CANNABIS ROAD: The Freakoid Cracker

Redhead (n)--A combination of the terms 'redneck' and 'head'. A country or farmboy who smokes dope, maybe grows it, and is more than likely from the southeastern part of the United States.

During the month of September in 1973, I spent a good deal of time and energy looking for redheads in north central Florida, a region which, once you get away from the coast, is as full of crackers as anything you'll find in Georgia. Crackers are the descendants of cowboys, and are a particular version of the Southern good ol' boy. The search for redheads was extremely difficult primarily because no one would admit to the term who hadn't known me before, since the activities of the redheads included growing illegal crops.

In Florida, sentences are long and narcs have big ears. Still, a lot could be found out about Redheads from others. James Pinckney Ruiderman was an old friend and he had perhaps the best idea of the philosophy and psychology of the people I was looking for.

Ruiderman was once a member in good standing of--the Gainesville Marijuana Dealer's Assn.--that unofficial organization which gained quite a bit of notoriety last summer by making a $10,000 contribution to a muscular dystrophy telethon. The Gainesville organization is very informal and tightly knit. James no longer is involved--he was there when things were a little less professional and a whole lot hairier.

The most famous instance in which he was inadvertently involved, occurred when James was standing around in a south Florida wood when several 50 pound bales of Jamaican fell from the sky.

James and a friend and the bales were immediately surrounded by the police (dozens of them). It seems the police were a little ahead of the entrepreneurs, for they had taken several telephoto shots from a Navy helicopter while one of the boys in the airplane shoved the bales out of the side. One detail of the importers' operation, you see, involved a telephone call to a hotel in a famous south Florida resort on the same day the president of the United States was scheduled to visit. The codeword for the payload was "corpse," and so an alert operator smelled a plot with a higher and more violent purpose and had the call traced. By the time the smugglers' plane was in the air, it was already photographed and under constant radar and photographic surveillance. Which just goes to show James's ingenuity and initiative in getting off the hook. Still, the life of a dealer had deeply affected James, the son of an unbending man who when the family used to live in the hills of North Carolina, other relatives used to send their boys to him to be raised according to the Bible.

When James sleeps now, he finds it wiser to keep one eye open--a Confederate catnap, they call it. He is thin and wiry with a lot of freckles on his face. Some say they're the stains of the fiery sarcasm that spits so naturally out of his mouth. His voice is high pitched, like his mother's, and falls easily into evangelical cadences. His record is still clear, now he is married and he will be applying to law school soon.

Although James hadn't heard of the redheads themselves, he seemed to have the whole thing in a sort of part evangelical and part paranoid perspective:

"You mean love crackers? Sometimes known as freakoid crackers? Sure I know what you're talkin about.

"There's hordes of characters who fit the general pattern, and some wild ones too. There's a guy who lives between St. Augustine and Jacksonville who looks like Dan'l Boone, with buckskins and beard, and lives in an abandoned tourist camp. He's an old time musician mebbe 37-years-old, been giggin for 15. He carries a sawed-off shot gun and has a herd of goats runnin through his yard and a chicken house and a coupla hogs. He's real reclusive and don't want to meet nobody and he certainly knows the pleasures of the weed.

"There's some guys you ought to meet.

"Shit, you know Charlie Cobb, he's a freakoid cracker. Freakoid crackers are individualists to an extreme degree. They smoke, but they know its gotta be kept a secret from the rest of the world. They might have been to Vietnam and started smokin there. But one thing they don't like is freaks. They don't like to be considered freaks. They consider freaks lazy. They might have hair down to their assholes, but they're willing to get out and shovel shit and dig ditches. They don't look down on any chore that needs doin.

"What they're rebelling against is the attitude that you can be a halfass advertising man and sell a load of crap to folks and expect to get paid for it.

"They've got endurance. At the best they've got a dedication to building a spread outa nothin, they're willing to get up before dawn and go do it. But if they cain't get a shot at a place like that of their own, they'll cross over the line and enter the world of the car salesman. But they won't like it. They don't like advertising people, public relations men. They're still tied to the land.

"Yes, they smoke dope and put stuff into their heads that blasts them wide open every now and then, but they're not hippies yet and they never want to be. None of this love peace beads bullshit. They haven't come to any grand revelation yet. They don't realize that for society to make a jump you've got to have no killing, nobody going without food, no need for robbing people, no mistreatment of any minority including black, no widows left without enough grocery money.

"Basically they're staunch conservatives--puritanical in a way--they are people who are compulsive about work. They will work themselves to death until the work is done.

"Their attitude is more one of distrust. If they smoke, they care enough about their parents to keep it from them. They know their parents are smart, and aren't gonna want to change their views. They don't travel this 'hip' and 'groovy' street.

"You know the thing a freakoid cracker hates most in the world? Platform shoes on a male. In any hip crowd you can spot the freakoid cracker. He'll be looking with utter disdain on the guy flying around with the four-inch platform heels. The English mod look.

"Around Gainesville, which I call the greatest marijuana terminal in the Western World, they're a lot of em growing marijuana on their farms. Course students started all that before, but it's caught on with the people with families. Now it seems like everybody is longhair in a way.

"These people are always completely ready to defend themselves. The man with a family keeps thinkin that somebody is gonna come up to 'im with a tommy gun and they're ready for it.

"Which is why you've had such a rough time tryin' to find 'em. In this state there are a group of fanatics who believe that dope is evil, and they're fightin tooth and claw to wipe it out. Jesus freaks are nothin compared to narcs, and especially local narcs. They're bible totin statute quotin freaks and in my opinion they are the lowest type of scumbag because they'll get in with you and then betray you. The only character out of the Bible they forget to cite is Judas.

"Still, the majority's tolerant of marijuana, and it's been growing on more and more corners of farms ever since D-day, whenever it was that dope hit the country, about six years ago.

"Now veterans are ruining the image of veterans. They hate Nixon and his phonies. Maybe one day this group of Americans is gonna get the idea that they can change the country around and when the rednecks and freakoid crackers get their piece of land and start fightin for just causes, ain't nobody gonna see it comin but one day people are gonna open their eyes and then there'll be a revelation."