Book Reviews and other tasty bits
My Old Florida offers book reviews and sometimes reviews of movies that range from vintage books that are hard to find to brand new releases. The books could come from mainstream presses, small presses or be self-published. The one thing they will all have in common is a love for Florida in a less manicured state than we often find it today. Like this site, these books will dip into the past and wander through the present always on the lookout for the people, places and things that just seem real.
As each book is reviewed it will become the current featured book and when another is added, the formerly featured book will drop down into a reverse chronological list by Title with the oldest post at the bottom. In addition to books, there may also be reviews of map systems, apps for trekking, movies and other things that one could use to discover and enjoy Old Florida.
The featured book now is: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray.
Previous reviews: Seasons of Real Florida by Jeff Klinkenberg; Angel City by Patrick Smith
As each book is reviewed it will become the current featured book and when another is added, the formerly featured book will drop down into a reverse chronological list by Title with the oldest post at the bottom. In addition to books, there may also be reviews of map systems, apps for trekking, movies and other things that one could use to discover and enjoy Old Florida.
The featured book now is: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray.
Previous reviews: Seasons of Real Florida by Jeff Klinkenberg; Angel City by Patrick Smith
“Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” rings true
Janisse Ray’s book, “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood,” is part memoir and part naturalist essay. Both parts are about a very particular piece of ground in South Georgia out side of the small town of Baxley in Appling County.
Admittedly, this is not Florida but north Florida and south Georgia have a lot in common when it comes to ecology and small towns.
Ray’s family ran a junkyard on a piece of land that had already fallen to the loggers’ steady tide of wiping the earth clear of forests that had taken hundreds or thousands of years to evolve. Her childhood world was a sea of broken cars and parts, rowdy brothers, a sister pal, a hard working mother and a father who could fix a heron’s broken leg as tidily as he could extract a starter motor from a ’58 Chevy.
She grew up knowing her family was an oddity in a land of oddities full of people living in trailers and shacks as well as big brick houses. Her parents, and by extension the kids, were Evangelicals but in their case, they went to a church almost exclusively black, another odd thing for a white family in the deep south.
Her family tree stretched back into the history of the region and contained the ne’er do well and the quite well-to-do. Even the town was named after a distant relative on her mother’s side. Her father’s side was plagued with depression and generations of them “got sick” and disappeared into the mental hospital from time to time.
Growing up, she had little awareness of the natural world around her and could not name a bird beyond cardinals or blue jays. She knew no plants and wasn't interested. But somewhere down the line, after she had left the small town for college the pull of her birth land grabbed her by the ankle and suddenly it became important to understand the arc of life that had gone on before her people arrived and equally important to consider what will happen to the land from here on out.
The book flips back and forth between her childhood recollections of the junkyard and her peculiar family and the writings of the adult naturalist she became. The little as she knew as a child is remedied by the depth of her adult understanding of place and evolution. And she is angry and hurt about how human intervention has decimated the forests of long leaf pine that dominated between 85 and 156 million acres in its southern range. Those virgin forests are down to around 10,000 acres and half of those are part of the Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. What is lost, she writes, is not only the elegant and beautiful forests but all the other plants and animals that depended on that very particular type of forest to thrive.
In its review, the New York Times compared her to Rachel Carson and the book is praised across the board by reviewers for its insight and the beauty of its prose.
It is a wonderful book about the intricacies of the long leaf pine environment and a captivating tale of growing southern in a junkyard on the edge of town. If I have any criticism it is that I felt her adult voice and sensibilities sometimes laid too heavy a hand on the shoulder of the narrator of her early childhood. We see that girl but not always with quite the fire and vividness I would like to have seen.
Admittedly, this is not Florida but north Florida and south Georgia have a lot in common when it comes to ecology and small towns.
Ray’s family ran a junkyard on a piece of land that had already fallen to the loggers’ steady tide of wiping the earth clear of forests that had taken hundreds or thousands of years to evolve. Her childhood world was a sea of broken cars and parts, rowdy brothers, a sister pal, a hard working mother and a father who could fix a heron’s broken leg as tidily as he could extract a starter motor from a ’58 Chevy.
She grew up knowing her family was an oddity in a land of oddities full of people living in trailers and shacks as well as big brick houses. Her parents, and by extension the kids, were Evangelicals but in their case, they went to a church almost exclusively black, another odd thing for a white family in the deep south.
Her family tree stretched back into the history of the region and contained the ne’er do well and the quite well-to-do. Even the town was named after a distant relative on her mother’s side. Her father’s side was plagued with depression and generations of them “got sick” and disappeared into the mental hospital from time to time.
Growing up, she had little awareness of the natural world around her and could not name a bird beyond cardinals or blue jays. She knew no plants and wasn't interested. But somewhere down the line, after she had left the small town for college the pull of her birth land grabbed her by the ankle and suddenly it became important to understand the arc of life that had gone on before her people arrived and equally important to consider what will happen to the land from here on out.
The book flips back and forth between her childhood recollections of the junkyard and her peculiar family and the writings of the adult naturalist she became. The little as she knew as a child is remedied by the depth of her adult understanding of place and evolution. And she is angry and hurt about how human intervention has decimated the forests of long leaf pine that dominated between 85 and 156 million acres in its southern range. Those virgin forests are down to around 10,000 acres and half of those are part of the Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. What is lost, she writes, is not only the elegant and beautiful forests but all the other plants and animals that depended on that very particular type of forest to thrive.
In its review, the New York Times compared her to Rachel Carson and the book is praised across the board by reviewers for its insight and the beauty of its prose.
It is a wonderful book about the intricacies of the long leaf pine environment and a captivating tale of growing southern in a junkyard on the edge of town. If I have any criticism it is that I felt her adult voice and sensibilities sometimes laid too heavy a hand on the shoulder of the narrator of her early childhood. We see that girl but not always with quite the fire and vividness I would like to have seen.
“Seasons of Real Florida” is Klinkenberg at his best
Newspaper columnist and author Jeff Klinkenberg really gets Florida. He understands what makes it quirky, unique and on odd levels, endearing. He moved to Florida when he was two and has been burrowing into the essence of the state ever since.
This book breaks its essays up into seasons and takes us around the state to discover quintessential BBQ joints that are only open seasonally or a visit with a Highwayman artist who now calls prison home. Of course he touches on that amazing photographer of Florida, Clyde Butcher, the Smallwood Store where Mr. Watson of “Killing Mr. Watson” fame meets his end and Dessie Prescott who taught Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings how to fish and hunt and who went with her on the trip from the navigable end of the St. Johns River to its mile-wide mouth. He even hunts for ghosts with a UF scientist and that’s all just in his section of the book called “Fall.”
In “Winter” he visits the Last Fish Monger in Ybor City, a guy who not only sold fish, he had his finger on the pulse of everything in that area and politicians routinely sought his advice. Klinkenberg dips a little south, not much, for Ted Peters, the king of smoked fish since 1947. He also introduces us to Miss Ruby, an older black woman who has run a fruit stand for much of her life and is now also known for her outsider artwork. We meet Frank Wilson, a so-called fruit hog because at 80 he can out-pick men a third of is age and make it look easy. We go with him to count some manatees and see which ones have new terrible scars from boats on their backs and we wander back into the land of Miz Rawlings to eat a mountain of frog legs and hush puppies at The Yearling, a restaurant in Cross Creek named after one of her best books.
Klinkenberg is a born storyteller and when he meets Henry Aparico, an elderly man whose late Cuban father was a “reader” in the old Ybor City cigar factories he sets out to help him unlock the sounds of the father’s voice still held on a rare transcription recording. No one has a machine that can play it but Klinkenberg doesn’t give up and eventually finds a record collector who has an old machine, perhaps the last one around that can play it. Klinkenberg takes the son and they go to see the collector. As the scratchy record turns and the sound fills the room, they listen to the father tell the story in Spanish of a grandson who leaves home, becomes a criminal and dying from his wounds, literally crawls back to his grandmother’s house for forgiveness and one last kiss. Henry translates but Klinkenberg says even without the translation, he knows he is hearing a master is tell a tale.
“Soon the needle reached the end of the groove. All was silent in the warehouse except for the beating of an old man’s heart. ‘I told you! I told you!’ Henry Aparico whispered, wiping away his tears. ‘That is my father’s voice!’”
In “Spring” we learn about alligators and meet a man with a three legged dog whose love of playing catch in the water almost cost her more than a leg. Fortunately her owner ran out to help her and swam back with an eight foot gator so close on his heels that it brushed by his leg as the stood up in shallow water. Then we meet Idella Parker, Miz Rawlings’ maid who is depicted in the book “Cross Creek” and becomes famous in her own right. Then we nip over to Fish Eating Creek to meet Tom Gaskins, a man who opened a museum dedicated to the beauty and mystery of the cypress tree. Marjory Stoneman Douglas is intimidating in her celebrity as the savior of the Everglades and after talking with her, Klinkenberg goes to see a man who was a famous gator hunter who now raises and sells fruit in the edge of the Glades. Then he goes to the granddaddy of gator hunters, Columbus White, who tells him plenty of stories, stabbing the air for emphasis with half an index finger. His most important piece of advice? “There ain’t no such thing as a dead gator.”
“Summer,” of course, is all about heat. Ed Watts who lives out on the Santa Fe River has that solved, he just goes around naked all day unless someone comes to his house. Then he puts on a loincloth. But there are worse things than heat in the summer. That worse thing would be mosquitoes. Wandering out into the swamp in summertime will drive a man to wear long pants, socks, a long sleeved shirt, hat and more if it can be found. Heat is awful but a veritable black cloud of mosquitoes wanting nothing more than all of your blood is worse. They have a saying in the Glades, Klinkenberg reports, “swing a quart jar, catch a gallon on mosquitoes.”
But summer is a good time to check up on Cracker Cattle, those vestiges of the livestock the Spaniards left behind several hundred years ago. In a visit with one of the few ranchers still keeping the breed alive, Klinkenberg learns about the man’s grandmother, an iron maiden if ever there was one. She was a riding, shooting, don’t-mess-with-me rancher herself and when the government wanted to put that new fangled interstate (75) in through her ranch she sent that grandson out every night to pull up the stakes and confuse them. Like most good things that fight had to end, too, and now the interstate drives through her land.
The heat drives him out to Cayo Costa where he meets the Shell Woman and way up north to Wakulla Springs where parts of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” was filmed. He gives us a look back at Hemingway and sets out to find the best lemonade. We meet a woman whose life quest is the keep the skies around her town dark. There is too much artificial light, she says, and it changes our relationship with the world in bad ways. The book ends with that well-remembered childhood pastime of summer — chasing fireflies.
If you love Florida or only have a vague curiosity about it, you should read Jeff Klinkenberg. He is terrific writer. He knows how to structure a story and play it for all it’s worth without every overplaying it. Each essay is a delightful jewel. Like many of the things and people he writes about, he is a true Florida treasure. Order his books if you can’t find them at your local bookstore, it will be worth your time.
“Angel City” is anything but
Most readers of Florida-based novels or history are familiar with Patrick Smith’s “A Land Remembered.” Many consider it the quintessential tale of settling the state when it was wild and scarcely populated. In three generations, the family in that book went from dirt-poor farmers to wealthy real estate magnates and learned that as a family they had done much to destroy the very thing they loved.
Smith has written several lesser-known books including “Angel City,” the fictional tale of the Teeter family from West Virginia who come to south Florida is the early ‘70s seeking prosperity and an escape from the poverty of the mountains where they lived for generations.
It seems like such a simple dream. Get to the Miami area somehow and start a little farm out by Homestead in the Redland. Things grow yearround and it will be easy to open a roadside produce stand and sell the bounty of the land and some items the womenfolk and kids make.
It doesn’t work that way. A lot of people, facing tough times in other parts of the country have headed south, believing that same easy-living dream that doesn’t quite come true. Lots of people are looking for jobs, any kind of jobs. And Jared, his very pregnant wife Cloma, his 16 year-old daughter Kristy and 11 year-old son Bennie soon have little money and are fooled into taking a job picking produce for an unscrupulous man who runs a migrant camp called Angel City.
Things go from bad to worse for the Teeters as unexpected fees for getting the job are added to high rent for a tiny, nasty room and big food costs for what amounts to left over produce cooked and given to them for dinner every night turn their job and hopes into a situation of indentured servitude. The camp is inside a high fence and locked at all times. No one can leave or go anywhere except the nearby store where they are taken by bus and brought back or the fields where they start picking by dawn every day. There is no way out and most workers soon wind up broken in spirit and without hope of any other way of life. Those that revolt, are beaten senseless and even killed and dumped in the swamp by the hired goons that run the camp. Things continue to worsen in quite terrible ways for the family.
If this sounds melodramatic and unlikely, you’ll be surprised to learn that there was a lot of this kind of treatment of migrant workers in the camps right up through the ‘70s. Smith actually went and lived undercover in a migrant camp in order to research this book. Though conditions have improved a lot since then, there may still be a lot substandard housing and questionable treatment of workers, largely migrants, who can not afford to complain.
Readers will care about the Teeters and mourn their losses, both physical and spiritual and hope that there is some way out for them by the last page.
The book paints a dark picture of the agricultural industry of south Florida and will make the reader wonder just who picked those tomatoes or that corn the next time they are wandering the nice clean aisles of their neighborhood supermarket.
Most readers of Florida-based novels or history are familiar with Patrick Smith’s “A Land Remembered.” Many consider it the quintessential tale of settling the state when it was wild and scarcely populated. In three generations, the family in that book went from dirt-poor farmers to wealthy real estate magnates and learned that as a family they had done much to destroy the very thing they loved.
Smith has written several lesser-known books including “Angel City,” the fictional tale of the Teeter family from West Virginia who come to south Florida is the early ‘70s seeking prosperity and an escape from the poverty of the mountains where they lived for generations.
It seems like such a simple dream. Get to the Miami area somehow and start a little farm out by Homestead in the Redland. Things grow yearround and it will be easy to open a roadside produce stand and sell the bounty of the land and some items the womenfolk and kids make.
It doesn’t work that way. A lot of people, facing tough times in other parts of the country have headed south, believing that same easy-living dream that doesn’t quite come true. Lots of people are looking for jobs, any kind of jobs. And Jared, his very pregnant wife Cloma, his 16 year-old daughter Kristy and 11 year-old son Bennie soon have little money and are fooled into taking a job picking produce for an unscrupulous man who runs a migrant camp called Angel City.
Things go from bad to worse for the Teeters as unexpected fees for getting the job are added to high rent for a tiny, nasty room and big food costs for what amounts to left over produce cooked and given to them for dinner every night turn their job and hopes into a situation of indentured servitude. The camp is inside a high fence and locked at all times. No one can leave or go anywhere except the nearby store where they are taken by bus and brought back or the fields where they start picking by dawn every day. There is no way out and most workers soon wind up broken in spirit and without hope of any other way of life. Those that revolt, are beaten senseless and even killed and dumped in the swamp by the hired goons that run the camp. Things continue to worsen in quite terrible ways for the family.
If this sounds melodramatic and unlikely, you’ll be surprised to learn that there was a lot of this kind of treatment of migrant workers in the camps right up through the ‘70s. Smith actually went and lived undercover in a migrant camp in order to research this book. Though conditions have improved a lot since then, there may still be a lot substandard housing and questionable treatment of workers, largely migrants, who can not afford to complain.
Readers will care about the Teeters and mourn their losses, both physical and spiritual and hope that there is some way out for them by the last page.
The book paints a dark picture of the agricultural industry of south Florida and will make the reader wonder just who picked those tomatoes or that corn the next time they are wandering the nice clean aisles of their neighborhood supermarket.
© Copyright 2017: text Sue Harrison; photos Sue Harrison for MyOldFlorida.com.
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