He is the last Florida panther. The last living tree in Florida's golden literary forest, an everlasting dark night for the felons and foes of civil rights the world over.
A dead salt marsh mosquito sticks to his freckly forehead, bald now, save for the ghost memories of the Ku Klux Klan robe that covered his head and cloaked his testicles from the stapling the Grand Dragon threatened to give the unknown snitch within.
By the time the Klan found out it was actually Stetson Kennedy, not the nigger-talking alias John Perkins, who had infiltrated the secretest of societies and published the historic expose The Klan Unmasked, the undercover author was long gone. He had spirited himself away to Paris for eight years until the heat wore off and the last kowardly klansman learned to kourtsy like a little girl. He has lived in his beloved native Florida ever since, writing, thinking, picking up the phone and raising holy hell with the world beyond his rustic lakeside home near Switzerland, a peaceful suburb of noisy, belching Jacksonville.
Tonight we are dining on the delightful Cuban dishes of La Teresita; it's a planning session for his Wednesday, May 7 appearance at Eckerd Eckerd College's Dendy-McNair auditorium: "An Evening With Stetson Kennedy." Also appearing on the 7 p.m. bill will be Florida folksinger Frank Thomas and Eckerd student Kelly Green — both of whom, like Woody Guthrie, have written songs about Kennedy.
"Where's that waiter?" Kennedy asks, his 86-year-old eyes darting about the periphery, his head unmoving and straight ahead, a sly smile belying his furrowed brow, a strong mint julep of Southern dripping from every word. "We need an investigation here."
His x-ray vision peers through a wall and sees something none of the rest of us can see. He is inspired to suddenly stand and trot off in search of someone to take his credit card. Enough reminiscing, it's time for action. Got another letter to the governor to write about those Indian kids HRS took away from their parents. Got to call about the folklore budget being cut. "How the hell can they close the archives?" he says. "No, I'm serious. That stuff needs to be temperature controlled."
At his age, with some sort of award or honor knocking on his door every week, Stetson Kennedy is considered Florida's own national treasure. In his paean to singer Johnny Cash, Tampa singer Ronnie Elliott sings "I don't want to be the last man standing." But last man Stetson Kennedy doesn't mind. He still has his fingers stuck in every pie that his departed contemporaries Hemingway, Hurston, Kinnan Rawlings, Stoneman Douglas, Lomax, Hughes, Sartre and Wright ever cooked. And he remembers every ingredient.
It comes out of him like a rain from an Okeechobee storm spout. He recalls the halcyon days Woody Guthrie spent at his home writing a book "and firing a rifle at terrorists," and the sweat-soaked phone kalls in the middle of the night when "I didn't know if I was being called to my own lynching or some other poor soul's," traveling the back roads in Florida's first search for folklore with Zora Neale Hurston and Alan Lomax "knocking on doors that had never been knocked on before," and spending nearly every cent he had in his tireless pursuit of preserving "the culture of people" and civil rights around the world.
"You'd think by now I'd be a rich man, but, as my wife used to always remind me, 'Money isn't important, you have made a difference.'"
His beloved wife Joyce, an elementary school educator for more than 30 years, died last year, and a church near their home was filled to overflowing by grown men and women who remembered her counsel from kindergarten. His daughter worried Joyce's passing would send her father into a tailspin, but close friends have gathered around the old spry firebrand and he's hardly missed a beat. He's working on no less than six books right now, including his autobiography: Dissident At Large.
The resume of Stetson Kennedy would fill several issues of the Weekly Planet. Born Oct. 10, 1916 in Jacksonville and educated at the Universities of Florida and Paris, he has always been a folklorist. Folk icon Woody Guthrie admired Kennedy so much he wrote a campaign song for the author's unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign against George Smathers: "Woody once said to me, Stetson, you're not a folklorist, you're a 'po-folkist.' And I guess he was right."
Kennedy was a character right out of Guthrie's idealistic world. The downtrodden and suffering peoples, no matter where in the world he found them, grabbed his attention away from the Southern aristocracy of his family and sent him on several life-threatening journeys. One, as a special investigator for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, saw him infiltrate the Klan, the Nazis and other Southern terrorist groups. He was the secret source who provided national broadcasters Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell with weekly minutes from Klan meetings.
In addition to The Klan Unmasked, he has published four other classics of Southern American literature: Palmetto Country, Southern Exposure, After Appomattox: How The South Won The War, and the Jim Crow Guide, personally edited and published by Jean Paul Sartre.
Kennedy is looking forward to his talk next Wednesday evening at Eckerd. "I had a student once who was extolling the virtues of the free speech they all have today and I told him, 'Okay, you have free speech, then say something!' It seems to me they have free speech because they've all been fixed, mentally, like trained pets."
All he requires is a chair, a table, a glass of water and a student nearby to help him with questions in case his hearing is bad that night.
"Maybe we should call it 'Backtracking With Stetson Kennedy.'" he says. "You know, reminisces of Zora Neal Hurston and Marjory Kinnan Rawlings and John Paul Satre. If you get those names in the press release it might draw more people than just my name."
The 'po-folkist has spoken.
Peter B. Gallagher is a writer in St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2003.