Peggy’s prompt—crackers 020911

My family are all Florida crackers. Both sides, although it goes back much further on my father’s side—both his mother’s family and his father’s family. That’s what they called themselves—Florida crackers, as opposed to the newly Floridaners, who were really New Yorkers or New Jerseyers, or Connecticutters, or Massachusetters. That’s where most of the immigration into Fort Pierce in the 40’s and 50’s came from. That and the folks from Georgia and South Carolina, who were pretty much crackers already, just not Florida crackers. Florida crackers were proud of their status, they felt (we felt) like pioneers, or, at least, descendents of pioneers. The southern part of Florida had very little population before the 1900’s, except for the Indians, and there weren’t all that many of them, either. So when we learned in school about American history starting in the 1600’s, that seemed like another planet to us. Imagine how I felt, later, in Europe, seeing buildings that already existed in the 1200’s!

Anyhow, we were crackers. Not conchs—those were the folks from the Keys and the Bahamas. Not frontiersmen, not white settlers. We were crackers. Self-sufficient, with minimal formal education, a strong work ethic, and a deep Southern accent. Unlike the snack called “crackers”, we bent, we didn’t break. We rolled with the punches, of which there were many—mosquitoes, sand flies, hurricanes, heat and humidity, mold and mildew, skin infections and hookworm, typhoid and tetanus. It wasn’t the sunshiny life now depicted in Florida ads.

But there was the upside. We crackers had “the sun in the morning and the moon at night”, so went the song. In third grade we all had to learn the words to “Florida”, which went:

I like to wake up In the sunshine

Where the orange blossoms grow.

Where the sun comes peepin’

Into where I’m sleepin’

And the songbirds say hello!



I like the fresh air and the sunshine

It’s so good for us, you know

So I’ll make my home in Flor-i-da

Da-da-da--da-da-da--da. ( I forget this line.)



Probably school kids don’t learn that song anymore. The air’s not as fresh any more, and the sunshine can give you skin cancer or heat stroke. But my childhood Florida was a lot like that song. And I just remembered another Florida song, which goes:



I’ll make my home in old Florida

F-L-O-R-I-D-A,

Where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the rarest,

Of any old state down our way.



We are all proud of old Florida

F-L-O-R-I-D-A,

In any old weather, we’ll all stick together

In F-L-O-R-I-D-A



Pretty hokey, huh? Do other states have similar songs? Probably. I don’t know any for North Carolina, though, where I’ve lived for a big chunk of my life. Texas, yes, where I also lived for a while. They’ve got plenty of songs, starting with “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” But then, they’d be expected to have a song as Texas was its own country for awhile. Even Florida can’t say that. We always belonged to someone—the Spanish or the English or the USA. Except of course for the Great Wahr of Nawthun Aggression, when Florida was part of the Confederacy. But I digress.



Florida crackers. Someone should develop a line of salty delicious, can’t-eat-just-one snack crackers called Florida Crackers. I’d buy them, just out of solidarity. Maybe they could have a little citrus flavor—orange, or lime. And they could be shaped like palm trees, or Brahma bulls, or crawfish, or Mickey Mouse—but wait, Mickey came much later. Anyhow, they could sell them in souvenir shops along the Florida Turnpike, alongside the rubber alligators, and the pecan rolls. Just a thought.