margaret selling the land to the Brownes, he grows impatient. “That’s not what happened,” he says and adds that the Spearing family always felt animosity toward the Brownes.

After John Spearing died in 1879, George believes, his pregnant widow moved back to Jacksonville and left the land on the bluff in the care of the Brownes. Eventually, in this version of the history, the Brownes paid Margaret’s back taxes and took over the land themselves.

“Whatever actually happened,” George says, “our family has always said the Brownes swindled the land away from us.”

But Mignonette said Willie was always gracious to her and helped her place the gravestone. On the outer bluff beside the path that Willie always called “the Indian Trail,” a cedar, a traditional “cemetery tree,” had marked the grave where no headstone did. Willie, Mignonette’s husband Frank and her son George planted the stone marker there in January 1962.

Then in 1988, she wrote how a year earlier, “Vandal removed Stone from site and moved it a short distance. As it had been 26 years since I had been down there and was raining, My Son George, my cousin Louis Schick and Earl Raye replanted stone was impossible to find where it had been moved from, as all the pits dug to remove shells. Originally he had been buried in one of the shell depressions left by the Indians.”

When John Spearing died, a steamship called the Volusia brought his body back from town to the bluff and friends and family held his funeral beside the Indian Trail. His brother Warren lived in a cabin he’d built alongside the trail not far from the big Spearing house.

Warren had sired a baby who didn’t live, names of both mother and child now lost, and buried the baby “in an unmarked grave at the site of the old cabin.” Maybe this was the baby whose ghost Willie Browne said “the colored folks that belonged to Spearing” heard crying in the woods.

Then again, several items don’t line up. There’s no record of the Spearings having owned slaves and the 1860 census lists a “Warrin,” who was six at the time, as “inferred son.” Census records, of course, are frequently incorrect and memory is more unreliable that anyone would like to admit. How much less reliable are the stories, long told, of someone else’s stories?

Mignonette writes that Warren “left on a cattle Drive to Texas during the Spanish American War + never returned.”

The sites of Warren’s cabin and his baby’s grave are now as lost as John Spearing’s own bones, as lost as the story of the life of the child’s mother, as lost as old truths obscured. Perhaps the infant’s remains still lie along the bluff. Perhaps the shell miners, who scooped out the Timucuans’ middens and hauled tons of shells away to lay bedrock for local highways in the 1930s or ’50s, unknowingly took the baby’s bones too and spread them out along Atlantic Boulevard or Heckscher Drive between here and the ocean.

All along these slender snaking trails, the roots of old trees rise up and dig back into the hard ground and braid themselves together like witches’ fingers. Everywhere on earth, the dead nourish the living; here that relationship is stark and clear. Resurrection ferns mantle the fallen trees like redemption embodied. Always the earth redeems the world.

Just behind this grave that’s not really a grave, the half-moon entrance to a gopher tortoise burrow hides from the shaded sunlight. Maybe the tortoise knows, in whatever way a tortoise knows, where Spearing’s bones lie, not that the tortoise knows they’re bones, and not that it knows it knows.