The Tropic of Cracker, and: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and: Crackers in the Glade: Life and Times in the Old Everglades (review)

The Tropic of Cracker. By Al Burt. University Press of Florida, 1999. 224 pp. Cloth $24.95

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. By Janisse Ray. Milkweed Editions, 2000. 224 pp. Paper $14.95

Crackers in the Glade. Life and Times in the Old Everglades. By Rob Storter. Edited by Betty Savidge Briggs. Foreword by Peter Matthiessen. University of Georgia Press, 2000. 160 pp. Cloth $29.95

The term "Cracker" evokes images of white, poor pioneer families who sweated and scrapped out a living from the vast, mosquito-clogged swamps, piney woods, and coastlands of the deepest southern states. The origins of the epithet are mysterious, sometimes attributed to the dried, yellow cracked corn that was a staple for livestock and southern farmers; or the cattleman's whip that smacked the air above longhorns in the palmettos; or the word used by British faithful to describe the unruly braggarts of Celtic origins who settled in the southern piney woods.

Al Burt's collection of essays, The Tropic of Cracker, based primarily on interviews and first-person observations gathered and described in the 1970s and 80s, explores the mystical bond between a unique cadre of Florida residents and Florida's various environments. As Burt notes at the onset of this delightfully readable work, the term "Tropic of Cracker" has no set geographical or cultural boundaries but, rather, "survives in myth, memory and love of natural Florida"-- and involves elements that are celebrated by people who have both long and recent roots in the state. From stories about well-known Floridians such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale Hurston to tales about farmers, fishers, and ferrymen, Burt captures an essence of the state's citizenry that defies the state's modern characterization as a land of tourists, transplants, and snowbirds. Throughout the book, an enduring theme expressed by many of his informants--even twenty and thirty years ago--is the fact that Florida has changed because of waves of newcomers and concomitant development. As Burt notes, "It became a Cracker axiom that Florida couldn't truly measure its loss and gain and potential except by comparison with the good and bad of what life had been like."

The Tropic of Cracker offers a sensitive and insightful view of the history, folklife, and observations of people who have been and remain the salt-of-the-earth of Florida's cultural landscape. But looking toward the future, the author also observes that "Floridians . . . peer across the state and hope that dizzying combination of beauty and mess they see out there is not really The Next Florida, even though they know it might be, unless . . . we quit growing dumb and learn to grow smart." In this regard, Burt has expressed the essential and inseparable interaction between people and their environment.

Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood provides a deeply personal account of her family upbringing and the landscape in which her life is embedded. What sets this book apart from other memoirs is that Ray, who carries "the landscape inside like an ache," intertwines rich stories of her childhood with elegant renderings of the piney woods landscape, its critters, and its ecological demise.

In a southern drawl that describes how bugs get squished and people holler, Ray writes with the direct cadence of porch-swing storytelling that has humor, sadness, and graceful attention to detail. She learned a fierce self-reliance and love of nature in her childhood home, a ten-acre junkyard in south Georgia where insectivorous pitcher plants, wiregrass, and longleaf pines shared space with the bodies and innards of decrepit machinery. Thanks to the "native genius" of her father for fixing things, the rusting inventory formed the basis of the family's austere economy.

Ray recounts the scary discovery of her father's mental illness and...