The Jackson Grocery, not to be confused with the original Jackson Store which is located on F M 562, was founded by Oscar Mayes in 1931. Roscoe and Ruby Jackson purchased the store after Oscar's death in 1979. The following well-written article of September 29th, 1996 is by Carol Rust, a journalist for the Houston Chronicle Magazine, Texan and gives an in-depth look into the daily routine of running the Jackson Grocery. .
Minding a Country Store
Two scissortail swallows swoop from the mist that hangs over a field of milo, its unharvested seed heads standing on stalks like dark red fists. A dozen white egrets take flight like so many silver flags.
A bull calf in a nearby pasture butts his mother's bag with his head, sucks enthusiastically, then repeats the process. A rooster crows from somewhere in the marshy distance, although the soft dawn has already melted into a warm morning.
Roscoe Jackson has washed his teeth, strapped his suspenders onto a fresh pair of jeans, turned out his calves and let the chickens into the yard before climbing into his truck and rumbling across a cattle guard on the way out of his driveway and down a curvy blacktop to his store.
In a shallow ditch, a black dog, part collie, lies on its stomach, watching him go by. Around a curve shaded by tall tallow and sweet gum trees, the store appears. The simple building and the outhouse next door are the colors of a winter storm.
This time of day, a pair of red, rusted gas pumps are the only crowd in front of Jackson's Grocery, which is the sole place to get a cold beer, crab boil, cake mix, or cough medication between Anahuac and Winnie. To get the groceries fresh farm eggs, cane syrup, School Time scissors (slightly rusted but a bargain at 29 cents), homemade boudin, or occasional loaves of fresh bread, it may be the only place between 1950 and the present.
Notices and ads are stapled to the storefront: a barbecue benefit, a Mexican dance, serving hours for the Circle 6 Cafe at the rodeo arena. A new barber shop in Anahuac, hay for sale, and crabs, live or steamed, but please call ahead. Posters for upcoming elections and shreds of posters from elections past. A little bit of everything that is going on around Double Bayou has a place at the Jackson Store.
By the front steps sits a coal-oil pump with a windup handle that in days past held oil that sold for a nickel a gallon. Store customers came on horseback then.
Roscoe was just a boy in those days, when he and his older sister, Sarah Mae rode from their home one mile across the prairie for what their truck-farming family couldn't grow: sugar, chewing tobacco, coffee, and a jug of coal oil.
Customers no longer come to buy the oil, and Roscoe is now proprietor of the old store in this backwoods community, where everyone knows everybody else, and a good many of them are related.
They all stop in from time to time, if not several times a day -- on their way to and from work, fishing, visiting, or sitting under a tree next door where a small circle of locals hold court every day, weather permitting.
"Need anything from town?" customers ask. "Town" means any place bigger than Double Bayou, and that's just about any wide place in the road. These days the question is more a gesture of goodwill than anything else. After Roscoe and wife, Ruby, bought the store 31 years ago, he hauled his groceries from Beaumont or Houston, and he'd take a customer up on the offer sometimes if he ran out of something critical before his next haul. But now, everything is delivered right to the store's front screen door that bears the Rainbow Bread logo.
"When I first started this, a $500 load of groceries would fill up the back of a pickup," Roscoe says. "Then it got to where $1,000 would fill up the back. Don't know what it would take today."
As he pulls his faded blue pickup into the parking lot, which is one part shell, one part gravel, and one part soda bottle caps, the store looks the same as when he left it at midnight, just eight hours ago. He keeps it open 365 days a year.
His crutches come out of the truck first. He's not totally dependent on them -- as he was when he had his left leg amputated three years ago -- but they come in handy for maneuvering and extra support. He uses one to swat a Styrofoam food container out of his path, heads to the door and shoves it open. The police scanner crackles from the top of a refrigerated display case as he flips on the lights. He keeps it -- and the police radio by the bed at home -- turned on 24 hours a day to keep up with what's going on. "I'd be lost without it," he says.
He starts a pot of coffee, then shaves over a sink in the cramped quarters in the back, peering into a rearview mirror he's mounted in the tiny bathroom, while the coffee brews. He pats his face dry and heads to the front. Pouring the first of what will be many cups of coffee throughout the day, he takes his place behind the counter. Half sitting, half leaning on the armrest of a battered wheelchair, he counts the change in a little box and sets it aside. Jackson's Grocery is officially open for business.
To Roscoe and Ruby, their store is the same old thing, day after day. Nothing special, but a bare-bones living nonetheless. To anyone who loves the rustic, it is a find. Stark and homespun, it's a fading icon of rural America, the granddaddy of the brightly colored franchise convenience stores with automated bank tellers and cappuccino machines. But modern convenience stores are built and torn down almost overnight, this grocery has been operating in the same place since 1931.
Unlike most of its fancier counterparts, Jackson's Grocery has an undeniable place in the heart of the community. It is where folks stop to spread or find out news. If someone needs to sell something he brings it to the store and leaves it in the Jackson's care. Customers have stood at the counter and cried over a wife who left or a child on drugs.
At the heart of a small community, there is always something going on to help some of the home folks. Right now the cause is a raffle and Saturday night get-together to help pay the medical costs of a Double Bayou woman with cancer. A book of tickets is on the cluttered counter, next to a loaf of bread that a woman who's taken on hard times baked to raise a little cash.
When there is a death, Roscoe and Ruby usually donate coffee or sodas for the wake, a gathering they can't attend themselves because they are tending the store. If they were to close it, folks couldn't depend on them, Roscoe says. "You can't just lock up, because customers won't know when you're open or not," he says. Roscoe's cousin tried to help at the store, working four days a week while Roscoe and Ruby ran it nights and weekends, but he had to quit three months ago because of illness. Even so, there was no thought of cutting back hours, although that meant Roscoe would be pulling 8:30 a.m. to midnight shifts.
"You start locking up for any reason and you'd probably just have to stay locked," he said. "You'd lose your credibility with your customers." And as slow as business is, he can't afford to lose any of it.
There are no customers in the store at the moment, so Roscoe talks to himself, reciting the things he's done and needs to do today. "I need to meet my beer man, " he says, holding a finger in the air. In his other hand he holds his ever-present cigarette. "I've made my Coke list, waiting on him. Pepsi might come by here today. I need to be ready if he does."
He's not going to stock up on beer too much for the weekend because of the benefit. Someone will be selling beer there, so folks probably won't buy much at the store. Even though the event will cut into their business, Roscoe and Ruby still sell raffle tickets for a side of beef. They have bought a dozen themselves.
Monday is bank day. As soon as Ruby gets there Roscoe will head to Winnie with his weekly deposit. It's never much, he's quick to say. And he'll bring a portion of the money he owes the light company and hope they'll give him more time on the rest.
A Miller beer truck pulls into the parking lot, and Roscoe nods to himself. Right on time. He orders nine cases, and the delivery man brings it in on a dolly, standing it on its end in front of the counter and patting each case as he counts "One, two, three. One , two, three. One, two, three." Roscoe hands him a stack of wrinkled bills and says, "Check and see whether I need to back up or move up." The delivery man hands him a few dollars back. "Grab you a cold drink," Roscoe says, but the delivery man hustles out after thanking him. He's got other deliveries to make and no time to linger at a country store.
Advertising mail-outs with pictures of missing children are posted by the door like FBI wanted posters. Roscoe has singled out one and taped it on the pipe of a wood-burning stove in the center of the store. "From Wharton Texas" he has written on it in spidery script.
"I figure by her being from Wharton, Texas she could straggle through here, and I try to put her face in the back of my mind," he says. He's never used the wood-burning stove because the pipe going to the ceiling isn't connected right, and he's scared sparks will catch the store on fire. A butane heater that dates back to the 50s heats the place instead, and cardboard he's nailed over holes and cracks in the walls help keep out the cold.
The refrigerated display case next to the counter is turned off . It's stuffed with over-the-counter medications and an occasional can of insect repellent instead of deli meats and cheese. "The motor runs, but it's so full of holes it couldn't keep anything cold," Roscoe says.