I'm writing during a visit with friends in a college town on Maryland's Eastern Shore. We've just heard a lecture about a little-known saga in which hundreds of Africans from a captured slave ship were held in Key West in 1860 and then shipped to Liberia. A third of them died on the voyage. It's a gripping story.
Tales from the past create "ties of empathy and understanding that span centuries and continents," says the speaker, historian Ted Maris-Wolf.
History is a mystery. "How can something that no longer exists be here still?" he asks.
An ever-elusive place
But the past exists, even in our ever-new state of dreams.
"People are constantly ruining Florida; Florida is constantly ruining them back," writes T.D. Allman in the prologue to his sweeping new book, "Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State." "For at last 500 years, that has been Florida's defining theme. . . . "
One advance review, by respected Florida author Les Standiford, calls the book "equal parts social analysis, historical review, and jeremiad, . . . a passionate, often scathing, and remarkably comprehensive encounter with a confounding, contradictory, and ever-elusive place."
Touching a nerve
I've just started reading "Finding Florida." It's an important book.
But a question in its advance publicity touches a nerve. "It will be interesting to see if Florida's academic, journalistic, community and business groups are willing to give the book the same respect and attention it is getting in California and New York," it asks.
Remember those Florida bumper stickers from years ago: "We don't care how you do it Up North"?
Cracker provincialism? Maybe there's more to it.
The butt of national jokes for everything from butterfly ballots to big-snake hunts, Florida deserves some of the abuse we get in the media.
But our role as vacation refuge and retirement haven has put us in a peculiar spot.
Tiny example: When a friend who's skilled in an old Florida craft, pine-needle baskets, showed her work at a South Florida show, many visitors to her booth wanted only to tell her about the baskets folks made back in New England.
Here's how we do it Up North.
Sure, these interactions involve our human need to talk about our own experiences. But when they happen over and over, we send a message.
A Floridian's memories
Reader Annette Everett Farrar of Mount Dora might understand. After a recent Flashback about snowbird Lois Lenski's 1945 book "Strawberry Girl," Farrar responded with a passionate email about the dialect in the book.
A sixth-generation Floridian born in 1935 and raised in the strawberry belt, Farrar moved many times with her family as a child, she writes.
"Never in my whole life have I heard anyone say, 'you git outen here' or . . . I don't want no possum.' "
"I'm sick and tired of people from the north writing words that are not true to make Floridians sound stupid," Farrar writes, recalling that when she was in the 5th grade, a northern teacher told her class that "we southern students were all descended from the people who got off Oglethorpe's poverty boat in Savannah, Ga."
Farrar was reacting to "Strawberry Girl," not "Finding Florida," which is another thing altogether. But putting out a challenge for Floridians to greet the book with the respect it's receiving in New York and California steps into some raw territory.
I'm sure we have a lot to learn from "Finding Florida" and a lot to talk about concerning Florida's history. Plenty that no longer exists is here, still, and it's not pretty. We have an easier time getting that when we're sure the folks Up North don't sell us short.
What's going on
On Tuesday, March 12 at 7 p.m., T.D. Allman is slated to sign "Finding Florida" at the Colonial Plaza Barnes & Noble, 2418 E. Colonial Dr., Orlando. Details: 407-894-6024.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.
