I Love Florida Crackers

Two of my very best friends (Power Rangers) are Florida Crackers. I'm not. I'm a Hoosier.

One of these friends is also one of my favorite writers. She responded to yesterday's blog posting about the definition of the word "Cracker" by giving us the best one ever.

Following are Julia's words:

My family, way back, always liked to call themselves Crackers. Probably every family has its own spin on what it means.

We took it to mean people who had an "insiders" view of the real Florida. That meant the natural Florida that we had learned to cope with and fully appreciate and call beautiful.

Someone who found squirrel and quail stew and swamp cabbage a very superior rendition of a Thanksgiving feast. A Cracker kid knew that you could pick up and play with a king snake but not a coral snake - and never mistook which was which.

Crackers, to us, usually made their living in some earthy way such as raising oranges or cattle, turpentining or timber, or fishing. There was a certain resourcefulness and resilience involved.

There was a lot of the outdoors in a Cracker. Even housework was done outdoors or on the porch. Rain would call one to the porch rocker from the interior of the house.

There was also a facet of being Cracker that meant you knew how to hold your own on the evening front porch story-telling time. Those blow-hard stories usually had a teasing quality which ended in a joke being "cracked" at somebody's expense but in a gentle way.

I do think Crackers were always a bit smug to "outsiders" but not so the outsider would know it because that wouldn't have been charming.

Other times I think that isn't so because I remember Crackers extending a helping and inclusive hand to newcomers. It's just that no matter how many decades passed they were still newcomers.

We didn't much cotton to someone from the North calling us Crackers because we had an innate sense that a Northerner did not hold our same exalted definition of the word. To them it might have meant an inferior and small view of the world, inferior taste and intelligence which we knew was not true but sort of hard to prove standing there in one's bare, sandy feet so rooted in the earth.

And, yes, it is a kind of architecture that is very comfortable, oriented as it is to cross breezes and hunting dogs. Most Cracker houses have a dog trot through the middle and a porch - preferably a wrap around one. The roof has to be tin, the ceilings high and the windows long and open.

Thanks, Julia, for this definitive - and fun - definition.


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